Walk in Hell

“Other climes, yeah,” Carsten said, while Vic Crosetti did his best, which wasn’t any too good, to keep from snickering. As always, every inch of Sam’s flesh the sun touched was cooked red and juicy.

“How come you talk so damn fancy?” Crosetti asked.

“This is how English was taught to me,” the Sandwich Islander said with another shrug. “Since you Americans came here, I have learned the language may be spoken with a number of different accents.”

“Haven’t heard anybody here who’s got quite as much mush in his mouth as you do,” Crosetti said. Was he looking for a fight in spite of denying it before? He hadn’t had that much to drink yet; he and Sam had only just come on leave from the Dakota.

The surf-rider sighed. “You must understand, gentlemen, that under the previous administration my father was assistant minister for sugar production, thus enabling me to acquire rather better schooling than most of my contemporaries.”

Sam needed a moment to realize that under the previous administration meant when the British ran the show. He needed another moment to realize something else. “Your father was assistant what-do-you-call-it, and you took our dimes? Christ on His cross, I bet you can buy and sell both of us and hardly even notice you’ve done it.”

“It may be so, but, for one thing, we Hawaiians-we prefer that to Sandwich Islanders, if it matters to you- have discovered expediency to be the wiser course in dealing with the occupying authorities. Had I refused your money, you might have thought I was insulting you, with results unpleasant for me.” The fellow’s smile revealed large, gleaming white teeth. “And besides, you both chose to reward me for my skill out of what I know to be your small pay. Especially in wartime, acts of kindness and generosity should not be discouraged, lest they disappear altogether off the face of the earth.”

“Whew!” Carsten couldn’t remember the last time anybody had done that much explaining. “You ought to be a chaplain, uh-”

“John Liholiho, at your service.” The surf-rider’s bow could have been executed no more smartly had he been wearing top hat, cutaway, and patent-leather shoes rather than gaudy loincloth and bare feet. “And with whom have I had the pleasure of conversing?”

Carsten and Crosetti gave their names. Crosetti plucked at Sam’s sleeve, whispering, “Listen, do you want to spend the time chewing the fat with this big galoot, or do you want to get drunk and get laid?”

“We got a forty-eight, Vic-don’t have to be back on board ship till day after tomorrow,” Sam answered, also in a low voice. “God knows it’s easy to find a saloon and a piece of ass in this town, but when are you going to run across another real live aristocrat?”

“Ahh, you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up,” Crosetti snarled in deeply unhappy tones. But he didn’t leave. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his tropical white bell-bottoms and waited to see whether Sam could make standing on the beach banging his gums with a native more interesting than a drunken debauch.

John Liholiho peered over toward the jutting prominence of Diamond Head while the two sailors talked with each other. The presumably British school he’d attended had trained him in more things than an upper-crust accent; he showed very plainly that he was not listening to a conversation not intended for him. Carsten wished most of the sailors he knew had a matching reserve instead of being snoops.

He didn’t really know how he was going to make this more fun than getting lit up and having his ashes hauled, either. After a little thought, he asked, “So how do you like it, living under the Stars and Stripes?”

The Sandwich Islander-no matter how he thought of himself, that was how Carsten thought of him-frowned. “You do realize, of course, that this is a question on which circumspection might be the wisest course for me?” Seeing Sam hadn’t the slightest idea what circumspection was, he translated his English into English: “I might be wiser to keep quiet or lie.”

“What am I going to do, shoot you?” Sam said, laughing. Crosetti plucked at his sleeve again. He shook off his pal.

Liholiho gave him a serious look. “Two friends of my father’s of whom I know for certain have suffered this fate. It does give one pause. On the other side of the coin, the protectorate the British exercised over these islands was also imperfectly humane. Mr. Carsten, would you prefer to be thought of as a bloody wog or a nigger?”

Since Sam had been thinking of John Liholiho as a nigger not ten minutes before, he had to work as hard at keeping his face straight as when he was raising on a pair of fives in a poker game. “Anybody called me either one of those things, I’d punch him in the teeth.”

“Yeah.” Now Vic Crosetti’s attention was engaged. “I get called a fuckin’ dago or a wop, that’s bad enough.”

“People seldom call me these things to my face, though I have heard nigger in a mouth or two since you Americans came.” The surf-rider seemed to have a British sense of precision, too. He went on, “What one is called, however, sometimes matters less than how one is seen. If the powers that be reckon one a wog or a nigger, one is not apt to be taken seriously regardless of the potential value of one’s contributions.”

“That’s too complicated for me,” Carsten said, thinking he should have headed out and got drunk after all.

But Crosetti got it. “He’s saying it’s like he’s an ordinary sailor, and he’s trying to convince an admiral he knows what he’s talking about.”

John Liholiho beamed at him. “Mr. Crosetti, I am in your debt. You Americans and our former British overlords do tend to look at race as if it were rank, don’t you? — yourselves being admirals, by the very nature of things. I shall have to use the analogy elsewhere.”

A Sandwich Islander as near naked as made no difference…with whom would he use an analogy (whatever an analogy was; Sam gathered it meant something like comparison, but it was another word he didn’t think he’d ever heard before)? Then Carsten remembered that, even though John looked like a savage, he was a local bigwig’s son. That he had to think twice before the fellow’s station came to mind went a long way toward making his point for him.

Dipping his head again, the brown-skinned man said, “And now, if you will excuse me-” He turned and, carrying his surfriding board, trotted out into the Pacific. Once in the water, he climbed up onto the board, lay on his belly atop it, and used his arms to paddle farther from shore.

Sam turned to Vic Crosetti. “All right, now we can have all the fun we want to. That didn’t take real long, and it was sort of interesting.”

“Yeah, sort of.” Crosetti stared out at John Liholiho’s receding shape. “I bet he’s a limey spy. He sure talks like a limey spy, don’t he?”

“He talks like a limey, anyway,” Carsten answered. “But so what? Even if he is a spy, how’s he going to get word off the island? And if you’re going to start seeing spies under every bed-”

“If I look under a bed,” Crosetti said with great assurance, “it’s to make sure I can hide there if her husband comes home before he’s supposed to.” Both men laughed, and headed into town to see what kind of damage they could do to the fleshpots there.

Reggie Bartlett trudged wearily into Wilson Town, Sequoyah. Seeing houses around him felt strange after so long on the prairie with no human-made artifacts close by but the occasional oil well…and the trenches, and the shells, and the other appurtenances of war.

Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll called, “We got to hold this town, boys. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of Sequoyah left to us, and we have to hang on to what there is, not let the damnyankees run us out of the whole state. Remember, the Germans don’t hold all of Belgium even now.”

“I ain’t seen any Germans in Sequoyah,” Nap Dibble said. Sweat cut ravines through the dust caking his face. “You see any o’ them damn Huns, Reggie? Yankees is bad enough, but them folks-”

“Haven’t seen any Germans, Nap,” Bartlett answered. He’d long since figured out Nap, while a good fellow, wasn’t what anybody would call sharp. When Dibble lined up in front of the paymaster, he signed his name with an X. No wonder he’d be on the lookout for Germans smack in the middle of Sequoyah.

“We have to save this town,” Lieutenant Nicoll repeated. A shell crashed down a few hundred yards off to the left, arguing that the Confederate soldiers didn’t have to do any such thing.

Bartlett would have been more impressed with the speech if the lieutenant hadn’t said the same thing about Duncan, which had fallen several weeks before. He’d heard the same kind of speech on the Roanoke front, too.