Drive to the East

Hotel Street in Honolulu was a raucous, drunken place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sailors who had liberty got drunk and got laid, caring about nothing but the moment. George Enos, Jr., knew exactly how they felt. He should have-he was one of them.

He’d drunk enough to make the sidewalk seem to sway and twist under his feet like the Townsend’s deck in a heavy sea. But the pavement wasn’t listing-he was.

“Where do we go now?” he asked Fremont Dalby. He’d pretty much given up thinking on his own. If the gun chief could manage it, George would follow along.

Dalby made a production out of pondering. He’d taken plenty of antifreeze on board, too. “Well, do we want to drink some more, or do we want to screw?” he asked.

George frowned. He didn’t want to decide anything. He wasn’t sure he could decide anything. Fritz Gustafson settled things by walking through the next open door they passed.

If it had been a brothel, they would have done their best there. But it was another gin mill. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and vomit. A record player was cranking out Hawaiian music much too loud. George’s head started to ache, and he wasn’t even hung over yet. That would come tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning might as well be ten years away.

He and his buddies from the Townsend elbowed their way up to the bar. A couple of the men they muscled by gave them sour stares, but nobody threw a punch. “What’ll you have, gents?” the barkeep asked.

“Whiskey,” Fremont Dalby said. George nodded. So did Fritz Gustafson. The man behind the bar poured the booze into three glasses, added ice, and waited till he saw money before sliding the drinks across the bar. Dalby gulped his. So did Gustafson. George went a little slower. By himself, he would have stuck with beer. He liked it better. But when he was out with friends, whiskey got him drunk faster. On a forty-eight-hour liberty, speed mattered.

He wasn’t sorry this had turned out to be a bar, not a cathouse. He always felt bad about being unfaithful to Co

“Drink up, George,” Dalby said. “The night is young, and you are-hell, I ain’t drunk enough to think you’re beautiful.”

George laughed. He knocked back his drink, then coughed two or three times. The rotgut in the glass was smooth as sandpaper. Gustafson pounded him on the back. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

“Sure,” the loader said. Even pretty well lit up, he spent words as if he paid for them out of his own pocket.

“Another round,” Dalby told the the bartender.

“Coming up.” The man’s gray hair said he’d been around a while. So did his faint British accent. The Sandwich Islands had belonged to the limeys before the USA took them away in 1914. A lot of the old-timers had been here since the Union Jack flew alongside the flag of the Sandwich Islands, which joined it to the Stars and Stripes in what had been the old Kingdom of Hawaii’s doomed effort to keep everybody happy.

George would have loved to spend the rest of his life in the Sandwich Islands. He didn’t suppose many people who came here didn’t want to stay. After the winter he’d just been through, he would never look at January in Boston the same way again. He wouldn’t look at the North Atlantic in January the same way again, either. Oh, they had swells here. But nothing he’d seen came within miles of the Nantucket sleighride. And you’d never have to worry about working on deck in the middle of an ice storm.

Again, Dalby and Gustafson poured down their drinks in nothing flat. Again, they waited not too patiently for him to finish his. He was about to go bottoms up when a brawl broke out behind him.

He never knew what started it. An argument over a barmaid? Two sailors from the same ship who didn’t like each other? Sailors from two ships that didn’t like each other? The roll of the dice at a corner table?

Whatever got it going, it was everywhere fifteen seconds later. Nobody tried to stop it; everyone just joined in. If that didn’t prove there were a lot of drunks in the place, nothing ever would have.

Somebody swung at George: a big, burly machinist’s mate. The haymaker would have knocked him into the middle of next week had it landed, but it missed by at least a foot. George threw what was left of his drink in the other sailor’s face. The man roared and rubbed frantically at his eyes. George hit him in the belly. He folded up with an explosive, “Oof!”

Oh, shit! The bartender was probably yelling it, but George had to read his lips to understand it. Everybody in the joint was shouting at the top of his lungs. The noise of things breaking didn’t help.

Somebody took a swing at Fremont Dalby. The gun chief ducked so the punch caught him on top of the head. That hurt the puncher much more than it hurt Dalby. One of the things you learned in a hurry was not to punch bony places. By the way the sailor clutched his wounded hand, he’d probably broken a knuckle or two. A heartbeat later, he had other things to worry about. Dalby, a barroom veteran, didn’t waste time fighting fair. He kneed the sailor in the crotch. The man howled like a wolf.

George stopped a punch with his forehead. He saw stars. It probably hurt the other guy worse than it hurt him, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Plenty of sailors got into fights for the fun of it. George didn’t understand that. Watching a fight was fun. Getting punched and kicked and elbowed? That wasn’t what he called a good time.

He hit the other guy in the ribs. He’d aimed for the sailor’s solar plexus. If he’d hit it, that would have taken the SOB out of the brawl till his motor started working again.

But a shot to the ribs just pissed the sailor off. He gave George a punch identical to the one he’d just taken. George grunted and swore. That would leave a bruise, and he’d probably be sore whenever he breathed for the next week.

Nobody in a barroom brawl played much defense. George slugged the guy in front of him again. Then Fritz Gustafson hauled off and belted the sailor in the chops. The man went down like a felled tree. With a small smile, Gustafson displayed a set of brass knucks. He would have made a hell of a Boy Scout. He was prepared for anything.

Halfway down the bar, somebody who didn’t have brass knuckles improvised. He picked up a long-legged stool and swung it like a flail, felling whoever he could reach. Maybe the rising and falling screech that burst from him was intended for a Rebel yell. Maybe it just meant he was enjoying himself.

Whatever it meant, the screech abruptly cut off. Someone coldcocked the stool swinger from behind with a beer bottle. The bar stool crashed to the floor. So did the sailor, bleeding from a scalp wound.

A fighting knife gleamed in the hand of a Marine in a forest-green uniform. George didn’t see the leatherneck stick anybody. All the same, he decided he was up way past his bedtime.

Getting out of a brawl without getting a name for ru

Then somebody yelled, “Shore patrol!” That sent everybody surging toward the door. George hoped the bartender had shouted out the warning to get the sailors to quit tearing his place to pieces. No such luck. The Navy equivalent of MPs waded into the fray, nightsticks swinging.

George counted himself lucky-he didn’t get hit in the head. He did get hit in the ribs, which made the punch he’d taken there seem a love pat by comparison. Fremont Dalby got a bloody stripe over one eye. Fritz Gustafson knocked a shore patrolman ass over teakettle with his knuckleduster. That could have won him a pounding to end all poundings, but none of the shore patrolman’s pals saw him do it. Some people had all the luck.