The Ambassador's Son Read online

  Josh dropped her hand so he could clutch roots and small trees to help haul himself up a steep earthen rise. Then they were in the open. An ebony sky floated overhead, strewn with bright, twinkling stars. Thick grass brushed at Josh’s waist. Her hand found his again and pulled him along. “Where are we going?” Josh asked.

  “A village. It will be safe there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “When the Japoni came, the people of this village ran away. Japoni took all their pigs and chickens, and now they have no reason to go there.”

  That sounded reasonable, so Josh continued to follow the woman up and down small hills, along well-trod paths and those that were overgrown. Josh had a good sense of direction and sensed they were making a circle and moving back toward the sea. Sure enough, they popped out onto a broad savannah, and in the moon’s silvery light he could see straw and bamboo huts set along a white sand beach. The girl led him through the village. All was silent, not even a barking dog, and the empty doors of the huts were like gaping dark mouths. At the beach was a small round hut. In front of it, two palm trees bent toward one another; a rope hammock swayed between them, rocking gently in the light breeze. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  Josh confessed he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She bade him sit on the ground, and it wasn’t long before she was cooking something in a pan over a fire in a cooking pit. It turned out to be breadfruit and yams (where she got them, he did not know), delivered up on a small banana leaf, and a drink in an earthen mug. He ate the food, which was tasteless but filling, and then sniffed the contents of the mug. It smelled terribly foul. “What is this?”

  “Kava,” she said. “It is very good for what ails you now. It will help you to sleep. Tomorrow we will go to Minister Clarence’s mission.”

  “Why will we go there?”

  “To see Minister Clarence,” she answered as if he were daft.

  To be polite, Josh drank the kava. It was bitter stuff, and slimy to the tongue. Still, once started, it seemed impossible to stop. When she saw that he had emptied the mug, the girl refilled it, and he drank that, too. Pretty soon, he discovered he wanted more kava even though it had numbed his lips and tongue. “Yes, kava does that to a man,” she said when he commented on it, then added, “And a woman.” That was when Josh noticed that she was also drinking kava and that her eyes had grown into large black pools.

  Though he was feeling warm and fuzzy, Josh recalled that he was on a mission and then further recalled the notebook in his shirt pocket. He took it out and opened it to the first page. “My darling girl,” he said, then stopped short, surprised that he would call her a darling girl. He inwardly shrugged it off as a harmless term of endearment and continued. “Do you by any chance know Kimba Whitman?”

  “She is Mastah Whitman’s wife,” the girl said.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “With Mastah Whitman, I would suppose.”

  Josh nodded, then went to the only other name in his notebook. “Would you happen to know a man by the name of Joe Gimmee?”

  “Of course,” she answered as she poured him some more kava and then topped off her own cup. “Everyone knows Joe Gimmee.”

  Josh peered at the woman, this lovely creature of soft curves who had about her a scent that was musk and coconut and sweet fruit and—never mind—he struggled with his thoughts, which seemed to be draped in a gauzy veil. He felt that perhaps, to help him think, he should put away his notebook and drink some more kava, which he did. But then he thought he was being derelict in his duty, so he worked hard to ask her another question, although his mind did not seem to want to cooperate. Still, with great difficulty, he managed it. “So who is this Joe Gimmee everybody knows?”

  “Joe Gimmee is Joe Gimmee,” she answered in a tone that said that settled the issue. She put down her mug and came crawling over to Josh on her hands and knees and then snuggled into his arms. He put down his mug, too, and thought that there was never a more darling girl than this, no, never in the entire history of the world. Except for Dosie Crossan, of course, a little voice said in his head. Dosie. Dosie. The name rang like a distant bell, like the one in the steeple of the old Killakeet Church of the Mariner. He thought he actually heard that very same church bell ring, and then he thought that he also saw his father’s lighthouse. He watched its great sweep of light into the darkness like spokes of fire, letting all who sailed by those awful shoals know that there was a family on guard for them, the Thur-lows of Killakeet Island. And there, standing at the rail of the lighthouse cupola, was a man and a woman. The woman’s hat was caught by the wind and sent flying. Oh, she cried. Hold me, Josh. Hold me and never let me go. I’m so frightened.

