Chapter 5

A PARACHUTE MADE A WARM NEST for us in the tropical night. Ella and I lay close to each other in our hut, talking in whispers. An affinity had grown between us, something close formed out of mutual need and understanding.

Bit by bit, we had brought out all our memories and discussed them with a candor seldom found between women. We were more than sisters, because we lacked the jealousy, the competition, that sisters have. We were friends now, as only women can be friends, with a relationship bordering close to love. Our closeness was obvious, and some of the women tried to make something of it, to feed gossip upon it-as they were doing about the romance between the WAC, Jessie Maraws-ki, and young Helen Fergus.

But that wasn't so, and we talked of Danny now, while the fire beat time for dancing shadows and a night bird whistled back in the trees.

"I don't know," I murmured. "I just don't know why or how, but I may as well be honest about it. I'm drawn to Danny, but I won't call it love."

"The mother instinct?" Ella asked.

"Possibly. He's so helpless, almost child-like, and yet there's a strength in him. He proved that, against the shark."

Ella stiffened against me. "Yes, but it may never come out again."

"I know, but when his whiskey is gone-"

"He'll need us more,"

"Why?"

"He'll crack up," she said. "I studied about alcoholics once. It will be as if he were coming off narcotics; he may go into convulsions."

"No," I whispered. "We can't let him."

"We may not be able to help it."

Joy Santee's voice shrilled across the clearing, piercing and harridan-thin. It was a wordless noise, full of rage and breaking on a weird crescendo of fear.

"I can't help it," Joy shrieked. "I can't, I can't! You're not a man, you're a-a bull!"

The sound of a meaty slap then, and Zell's rumble: "Get out-get your ass outa' here."

Clutching a skirt about her, Joy stumbled into the ring of firelight. She was bare from the waist up, and the angry red print of a wide hand covered her left breast and one side of her rib cage. Zell had slapped her where it hurt.

"Bastard!" she shouted, while tears of pain wet her cheeks. She wheeled to face the hut door, her face contorted and ugly. "You bastard!"

Snakeswift, a shadow lunged out of the hut and was upon her before she could whirl to run. A full-armed slap staggered Joy back to the fireside. She collapsed, sobbing, her hands cupping both bruised breasts.

Dark fur gleamed across Zell's powerful chest, patterned down thickly into his shorts, swept up over his burly shoulders and down the middle of his back. His teeth gleamed from pulled-back lips, and the obsidian hardness of his eyes glinted in the light of the burning logs.

"Flabby bitch," he hissed down at her. "You'll toughen up, all right. Startin' tomorrow, you haul wood. When you get yourself solid, I might let you come back."

I saw Danny across the fire. He was staring woodenly into it, setting himself apart. From the other huts, heads poked out, curious, frightened faces. Joy whimpered, rocking back and forth, holding her breasts.

A column of hairy power, Zell stood with his fists on his hips and roared at us all. "Time you got it all straight. like I said-I take who I want, when I want-I got enough of this used-up bitch. There's gonna' be a change made-now."

Danny pulled his head farther down, shoulders slumping. The gin bottle was half full.

Logs popped softly in the fire, the only sounds in a brittle, breath-held silence. Even Joy held her teeth clamped on the gasps that shook her.

Zell's hand shot out, one rigid finger targeting on the Japanese hut. "One of you slopeheads tonight. I know slopeheads are good."

His voice lashed at them: "Come outa' there! All of you!"

They came, touching each other for comfort. Sako's face was down, as was Kyoko's. Michiko Kuwaye held her head up, tense, tight-mouthed. Zell's glance flicked over them, measuring, touching hotly at their legs, their hips. "You," he said. "Miss high nose; you're the lucky one tonight."

"No!" The word burst from Kyoko and she pattered over to kneel at Zell's feet. "Zell-san, please-I go with you."

Zell grinned at the girl humbling herself before him. "Michiko's too good, huh? Too much slopehead society for a slob like me?"

