IN HIS BOOK, SEX WITHOUT GUILT, DR. ALBERT ELLIS WRITES: "MANY INDIVIDUALS, especially females in our culture, who say that they only enjoy sex when it is accompanied by affection are actually being unthinkingly conformist and unconsciously hypocritical. If they were able to contemplate themselves objectively, and had the courage of their inner convictions, they would find sex without love eminently gratifying ... And why should they not?" When the plane went down close to the lonely island, the women aboard didn't know their greatest adventure was upon them. Two men survived, one a massive brute who needed all the women to satisfy his lust, and the other a weak drunk who couldn't so much as help himself. But each day was to change their shameless society.
CHAPTER I
I SAT WEAKLY, HELPLESSLY, and watched the half-naked man in the edge of the water. I felt with him the sand that grated between his cheek and something harder; I felt the sun burn his other cheek, felt the skin tightening as the salt dried.
I wanted to go to him, to help him from the sullen, cheated waves, but I couldn't. My legs refused to move; my neck was too weak for my head. All I could do was lie there in a dress ripped open from the crash. And watch.
And be thankful I wasn't alone.
He pushed up a knee, dragged his foot out of water. He tried to laugh, but choked and had to lift his head to vomit. Retching, he blobbed the beach with greenness. Swaying, he sat slumped, forcing his fingers to uncurl themselves from the handle of the flight bag he'd somehow managed to drag ashore.
Then he did manage a laugh, a tired and unfunny sound that said he and the bag were safe with the angered surf cursing behind them. The man shouldn't have made it alone, much less dragging the heavy flight bag. He looked weak and drawn, without strength. I didn't remember him.
Mutely, wave-beaten and sand-hammered, I lay quiet, staring at this other survivor as he fumbled with the catch of the bag. Wet cloth tongued through a rip in one side, and the material was smeared with oil. The stuff made his hands slippery and he had trouble with the lock.
He started to cry, and my heart turned over. What kind of man was this; which of us would lean upon the other in the stark fight for survival we would both have to face? But I remembered I had cried, too. A man is also entitled to tears.
He felt into the rip. The bottle came out, but his fingers were shaking so he couldn't open the seal. He forced the cap between his teeth and chewed at it, spitting out celluloid, twisting with both oily hands. The cap came off and he let it fall into the sand. The first drink was a long one. I heard the bottle neck rattle against his teeth.
Eyes closed as if in prayer, he waited for strength to come. He pulled at the bottle again, and once more, until he was able to worry the bag up to the edge of the trees. He collapsed across the wet oblong, sighing, his sea-matted head in the shade.
Shade. I had to find it, too. I had to force my scuffed knees to take my swaying weight, to crawl like a wounded crab up the burning sands to the welcome coolness out of the blazing sun. In the shade, I sank down again, bone-tired, soul-tired, wondering vaguely why I had taken the trouble.
It came to me then, sharp and clear. The plane. It had been crammed with military dependents, Department of the Army employees, a few soldiers and one or two genuine civilians.
The plane had been at Tokyo International Airport, and I had almost missed it. The hours aboard-how many? I didn't know, for time had long ago become a blur; my world had become populated with vague shadow people.
Somewhere, there had been noise-a mighty, paralyzing blow of sound wrapped in brightness that struck against closed eyelids and hurt.
I remembered the moment of silence, the fragment of utter quiet from which all the air had been sucked. My window wasn't there and the air whooshed in just as the screaming began. Wild, frenetic motion was an eggbeater that mixed sight and sound with people and objects.
Instinct made me claw my way out of the glass-toothed frame; blind instinct pushed me away from the rupturing metal and into the roiling sea. I didn't want to live, and I wallowed coughing and flailing through the waves until they spat me upon the beach.
My cheek was against the earth now, and I stared out at the water, at the oilslicks and bits of wreckage lurching with the waves. The plane had missed land by some fifty yards. Any closer, and the man and I would never have battled our way to shore; any nearer, and we would have been flattened messily with the impact.
Far out where sea and sky met, the cloud hovered-tall, tall with a fat parasol top. So it has started, I thought. Someone, somewhere, pushed a button, and now the beginning of it and the end will be close together.
Somebody had chosen a target in this part of the world-Guam, Wake, Midway? By now, Tokyo and Manila were probably gone, along with Seoul and Taipeh in a chain of rampaging destruction spring-boarding from Manchuria to Hawaii and beyond.
"Well," the husky, scratched voice said, "here's to anybody that's left."
I searched for my own voice and slowly found it. "To us, at least."
His thin face turned my way, seeking. Then he crawled down to where I lay and propped my head in his lap to trickle a few drops of the whiskey between my lips.
"Take it easy," he said, "you're okay now. I'm Danny Mixon."
I knew the warm bite of the liquor in my stomach, and firmed the slackness of my mouth. "The rest?" I asked.
Danny Mixon shrugged. "You're the first I've seen." Tilting the bottle to his lips again, he said, "To us, then."
I stared at him. The man was drunk, had been drunk for a long time. Now I remembered him, recalled glimpses of his pale thin face as he had weaved through the aisle of the plane on many trips to the washroom-where he could drink in peace.
"I'll look around," he said, and lowered my head to the ground. I watched him move stiffly along the beach, saw him stooping over huddled bundles that were strewn casually in the sand. He turned a man over, and even from where I lay, I could see the man was dead. He only had part of a head.
I was stronger now, and guilty because I was doing nothing, so I pulled myself up and went clumsily down to help Danny pull the living from the water. We stopped when the waves were the only things moving. The survivors crouched or lay limply around Danny's flight bag. He gave them his bottle and watched it pass from hand to hand. A dozen people had come through the crash.
Eleven women and Danny Mixon.
I sat close to him, arms folded across my breasts, waiting for him to say something, do something. Danny took a deep breath and I felt he didn't want to take over, that decisions were things Danny left to other people.
A few of us were hurt. One girl had a broken arm, already being splinted by an efficient woman in her fifties. There were bruises and scratches on the rest of us, but nothing serious. I was glad. I didn't like to watch people die.
"Well," Danny said to the waiting faces, "I guess we'd better rest awhile. Later, we can put some sort of camp together."
The older woman nodded. "A good idea."
Nobody else spoke; we stretched out in wet closeness, and let the shock come as it would, let our keyed-up emotions subside into something like sleep. I awoke still tired and aching, and saw Danny with a bottle to his mouth. The other women were watching when he lowered it.
"All right," he said angrily, "I need two volunteers."
Some of the women lifted their hands, and memories tugged at me. Danny knew the words, and I could imagine he had said them many times before-in a sharp, clear voice that would have gone with the chevrons on his sleeve. But now the voice was blurred and uncertain, and the stripes were gone.
"We need fresh water," he said. You two look for some. Mark your way so you won't get lost, and watch where you put your feet. We don't know what's on this island."
One of the women whined: "We don't even know if it's an island."
"It has to be," Danny said. "There's nothing else out here. Now look for that water."
I recognized the old buddy system of the army, two on patrol, two in a foxhole, so that each is ashamed to show fear. Would the method work as well with women?
Danny moistened cracked lips with a fuzzy tongue, and pointed out the older woman: "Take a couple of girls with you and comb the beach. Bring back anything we might use."
I stood up and brushed myself off, wondering where I'd lost my shoes, wondering how I'd ever patch together the rips in my wrinkled, shrunken dress, and laughing silently and cynically at myself for thinking of such trivia.
The others clustered around Danny as he squatted to draw lines in the sand, lines that showed them how to build a lean-to, other sketches that demonstrated how to bind the poles with strips of cloth torn from the clothing in his flight bag.
"Food next," he said, touching me on the shoulder. "We'll try up the beach for shellfish."
The man was a drunk, but all of the other things he had been weren't completely soaked away. I knew the signs, knew he had listened to countless survival lectures, that he'd lived off the land in strange countries. I felt better. If this island had anything edible for us, this ex-soldier could find it.
"I'm Mrs. Julie Curtis," I said as we walked together away from the others
"Danny Mixon," he repeated, "civilian."
"You weren't always."
"No. You Army?"
"I was. My husband-died."
"Recently? It's still hard for you to say."
I held my face down. "Yes."
He squatted, pointing. "Here-this ridge says there's a clam under it."
We dug with our fingers, searching, tugging the shells out to heap them in little piles. I thought of what it was going to be like, of how rough the "simple life" is, when translated into terms of scratching for our existence.
Cigarette lighters and matches would function when they dried out, and there was plenty of fuel around. There must be birds and perhaps small animals on this atoll. With fruits and berries, we could hold out until help came.
I stopped digging. Help? Who would miss one stray plane in the atomic holocaust raging across the world now. Who would even know, or care?
Danny was watching me. "You've thought of it."
"Yes; I guess we've had it."
"We'd better keep it quiet-about no rescue, I mean. Some of the others might get hysterical. I don't think you will."
I said it calmly: "No; it doesn't matter."
He looked at me closely and I knew what he saw-a woman in her mid-thirties with a streak of gray in her brown hair. My body was goodfull and firm and snuggled by the torn blouse and wrinkled skirt. In the past, in the long, dead years ago, I had been told my body was that of a temptress, seductive and alluring. But that didn't matter now, either.
My mouth is too wide for my face, and had smile lines worn into its corners, but I hadn't smiled for a long time. My nose was straight, and I thought he must see the ache lying close to the surface of my dark blue eyes.
"You don't care?" he asked.
Only my lips were mobile in the stillness of my face, curling. "I don't, except."
"Except for what?"
I motioned at the twisted trees, the coral, the sea. "Except-I don't want to be buried in strangeness. It's difficult to explain."
He nodded. "I know; it's a soldier thing-alien dirt, earth you don't know, the differentness. You hate to die on it and have it piled on you. You must have been Army a long time, Julie. That idea is something civilians don't know."
"Yes," I said.
He took off his tattered undershirt and spread it out. We began to fill it with clams. It was nearly full, and we were lifting it between us when a man's voice said: "Hey!"
They came around a jutting point of coral, a man and a woman. The man moved easily, bulking big with a power that made itself felt even from a distance. The woman behind him was Japanese, small and frightened.
Danny put out his hand when they came close. "Glad to see you."
The man looked at Danny's hand, but made no move to take it. "How many more made it?"
Danny dropped his hand, and the man's stare moved up to his bare chest and fixed there. I couldn't see his eyes; I only sensed the darkness beneath the black, scarred brows. I shivered, and tried to pull my torn blouse together.
I saw Danny's right foot slide back in instinctive reflex, and spoke quickly: "Twelve, including us. You two make fourteen."
Knobbed cheekbones showed as the man's head swung to me. A too-red tongue licked at heavy lips as his opaque eyes flickered over me, touching my breasts, stomach, legs.
"How many men?"
I moved closer to Danny. The man's eyes followed me, unwinking under a furry skullcap of cropped hair. "Just me," Danny said.
The man laughed, a choppy burst of sound. "And me."
His eyes measured Danny, guessed his weight, knew the weakness of his thin arms, the softness of his belly. He laughed again.
"I'm Kane Zell-sergeant. I don't guess that matters a hell of a lot now. This moose was sittin' with them others up front. Figured it was just her and me left--but I like the idea of other women; a lot of other women.
His hard eyes ran over me again, then he abruptly pushed past Danny and me, with the Japanese girl following silently.
I watched Zell move up the beach and caught the glint of sunlight on the naked bayonet thrust through his belt.
I put my hand into Danny's and he clung to it. The flutter inside me was the same feeling you get when you've been too close to something wild and deadly.
We picked up the clams and followed the tracks. Danny clung to my cold hand and I wondered which of us was more afraid.
The camp was taking shape, and I was working beside a girl named Ella Martin. Her quick fingers tugged at a wet shirt, took another grip and tugged again until the material parted at the seam and ripped across. She gave a strip of cloth to me and I clumsily lashed one end of a long, dry limb to a small tree.
Ella's slightly too-full lips twisted. "It's ironic," she said, "that I should be helping to build a house, at last. When I was very small, I used to daydream my own house, planning each room in detail, helped by treasured cutouts from the color catalogs. In my dreams, I always helped with the building, because I had to be certain everything was exactly right."
I stepped back and down, dug my bare toes into the sand. "And what happened?"
Her heavy lashes came down. "It fizzled out, as dreams do. But it was a fine, great house while it lasted. Now its outlines are fuzzy, pushed out of shape by the years. At least-it didn't look like this one."
"No house ever did," I said, "but I suppose it will hold out water and wind-maybe."
Ella's fingers tore another strip of cloth. "You won't mind sharing this lean-to with me."
"No," I said. "Should I?"
"All of you are shaken by the crash now," she said slowly, "so maybe it doesn't matter yet. But it will, later. It always does."
"The people who feel that way aren't worth counting," I said.
She smiled, slow and bitter. "Everybody counts here."
We worked silently for awhile, lashing branches into place, weaving dry palm leaves through the roof sticks in overlapping layers. Then Ella said: "I have to talk. When I get frightened, I always have to talk. If you don't want to, you don't have to listen."
"I'll listen," I said. "We're not going anywhere."
Hesitantly at first, then with her rich voice growing quicker and stronger, Ella told me about her stay in Japan. From the beginning, she had felt a kinship to the Japanese, a oneness of pigmentation that should have drawn her closer to the natives, on the other side of the invisible barrier between themselves and the other Americans.
But Ella had found the wall to be strongly braced from the other side, too. The Japanese accepted no foreigners, no matter what their skin shade. They had bowed and smiled and talked ever so politely, but she had always been conscious of an uncrossable gap.
"Once," she went on, "I thought it might be different, but the man was only interested in me because I was-an oddity. He would have liked to display me better, if my skin was much darker, so there could be no mistake."
She paused, and I said: "I'm ready for another one."
Ella passed me more palm leaves, dark, sloe eyes evaluating me. "You don't know what it's like, being put on display."
"No, I don't."
Her rich mouth turned even more bitter. "I know you, Mrs. Curtis. I know a hundred like you, a thousand-married, loved, taken care of. You all accept it casually, as if being loved was something you had coming."
I didn't answer. I kept my hands busy and my face turned away as Ella talked it out.
"You know what love is to me?" she asked. "I'll tell you-it's a stomach-churning, hateful thing, all dark and hurting and ugly. Love is a brutal, sweaty lie with grinning gold teeth and the stink of cheap gin. Love is a gray sheet on a thin mattress where nobody can hear you scream."
I felt her try to push the man back into memory, back through the years to the dirty shack she described to me, the shack smelling of collard greens and often used grease. But the man came forward, refusing to be shut out of Ella's now.
I saw the scene with her, the moon that came through a curtain-less window and put a big, round pearl on her flour sack nightgown. The pearl was just like the ones those funny women in the book wore in their navels.
