Red Sky in Morning A Novel of World War II Read online

  Dutifully, a good little sailor, he obeyed his commanding officer; soon she padded in, the pajama tops barely covering up wonderfully indecent parts of her, to wait for him to finish, then brushed her teeth.

  She was still in the foamy process when she asked, “Don’t you need to get to work?”

  “Yes, and we’re wasting time.”

  She giggled, rinsed, and turned to him for the ritual unbuttoning of the pajama top. He was kissing the pink tips of her creamy pale breasts, right there in the cramped bathroom, when she said, “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Then you shouldn’t incorrige me,” he said, and she groaned and laughed, and he picked her up in his arms and carried her like the naked bride she was from the bathroom threshold into the living room and the Murphy bed, depositing her there. Her perfect little bosomy twenty-two-year-old body was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He told her so, and kissed her in places he’d never dreamed of kissing a girl before he was married.

  Fifteen minutes later, in a happy post-coital haze, he shaved, showered, and got into his crisp tan khaki uniform, then went over to tower above Kay, who still lay languorously in bed, sheet pulled to her pale throat.

  Her husky alto purred, “Love ’em and leave ’em, huh, sailor?”

  “Love you,” he said, matching her kidding tone but dead serious. “Never leave you.”

  That got a smile out of her, but a funny one. “You are leaving, though.”

  Did she sense his inner struggle?

  “Just for work,” he said lightly. “And speaking of work, shouldn’t you be getting ready, too?”

  Kay shook her head. “Late shift tonight. I won’t get off until nine.”

  “Want me to pick you up?”

  “I appreciate the offer, but we both know what you want to do, with me working late, is haul your cornet down to one of those crummy jazz clubs and . . .” She did a minstrel move, waving both hands. “. . . wail!”

  “You think that’s nice, making fun of an officer and a gentleman?”

  She looked around. “I see the officer. Where’s the gentleman?”

  He leaned over, tugged at the sheet. “We could both take the day off. Sick call. . . .”

  She pulled the sheet up. “No, we can’t. Somebody’s gotta pay the rent.”

  “That’s a low blow.”

  She heaved a pillow at him. “Get going! Go sing for your supper, Little Boy Blue, then go blow your horn. I’ll get home just fine, and be right here under this sheet for you.”

  “It’s an incentive,” he admitted.

  Then from the closet he got the battered case that held his horn (the one his pop had played in a circus band years and years ago), and went off to war, which today meant drilling a bunch of hillbillies from the Deep South. When you took your eyes off of them, they’d peel off to try to skip class. It was like herding puppies. Or maybe hound dogs, in this case. Worse than colored boys.

  The first thing he did when he got to the base, however, was look at the postings board. He’d made a daily ritual of this, since he’d done so well with bulletin boards in the past. But currently he wasn’t looking for another musical opportunity.

  He and the rest of his pals in the Fantail Four had vowed they’d do everything in their power to get off this darn base and into the war . . . and together, on the same ship. The former would be easy, the latter tough—with the action in the Pacific intensifying, junior officers were being snapped up at an alarming rate, and it was only dumb luck thus far that had kept the choir’s quartet together.

  Usually, orders just came down and one day an officer would be there, the next he wouldn’t. Ensigns and lieutenant j.g.’s were being shipped out fast and furious, and Pete knew that if they stood any chance of sticking together, it would be on one of the new vessels being cranked out up the coast.

  Kaiser-Permanente Shipyards in Richmond, California, were turning out Victory ships at the rate of one every eighty-five to ninety days; and although they were the ammo and cargo variety, not destroyers or battleships or even (if Pete dared dream big enough) an aircraft carrier, these were still ships, carrying men going off to war, not to sing off-key in the base choir.

  So, every day, first thing, Pete looked at the postings board and hoped that an opportunity would come along. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been any chances. Each guy in the quartet had a special skill that kept him on base and away from overseas duty, so this gave the four more leeway in making a choice. And if the four hadn’t been so dead set on staying together, they could have left San Diego nearly a year earlier.

  But along about then, Ensign Vince Rosetti’s wife had left him. None of them had ever met the woman, about whom Rosetti (second tenor in the Fantail Four) had seemed loath to speak even before he got the Dear John letter.