"Please," Kyoko begged. "For me, no difference. Business girl, me. Please Zell-san-no Michiko."

Zell lifted his leg, rammed a big, bare foot between Kyoko's small breasts and shoved. She careened away from him, skidded to her hands and knees in the sand.

"Your turn's comin', " he growled, "but not now. Now Michiko gets it. I never sampled a slopehead society broad before." His voice rose. "C'mere, miss high nose!"

Michiko didn't move. Chin lifted, she stared at him, her arms stiffly by her sides. Sako touched her hand and moved away, back into the shadows. Michiko stood alone to face him, taut and motionless as an ivory carving.

A single fluid movement brought Zell around the fire and to her. like a giant claw, his hand hooked out and down, and the girl's one-piece dress fell away from her body. Slim, golden, Michiko stood naked in the flickering light, the dark pussy attracting Zell's probing eyes.

She moved suddenly. One hand darted out from behind her, blurring as she hissed and struck at Zell's exposed belly. His huge, square hand chopped down and a honed sliver of metal spun off across the clearing. Cat-like he caught her by the hair, flung her onto her back with tapered legs flailing.

"Pretty good," Zell grinned. "Only you shoulda' waited until I got closer. But next time, sister, I'll break your arm."

like a butterfly pinned on the sand, Michiko spat at him, her rich lips curled back from sharp teeth, her naked body writhing in helpless fury. "Peasant-stupid, foreign peasant!"

Zell's grin faded. He put his foot on her stomach and pushed down. Breath sighed gustily from her and she clawed both hands at his ankle. "Peasant, huh?" Zell muttered. "Okay, miss high nose. You don't like show-in' your tail to everybody? Okay, so I'll make this hurt-really hurt. I'll lay you right here in the light-right here, with everybody watchin'!"

Danny Mixon quivered. I saw the shudder rake him. Unwillingly, his head came up and he braced against the sand with both hands. Zell's mean eyes struck at him, transfixed him.

"Don't," Zell said, soft and deadly. "I'll break your lousy back if you move one inch."

Danny shifted away from the flat eyes, looked away from the nude girl twisting on the sand. Involuntarily, his hand fumbled down and came up with the flat bottle of gin.

Scornfully, Zell laughed and turned back to Michiko, lifting his foot, leaning over her, fingering at his shorts.

Mary Tetson came out of the shadows, her heavy body wrapped in parachute nylon.

"Kane," she said firmly, "not here."

Zell stared at her, at her lined face and the silver of her hair. His thick lips twitched and his tongue darted out to wet them. Muscles coiled in the thick matting of hair across his heavy chest.

Mary Tetson faced him calmly, her own stare unwavering.

Abruptly, he looked away from her. "Okay," he said, "have it your way. But in the hut. In the hut and right now. And don't you get in my way again, Ma. You hear me now-don't you get in my way again."

Sighing, Mary pulled her makeshift gown closer. Zell stooped and dragged Michiko kicking to her feet. She tried to stab his eyes with her nails. He slapped her twice, great, ringing slaps that rocked her head and buckled her rounded knees. Effortlessly, he scooped up her sagging body and threw it over one shoulder, locking her slim ankles in one hand. Michiko's rich, midnight hair swung down to the backs of his knees as Zell swung around and carried her to his hut.

Danny screwed the cap back onto the gin bottle and returned it to his pocket. He got up slowly and brought another log to lay across the fire. Its weight fluttered bright sparks into the drifting breeze for a moment. Danny moved to the tent Jessie Marawski and the girl Helen were sharing. "Your fire watch, soldier," he said to the WAC.

Jessie mumbled and Danny went away. He was heading for the beach, I thought, where the only noises would be of clean waves, and of fresh salt wind in the trees; all uncruel things, all natural noises, unhurting, uncrying.

