Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [74]
It was the atabrine that gave Joe his worst trouble. He hated the little yellow pills and wasn't sure they did any good. The American Medical Association said they were a waste of time, and Joe was pretty sure the doctors back home knew more than the sawbones on the rock. Hell, these guys couldn't even cure the itch! But all the same everyone had to take his atabrine tablets daily. That was not so bad until you began to turn yellow. Then you got worried.
Joe started to wonder if maybe those stories weren't true after all. "As I got it straight from a doctor," one of the men confided to him one night, "all this atabrine does is keep malaria down. It don't show on you, see? You're yellow, and it don't show. But all the time malaria is runnin' wild! Down here!" He slapped the fly of his pants. "And when they got all the work they can out of you, they send you on home. A livin' wreck! They stop the atabrine and the disease pops out all over you." Then he lowered his voice mysteriously and slapped his fly again. "But mostly here," he said in doleful tones. "You're nothin' but a burned-out wreck."
The men in Joe's hut wondered if there was any truth in what the man said. It stood to reason you took atabrine only to keep something in check. If they were hopping you up with dope, only so you could work without falling down, that was bad enough. But what if taking atabrine for three months, say, made you lose your power? Did it mean you couldn't ever have any babies? Or did it mean something worse? With wonderful funds of ignorance and superstition Joe and his friends considered the question from all angles. They found no answer to their informer's devastating insinuation: "All right! All right! How do you know you ain't losin' your power?"
Joe had no way of knowing. In fact, like hundreds of men on the rock, he had no reason to believe that he had any power. He had been in love once or twice, but he had never married. Nor had he slept with a girl. He had wanted to, once or twice, but morals, lost opportunities and all those strange things that keep men from doing what they otherwise want to, had intervened. He had to guess about his power, but he sure didn't want to lose it. As days passed and he became more yellow, he began to wonder darkly if maybe that guy was right. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, but he had noticed that whenever you got started on something like that, you got into trouble. Bad trouble.
Two months before, Joe was lying in his bunk. It was about eleven-thirty at night. Suddenly he heard a loud shout and sounds of a fight. With the rest of his hut he scrambled from bed in time to see two officers and three enlisted men rounding up a chief petty officer and a young seaman whose nose was bleeding.
A third officer hurried to each of the huts. "All right, men!" he said quietly. "Back to bed. Break it up, men. Break it up!"
Next morning hushed whispers flamed through the camp. No one ever said anything officially, but the C. P. O. and the seaman disappeared. Later Joe got the word. The chief got sixteen years in Portsmouth and the seaman two years in Mare Island. Eight nights later Louie sneaked into the nurse's room. The one whose plane was forced down. Louie went to jail, too. After that Joe just stayed away from everything to do with sex. It was an expensive luxury on the rock. "And," he had sworn, "it ain't gonna get me!"
Fortunately, a smart young doctor got wind of what was troubling the men. He wrote to Washington for an official statement that atabrine did not affect virility. It was signed by a Jew, an Irishman, a Protestant, and a doctor from a little town in Missouri. Eight hundred copies were made, and each man on the rock got one. But the young doctor's second idea was even better. He got a clever photographer who