  “My darling girl,” Josh whispered, taking Dosie into his arms. “My darling, darling girl.”

  “Yes, mastah,” Dosie answered, only it wasn’t Dosie but a beautiful black woman, and the tropical wind was picking up, near to a breeze. Josh was glad that there was a breeze, but wait, it was the woman blowing across his face with her pursed lips, a strange gesture, difficult to interpret, but then she leaned back on a mat of woven palm fronds and drew him down on top of her, a gesture that needed no interpretation at all. Josh wondered where his utilities were. He did not appear to be wearing them, although he didn’t recall taking them off, either. Yet another strange dream overtook him, of him removing the woman’s lap-lap, and her wrapping her legs around him, and then he concluded that since it was only a dream, he should go ahead and enjoy it.

  He also noticed that he was happy.

  Kava did that to a man.

  16

  Darkness had settled over Santa Cruz but powerful generators were humming, keeping the camp brightly lit. There seemed to be no fear of Japanese bombing raids. To pass the time while waiting for the poker game to begin, Kennedy used the five bucks he had in his pocket to treat Ready to a meal at a roadside stand. The stand was identified by a sign that read NICK’S TROPICAL HAMBURGER JOINT.

  “What’s in these?” Ready asked after he’d been served a cheeseburger that didn’t much look like a cheeseburger at all. It was a slab of unidentifiable brown meat brushed with a pale yellow substance that had the consistency of lard, all served up between two slices of limp, doughy white bread.

  “You don’t like it, don’t eat it, that’s my advice,” the short-order cook replied. He was a burly fat creature with a cigarette dangling from his lips and a dirty apron around his neck. A tattoo of Betty Boop was on his hairy shoulder. Betty was wearing a grass skirt and a garland of flowers that just barely covered her breasts.

  Kennedy also ordered a “cheeseburger” and a beer. He took a sip from the long-necked bottle. “Not bad,” he announced, and then inspected the label: CASTLEMAINE XXXX BITTER ALE, PRODUCT OF AUSTRALIA. “How’d you get Castlemaine all the way out here?”

  “Nick got it, all’s I know,” the cook replied. “Nick can get anything.”

  “This the same Nick that runs the supply outfit down by the beach?”

  “Ain’t no other Nick on this island, bub. Nick’s Nick and that’s an end to it.”

  Kennedy drained his beer and, noticing that Ready had long since emptied his, paid for two more. “I’m curious,” he said to the cook. “What do you do besides work here?”

  “Nothing else,” he said.

  “You’re paid by the navy?”

  “I’m in it, ain’t I?”

  “This stand make money?”

  “Sure does.”

  “Who do you give it to?”

  “Nick. See his name on the sign?”

  “What does he do with it?”

  The cook shrugged. “He slips me a little. Otherwise, I never asked him. It’s his money.”

  Kennedy and Ready carried their food and drink to the next stand, this one with a sign that read NICK’S SOUVENIRS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. It didn’t look very prosperous. A fat brown woman in a flowery gown peered at them from behind the counter displaying a sorry collection of c
arved coconut heads, a few uninspired bead and shell necklaces, and a couple of wilted grass skirts. “You like?” she asked while grinning at them with black, broken teeth.

  A tall, balding man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and dressed in the khakis of a naval lieutenant commander was also inspecting the goods. “Mostly junk,” he pronounced.

  “You no like, you no buy,” the woman snapped.

  “Oh, come on, Mary,” the commander replied. “Nobody wants this stuff. When are you going to get some decent souvenirs?”

  “Ask Nick,” she said. “You think you so damned smart. You asshole, that’s what.”

  “Now, Mary,” the commander simpered. “You shouldn’t use such language.”

  “Foh dollah,” Mary said, ignoring the officer and focusing on Kennedy, who was fingering one of the grass skirts.

  “Is this real?” Kennedy asked.

  “I can tell you,” the commander said. “No, it’s not. Nick’s got some boys who whip all this stuff up in a back room. Look here at the waistband of the grass skirt. It’s GI issue, and those are GI shoelaces that keep it tied together.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Mary growled.

