Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [71]
Dinah urged their driver to hurry. "Can't do but 25," he growled. "But it's an emergency!" Dinah protested.
"It's always an emergency," the driver replied. "This is an awful island!"
"But this is a real emergency!" Dinah insisted.
"Oh! Well! Why didn't you say so?" the driver asked in a most cooperative spirit. "In a real emergency I always do 26."
Nellie winced as they passed the place where four men had jumped on the car earlier that night. As they reached the plantation, she directed Dinah and the driver to wait. Hurrying across the garden she went to the veranda. It was empty. The dining room was empty, too. Then she heard sounds from one of the bedrooms.
She hurried along the walk and found the source of the sounds. There it was. The little girls' bedroom. She opened the door. The four girls were in nightgowns, standing about a bed on which De Becque sat. They were singing "Au clair de la lune" in childish voices. Emile rose, smiled at Nellie, and hummed along with his daughters. Nellie added her uncertain treble to the chorus, and before long they were singing the old song so loudly that Dinah and the driver could join in from the jeep.
DRY ROT
"I WON"T let it get me down," Joe used to say. He would mumble the sentence over and over to himself. "I ain't gonna let it get me down! It ain't gonna get me down."
What it was, Joe never stopped to say. It was the heebie-jeebies or the screaming meemies. It was rock-jolly, or island-happy, or G. I. fever, or the purple moo-moo.
It was hellish stuff to get, and you got it when you had been on one island for a year or more. Joe had been on his rock for twenty-seven months, and he swore by God that it would never get him.
Not like it got some of the other guys! There was the soldier that stole a truck. On an island that had only three miles of roads he stole a truck. Then there was the other soldier that stowed away on a ship. Just a ship going anywhere. One fellow hit an officer. Six others ran the still under the cliffs and were sent up for terms at Mare Island. And then there was Louie, who sneaked into the nurse's room that night the transport crashed. But that's another story.
Joe watched these things happen, and hundreds of others. When something rough took place, there would be a court-martial. Everybody would say, "What the hell? You ain't gonna send the guy up, are you? He was rock-jolly!" But they sent him up, all the same. A steady stream of guys, just as good as Joe, went back to the States, under guard.
"Not for me!" Joe promised himself. "When I leave here for good old Uncle Sugar, I'm goin' on me own two feet, and they ain't gonna be no guard taggin' along! It ain't gonna get me!"
But it got some of the officers. Just like enlisted men. They weren't exempt. Not by a long shot. There was the fine lieutenant who was always smiling. He stood the rock for about thirteen months. Day after day, doing nothing. Then one day he hitch-hiked a plane ride to New Zealand. He was so rock-jolly he went on to Australia and they finally picked him up in Karachi, India.
Just because you were an officer didn't mean you stayed out of trouble. There was the old-timer, a dry goods man from Philadelphia. Took to drinking, and one day they found him breaking into the officers' club. Had to have some whiskey, and it was two o'clock in the afternoon. Couldn't wait the extra two hours. They didn't court-martial him. Just shipped him home, quiet like. Tried to keep the enlisted men from hearing about it. But they heard. And nine-tenths of them felt sorry for the old man.
It seemed as if old men didn't stand the rock as well as young men did. There was that chief petty officer who started screaming one night. At first nobody knew what had hit him. Anyway, he yelled his head off, and they had to put him in a strait jacket. It took them two days to quiet him down. Found out he'd been drinking torpedo juice. They sent him home, too.
Now nobody on the rock liked a good drink of liquor better than Joe. Not a drunkard,