Ella had wriggled under it, moving her hips down on the torn sheet until the spot of moonlight sat square on her navel. She giggled, wondering if the women ever changed, like you did clothes, maybe putting a diamond into their navels on Monday, a ruby on Tuesday. The pearl would be best for Saturday nights.
But the pearl was not for North Little Rock Saturday nights, not for staggering feet in heavy work shoes, not to go with pints of Bluebird gin and tinny music of the jukebox. No, that kind of pearl was for a beautiful princess who would dance to soft music in a storybook palace, and fourteen-year-old Ella Martin had postured and posed on the sagging bed, pretending, humming the soft music, dancing lying down.
The creaking of worn floorboards came in, and the girl tried to pull a tattered quilt over herself, staring up at the dark shape looming in the dark.
His name was Big Monty, and he said: "Mighty pretty. Don't hide, girl-you got too much to hide."
"Get out. Get outa' here. I'll holler; I swear I'll holler."
The bed creaked when he eased down on it, and she scrunched up to the wall away from him. "Holler ahead. Won't nobody hear you."
"Mama will."
"Your mama's drunk, passed out in the kitchen."
"Big Monty, get away-please get away. You mama's man."
He laughed, his hand coming out toward her. The wall was hard against her back. "I every woman's man."
Ella had only screamed once-wordless and high and hating. Then she fought silently, hopelessly, as the rats did under the house when the cur dog got them. She bit into his chest, tasting blue work shirt, tasting man sweat, and he stopped laughing.
Light whiter than moonlight, redder than moonlight, burst inside her head and she fell back as he tore at her nightgown. It hurt; mean and dirty, it hurt where she couldn't rub it, and Ella cried into his wet mouth, against his slick gold teeth.
The tears were all gone, after. All gone forever, all dried out, cried out, and she could never feel them again.
"You pretty good," Big Monty grunted, sopping up the sweat from his chest with her wadded up nightgown. "You gonna' be a heap better when you know more. I teach you some more."
Long after he had gone back into the other room, Ella felt his fingers. The mark of them ached. She wiped at her mouth, trying to wipe away the taste of him, rub away the pigpen dirt he had put there.
She was still rubbing when she stood outside Miss Willa Hoffer's fence, waiting for it to get light, for the house to wake up and stir around so she could knock and beg Miss Willa to please ma'am' let her stay and work.
And Miss Willa did, being a schoolteacher and social worker, too. Three years of Miss Willa was a long time, because she was so good-hearted she never let anybody forget it; she told them about it all the time.
She was quiet after she told me of Miss Willa, quiet and still, with big, dark eyes staring achingly into the past. I said: "Ella, I'm sorry."
She came back to the present, to now and an island and the harsh facts of survival. "I'm not sorry," she murmured. "It took a thing like that to teach me."
"Love isn't like that," I said. "It's good and sweet and filling."
She looked at me and didn't say anything else until she glanced over at Danny Mixon. "That man looks sick to me."
"Danny?"
"If that's his name. He'd almost be nice-looking, if he wasn't so sickly. Did you ever see such dark circles around anyone's eyes before? And skinny. His bones are big enough, but there's no meat on them. How old you say he was?"
I hadn't thought about that. "Oh-thirty-four, thirty-five, maybe."
Ella stood and rubbed the small of her back. "There. One more stick that way, and we can start fixing them across the other way, as he said. Thirty-five? No, I'd say years more. But that might be because he's sort of-used up, as if he'd been a long way, and done a lot of thing-mostly bad."
"You may be right," I said. "I know he's lonely and afraid."
"The other, one isn't afraid of the devil himself," Ella said. "But I won't have to worry about either of them. Not with so many women of their own race here."
I frowned. "Ella-I think you're carrying a cross mostly fashioned by yourself."
Her mouth twitched. "You think so? What's my race, Mrs. Curtis? Superior white because some unknown, long-forgotten Caucasian with two dollars in his hand called on my mother? No-I'm not white; one drop doesn't make a river. Not even fifty percent white can turn muddy water into crystal.
"There are plenty of names for me-mulatto, quarter-blood, octoroon, cafe au lait, high yellow. It all boils down to nigger. And what about the black blood? Does its generation-diminishing strain hold me, make me eternally a part of it? The hell it does. The niggers scorn the lighter color of my skin; they don't want me; they sneer at me for being a line-crosser.
"I heard a preacher rant about that once. He said I was one of the uppity colored people who want to cross the line and pass as white. That I thought I was better, because I was lighter. But I wasn't, he raved. Because I wasn't nothin' but a nothin', he screamed-not a horse and not a jackass. A horse and a jackass get together to make a mule, but a mule can't reproduce. I was a mule, he said-nothin' but a nothin'. "
"Ella-" I said.
"He was right," she said. "He was an old, dirty, inflamed man, but he was right. My kind are nothings, of no race, accepted by none. I've had to carry my roots inside me, Mrs. Curtis, and since I can't put them down anywhere, they stay tender and touchy. So don't talk to me about love-any kind of love. I don't believe in it."
I was suddenly conscious of a stopping motion around me, a taut stillness, a waiting. I looked up at Ella again, then turned to follow her stare.
"Well, ain't this nice," Kane Zell said. "Everybody helpin' out, everybody workin' hard."
Ella's hand went to her mouth and rubbed across her full lips, scrubbed hard at them. A small girl drifted from behind the man bulking wide and fearsome at the edge of the campsite, and fled with joyous chatterings to the other Japanese girls.
I moved slowly to Ella's side; we stood together, facing the powerful man who gave off an aura of something feral.
Ella whispered it in my ear: "That one-he could be Big Monty himself, if he wasn't white. But that one is worse, Julie; that one is all black-inside."
CHAPTER 2
Realizing I was holding tightly to Ella's arm, I released it-after Kane Zell had smirked at us and swaggered away. For some reason, I looked around the clearing for Danny Mixon, and caught a glimpse of his back, disappearing into the trees.
I thought he must have been a larger man once, stronger. His bone structure was solid, his shoulders wide-wider than Jim's had been. Jim; I was vaguely surprised to find I could think about him now. His image brought only a nagging ache, not the frenzied pain it had been two months ago.
Had it been only that short a time? It was still difficult to believe, and when it happened, it had been totally impossible to accept.
Numbed, I hadn't been even able to see to the "arrangements." The chaplain had been wonderfully understanding, handling all the things that needed to be done. I remembered him as a quietly efficient man, appearing now and then in the gray vacuum I found myself living inside. If only he hadn't repeated that inane statement so many times, if only he hadn't said that Jim died as much a soldier as if he had fallen on the field of battle. Those were the chaplains words, "field of battle."
And it was a lie, because Jim died in a stupid, unnecessary maneuver accident, not in combat. Jim had been an athlete, a natural for Special Services officer, a bug on training Army fighters. Jim died senselessly, out of his element, because the Army must play at war in peacetime, to justify its existence.
I could faintly remember some of the things that happened after the chaplain brought the news, the signing of papers that meant the body of Captain James G. Curtis would be sent home; the thin, strained face of young Jim, man enough to escort the coffin aboard ship, to sail with it from Yokohama. I hadn't been able to do it. The doctors and nurses couldn't make me do it.
The thing they had in that box aboard ship wasn't Jim Curtis. It was a statistic, the cost of a ticket to the war games. Jim had gone away and would never come back. And neither would young Jim Curtis, fifteen. I had planned that much, managed to think it out. The Curtis family would care for him, would see that he got the chance to wear the uniform he wanted so desperately to wear. I wouldn't be forced to see my son in uniform.
I couldn't understand a life without my husband. I was more wife than mother, no matter what the rest of society thought about it. To be a woman without love, without hope, was to be no woman at all, but only a dreadful caricature-not alive, not dead, an in-between creature without substance or future.
Perhaps it might have been different, if Jim and I hadn't been so suited to each other, so much in love. Maybe I could have picked up the fragments of my life and stuck them back together, rearranging myself for another man, somewhere, sometime. But Jim had been the only man in my life.
I felt at times that I was out of date, clinging to the outworn concepts of marriage and fidelity, while all around me, other wives tended the blossoms of bright, casual affairs, or tacitly exchanged husbands at all-night parties.
But I couldn't be casual about sex. For me, it was too deep, too intertwined with love and living together. And I wasn't one of those dutifully faithful, frustrated wives, either. Jim and I were almost honeymoon-frequent lovers, knowing sudden urges of passion, knowing swift desires, even after sixteen years of marriage. Our sex drives had been matched, strong, brazen, seldom falling into dull routine, often experimental, always thrilling. I needed no other man, wanted no other man, from the first frightening, fulfilling experiences of the wedding night. I was a virgin, and Jim was tender.
This is what the damned Army destroyed. Even my instinctive, hating plans afterward had been turned into a big, bitter joke. In the Tokyo hospital, with the off-key chants of street peddlers rising outside the walls, the thriving, life-going-on noises of the ant-hill city all around me, I had wanted to die.
In part, I had died-all the bright and feeling parts of me. The husk refused to die. The shell continued to suck at air and expel it, gurgling in its belly, seeping wetness through its pores, fighting to carry on a meaningless existence.
I planned to do it quietly, when the paper lanterns across the city canal winked out in lonely silence. I listened to the hoarse, tinny voice in the harbor warn fog blind ships away from rocks and thought of the best way to destroy the obstinate, stupid, sucking hulk I had become.
There were many times I could have done it, for all the rustling watchfulness of the night nurses, the probing beams of the ward boys' flashlights. But I didn't.
That alien land stopped me. Its chatter and smells and the odd, leering slyness of its people had taken enough from me. I couldn't bring myself to die in such strangeness, knowing that the wooden rhythm of the geta would chuckle on past the cold white room in which my body would lie. I could not die there, not while the doll women and the monkey men lived on, unknowing, uncaring.
So I decided to wait, not forever, but only until I would be able to die with dignity in a proper place. Now the bitter jest had topped itself with satanic humor. The plane crash offered me an easy way out, in clean green water with cool stillness in its depths. But my idiot body had struggled for life, for the chance to go on gurgling and breathing, and the body of Julie Curtis had won, but what had been the golden prize?
Only more strangeness, an island of it in a foreign sea, with an odd assortment of people I didn't want to know. The possible exceptions were the girl beside me, tortured by prejudice, and the weakly, needing alcoholic hiding somewhere in the trees with his bottles.
The other women were yet bland and blank faces, some Japanese, some not. But the other man-padding now around the camp, his furry head swinging from side to side like a stalking animal-that man was a very real threat. I watched him poke into the brush, saw him return, prodding Danny Mixon ahead of him.
Two women came from another way, shouting that they'd found water. They saw Zell and stopped.
"Water," Zell grunted. "That's good. After we get set, we'll move camp closer to it."
Danny moved listlessly over to his bag and squatted beside it, the bottle in his hands. There was an inch or so of whisky in it.
"How far is the water?" Zell asked.
A blonde woman answered him: "Just a little way-a spring and a stream."
Zell walked to Danny, stood balanced above him. "We need that bottle to get water."
Danny didn't look up. "In a minute."
Zell's voice was low, raspingly eager. "Now."
Danny lifted the bottle, gulped quickly and handed it to Zell. Grinning, the big man took it and said, "Okay, boy. Now build a fire, so the women can cook up those clams."
"Yes," Danny said.
I looked away from them, but when Danny came for the clams, I helped him carry them to the center of the clearing, helped him smooth a place for the fire.
"The bayonet," Danny said. "I can use it to split kindling."
Feet widespread, thumbs hooked into his belt, Zell laughed. "Use your hands. If you're too weak, the women will help you."
I touched Danny's arm. "Come on, let's get the wood. We can manage."
"Yeah," Zell said, "you can manage without my bayonet. While you were saving your bottle, I thought of the bayonet. Who's better off?"
Danny didn't answer, and anything else Zell intended to say was blocked by the entrance of the gray-haired woman and the girls with her, panting into camp with their loads of salvage. I led Danny away, and into the brush for firewood.
"Don't mind," I said, when we were away from the buzz of voices.
He shook his head. "I don't mind. It doesn't make any difference."
I was sorry I'd said anything. It should make a difference that one man was deliberately, senselessly humbled by another man. But evidently Danny's spirit was gone, burned away by liquor and a weakness in himself that no longer shamed him.
I looked at his face again, at the long nose slightly twisted at its bridge, the pale lashes, the ridged network of little white scars that ran through his eyebrows. His mouth was well-shaped, but with a hint of immature petulance in its downward curl. It, too, was scarred, thicker on one side, the upper lip permanently puffed.
"How old are you, Danny?" I asked, surprising us both.
His faded blue eyes peered at me. "A thousand years, at least. Somewhere in a book, it says thirty-eight, but that's not true. It can't be."
I reached out and touched his cheek. There was nothing man-to-woman personal in it. It was the instinctive motion I would make, to pat the drooping head of a lost, tired dog.
"I understand," I said softly.
He pulled away from my touch. "No," he said, almost talking to himself, "no. You're one of the good ones, one of the rare women, and you'll try to understand. But you can't; nobody can, because I don't myself-and I don't think I want to."
He was different from the man my husband had been, far, far different. Where Jim Curtis had been strong, this man was weak; where Jim had been mature and capable of swift, aggressive decisions, this man was childish and vacillating.
We said no more, but crouched searching through the brush for dry sticks. Opposites attract, they say, and certainly Danny Mixon was a direct opposite of the man I had before. But interested in him, as a man? No; I could be interested in no man that way.
I was sorry for Danny Mixon. I merely pitied him.
Ella and I were fairly fast, getting our hut constructed, but the lean-to being put together by the Japanese girls was rising far more swiftly. Their deft hands were completing their shelter drawn apart from all the others. And I could see it would be watertight, the palm leaves woven together in much the same manner as the brush fences and rice-straw roofs of farm houses in Japan. They knew what they were doing.
One girl was the leader, and from what I could remember of the language classes in Yokohama, she didn't make suggestions, but gave orders. The other girls followed her directions quickly, and without question. Japanese are swift to recognize differences in caste, and just as quick to accept their proper places in the traditional scheme of things, in the ancient, efficient system of a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.
Snatches of conversation, mixed English and Japanese, gave me bits of information about the girls. Marriages to foreign soldiers hadn't changed the feudal system for Sako Watanabe, now Smith, nor for Kyoko O'Hara, formerly Tanaka. The modern customs and publicized freedoms of the new Nippon fit them as loosely and uncomfortably as their new names, and were as easily forgotten.
They saw Michiki Kuwaye and knew her for a descendent of the samurai, the warrior caste, or for a daughter of a great land owner. The stamp was plain in the up-thrust chin and arrogant mouth, the straight proud walk with eyes lifted and steady, not downcast like those of daughters of rice farmers.
