Steve put his fingers on the telegraph key.
FRD1.FRD6.FRD 1.FRD6.FRD1.FRD6.
Royal Australian Navy Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A, Special Marine Detachment 14.
Today, for a change, there was an immediate response:
FRD6.FRD1.GA.
Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio, Townesville, Australia, responding to your call. Go ahead.
FRD1.FRD6.NTATT.
Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A. No traffic for you at this time.
FRD6.FRD1.NTATT.FRD1 CLR.
Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio. No traffic for you at this time. Coastwatcher Radio Clear.
"Fuck!" Sergeant Koffler said, and signaled for Ian Bruce to stop pedaling. He had hoped-he always hoped-that there would be some kind of message. And he was always disappointed when there was not.
He got to his feet and walked out of the hut. Lieutenant Reeves was nowhere in sight, and Lieutenant Howard was asleep on the bank of the stream. There was no point in waking him up; there had been no traffic.
He walked to one of the charcoal fires. The pig's ribs were getting done. They looked like spareribs now, Steve thought, not like parts of a dead animal.
And they smelled good. His mouth actually salivated.
He wondered how much salt from their short-and dwindling-supply Lieutenant Reeves would permit them to use to season the spareribs.
Chapter Five
(One)
THE CLUB CAR "CURTIS SANDROCK"
THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD "CONGRESSIONAL
LIMITED"
16 JUNE 1942
Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, had been in his chair less than half an hour when he had occasion to dwell on the question of saltpeter.
It had been commonly accepted by his peers at Parris Island that the Corps liberally dosed the boots' chow with the stuff. The action was deemed necessary by the Corps, the reasoning went, in order to suppress the sexual drives of the boots, who were by definition perfectly healthy young men who would have absolutely no chance during the period of their training to satisfy their sexual hungers.
Save of course by committing what his father called the sin of onanism, and what was known commonly in the Corps as Beating Your Meat, or Pounding Your Pud-a behavior that was high on the long list of acts one must not be caught doing by one's Drill Instructor... considerations of finding someplace to do it aside.
John Moore now realized that all he knew about saltpeter was what he had heard at Parris Island. That is to say, he had no certain knowledge whether such a substance really existed; or if it did exist, whether it did indeed suppress sexual desires, once ingested; or whether the Corps really fed it to their boots.
It was possible, of course.
There was the question of homosexuality, for instance. He had heard that because of the absence of women, a lot of the men in prisons turned queer.... There was a large number of other things Parris Island and prison had in common, too. The Corps could certainly not afford to have its boots turn to each other for sexual gratification. Several times the pertinent passages from The Articles for the Governance of the Naval Service, known as "Rocks and Shoals," had been read out loud to them. These described the penalties for taking the penis of another male into one's mouth and/or anus. In the eyes of the Corps, this was a crime ranking close to desertion in the face of the enemy and striking a superior officer or non-commissioned officer.
And if one was to judge from the training time allocated to inspiring talks from Navy Chaplains and incredibly graphic motion pictures taken in Venereal Disease wards, the Corps had a deep interest in even the heterosexual activities of its men. After they were freed from Parris Island, the Corps did not want them to rush to the nearest brothel and/or to consort with what it called "Easy Women." Easy women were defined as those who would infect Marines with syphilis, gonorrhea, and other social diseases, thereby rendering them unfit for combat service.
The conclusions Sergeant Moore reached as he accepted a second rye and ginger ale from the club car steward was that (a) it was likely that the Corps had been feeding him saltpeter at Parris Island; (b) that it had worked, because he could not now recall any feelings of sexual deprivation while he was there; and (c) that once one was taken off saltpeter, one's normal sexual drives and hungers returned within a day.
With a vengeance, he thought, as he tried to fold his leg over the first erection he'd had in weeks. It seemed to have a mind of its own, determined to make his trousers look like an eight-man squad tent, canvas tautly stretched from a stout center pole.
The source of his sexual arousal, he was quite sure, was not what the Corps would think of as an Easy Woman. In the training films, Easy Women had without exception earned the cheering approval of the boots with their tight sweaters, short skirts, heavily applied lipstick, and lewdly inviting mascaraed eyes. Most of them had cigarettes hanging from their mouths, and one hand attached to a bottle of beer.
This woman demonstrated none of these characteristics. She wore very little makeup. She held her cigarette in what Sergeant Moore thought was a charming and exquisitely feminine manner. She wore a blouse buttoned to her neck, a suit, and a hat with a half-veil. She was old-at least thirty, John judged, maybe even thirty-five-but he charitably judged that her hair, neatly done up in sort of a knot at the back of her bead, was prematurely gray.
And the final proof that she was a lady and not an Easy Woman came during the one time she raised her eyes from The Saturday Evening Post to look at him. It was clear from her facial expression that he was of absolutely no interest to her at all.
But despite all this, he found her exciting and desirable. This struck him with particular urgency after she stood to take off her suit jacket: The light then was such that her torso was silhouetted by the sun; the absolutely magnificent shape of her breasts had, for ten seconds or so, been his to marvel at.
And when she sat down and crossed her legs, there was a flash of thigh and slip, of lace and soft white flesh; and instantly, in his mind's eye, she was as naked as the lady in the club soda ad, sitting on a rock by a mountain lake.
At that instant the sexual depressant effects of saltpeter were flushed from his system as if they were never there, and Old Faithful popped to a position of attention that met every standard of the Guide Book for Marines for stiffness and immobility.
Had the opportunity presented itself, Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, would cheerfully have gone with her then... even if the price was the loss of all his money, contraction of syphilis, gonorrhea, all other social diseases, and any chances he had after the war to meet Miss Right and have a family of his own.
He tried, very hard, not to let her know he was watching her. This involved adjusting his head so that he could see her reflection in a mirror on the club car wall. Despite his care, she did catch him looking at her once; in a flash, he desperately spun around in his chair.
A little later, he managed to catch another reflection of her in the glass of his window, but that was nowhere near as satisfactory as the mirror reflection.
Between Baltimore and Philadelphia, she spoke to him. Her voice was as deep, soft, throaty, and sensual as he knew it would be.
"Excuse me," she said, waving The Saturday Evening Post at him. "I'm through with this. Would you like it?"
"No!" he said abruptly, with all the fervor the Good Marine had shown in the training film when the Easy Woman offered him a cigarette laced with some kind of narcotic. "It'll make you feel real good," she'd told him breathily.
"Sorry," the woman said, taken aback.
You're a fucking asshole, Moore, J. Out of your cotton-picking fucking mind!
"I don't read much," he heard himself say.
The absolutely beautiful woman smiled at him uneasily.
"Excuse me," Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, said. They he got up and walked to the vestibule of the car, where he banged his forehead on the window, and where he stayed until the train pulled into the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.
The woman got off the train there. Fortunately, Moore decided, she didn't see him hiding in the vestibule corner. He exhaled audibly with relief. And then, for one last look at the beautiful older woman as she marched down the platform and out of his life forever, he stuck his head out the door.
She was standing right there, as the porter transferred her luggage into the custody of a Red Cap.