Chapter 2
Realizing I was holding tightly to Ella's arm, I released it-after Kane Zell had smirked at us and swaggered away. For some reason, I looked around the clearing for Danny Mixon, and caught a glimpse of his back, disappearing into the trees.
I thought he must have been a larger man once, stronger. His bone structure was solid, his shoulders wide-wider than Jim's had been. Jim; I was vaguely surprised to find I could think about him now. His image brought only a nagging ache, not the frenzied pain it had been two months ago.
Had it been only that short a time? It was still difficult to believe, and when it happened, it had been totally impossible to accept.
Numbed, I hadn't been even able to see to the "arrangements." The chaplain had been wonderfully understanding, handling all the things that needed to be done. I remembered him as a quietly efficient man, appearing now and then in the gray vacuum I found myself living inside. If only he hadn't repeated that inane statement so many times, if only he hadn't said that Jim died as much a soldier as if he had fallen on the field of battle. Those were the chaplains words, "field of battle."
And it was a lie, because Jim died in a stupid, unnecessary maneuver accident, not in combat. Jim had been an athlete, a natural for Special Services officer, a bug on training Army fighters. Jim died senselessly, out of his element, because the Army must play at war in peacetime, to justify its existence.
I could faintly remember some of the things that happened after the chaplain brought the news, the signing of papers that meant the body of Captain James G. Curtis would be sent home; the thin, strained face of young Jim, man enough to escort the coffin aboard ship, to sail with it from Yokohama. I hadn't been able to do it. The doctors and nurses couldn't make me do it.
The thing they had in that box aboard ship wasn't Jim Curtis. It was a statistic, the cost of a ticket to the war games. Jim had gone away and would never come back. And neither would young Jim Curtis, fifteen. I had planned that much, managed to think it out. The Curtis family would care for him, would see that he got the chance to wear the uniform he wanted so desperately to wear. I wouldn't be forced to see my son in uniform.
I couldn't understand a life without my husband. I was more wife than mother, no matter what the rest of society thought about it. To be a woman without love, without hope, was to be no woman at all, but only a dreadful caricature-not alive, not dead, an in-between creature without substance or future.
Perhaps it might have been different, if Jim and I hadn't been so suited to each other, so much in love. Maybe I could have picked up the fragments of my life and stuck them back together, rearranging myself for another man, somewhere, sometime. But Jim had been the only man in my life.
I felt at times that I was out of date, clinging to the outworn concepts of marriage and fidelity, while all around me, other wives tended the blossoms of bright, casual affairs, or tacitly exchanged husbands at all-night parties.
But I couldn't be casual about sex. For me, it was too deep, too intertwined with love and living together. And I wasn't one of those dutifully faithful, frustrated wives, either. Jim and I were almost honeymoon-frequent lovers, knowing sudden urges of passion, knowing swift desires, even after sixteen years of marriage. Our sex drives had been matched, strong, brazen, seldom falling into dull routine, often experimental, always thrilling. I needed no other man, wanted no other man, from the first frightening, fulfilling experiences of the wedding night. I was a virgin, and Jim was tender.
This is what the damned Army destroyed. Even my instinctive, hating plans afterward had been turned into a big, bitter joke. In the Tokyo hospital, with the off-key chants of street peddlers rising outside the walls, the thriving, life-going-on noises of the ant-hill city all around me, I had wanted to die.
In part, I had died-all the bright and feeling parts of me. The husk refused to die. The shell continued to suck at air and expel it, gurgling in its belly, seeping wetness through its pores, fighting to carry on a meaningless existence.
I planned to do it quietly, when the paper lanterns across the city canal winked out in lonely silence. I listened to the hoarse, tinny voice in the harbor warn fog blind ships away from rocks and thought of the best way to destroy the obstinate, stupid, sucking hulk I had become.
There were many times I could have done it, for all the rustling watchfulness of the night nurses, the probing beams of the ward boys' flashlights. But I didn't.