That bold stare was an easy thing to practice, in the tinseled bars, drinking and dancing with Americans. Sako and Kyoko knew how easily it could be acquired, as they had learned their patched-together English, and how to wear sweaters, skirts and high-heeled shoes.
But they couldn't use it among their own, for Japanese knew them for what they were, "business girls," simple prostitutes and not scorned for it, but sneered at for crossing the racial fence and standing with Nippon's conquerors.
In time, I was to learn the strain Michiki had come from-neither warlord nor landowner. Her family had come into some prominence through war manufacturing, but she finished Tokyo University with enemy boots upon the soil of Japan, and with the factory of her family only ashes from the night-raiding B-29s.
In the stunned vacuum of defeat, a smart girl could make her way, and Michiko was smart, too intelligent to go the path of the prostitutes. Her education and working knowledge of English made her valuable in import-export.
The way was difficult until the Korean war put Japan back upon its commercial feet. By then, Michiko was a traveling buyer and manager of the Yokohama branch, proving that the new Japan had a place for women in business.
And she had also been mistress, for little more than a year, to a charming, lying American lieutenant. The new Japan, the new freedom, the new love. But it had lasted only until the lieutenant was ordered back to his own country. He would not jeopardize his military career by taking Michiko with him as his wife.
She should have known better than to hope. She should have understood that, for some, the gulf between Caucasian and Oriental is deep and wide. Michiko understood, later, and the understanding hurt. In her knowledge, she turned bitter, even hating the girls who worked with her on the hut, the girls with the marks of the Yoshiwara district upon them, the many, many sweaty beddings plain in their swaying hips, their cheap Yankee clothing. A married prostitute was still a prostitute.
But Michiko took them under her wing. They were Japanese, and at least honest whores who didn't claim the cheating imitation of respectability that white women used-like the blonde woman and the ugly, powerful man across the clearing.
Later, Michiko told me how she had felt that first day on the island, how she had evaluated Kane Zell and the woman who had first made up to him, knowing that he would no more be satisfied with one woman than a rutting field bull would be happy with a single cow.
I was watching her, too. Her legs were long and just a shade thin, but smooth knees peeped through a rip in her skirt. She arched her breasts in coy invitation as she sidled up to Zell.
"Oh sergeant," she said. "Can you-I mean, will you-help me put up my shelter? I-it's difficult for me to get it right. I'm not used to labor like this."
Zell grunted and looked first at her legs, bringing his eyes up slowly to fasten on her breasts. She held still for his inspection, unflushing, wanting him to see all she had to offer. She kept her shoulders back so her breasts would stand higher, and let her mouth dampen.
"I'm Joy Santee," she murmured. "I was a DAC at Camp Zama."
She was about five-feet eight-inches tall, and possibly one hundred and thirty pounds. I knew her red-blonde hair would revert to its original color after we'd been here awhile. Her eyes were gray and stared directly into Zell's, saying what she wanted them to say-that she was a woman, that she wanted and needed a man.
My eyes narrowed. Whatever layers of civilization we had was being peeled away in a hurry. But perhaps it was better this way. I didn't like the way Zell looked at me. Maybe a willing woman would keep him away from me-for a while, anyhow. And Joy Santee was obviously after him, not only as a male, but as protection.
Back in Japan, she'd have been nudging hips with her boss, sacking out with some pot-bellied colonel, making sure of her next raise in pay, she would know all the tricks in bed; she'd use her body as bait. She was a prostitute, but she didn't think of herself that way.
"Sure," Zell said slowly. "I'll help you, baby. Guess I got to have a place to sleep tonight, too."
Joy smiled, knowing she had the edge on the rest of us, sure of herself now, of her position in this society. Zell was the boss, here, and Joy had learned long ago that only the boss counted.
"Why," she lisped, playing a familiar game, making her moves from experience, "why-I-I don't know. I mean-"
"Cut the crap," Zell snapped. "You ain't playin' pattycake with some old jerk in Zama now. I'll help you get a shelter up and you crawl in with me tonight, and you'll lay without any more crap."
I saw Joy's eyes widen. To her way of thinking, this man wasn't playing the game; he was making his own rules as he went. But he was still the boss.
"All right," she said.
The rest of us hadn't missed a movement of the little act. The Japanese girls accepted it without changing expressions, although I thought I saw a flicker of relief cross Michiko's ivory face. The pudgy Mrs. Faye Herman seemed a bit disappointed and stuck out her lips before she leaned over to whisper something to Ella. One woman, tall and with a mousetrap of a mouth, stood stiff with disgust for a moment, then turned swiftly and walked down toward the beach.
The gray-haired woman sighed and continued sorting bits of wreckage, placing bits of metal that could be made into tools on one pile, scraps of fabric which might possibly be useful onto another.
Zell's lips stretched into something like a smile. "Knock it off!" he ordered. "Knock it off and listen to me.
We waited, and something deep in the pit of my stomach turned cold.
Zell stood braced, with Joy Santee beside him, preening herself. "You all think this wench got the jump on you," he said. "She thinks she's gonna' be the queen bee around here. She'll find out different; all of you will find out. Joy stays only until I get tired of her, understand?"
Joy lifted the back of her hand to her mouth and pressed hard. She took it away to say: "Why-why, sergeant-"
"Shut up!" Zell ordered. "I ain't through talkin'. The rest of you, listen good, Joy here probably won't last long, and when this phony blonde gets draggy-butted, somebody else is gonna' take her place. I don't give a damn how many tricks Joy knows; I don't care how good she thinks she is in the sack. The time will come when I'll throw her out on her achin' can, and pick out a replacement. That's the way it's gonna be, and it ain't gonna' do any of you any good to scream about it. I'm the man here-the only man, because the drunk don't count, and all you women better get used to the idea.
He paused, looking around at our pale faces, then added: "Think of it like you was a bunch of mares in a private pasture, and I was the only stud horse. You'll get used to it, account of we're all gonna' be here for a long, long time together. Hell," and he grinned wolfishly,"-the way it stacks up, I'll probably have to beat you women off with a stick."
When he put his broad, hairy back to us, the expression on Joy Santee's face was sick, but she was already committed. I gnawed my lips. Weren't we all committed? Could any of us, single or in concert, stand against such a powerful animal? Would most of us want to resist him, after man-less weeks and months had gone by?
I didn't know about the others, and I didn't care much. I knew only myself, and I realized I could never allow that sweaty, hairy man to put his great paws on my body. I'd die first.
Or kill him.
I flinched. In a few short hours on this island, the widowed Julie Curtis had been stripped down to her basics, exposing a primitive streak I hadn't known existed. When I left Japan, I wanted to die, to become without feeling, without thought. Now I was fighting to live, and more than that-I was ready to kill to protect my dignity as an individual.
Shaking myself like a dog crawling out of water, I moved to help the gray-haired woman, needing to keep busy, needing to mask my feelings from Kane Zell. Some savage cunning told me not to warn him, not to put him on guard.
"Hello," the older woman said. "I'm Mary Tetson."
"Julie Curtis. We're in for a rough time, aren't we?"
Mary pursed worn lips. "Perhaps. Time has a way of working things out. It's going to be rough staying alive; the rest-Zell-will be minor annoyances compared to that."
Zell took Joy by the arm, his big fingers cutting deeply into the soft flesh above her elbow, and led her into the brush.
"He's not waiting until tonight," I said.
Mary Tetson sighed. "I hope she can keep him satisfied for a while."
Above us, another woman snapped: "How terrible! What a terrible thing to say!"
Mary looked up. "Eve. Eve-meet Julie Curtis. Julie-Eve Short."
"Miss Short," Eve said. "I still think you shouldn't talk like that."
"Why not," Mary asked. "It won't do any good to hide our heads. Don't you think it's better for Zell to have someone willing?"
Eve kneeled beside us at the salvage pile. "It's sinful-but do you-do you think that man would actually-force himself upon a woman?"
"You can bet your girdle on it," Mary said.
I found myself liking Mary Tetson. She was heavy and gray and about fifty, but she was wise.
"Then," Eve said, "he-he's a savage!"
"That's pretty close," Mary nodded.
"And the other one," Eve chattered. "That drunkard. Do you think he might protect us? Do you think he still has a-a spark of decency left in him?"
Mary examined a thin strip of metal. "This might be made into a needle. We're going to need more clothing than we have. You're talking about Danny Mixon? He can't help himself, much less others."
Eve tried to adjust a stained blouse, smoothed at her long, wrinkled skirt." It's awful that a man should be so lacking in will power. He's just a drunkard."
"He's sick," Mary said.
"No," Eve snapped. "He's weak and sinful and he won't be able to protect us, if that-that man gets tired of his Jezebel and tries-tries to-"
I spoke up. "I hope Danny doesn't try to stop Zell."
Eve gasped. "W-why not? Mary here may be too old to-"
"Interest Zell?" Mary smiled. "Maybe, but I agree with Julie."
"But he should defend us," Eve said, "if he has any real manhood left."
Mary shook her gray head. "Eve-don't you understand? This isn't the world we knew. Here there are no laws, no police force, no social disapproval, no church."
Firmly, Eve said: "The church is everywhere."
"The church adapts itself to the times," Mary said. "And to forces it can no longer ignore. Remember the men in the Bible, and their many wives?"
"That's sacrilege-plain sacrilege!"
"Perhaps, but religion, or morals, will work in this situation only if we adapt ourselves."
Eve stared at her. "I don't understand. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and-and this Danny Mixon should rise up to defend us against the wrong. He should be our champion against evil, against this lustful man."
"A righteous David standing small and alone against the mighty Goliath?" I cut in, angry. "I hope Danny doesn't get any such chivalrous ideas."
Eve turned on me, eyes blazing. "For heaven's sake, why not? Why shouldn't he?"
Mary's faded eyes looked past us both, looked toward the beach, where oil slicks on twilight-graying waves were the only signs that a man-made wonder had died there, breaking the tenuous line that had bound us all to man-made laws and established customs of right and wrong. At least, I felt that was the way she was thinking before she answered Eve Short. I was thinking like that.
"If Danny Mixon tries to interfere with Kane Zell in any way," Mary said, "if he crosses Zell in even a minute matter, Zell will kill him."
"But-" Eve said, wide-eyed and ashen, "-but he couldn't. Not-not just like that."
"He could," Mary said, "and I'm afraid he will-just like that."
CHAPTER 3
WHEN ZELL CAME BACK, FOLLOWED by a disheveled and hair-tangled Joy Santee, he strutted, chest out, long arms dangling. He'd shed his shirt, baring the ridged muscles of his furry chest and his flat belly. He had us cover the clams with a layer of wet sand, and the cooking fire was built over them.
In the fire-lit darkness, we waited hungrily, with the cool of tropic night creeping upon us. Our first meal here would be meager, but we were going to have to get used to cutting down on the frills. I took our shares over to where Danny sat beneath a spreading bush with the flames playing shadow tricks with his gaunt face. We ate slowly, but Danny only got through a few of the shellfish before making a pained face and shoving the rest to me.
"Sick?" I asked.
"Not the way you think. Sick in my own way, a familiar sickness. Cramps in the gut, twinges in the liver."
"From liquor."
He nodded, his cheeks sunken. "Booze has calories, but no vitamins. That plays hell with the liver. And there's no ampho-jell here to ease the cramps. I'll just have to tough it out."
I munched the tough meat and swallowed it. "You vanished earlier. You've got more whiskey hidden somewhere. Why don't you get rid of it, Danny?"
He grimaced. "The answer is simple-I can't. I can't plan beyond the next drink, if there's going to be a beyond, that is. I've been through the withdrawal symptoms before, Julie-I can't stand them again; not here, without paraldehyde to calm the shakes, to hold back the sweats and the hideous things that will come crouching around me."
I frowned at him. "But you'll have to stop sometime-when your hoard is depleted. What then?"
He held both thin hands clenched in the pit of his stomach. "What then? Exit Danny Mixon-but not laughing. Hell no-not laughing."
"It doesn't have to be like that," I said.
"The hell it doesn't." He had found a shred of anger. "What do you know? What do any of you know about it?"
"Tell me," I said. "Just whisper, so the others can't hear. It may make it better."
He'd lost the threadbare bit of rage already. "All right. It wouldn't do for the stirring saga of Danny Mixon to be lost to posterity. I'll pass it along to you, Mrs. Julie Curtis-until my last shot wears off and I have to skulk back to my cache."
Danny told me his story, haltingly, with long pauses between thoughts, as if it was difficult for him to piece together the tattered memories.
"I have six more fifths in the bag-and nine of those little two-ounce bottles, the kind drunks can hide in their pockets and suck dry in a washroom. I'll drink some more later tonight, because I have to. Oh-I won't be drunk; I'll just take enough to put me under for an hour or so of sleep.
Know what else I had in that bag? A toilet kit with the razor missing; some underwear-all dirty, and a wad of copy paper that's lumped together now by the sea. Nothing else. There had to be room for whiskey."
Across the fire, the others talked loudly, lifting their voices against the unknown terrors of an alien night. His head close to mine, Danny murmured on, telling me of going through the gates of Oakland Army Base with less than his bag had held, but with the General Discharge for alcoholism stuffed into the pocket of the GI fatigues the Army had given him when they took away the rest of his uniforms.
The Army left him what-experience useless in civilian life? Not quite; there was the writing, the GI newspaper background. It was enough to hack out stories for a smear and smut magazine; enough for a drunk to supply himself with booze. For a while. Now at least that was over; that, and everything else.
But before-before-the young, cocky Sergeant Mixon of World War II, the not noncom who knew machine guns as well as the men who built them. The Silver Star pinned to his OD shirtfront beside the Purple Heart. Was it in Tunisia?
The hills were African, but the dead man at his feet was too young for the veteran Afrika Korps, and the woman crying over there was Sicilian. Or was she French, or German, or Belgian? He couldn't remember; there were so many crying women, so many dead men.
But Sergeant Mixon was young and he was though. They'd found that out even before combat. All the old pugs he'd faced in the gym could tell them that much, all the journeymen middleweights he'd outsmarted and outfought in the civilian rings off post, the professional rings where a sharp young puncher could make a hundred bucks for six rounds-and blow it all on a party, because a soldier didn't have to pay rent or chow bills.
There might have been bigger money; there had been a real chance for it, the same chance Lew Jenkins got, coming right out of the Army and going for the title. But the war came, and Danny Mixon didn't give a damn, for a fight was a fight.
Only-when you went down in that kind of fight, you stayed down. The glory rubbed off quickly, and by the time the Big Red One of the First Infantry Division had been daubed on a Berlin Wall, Danny Mixon wasn't so tough any more.