  A thick-set guy of average height and mixed heritage, Rosetti—an ex–L.A. cop who had earned a night-school engineering degree—had curly black hair, coal-black eyes that burned right through you, and muscles on his muscles. When Vince Rosetti had climbed into a bottle after the Dear John, the other three took the better part of six months pulling his ass back out.

  And when Rosetti had said, “Fuck this candy-ass land duty—I’m going the fuck to sea,” the others in the quartet had agreed the time had come, all right, but they’d still do everything they could to face that adventure together.

  The other members of the Fantail Four were Lieutenant (junior grade) Richard Driscoll (first tenor) and Ensign Ben Connor (bass). Driscoll outranked the others.

  “Fellas,” the lieutenant (j.g.) had said early on in rehearsal, “please don’t think anything as insignificant as mili

  tary rank puts me above you.”

  “White of you,” Connor had said.

  Driscoll’s grin was dazzling, one-hundred-watts, easy. “I’ll let my social station take care of that.”

  “You prick,” Rosetti said, laughing.

  Driscoll—richer than God and better educated than Jesus (Haah-vuhd)—was movie-star handsome with swept-back blond hair and sky-blue eyes. The son of a buck had it all, and knew it . . . but Pete figured the guy didn’t flaunt his superiority as much as he could have. Driscoll’s snootiness, they’d decided, was mostly just an act—a small, kidding (if on the square) facet of what made Driscoll, well, Driscoll . . . who was, for the most part, a decent enough Joe.

  Though the rest of the Fantail Four liked (or at least tolerated) Driscoll, many others on the base were less impressed by the lieutenant (j.g.). Ben Connor, on the other hand, everybody liked, despite the fact that he was Jewish and “Connor” was his show-biz name.

  In fact, whenever Driscoll would inform people he was one of “the Newport Driscolls,” Connor would chime in that he was one of “the Brighton Beach Cohns.”

  Ben had changed his last name to Connor when he got a job writing in radio—having a Jewish last name was no drawback in that world, but Ben held ambitions about performing. Even so, one look told the world the guy was Jewish—Ben’s short, curly brown hair was a bird’s nest above a wide forehead, narrow dark eyes, and a hawkish nose. And the comedy writer’s perpetual frown belied his dry wit, his hangdog puss somehow working to make every woman he met want to mother him.

  “Maybe you got the money and the looks,” Ben liked to tell Driscoll, “but the Jewboy gets the girls.”

  Everybody, even Driscoll, routinely roared at this, one of those running jokes that could always elicit a howl.

  And Ben was a master jokesmith, running or otherwise. In three short years, before the war, Ben had gone from writing news copy and commercials to a berth on the hugely popular Jack Benny Show, making Connor one of the highest paid writers in radio. Responsible for many of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s best lines, Connor wasn’t above slipping a gravelly “Oh, Mr. Benny” into a conversation every now and then.

  Pete was about to turn away from the board and trot off to choir rehearsal when his eye was caught by a slip of paper in the lower right-
hand corner, just under the BUY BONDS and war-effort posters, a single thumbtack keeping the wind from getting it. He crouched to take in the posting and his eyes widened as he read.

  Officers were being sought for a new Victory ship coming out of Kaiser-Permanente Shipyard #1. Not just any Victory ship, either—this one had taken on a full cargo of coincidence with a significance that immediately magnified itself in the young ensign’s mind.

  The new ship had been christened Liberty Hill Victory in honor of Pete Maxwell’s tiny hometown.

  Not even bothering to look around to see if anyone was watching, Pete pulled off the posting and stood as straight as if at attention, mind whirling as he read it again. Four officers and four petty officers were being sought to lead the crew.

  Now Pete knew providence was on his side. For all the church choirs he’d been in, and even had led, he didn’t consider himself particularly religious; but this, this, had to be a sign from above.

  A letter from his mother, months ago, had unwittingly explained why a Navy cargo ship was being named after a small town in southeast Iowa: most of Liberty Hill’s sons had ended up in Company M of the Iowa National Guard, their unit at Kasserine Pass in Africa when Rommel counterattacked the Allies. Twenty-seven of Liberty Hill’s young men went missing in that one battle. Another eighty were declared missing at some time during the war, and fifty had been declared Killed in Action.