That alien land stopped me. Its chatter and smells and the odd, leering slyness of its people had taken enough from me. I couldn't bring myself to die in such strangeness, knowing that the wooden rhythm of the geta would chuckle on past the cold white room in which my body would lie. I could not die there, not while the doll women and the monkey men lived on, unknowing, uncaring.
So I decided to wait, not forever, but only until I would be able to die with dignity in a proper place. Now the bitter jest had topped itself with satanic humor. The plane crash offered me an easy way out, in clean green water with cool stillness in its depths. But my idiot body had struggled for life, for the chance to go on gurgling and breathing, and the body of Julie Curtis had won, but what had been the golden prize?
Only more strangeness, an island of it in a foreign sea, with an odd assortment of people I didn't want to know. The possible exceptions were the girl beside me, tortured by prejudice, and the weakly, needing alcoholic hiding somewhere in the trees with his bottles.
The other women were yet bland and blank faces, some Japanese, some not. But the other man-padding now around the camp, his furry head swinging from side to side like a stalking animal-that man was a very real threat. I watched him poke into the brush, saw him return, prodding Danny Mixon ahead of him.
Two women came from another way, shouting that they'd found water. They saw Zell and stopped.
"Water," Zell grunted. "That's good. After we get set, we'll move camp closer to it."
Danny moved listlessly over to his bag and squatted beside it, the bottle in his hands. There was an inch or so of whisky in it.
"How far is the water?" Zell asked.
A blonde woman answered him: "Just a little way-a spring and a stream."
Zell walked to Danny, stood balanced above him. "We need that bottle to get water."
Danny didn't look up. "In a minute."
Zell's voice was low, raspingly eager. "Now."
Danny lifted the bottle, gulped quickly and handed it to Zell. Grinning, the big man took it and said, "Okay, boy. Now build a fire, so the women can cook up those clams."
"Yes," Danny said.
I looked away from them, but when Danny came for the clams, I helped him carry them to the center of the clearing, helped him smooth a place for the fire.
"The bayonet," Danny said. "I can use it to split kindling."
Feet widespread, thumbs hooked into his belt, Zell laughed. "Use your hands. If you're too weak, the women will help you."
I touched Danny's arm. "Come on, let's get the wood. We can manage."
"Yeah," Zell said, "you can manage without my bayonet. While you were saving your bottle, I thought of the bayonet. Who's better off?"
Danny didn't answer, and anything else Zell intended to say was blocked by the entrance of the gray-haired woman and the girls with her, panting into camp with their loads of salvage. I led Danny away, and into the brush for firewood.
"Don't mind," I said, when we were away from the buzz of voices.
He shook his head. "I don't mind. It doesn't make any difference."
I was sorry I'd said anything. It should make a difference that one man was deliberately, senselessly humbled by another man. But evidently Danny's spirit was gone, burned away by liquor and a weakness in himself that no longer shamed him.
I looked at his face again, at the long nose slightly twisted at its bridge, the pale lashes, the ridged network of little white scars that ran through his eyebrows. His mouth was well-shaped, but with a hint of immature petulance in its downward curl. It, too, was scarred, thicker on one side, the upper lip permanently puffed.
"How old are you, Danny?" I asked, surprising us both.
His faded blue eyes peered at me. "A thousand years, at least. Somewhere in a book, it says thirty-eight, but that's not true. It can't be."
I reached out and touched his cheek. There was nothing man-to-woman personal in it. It was the instinctive motion I would make, to pat the drooping head of a lost, tired dog.
"I understand," I said softly.
He pulled away from my touch. "No," he said, almost talking to himself, "no. You're one of the good ones, one of the rare women, and you'll try to understand. But you can't; nobody can, because I don't myself-and I don't think I want to."
He was different from the man my husband had been, far, far different. Where Jim Curtis had been strong, this man was weak; where Jim had been mature and capable of swift, aggressive decisions, this man was childish and vacillating.
We said no more, but crouched searching through the brush for dry sticks. Opposites attract, they say, and certainly Danny Mixon was a direct opposite of the man I had before. But interested in him, as a man? No; I could be interested in no man that way.