Not after the dead Legionaires at Oran, the dead desert fighters of Rommel, the dead Wop soldier on a Sicilian mountain top, the dead kids and dead old men at Aachen. Not after all the women crying.
Stiff-lipped, droning in a heart-aching monotone, Danny Mixon made me see him after the war, the Danny still fighting, but losing now in tank town rings, losing more to the bottle than to his opponents. But still not giving a damn because the Army was always there and the bottles were always there, and the other kind of fighting was forever done and over with.
But it wasn't. Korea had dead men and babies frozen blue in icy ditches, and crying women, too. No Silver Stars for Danny this time, because the guts were gone-pickled, burned out, raw and quivering. But Sergeant Mixon wasn't looking for medals; he had a knack for stringing words together, and found a new slot as combat correspondent. Yet he was looking only to get away from the terrible, hurt country.
And then-where was Sergeant Mixon, next corporal, next private? In an orderly room in Japan with seventeen years service behind him and a hard faced major in front of him, the major saying that the next drunken brawl would be the last one, that the next stay in the NP ward of Tokyo hospital would be the last one, because the Army is tired of Danny Mixon; it has no place for alcoholics.
Danny believed that CO, because he'd have said the same thing if they'd been on opposite sides of the desk. He saluted the major, thanked him, and left the man's office. Then he went out of the back gate of Camp Zama and into the tawdry ginmill called the Club Naha. A week later, medics of NP Ward 18 were standing by as MPs unlocked the handcuffs. There was a board of officers, the general discharge stateside, and civilian Danny Mixon, thirty-eight years old, standing at the gate with a battered toilet kit, seven dollars and twenty cents in his pocket, and no place to go.
Her name was Marilyn, and once they'd been married. She was ashamed and nervous, but she gave him a place to sleep and fed him. Marilyn made two conditions-that he didn't touch a drop of whiskey, that he didn't touch her. Danny didn't want to touch either, and for two months, he didn't. Then he got the magazine job, and after ten months dry in a furnished room, the expense money, the ticket to Japan, where he'd interview a movie star in hiding.
Danny celebrated the big job. He got drunk. He went back to the apartment and threw Marilyn on a couch. She screamed, she hated him as he ripped off the nightgown, but what the hell? He was Danny Mixon on top of the world again, and it wasn't like it was Marilyn's first time. All white legs and quivering breasts and a hating mouth, and somehow, he didn't feel big anymore. Before he caught the plane in San Francisco, he bought three fifths of bourbon.
The firelight flickered. The others were asleep, all but the wide-shouldered woman in the bedraggled WAC jacket; Corporal Jessie Marawski was pulling guard-at Zell's orders. The lean-tos were occupied; a faint whimper came from one of them, a low-pitched giggle from another-from the one Zell and Joy Santee were in.
Danny's head was nodding; his hands lay limply across his knees. In another moment, his chin sagged to his chest, and I saw him slip into dreams-dreams whose horror I could only imagine. I watched him, wanting to help, but not knowing how I could-no more than the woman named Marilyn had been able to help him before.
Slowly, he eased down upon his back, legs twitching, Danny's hands came up in the protective shell of a fighter who is taking a beating. But soon the hands sagged, went to his shrunken belly to cover it.
I saw that he was crying now, softly and quietly, the tears mingling with a thin film of sick sweat on his cheeks. He turned on his side and his knees drew up close to his chest. His hands went hugging around them, and his forehead drew down to his knees. Curled into the fetal position, his shoulders soon ceased to shake, and the little whimpers stopped.
I stared down at him for a long time, but he didn't move again. I lifted his shaggy head gently, easily, surprised at its lack of weight, and slid his near-flattened flight bag under it. There was only a towel to cover him with, but I arranged it to keep the chill off his thin chest.
Why, I wondered, did I feel drawn to this shell of a man, to this self-tortured creature so single-mindedly bent upon destruction of himself? My own man had been-but that was the point: had been. And, I told myself, I wasn't interested in Danny Mixon like that. I'd never be sexually interested in anyone else; my Jim had always been enough, and now that he was gone, what other male could possibly take his place? The answer was simple-none.
What I felt for Danny Mixon wasn't man-woman, but more like woman-child. Danny was like that-a child, lost and alone just now, terribly sick. Maybe I was dead inside, but I was still woman, still a mother, and I couldn't turn away from this manchild who needed me.
He would sleep now, for a while at least. I nodded good night to the WAC standing guard, and slipped into the lean-to I'd share with Ella Martin. For tonight, all of us, tired and sore, could forget this strange and frightening world we'd been hurled into together. Tomorrow would bring the problems, accentuate the fears that somehow seemed to center in Kane Zell. But tonight we could sleep; it might be the last relaxed, unterrified sleep we women would get.
We were all in a half circle on the scuffed sand, watching Zell rapidly sketching a crude map with a pointed stick. Beside him, propped against a palm, his spear gleamed in the morning sunlight. It was made of his bayonet, lashed to a long, thin pole. It looked wickedly effective.
"This is it," Zell grunted. "This island runs like this, like an egg, with the little end pointing west. That's the end we're on now, and it ain't very big-maybe three miles from tip to tip, maybe two miles across the thick part, at the most."
His stick made a circle in the sand. "Here's the spring, and there's a bigger one other side of the high ground. We followed the creek it makes, right down to the sea."
He looked around at us. Kneeling beside him, Joy Santee looked too-smugly, self-satisfied, on the right hand of this self-appointed god of the island. Beyond them, Danny Mixon lay on the sand, facing away, wrapped in his secret misery. Ella Martin sat close to me.
"There's kind of a cliff over there," Zell continued, "with a good size cave in it. It'll come in handy for storage, and for a storm cellar when the typhoons hit."
The women murmured. Zell curled his lip. "This ain't exactly the garden of Eden. Our educated drunk over there says this is a typhoon belt, and from seein' stuff jammed in the treetops, I go along with him. So, I figure tomorrow we'll haul everything we got to that other spring and set up camp there. "We'll be close to the cave if a blow comes up."
One of the girls, the one with the broken arm, muttered that she was hungry.
"Ain't we all?" Zell said. "And we all got to hustle to keep our bellies full. It could be worse. The ocean's full of stuff we can eat-and that includes seaweed. The Jap moose says its got vitamins we're gonna need. I saw some birds inland, and we run across something' the bright drunk calls 'taro'-kinda' like sweet potatoes, and he says there oughta' be breadfruit.
"I don't know about that-but there's berries and fruit. We ain't going to starve, but we ain't going to have time for pink teas. So everybody works-and that includes you, Mixon."
Danny didn't move. The long hike Zell had forced him into that morning had taken what little strength he had left. He was beaten, sick, and Zell was enjoying the sickness.
"Now," Zell said, "You-fat woman-what about the salvage?'
Mary Tetson shrugged. "Sako tells me she used to be a pearl diver. If she can go down, reach the plane itself, we should be able to bring up many things we'll need-and we need everything. But we have to wait for low tides so she can work; the water's too deep, otherwise."
"Okay," Zell said. "I want every scrap of cloth and every piece of metal. You, Ma-you're chief cook from her on out, besides supply sergeant. You understand, Ma?"
"Mary," she corrected.
"Ma is good enough," Zell grunted. "Now, you young broads see to the salt."
The girl with the broken arm frowned up at him. "Salt?"
"Yeah, stupid. The two of you go dig holes in the beach, make 'em watertight as you can by lining 'em with rocks jammed over pieces of cloth. Pour sea water in the holes, and keep pouring' until it stands. The sun will suck out the water and leave salt. We got to have salt-and you broads are gonna' provide it."
"A-all right," the girl said, and her friends helped her to her feet.
At least, I thought, Zell had given the hurt girl work she could do, and perhaps he was right in saying everyone had to work, so that all might survive-so that any of us might survive. And I had to admit, somebody had to take over, had to run things. Zell had an animal cunning that took the place of real intelligence; it might do. It had to do, since Danny Mixon was so helpless and hopeless.
Danny was on his side now, his thin chest still heaving, a blueness about mouth and nostrils. Zell must have driven him without mercy, shoved him through jungle and up steep hills until Danny was ready to collapse. Sneering, one splayed hand planted firmly upon Joy Santee's full butt, Zell had turned away, eager to get the camp moved.
I eased over to Danny's bag, almost flat in the sand. Maybe I could help him a little, if only-there was; my fingers found smooth glass, a tiny bottle hidden in the folds of the bag. Palming it, I thumbed off its cap and went to Danny. He was lifting himself by his elbows, head wobbling on a loose neck, mouth hanging open. I tried to fit the bottle to his mouth, but his head wouldn't stay still.
Other hands came to help, slightly dark hands on each side of Danny's sick head, steadying it for me. I poured the small drink between his teeth, saw the pain lessen immediately, saw what passed for strength come into his face.
Sighing, Danny let his head fall back upon the knees of Ella Martin and stared up into her expressionless face. No, not quite expressionless; I saw something there in the dark eye, something like pity.
"Thanks," Danny said briefly.
I leaned forward. "I'll give you another drink when you need it, all right? The hike must have been hell for you."
Ella's soft warm thighs pillowed his head; she didn't seem to mind. "Only for me," Danny muttered. "Only because I'm soft and gutless. There wasn't too much undergrowth, but I kept stumbling over things."
Ella's fingers fluttered across his forehead. "You're all hot and dry; you may have a fever."
Danny's grin was weak. "No-just dehydrated. Alcohol does that, bums away the water."
"I'll bring some water," I said, and moved a few yards away from them.
I heard Danny say: "She's a good woman."
Ella's voice, then: "Julie is a fine woman, all right."
"Thanks for helping," Danny said.
"I'd help Julie any time."
"Oh."
"I didn't mean it like that," she said. "I know you can't help it, right now. It's just that I haven't had much to do with heavy drinkers. I saw too many mean ones-a long time back."
I scooped water from a battered metal drum, our only supply tank, and carried it to Danny in half a coconut husk. He drank greedily, droplets running over his bristly chin.
"I-" he said to Ella, "-I used to get mean, sometimes. There's no strength left for it, now, and no need. I found I was only angry with myself."
"Julie," Ella said, "can we get him some of that clam soup?"
Danny lifted his head from her lap. "Both of you-you're being too damned good to me."
Faint and fleeting a smile touched Ella's rich lips. "All of us need help, on this island."
"When we left Danny resting, I said to her: "We're all going to need help all right-and not only for food and shelter, but against Zell, too."
Ella's eyes changed, darkened. "That man better keep his hands off me; all the way off. He's got a woman. Let him stay with her."
"He won't, though," I said. "He told us that much. He sees all of us a harem-his harem."
Ella stood straight and strong, glaring across the clearing. "All the women in the world won't do a man any good-if he's dead."
I bit my lips. "Ella-be careful, if he hears-"
"I don't care," she said. "I was raped once, but it will never happen again. If Zell tries it, either I'll manage to kill him, somehow, or-"
"Or?" I prompted.
"Or he'll be making love to a dead woman."
I saw Zell staring at us, so I moved in front of Ella, whispering: "See to Danny, get him on his feet and out of sight before Zell starts riding him again. I'll-go over close and begin packing things for the trip to the new campsite."
"Julie," Ella said, "don't get too close to him. There's something wrong in that man's head-something bad wrong."
"I'll be careful," I said, and moved swiftly to kneel near Zell and Joy Santee, to keep his eyes busy with me as I stowed bits of metal and the husks we used for dishes into a man's water-stained shirt.
Joy's voice, superior and catty, pushed at me. "Wouldn't you figure it?" she asked. "The widow has to play mother to him, and that mulatto snuggling up to the man who'd have her."
I felt Zell's animal eyes boring into my back. "Mix-on ain't the only one. They're both good-lookin' women.
"No better than me," Joy pouted.
"That's right," he rumbled. "Ain't much difference in women-some fat, some skinny, some in between."
Joy kept trying. "But so many women are ugly."
"Only in the light. When it's dark, they're about the same."
Petulance crept into Joy's words now, and she was no longer striking at me, but attempting to protect herself. "Is that all you think a woman's good for, just to sleep with?"
Zell grunted. "Don't practice that slop on me. You might kid yourself that what you got between your legs is real special, but I know better."
"You shouldn't talk like that," she said, almost whispering. "Wasn't I nice to you last night? And I can be even better. You'll see."
"You'll have to be a hell of a lot better, to be good as you think you are," Zell said. "And if you want to keep blisters off those lily white hands, you're gonna' have to work at it."
I heard her breath hiss in sharply. "Kane-I-I'll try; I promise you, I'll be nice, real nice."
Zell grunted again, scornfully, and I saw that Ella had gotten Danny away. I lifted the makeshift bag and walked away, but the memory of Zell's probing eyes clung to me for a long time afterward.
CHAPTER 4
ELENA MARQUEZ DID MOST of the digging, while I hauled stones to line the salt pits. Nursing her broken arm, Helen Jacobs sat by, watching. As young girls will, they practically ignored me, put me beyond the pale of their conversation. I was too old. "Does it hurt, Helen."
"A little bit."
"Don't try to dig, if it hurts. I-we-don't mind. Mrs. Curtis and me."
Helen said: "I wish-I wish we were back in Japan."
Elena straightened up, arching her back. The movement threw her mature breasts into full relief. "Me, too. Japan was real wild, wasn't it, with nobody checking up?"
Helen nodded. "And how. All those silly little Japanese policemen afraid to say anything and-"
"The clubs, the Teen Clubs-"
"Boy, if they only knew what went on in those clubs-"
"Yeah."
They were both quiet for awhile, remembering the country where no restrictions had been placed upon them, where GI money could, and did, buy anything and everything; where nobody asked them how old they were.
"Helen," Elena said thoughtfully. "What do you think that Zell will do?"
The blonde eased her broken arm with the other hand. "What do you mean?"
"I mean after he's tired of sleeping with that Joy Santee."
Helen reddened. "I'm sure I don't know."
"Oh, come on now. You're not that square. You know he'll look around for somebody else. Who do you think he'll pick next time?"
Helen glanced at me, considered for a moment, then wiped my presence away. She didn't answer directly. "I wonder," she said, "what the colonel would say, if he could hear us talking like this. The colonel-that's what I always called my father. Anything else wouldn't have seemed right; he was that kind of man. I wonder if the colonel and mother are still alive, back in Yokohama?"
"You ought to forget that," Elena said. "Worrying, I mean. It won't help."
Helen shifted her arm to a more comfortable position. "If only they hadn't insisted on sending me Stateside to school. I'd be with them now. With mother and the colonel. He's strong, the colonel."