  The commander stuck out his hand to Kennedy. “Jim Michener. Don’t let the insignia fool you. I’m a navy historian, out here to keep track of this mess for future generations. I do a little intelligence work, too, just for fun. This is Mary. She’s Tonkinese. Bunch of them down here out of Hanoi and Saigon. Great merchants, but they’ll cheat you if you don’t stay on your toes.”

  “Bloody bastard!” Mary hissed.

  “Bloody Mary!” Michener responded with a chuckle.

  Kennedy introduced himself. “An honor to meet you,” Michener responded. “It’s good to see a man such as yourself out here. We’re going to need men like you from important families to go back and tell the story of the South Pacific to the public. I think mostly they hear about North Africa and Italy. After we invade France, the Pacific theater will be practically ignored.”

  “It’s understandable,” Kennedy replied. “Europe is, after all, the mother of American history.”

  “Yes,” Michener replied, “but the future of America is here in the Pacific.”

  “I agree, yet our path will be difficult. ‘And when your goal is nearest, the end for others sought, watch Sloth and heathen Folly bring all your hope to nought.’”

  “Well, I see you’re up on your Kipling,” Michener said in an admiring tone.

  While Kennedy and Michener wandered off to discuss history, poetry, and politics, Ready, bored with their high-flown exchange, inspected Mary’s display. “Foh dollah, foh dollah, foh dollah,” she said, as if she were a cracked record, whenever he held anything up.

  “Mary, there ain’t nobody gonna pay four dollars for any of this stuff!”

  “Not my plobum, GI,” she answered. “It’s Nick’s plobum.”

  “An interesting man,” Kennedy said after he’d finished his discussion with Michener. He and Ready were sitting on a bench beneath a fern tree, having another beer from Nick’s Tropical Hamburger Joint.

  Ready, hoping to avoid hearing about the surely dreary discussion between Kennedy and the articulate lieutenant commander, pointed out another of Nick’s operations, this one proclaimed by a sign that read NICK’S TROPICAL JEEP WASH $I. A string of jeeps and trucks was lined up at a concrete slab where four men sprayed water out of hoses attached to a navy fire truck and scrubbed the vehicles.

  “Corruption, pure and simple,” Kennedy advised. “At his hamburger stand, Nick likely gets the meat from a navy freezer, the bread from a navy bakery, the beer”—he contemplated the brown bottle—”from God knows where, peels off a cook from some other corrupt officer, builds himself a stand out of scrap lumber and sells burgers and beer and puts nearly all the profit in his pockets, tax free. This jeep wash is the same. Four men working for Nick who should be on duty. God only knows how many sailors he has working for him in the laundry. Oh, quite the flimflam man, our Nick.” He shook his head. “And this is the man you have me playing poker with.”

  Ready gave some thought to Kennedy’s complaint. “You shouldn’t worry about the game, Mister Kennedy,” he concluded. “I’m an old hand at poker. I’ll give you advice when you need it. But you’ll catch on, pretty quick. You seem smart.”

  “Thank you,” Kennedy replied in an ironic tone. “A Harvard education will always make a man seem smart, if nothing else.”

  “What’s that Harvard like, sir?” Ready asked, wishing he could go back and get another of those beers. “Do you have to read a lot of books?”

  “A lot of books,” Kennedy confirmed. “Sometimes you’re even required to understand a few of them.”

  “I’m not much for reading past comic books,” Ready said. “I like Superman best of all. Batman’s too dark and moody, that’s my thinking.”

  Kennedy chuckled at Ready’s childlike enthusiasm for comics. “Well, I guess we better get on to the O-Club Annex,” he said. “Lead on, McDuff. That would be Shakespeare, Bosun.”

  “And a pretty fair version of it, sir,” Ready replied and then quoted the actual line: “Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” He shrugged. “I was in a school play. Never could get the words out of my head.”

  After the startled expression faded from his face, Kennedy said, “I’ve never understood kryptonite. If it’s part of the planet where Superman was born, why would it make him so weak? Seems like he’d be used to it.”

  “You’ve got a point, sir. I never thought of that.”