I was sorry for Danny Mixon. I merely pitied him.
Ella and I were fairly fast, getting our hut constructed, but the lean-to being put together by the Japanese girls was rising far more swiftly. Their deft hands were completing their shelter drawn apart from all the others. And I could see it would be watertight, the palm leaves woven together in much the same manner as the brush fences and rice-straw roofs of farm houses in Japan. They knew what they were doing.
One girl was the leader, and from what I could remember of the language classes in Yokohama, she didn't make suggestions, but gave orders. The other girls followed her directions quickly, and without question. Japanese are swift to recognize differences in caste, and just as quick to accept their proper places in the traditional scheme of things, in the ancient, efficient system of a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.
Snatches of conversation, mixed English and Japanese, gave me bits of information about the girls. Marriages to foreign soldiers hadn't changed the feudal system for Sako Watanabe, now Smith, nor for Kyoko O'Hara, formerly Tanaka. The modern customs and publicized freedoms of the new Nippon fit them as loosely and uncomfortably as their new names, and were as easily forgotten.
They saw Michiki Kuwaye and knew her for a descendent of the samurai, the warrior caste, or for a daughter of a great land owner. The stamp was plain in the up-thrust chin and arrogant mouth, the straight proud walk with eyes lifted and steady, not downcast like those of daughters of rice farmers.
That bold stare was an easy thing to practice, in the tinseled bars, drinking and dancing with Americans. Sako and Kyoko knew how easily it could be acquired, as they had learned their patched-together English, and how to wear sweaters, skirts and high-heeled shoes.
But they couldn't use it among their own, for Japanese knew them for what they were, "business girls," simple prostitutes and not scorned for it, but sneered at for crossing the racial fence and standing with Nippon's conquerors.
In time, I was to learn the strain Michiki had come from-neither warlord nor landowner. Her family had come into some prominence through war manufacturing, but she finished Tokyo University with enemy boots upon the soil of Japan, and with the factory of her family only ashes from the night-raiding B-29s.
In the stunned vacuum of defeat, a smart girl could make her way, and Michiko was smart, too intelligent to go the path of the prostitutes. Her education and working knowledge of English made her valuable in import-export.
The way was difficult until the Korean war put Japan back upon its commercial feet. By then, Michiko was a traveling buyer and manager of the Yokohama branch, proving that the new Japan had a place for women in business.
And she had also been mistress, for little more than a year, to a charming, lying American lieutenant. The new Japan, the new freedom, the new love. But it had lasted only until the lieutenant was ordered back to his own country. He would not jeopardize his military career by taking Michiko with him as his wife.
She should have known better than to hope. She should have understood that, for some, the gulf between Caucasian and Oriental is deep and wide. Michiko understood, later, and the understanding hurt. In her knowledge, she turned bitter, even hating the girls who worked with her on the hut, the girls with the marks of the Yoshiwara district upon them, the many, many sweaty beddings plain in their swaying hips, their cheap Yankee clothing. A married prostitute was still a prostitute.
But Michiko took them under her wing. They were Japanese, and at least honest whores who didn't claim the cheating imitation of respectability that white women used-like the blonde woman and the ugly, powerful man across the clearing.
Later, Michiko told me how she had felt that first day on the island, how she had evaluated Kane Zell and the woman who had first made up to him, knowing that he would no more be satisfied with one woman than a rutting field bull would be happy with a single cow.
I was watching her, too. Her legs were long and just a shade thin, but smooth knees peeped through a rip in her skirt. She arched her breasts in coy invitation as she sidled up to Zell.
"Oh sergeant," she said. "Can you-I mean, will you-help me put up my shelter? I-it's difficult for me to get it right. I'm not used to labor like this."
Zell grunted and looked first at her legs, bringing his eyes up slowly to fasten on her breasts. She held still for his inspection, unflushing, wanting him to see all she had to offer. She kept her shoulders back so her breasts would stand higher, and let her mouth dampen.
