Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [82]
When he arrived at the camp the chaplain was waiting for him. The padre was a Catholic and Joe a Methodist, but they were friends. The chaplain's business was brief. Alice Baker had been killed. An auto accident. Her sister sent the news.
The padre had never heard of Alice Baker. All he knew was that a human being of greater or less importance to some other human being was dead. No message could transcend that. He cast about for words, which never seemed to be available for such emergencies. The day was hot. Sweat ran down Joe's face until it looked like tears. "Brave people are dying throughout the world," the chaplain said. "And brave people live after them." There was nothing more to say. Joe sat looking at the priest for a few minutes and then left.
He went into the brilliant sunlight. Glare from the airstrip was intense. Even the ocean was hot. Joe looked at the waves whose beauty Luther Billis had discovered. They came rippling toward the rock in overwhelming monotony. Joe counted them. One, two, three! They were the months he had been on the rock. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. That was when he met Luther Billis. Seventeen, eighteen. The yeoman had committed suicide. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Alice Baker had become his girl. Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. They were all the same, one after the other, like the dreary months.
Joe dropped his head in his hands. A girl he had never seen. A funny town he had never visited. "I want to get out of here," he muttered to himself. "I got to get out of here!"
FO' DOLLA'
ATABRINE BENNY had the best job in the islands. Field man for the Malaria Control Unit. He traveled from plantation to plantation with large bottles of atabrine pills. Wherever there might be malaria to infect mosquitoes to infect our men, Benny was on guard. All day long, on one island or another, he gave little yellow pills to little yellow men. His freedom of movement, lack of a boss, and opportunity for spending long hours with plantation owners made his job an enviable one.
Benny was a fat little man with no bottom at all. He went straight down in back and way out in front. He walked with his toes at ten minutes of two and consequently moved with a tireless waddle. He was a druggist from Waco, Texas, a man nearly fifty. He had enlisted in the Navy out of patriotism, boredom, the fact that his two sons were in the Marines, and because his wife was a mean old son-of-a-bitch. "Ornriest goddam woman in Waco, Texas," he confided one day as we climbed a hill to a small French plantation.
"But I should worry about her now!" he added. "What I got to moan about? This job's romantic. I want to see the South Pacific ever since I am a little guy. Now here I am! Right in the heart of it!"
Benny grinned, adjusting his heavy bottles. As we reached a grubby clearing, with a few coconut trees, bananas, pineapples and cacao bushes, he gave a long, mournful cry, "Yaaaaaoooooo!"
From a hut near the jungle a native Mary shuffled out. She carried a mammoth conch shell, an ancient thing dating back a century or more, encrusted by the lips and hands of numerous villagers. On this shell she blew a long, sad blast. Slowly, from cacao, coconut, and jungle, men and women shuffled. Tonks, natives, and nondescript workers appeared, shy, reticent, nudging one another, and giggling.
Benny and I took our places beneath an open bamboo lean-to. We lined up bottles of atabrine, large tins of candy, and a carton of cigarettes. Little Tonkinese workers approached first, men in the lead, then women. Patiently they leaned their heads back, closed their eyes, and opened their mouths. Deftly Atabrine Benny popped three tablets between each one's jet black betel-stained teeth. Waiting Tonks would laugh and joke while the unfortunate one taking the medicine made a horrible face and gulped a drink from the water jug. Benny and I stood by, our shirts, our pants, our entire bodies