Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [140]
Then one card is flipped in the middle. If it's a one-eyed jack, a blind umpire calls the game and you start over with a new deal and the old kitty! If a nine appears, it's a tie game, and you all get an extra card, face up. By this time it's pretty risky to bet on anything less than five nines. So the pot is split between the best hand and the poorest. Trouble is, you can't tell what the man next you is bidding on, the three queens that show or the complete bust that doesn't. It's a man's game.
At 0345 we trailed out into the tropic night. Orion was in the west. Far to the south Canopus and the Southern Cross appeared. It was a lonely and beautiful night.
Guadalcanal was silent as we left the De Gink. But as we approached Henderson Field the strip was alive with activity. Liberators were going out to photograph Kuralei at dawn. Medium bombers were getting ready for a strike. And two C-47's were warming up. The Bouncing Belch was out of place among those nobler craft. We wheeled the tired old lady into position and waited for the New Zealand C-47 to take the air. We followed, and before the transport had cleared Guadal, we were on its tail. There we stayed, grimly, during the tedious over-water flight. It was daylight long before we reached Espiritu. Eventually we saw the long northwestern finger of that strange island.
As soon as Bus was satisfied that it was Espiritu we dipped twice to the C-47. Its pilots waved to us. We zoomed off through the bitter cold morning air. We were on our own. Bus gunned the engine, which had been idling to stay back with the C-47. Now the Belch tore along, and at the same time we lost altitude. The old girl became liveable once more. The intense cold was gone.
We hurried past the great bay at the northern end of Santo, down the eastern side of the island, well clear of its gaunt, still unexplored mountains. The morning sun was low when we passed the central part of Santo, and I can still recall the eerie effect of horizontal shadows upon the thickest jungle in the South Pacific. A hard, forbidding green mat hid every feature of the island, but from time to time solitary trees, burdened with parasites, thrust their tops high above the mat. It was these trees, catching the early sunlight, that made the island grotesque, crawling, and infinitely lonely. Planes had crashed into this green sea of Espiritu and had never been seen again. Ten minutes after the smoke cleared, a burnt plane was invisible.
As if in contrast, the southern part of the island was a bustling military concentration. The Bouncing Belch sidled along the channel and sought out Luganville strip. Bus eased his adventuresome plane down, and before we were fairly stopped, Tony had wangled a jeep. How he did it one never knew. He came back much excited. He had not found any whiskey, that was true. But he was certain that, at Noumea the Army had more than a thousand cases. All we had to do was get there.
It was over six hundred miles, due south, and Bus had never flown the route before. He studied the map a minute and said, "We'll hop down to Efate. That's easy. Then we'll pick up some big plane flying the rest of the way. OK?" Who could object? At five that afternoon we were in Noumea!
This time Tony was right! There was whiskey in Noumea. Barrels of it. Using our official permit, we bought $350 worth and then tossed in all the spare cash we had. We traded our dynamotors, ice machine, electric iron, and hot-water heater for more. If we could have traded the rear end of the Belch we would have done so. We wound up with twenty-two cases of Christmas cheer. We locked it in a warehouse, gave the mechanics at Magenta two bottles for checking the engine, and set out to find some fun in Noumea.
Next morning Bus and Tony looked at one