Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [75]
Joe had fought it out on the rock for sixteen months when two important events occurred in his life. He got a new skipper, and a liberty ship carrying some SeaBees stopped at the island for engine repairs. Joe's old skipper was sent home under some kind of a cloud. Either he went to pieces mentally or he got into trouble over the accounts of the officers' club. Joe never got the right of it.
The new skipper was a Navy type. He was a commander fifty-two years old. He would never go higher. He was a hard-drinking man who could not be relied upon. Yet he was an excellent fellow, and no one would prefer charges against him. So he dragged on and on, from one unimportant job to another. Many loved him but few respected him. Ambitious young men sought to leave his command at any opportunity, but they buttered him up while he was their superior. Some of them even bit their lips in silence when he made passes at their lovely wives. Before he was on the rock a week even Joe knew that he had been sent there as some kind of punishment. Something he had done in the States. Joe never got the right of it.
The Skipper, as he was known, started innovations at once. By God, he was the boss and things were going to be different. If he had to come to this god-forsaken island, he'd show them a thing or two. His first order was that each man must sleep under mosquito nets at all times. He almost had a mutiny on his hands, and the ringleader was Joe.
The huts in which enlisted men slept were foul things. Quonsets for eight men housed twenty-four. Men slept in double deckers, and even though there was a breeze at night, it could not penetrate the crowded quonsets. On some nights Joe lay in bed and sweated all night long. When the order came for mosquito netting, therefore, he rebelled. He tried it for two nights and found that he had what a doctor would have termed claustrophobia. He struggled with the net and almost strangled. In the hot, sweaty night he swore he'd not use a net again. He tore it off.
Next day he was before the new skipper. "I'm going to make an example of you," that red-faced man said.
When the words were spoken, Joe visibly trembled. For sixteen months he had kept out of trouble, and now he was in, up to his ears. "Get me out of this! Get me out of this!" he prayed. "I don't want no trouble!"
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the Skipper shouted. "You think you can get away with murder around here?" He looked up at the frightened seaman. Joe licked his lips. The Skipper was about to throw the book at Joe when he remembered why it was he had been sent to the rock. "Got to start over!" he muttered to himself. "This time I'm starting over!" he promised under his breath.
"Young man," he said aloud, "don't you like the Navy?"
"Oh, sir!" Joe replied in the seaman's stock reply to the Skipper's stock question, "I love the Navy!"
"You'd better show it!" the Skipper said gruffly. "If I catch you in trouble again, I'll bounce you right out of the Navy." Then he added the crusher: "And you'll find yourself in the Army!"
Joe came to attention and left. After that he slept under a mosquito netting. It was strange, but out there in the middle of the Pacific, with an island almost to himself, Joe was cramped and stifled. He would wake up at night gasping for breath. He finally solved the problem by compounding his earlier felony. He stole a dynamotor and rigged up an electric fan. "If they ask me about it," he muttered to himself, "I'll say I got it from one of them wrecked planes." He scuffed the dynamotor up a bit to make it look like salvage. The fan was a wonder and helped him to breathe. Once he stuck his hand in it, and several