Elena scooped sand for a moment, then said: "But your father isn't here. Nobody is, nobody who can protect you-or me. The only men on this island are the sick, skinny one and the mean one-Zell. We have to think about them, Helen. They're all we have."
Helen frowned. "I suppose so. I-I wonder what it will be like-having a man."
"You're kidding," Elena said.
"No-no, I'm not. I mean, well-in Japan, I tried. Ken was the son of an artillery major, and cute. But the colonel always seemed to be right there, right behind me, even when he was miles and miles away. I-I just couldn't. Ken-Ken finally got angry and left."
"Then you're a virgin," Elena said, wonderingly. "Yes. Maybe-maybe Zell will leave me alone, if he knows that."
Elena laughed, a laugh too old, too wise for her years. "Don't bet on it. A lot of men go for that-old men. But get this straight-if Zell wants you, and he probably will-there's nothing you, or the colonel, or anybody else can do about it."
"I-I guess so," Helen whispered.
I wanted to comfort her, but the words would have been lies. Elena Marquez was right. There was nothing any of us could do, if Zell chose this young, untouched girl as his next mistress.
"Let's see," Elena mused. "Maybe he'll go for that colored girl, or maybe even for Mr. Curtis here. I think they've got the nicest shapes-for older women, that is. You've got the prettiest young shape, Helen, and mine's not bad, either."
Helen looked away from the Latin sensuousness of the other girl. "Do you think he'll really be interested in us-in girls young as us?"
Elena laughed again. "Sure he will. Don't let them kid you, a lot of men are interested in us. Only the cops and MPs won't let old guys play around. But there aren't any cops here, so that makes everything okay. You watch; Zell will be coming after us pretty soon."
Helen was silent, thinking. Elena went on: "I've got nice legs. Yours are longer, but mine are rounder. It'll be different, having a real man instead of a kid. I'm kind of anxious to find out how different. I'll tell youI'm no virgin, but I'm no old hooker, either. I haven't had much experience myself-just twice. Once with a fella' at the Teen Club in Tokyo. He wasn't much, because he was about as scared as I was. And once with a boy in Yokohama. He knew a little more, but he was too excited. You know-too quick."
Helen reddened again, and Elena said: "That's right, I forgot. You don't know. But you'll find out, honey. We'd both better hope Zell isn't too-rough. I've heard rough men can hurt a woman, sometime."
Helen shivered. "How-how about the other one? How about Danny? Maybe he'll be gentle, if he's the first. After-after him, it won't matter so much if Zell is rough. That's what I heard, anyway."
Elena stood up, stretching. Her firm young body outlined itself against the thin dress. "Him? Don't make me laugh, honey. Zell won't let him get within ten feet of us. Besides, he's a drunk, and drunks are no good in bed, they say. But he is kind of poetic looking, isn't he?"
She arched an eyebrow at me. "But," she said, "it looks like Mrs. Curtis has latched onto Danny, anyway, That right, Mrs. Curtis?"
I opened my fingers to dribble small rocks into the hole in the sand. "Elena, you're a damned fool. You haven't sense enough to be frightened."
She put both hands on her svelte hips. "Frightened? Of what? I'm not scared, Mrs. Curtis-I'm anxious."
"I'm scared," Helen admitted. "I wish I was home."
"Not me," Elena cut in. "At home, I'm a kid. I can't do things I want to do, because they say I'm not old enough. Well-here I'm old enough, and I'll prove I'm just as much woman as you, Mrs. Curtis-you, or anyone else."
I looked at their young faces, at the pale one, at the rebellious one. "I hope you don't have to prove anything," I said, and left them to find Ella.
She was digging in the sand up the beach, poking a pointed stick into an artificial-looking heap of sand. "Hi," she said. "The big boss assigned me to the turtle egg detail. He said turtles come up here and lay eggs in sand piles like this."
I made a face. "Turtle eggs? But I suppose anything will seem good to eat, after a while."
"Hey!" Ella said. "Maybe I've struck oil, or yolks. Are these eggs?"
I kneeled to touch one cautious fingertip to the things she had uncovered. "I think so-but they have skin instead of shells."
Ella smiled. "Whatever they are, there's plenty of them. We'll bring them back."
"Okay-here, I'll get them."
"No, you hold the sack. I'm not afraid of them."
"But I don't mind-"
Her smile widened. "Sure you do, but that's okay. Some people don't like to touch certain things. I'm not afraid of much, just centipedes. We call them 'thousand-legs' back home, and they can make you sick."
"I know," I said. "One stung me once."
Ella paused, her hands full of the leathery marbles. "Are you from the South?"
"California, originally. Many places after that. The centipede stung me in Panama."
"Oh, you're Army then."
"I was; my husband's dead."
"I'm sorry. In the crash?"
"Before, in Japan-in a stupid, unnecessary accident. It seems so long ago. If the plane hadn't crashed, it wouldn't be so long ago. Now everything seems different; new, sort of."
Ella dusted sand off her slightly pink palms. "New, maybe, but not different."
I pulled the mouth of the sack together. "How do you mean?"
"There's still the strong and the weak; there's still social and racial levels. Didn't you notice the Japanese move together?"
I frowned. "Isn't that natural?"
"Is it? Or is it because kind seeks kind, for protection?"
I touched the girl's arm. "I think I understand, but it will be different here. We must work together, think of each other, for our own individual good. I don't think the shape of eyes or the color of skin will have much importance here."
Ella turned away, thrusting her long stick into the sand-crowding bushes. "Maybe at first it won't matter, while everybody's so afraid, while we need each other for survival. But later, when this lopsided society of self-supporting, the changes will come. Many people need someone to feel inferior, someone to be above. Any minority will be inferior; the Japanese will be, because the Caucasions outnumber them. In turn, they'll be superior to me-because I'm alone."
"Oh, no," I said. "Ella, you're not alone, at all-no more than Danny is alone because he's different from the rest of us."
"Not really different; he's sick, and being sick doesn't change anything. He's an alcoholic now, because he still has whiskey. When there's no more whiskey, he'll be the same as the rest of you."
I shook my head. "Not unless we help him. Whiskey doesn't cause the illness; it's the other way around. He lacks something."
Ella suddenly lifted her stick and brought it down with a solid thump upon something that was trying to scuttle away. "Got him! Look, a big crab. I didn't know crabs lived on land."
"In this part of the world, some do. I hope he's good to eat."
"He'll be good to eat," Ella said, and using her stick as a scoop, raised the still-kicking crab over the bag and dropped it in. "See? The crab was weak and I was strong, so he got smashed. Just the way any of us will be smashed if we try to stand up against Zell."
I pushed my hair back from my forehead. "Zell is dangerous, almost an animal. But perhaps he's far enough above the animal to take only those who are willing. There's more willing than Joy Santee."
Ella peered into the bushes, her thin dress clinging to her slim body, glued here and there by sweat. "You're wrong, Zell's not 'almost animal,' he is an animal. I've seen his kind before. He won't care if a woman is willing or not. He might like it better if she's not."
"Let's rest," I said, and sat down in a shaded spot. "Even if he takes a woman, if he rapes, does it matter so much? If he wants me, I won't like it, but I've changed my mind about fighting him. I thought I would fight, last night. But today is new and the world is new-and I want to live, now. He's far too strong, too savage. If we're going to survive on this island, we need Kane Zell. Danny knows things about survival, but we can't trust him. When his liquor supply runs out, he may go insane. So if Zane wants to take me, I imagine I'll have to put up with it. We need him to keep us alive."
Ella slashed viciously at a flower bobbing in the ocean breeze. "I don't need him. If that bastard puts his hairy hands on me, I'll kill him. I said it before, and I mean it. You don't have to try talking me out of that, Julie."
We glared at each other, then suddenly, Ella was in my arms, her dark head pillowed upon my shoulder. "Maybe it won't happen," I murmured, patting her back, "maybe everything will be all right."
Comforting her, I felt comfort myself, a soft warmth spreading within me, relaxing me. The sensation was surprising; I thought I'd been lying to Ella when I said I wanted to live. Now I found I was telling the truth.
I felt warm tears slide down to kiss Ella's golden cheek-my tears. They should have been all used up. Ella clung to me in strange desperation, and we sat together for long minutes, each giving something. Then she pulled away, slowly, gently.
"You know," Ella said through uncertain lips, "that's the first time anybody ever cried over me, the very first time."
"I-didn't realize I was crying. I thought my eyes were dry forever. It's a new world here, Ella-if we'll let it be new."
"I hope so," she said. "I don't want anything to do with the old one."
Sako's body was brown and bare except for the twisted bit of white cloth that snugged her hips, and the other strip that held back her hair. A wave foamed around her smooth, gleaming knees as she waded to shore, sturdy and erect. A many-tied piece of parachute rigging lost itself in the green water behind her.
Panting a little, she nodded to Michiko and Kyoko, and offered the end of the line to them. "Parachutes," she said, "and one small bag. Not hard to pull out."
Michiko glanced at me. "Is the signal wood enough?"
"Hai," Kyoko said. "It will burn on high ground."
"And he does not know?" Michiko asked. Kyoko nodded. "As you said, Kuwaye-san; we didn't let him see us bringing the wood."
Michiko came over to where I sat by the growing pile of salvage. "You understand Japanese, don't you?"
"A little."
She studied me. "But you won't tell him?"
"Zell? About the signal fire? No."
"I didn't think you would." She said over her shoulder: "Speak English when Julie-san is here."
I joined them then, helping with the rope, tugging and hauling until the load floated ashore. Together we spread the nylon to dry. Her brown body slowly drying in the sun, Sako said: "No understand man. Why he no want go?"
Michiko said flatly, "Because here he is king and we are his slaves."
Sako shrugged. "Okay by me. I think I dive one more."
Michiko put a hand on her shoulder. "Remember to search for a gun."
Sako grinned. "No forget," and waded back into the sea.
I watched her arms flash in the sun as she moved out to the spot where the plane lay, and saw her legs flick high as she dived.
"She's graceful," I said.
Michiko nodded. "Sako learned to dive very young, in the pearl beds off Kyushu-before she discovered more money was to be made another way."
Sako's head bobbed up; she waved a hand at us and went under again.
"She works hard," the voice said behind us, and Michiko whirled with me to face it.
Danny stood with a spear over his shoulder, a patched-together thing made from a sharpened bit of metal, a stick and nylon cord. It wasn't sturdy as the one Zell carried.
Danny was drunk. "Behold," he said thickly, "the spear carrier. I'm looking for the rest of the chorus. Know whichaway they went?"
Michiko's lips curled. I said, "Better stay away from camp like that, Danny. Zell won't like it."
"Zell? Zell? Who's he-the tenor?"
Grinning clownishly, he stumbled down to the edge of the water and posed Indian-like, hand over his eyes, staring out at Sako. She was kicking strongly for shore now, tugging at the line. She swam effortlessly, one arm pulling before her, the other dragging her latest find. I thought again what a boon she was to us all. Nobody else could have reached the wreck; it lay in almost thirty feet of water.
Sako came on; gentle, frothy waves foamed past her to bubble upon the sand at our feet. Another wave formed behind her, moving up to catch up with her, to race her to the beach.
Something else was behind her, too, something gray, thin and straight, an edged blade leaving a white feather wake behind it.
Danny yelled it first. "Sako! Sako-hurry-fast-hurry!"
I felt him search for the Japanese word, heard him funnel it through cupped hands at her "Hiyakuhiyaku!"
Still yelling, Danny pointed with his spear. Sako paused in the water; she was near enough now to see the horror in our faces. She looked over one bare shoulder and screamed. Then she dug both arms into the sea and churned for the beach. She wasn't going to make it; the shark would be at her in another moment.
Danny was in the water, chin deep, flounding straight for the dark, deadly torpedo under the dorsal fin. Sako flashed past him, veering for shallow water, and Danny met the shark head on.
The jolt of the powerful body drove him back, but he held to the spear handle, stabbed its head against the monster that boiled sand and water a few feet away from his legs. Furious, Wright thrust him back, drove him off his feet, and we saw the gleam of gray sandpaper skin as the shark's body lunged halfway out of the sea.
Danny went under. Someone was screaming, the high, piercing wail of terror. It was me. Danny's head bobbed up again, and I stopped screaming. Scuttling backward, he jabbed, jabbed with his pitiful weapon until it stuck hard. He turned then and stumbled toward us. Sako caught his hands and tugged him safely ashore.
Behind him, the monster fought against the jagged piece of metal driven into its belly, the spear handle whipping over and over in blood-bubble water. A massive tail flipped high, and the thing was gone into deep water, leaving a dark trail behind it.
Danny was on his knees as we gathered around him. Fists clenched into his sunken belly, he shuddered. His face was white, his eyes burnt-out charcoal. There was an angry abrasion across one leg, just below the bottom of his chopped-off pants.
"If ever a d-drink was called for," he mumbled, "this is the time."
Small brown breasts heaving, her eyes wide, Sako placed her hands formally across her wet stomach and said in Japanese, bowing: "I most humbly thank you for giving me back my life."
Danny's shaky hands rubbed across his pale cheeks. "You left me, kid."
Michiko's face was composed now, still. "Sako thanks you for saving her from the shark. In broken English, it would not have sounded the same, so she spoke in her own language."
"No thanks due," Danny muttered. "Not for a threadbare hero."
He struggled to his feet and swayed there for a moment, then lurched away toward a tangle of trees. Going for his bottle, I thought, for liquid fortification against the tremendous letdown he was experiencing. But Danny Mixon hadn't been afraid, short minutes ago. Drunk or sober, he'd plunged into the sea to do battle-for a girl he knew well enough to value.
Danny Mixon had courage of his own.
Sako looked a question at Michiko, and the wiser woman nodded. Head down, Sako went to the pile of wet salvage and dug under it. When she rose again, there was a flat bottle in her hand. She hurried after Danny, water droplets diamonding her bronzed skin, beading the tautness of the smooth belly. Trim legs flashing, she entered the grove of trees.
Untliinking, I found myself trotting after them, disregarding Michiko's "no!" I followed the footprints across the beach, Danny's and Sako's, and into the cool greenery of palm and bamboo. At the edge of a little clearing, I stopped, hearing voices. I pushed aside a palm frond and saw them.
"Thanks," Danny was saying, "now we're even. You saved my life, too-or at least prolonged it for awhile."
"Find in plane," she said, kneeling beside him. "Three days keep; now for you."
Danny twisted off the cap. "To fish that stay the hell where they belong."
Sako wrinkled her nose. "What say, you? My English no good."
"I didn't say anything," Danny told her. "I talk a lot, but I don't say anything." He gulped at the bottle.
"You all time drink," she murmured. "Scared Zell-san, but no scared shark. How come?"
