Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (20 page)

“Oh, Luck—I hope they never make you go back.”

“Me, too.”

“But they will, won’t they?”

“Don’t worry about it, Molly. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the war.”

“Yes, but without it, we would never have met. You can thank the war for that, anyway.”

Soon the mood would pass, and she would be jesting.

“Ah, you Yanks. You’re full of the blarney. All of that sweet talk and the fine manners—and there’s only one thing you’re all after.”

We would rise and swing, arm in arm, along the path, racing each other sometimes, at other times singing. Molly liked my voice, God bless her. The only woman—the only person—who ever has. She thought I could sing, or maybe she only said she did to get me to sing the American swing songs she loved. But Molly could sing—with a fine clear pitch she could. There was one that was my favorite, a lilting little thing she’d sing in a soft low voice as we walked home.

Patrick—Michael—Fran-cis O’Brien
Would never stop cryin’
For sweet Molly-o
.

Each morn-ing
Up with the sparrow
,
As swift as an arrow
Just leaving the bow
,
Into her garden he’d wing
.
Under her window he’d sing—

“Sweet Molly O’Donahue
It’s yourself that I’m asking
To go for a bit of a walk …”

But Molly and I quarreled over another girl, and we drifted apart, even though Chuckler stayed close to his Hope.

Sheila had caused the breakup between Molly and me. I met her on a tram, as Chuckler and I rode to St. Kilda, an Australian beach resort outside of Melbourne similar to Coney Island—but not so blaring, not so much a honky-tonk.

At the end of the line the bus lurched and Sheila fell backward into my lap.

I imprisoned her with my knees, and said, “Get up please.”

“I can’t get up,” she said, laughing.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I whispered into her ear. “Australian girls are so forward.”

“Please,” she said, giggling, turning her dark head to look at me, “please let me go.”

I looked at Chuckler. “What’s she talking about, Chuck? Let her go? She can get up, can’t she?”

He nodded gravely. “She likes it there.”

Sheila cast him an indignant look and said in a strained voice, “Let me go, please.”

“All right,” I said, “if you go into Luna Park with me.”

She pursed her lips, then said, “Right-o.”

“Good,” I said, and relaxed my knees. Sheila got to her feet. She introduced herself and another girl, and the four of us went into Luna Park together.

We went home together, too, taking the long train ride to one of the far-lying suburbs—and Sheila put both Chuckler and me up for the night in her mother’s home. Chuckler stayed in a room in the house, but I was given an outlying cottage to sleep in. Actually, it may have been a stable at one time, for Sheila called the backyard “the paddock.” A walk connected it with the house about fifty feet away. The mattress was soft and lumpy, but the sheets were cool and clean-smelling—I dropped off to sleep.

A noise aroused me, and I looked up to see Sheila closing the door. She turned and came toward me, holding a candle. She wore a nightgown.

“Hello, Yank,” she said with a soft gaiety. “How d’ya like it in the paddock?”

I propped myself up on an elbow and nodded my answer. She sank to her knees beside the bed and looked into my face with laughing eyes. “I’m fond of you, Yank. I hope you’ll be coming up to see me often.” I looked at her and she leaned closer and said, “Anything you want me to do for you?” I looked at her and she blew out the candle.

I saw Sheila every chance I had for about a month, sometimes dining at our headquarters, sometimes going to a dance, sometimes taking long walks about the lovely town she lived in, where the wattle grew bright on the hill—sometimes drinking endless cups of tea in her parlor to moisten a throat gone dry with the telling of tales of America to her lame and widowed mother. Not till the end of this time, till she told me that she was going to Tasmania, did Sheila tell me that she was married.

After Molly and Sheila, no more affection.

Only the chase.

How does it go? How should I know. I am not a Casanova, nor is this a textbook for the amorous.

It is cold, yes; it is calculating, of course; but a man should not risk involvement when satisfying lust. He must never be romantic. He must leave romantic love to the unrequited poets who invented it.

At times the chase would end in strange coverts. There was the drink waitress with the strongly developed moral sense.

“You Yanks,” she panted, “have no morals.”

“How so?”

