Winter in June (20 page)

“No, it's all right. In a strange way I feel like by seeing Gilda I got to say good-bye to Jack too. Looking at her, I realized death doesn't have to be so awful. We're the ones who suffer the worst of it.” Was I really okay? No, but I had come to accept the idea that death was irreversible, and neither Gilda nor Jack was going to suddenly appear at my side to brush away my tears.

“She was such a good person.”

I nodded, even though I wasn't sure
good
was the right word. Generous, yes, but we didn't know her well enough to comment on her moral life. “My ma always claimed bad things come in threes.”

“You mean there's more to come?”

“Not the way I'm counting. I'm assuming Irene Zinn was the first awful thing, so from where I'm sitting we're home free from here.”

She traced the edge of the pulp with her thumbnail. “I forgot about her.”

“I almost did too. Did you know she was an actress?”

Jayne shook her head.

“One of the Wacs told me. Isn't it weird that Irene and Gilda were both actresses and now they're both dead?”

“They weren't exactly the same caliber though, right?”

“True, but it seems like too much of a coincidence, you know?” I remembered the envelope in my hand and offered it to Jayne. “I brought you mail.”

She opened the letter and read it in silence, poring over the words for longer than was necessary. After all, Tony wasn't known for his way with language. When she finished, she rolled over on her cot and turned my way.

“So what's new with Tony?” I picked up the pulp and flipped through it.

“Nothing much. He misses me. He promises things will be different if I give him another chance. The usual.”

It was clear she was withholding information. Jayne's emotions were as transparent as glass.

“So what aren't you telling me?” I asked.

Her voice went up an octave. “Nothing.”

I closed the pulp and pointed at the green figurine on the cover. “Come on,” I said. “We know you're hiding something.”

Jayne sighed, fluttering the edges of the letter with her breath. Tony didn't use V-mail. He wasn't a fan of anything created by the federal government. She folded the letter, carefully following the original creases, and attempted to cram it back in its envelope. “I just used to feel safe with Tony, and right now I'm really missing that.”

“Safe? Before or after he hit you?”

She cocked her head. “That was one time, Rosie.”

I showed her with my finger how enormous once could be. “One time too many.”

She directed her comments at the letter. “If Tony were here, he'd make sure nothing happened to any of us.”

“Or he'd hire someone else to guarantee it.”

She didn't see that as a shortcoming. “Exactly. I feel so…I don't know…vulnerable here. At any moment, any one of us could die. I didn't think this place would be like that.”

“No one did.” And weren't we the fools for being so naïve? What
did we think would happen on the battlefront? That we'd spend our days on the beach waiting for Dorothy Lamour to serve us cocktails?

“If Tony were here—” Her voice faded away, and I fought the desire to finish her sentence. If Tony were here, she wouldn't be able to relax and just be herself. She would constantly be worried that she was upsetting him. She would be a nervous wreck every time he disappeared to get involved with who knows what.

Of course, if Tony were here and supplies were missing, we could almost guarantee that he was somehow involved. At least that mystery would be solved.

“We can get through this,” I told Jayne. “We will get through this. We don't need Tony to hold our hands in order to survive.”

“I know.” She gave up trying to put the letter in the envelope and tossed it onto her side table. “How's everyone else holding up?”

“Kay and Violet are at each other's throats. Spanky wants to take down the whole imperial army. And our new CO, Amelia Lambert, finds grief messy and inconvenient.”

Jayne smiled. “Maybe she's got the right idea. Life would be so much easier if we didn't care.”

I had to agree.

That night we held an impromptu memorial service for Gilda. We gathered in the enlisted mess where the blaring overhead lights were replaced with lanterns. There we led the men in Gilda's favorite songs and shared stories about her. As we found our material growing thin, we invited anyone in the audience to share their own memories. A quartet of sailors sang “The Gilda DeVane Blues.” An Australian officer described dancing with her and how she insisted on hearing his story before she told him her own. Men from our hospital visit shared the tale of how we spent the afternoon talking with them and helping them write letters home.

