Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

18.

March 1945

It was good to be out in the fresh air of San Francisco, wearing a slightly rumpled but clean uniform that his sister Catherine had ironed for him and carefully rolled up in the sea bag. He was young, and jaunty, with a nice collection of ribbons, and he attracted attention from passing women. A lot of those were in uniform themselves, particularly the nurses from Letterman Army Hospital and other duty stations overflowing with distaff military. San Francisco had a reputation as the Paris of the West. He felt more comfortable in his own country with its more generous living space, soap, baths, all the little extras of life that had been missing in Europe and nonexistent in Africa. Whistling, he carried his personnel folder and medical records around to various sun drenched, whitewashed offices set on well-sprinkled green lawns. He sent a telegram home to New Haven, announcing that he’d arrived okay.

His duty station was at the Presidio in a two-story stucco building that itself was an annex to the rambling Navy Quartermaster Corps facilities all around the Bay area. He had a small office overlooking a sunless courtyard. One of the many cute young enlisted women who did administrative tasks like typing and filing told him, while chewing gum and patting her brown hair, that the sun did penetrate down to the second floor during the mornings on clear days, but generally she was always happy to get out. He thanked her, getting his own coffee rather than asking her to do, it, and began the process of settling in.

He met his boss, Commander Martin Teague, in a large office with a round conference table overlooking a sunny, breezy intersection below. Teague was a tall, white-mustached man with a dignified mien and the often-expressed self-effacing desire to get the war over with so he could return home to his farming real estate business in Kansas. Sitting in was Lt. Cdr. Stan Kehoe, Tim’s friend—young, dark-haired athletic, a bit brash.

“I hear you went for a swim off the Canaries,” Martin Teague said without making light of the tragedy. He had florid cheeks and had a way of pulling his chin in when remarking in understated humor. Tim felt comfortable with him.

Stan Kehoe tended to always be sort of forward, to say just one thing too many, or say not quite the right thing considering the company, but he was so good-natured that most people overlooked his eager quality. He usually had his tie slightly loose, as if he needed air while he bounced about in his seat and gesticulated as he spoke. “Yeah, Tim and I hit all the hot spots in London town from one end of the Thames to the other. I’ll vouch for him.”

“Glad to hear it,” Teague said quietly, raising both hands over Tim’s personnel field file as if in blessing. “Everything in here looks first rate. I feel very lucky that we have a good solid staff officer on board, and I’m sure Admiral Lemney will feel the same way as he gets to know of you from our weekly briefings.”

Hiram L. Lemney was the two star flag officer in charge of Procurement 5549, which specialized in turning specific small captured exotic enemy weapons over to the maws of the vast U.S. industrial machine and receiving back production versions that could be shot back at the enemy—kind of like throwing their own smoking grenades back at them.

Later that evening, sitting over a red checkered tablecloth in a smoky bar in the commercial district of Union Square, Tim and Stan reviewed the day’s meeting. “Teague likes you. I can tell.”

“Glad to hear it.” Tim had begun thinking about home.

“You’ll do just fine. Say, I thought you were going to be the life of the party. You look a little under the weather.”

“Still a little bushed from the long trip.” Tim sat back in the corner and propped one leg up on the dark red plastic bench. “That meeting today got me thinking about clocks.”

Stan laughed, sucking ice from his empty glass and letting the cubes tinkle back in while his eyes roved at the young women in military hats parading by outside on the neon-lit avenue. “Clocks? You feeling okay?”

Tim shrugged, pushing an ice cube around so it left soggy little trails in the table cloth amid the bread crumbs from the Italian sandwiches they had just eaten. “I begin to wonder, you know. Do I really want to go back to Connecticut and design escapements in a little town. You know, marry the girl next door, have children, live out the whole conventional life style.”

“Hmmm. Miss London?”

“A bit. Not the plumbing.”

Stan laughed. “I know what you mean. And not the buzz bombs.”

“I’m sure they won’t have those after the war.”

“And the V-2s.”

“Them neither.”