Other noises would be coming from Zell's hutgrunts, damp, threshing sounds of thrusting flesh upon shuddering flesh, and a woman crying out against the indignity of wrenching pain.

Ella drew back, pulled me back beside her in our nest that didn't seem warm and secure now. "Come to bed. There's nothing we can do about it."

I sank back and stared into the dark, listened to the stirring begin in Zell's hut. Once I thought I heard a broken whimper, but it wasn't repeated.

"When he gets to me," Ella said desperately, "I don't know what I'll do-run, try to kill him with something. But Michiko couldn't kill him, and she tried-she tried hard. I know; he's got to sleep sometime. Maybe I can kill him then."

I tucked the girl's head into my shoulder. "Don't think about it now."

"That Danny," she said. "He ran away with his bottle."

I moistened my lips. "He couldn't take on Zell. That brute would have mangled him."

"I couldn't have looked away," Ella whispered. "If he had done it to her right there by the fire, I couldn't have looked away."

I patted her head. "Mary stopped that. It was strange how he listened to her, almost as if she had some sort of control over him. He called her-Ma. Maybe he has a-

"Julie, why is it that I couldn't have looked away? I-I never did it, you know. Only when that-swine raped me, and then it hurt so much. Do you think I'm all right? I mean, Julie-"

"Hush, now-hush. Of course you're all right. What happened to you before was terrible, and you were so young. One day you'll find a man to love. He'll be kind and tender, and it will be all right then. Hush now."

Child-like, Ella snuggled to me and I held her close until her breathing deepened, until she had fallen asleep. Then I moved carefully from her side and sat up. I needed to walk, to run through the night, to plunge into chill water, anything that would take my mind off what was going on in Zell's hut.

Jessie sat by the fire, with Helen beside her. "It's like I told you, baby," she was saying. "You saw; you watched him hurt her, slap her around. It's like that with men. They don't know how to be good; they just want to dirty you. You don't want to be hurt, do you, baby?"

"No," Helen said. "No; don't let him hurt me, Jessie."

Jessie stroked the girl, running her fingers down the smooth back. "I won't let him hurt you, baby. But you see how it is with them, don't you? Men are animals. They can never do things for you like I can."

Trembling, Helen pressed her face between Jessie's heavy breasts. Jessie ran her fingers through the soft blonde hair, stroking, pampering. "He won't bother you, darling. I swear he won't."

Quietly, I slipped past them, my face burning, knots in my stomach. What had happened to the virginal girl from the salt pits on the beach? She had needed strength and comfort from herself, but Jessie could supply it. So she took the easy way.

At loose ends, wanting to search for Danny Mixon and yet somehow repelled by the thought, I paused at the wall of Mary Tetson's hut. Maybe she could advise me, or just talk with me. But she shared the hut with Eve Short, and I didn't feel I could take much of that girl's hidebound opinions just now.

They were talking, and I started to pass by, for they were working to ease the pains of Joy Santee; Mary had taken her in after Zell threw her out.

"I don't know why she should move in with us," Eve said. "She went to him in the first place, like a-a Jezebel."

Mary ignored her. "I can't do much, Joy, but maybe the cool water will soothe a little."

"That bastard." Joy said.

"Listen to her," Eve's voice was querulous. "Just listen to her foul mouth. She got no better than she deserved."

"Be quiet," Mary said.

"I won't be quiet. She switched right up to him, wanted him to put his dirty hands on her. I saw it; we all saw it. She slept with him every night and-and laughed out loud when he-did things to her in the dark. I heard her laughing."

"You sanctimonious bitch," Joy grated. "You're mad because he didn't take you. You sit there hugging yourself and twisting your ass, just thinking about him in there with that Jap. You're not kidding anybody, you know."

I heard Eve's outraged gasp. "Why-I never-I don't-"

Joy laughed bitterly. "The hell you don't. I've seen your kind before, sister. All mealy-mouthed and psalm-singing, but you'll drop your pants as quick as the rest of us-if anybody asks you."