"Oh," he said, "I was afraid of the shark, too."
Her lips puckered; she leaned closer, looking into his face. "Danny-san, takusan thank you."
She was inches away, shining bare, smooth and damp. If he lifted one hand, he could close it on the dark nipple of her breast. He kissed her-lightly, gently.
"You don't have to pay me," he said softly. "It's all right."
I wanted to turn and run, but they would hear me. I wanted to flee, to close my eyes against what was about to happen. I couldn't. Hidden, a secret observer, I stared wide-eyed through the screening fronds. Now I understood why Michiko had said no.
Sako's hand moved to the white band across her sleek hair. It came away and her thick tresses fell free, coiling wetly to her shoulders.
"No pay, Darmy-san," she whispered. "You want. I want. Please, Danny-san."
She warmed herself against him, submissive, yet tenderly seeking. She twisted on her knees. "Jotomatte-just a minute, ne?"
A deft flick of small hands and the loin cloth was in the white sand beside her. She came to him again, not so yielding now, but eager, eager and a bronzed flame in his arms. I saw Danny lose himself in her, penetrate her moist sex while the salt wind kissed their bodies, caressed their bodies, and they did not know it touched them.
When they were quiet at last, when they were leg-locked and still from the sweeping climax of their passions, I finally found the strength to slip away from the little grove, from the intertwined bodies of the lovers. My mouth was dry and there was an ache deep within me that had nothing to do with the shame I was supposed to be feeling.
Somehow, I stumbled through the trees and along the beach. Somehow I made my way to the new campsite. There were people milling about there, and odors of cooking, and the excited chatter of girls as they told the others about Danny's fight with the shark. I felt apart from it all, and sat at the entrance to our new lean-to with Ella Martin. I was mixed-up, disturbed, emotionally tangled, and I didn't want to be. It was too soon, I told myself, too quick and too soon. I couldn't let this happen to me; I wouldn't allow it to happen.
Across the clearing, Zell laughed harshly and said something about not believing Danny had the guts. Then he went up to the cave to finish skinning out a pig he'd speared in the jungle.
Ella was talking to someone. I blinked hard and furiously, and made myself take notice. I flinched inwardly when I saw Danny Mixon standing over us.
"Congratulations," Ella was saying.
Face flushed, Danny said, "It was nothing. I always had a way with goldfish."
Ella lifted a feathery eyebrow. "I always thought you could smile, if you put your mind to it. Michiko said you were very brave."
"No, not brave-just there."
"Zell didn't believe it," Ella said.
Danny held out his bowl for some stew brewing in a tin can. "I don't believe it either; somebody must have pushed me."
I didn't look up at him until he said, "I got a reward, anyway. Sako presented me with a whole pint of gin she'd found in the plane."
"And," I said, "was that all you got?"
Danny lowered his bowl, "What?"
"You must have enjoyed your reward fully," I said, hating myself but unable to halt the flow of words. "There are teeth marks at the base of your throat."
I bounced up then, and stalked over to the cooking fire. Behind me, Danny said, "Now what the hell-"
"You're not only a drunk, Danny Mixon," Ella said calmly, "but you're also a damned fool."
"What the-wait; has everybody flipped around here?"
Ella's voice turned into anger. "Oh-go play with your damned bottles. Or with your girl friend, and let me-us-alone."
She was standing beside me in the warmth of the fire. "He's gone, now, all shook up. Sorry if I butted in where I don't belong, Julie. But he's such a-"
"Damned fool," I repeated. "Only he's not alone, Ella. I'm foolish, too. How-how could you tell?"
"Your face," she said. "It was written all over your face. You-saw them?"
"I wish I hadn't. I had no right."
Her arm went around my waist. "As much right as anyone else. What I said before, Julie, about not much changing on this island-that goes for the basics, toofor love and jealousy. But-him? Is it, because he's the only choice?"
I said, "I don't know, Ella. I should be in mourning; I should be on my way home to die. Instead, I-I'm wanting a man. Wanting him as I wanted my dead husband. Isn't that-all wrong?"
"Wrong?" Ella said. "Wrong is a word we used to know-that's all."
CHAPTER 5
A PARACHUTE MADE A WARM NEST for us in the tropical night. Ella and I lay close to each other in our hut, talking in whispers. An affinity had grown between us, something close formed out of mutual need and understanding.
Bit by bit, we had brought out all our memories and discussed them with a candor seldom found between women. We were more than sisters, because we lacked the jealousy, the competition, that sisters have. We were friends now, as only women can be friends, with a relationship bordering close to love. Our closeness was obvious, and some of the women tried to make something of it, to feed gossip upon it-as they were doing about the romance between the WAC, Jessie Maraws-ki, and young Helen Fergus.
But that wasn't so, and we talked of Danny now, while the fire beat time for dancing shadows and a night bird whistled back in the trees.
"I don't know," I murmured. "I just don't know why or how, but I may as well be honest about it. I'm drawn to Danny, but I won't call it love."
"The mother instinct?" Ella asked.
"Possibly. He's so helpless, almost child-like, and yet there's a strength in him. He proved that, against the shark."
Ella stiffened against me. "Yes, but it may never come out again."
"I know, but when his whiskey is gone-"
"He'll need us more,"
"Why?"
"He'll crack up," she said. "I studied about alcoholics once. It will be as if he were coming off narcotics; he may go into convulsions."
"No," I whispered. "We can't let him."
"We may not be able to help it."
Joy Santee's voice shrilled across the clearing, piercing and harridan-thin. It was a wordless noise, full of rage and breaking on a weird crescendo of fear.
"I can't help it," Joy shrieked. "I can't, I can't! You're not a man, you're a-a bull!"
The sound of a meaty slap then, and Zell's rumble: "Get out-get your ass outa' here."
Clutching a skirt about her, Joy stumbled into the ring of firelight. She was bare from the waist up, and the angry red print of a wide hand covered her left breast and one side of her rib cage. Zell had slapped her where it hurt.
"Bastard!" she shouted, while tears of pain wet her cheeks. She wheeled to face the hut door, her face contorted and ugly. "You bastard!"
Snakeswift, a shadow lunged out of the hut and was upon her before she could whirl to run. A full-armed slap staggered Joy back to the fireside. She collapsed, sobbing, her hands cupping both bruised breasts.
Dark fur gleamed across Zell's powerful chest, patterned down thickly into his shorts, swept up over his burly shoulders and down the middle of his back. His teeth gleamed from pulled-back lips, and the obsidian hardness of his eyes glinted in the light of the burning logs.
"Flabby bitch," he hissed down at her. "You'll toughen up, all right. Startin' tomorrow, you haul wood. When you get yourself solid, I might let you come back."
I saw Danny across the fire. He was staring woodenly into it, setting himself apart. From the other huts, heads poked out, curious, frightened faces. Joy whimpered, rocking back and forth, holding her breasts.
A column of hairy power, Zell stood with his fists on his hips and roared at us all. "Time you got it all straight. like I said-I take who I want, when I want-I got enough of this used-up bitch. There's gonna' be a change made-now."
Danny pulled his head farther down, shoulders slumping. The gin bottle was half full.
Logs popped softly in the fire, the only sounds in a brittle, breath-held silence. Even Joy held her teeth clamped on the gasps that shook her.
Zell's hand shot out, one rigid finger targeting on the Japanese hut. "One of you slopeheads tonight. I know slopeheads are good."
His voice lashed at them: "Come outa' there! All of you!"
They came, touching each other for comfort. Sako's face was down, as was Kyoko's. Michiko Kuwaye held her head up, tense, tight-mouthed. Zell's glance flicked over them, measuring, touching hotly at their legs, their hips. "You," he said. "Miss high nose; you're the lucky one tonight."
"No!" The word burst from Kyoko and she pattered over to kneel at Zell's feet. "Zell-san, please-I go with you."
Zell grinned at the girl humbling herself before him. "Michiko's too good, huh? Too much slopehead society for a slob like me?"
"Please," Kyoko begged. "For me, no difference. Business girl, me. Please Zell-san-no Michiko."
Zell lifted his leg, rammed a big, bare foot between Kyoko's small breasts and shoved. She careened away from him, skidded to her hands and knees in the sand.
"Your turn's comin', " he growled, "but not now. Now Michiko gets it. I never sampled a slopehead society broad before." His voice rose. "C'mere, miss high nose!"
Michiko didn't move. Chin lifted, she stared at him, her arms stiffly by her sides. Sako touched her hand and moved away, back into the shadows. Michiko stood alone to face him, taut and motionless as an ivory carving.
A single fluid movement brought Zell around the fire and to her. like a giant claw, his hand hooked out and down, and the girl's one-piece dress fell away from her body. Slim, golden, Michiko stood naked in the flickering light, the dark pussy attracting Zell's probing eyes.
She moved suddenly. One hand darted out from behind her, blurring as she hissed and struck at Zell's exposed belly. His huge, square hand chopped down and a honed sliver of metal spun off across the clearing. Cat-like he caught her by the hair, flung her onto her back with tapered legs flailing.
"Pretty good," Zell grinned. "Only you shoulda' waited until I got closer. But next time, sister, I'll break your arm."
like a butterfly pinned on the sand, Michiko spat at him, her rich lips curled back from sharp teeth, her naked body writhing in helpless fury. "Peasant-stupid, foreign peasant!"
Zell's grin faded. He put his foot on her stomach and pushed down. Breath sighed gustily from her and she clawed both hands at his ankle. "Peasant, huh?" Zell muttered. "Okay, miss high nose. You don't like show-in' your tail to everybody? Okay, so I'll make this hurt-really hurt. I'll lay you right here in the light-right here, with everybody watchin'!"
Danny Mixon quivered. I saw the shudder rake him. Unwillingly, his head came up and he braced against the sand with both hands. Zell's mean eyes struck at him, transfixed him.
"Don't," Zell said, soft and deadly. "I'll break your lousy back if you move one inch."
Danny shifted away from the flat eyes, looked away from the nude girl twisting on the sand. Involuntarily, his hand fumbled down and came up with the flat bottle of gin.
Scornfully, Zell laughed and turned back to Michiko, lifting his foot, leaning over her, fingering at his shorts.
Mary Tetson came out of the shadows, her heavy body wrapped in parachute nylon.
"Kane," she said firmly, "not here."
Zell stared at her, at her lined face and the silver of her hair. His thick lips twitched and his tongue darted out to wet them. Muscles coiled in the thick matting of hair across his heavy chest.
Mary Tetson faced him calmly, her own stare unwavering.
Abruptly, he looked away from her. "Okay," he said, "have it your way. But in the hut. In the hut and right now. And don't you get in my way again, Ma. You hear me now-don't you get in my way again."
Sighing, Mary pulled her makeshift gown closer. Zell stooped and dragged Michiko kicking to her feet. She tried to stab his eyes with her nails. He slapped her twice, great, ringing slaps that rocked her head and buckled her rounded knees. Effortlessly, he scooped up her sagging body and threw it over one shoulder, locking her slim ankles in one hand. Michiko's rich, midnight hair swung down to the backs of his knees as Zell swung around and carried her to his hut.
Danny screwed the cap back onto the gin bottle and returned it to his pocket. He got up slowly and brought another log to lay across the fire. Its weight fluttered bright sparks into the drifting breeze for a moment. Danny moved to the tent Jessie Marawski and the girl Helen were sharing. "Your fire watch, soldier," he said to the WAC.
Jessie mumbled and Danny went away. He was heading for the beach, I thought, where the only noises would be of clean waves, and of fresh salt wind in the trees; all uncruel things, all natural noises, unhurting, uncrying.
Other noises would be coming from Zell's hutgrunts, damp, threshing sounds of thrusting flesh upon shuddering flesh, and a woman crying out against the indignity of wrenching pain.
Ella drew back, pulled me back beside her in our nest that didn't seem warm and secure now. "Come to bed. There's nothing we can do about it."
I sank back and stared into the dark, listened to the stirring begin in Zell's hut. Once I thought I heard a broken whimper, but it wasn't repeated.
"When he gets to me," Ella said desperately, "I don't know what I'll do-run, try to kill him with something. But Michiko couldn't kill him, and she tried-she tried hard. I know; he's got to sleep sometime. Maybe I can kill him then."
I tucked the girl's head into my shoulder. "Don't think about it now."
"That Danny," she said. "He ran away with his bottle."
I moistened my lips. "He couldn't take on Zell. That brute would have mangled him."
"I couldn't have looked away," Ella whispered. "If he had done it to her right there by the fire, I couldn't have looked away."
I patted her head. "Mary stopped that. It was strange how he listened to her, almost as if she had some sort of control over him. He called her-Ma. Maybe he has a-
"Julie, why is it that I couldn't have looked away? I-I never did it, you know. Only when that-swine raped me, and then it hurt so much. Do you think I'm all right? I mean, Julie-"
"Hush, now-hush. Of course you're all right. What happened to you before was terrible, and you were so young. One day you'll find a man to love. He'll be kind and tender, and it will be all right then. Hush now."
Child-like, Ella snuggled to me and I held her close until her breathing deepened, until she had fallen asleep. Then I moved carefully from her side and sat up. I needed to walk, to run through the night, to plunge into chill water, anything that would take my mind off what was going on in Zell's hut.
Jessie sat by the fire, with Helen beside her. "It's like I told you, baby," she was saying. "You saw; you watched him hurt her, slap her around. It's like that with men. They don't know how to be good; they just want to dirty you. You don't want to be hurt, do you, baby?"
"No," Helen said. "No; don't let him hurt me, Jessie."
Jessie stroked the girl, running her fingers down the smooth back. "I won't let him hurt you, baby. But you see how it is with them, don't you? Men are animals. They can never do things for you like I can."
Trembling, Helen pressed her face between Jessie's heavy breasts. Jessie ran her fingers through the soft blonde hair, stroking, pampering. "He won't bother you, darling. I swear he won't."
Quietly, I slipped past them, my face burning, knots in my stomach. What had happened to the virginal girl from the salt pits on the beach? She had needed strength and comfort from herself, but Jessie could supply it. So she took the easy way.
At loose ends, wanting to search for Danny Mixon and yet somehow repelled by the thought, I paused at the wall of Mary Tetson's hut. Maybe she could advise me, or just talk with me. But she shared the hut with Eve Short, and I didn't feel I could take much of that girl's hidebound opinions just now.
They were talking, and I started to pass by, for they were working to ease the pains of Joy Santee; Mary had taken her in after Zell threw her out.
"I don't know why she should move in with us," Eve said. "She went to him in the first place, like a-a Jezebel."
Mary ignored her. "I can't do much, Joy, but maybe the cool water will soothe a little."
"That bastard." Joy said.