“Ah,” she said, scathingly, “just look at your Hollywood. Why, you read about those stars every day—going on with each other the way they do. Married four and five times. They’d be run right out of Australia. We’ve still got some morals left!” She drew the cover up to her chin. “Not you Yanks—all you want from a girl is to sleep with her!”

Only a fool, or one no longer interested in the chase, would have pointed to the difficulty of her position.

The same evening my homeward steps crossed those of another marine, younger than I, who grumbled as he sought to remove lipstick smears from the collar of his tunic.

“Trouble with these Australian girls,” he complained, “is that they ain’t got no morals. They’re too easy. Catch an American girl giving herself away like they do. No siree, buddy—they’ve still got morals.”

The descendants of the Pharisee are legion. ‘O God. I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men … adulterers, as also is this Australian, as also is this American, as also is …”

It was the drink waitress who was the enigmatic one. As often as I was in her company, I could not comprehend her. She affected to despise Americans, yet, if she did not see me, she saw another marine. She liked to keep my money, yet, everytime I offended her, she pulled it from her purse with an imprecation and gave it back to me. Hot-tempered, she was cold. Drink waitress, she did not like to drink. Scoffer at American music, she would travel miles to a jazz dance.

When we went boating on the Yarra, she trailed her hand languidly in the water and seemed so bored that I secretly rejoiced, for we marines had been getting soft and the task of rowing upstream had become an ordeal. At last, when she began to yawn, I put the craft about and made for the boathouse.

The moment we set foot upon the shore, she wheeled in white anger and blazed at me: “Fancy! Fancy a man like you—to take a girl out on the water and bring her back without as much as a sweet look!”

Next day, my chest and arms throbbed with pain—and I was not rueful that I would not row or see her again.

Sheila came back. On a Saturday night when I had to remain in the Cricket Grounds and had gone to bed early, someone awoke me and said, “There’s a girl outside the gate asking for you, Lucky.”

She had been in Tasmania only a few months, yet she seemed older. We walked in the park and talked. Sheila wanted to go to town, but I told her I could not—even though she was going back to Tasmania in the morning, I could not.

“But we can’t just sit here in the park,” she wailed.

“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea. The others are on forty-eight-hour passes. I’ll get their sleeping pads and blankets and bring them out here. You go get a couple bottles of beer.” I gave her the money. “We’ll have a picnic. Okay?”

She laughed and said, “Yank, yer a bonzer boy.”

The bunks were darkly silent. I denuded Chuckler’s and Hoosier’s sacks, as well as my own, rolled all up into a huge cylindrical wad, and stumbled out into the park with it. Sheila came along with the beer, as I was spreading out our couch beneath a big tree. We sat on the pads and reached for the beer.

I groaned in dismay. She had forgotten to get a bottle opener.

“Don’t fret, Yank,” she said. “Here’s a go,” and she placed the neck of a quart bottle of Melbourne bitter to her mouth and bit off the cap.

Ah, those Australian girls, I reflected, as the wonderful amber fluid came foaming free.

“Y’know, this is a serious offense,” she said, making herself comfortable beside me. “It’s offending in the King’s Domain.”

“What’s that?”

“All public property belongs to the Crown. Something like this is called offending in the King’s Domain—and they can put you in prison for it.”

“Bloody good show, eh?” I teased. “Poaching, what? … here’s a go, Sheila—to His Majesty the King …”

We spent the night in the park, and she left me in the morning, left me when gray dawn drew back the curtain of the night—left me forever.

I gathered the bedding together and stumbled back to the stadium. To my horror, the companies were already forming for reveille outside the wall. With my roll of bedding I was as inconspicuous as an elephant, a most patent offender in the King’s Domain.

But I resolved to brazen it out. Sinking my face deeply into the bedding, I broke into a half trot.

I shall never forget the look of incredulity that creased the brow of Old Gunny when I passed between him and H Company. I had gone but ten steps or so when a titter broke out. Then catcalls. Then roars of ridicule. I increased my speed. But it had spread to the other three companies and soon I was running a gauntlet of derision. Running I was, now, and with all of my speed—for the shouting and the laughter and the hooting had risen to a gale of sound that blew me through the gate and up the steps to the bunks.