Scuffling sounds from inside the hut, then Eve's voice again: "I-I won't stay another minute. I won't stay here and listen to the ravings of a dirty-mouthed prostitute."

Mary was calm as always. "Take some bedding with you, then. In the morning, when we're all thinking more clearly, we can make other sleeping arrangements."

I shrank into the shadows as Eve burst outside, a pile of nylon clutched to her breasts. She turned for a last volley. "You're taking a viper to your bosom, Mary Tetson-remember my words."

"Oh hell," Joy said. "Go lie by the fire. You can listen to Zell and the Jap better from there."

Eve darted across the clearing, running blindly. She didn't pause at the fire but headed down the path toward the beach. I drifted the other way, staying close to the clearing, wary of the shapeless darkness of the trees.

We were all touchy now, all thinning down from the lack of a proper diet, all edgy and ready to explode. Fear does that to people, I thought-fear and hate and perhaps, jealousy. The women were still women, cut off from men. Helen had found a substitute-for as long as Zell allowed it to last.

The rest of us? In time, most of us wouldn't mind becoming the transient mistresses of Kane Zell. Maybe we'd even draw straws for his attentions; maybe we'd fight each other for the brutal caresses of his virile body.

I shuddered and stumbled across a path. I followed it without thinking. I didn't realize at the moment that it led to the beach where Eve Short was.

Where Danny Mixon was, too.

I stopped at the crescent edge of whiteness, stopped to stare at the dark figures in the pristine sands, the shapes washed by moonlight. Again, I thought raggedly-again I was the outsider, the window peeper, the secret onlooker. I was once more the voyeur, thrilling at the sexual couplings of others. Danny and Eve Short were there on the beach; it couldn't be anyone else.

Well, this time I didn't have to watch. This time I could turn around and get the hell away from it, and the hell with Danny Mixon, too-now and forever. He was only a jackal, slinking at the rim of another animal's kill, too cowardly to fight, content to take the leavings. Danny was-

He wasn't moving. I frowned, eased closer, down to the last bush and stared hard at them. Danny was-I couldn't be too sure-but from there it looked as if he had already passed out, his arms stretched wide upon the sands.

Eve was talking to him in a low, husky voice. "I came to cover you up," she said. "It's the Christian thing to do. You can catch cold from the dew, and I thought-"

Her words trailed off, took up again. "Oh, I knew you'd been drinking, and I know that drinking men do some-crazy things. Danny? Danny, you don't have to pretend; not with me. I-I've been watching you, and I think you're not like that brute. I think you're kind of nice-even if, even if you drink.

"Men can't really be blamed for what they do when they drink, can they? My Aunt Agnes wouldn't agree with that, though. She told me to stay away from drinking men, that they'd hurt me, dirty me. Aunt Agnes said-"

Eve's soliloquy rambled on, and I felt more like a Peeping Tom than I had watching Sako and Danny make love. The words tumbled out of Eve, dusty from being long unused, a tale of childhood she'd never bared to anyone before. It was poignant, and it was terrible.

The old way was always best for Eve; her Aunt Agnes said so, and Auntie's word was law, coming direct from heaven. Eve was thirty-four years old, and she liked the touch of earrings on her unpowdered cheeks. They had to be plain, of course-simple gold earrings for pierced ears; not those gaudy screw-on things. A good, sensible woman always followed the old, tried ways; she could get along even when surrounded by evil-doers.

Auntie said disciples of the devil were always near, and Eve had seen them in the shamelessness of Joy Santee, the heathen Japanese, the carnal lust of Kane Zell, the promiscuous Army brats.

And the Nigra. Anyone knew that mulattos were just palin no good, or real black Nigras either. Aunt Agnes used to say the only Nigra girls in New Orleans who were virgins could outrun their brothers. But they brought it on themselves, flaunting their bodies shamelessly in thin cotton dresses, switching their hips so.

