accent. He had rejoiced in serving booze to thirsty seamen since the bleakest days of Prohibition. Buck owned the joint and liked it when all the ships were docked. But Buck already had the bad news, courtesy of a British warrant officer.
'English sailors'll be pullin' out next week,' Buck confided to the old man. 'Don't tell no one I told you. All shore leave's canceled August 27.'
'The English like it here,' Elmer said, his gray brows narrowing with a mischievous glint. 'They like our women. They ain't going nowhere.'
'There's a friggin' war gonna start, old man,' Buck said. 'These English boys'll be fightin' it.'
'Already fought a war,' the old man recalled. 'Won it, too.'
'There's gonna be another. In Europe, anyway.' Buck blew his breath into a glass and polished the glass with his apron. He cast a jaundiced eye upon Elmer. 'Lucky you're old,'
Buck said to him. 'You ain't going to fight.'
'Lucky you're middle-aged,' Elmer shot back at him with considerable irritation. 'I was in the last one.'
Buck took a long look at Elmer's lined, sickly face. A new enlightenment came over the bartender, 'Hey. Sorry, old-timer,' he said with sudden affection. 'Let me draw one for you. On the house.'
'Don't mind,' the old man said, watching Buck place a beer mug beneath Elmer's favorite spigot. 'Don't mind at all if I do.' Elmer accepted the drink and turned with new enthusiasm toward the English sailors behind him. 'Not a man in the house can beat this old man at darts!' he proclaimed boisterously.
'Penny a point, Elmer,' said an English sailor who, like the others, never bothered to collect after trouncing the aging American. 'Think you can afford to lose again?' More often than not, the Englishmen bought Elmer a meal instead.
'Never lost yet to you young saps!' Elmer said gruffly, snatching some darts from a table.
'What about yesterday?' a sailor asked him.
'Don't remember yesterday,' Elmer said. 'Here! Show you how it's done.' Elmer's first shot hit the black border on the edge of the target. 'That's practice,' he said. 'Just warmup.'
'Go get 'em now, Elmer,' someone said.
The old man's point total lagged considerably behind his opponents'. Meanwhile, Elmer caught snippets of conversation from the English sailors. The place to visit in New Jersey, they said, was Atlantic City, though the older crewmen remembered it as being much grander before the Depression. And two sailors had almost been severely injured or even killed when the gears slid on the derrick loading the crated motorcycles and sidecars from General Motors onto the Adriana. Those big crates weighed a ton and a half, complained one sailor, and one of them had tumbled fifty feet across the Two Deck.
The brothels were better in New York than in Philadelphia, the enlisted men reached consensus, but with the latest shipment of cargo, there was no time for extended leave. The Adriana was even being loaded on weekends, as fast as the coffin-sized crates could arrive. Desmond, Baldwin, and Condon had sprained their backs loading those boxes, someone else complained. Why did Smith amp; Wesson have to pack fifty machine guns to a crate, anyway?
Elmer threw another dart. It hit the metal rim of the target and ricocheted away. Billy Pritchard, sitting sullenly toward the end of the bar, nearly caught it in the butt. The Englishmen laughed merrily.
Elmer hung around with them a little longer, then repaired to Billy's side when the Brits wanted a more competitive game. Elmer and Billy were about the same size and saw things eye to eye. Billy was slumped over a drink.
'What’s the matter, Billy boy?' Elmer asked.
'Dunno,' said the young man. 'Thinking about home too much, I guess.'
'Why don't you telephone home? Talk to Mom and Pop?”
Pritchard looked at Elmer as if the latter were crazy. 'Long distance?'
'Yeah.'
'Who's got the money for that?' the ensign asked with irritation.
'I'll treat you. I got a secret telephone. Not tonight. But I'll show you sometime.'
Pritchard looked at Elmer in the dim light of Reilly's. 'Yeah,' he said after several seconds. 'A secret telephone. Sure.' He glanced at his watch. 'Hey, I got to get back to base,' Billy said next.
Then he stood, paid, and lurched toward the door. Elmer watched him go.
Elmer assumed Billy's place at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka with a chaser. Through the mirror behind Buck, Elmer watched the dart game in progress. He tuned in the conversation.
'Try not to hit me in the ass, mates,' Elmer said, exaggerating an English accent.
'Who'd you think I am? Hitler?'
'You look more like Uncle Joe Stalin to me,' someone answered with a Midlands twang.
'Them's fighting words!' Elmer exploded, leaping upward from his barstool, his fists raised like a pair of gnarled. potatoes. Two sailors quickly interceded before Elmer split up with laughter. Then the rest of the sailors realized that Elmer's rage had only been a lonely old man's sense of fun.
Someone else paid for his drink and Elmer watched the young men play darts. He fell appreciatively silent for the rest of the evening.
What a funny bunch of people these Brits were, Elmer was thinking. Motorcycles and sidecars from Detroit. Machine guns from Illinois packed fifty to a crate. The English were bolstering their ground defenses for a possible invasion from Europe. And Roosevelt, in defiance of every tenet of the Neutrality Act of 1937, was sneaking weapons to them.
*
Two nights later, Elmer told Billy Pritchard more about the secret telephone. It was a public booth located a short walk from Reilly's, up a hill toward the old truck route beyond Red Bank's downtown. The telephone did not work right and you could call anywhere in American for a pocketful of aluminum slugs. The telephone was near an all-night diner, Elmer said, which had failed when the new truck route was built east of the town.
'I don't believe it,' Billy Pritchard answered, disconsolate and half drunk. 'It's bull.'
'I'll show you.'
Ensign Pritchard studied the old man, wanting to believe. 'Ah, go on…' he scoffed a second time.
'All right,' grumbled Elmer. 'If you don't want to talk to your folks, it's no skin off my ass.'
'Okay. Show me the booth,' Billy Pritchard said.
They left together and no one missed them.
The old man guided Billy up a steep incline several blocks from Reilly's. The incline followed a back street upon which the lighting was poor. There was no traffic and Elmer was always a step or two ahead. But sure enough, at the crest of the hill there was a telephone booth, standing like a lonely sentry at the edge of a dark parking lot. The diner that Elmer had mentioned was no more than a burned-out skeleton of an enterprise that served its last lukewarm hash before the stock market crash.
Billy Pritchard looked around. They were easily a mile from the old truck route and only a few yards from the wooded end of a public park. The place, Pritchard now noticed, was eerie.
'I still think you're full of crap, old man,' Billy Pritchard said hotly. 'What are you up to?'
'Do you see a telephone or not?'
'I see a telephone,' he admitted. 'Does it work?'
'Try it, you young jerk!'
The old man seemed not quite as bent over as he had seemed earlier, and although Pritchard was breathing hard from the climb, Elmer wasn't. Pritchard stared him eye-to-eye and suddenly came away with a queer sensation. Elmer's blue eyes were glaring now and filled with some intense emotion. The youth couldn't recognize it. Anger? Impatience? He did not know. He only knew that the glare put him off-scared him, almost-and Elmer's hand was in his coat pocket jangling something. Slugs, Pritchard assumed.
'Go ahead! Try it!' Elmer ordered.
The young officer turned, still trying to decipher the look in Elmer's eyes. Then, just as he faced the telephone, Pritchard realized what he had seen.
The eyes were not the glazed eyes of an older man. In the natural light, Pritchard had seen what the dimness of the bar had always hidden. Elmer's eyes were the piercing, intense eyes of a younger man. Much younger. The realization stabbed Pritchard like a stiletto. Pritchard began to turn, but suddenly the cold rough grasp of a bicycle
