Tales of the South Pacific (8 page)

Each week he read Time, Life, the Denver Post, and at least two good books. He listened to news broadcasts four times a day from Australia on a radio set his men had built for him, and once or twice a week he tried to get Tokyo Rose, whom he found most amusing. He wrote a long letter to his wife every other day, and received one from her every day.

Bill's main contributions to LARU-8 were his splendid personal appearance, which everyone envied and some tried to copy, his neatness and bearing as an officer, and the fact that he found a French plantation owner who would butcher steers at regular intervals. Thanks to Bill, his fellow officers ate some of the finest food in the South Pacific. They had fresh papaya, those excellent pepsin melons, fresh limes and lemons, fresh oranges, fresh pineapple, fresh corn on the cob, and steak at least once a week. As a matter of principle Bill insisted that the Officers' Mess must never have steak more than twice before the enlisted men had it once. They got the tougher cuts, it was true, but a steer gave only so many filets.

In nine more months Bill would be a full lieutenant. In ten more months he would be eligible to return to the States. Everything would have turned out all right for Bill if a slight accident hadn't intervened. Nurses came to Efate!

They came late one afternoon, on the other side of the island. They were Navy nurses and were attached to a hospital that was temporarily established on Efate. They arrived with inadequate provisions and among the would-be gallants on the island a great rush developed as to who would help them first and most. An Army unit provided cots and blankets. One of the airfields found a refrigerator. Eight electric fans, valuable as rubies, were given the nurses outright as a gift. But Bill Harbison topped them all. He got a small truck, butchered a steer, got twelve bushels of fresh vegetables and set out for the hospital.

He drove up to the locked gate of the nurses' quarters and started to shout. "Here's the butcher boy! Come and get it!" From their windows the nurses looked down at the strange sight below. "Isn't he cute?" several of them whispered to one another.

"Here it is, girls!" Bill shouted, and soon his truck was surrounded by the nurses. They were hungry. Their stores had not yet been unpacked. They had been living on meager rations.

"Where's the kitchen?" he cried. Suddenly, after all the indifferent months on Efate, he felt good. He was smiling and almost excited. The girls led him off to a big, empty wooden structure that would one day be the mess hall.

"Light up the stoves!" he cried merrily. "We'll have a steak fry right here. See if you have any salt." The nurses made a quick survey and provided salt, a few onions, some bread, some potatoes and a surly mess attendant.

"You can't fool around in here," he whined.

"The lieutenant brought us some food!" one of the older nurses said.

"He ain't got no right in here," the attendant replied.

"Look, Oscar!" Harbison said. Some girls giggled. "How do you suppose I could start that fire? 'Cause listen, Oscar. If I get it started, you get a steak!"

The attendant snarled something. He was a thin, small man and disliked everybody. "Mess hall won't be opened for two more days," he said. "And you better quit fooling around here, too." He stood defiantly by the stoves as he spoke.

"All right, Oscar!" Harbison cried. "You keep the stoves! We'll keep the steaks. Grab some of this stuff, girls!" With that he started throwing pots and pans to nurses who caught them. "We'll have a barbecue outside!" he announced.

"You'll get into trouble for this," the attendant said dolefully.

"It's our funeral!" Harbison replied. All his lethargy was gone. Here was something to do, and it was fun! He led the nurses out of the forbidden mess hall and into the edge of the jungle beneath some large trees. Acting as general manager, he directed them to build a fire and cut long sticks. Then, with some rocks, he built several grills, and before long steaks and onions and dehydrated potatoes were cooking. Bill showed the girls where to find papayas and how to select the ripe ones. Soon the smell of sizzling steaks, expertly cut by Harbison, filled the air. A fat doctor, catching a whiff of the delectable odor, waddled out to see what was going on. Pretty soon another followed, and before long a collection of doctors and nurses stood around the four fires.

Harbison acted as toastmaster, chef, and fireman. He was a delight-pi man for such an affair, and he bore himself with distinction. The steaks were good. One doctor had three. Bill ate sparingly of one choice let. A young nurse prepared it for him, and he thanked her graciously. There were, among the nurses, several attractive girls. They looked lovelier, perhaps, than they were, for Bill had seen no white women for some time. They were witty and neat, two wonderful attributes for any girl; and they were exotic, standing as they did at the very edge of the jungle. Bill watched them as they ate. Some wore slacks becomingly; others wore seersucker dresses, and one or two wore mixed clothes. Three were in white uniform, for they had official duties. Bill particularly liked the manner in which many of the girls wore bandanas to control their hair. They looked doubly colorful against the dull green of the jungle.