It was up to good women to take care their bodies didn't inflame men. That's why Auntie bought Eve plain, sensible clothing-long, loose skirts and flatheel shoes and ruffled blouses. That's why Auntie showed Eve how to bind her breasts flat so they wouldn't stick out.

And only loose women painted their faces, for paint attracted men like Eve's father. That wretched man had run off and left Auntie's sister ill nigh unto death, with a helpless baby girl.

Eve had long been ashamed of her father, for he was not only a wife deserter, but a gambler and drunkard who lusted after Jezebels.

Until Auntie died and went to her glory, Eve had stayed with her in the musty old house on Esplanade Street, going to church four times a week, sewing and playing the Victrola and reading the Good Book. But when the preacher said ashes to ashes over Auntie, Eve was on her own. She took all the money from the

Hibernia Bank and went to secretarial school, and the school found her a job with the government in Japan.

"Danny," she said now, "Danny, I'm telling you all about myself, so you'll know what kind of woman I am. I want you to know, Danny. I hurried down here to you, and I was conscious all the way of my skirt rubbing my thighs, of the touch of my blouse upon my-my nipples. There! I said it to you. You're drinking and you won't remember, so I can say things like that to you."

He didn't answer, didn't move.

"Danny?" she said anxiously. "Oh-maybe he's dead. Maybe the whiskey killed him. Danny?"

I saw her press an ear against his chest. "Danny-" she said, "wake up; please wake up."

He mumbled, turned slowly and buried his face in the crook of an arm.

Eve shook him. "Wake up, wake up!"

"Huh?" he mumbled and something else that died away into bubbles.

Eve crouched over him, tearing at her constricting clothing. She peeled off her thick, ruffled blouse and hurled it from her. She fought out of the long skirt and kicked it aside. Then a slip, and a masking bra, and long, unfeminine panties. She crouched naked over him, the moonlight playing over her body, gleaming from a body surprisingly full and lush and rounded.

She covered him with her body, squirmed seeking over him, grinding her pelvis hungrily into him, flattened the richness of her eager breasts against him, rotated and shook and gyrated in an unreasoning blindness of thirty-four bottled-up years.

Ragdoll loose, Danny lay there with his mouth open, sunken deep in a stupor that was only a hairline away from the final, total oblivion he sought. Eve moved her lips across his mouth, her body thrusting, shuddering. She whispered in his ear, dug her fingernails into his flesh as she pulled him to her this way, that way.

"Huh?" Danny muttered again and flopped his arms slowly, weakly.

Snarling, Eve pushed him from her. In rage, in disgust, she spurned him with her bare foot as she rose shakily to curse him steadily, viciously with words that spewed up from a tortured ego, from agonizing frustration. After a while, weakened, she reeled away from him toward the water.

I started up from my hiding place, afraid she was going to throw herself into the sea. My hands were stretched out to her, but my lips were numb and mute.

She waded into the waves, but not for suicide. She stood navel-deep in the cool water, both hands laving her erectile breasts with its chill, the waves washing over her hips and aching thighs. But I knew the sea couldn't reach the thing burning deep inside her body. Only a man could put out that fire, and the man wasn't Danny Mixon.

My sympathy went out to Eve Short as she tried to wash away her need in the ocean, but I also felt a strange, shameful sort of gratitude. If she hadn't come down here, if she hadn't offered herself to a man too drunk to realize it, I might have been in her place. I might have done the things she did, may have shamed and degraded myself in an identical manner.

For the flame was in me, too, and now I knew it for what it was. I walked away from the beach, moved along the treeline until I was far from them, and kept walking until my feet stumbled in tiredness, until my mind was blank from exhaustion. Only then did I turn for camp and find my hut. When I crawled in beside Ella Martin, it was almost daylight, but my fires were banked. I only hoped they could remain like that.

