Clash by Night (46 page)

He’d been away from it for two months, ever since he’d been shot out of the sky over Okinawa like a clay target at a skeet match. He’d ended up here, in the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital on the island of Oahu in the U.S. Territory of Hawaii.

He’d never seen such a preposterously gorgeous place in his life. Before this assignment “Pearl” had just been a name to him, the place where an infamous Japanese attack began the American phase of the war. Descriptions had not prepared him for the reality. The ocean was a blinding, glittering gemstone, sometimes aquamarine, sometimes emerald, sometimes sapphire. The sand was sifted sugar, the sky a uniform, cloudless blue. And the temperature hovered between 75 and 85 all the time, like the perpetually controlled environment one imagined in paradise.

Not that he’d been in any shape to appreciate it right after he was wounded. He had vague memories of his leg on fire, both before surgery and after it. Then came long weeks of recuperation, during which he was able to do little besides sleep and pray for the next injection when he was awake. But gradually the pain faded and he could sit in the long, shimmering afternoons on the back lawn of the hospital, looking past the lush greenery to the endless expanse of the sea.
 

And now he was getting antsy. He wished they would release him. All right, maybe he wasn’t able to walk that well yet. But he could get around, and they’d told him he would have a limp anyway so what was the purpose of keeping him flat on his back? Even paradise could get boring after a while.

He took another deep drag on his cigarette and wondered how the rest of the men in his outfit were doing. He’d been brought to the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station at Mokapu early in the year for special training in the “Corsair” fighter planes, and then assigned to the Wildcats Squadron. It was the best job he’d ever had and he’d held it for all of about ninety days.
 

Harris had loved the trim, nifty Corsairs. They recalled to him his childhood dreams of flying, like thistledown, on the wings of the wind. In the Corsair he was alone in the cockpit, in total control of the plane. He much preferred the fighters to the Air Force bombers he had flown in Europe. In the B-25s he always had to consider the safety of his crew, afraid to take chances he would not have shirked alone. But the Corsair freed him of that restriction, which was one of the reasons he was currently planted in this hospital bed like a petunia. He’d gotten a little too creative and flown low on a run, caught some Japanese flak. The next thing he knew he was swimming.

He hoped he would be considered well enough soon to be reassigned to the base school. He’d been told that flying was out for a while (he refused to consider that the prohibition might be permanent), but he could certainly instruct the trainees. When he was last there the pilots had been learning the new techniques of close air support for beach landings. These lessons came in handy when they were all put on the alert for the Ryukyu Islands assault which began the first week in April.

The Ryukyus were an imperial prefecture, just to the south of the Japanese mainland, and Okinawa was the largest and most important island in the chain. It took three months to conquer it and Harris had made it almost to the end of the campaign. He was shot down in the East China Sea after knocking out several oil storage tanks on the ground. He was rescued, drifting in his life jacket, two days later by an aircraft carrier with a sharp eyed second lieutenant in the conning tower.
 

He grimaced and moved his leg again, fitfully. The metal fragments taken from his thigh had left him with a purpled, horseshoe scar and a deteriorated femoral muscle, which he was assured could be partially restored with programmed exercise. So far he hadn’t seen any of it; they’d kept him nailed to his bed so long that his feet had almost forgotten the feel of the floor. Lately he was able to lurch to the john and so on, but waltzes would be a long time off in his future.

He looked up, startled, as the glare of a flashlight caught him full in the face.

“Just as I thought,” Lieutenant Cady whispered fiercely. “Major Harris, put out that cigarette.” She lowered the beam of her torch, leaving it just bright enough to see him.

He smiled at her charmingly.
 

“Don’t grin at me, my boy. I could smell that thing burning all the way down the hall at the station, and I knew right where to find the culprit. Put it out, I said.”

“Come on, Cady,” Harris said, wheedling. “Let me finish it. I’ve only got a couple of drags left.” He kept his voice low but his tone was vehement.

Grace Cady put her hands on her hips and shook her head, suppressing a smile. A career navy nurse old enough to be his mother, she had seen all kinds come and go and recognized this kid for the natural con artist he was. Yet she couldn’t help liking him. All summer she’d watched him conniving his way around the rules, but she found it hard to really resent the liberties he took with her staff. His Okinawa exploits had earned him a Purple Heart and the Silver Star, along with the Major’s gold leaf now pinned to the uniform jacket draped over a chair. And a leg that would plague him for the rest of his life.

“Finish it, then,” she said. “I’ll stand right here until you do. And where’s the rest of the pack?”
 

“This is the last one, I think,” he said innocently.

“Hmmph. ‘You think.’ A lie if I ever heard one. And if I find out who’s been smuggling them in to you there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Why don’t you sit down and keep me company for a while?” he said quickly, diverting her attention from his accomplice, a day orderly who bought him Camels at the PX.

“Don’t start that routine with me, Major,” Grace told him. “I know it works with the young nurses but I’m a little too old to be taken in by your baby blues or the fruit salad on your chest. Silver Stars have to obey regulations too. It’s 3:00 a.m. and the smoking lamp is
not
lit.”

Harris sighed and crushed out his cigarette in the bottom of his metal drinking cup. Lieutenant Cady pulled back the mosquito netting and took the cup from his hand.

“I’ll just rinse this or the butt will be floating in your morning coffee,” she said dryly. She set off smartly, shoes squishing on the tile floor, and returned to place the cup on his nightstand. He watched her, his pale eyes bright in the semi-darkness.

“What’s the matter, marine?” she asked him sympathetically, turning back to the bed. “Can’t sleep?”

“Guess not.”

