Winter in June (8 page)

Knowing Violet's propensity for drama, I turned to Kay to verify that it was as bad as she claimed. “It's fine,” she said. “I've dealt with worse.”

Her face didn't look right. I may have known Kay only a week, but it was clear that she wore her emotions like a stripper wore her brassiere—outside where everyone could see it. “Why the glum puss?” I asked.

“The bathroom isn't ours alone. We have to share it,” said Violet. “Apparently, there's a large contingency of G.I. Janes that just moved in over the hill.”

“Wacs? That's cozy,” I said.

“Turns out Kay knows some of them. Don't you, Kay?” said Violet.

Kay nodded slowly, as though her head weighed two tons.

“Isn't that a coincidence? Are they old friends from home?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” said Kay. “I was a Wac myself until a few months ago.”

Before we could give Kay the third, Dotty returned with another sailor in tow, a stout man with a bald head that had been burned red by the tropical sun.

“This is Spanky,” he said to us. It was obvious how he'd gotten the name; he was a dead ringer for the kid from
Our Gang
. “When Spanky's not breaking hearts here on the islands, he's the radar operator on an attack transport called
The McCawley
.”

“Nice to meet you, ladies. We thought you might enjoy a tour of camp.” Spanky had a brash midwestern accent and the kind of body that was made for tilling soil and herding cattle. When he spoke, he didn't immediately gravitate toward Gilda. Rather his eyes landed on Violet and lingered there. She blushed beneath the weight of his attention, although I could tell that she was thrilled that, for once, she was the one being stared at.

“You have such pretty eyes,” he said. The minute the words left his mouth he snapped to attention as though he'd just remembered
that they weren't the only two people there. “Er…this way, ladies.”

We followed him out of the tent and onto the road. Kay and Violet kept pace with Spanky, while Gilda, Jayne, and I walked with Dotty.

“Why does everyone have a nickname?” asked Jayne.

“When you're around as many people are we are, it helps to have shorthand to remember who everyone is and where they're from. It's less confusing too,” said Dotty.

I suspected there was more to it than that. The nicknames were a way to distance the men from the lives they'd left behind and help them slip into their new roles as warriors. It was a bit like giving them stage names, I suppose. The soldier on the battlefield was a very different character from the man he'd been at home, just as Gilda DeVane was probably a very different woman from Maria Elizondo.

“So what was all the commotion before?” asked Gilda.

“Just a normal Tuesday afternoon in the South Pacific.” His mood was dour compared to when we'd first met him. I couldn't tell if it was because of the events of that afternoon or if Kay's attempt to avoid him was what was affecting him.

“I couldn't figure out where the noise was coming from,” I said. “Were they bombing Tulagi?”

“Guadalcanal, but Tulagi was in their flight path. What you heard were some of the depth charges going off in the ocean. Water's got a way of amplifying things.”

“Was anyone hurt?” asked Gilda.

“Probably. Someone's always hurt. This is war.”

Sensing his mood, Gilda looped her arm in his and pointed toward a tree in the distance. “What on earth is that brilliantly colored bird?” she asked. “I've never seen anything like it.”

The two men took us to each of the major structures on the island and introduced us to the men responsible for running things behind the scenes. We went into the commissary, the PX, the infirmary and the rec hall. Just like the ship, the island felt like a
miniature city, set up to provide the men with everything they could possibly need, save the people they'd left at home. I wondered if the department stores even sent girls around in December so the men could pick out their gifts without ever resting from their work.

Our last stop was the enlisted men's mess, where preparations for dinner were already underway. In enormous vats that seemed more appropriate for baths than food, huge quantities of potatoes were being mashed by electric implements that looked like they could also be used to break up asphalt in a pinch. While the men waited for kettles to boil and for the mixers to finish churning, they threw dice and played cards.

Most of the people working in the mess were black, Mexican, or Italian. From what Dotty and Spanky said they'd gotten their jobs not because of their skill in the kitchen but because of the color of their skin or what they'd done before the war. “That's where they put the men with records,” said Spanky, his voice making it clear this information was on the QT. The men had lean, hard bodies that reminded me of the tough guys who worked for Tony B. In fact, I could swear I saw the bulge of a revolver peeking out from one of their waistbands.