"Listen to her," Eve's voice was querulous. "Just listen to her foul mouth. She got no better than she deserved."
"Be quiet," Mary said.
"I won't be quiet. She switched right up to him, wanted him to put his dirty hands on her. I saw it; we all saw it. She slept with him every night and-and laughed out loud when he-did things to her in the dark. I heard her laughing."
"You sanctimonious bitch," Joy grated. "You're mad because he didn't take you. You sit there hugging yourself and twisting your ass, just thinking about him in there with that Jap. You're not kidding anybody, you know."
I heard Eve's outraged gasp. "Why-I never-I don't-"
Joy laughed bitterly. "The hell you don't. I've seen your kind before, sister. All mealy-mouthed and psalm-singing, but you'll drop your pants as quick as the rest of us-if anybody asks you."
Scuffling sounds from inside the hut, then Eve's voice again: "I-I won't stay another minute. I won't stay here and listen to the ravings of a dirty-mouthed prostitute."
Mary was calm as always. "Take some bedding with you, then. In the morning, when we're all thinking more clearly, we can make other sleeping arrangements."
I shrank into the shadows as Eve burst outside, a pile of nylon clutched to her breasts. She turned for a last volley. "You're taking a viper to your bosom, Mary Tetson-remember my words."
"Oh hell," Joy said. "Go lie by the fire. You can listen to Zell and the Jap better from there."
Eve darted across the clearing, running blindly. She didn't pause at the fire but headed down the path toward the beach. I drifted the other way, staying close to the clearing, wary of the shapeless darkness of the trees.
We were all touchy now, all thinning down from the lack of a proper diet, all edgy and ready to explode. Fear does that to people, I thought-fear and hate and perhaps, jealousy. The women were still women, cut off from men. Helen had found a substitute-for as long as Zell allowed it to last.
The rest of us? In time, most of us wouldn't mind becoming the transient mistresses of Kane Zell. Maybe we'd even draw straws for his attentions; maybe we'd fight each other for the brutal caresses of his virile body.
I shuddered and stumbled across a path. I followed it without thinking. I didn't realize at the moment that it led to the beach where Eve Short was.
Where Danny Mixon was, too.
I stopped at the crescent edge of whiteness, stopped to stare at the dark figures in the pristine sands, the shapes washed by moonlight. Again, I thought raggedly-again I was the outsider, the window peeper, the secret onlooker. I was once more the voyeur, thrilling at the sexual couplings of others. Danny and Eve Short were there on the beach; it couldn't be anyone else.
Well, this time I didn't have to watch. This time I could turn around and get the hell away from it, and the hell with Danny Mixon, too-now and forever. He was only a jackal, slinking at the rim of another animal's kill, too cowardly to fight, content to take the leavings. Danny was-
He wasn't moving. I frowned, eased closer, down to the last bush and stared hard at them. Danny was-I couldn't be too sure-but from there it looked as if he had already passed out, his arms stretched wide upon the sands.
Eve was talking to him in a low, husky voice. "I came to cover you up," she said. "It's the Christian thing to do. You can catch cold from the dew, and I thought-"
Her words trailed off, took up again. "Oh, I knew you'd been drinking, and I know that drinking men do some-crazy things. Danny? Danny, you don't have to pretend; not with me. I-I've been watching you, and I think you're not like that brute. I think you're kind of nice-even if, even if you drink.
"Men can't really be blamed for what they do when they drink, can they? My Aunt Agnes wouldn't agree with that, though. She told me to stay away from drinking men, that they'd hurt me, dirty me. Aunt Agnes said-"
Eve's soliloquy rambled on, and I felt more like a Peeping Tom than I had watching Sako and Danny make love. The words tumbled out of Eve, dusty from being long unused, a tale of childhood she'd never bared to anyone before. It was poignant, and it was terrible.
The old way was always best for Eve; her Aunt Agnes said so, and Auntie's word was law, coming direct from heaven. Eve was thirty-four years old, and she liked the touch of earrings on her unpowdered cheeks. They had to be plain, of course-simple gold earrings for pierced ears; not those gaudy screw-on things. A good, sensible woman always followed the old, tried ways; she could get along even when surrounded by evil-doers.
Auntie said disciples of the devil were always near, and Eve had seen them in the shamelessness of Joy Santee, the heathen Japanese, the carnal lust of Kane Zell, the promiscuous Army brats.
And the Nigra. Anyone knew that mulattos were just palin no good, or real black Nigras either. Aunt Agnes used to say the only Nigra girls in New Orleans who were virgins could outrun their brothers. But they brought it on themselves, flaunting their bodies shamelessly in thin cotton dresses, switching their hips so.
It was up to good women to take care their bodies didn't inflame men. That's why Auntie bought Eve plain, sensible clothing-long, loose skirts and flatheel shoes and ruffled blouses. That's why Auntie showed Eve how to bind her breasts flat so they wouldn't stick out.
And only loose women painted their faces, for paint attracted men like Eve's father. That wretched man had run off and left Auntie's sister ill nigh unto death, with a helpless baby girl.
Eve had long been ashamed of her father, for he was not only a wife deserter, but a gambler and drunkard who lusted after Jezebels.
Until Auntie died and went to her glory, Eve had stayed with her in the musty old house on Esplanade Street, going to church four times a week, sewing and playing the Victrola and reading the Good Book. But when the preacher said ashes to ashes over Auntie, Eve was on her own. She took all the money from the
Hibernia Bank and went to secretarial school, and the school found her a job with the government in Japan.
"Danny," she said now, "Danny, I'm telling you all about myself, so you'll know what kind of woman I am. I want you to know, Danny. I hurried down here to you, and I was conscious all the way of my skirt rubbing my thighs, of the touch of my blouse upon my-my nipples. There! I said it to you. You're drinking and you won't remember, so I can say things like that to you."
He didn't answer, didn't move.
"Danny?" she said anxiously. "Oh-maybe he's dead. Maybe the whiskey killed him. Danny?"
I saw her press an ear against his chest. "Danny-" she said, "wake up; please wake up."
He mumbled, turned slowly and buried his face in the crook of an arm.
Eve shook him. "Wake up, wake up!"
"Huh?" he mumbled and something else that died away into bubbles.
Eve crouched over him, tearing at her constricting clothing. She peeled off her thick, ruffled blouse and hurled it from her. She fought out of the long skirt and kicked it aside. Then a slip, and a masking bra, and long, unfeminine panties. She crouched naked over him, the moonlight playing over her body, gleaming from a body surprisingly full and lush and rounded.
She covered him with her body, squirmed seeking over him, grinding her pelvis hungrily into him, flattened the richness of her eager breasts against him, rotated and shook and gyrated in an unreasoning blindness of thirty-four bottled-up years.
Ragdoll loose, Danny lay there with his mouth open, sunken deep in a stupor that was only a hairline away from the final, total oblivion he sought. Eve moved her lips across his mouth, her body thrusting, shuddering. She whispered in his ear, dug her fingernails into his flesh as she pulled him to her this way, that way.
"Huh?" Danny muttered again and flopped his arms slowly, weakly.
Snarling, Eve pushed him from her. In rage, in disgust, she spurned him with her bare foot as she rose shakily to curse him steadily, viciously with words that spewed up from a tortured ego, from agonizing frustration. After a while, weakened, she reeled away from him toward the water.
I started up from my hiding place, afraid she was going to throw herself into the sea. My hands were stretched out to her, but my lips were numb and mute.
She waded into the waves, but not for suicide. She stood navel-deep in the cool water, both hands laving her erectile breasts with its chill, the waves washing over her hips and aching thighs. But I knew the sea couldn't reach the thing burning deep inside her body. Only a man could put out that fire, and the man wasn't Danny Mixon.
My sympathy went out to Eve Short as she tried to wash away her need in the ocean, but I also felt a strange, shameful sort of gratitude. If she hadn't come down here, if she hadn't offered herself to a man too drunk to realize it, I might have been in her place. I might have done the things she did, may have shamed and degraded myself in an identical manner.
For the flame was in me, too, and now I knew it for what it was. I walked away from the beach, moved along the treeline until I was far from them, and kept walking until my feet stumbled in tiredness, until my mind was blank from exhaustion. Only then did I turn for camp and find my hut. When I crawled in beside Ella Martin, it was almost daylight, but my fires were banked. I only hoped they could remain like that.
Sleep wouldn't come, and I tried to rationalize things I felt, tried to take apart our island society and look at it closely. After sunrise, Zell would be gone to search for animals in the thick brush on the other side of the island. He liked being the hunter because he liked to kill.
I remembered what Danny had said about our island-that it was probably somewhere in the Marianas, one of a thousand coral dots in a limitless sea. It showed signs of having been settled once, and I wondered what had driven away the settlers-hurricanes, the war, or atomic testing. I didn't want to think of disease.
We were lucky; other, forgotten people had left taro plants, had willed us a legacy of pigs gone wild, of chickens that had regained their jungle cunning and survived the departure of their former owners. There was food here, in the trees and in the sea, but we would have to struggle for it. We would have to erect more permanent shelters, too, and manufacture clothes when what we had wore out. We were going to have to do many things none of us had ever imagined ourselves doing, in order to live.
The climate was fine now, warm and ideal, but that could change suddenly when the typhoons came. We'd have to battle nature itself, then. I rolled closer to Ella Martin and wondered about all the people in the world outside-if a world still existed outside-wondered about their talking wistfully of returning to the soil, where they could live simply, without the pressures of the rat race.
They should be here with us, I thought. They should be where life is rough and will be even rougher, where women's hands turn brown and grow ugly calluses from manual labor. Then they'd be happy to return to the pushbutton society they complain of. For it isn't civilization that's all wrong, but the men with misplaced values who run it.
Here, we had all that the professional promisers of the welfare state offer us-food and clothing and shelter; but we had to work for it. The politicians couldn't tax one segment of us to give our earnings to another; here we wouldn't be penalized for initiative and fined for ambition-for up to ninety-one per cent of our incomes when we were alive and up to seventy-five per cent of our legacies after we died.
There were plenty of reasons for enjoying our lives away from the benevolent thumb of the big brother government, and plenty of other reasons for wishing we were back in civilization. I wanted a hot, soapy shower and a cup of coffee. I wanted a silken nightie and a deep soft mattress.
But perhaps nobody had those things any more. The bomb had gone off.
America's blunders into socialism had cost it every luxury that had been built up over the short time in which capitalism had been tried.
But worrying about a world that might not exist was foolish. There were enough problems here to keep me occupied for a long, long time.
After breakfast, I'd have a new job-weeding the grown-over vegetable field Zell had discovered. Ella would help me. Zell would bring in the bloody meat; the Japanese girls would continue to snag seaweed and hunt for shellfish. Zell's orders were to stay away from the plane wreck until the sharks had finished with the bodies still in it, or in the sea around it.
I wondered if Michiko would be with the others this morning, if she'd be able to walk erect in the ruins of her pride, after what Zell did to her last night. I supposed she would be at work as usual, whether she wanted or not. Briefly, I puzzled over the reason she had fought him, why she'd tried to kill him in the firelight when he shamed her.
The Japanese were casual about sex; I knew that much from my stay in Japan. The real blow to Michiko must have been loss of face, the public humiliation so disturbing to Orientals. Or was it that Michiko, unlike Danny Mixon, held individuality dear? Individuality, I imagined Danny saying, is a luxury for the strong. Back in civilization, weren't the shadowy terrifying "They" all-powerful?
Our island could be a peaceful spot, without Zell. The pain and troubles of the world were far from us, but here we manufactured our own, because even here people insisted upon retaining poor values to live by. Here was prejudice, pointing pale fingers at Ella; here was race consciousness, the Japanese united against the others. Here was the savage-Zell; the deviate-Jessie; the do-gooder-Eve; the has-been hero-Danny Mixon.
And me-the widowed, the once-loved hoping to recapture a faint glimmer of love.
All of us would go on almost as we had before, cheating, lying, snooping, all our flaws magnified because of our enforced closeness here. I closed my eyes, smiling sardonically at our bucolic garden of Eden, populated by fourteen Eves, one drunken Adam and a powerful snake.
CHAPTER 6
IN THE MORNING, THE ARROGANCE of Michiko Kuwaye was gone, battered out of her during the long and arduous night. As she came from Zell's hut, she moved uncertainly, holding the torn remnants of her dress to her bruised and clawed body. Her shoulders were slumped, and she averted her face from us.
I took a quick check of the other women, and read several emotions into their watching eyes. Ella Martin showed compassion, as did Mary Tetson. With shame for their own, the Japanese had looked quickly away. Faye Herman mixed superiority with envy, and others showed fear, expectancy, or pure hate.
Zell came out and stood wide-legged, grinning as he scratched his matted chest. Stalking to the hollowed log that served as a washing place, he plunged thick arms into the cold water and threw it over head an shoulders, snorting and wallowing.
Still dripping, he strutted to Mary and took the plate she held out for him. Breakfast was the inevitable stew-this time young pork laced with long-boiled palm hearts and salted with sea water. It was palatable, barely, but Zell chewed and smacked with gusto. He was swiftly finished, and squatted on his haunches to lay out the day's program.
"Mixon," he grunted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, "you stick to the wood supply, and when that's caught up, chop bamboo."
Mutely, Danny nodded. I felt a flare of anger at him, knowing that he shouldn't do anything to irritate Zell, but nonetheless angry because he took orders so meekly.
"Rest of you," Zell continued, "Stay with the salt and food. I'm gonna' go check the snares, I set yesterday, and get after the big red pig I run across. Might get a fight outta' that one, better than the battle that black boar put up. These ain't barnyard pigs; you got to put steel in 'em-quick and deep."
Zell felt good today, I thought; every inch the virile conqueror. Because of his rape of Michiko last night? I wondered if that made him feel better, more masterful. If so, why was Zell looking for approbation now, why was he bragging about the difficulties of the hunt?
I felt almost a physical jolt along my spine when I found his eyes locked with mine. "You're a good-look-in' woman, Julie," he said. "But I got a hunch you think too damned much. A woman don't have to think; all she's gotta do is enjoy herself. You remember that, Julie-just like you remember that I'm the big dog I around here, and the big dog always sleeps light. I don't know what kinda' ideas you had when you went prowlin' around last night, but I thought I'd let you know I heard every step you took."
"I-I was restless," I said.
His grin was wet and knowing. "Yeah? That little act by the fire kind of shake you up some? You don't hafta' wait around for me to point you out, if you get too eager. You can come on over to my hut any time, any time at all."
"I'll remember that," I said.
Beady, glittering, his eyes probed into mind. "That goes for your buddy, too. Hell-I ain't choosy. Of course, I'll get around to all of you, sooner or later. We got plenty of time; we got all the time there is."