“That leg bothering you?” Cady asked.

“The usual,” he said, shaking his head.

“Do you want something for it?”

He gestured disgustedly. “No more happy juice, Cady. I’m just beginning to get that dope fog out of my head.”

She sat down in his visitor’s chair, deciding that she could take a break after all. The other patients were asleep and she’d already passed meds. The night breeze rattled the leaves of the chinaberry bush outside the window screen as she said firmly, “You ask for something if you still need it. You almost lost that leg, Major, and I know you feel it.”

“It’s a lot better than it was,” he replied, and she let the subject drop. She knew better than to try to get his type to admit a weakness.

“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. She felt he was lonely; he spent long intervals staring into space and he always seemed restless, on edge.

“A date with Betty Grable?” he suggested, folding his arms behind his head.

She made a wry face. “Sorry, Major. But I don’t know what you would need with her. A good looking flyboy like you must have a girl back home.”

“I’ve got a girl,” he said softly. “Not home but in France.”

“France?”

He nodded. “I met her when I was working with the Résistance before the States got into the war. She’s from Boston. She was married to a Frenchman killed right after the outbreak of fighting in Europe.”

“Pretty girl?” Cady asked, smiling.

He sighed. “A beauty. Creamy skin and green eyes. Red hair.”

“Red hair!” Cady said. “My, my.”

“Smart, too. And brave! When I was shot down over Germany in ‘42 she and her partisan friends hid me right in her house in a French village until they could get me out of the country.”
 

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Major, you seem to spend a lot of time getting shot down,” Cady said teasingly.

“Only twice,” he said, his lips twisting.

“I thought the object of the exercise was to stay up,” she replied.

“Stop ragging me, Cady. I’m an injured man,” he said, with exaggerated weariness.

She stood up. “Then I’ll let you get your rest. Maybe you’ll hear from the redhead soon.”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. I was transferred here from England right before Okee began. The mail from my family just caught up with me a few days ago and it’s several months old.”

“You’ve been right around the world in this war, haven’t you, Major?” Cady said.

He nodded slowly.

“But I guess France is where you’d like to be,” Cady added. “It must be hard, not having any word from her.”
 

Harris frowned. “From what I hear the whole country is in chaos since the invasion, with the Germans pulling out and the Allied advance. Laura would have no way to get any message through to me.”

“And you’re worried about her,” Cady said, volunteering what he did not want to say.

He looked away, not answering.

Cady patted his tanned arm as she walked past him into the aisle.

“If this Laura is as wonderful as you say she is, she’ll be fine. A beautiful, brave, and brilliant redhead like her? Come on!”

He laughed sheepishly. “I guess I was bragging, wasn’t I? Sorry.”

Cady pulled the netting around his bed again and said, “That’s okay, son. You’ve got a right.”

She took a step and then turned back to him, her index finger upraised.

“But I’ll have no more smoking, do you hear? And don’t think you’ll be able to pull anything when the day people come on. I’m working a double shift until three in the afternoon and I’ll be watching you.”
 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly, and smiled into the darkness as she walked away.
 

Harris was reading after breakfast when Cady returned, carrying a manila envelope in her hand.

“Your orders,” she announced.

He sat up, reaching for the packet. “Good,” he said. “Time to get back in harness, this war isn’t over yet.”

“It is for you, Major,” Cady replied, smiling broadly as she handed it to him. “I peeked inside the envelope.”
 

He looked at her.

“You’re going home.”
 

* * *

With the Germans gone, the pall that had lain over the Meuse for four years lifted like a dawn fog.

In the Duclos house Brigitte played the once forbidden BBC channel at the top of its volume continuously. She and Laura listened with relish to the reports of the Canadian conquest of Falaise and the liberation of Paris. During the last week of August United States forces also took Avignon and Château Thierry, crossing the Marne at Meaux, and de Gaulle returned to the capital.

The news was all good.

Brigitte became adept at rendering British pop tunes in her Parisian accent, belting out “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” and “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover” until all hours. Laura responded with “I’ll Be Seeing You (in All the Old Familiar Places)” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” a technique which resulted in a truculent silence. Brigitte’s joy knew no bounds: Kurt was recovering nicely in the Saint-Dizier clinic and her beloved France was in the hands of the French once more.

During the final days of the month the Russians announced evidence that the Germans had murdered over one million people in the Majdanek concentration camp. Laura and Brigitte listened, mute with horror, to the broadcast of the grisly details, unaware that this was only the first of many such revelations. In the months and years to come the whole world would reel with the shock of the discoveries, the like of which had never been seen before in history.

The night that Laura heard about Majdanek she lay awake in breathless heat, replaying the incident in her head. She couldn’t forget the BBC announcer’s voice, describing the unthinkable in his clipped, British English, his journalistic impartiality seeming almost inhuman under the circumstances. Was there knowledge so terrible that the mind shut down from overload, refusing to accept it? Was that what happened to Henri? Had he understood in those terrible moments before he escaped into a fog of confusion that he had sent his own son to his death?

Laura sat up, lifting her damp hair from her neck. She had let it grow long again, as requested, and wondered now if Harris would ever see it. Where was he? The news for the last several months had been full of reports of marines in places with exotic names like Guam and Tinian and Iwo Jima, locations as familiar to Laura as the mountains of the moon. She had a deep suspicion he was no longer in England; he would have found a way to send her a message if he were. The marine strength was in the Pacific now and those islands were so very far away.

She started as she heard a noise on the stairs and put her feet to the floor. She was just standing when her door flew open and she stared, stunned, into a face she vaguely recognized.