Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [88]
It would be difficult to say why Lt. Cable kept coming back to check on Bloody Mary after he closed out her kiosk. She was giving no one any trouble. Plantation owners were content with the new arrangement whereby they received their fair cut of the grass-skirt bonanza. The government was pleased. The naval commander was happy that everything was satisfactory, and besides he had a wonderful story about that upstart assistant of his who was such a damned pain in the neck... or was it elsewhere?
But Lt. Cable did keep coming back. He rather suspected that Mary was doing a bigger business than ever after dark, and some officers were beginning to wonder exactly where all this bad gin was coming from. Officially, of course, Cable knew nothing and said nothing. He wasn't paid to deal in suspicions. Perhaps it was Bloody Mary's frank hero worship that attracted him. Whenever Cable appeared, she would jump up, brush her clothes, straighten her ridiculous hat, knock the sand out of her shoes, and smile pleasantly. It was almost as if she were standing at attention. When Cable tried to make her give up her Marine device, which was sacrilegious around her neck, she refused. "Me no so-and-so G. I." she protested.
"No, no! Mary!" Cable shouted at her, wagging his finger again across her face. "Bad! Bad word!"
Mary knew the Marine word was bad, but she, like the Marines, also knew that it was effective. But Cable spoke with such authority that she willingly forswore the word and its fellows when he was around.
And Cable was around a good deal. He used to drop by in the hot afternoons. Even the flies would be asleep, and cattle would be in the shade. No birds would sing, and from the cacao trees no lorikeets would fly. It was tropic midday, and Bloody Mary with her lieutenant would sit in the cavernous shade of the banyan tree and talk.
"It would be difficult to say what we talk about," Cable wrote to the Bryn Mawr junior. "I can't speak Tonkinese and Old Mary can't speak English. We can both speak a good deal of French, of course, and I've learned some Pidgin English. It is surprising how well we get along. We talk mostly about Tonkin, where Mary lives far inland among the mountains that border China proper. It is very interesting, out here, to talk to human beings."
For myself, I think Lt. Cable hit the nail on the head when he made that observation. It was sometimes terrifying to me to see the mental hunger that men experienced for companionship in the islands. At the laundry on my base, for example, the men had a little banjo-footed dog. They raised him from a pup, and while he was still a pup, a truck ran over him. That afternoon those men could not look at one another. That night none of them wrote letters home. Next morning they stared at the ceiling above their bunks. And I am not fooling when I say that for several days the salt had gone out of life. On the third day one of them bought another pup from an Army outfit. After lunch he hesitatingly presented the scrawny little dog. The laundry workers looked at it. "Goddam skinny little pup," one of them observed, but that dog made a great difference.
So far I have seen men tame pigs, goats, a jackass, a coconut tree cuscus, two chickens, cats, and a bowl of ultramarine tropical fish so beautiful that it was difficult to believe they lived. Pigs were the best pets, after dogs, because you could never look at them without laughing. And when they lived in a hut right along with you, they were surprisingly clean. One man could even housebreak pigs!
Throughout their existence on the edge of