It is probable that several of the young nurses would have enjoyed knowing Bill Harbison. But Bill was already married and had no wish to set up illicit amours of any kind on the side. He smiled at the girls, showed courtesies to the women, and was the very spirit of a naval officer to all. When the party was over, he helped pack the remaining steaks in the ice box. As he drove off, the nurses clustered about his truck and thanked him again. Bill smiled at everyone, waved his hand out the side and started back over the hill to his camp. "He was nice," one of the nurses said to another. "Not like those Army men. They bring you a fan or something and think it's an introduction to spend the night."

When the hospital was established Bill became a frequent visitor. He would bring the nurses things, take them swimming in large groups, show them how to build equipment they needed, and introduce them to his circle of acquaintances. He became a familiar sight on the hospital grounds, but never in the manner of other officers who came, gaped at the pretty nurses, and started a flirtation immediately. Harbison, it might be said, flirted with the entire hospital staff. He never told any of the girls that he was married, but he conducted himself as if he were. That made him doubly intriguing.

In time Bill naturally gravitated toward two or three nurses in particular, and after the first month of mass gallantry he had selected for himself one nurse to whom he paid special attention. It was she who first ate at Bill's mess; it was she who accompanied him on the boat trip to Vanicoro.

She was, it might have seemed, the least likely of all candidates for the honor. Her name was Dinah Culbert, a woman about 42 years old, from some nondescript place in Indiana. She was taller than the average nurse, quiet, not good looking. She had minor intellectual pretensions, and she worshipped Bill. Thus, in one deft maneuver, Bill accomplished what would have eluded many a lesser man. He had a feminine cheering section without danger of emotional complications.

No one can say what the precise arrangement was between Bill Harbison and Dinah Culbert. Two good looking young nurses who would have enjoyed going places with Bill were sure it meant he was a pansy. Three shrewd gals on Wing Three got half the diagnosis correct: He's got a mother-complex and will probably never get married. One little fluff who was soon sent back to the States said, "I don't care what's wrong with him. I think he's cute!"

There was much for an officer and a nurse to do on Efate. There were boat trips to near-by islands, trips inland toward the volcanoes of Vanicoro, pig roasts, fishing for tuna and barracuda, visits to native villages, work in carpentry shops, and swimming. Sometimes in the evening there were informal dances, and every night there was some officers' club to visit for light conversation and cokes, or beer, or whiskey. But most of all, over your entire life there hung the great Pacific tropics. At night you would be aimlessly driving home and suddenly, around a bend you would come upon a vista of the ocean, framed in palm trees, under a moon so large and brilliant that the night seemed day! Or again, driving along the shore your jeep would reach a point where ocean spray spumed across the road and engulfed you in a million rainbows. Or hiking into the jungles for ivory nuts you might meet a naked native with his naked wives and children, walking somewhere, going to do some unimportant thing. The tropics never left you, and in time you accustomed yourself to them. They were a vast relaxation, nature growing free and wild. An officer and a nurse in such surroundings usually fell in love.

There was one nurse, for example, who was escorted everywhere by a weak-chinned naval ensign. She did not like him, but he was a kindly young man. One night driving home from a dance he unexpectedly turned a bend in the road and there before them, across the ocean, the volcanoes on Vanicoro were in eruption! Great lights played from the jagged cones, and pillars of ashen cloud spiraled into the darkness. The nurse had never seen anything so magnificent, and on he impulse of the moment put her head on the ensign's shoulder. He kissed her. "It was strange," she said afterward. "No chin. That's a funny kiss." She never went with the young ensign again.

It is not certain whether Bill and Dinah ever saw the volcanoes in eruption. It is not even certain that they ever kissed. There was some speculation on this point, but no one knew anything definitely. Had not Lenore Harbison's brother Eddie been promoted to a major in the Army, Bill and Dinah might have gone on for many more months in their fine aimless manner.