  The town only had five thousand or so souls to begin with. The battle of Kasserine Pass helped elevate Liberty Hill, Iowa, from an inconsequential hamlet to the town in the USA with the greatest wartime loss per capita.

  Pete folded the sheet carefully and put it in his shirt pocket, then practically skipped to the chapel, so like a happy little kid did he feel. The two-hour morning rehearsal dragged by, but that didn’t keep Pete from being thorough— this was Tuesday, and they had a bond rally coming up on Friday.

  He didn’t have a chance to share his news with the rest of the Fantail Four after rehearsal, but he made a point of telling them to save him a seat at lunchtime. They all gave him a what-the-hell look—they always sat together at lunch—while he settled in to go over some new music with his accompanist.

  When lunch finally rolled around, Pete sprinted over to the mess hall, which was in one of the wealth of two-story red-roofed stucco buildings making up much of the base. Driscoll and Connor already occupied a table near the far corner. Rosetti was halfway through the cafeteria line, his tray piled with food. Though the shortest of the quartet, Rosetti ate like (and had the metabolism of ) a man half-again his size.

  Pete ran his tray along the steel bars, taking a small bowl of peaches, a slice of yellow cake, and filling a heavy ceramic mug with coffee before he got to the main food tubs manned by three enlisted men who doled out generous portions of food nobody was wild about getting a serving of in the first place.

  For example, the chipped beef on toast, which Pete skipped in favor of an egg salad sandwich and a soggy-looking dill pickle. At the end of the line, he picked up something even the Navy cookies couldn’t screw up: two fresh oranges, one for now, one for later.

  Normally, the rule was get it in the mess, eat it in the mess; but in Southern California, nobody ever bitched if you took an extra orange. The running joke was always, “So many goddamn oranges around here, it’s like they grow on trees.” Pete had heard the stupid joke again and again, and hadn’t laughed the first time—partly because, truth be told, the casual profanity of the Navy still bothered him.

  Pete approached the long wooden table. The other three of the Fantail Four were dressed as he (and virtually every other patron in the officer’s mess) was: khaki day uniform, open at the collar, white t-shirt peeking out, black socks, black shoes mirror-polished. The only difference was Pete, Rosetti, and Connor each had single gold bars on their collars, whereas Driscoll’s were silver.

  Shortish Rosetti plopped down next to lanky Driscoll; Connor, taller than the former and shorter than the latter, occupied a seat opposite. Fairly bursting with his news, Pete strode over to join them, almost spilling his tray in a near collision with another ensign in the aisle.

  Connor, who had seen that, nodded as Pete approached. The writer’s mouth was full, but his eyes indicated the chair beside him he’d saved.

  “Maxie, my boy,” Driscoll said, “how is the world treating you?”

  “The world doesn’t give two hoots about me,” Pete said good-naturedly.

  Driscoll raised both palms. “Language, Maxie, language! There are children present.” He nodded toward Connor and Rosetti.

  Pete set the tray next to Connor and settled into a creaking wooden chair. Connor watched him suspiciously as Pete put a paper napkin on his lap and smoothed it in a way that would make a mother proud.

  “Why the shit-eating grin?” Connor asked Pete.

  “What?” Pete asked innocently, but he was grinning. And, truth be told, it was probably shit-eating.

  Speaking of which, Rosetti was studying his tray as if it were a great big lab slide crawling with germs, specifically the chipped beef on toast. “Fucking shit on a shingle again,” he growled.

  Driscoll just shook his head. “You had other choices, Rosie—of main course and of words . . . Maxie, how can a clean-cut child such as yourself bear to be around such a vulgarian?”

  “I ain’t Vulgarian,” Rosetti said. “I’m half-Mexican, and half-Italian, I’ll have you know.”

  They all looked at him, wondering if their friend could be this big an idiot.

  Then Rosetti grinned, said, “Got ya, ya bastards,” and the ex-cop dug into his chipped beef with the same enthusiasm he’d brought to cursing it.