Stan waved to a pair of young women who waved back. They were Army nurses in Class B uniforms. They’d taken off their starched caps, but still wore their dark blue sweaters. They carried their regulation leather purses as well as hat bags with them, and wore their caduceus brass on their rounded blouse lapels. Lieutenants fresh out of some nearby state college, it turned out. Before long, Tim and Stan were having beers with Lorraine and Susie and getting more and more tight. They did a lot of laughing and shoulder-hugging, told a lot of off-color jokes, and rolled from one bar to the next while the air smelled of fog and smoke and French fries. At some point, Susie left but was replaced by a darker skinned nursing aide named Myrna or something—Tim never quite got it straight and didn’t really care. They all went dancing in a hall near Chinatown, and by now Tim felt thoroughly anaesthetized. Before long he had trouble standing. Then they were singing in a bar while across the street the Shore Patrol arrived in several jeeps. Men in white cracker jacks and helmet liners piled out waving night sticks, and before long an antique black city paddy wagon was removing a squad of Marines and sailors who’d decided to exchange opinions. Tim found himself alone with Stan, walking along endless blocks of dark dockyards under glaring industrial lights. It had gotten cold, and damp, and fog rolled in. Tim stopped by a lamp post and barfed his eyeballs out into a black void filled with crawling yellow-green lights, or were those at the back of his skull?

Stan patted him on the back. “Got it all out of your system, eh?”

Tim nodded, feebly spitting out the last remnants, particle by acidic particle, of the evening’s hamburger pizza. “Shit.”

“Here,” Stan said, offering a drink.”

“Get away,” Tim said spitting some more.

“Just a soda. It’s a little warm, but it will clean out your bilges.”

In reply, Tim barfed up another slice or so. “That’s it for me. Get away with that.” He dug around in his pocket and found some gum. He popped four sticks in his mouth, one after another, and welcomed the cool spearmint taste on the raw back of his tongue.

They walked another block or so, and it started raining lightly again.

A yellow taxi cruised by. Stan waved, and the cab pulled over. “Thank God,” they both said getting in.

“Good evening,” the driver said. He was a Mexican-American wearing an old, stripped police cap with no strap or hardware.

“Nob Hill,” Tim said with a groan.

“That, and then Lafayette Park where I live,” Stan instructed.

The rain came down hard for a few minutes and then eased off. The driver put on the wipers. The inside filled with warmth that smelled of oil and upholstery. It almost made Tim want to gag again.

Stan nudged Tim. “You still alive?”

“Barely,” Tim said, slumped in the seat with his chin buried in his chest. He dozed most of the way back to the hotel, catching flashes of passing lights, snippets of laughter from people still partying away the craziness of the war where nothing was what anyone used to assume to be normal.

“See you at work tomorrow,” Stan said yawning.

Tim stepped from the cab and gave him a five dollar bill. “Pay the man.”

“Oh, amigo, no,” Stan said, fumbling for his own wallet.

“Treat’s on me,” Tim said as he pushed the door shut. “Thanks for showing me around.” He waited a moment, standing in the quiet street. The taxi hove off with a receding motor sound, putting out puffs of vapor on the streets. It was just drizzling now, and Tim welcomed the fresh wind, the sobering calming effect of being away from the frenetic bars and women and the swing music pouring out of every window and dive.

He took a deep breath, staggered a bit, and turned to enter the hotel grounds. Okay, that was it. He’d had his little blast. He felt a bit old to party like a kid. He wanted something that he found hard to define—something more, somehow, a bigger meaning in life. He wanted to read important books and think weighty thoughts. Being alive was too precious to waste on trivialities. Thus, over the next few days and weeks, he would settle down to a normal working routine punctuated by dinners alone in this restaurant or that followed by evenings sitting by a lamp, reading Aristotle or Steinbeck or Dos Passos or Fitzgerald before turning in early. Nothing exciting, he thought as he fumbled for his room key.

The front entrance was locked for the night, and he’d been instructed to enter by a smaller secure entrance in the courtyard. He walked around the building, his shoes crackling on the asphalt and gravel of the driveway running alongside, and entered the little maze of flagstones leading through grape bowers, ivy, bougainvillea, and night jasmin. This brought him onto the glistening and moss-edged courtyard of Spanish pavers surrounding a concrete fountain. The fountain barely trickled from its age-dark copper mouth, but it had a picturesque old poured-concrete Classical-style statue set against one ivied wall of the courtyard. The statue was of a female goddess representing a bountiful and happy city. She had a dimpled smile and one breast bare as she poured rainwater from a horn of plenty into the cupped palms of an aroused looking satyr with tiny horns and a mass of tight curls caught in a stone band.

As Tim walked unsteadily into the courtyard and stopped for a moment to admire the details of this faux Grecian tableau, he noticed a light out of the corner of his eyes and looked up. Two lights, actually. One was the full moon, which had just swum out from behind a bank of rain clouds and shone like dripping liquid down the gilded piles and wrinkles of cloud and bounced off several windows. The other light came from the window where the blonde woman had fed the birds. For a moment, Tim glimpsed the silhouettes, through the curtains, of two women holding drinks and talking earnestly. One laughed—the blonde probably—and the next instant the light went out leaving the window dark, smoldering with moonlight.