And then Van Lauer volunteered to speak. We watched in trepidation as he came to the center of the room and addressed the audience.

“For those of you who don't know me, I'm Van Lauer, and I've had the great fortune to do two extraordinary things in the past
year: share a screen with Gilda DeVane and become a pilot in the army air forces.” He paused as though he expected to be assailed with the usual declarations of love that audiences at his appearances bombarded him with. “Gilda, of course, wasn't her real name, but one that was chosen for her in a fan poll in the back of a movie magazine five years ago. She liked to say that Gilda DeVane was created at that moment, sprung fully from the imaginations of the thousands of moviegoers who chose what to call her. And for five amazing years, she gave them everything they wanted: a woman of glamour and passion who would do anything for her career, even if it meant dying in the process. I guess, in a sense, we lost two women last night: the one she was and the one she was made to be.”

He turned to leave, and I looked at Kay to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the strange, disjointed talk. He stumbled as he headed back to his seat. Violet cupped her hand and tilted her elbow to confirm what I suspected: he was lit.

The audience seemed equally confused by his remarks. Had he insulted her? Praised her? Was it possible he'd done both?

Violet leaped to her feet and returned to the center of the room. “Thank you, Van. That was…interesting. And it reminded me that I had a few more things to say about her myself.” I braced myself. “If you've seen my act, you probably know I haven't been particularly kind to Gilda. Let's face it: it takes a better person than me not to be jealous of a movie star. But over the course of our few weeks together, she showed me what an amazing person she was. Generous, as so many of the men tonight have described her. Compassionate. And, of course, talented. Those are the things that we should be remembering her for.”

I was dumbfounded that Violet felt the need to defend her. And powerfully moved. She was right. Gilda's role as a movie star was unimportant. It was Gilda as a person that we needed to recognize.

Late Nate was the last person to speak. Unlike Van, he wasn't drunk, though he made me wish I was. “This has been a most moving outpouring of emotion this evening, and I'm very pleased to see that so many of you were able to express your thoughts with heartfelt
words. It would be easy to label Miss DeVane's death a tragedy and be done with it, but I think we must see it for the greater role it plays during our time in these islands. This lovely, talented woman was not taken from us for any reason other than the cruelty, greed, and inhumanity of the enemy.” The crowd stirred, coming alive the way leaves rustled when the wind ran through them. “This is the same enemy that bombed Pearl Harbor. The same that raped this land and wounded its people. These are godless men who think nothing of torture and relish the smell of death, who cannot distinguish between soldier and civilian, man and woman, light and dark.” The stirring evolved into something else. Whispers whipped around me as men repeated Blake's words, not Blake's exact sentences but the same basic idea pumped up with profanity and venom. The room was taut with an inaudible growl. There was a beast that had been held at bay that was getting ready to be unleashed.

Blake lowered his voice and pumped his fist triumphantly into the air. “We cannot let this treachery continue. We must punish the perpetrators of this crime. Do not let Gilda DeVane's death be in vain!”

A low rumble rushed through the crowd, like a wave pounding the beach, and morphed into a chant: “Kill the Japs! Avenge Gilda! Kill the Japs!” The men rose to their feet and mimicked Blake's stance, striking an unseen assailant with their fists in time to their words. Kay and Violet stood, too, their voices rising to reach the volume of everyone else. Soon I was the only one sitting in silence, and the crowd seemed to direct their energy at getting me to stand. Didn't I realize how important their message was? Didn't I agree that Gilda should be avenged? She was an innocent who didn't have a stake in this war. All she wanted was to spread joy and happiness. The Japanese took advantage of her generosity and good nature, picking her off when she was at her most vulnerable, sharing her gifts with a crowd of hungry soldiers. The sniper should've shot into the audience. That would've been fair turnaround. At least those men were prepared to die.