  “I’m glad I’ve defended my Harvard education.”

  “Yes, sir, for sartain. Now, let’s go win us a PT boat.”

  17

  The Officer’s Club Annex proved to be a small Quonset on the beach beside a shack with a sign that said NICK’S BEACH SUPPLIES, FLOATS, SURFBOARDS, SAILBOATS, AND SUCH. On the beach behind the shack were a half dozen tiny sailboats constructed from aircraft belly tanks. “Quite the inventive entrepreneur, our Nick,” Kennedy said, marveling. “Too bad he’s a crook.”

  “I’d surely like to sail around in them little boats,” Ready said, nostalgically recalling his days as a boy on Killakeet Island when he and his pals built their own sailboats out of anything that would float.

  Kennedy pushed open the door of the O-Club Annex, and he and Ready went in. Three men looked up from a round wooden table. Two of them were lieutenant junior grades like Kennedy, but the third was Jim Michener, who smiled and nodded at him. Nick was sitting on a bench in front of an old upright piano, playing a lively tune and singing, too:

  Oh, there’s nothing finer than a beach of sand,

  With a round of gin, and a girl so grand,

  Out here in the islands with the ocean so blue,

  All I want is to snuggle with you.

  Oh, be my pal, South Pacific Gal.

  Be my pal, South Pacific Gal.

  Nick finished the piece with a flourish. Everyone in the hut, including Kennedy and Ready, applauded. “Thank you,” Nick said, clearly delighted with their appreciation. “I wrote it myself.”

  “What’s it called?” Kennedy asked.

  “Just as the chorus implies. ‘Be My Pal, South Pacific Gal.’”

  “Catchy.”

  “Sure to be a hit,” Ready added. “Can I stay for the game, sir? I know I ain’t no officer, but I got nowhere else to go.”

  Nick slapped his hands on his thighs and grinned. “Why, of course you can stay, Bosun. Can’t he, boys? See, we don’t stand on rank around here. This is poker, and poker is the most egalitarian of contests. Do you want in? I’ll stake you.”

  “No, sir, don’t reckon I do, you being my superiors and all in every respect. But I would like to give Mister Kennedy some advice now and again if it wouldn’t be considered too much against the rules.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Nick said, rising from the piano and taking his place at the table. “Advise all you want. We’re an
easy game here, aren’t we, gentlemen?”

  The other officers all nodded. Nick introduced them, one by one. “This is “Duck” Hendricks, ace Tomahawk pilot with your United States Army Air Corps, that’s Chris Welch, journalist, Stars and Stripes, and here’s Jim Michener, who I’m not certain why he’s here but we’re glad to have him. Fellows, meet Jack Kennedy and Bosun O’Neal.” There were handshakes all around.

  Michener beamed at Kennedy. “I forgot to mention this earlier. Congratulations on your best seller. How’d you feel when you knew it was going to be published?”

  “Deserving,” Kennedy replied, with the smug expression only a published writer could attain.

  “I’d like to write someday for publication,” Michener confessed. “Maybe I’ll write a book on the historical tensions between East and West and the deterministic factors of empire and commercialism.”

  “Boy, that sounds boring as hell!” Ready chirped, then clapped his hands over his mouth. He spoke between his fingers. “Sorry, sir.”

  Michener chuckled. “Well, what do you think I should write about, Bosun?”

  Ready freed his mouth. “Well, if you wrote it right, I bet folks would like to read about all us guys out here doing our jobs.”

  “Oh, sure. It would be real interesting to read about a guy with the creeping crud,” Welch scoffed. “Or a guy who sits around day after day waiting for a letter from his girl who’s going out with some 4-F guy back home. Oh, yeah, some really interesting stories to be told out here.”

  “Nurses, sir!” Ready enthused, not willing to let his idea go so easily. “How about the nurses you got down here in Santa Cruz? People like to read about a dame in a peculiar place. Maybe you could write about one of those nurses falling in love with some really special guy. You know, like Lois Lane with Superman.”

  “This is all fascinating, Bosun,” Nick interceded. “But I believe we have a poker game to play, not a discussion of literature.”