"I'm Joy Santee," she murmured. "I was a DAC at Camp Zama."
She was about five-feet eight-inches tall, and possibly one hundred and thirty pounds. I knew her red-blonde hair would revert to its original color after we'd been here awhile. Her eyes were gray and stared directly into Zell's, saying what she wanted them to say-that she was a woman, that she wanted and needed a man.
My eyes narrowed. Whatever layers of civilization we had was being peeled away in a hurry. But perhaps it was better this way. I didn't like the way Zell looked at me. Maybe a willing woman would keep him away from me-for a while, anyhow. And Joy Santee was obviously after him, not only as a male, but as protection.
Back in Japan, she'd have been nudging hips with her boss, sacking out with some pot-bellied colonel, making sure of her next raise in pay, she would know all the tricks in bed; she'd use her body as bait. She was a prostitute, but she didn't think of herself that way.
"Sure," Zell said slowly. "I'll help you, baby. Guess I got to have a place to sleep tonight, too."
Joy smiled, knowing she had the edge on the rest of us, sure of herself now, of her position in this society. Zell was the boss, here, and Joy had learned long ago that only the boss counted.
"Why," she lisped, playing a familiar game, making her moves from experience, "why-I-I don't know. I mean-"
"Cut the crap," Zell snapped. "You ain't playin' pattycake with some old jerk in Zama now. I'll help you get a shelter up and you crawl in with me tonight, and you'll lay without any more crap."
I saw Joy's eyes widen. To her way of thinking, this man wasn't playing the game; he was making his own rules as he went. But he was still the boss.
"All right," she said.
The rest of us hadn't missed a movement of the little act. The Japanese girls accepted it without changing expressions, although I thought I saw a flicker of relief cross Michiko's ivory face. The pudgy Mrs. Faye Herman seemed a bit disappointed and stuck out her lips before she leaned over to whisper something to Ella. One woman, tall and with a mousetrap of a mouth, stood stiff with disgust for a moment, then turned swiftly and walked down toward the beach.
The gray-haired woman sighed and continued sorting bits of wreckage, placing bits of metal that could be made into tools on one pile, scraps of fabric which might possibly be useful onto another.
Zell's lips stretched into something like a smile. "Knock it off!" he ordered. "Knock it off and listen to me.
We waited, and something deep in the pit of my stomach turned cold.
Zell stood braced, with Joy Santee beside him, preening herself. "You all think this wench got the jump on you," he said. "She thinks she's gonna' be the queen bee around here. She'll find out different; all of you will find out. Joy stays only until I get tired of her, understand?"
Joy lifted the back of her hand to her mouth and pressed hard. She took it away to say: "Why-why, sergeant-"
"Shut up!" Zell ordered. "I ain't through talkin'. The rest of you, listen good, Joy here probably won't last long, and when this phony blonde gets draggy-butted, somebody else is gonna' take her place. I don't give a damn how many tricks Joy knows; I don't care how good she thinks she is in the sack. The time will come when I'll throw her out on her achin' can, and pick out a replacement. That's the way it's gonna be, and it ain't gonna' do any of you any good to scream about it. I'm the man here-the only man, because the drunk don't count, and all you women better get used to the idea.
He paused, looking around at our pale faces, then added: "Think of it like you was a bunch of mares in a private pasture, and I was the only stud horse. You'll get used to it, account of we're all gonna' be here for a long, long time together. Hell," and he grinned wolfishly,"-the way it stacks up, I'll probably have to beat you women off with a stick."
When he put his broad, hairy back to us, the expression on Joy Santee's face was sick, but she was already committed. I gnawed my lips. Weren't we all committed? Could any of us, single or in concert, stand against such a powerful animal? Would most of us want to resist him, after man-less weeks and months had gone by?
I didn't know about the others, and I didn't care much. I knew only myself, and I realized I could never allow that sweaty, hairy man to put his great paws on my body. I'd die first.
Or kill him.