“Dotty,” said one fellow, whose gut professed that the food he prepared met with his own approval. A cigar dangled from his mouth, leaving a trail of ashes on the kitchen floor. I wondered how much of the cigar was going to end up in the potatoes that night. “Who're your friends?”

“These are the USO girls I was telling you about. Spanky and I are giving them the VIP tour. Ladies, this is Deacon.”

He made a great show of wiping his mitts on his apron before offering one of his hands to us.

“That's an unusual name,” I said.

“It ain't a name—it's my job. I'm a man of the church.”

“Is the food really so bad that it requires divine intervention?”

He laughed and turned off the vat of potatoes.

“What's for dinner?” asked Jayne.

“SOS.”

She cocked her head to the right. “We're having an emergency signal for dinner?”

“It stands for stuff on a shingle,” he announced. Only he didn't say “stuff.” As the profanity left his mouth, his black face took on a red cast. “Pardon my French, ma'am. Chipped beef on toast, potatoes, and green beans. Don't you worry though; if you're VIPs, you're not eating anything that passed through this kitchen. What's your name?”

“Jayne Hamilton,” she said.

“Hey, fellows!” he called out. “Come meet Jayne Hamilton and her friends!”

In a portion of the kitchen unseen to us, but which must've housed the sinks, a tremendous clatter warned that some catastrophe had just taken place. Deacon left us to bump gums with the gamblers while he went to investigate the source of the sound. The card players had colorful nicknames like Lefty, Gris, and King that I was dying to learn the history behind. As with everyone we'd met, the men were gracious and welcoming despite the fact that I was pretty certain none of them had a cement floor or an ersatz sink in their tent.

Deacon returned with a grim look on his face. “Gris, you got a problem back there.”

“Again?” Gris dropped his cards facedown. “I swear it's sabotage.”

“Sabotage or not, you better mop up that floor. If the SP catches a whiff, you're cooked for good.”

Gris started toward the back of the kitchen.

“Hey, wait up,” said Spanky. “I'll give you a hand.” He crawled under the pass-through and together they disappeared into the back.

Spanky, a cardboard box in hand, returned just as we were getting ready to leave. The contents rattled all the way back to our tent.

 

After the tour, we got our first week's performance schedule. Or, rather, Gilda did. She gave it a cursory look before hanging it on one
of the spare nails in the tent. “The bad news is we start tomorrow. The good news is our first show isn't until ten.”

We all approached the schedule and tried to figure out what the typed abbreviations meant. I thought they might be locations, but since no key was provided to help us decipher them, we decided the information wasn't important. What was crucial was the number of shows we'd be doing: three a day.

“What the deuce?” I said. “What is this—boot camp?”

“There's hours between them,” said Violet. “And believe me: three shows will feel like a vacation when you see what they throw at you later on. Toward the end of my last tour we were doing seven a day.”

I groaned at the news. Singing a few songs a half dozen times a day was one thing, but tap dancing? I'd be lucky if I ever walked again. More important, having a schedule of constant performances was going to make it awfully difficult to accomplish what I'd come to the islands for in the first place.

 

By the time 1800 hours arrived, we were starving. No one had told us what the arrangements were for dinner, so we assumed that the officers would be in the same mess area as the enlisted men, just as they'd been on the boat. We high-tailed it to the mess and paused in the doorway, too stunned by what we saw to enter. It seemed impossible that so many men were on that little island, much less inside that one Quonset hut. The room was an overwhelming hodgepodge of noise, as steel trays were put onto metal tables, bodies settled heavily onto benches, and men communicated with one another through grunts, smacks, and four-letter words. As word of our arrival spread about the room, the words the men chose to speak underwent a cleansing so drastic that many of them shut their yaps entirely. New skirts were here, and that meant they had to be on their best behavior.