Sleep wouldn't come, and I tried to rationalize things I felt, tried to take apart our island society and look at it closely. After sunrise, Zell would be gone to search for animals in the thick brush on the other side of the island. He liked being the hunter because he liked to kill.

I remembered what Danny had said about our island-that it was probably somewhere in the Marianas, one of a thousand coral dots in a limitless sea. It showed signs of having been settled once, and I wondered what had driven away the settlers-hurricanes, the war, or atomic testing. I didn't want to think of disease.

We were lucky; other, forgotten people had left taro plants, had willed us a legacy of pigs gone wild, of chickens that had regained their jungle cunning and survived the departure of their former owners. There was food here, in the trees and in the sea, but we would have to struggle for it. We would have to erect more permanent shelters, too, and manufacture clothes when what we had wore out. We were going to have to do many things none of us had ever imagined ourselves doing, in order to live.

The climate was fine now, warm and ideal, but that could change suddenly when the typhoons came. We'd have to battle nature itself, then. I rolled closer to Ella Martin and wondered about all the people in the world outside-if a world still existed outside-wondered about their talking wistfully of returning to the soil, where they could live simply, without the pressures of the rat race.

They should be here with us, I thought. They should be where life is rough and will be even rougher, where women's hands turn brown and grow ugly calluses from manual labor. Then they'd be happy to return to the pushbutton society they complain of. For it isn't civilization that's all wrong, but the men with misplaced values who run it.

Here, we had all that the professional promisers of the welfare state offer us-food and clothing and shelter; but we had to work for it. The politicians couldn't tax one segment of us to give our earnings to another; here we wouldn't be penalized for initiative and fined for ambition-for up to ninety-one per cent of our incomes when we were alive and up to seventy-five per cent of our legacies after we died.

There were plenty of reasons for enjoying our lives away from the benevolent thumb of the big brother government, and plenty of other reasons for wishing we were back in civilization. I wanted a hot, soapy shower and a cup of coffee. I wanted a silken nightie and a deep soft mattress.

But perhaps nobody had those things any more. The bomb had gone off.

America's blunders into socialism had cost it every luxury that had been built up over the short time in which capitalism had been tried.

But worrying about a world that might not exist was foolish. There were enough problems here to keep me occupied for a long, long time.

After breakfast, I'd have a new job-weeding the grown-over vegetable field Zell had discovered. Ella would help me. Zell would bring in the bloody meat; the Japanese girls would continue to snag seaweed and hunt for shellfish. Zell's orders were to stay away from the plane wreck until the sharks had finished with the bodies still in it, or in the sea around it.

I wondered if Michiko would be with the others this morning, if she'd be able to walk erect in the ruins of her pride, after what Zell did to her last night. I supposed she would be at work as usual, whether she wanted or not. Briefly, I puzzled over the reason she had fought him, why she'd tried to kill him in the firelight when he shamed her.

The Japanese were casual about sex; I knew that much from my stay in Japan. The real blow to Michiko must have been loss of face, the public humiliation so disturbing to Orientals. Or was it that Michiko, unlike Danny Mixon, held individuality dear? Individuality, I imagined Danny saying, is a luxury for the strong. Back in civilization, weren't the shadowy terrifying "They" all-powerful?

Our island could be a peaceful spot, without Zell. The pain and troubles of the world were far from us, but here we manufactured our own, because even here people insisted upon retaining poor values to live by. Here was prejudice, pointing pale fingers at Ella; here was race consciousness, the Japanese united against the others. Here was the savage-Zell; the deviate-Jessie; the do-gooder-Eve; the has-been hero-Danny Mixon.

And me-the widowed, the once-loved hoping to recapture a faint glimmer of love.

All of us would go on almost as we had before, cheating, lying, snooping, all our flaws magnified because of our enforced closeness here. I closed my eyes, smiling sardonically at our bucolic garden of Eden, populated by fourteen Eves, one drunken Adam and a powerful snake.