I stood and lifted my fist with the rest of the crowd, my mouth
working in time to their words, my throat growing hoarse with the power of our message. “Kill the Japs! Avenge Gilda!”

 

Only later did I realize what a strange spell Blake had managed to cast on all of us. It was unnerving how quickly I'd given in to it, and even more disturbing how effective his words were going to be, come the next battle. He'd made the war personal for those boys who were still grappling with the wisdom of being there or growing weary from how long the offensive dragged on. No longer were they fighting a faceless enemy. They were punishing the savages responsible for killing Gilda DeVane and all the friends and family members they'd lost—and would lose—to the war.

As the men cleared out after the show, I heard a familiar voice calling out my name. It was Peaches.

“How are you?” he asked me. We tried to find someplace away from the scurrying crowd to talk.

“How do you think?”

“I was so sorry when I heard the news.”

“You and everyone here.”

“Were you close to her?”

It seemed like a silly question; after all, I'd been touring with her for a month. But thinking back on Van's speech, I wondered how much of what we'd seen had been the real Gilda. Was he right to suggest there were two of her, and if so, which one had she sent to the islands? “We all were,” I told Peaches. “She had a way of making friends with people. What are you doing here?”

“Billy heard about Jayne and insisted on seeing her.”

“She's fine. The bullet barely kissed her. Her ankle got the worst of it.”

“Still, he had to see her with his own eyes. Plus, I thought you could use the company. You've had a pretty rough week. And now with Jayne out of commission…”

Boy did he have that right. In fact, the whole year was looking like it was going to be a wash. “That's swell of you. Thanks.”

“Are you going back to the States?”

“Nope. They won't let us. We're here for the duration. And we're now under Wac command.”

He let out a low whistle. “Yikes. So it does get worse?”

“Lucky us, right?”

He looked toward the ocean. “You want to go for a walk?”

“Sure.” I didn't have anything better to do. Going back to the tent would mean going back to Captain Lambert. And I didn't want to be around Spanky and the boys tonight. All that talk about getting back at the Japs didn't sit well with me. I wasn't up to hanging out with a bunch of men who were using it as their guiding philosophy.

We walked along the clean white sand watching the waves as they beat the shore smooth. The moon hung low in the sky, creating a picture postcard of paradise. The water twinkled in the night. It wasn't just the motion and the stars—the waves actually seemed to be glowing.

I commented on the strangeness of it all.

“Phosphorescence,” said Peaches. “Different molds and algae make it glow like that. When we were coming over on the carrier, there were nights when you swore there were diamonds in the water.”

I wasn't seeing diamonds; to me, it looked like the water was teaming with ghosts. Was Jack in there, fighting to leave the sea that had claimed him? Was Gilda part of it now, forced to haunt this island for eternity?

I shook the thought out of my head. “What's it like?”

“What?”

“War?”

We stopped walking and sat in the sand.

“Keep in mind I'm a pilot, not a hand-to-hand combat kind of guy, so what I say may not be everyone's experience.”

“Duly noted,” I said. “So what's it like from your perspective?”

He removed a rock from the sand and tossed it into the water. It landed with a
plonk
in the darkness. “A lot of the time? Exhilarating. You're on a constant adrenaline rush and way up in the air. Even
though you know your targets are human, it becomes a kind of game. Someone on the radio is hollering for you to move a little left or right to make sure your next shot is lined up, and the two of you are cracking jokes about how many slant eyes you're about to take out or wondering if you've left enough bodies for the buzzards circling above the island to feed on.”

“Wow.”

“But it's not always like that. I was on one of the islands not long ago, picking up some marines who were stranded. They offered to give me a tour, and I took them up on it. I wanted to see with my own eyes what we'd been accomplishing from the air. We'd blown these huge craters into the land, which were filling with water, and that bothered me so much. It's one thing to kill the men who invaded this place, but to destroy the islands seemed just as bad as what they were doing. But even that didn't compare to the bodies. I saw things on that trip that I'll never get out of my mind. Men blown apart so they were just a foot here, an arm there. The ones who were still alive howling from the burns. And the smells—rotting bodies, cooking flesh. You can imagine what misery looks like, maybe even what it sounds like, but who knew it had a smell? A taste. And when I looked at all this, I didn't see the Japanese. Divided into pieces like that, you saw men. Just men.”

