Chapter Ten #2
Felix still had his Lucky Strikes out. He offered one.
Flipped open his lighter. A moment later, Augie was coughing up a storm.
He apologized to the rest of them, said he didn’t smoke.
Goretsky leaned back against a mooring bit and laughed.
Carazzo asked why Augie had bummed one if he didn’t smoke, and Augie said he thought it was about time he started.
Felix watched without watching as Augie placed the cigarette slightly off-center in his mouth and held it there, the hazel-colored eye on that side squinting slightly.
He looked younger than he was, probably got tired of being treated like a kid.
Still, Felix—five years older, if not any wiser—took him at his word: he didn’t smoke, just wanted to belong, socially, to this group of men he was floating around with.
Which was how Felix had started smoking, too, and now wished he hadn’t.
In a gesture infused with both rank and a touch of avuncularity, he reached over and plucked the cigarette from Augie’s lips.
Their eyes met for an instant as he did, and Augie didn’t resist as he felt his upper lip stick to the paper and pull away from his teeth.
Felix’s fingers were just an inch from his mouth.
His lip let go, and he smiled as Felix tossed the cigarette over the side of the ship.
Something hummed between them after that: a live current of signals sent, signals received.
Their week spent anchored in the lagoon at Majuro was long and stifling.
Stagnant water, stagnant air, nothing to do.
One ship after another moving in ahead of them to dock and unload while they sat low and heavy with tires and medical equipment.
You were never more tired of the war than when the war gave you nothing to do.
But at the end of that wait, just as they were finishing unloading, word came of their upcoming R Augie had girlfriends back home, no one he was ready to settle down with yet.
They’d also exchanged the look almost without any eye contact at all, had nodded to each other without nodding.
The awareness each had for the other was palpable.
With all five cargo holds full of still more plane parts, they steamed along in a convoy of forty ships at eleven knots, toward Espiritu Santo.
When they arrived, a foreboding (though expected) site awaited them: the shipping channel where the massive troopship SS President Coolidge lay on its side beneath the surface, having struck mines meant to protect the port two and a half years ago.
Only two men had died, thankfully; more than five thousand had managed to get themselves ashore before the Coolidge slipped down into the channel.
This time, the Teague didn’t have to wait to dock.
Thirty-six hours later, they were finished unloading.
They were exhausted, but the Germans had surrendered two weeks earlier.
They’d just delivered parts that would help make planes for the planned invasion of Tokyo.
The base on the island was enormous—and busy.
The Army, Air Corps, and Navy were all there together.
Planes were under repair out on the airfield.
A squadron of Hellcats sat parked alongside a runway made of steel-mesh Marston Mats.
In the harbor, ships were in dry dock, and those dry docks were feats of engineering Felix might have been drawn to investigate if he hadn’t been thoroughly sick of all things ship-related—and officially on R & R.
They were directed to follow the walkway through the scrub and were given their pick of subdivided Quonset huts, two men per hut.
As they neared the huts, they began to break off and claim their spots.
Felix walked all the way to the end of the row he was on, where he could see the beach through the palm trees.
At the second-to-last hut, he pulled the thin screen door open and Hicks said, “Thank you, kind sir,” and stepped around him.
Keane followed. Felix walked on to the last hut.
When he glanced behind him to see if anyone else had come down this far, there stood Augie, holding his duffel bag and doing his best to look a little confused as to why there were no more huts in the row.
Felix waved him in, and they each took a room.
A shuttle boat took them all across a different channel from the one they’d come in through—to Aore Island, which was as big a recreational center as Felix had ever seen.
Baseball diamonds, squash courts. Lagoons of clear blue water to swim in, sandy shores.
In the same heat they complained about on the ship, they spread out like flotsam on the sand, some naked, some in their skivvies, napping with their shirts over their faces, sitting around wheelbarrows filled with ice and cans of Lin-8 beer, passing an oyster knife to crack the beers open.
They drank and held the cans against their foreheads and chests.
They thrilled at seeing iguanas clinging to the tree trunks, were told by some of the men stationed there to keep their eyes open for dugongs in the lagoons—creatures that looked like big, smiling dumplings—and giant bats with orange faces in the evening sky.
They saw neither. They drank coconut milk and traded socks and bars of soap and cigarettes for laplap wrapped in banana leaves.
Everything about being on the island felt new to Felix.
The solid ground underfoot, the food, the sense of space.
Augie’s presence. All through that first afternoon, now that they were off the ship, Felix wondered if the tension he’d felt for weeks between him and Augie was only in his head.
Late in the evening, he took a walk alone along the beach, and when he came back to the Quonset hut and was entering his room, Augie called out, “See any dugongs?” from the other half of the hut, his side.
Felix peeked in. Augie was stretched out on his cot, on top of the blanket, in just his shorts, reading a dog-eared Armed Services edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
His freckled shoulders, Felix saw in the light from the overhead bulb, were pink from the sun.
As was the bridge of his nose. Felix was in shorts and a worn-out T-shirt, deck shoes, a floppy straw hat he’d found on Champagne Beach.
“I didn’t,” he said, “but it was pretty dark. Like the hat?” Augie shook his head a definitive no, grinning, and it occurred to them both that they didn’t have to look away.
So they didn’t look away. A moment later, Augie scrambled up from the cot.
The book tumbled. Without breaking eye contact, he closed the distance between them, reached for the lightbulb chain, and tipped Felix’s hat off his head.
In the dark—in the quiet—they took hold of each other and kissed as they got out of their clothes, and kept kissing as they moved, naked, touching from their shoulders to their knees, each with his hands open wide upon the other’s back, drawing him in, as if they were trying to press themselves into one person.
Soon, they were on Augie’s cot. They were sweaty before they even started and had to thumb the dampness from their eyes and rake it into their hair with their fingers.
They said little—and that, they whispered.
For half the night, they went at each other, finding confidence, feeding appetites they’d thought would never be fed.
They went to sleep a couple of hours before dawn, each in his own room.
It went like that every night they were there.
On the third morning, just after the sun came up, they were both still asleep when the outer door squeaked open a bit and a monkey sidled into the hut.
A foot and a half high, with gray-brown fur, a whiskered face, and a long thin tail.
It belonged to the local man who was there to sell them eggs—the same man who sold them laplap in the evening.
From him, they learned that there were no other monkeys on the island, only this one.
A sailor had brought him here from New Guinea and left him, the man said, and the monkey belonged to him now—unless Felix and Augie wanted to buy him. They didn’t.