Of course we weren't the only women there. The Wacs were already in the room, dining on their SOS. They were an interesting-looking crew of women. At head of the table was a blonde who wore her hair in a chignon that was pulled so tight that the skin around
her hairline turned red with strain. Her uniform was pin-neat, the chicken on her hat declaring that she was the leader of the pack. And what a motley pack it was. Unlike their CO, most of the Wacs had shed their formality and adapted to their new home as best they could. Their skin was tan, hiding the yellow tint of their Atabrine, their clothing altered to better fit the island climate. Some of them had cut through their thick, black army-issue Abner shoes and removed the toe portion to create a kind of sandal to better weather the heat. Many of them wore necklaces made of beads or seeds around their necks. Still others had silver rings and bracelets fashioned, I was to learn later, from hammered Australian coins, most likely presented to them by whatever men they were currently seeing. The bizarre outfits were topped with bandanas and the hobby hats that were their signature, though even those had been adapted with swaths of mosquito netting.

It was disconcerting observing the men, comfortable in surroundings they had grown to consider their own and afraid to curse like the sailors they were. I felt like we had walked into a private club we didn't hold a membership for.

“Excuse me,” said Gilda to a woman with an upturned piglike nose. “Can you tell us where the officers sit?”

The woman turned to the Wacs sitting around her, and they shared a private giggle. “No,” she said, her tone a caricature of Gilda's careful enunciation. “I cannot.”

We backed away from their table. As we scanned the room, the Wac CO's cold eyes watched our every move. I'm not sure I could blame her for her attitude. In a matter of seconds we had deposed them by doing little more than wearing civvies and counting a certain famous actress among us. It had to chafe her but good.

“You're the USO girls, right?” A man appeared at our side as we struggled to figure out if we should just grab the first empty table we saw.

“That's us,” said Violet.

“Then you ladies are in the wrong place. You're supposed to be eating at the high commissioner's house.”

We followed him as quickly as we could out of the mess and into an awaiting Jeep. He sped down a dusty road that made no concession to our freshly styled hair and painted faces. Within minutes we were at the high commissioner's mansion, a beautiful home on a hill that seemed as out of place as diapers on a monkey. Hyacinths and rosebushes hugged the building and filled the air with their rich, sweet scent. Inside, ornate English furnishings tried to pretend the building was on a very different island in the same way that a carefully rendered set could convince an audience that they were in eighteenth-century France rather than a dingy little theater in Greenwich Village. After seeing our own living conditions and the sparse accommodations shared by the natives, it was impossible not to view this joint without a little resentment.

We were ushered into a lavish dining room where the men already assembled stood to greet us.

“Sorry we're late,” said Gilda.

The tables were set with linen and china, imprinted with military insignia. Chairs were pushed aside to accommodate the five of us, each scattered among the officers to make sure we bumped gums with as many of them as possible. I sat between a captain in the Royal Air Force and an American with hair so blond it appeared white. As soon as my bottom met the seat, a native man appeared and deposited a plate on the table in front of me.

Just like on the ship, the food was much better than I could've imagined. After hearing about what the enlisted men were eating, and having been subjected to such military favorites as SPAM, it was disorienting to eat better than I ever had at home. Each of us was given a steak, baked potatoes, and a variety of fresh vegetables drowning in butter. Real coffee circulated the table in silver urns, along with what looked to be some sort of fruit punch.

“Pardon me, but what is this?” I asked the Brit as the serving man poured some into my glass.

“Flavored water. The local supply has bacteria in it. And the men don't like the taste or the color of the stuff the Yanks bring in, so they add colored tablets to disguise both.”

What would the military think of next? “Are all the officers' meals like this?”

He cut into his steak and stabbed a cube onto his fork. “Usually it's a sight better, but the air raid cut preparation time in half.” He looked at my plate. “Don't you eat meat?”

I'd pushed the steak to the side. A few months before I'd found out exactly what was in the black-market beef so many New York restaurants were buying, and the knowledge had killed my once-voracious appetite for flesh. Even though the USDA had put new regulations in place to make sure the meat we ate had once mooed, I knew better than to trust them. “Nope,” I told the Brit. “You want it?”

“You're getting me on.” I assured him I wasn't. He took my meat and paid for it with a hefty portion of his potato. While I devoured the food, the other officers kept up the conversation. They may not have had as colorful language as the enlisted men, but the topics they chose to discuss in front of us were anything but sanitized. They told us tales about the kidney-wrecking PT boats, missions gone awry, and the weapons employed by the Axis and Allies, which had amusing names like hedgehog, bazooka, and bouncing betties. Based on the monikers, they sounded quaint and charming until you remembered that this was stuff designed to kill people.