  “Droll,” Driscoll said. “Very droll, Rosie. But you’re still a vulgarian.”

  “Not sure what that means, exactly, Dick,” Rosetti said through a big biteful, “but comin’ from a fourteen-karat tight-ass like you, I’ll mark it a compliment.”

  Before tackling his sandwich, Pete withdrew the sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and passed it wordlessly to Connor.

  The writer slipped into his growly Rochester impression. “Don’t tell me I’m finally gettin’ the pink slip? You do know, don’t you, Mr. Benny, that going on Relief means a raise!”

  Everybody laughed at that, even Pete, but he didn’t respond to the wisecrack, pretending to be engrossed in his sandwich as Connor read the posting.

  Finally, Connor said, “What the hell is the USS Liberty Hill Victory? It sounds like a bunch of words fallin’ down the stairs.”

  “It’s our ship, fellas,” Pete said, chewing egg salad. “Our ship that has finally come in.”

  “Our ship would be called something that inelegant,” Driscoll said, between bites of his own shit-on-a-shingle.

  “Our ship?” Rosetti asked.

  “If we want it to be,” Pete said.

  The comedy writer’s dark eyes left the page and went to his friends, one at a time. “A new ammo ship,” Connor said. “In need of four officers and four petty officers.”

  “Ammo ship,” Driscoll said slowly, as if the words made a bad taste on his tongue. “As in ammunition? The variety that can blow up under one’s keister, ammunition?”

  “Liberty Hill . . .” Rosetti said, frowning. “Pete, isn’t that the name of that piece-of-shit bump in the road you grew up in?”

  Pete took a drink of his coffee, swallowed, then said, “It’s not a bump in the road. It’s a town of five thousand.”

  “I don’t think five thousand qualifies as a town,” Driscoll said, “except perhaps in the Philippines.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Dick,” Rosetti said. It was not the first time he’d said it, and would not be the last.

  “Why not an ammo ship?” Connor asked.

  Driscoll’s eyebrows rose and his nose twitched. “We’re all willing to lay our lives on the line in this war. There’s no question of that. But setting sail on a floating powderkeg? We can do better.”

  “Can we?�
� Connor asked.

  Driscoll, openly irritated now, said, “Boys and girls, didn’t we agree at the last student council meeting that we’d go after a warship?”

  Connor’s eyes trained on Driscoll like twin gun barrels. “What kind of war can anybody fight without ammo, Dick?”

  Driscoll threw a hand in the air. “Jesus Christ on a god-damn crutch—you’re as bad as the farm boy.”

  “I didn’t grow up on a farm,” Pete said tightly.

  “No offense meant,” Driscoll said smoothly. “We admire you, Maxie, one and all—we only rib you because we love you.”

  Rosetti farted with his lips. “You’re as full of shit as a Christmas goose, Dickie boy.”

  “Yet another rural reference, and from a city boy, of all people!”

  Pete was used to getting ribbed about his corn-country background, and not just by Driscoll. His pop had been a rural mail carrier, which meant young Pete had actually been pretty well off during the Depression, his father’s government job secure where so many others had vanished. Pete hadn’t been rich like Driscoll, but the Iowan had been able to stay in school, which was more than could be said for a lot of young men in his hometown.

  So Pete said to Driscoll, “Fuck you, Dick.”

  Six amazed eyes fell on Pete, who’d never before uttered that vile word—a word he’d never heard prior to joining the Navy.

  This outburst from Pete seemed to tell Driscoll he’d gone too far with the chiding; and, as ranking officer, the lieutenant led the discussion throughout lunch, without any notable prejudice toward either ammo ships or country boys. The Fantail Four simply weighed the pros and cons of trying to position themselves aboard the Liberty Hill Victory.

  Pete barely noticed his lunch as he wolfed it down. He stabbed a last morsel of dry cake, swallowed it, and followed with a long pull on his coffee. Around him, the parley seemed to be winding down, a decision in the offing.

  “I say it’s a good opportunity,” Rosetti said. “It’s a brand-new ship, not one of these refurbished shit buckets. What more can we ask?”

  Driscoll gave him a sideways look. “We could ask for a destroyer, or even a cruiser.”