If I had offended the King that night, my comrades had exacted ample justice in his behalf.

2

But two things might restrain a man in the Great Debauch: malaria and guard duty.

Malaria meant hospital, sometimes it meant shipment home. So determined were we to enjoy ourselves, though, that a man experiencing the dull, wearing discomfort of an approaching seizure would still go to town; nor was it uncommon to see such a hardy sensualist huddling against a lamppost, face whitened, teeth chattering, tunic clasped tightly about his shivering body looking for a taxicab to take him back to camp and a cot in sick bay.

That was how I saw Scar-Chin last. His malarial attacks had become fiercer as they became more frequent. This last time he lay in agony on a cot in sick bay, which was a made-over office beneath the stadium. He had the “bone-cracking” malaria, the malignant kind that bakes your body in an oven and stretches your bones on a rack.

I had come to say good-by, for I had heard he was to be shipped home. I could not be sure if he had recognized me; nor could I torture him by asking, for such suffering cannot endure the intrusion of another human person. So I took my leave of Scar-Chin, whom I loved, Scar-Chin of the sardonic wit and the steady nerve. I held his burning hand and said good-by. There came, I think, a glint of recognition, a quivering round the mouth as though he were marshaling those muscles for a smile. But I could not bear to watch him struggle. I dropped his hand and left.

For those impervious to malaria, only guard duty could keep us out of the fleshpots. When our battalion had the guard, no matter what company might stand it, we all had to stand by and remain within the Cricket Grounds.

It was like the old days at New River, almost as though life moved again around the old triad of huts, beer and oil. We would troop in from the drill field and clean up. We would divest ourselves of the long underwear and plunge into the cold showers.

Someone would grab the buckets—for beer this time, not oil—while the squad gathered at the foot of the mezzanine overlooking the field. Everyone would be there: Chuckler, Runner, Hoosier, Oak-stump, Amish, the Gentleman, plus newcomers like Broadgrin—a wide-shouldered, pleasant-faced lad from the Louisiana bayous who had come in as a replacement on Guadalcanal—and Big Ski, another replacement, tall, rangy, sallow, given to talking out of the side of his mouth about his Army hitch in Hawaii and his wife back home. Big Ski was the only married man among us.

So we spent the night, sitting in the gathering dark, facing outward to the black puddle of the infield, singing or telling stories, hearing in the lulls the muted voices of other squads, similarly spent, all around that huge horseshoe enclosing the playing field. The songs we sang were not our own; America had still not given us a song to sing. We borrowed “Waltzing Matilda” and “Bless ‘em All” from the Aussies, and “I’ve Got Sixpence” from the British, whom we had never seen.

Soon, even this mild sport came to an end, and the day that they marched us out to the camp at Dandenong we knew that the soft times were over.

Full marching packs again. Helmets clanking against gun barrels. Sergeants bellowing again, unable to conceal a certain pleasure. Pack straps pulling, cutting into the shoulders—the soft new flesh shrinking, and the veteran shrugging and shifting his load, remembering, desponding. All this again; like a detested acquaintance dropping in for a drink, stirring up old animosities and confiding that he expects he’s back in town for good. So make the most of it—and wait for the others to move out.

“Commmm-panee!”

There it was.

“… Harch!”

Silence, just a jot of it, just that tiny bit of nothingness, devoid of sound or movement, dividing one infinitesimal measure from another, infinity itself, perhaps—and then that unmistakable sound, the soft shrugging sigh of troops moving in unison, followed by the flat, ragged rap of multitudinous feet upon the pavement—and we were off.

“My mother told me there’d be days like this—but never so many of them.”

“Hey! Get that machine gun outta my face. Whatcha trying to do, make me a casualty?”

“Keep off my behind then, you jerk—and you won’t win no Purple Heart.”

“Yeah, Purple Heart! Purple ass, you mean, that’s what he’ll win.”

Dogs by the dozen were marching with us. They raced up and down the line of march, barking playfully. They were so silly and lovable and faithful, we had to laugh at them; a sort of sentimental laugh that moistens the corners of the eyes.