Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [77]
They didn't know where they were going, but they had a lot of heavy machinery. Probably going to some island. Going to invade some island. What you goin' to do when peace comes?" Billis asked. "Back to my shop in Columbus, Ohio. I'm a shoemaker."
"What you goin' to do if we all start wearin' plastic shoes?" Billis demanded. "Won't have to have them mended?" The thought shocked Joe. He had never thought of such a thing before. He had no answer. People would always have to have their shoes fixed. But Luther Billis' agile mind was on to new problems. "You got a girl?" he asked. "No," Joe replied. "I ain't."
"You ain't got a girl?" Billis shouted. "What the hell kind of a sailor are you?"
"I never went with girls very much," Joe explained. "I tell you what I do," Billis said with his hand about Joe's shoulder. "I'm gonna get you a girl. I like you. You're a real Joe, ain't he, Hyman?" Hyman agreed.
"Look at the moon over the water!" Weinstein said. Billis turned to study the rare sight of moonlight upon tropic waters with palm trees along the shore and a ship at the dock.
"God, that's beautiful!" he said. "You ought to come down here lots, Joe. You ought to look at that. Like Hyman just done."
The three men sat there in silence and watched the moonlight wax and wane along the waves. Never before in sixteen months had Joe seen that strange and lovely thing. He suddenly wanted to go with Billis and the Professor. He wanted to be with men that talked happily and saw new things. He wanted...
But at midnight the boat pulled out. The SeaBees were gone. Joe followed the ship as long as it rode in the moonlight. He had never before felt so strange. Great inchoate thoughts welled up within him. He could not sleep, and so he walked along the edge of the island. The airstrip shone in the moonlight. "It's beautiful," he said. "And look at the water bouncin' on them cliffs. It's beautiful."
The world was beautiful that night. It was beautiful as only a tropic night on some distant island can be beautiful. A million men in the South Seas would deny it to one another, would ridicule it in their letters home. But it was beautiful. Perhaps some of the million would deny the beauty because, like Joe, they had never seen it.
Something like this was going through Joe's mind when he became aware that men were behind him. He started to walk along the edge of the cliff when a light flashed in his eyes. "No you don't!" a voice shouted. Quickly two men ran up and grabbed him.
"Here's another of them," the voice with the light cried. Joe was hauled off to a jeep.
"Bunch of damned bootleggers!" a gruff voice said as he was thrust into a small truck. He looked at the other prisoners. He knew none of them.
"He ain't one of us!" the apparent leader of the gang said. "Keep your mouth shut!" the gruff voice ordered. "But he ain't one of us!"
"Shut up!"
"On your way, big time!" the leader of the gang grunted in surly tones.
That night Joe slept in the brig. He found himself among a group of six enlisted men who had been running a still in a cave along the cliffs. They had finally been caught. They were making pure alcohol from canned corn and sugar. They had a market for all they could make. Each man had been clearing two hundred dollars a month.
Joe studied them. They were guys just like him. He wondered why they got mixed up in such a racket. He wondered if Luther Billis was like them. Luther had lots of money. But somehow he felt that Luther was different. These men were in trouble.
"I'm gonna spill the whole story!" a little machinist's mate said. He had built the still. "If they try to pin a rap on me, I'll spill the whole story!"
"You do," the leader whispered hoarsely, "and I'll kill you. That's a promise!"
But next morning the little machinist's mate did spill the whole story. Joe was shocked. The revelation came shortly after the Skipper had ordered Joe to stand aside. Obviously Joe wasn't implicated. So there he stood, by the window, while the machinist's mate told how a lieutenant had sold them canned corn by the