But when Bill heard that Eddie, who was his own age, had been jumped to a major, he could not restrain himself. "Why is it," he asked himself over and over again, "that a guy can go up so fast in one service and not in another? Eddie's a good boy, but he hasn't half my stuff. This is a damned raw deal!" He brooded over the situation for several days and called Dinah to tell her he wouldn't be able to take her to the beach. He stayed in his sack for the better part of two days, reading War and Peace. He didn't even get up for his meals. Just ambled down to the shack and ate some papayas and canned soup his men provided. He played no volleyball and did not go swimming. He was disgusted with everything. He wrote to his wife every day for six days and tried to get the poison out of his system. But when he was done two facts remained: He was getting nowhere, and he had given up a good life in Albuquerque to do so.

The thought of Dinah Culbert infuriated him. He had been playing a game, that was all. He closed War and Peace, which he could not follow anyway, and thought of good old Aunt Dinah. He was ashamed of himself, a young man of twenty-three escorting a woman of forty. From that moment in his own mind he never referred to Dinah as anything but Grandmom. He even used the word aloud once or twice, and soon it was common gossip at the hospital that Bill Harbison, the fine naval lieutenant, had joked about Aunt Dinah as his Grandmom.

Otherwise Bill let Dinah down easily. He took her to lunch at the restaurant in Vila once more, took her to dinner at his own mess, had drinks with her at the hospital club, and that was all. Dinah was not dismayed. When rumor first reached her that he had called her his grandmother, there was a sharp pang of unbelief. Then she laughed, right heartily. She was a nurse and no dumb cluck. She thought she knew pretty well what Bill's trouble was. "I pity the next girl he goes with," she said to herself.

The next girl was Nellie Forbush. She was a slender, pretty nurse of twenty-two. She came from a small town in Arkansas and loved being in the Navy. Never in a hundred years would Bill Harbison have noticed her in the States. She wouldn't have moved in his crowd at all. In Denver she would have lived somewhere in the indiscriminate northern part of the city, by the viaduct. In Albuquerque she would have lived near the Mexican quarter. But on the island of Efate where white women were the exception and pretty white women rarities, Nellie Forbush was a queen. She suffered no social distinctions.

Military custom regarding nurses is most irrational. They are made officers and therefore not permitted to associate with enlisted men. This means that they must find their social life among other officers. But most male officers are married, especially in the medical corps. And most unmarried officers are from social levels into which nurses from small towns do not normally marry. As a result of this involved social system, military nurses frequently have unhappy emotional experiences. Cut off by law from fraternizing with those men who would like to marry them and who would have married them in civilian life, they find their friendships restricted to men who are surprisingly often married or who are social snobs.

Bill Harbison did not stop to formulate the above syllogism when he started going with Nellie Forbush. Yet in his mind he had the conclusion well formulated. Put into words it began, "What the hell! If I'm going to waste three years of my life..." It went on from there to a logical end. Nellie Forbush just happened to be around when the decision was reached.

Bill was lovely to her. He took her swimming and gasped when he saw her for the first time in a swimming suit. She wore a gingham halter and a pair of tight trunks with only a suggestion of a flared ballet skirt. She did not bathe. She dived into the ocean and swam with long easy strokes to the raft. Perched upon the boards, she shook her bobbed hair free of water and laughed. "Some difference," Bill thought. "Not much like Grandmom!"

Nor was she much like Grandmom driving home along the narrow road through the coconut plantation. It was still daylight, but shadows were so thick it seemed like evening. Bill pulled the jeep to the side of the road and kissed his beautiful nurse. It was no chivalrous kiss. It was a kiss born of seeing her the most lovely person on the beach. It was a long, helpless kiss, and both officers found it thrilling and delicious.

After that there were many more swims and even more kisses. Bill wasn't around LARU-8 much after that. If Nellie had any free time, he was sure to be somewhere with her. Since he ate no breakfast he might be absent from meals several days in a row. His men found no difficulty in doing the work he was supposed to do. Late at night he would censor his mail, so that fellow officers came to expect a thin light from his bunk at two or three in the morning. He rarely rose from his sack before ten. He was still slim, browner than before, and fastidious in dress. He played no basketball, and volleyball only occasionally. Long hours at the beach kept him in shape.