I flinched. In a few short hours on this island, the widowed Julie Curtis had been stripped down to her basics, exposing a primitive streak I hadn't known existed. When I left Japan, I wanted to die, to become without feeling, without thought. Now I was fighting to live, and more than that-I was ready to kill to protect my dignity as an individual.
Shaking myself like a dog crawling out of water, I moved to help the gray-haired woman, needing to keep busy, needing to mask my feelings from Kane Zell. Some savage cunning told me not to warn him, not to put him on guard.
"Hello," the older woman said. "I'm Mary Tetson."
"Julie Curtis. We're in for a rough time, aren't we?"
Mary pursed worn lips. "Perhaps. Time has a way of working things out. It's going to be rough staying alive; the rest-Zell-will be minor annoyances compared to that."
Zell took Joy by the arm, his big fingers cutting deeply into the soft flesh above her elbow, and led her into the brush.
"He's not waiting until tonight," I said.
Mary Tetson sighed. "I hope she can keep him satisfied for a while."
Above us, another woman snapped: "How terrible! What a terrible thing to say!"
Mary looked up. "Eve. Eve-meet Julie Curtis. Julie-Eve Short."
"Miss Short," Eve said. "I still think you shouldn't talk like that."
"Why not," Mary asked. "It won't do any good to hide our heads. Don't you think it's better for Zell to have someone willing?"
Eve kneeled beside us at the salvage pile. "It's sinful-but do you-do you think that man would actually-force himself upon a woman?"
"You can bet your girdle on it," Mary said.
I found myself liking Mary Tetson. She was heavy and gray and about fifty, but she was wise.
"Then," Eve said, "he-he's a savage!"
"That's pretty close," Mary nodded.
"And the other one," Eve chattered. "That drunkard. Do you think he might protect us? Do you think he still has a-a spark of decency left in him?"
Mary examined a thin strip of metal. "This might be made into a needle. We're going to need more clothing than we have. You're talking about Danny Mixon? He can't help himself, much less others."
Eve tried to adjust a stained blouse, smoothed at her long, wrinkled skirt." It's awful that a man should be so lacking in will power. He's just a drunkard."
"He's sick," Mary said.
"No," Eve snapped. "He's weak and sinful and he won't be able to protect us, if that-that man gets tired of his Jezebel and tries-tries to-"
I spoke up. "I hope Danny doesn't try to stop Zell."
Eve gasped. "W-why not? Mary here may be too old to-"
"Interest Zell?" Mary smiled. "Maybe, but I agree with Julie."
"But he should defend us," Eve said, "if he has any real manhood left."
Mary shook her gray head. "Eve-don't you understand? This isn't the world we knew. Here there are no laws, no police force, no social disapproval, no church."
Firmly, Eve said: "The church is everywhere."
"The church adapts itself to the times," Mary said. "And to forces it can no longer ignore. Remember the men in the Bible, and their many wives?"
"That's sacrilege-plain sacrilege!"
"Perhaps, but religion, or morals, will work in this situation only if we adapt ourselves."
Eve stared at her. "I don't understand. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and-and this Danny Mixon should rise up to defend us against the wrong. He should be our champion against evil, against this lustful man."
"A righteous David standing small and alone against the mighty Goliath?" I cut in, angry. "I hope Danny doesn't get any such chivalrous ideas."
Eve turned on me, eyes blazing. "For heaven's sake, why not? Why shouldn't he?"
Mary's faded eyes looked past us both, looked toward the beach, where oil slicks on twilight-graying waves were the only signs that a man-made wonder had died there, breaking the tenuous line that had bound us all to man-made laws and established customs of right and wrong. At least, I felt that was the way she was thinking before she answered Eve Short. I was thinking like that.
"If Danny Mixon tries to interfere with Kane Zell in any way," Mary said, "if he crosses Zell in even a minute matter, Zell will kill him."
"But-" Eve said, wide-eyed and ashen, "-but he couldn't. Not-not just like that."
"He could," Mary said, "and I'm afraid he will-just like that."