Comfort to the Enemy (2010) by Elmore - Carl Webster 03 Leonard Read Free Book Online Page B

not too bad, but I ate it. Most of the time, we wore greens, the shirts and pants,'' Carl said, stepping into the bathroom to hold his razor under the faucet and drink some of his highball, ''and green baseball caps, or you could wear your white cover. You could wear dungarees or just about anything you wanted, Seabees weren't that military. We'd cut the pants down to shorts and the sleeves off the shirts, cut our combat boots into sandals.''
    ''It must've been hot,'' Louly said, making a face, her brush caught in a snag.
    Carl took the brush, worked it free and put i back in her hand saying: ''Two degrees from the Equator, that's hot. Nobody cared -- we always had a breeze off the Bismarck Sea. I can't tell you where the sea ends and it becomes the Pacific Ocean again. I asked Jurgen -- he's the one told me why it's the Bismarck Sea, Germany taking over the Admiralties in 1884 and owned them up to the end of World War I. I said to Jurgen I was surprised you didn't put up any statues, Bismarck or any of your Kraut heroes like the Kaiser. I think Australia owns the islands now. Manus , the big one, has a huge harbor, so they made it Seventh Fleet headquarters. Los Negros is only 10 miles long, but curves around close to Manus and forms one side of the harbor. We were issued a carbine and three magazines of ammo, 45 rounds. And I had my .38 along."
    "You brought it with you?" Louly surprised.
    "I wore it every day for 15 years. It felt good th e t ime I packed it." Louly paused, holding the hairbrush in the air. "You never told me what your job was." "The lieutenant would tell me to get in the jee p a nd go check on something. We had a lot of heav y e quipment working, bulldozers and graders." Car l s miled at himself in the vanity mirror, half-turned an d m ade a muscle for Louly. "You like my tattoo?" "I love it." She said, "It's Palmer Method, huh?" looking at "Carlos" on his shoulder in perfect penmanship.
    "Only cost me a buck." He reached around Louly to get a towel off the vanity. He wiped his face and said, "Look up here." Louly looked straight up at him bending her head bac k a nd he kissed her till she reached up and took his face in her hands.
    After that tender moment he said: "They gave us the carbine and a steel helmet. Once in a while they'd announce general quarters over the P . A . and we'd go down to the beach and wait for something to happen. The thing the helmet was good for, it held two cans of beer in chipped ice we'd each take to the show at night. We're Seabees, so we made seats with arms and a back that would hook on to the plank nailed to a log -- rows of hard boards going back from the screen. It rained it didn't matter, we'd go to the show. One night I was with this young Seabee, George Klein from Chicago, in the rain watching Lauren Bacall in her first movie, 'To Have and Have Not,' where she tells Humphrey Bogart if he wants anything just whistle? Lauren Bacall says to him: 'You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You put your lips together and blow.' And George Klein went crazy. At that moment he fell in love with Lauren Bacall and kept saying: 'We're the same age. You know it? Look at her. Lauren Bacall and I are the exact same age.'''
    ''How'd he know that?''
    ''I don't know, but you could see she was a kid. Listen, the guy working the projector -- I made him put the same reel back on as he was changing reels so we could watch her say it again. Sitting in the rain.''
    Louly said: ''Are you coming to where you got shot? I think you said in the letter you were in a boat?''
    ''A duck,'' Carl said, ''it was green and looks like a 30-foot open boat but has wheels. You drive out of the water and keep going. We'd take it across a stream separating us from Manus, Los Negros was that close, and go to the supply depot for stores and 60 cases of beer. All the cans olive drab, it didn't matter what kind. On our base we kept them in a walk-in cooler and handed out two or three cans per man every other day.