I ran my hands through the sand, digging holes, then filling them back in. “Why do you think a Japanese sniper would've wanted to kill Gilda and Jayne?” I asked.

“I don't think there has to be a reason, Rosie. Maybe they weren't looking for a specific target. Maybe they were looking for any target.”

“But would they do that? There was a crowd of men there that night. He could've shot at any one of them.”

“Look, I don't think anyone's all bad or good, not even the Nazis, though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone around here that shares that opinion. But I have to tell you I've heard things about the Japanese that made me glad I helped kill as many as I did.”

He was such a contradiction. But then all men at war were. They could mourn death and suffering in one breath and rally to kill in the other. There were so many things I wanted to ask Peaches: Did he worry that all this violence made him a bad person? Did he think the Japanese viewed us as just as cruel as we viewed them? Did he wonder if he was going to hell?

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Do you think it's true, all these things they tell us about the Japanese?”

He started digging his own trenches in the sand. Were we both hoping to escape here? Or were we longing to build castles that turned this place back into a paradise?

“I think they exaggerate, sure, like Rear Admiral Blake today. They want us to see them as cruel and inhuman. They need us to, otherwise we'd feel remorse every time we pulled the trigger. But I don't think they've made everything up. I've seen things with my own eyes and heard stories out of the mouths of men I trust. If anything, I don't think they're telling us all the horrible stories that they could.”

I was hoping that wasn't the case. I had convinced myself that our enemies were just like us, only wearing different faces.

I was quiet for a moment, and the silence was filled with the sound of the crashing waves. How far did they come ashore at night? Based on the sand that had already been wiped clean by the water, it wasn't hard to imagine the entire island being underwater for a few hours each evening. I wasn't a religious person by any stretch, but it reminded me of a baptism. The detritus was washed away, and we were given a clean shore to taint again over the course of the next day. Perhaps Gilda believed that Tulagi could do the same thing for people.

Peaches's sand trench connected with my own. Our hands were so close that I could feel the warmth radiating from him.

“The sniper shot a dog too,” I said.

His hand retreated. I could still feel his nearness though. “I'm
not surprised. If you want to injure a man, you aim for his leg. If you want to kill him, you aim for his heart.”

 

I snuck back to the WAC barracks with only the moon to light my way. As I approached the structure, rustling in nearby bushes told me I wasn't alone. I froze, waiting for whoever it was to make themselves known. The movement stopped, and I could sense that peculiar tension that arises when people attempt to mimic silence. The longer I stared into the darkness the more certain I became that there were human shapes there, crouched down low, protecting a tiny red globe that could've been the dying embers of a cigarette. It should've terrified me, but for some reason I felt comforted. Our enemies weren't subtle. They made themselves known with the report of a gun or the clamor of a bomb. They didn't watch us under the protection of foliage while trying to silence the sound of their hearts.

I lay awake for a long time in our strange new surroundings. While the jungle was never quiet, the volume was considerably louder now that we had twenty-five new bunkmates. Some women snored, some mumbled; all of them tossed and turned on the uncomfortable little cots that groaned with every movement. Although our previous mattresses had been nothing to write home about, these felt like they were twice as thin and stuffed with nails. Every time I moved, something new poked into my back. It was considerably warmer than it had been in the tent. The Quonset hut turned into a giant oven and squeaked and groaned as the heat opened up its cracks. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that I was back at the Shaw House with Jayne an arm's reach away. The only sound would be Churchill purring his way to sleep and the sounds of the city as it wound down for the night. Outside our window the neon motel sign would pulse, illuminating my dreams with its constant light.