Burly, swaggering, he strode away into the trees, spear in hand, the hairy columns of his chunky legs carrying him balanced and smooth. All of us watched him go; every pair of eyes was focused upon his back, and Kane Zell knew it.
When he was gone, the clearing brightened; the sun felt warmer. I went to the cook fire and filled a plate for Michiko. At her side, I said: "Try some; you'll need your strength."
Her hands were shaking when she took the coconut shell. Lifting it to her bruised mouth, she forced her throat to carry some of the food to her stomach.
Sako and Kyoko sighed in concerted relief. "Good," Sako said.
Michiko's eyes flashed at them. "You thought the disgrace would be too much, that I would perform the ritual of suicide. No; I will live-so I can kill him."
Sako and Kyoko exchanged glances. "He is strong," Kyoko said in Japanese, "and sleeps like a cat."
"Speak English," Michiko said. "This woman is our friend. Zell can be killed; any man can be killed. When it is done, we will return to Japan."
Sako was startled. "Return-but-"
Determinedly, Michiko chewed a piece of meat. "A raft. He will not want us to go; he wants us all for his whores. So we will build the raft in secret and gather food and water for the journey. When it is ready, we will kill him and sail to Nippon."
"That's a large order," I said. "It's going to take know-how. If you do manage to build the raft, who's going to sail it?"
Michiko gulped more stew. "Kyoko's father was a fisherman. She knows something of the sea, and the sea has always been a friend to the Japanese. We can do it."
Sako shook her head. "I-I not know. Okay here; only Zell-san bad.
"Fool!" Michiko flared. "Because you gave yourself to the other one, because you married one of them? Do you know why your husband married you, Sako? Because you were good in bed, better than his own women; that's all. And because you would serve him, as his own women will not."
Sako looked away. Kyoko chewed her lips.
"You will help with the raft," Michiko said. "Think, and you will understand that the round eyes are destroying themselves out here. They are bombing each other's cities, as they did Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Back in our homeland, we will wait for them to tear out each other's throats. When they are bled dry, Nippon will regain its rightful place in the sun."
"But-what about GI's in Japan?" Sako asked.
"Do you think they will stay to watch Japan while their own cities are burning? They will flee, and take their boots off our necks. We will be free again."
"Need strong raft," Sako said, obeying.
"Takusan food and water," Kyoko added.
Michiko smiled at them and touched her bruised lips. "We are patient. Impatience is a failing of foreigners. I will be patient, too. I will not kill Kane Zell until we are ready to go."
"I wish you luck," I said.
Michiko had forgotten I was there. "We may take you with us, Julie."
"That's a long way off," I said. "And I'm a foreigner, remember?"
"Yes," she said. "That's true."
In the weed-choked vegetable field, Ella and I worked silently, sweatily, until the sun was high overhead. Neither of us wanted to talk about last night; neither of us wanted to think about Zell's choice for the coming night. After lunch in the clearing, a lunch brightened by Zell's continued absence, we relaxed in the shade-mice loafing in while the cat was away.
Helen Fergus came hesitantly over to stand beside her young friend Elena. They hadn't been seeing much of each other lately-not since Helen had been taken in by Jessie.
"Hi," Helen said.
"Hi, yourself." Elena's voice was chilly. "So you got around to talking to me again."
Helen reddened. "I'm sorry. I've been-kind of busy. You know, with the salt and everything."
"And with Jessie."
Helen's chin came up. "Yes, with Jessie."
"You look-different," Elena said. "Sort of grown up and older. I guess Jessie's all right, if you like it that way. But I figure a man is better. You know-a real man, like Kane."
Helen's mouth set. "He was awful, beating Michiko like that. He's only an animal that hurts women, and Jessie says all men are that way."
"He won't hurt me; I won't fight him."
"Elena! Do you mean you want him to take you to bed?"
The girl shrugged. "Sure, and you would, too-if you weren't all mixed up."
"No," Helen shuddered. "No, no. It's-different with Jessie. She-she won't let Zell hurt me; she promised."
Elena laughed. "Oh, she won't?"
"No, we'll run away."
"Run? Run where, stupid? Listen, if Kane decides he wants you, that's it. Jessie won't be able to do anything about it."
Jessie strode up to them. Shaggy-haired, tanned, she loomed over the.girls. "Is that so? You'd do better to come in with us, Elena."
"No thanks," Elena said.
Jessie stared at the girl, then reached for Helen's hand. "Come on, honey-she doesn't know any better."
Jessie lifted a big hand, face hardening.
"Let it drop," Danny said from the edge of the clearing. "We've got enough trouble."
Jessie lowered heavy brows at him. "The little bitch got smart."
"I heard," Danny said. "Let her alone."
Jessie's mouth curled. "Listen to the big man. You're big when Zell is out in the woods. When he comes in, I'll let him know how big you are."
Danny came slowly over to us. "While you're about it, let him know you were on the make for another girl. He might not like the competition."
Jessie cursed him and towed Helen into the trees.
I said to Danny, "You surprise me. Jessie might have hurt the girl."
"Yeah-I'm a big man, around woman."
"Give yourself a little credit, Danny. You have your good points, and you weren't always-"
"Weak? No, but who's like they were before. You're different than you were yesterday; I'm different. Yesterday I didn't have a hangover."
"Yesterday you hadn't watched a rape."
Danny looked down at his hands; they were blistered and scratched from hacking at branches with a dull, improvised axe. His bloodshot eyes retreated upon themselves, masking old pain that had risen to the surface.
"I've seen many rapes; French women, German women, Italians, Koreans-you name the brand. And not only women, but children, and cities and men.
There are a thousand forms of rape-each as violent, each as dirty as another. Some rapes dirty a body; others dirty the soul."
I wanted to touch him, to hold him close. Instead, I said, "Danny-everything isn't dirty. There are many good, clean things in this world of ours."
"That good clean world of ours is tearing itself apart with bombs right now."
"No, that's somebody else's world, Danny. Ours is here, this island and ourselves. There must be other places, too-other islands where people aren't killing and destroying."
"I don't give a damn," he said. "When the booze wears off, I won't care what goes on in either world."
Hefting his dull axe, he went back up the path into the woods.
Ella touched my arm. "We'd better get back to work, too. You know-Danny was lucid today; for a while; until he gets back to his jug."
"He was almost sober," I agreed, "and hating every moment of it."
Ella said, "He made Jessie let the girl alone."
"He doesn't like to see evil."
"Who does?" Ella said. "Only animals like Zell. But we can't all hide from evil. It's got to be faced when it comes."
I stopped in the path and stared at her. "You're playing tricks with me, Ella. You're trying to prepare me for the time when Zell picks me for his bedmate."
Her face was dark. "He'll try it. I heard him talking to you this morning."
"It won't matter," I said. "I won't let it matter."
"Don't try to kid me," Ella murmured. "Some of the others might relax and enjoy it, but not you, Julie. Not with Zell."
"Not with Zell," I agreed.
With anyone? With Danny Mixon?
Ella and I didn't have to worry-yet. Plump Faye Herman was Zell's next pick, and she went giggling to him. Placid and housewifely, she patted at her hair and smoothed her dress over her ample hips as she accepted her new role.
Danny was staying away from camp as much as possible, and I was certain his intake of alcohol was dropping. He was probably trying desperately to make his dwindling supply last, trying to stave off the inevitable day when the last drink was gone.
And in the evenings, I saw him prowling the beaches, walking, walking until he could sleep without the drug of another drink or two. The sun had brushed life into his hair and tanned his skin, and his eyes looked better. He was eating more often, too, and fleshing out. But I could see that the flesh was still soft, and that the softness within him hadn't hardened at all.
In his constant moving about, he must have discovered what I already knew-the signal fire laid ready and waiting on top of the ridge; the cunningly hidden framework of the raft. The Japanese girls had been lucky; Zell ranged the other end of the island where the deep woods provided cover for the game he enjoyed killing. But if he ever stumbled across the raft, they were in for real trouble.
Zell would never allow them to leave this kingdom he ruled. He'd prevent any escape from the harem he owned, the harem he was slowly sampling, one by one. As Zell had said, he was in no hurry, and I thought he liked to build the suspense of waiting and wondering. He liked to make us fret and worry, anticipating his next choice.
The days passed in swift succession, filled with the very real labor of gathering food, of strengthening the huts, and of laying in a small stockpile of dried meats and fruits against some terrible day when we couldn't fish or hunt or harvest the edible roots and berries.
The stockpile would have grown more quickly, but the Japanese girls were funneling food into their own secret cache, constantly preparing for the finishing of the raft and their escape from the island. If Zell hadn't bsen preoccupied with his women and his hunting, he might have noticed.
Faye Shannon lasted almost a week as Zell's mistress. She was replaced by Kyoko Smith. Experienced and eager to please, eager to hold his attention away from her friends, she threw herself into her work. I suspected that not all her zeal was dedication to the cause. Kyoko was all woman, and sleeping with Kane Zell wasn't a chore for her.
She had been his favorite for several days when the restlessness began to show on Zell. Tension swept over the camp, half-felt, half-seen, as we looked at each other and tried to decide which of us that thick, beckoning finger would point at next, which of us would have to go into his hut and spread ourselves for the onslaught of that massive, hairy body.
My turn? I thought-my turn?
And with my stomach knotting, with my throat aching and a dryness in my mouth, I couldn't work. I left the field and wandered into the trees, trying to walk away my fears and my problems as Danny Mixon did.
If you're attempting to hide, even a large city can become a small place. Our island was tiny to begin with, but I covered its length without seeing anyone else. I came to a coral headland, to a part of the island I'd never been before. This was Zell's territory, wilder, more savage than the other slope of the ridge.
I was tired then, worn out by the frantic rat race of mind and emotions. I crawled atop a mossed-over rock and stretched out in the sun. I was asleep before I even felt drowsiness creeping over me.
A voice awakened me, startled me into wide-eyed alertness. I lay still, listening, puzzling over the voice that answered its own questions. Carefully, I edged to the rim of the rock and peeped down at the sliver of beach below.
Eve Short was stripping on the sand, taking off her clothes and talking to herself. "I won't go barefoot like the others," she said. "Not as long as my shoes hold out. Savages, all of them."
She fumbled behind her back for the bra catch. "But I think-I just might-stop wearing this thing. Aunt Agnes isn't here, and she always made me buy these two sizes too small, anyway."
Her breasts arched out in quick freedom, round, full, stemmed. The sun brushed them with gold as she stooped to wriggle out of her skirt and panties. Then she was as I'd seen her that night when she tried to make love to Danny-nude, gleaming and amazingly beautiful. She waded into the surf where salt spray diamonded her silken skin, and I remembered that I had never seen Eve bathe with the rest of us. I suddenly felt like an intruder on her private beach.
She let herself sink into the water, entranced with the green sparkle that caressed her long, white legs and tickled her pussy. A wave foamed over her and she laughed aloud, the echoes ringing free and resounding into the trees.
He came out of nowhere, drifting like a jungle cat, on the balls of silent-padding feet. He came furry and stalking, the red-stained spear swinging loosely in one knotted fist.
Zell stood without sound, without motion, and watched Eve cavort in the water. She rose with her back to him, to the beach, waves frothing about her knees. Her long hair, unhampered by pins and nets, hung down her curving back in a dripping cascade, its curling ends touching her flared hips. She turned then, lifting her arms and stretching them to the sun, her head thrown back, breasts thrusting full and high. Water beaded her flat stomach, sparkled along the sweep of her hips and the roundness of her thighs, the crisp patch.
"Who woulda' figured it?" Zell said.
She saw him, watched in frozen horror as he took one step, then another, and the water washed over his feet. Eve remained that way, arms lifted, body arched, until he kicked out of his shorts. Then she screamed und ran clumsily through the waves.
Water sprayed high about them as he caught her, wrapped his arms tightly around her scissoring legs and dragged her into the shallows. She flinched when he rolled her over on her back, and brought her arms up to cross them over her breasts. Then she lay utterly still, eyes squeezed tight shut, her body half under water. Her mouth was open; her lips curled away from her teeth.
A wave foamed over them. Eve closed her mouth against it and opened it to cry out against the sudden, thrusting pain of Zell's massive rod. Zell muffled her lips with his own, and her screams broke against his teeth. Savagely then, she was fighting to slide out from under him, twisting in the shifting sands, in the wild, bubbling waves, biting at the fur of his chest, clawing at the hard muscles of his back.
Eve was enraged, engulfed by unreasoning panic, frightened by the explosion of pain which was changing, changing under the steady, relentless pressure. I saw the moment when the pain changed to something exquisitely sweet, saw her clinging to him and lifting, lifting-pushing her pussy at him.
For a long time afterward, Eve wouldn't let him go. Zell had to push her away. She followed him up onto the beach and stood close as he drew on his shorts. He sat down, and she sat down beside him, touching her knee to his leg.
"You never had it before," Zell said.
"No; you were the first."
Zell shook his head. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-four," she said. "That won't matter, will it?"
Zell laughed. "Why the hell should it? The way you use that body, I wouldn't care if you were sixty. How come you never been with a man before?"
Eve pressed her knees into his muscled thigh. "I didn't know-how it was. They lied to me, and I didn't know."
"Well," Zell grunted, "you sure as hell know now. You can make up for all that lost time."
"You'll take me? You'll take me into your hut tonight and-and make love to me again?"
Shaking himself like a bear, Zell stood up. "You better believe it. I got a hunch you're gonna' be there a long time."
"Have you?" Eve was tremulous, fluttery. "Kane, I don't know how to-to do things. You'll teach me, Kane darling? You'll show me how, so I can make you happy?"
"Damn right I will." His hand was cruel on her naked breast, but Eve gloried in the pain. "Come on; time to start back for supper."
She followed him gladly, puppy-like, snatching at her clothes and struggling into them swiftly, as if she was afraid he'd leave her behind.
I lay limp and exhausted on the rock, drained and spent-almost like I had been the woman in Zell's arms, instead of Eve. I was certain of one basic truthI couldn't go on this way, playing the voyeur, blundering into the sights and sounds of other women's love-making.
Plodding back across the island, I told myself Eve Short was in trouble, that she was confusing her first sexual experience with love, that she thought Kane Zell would be content with the fruits her body had to offer, and would search for no others. She was a fool. I was sorry for Eve Short.
CHAPTER I
They knew about it by the time I reached camp. It had been plain in the swing of Eve's body, in the adoring way she followed Zell around. When I came to the supper fire, I could see it, too. Eve was different, somehow taller and proud.
Only Elena Marquez missed the transition. She sat alone, legs crossed beneath her. Each time Zell looked her way, she tugged at her skirt, exposing another inch of shapely, tanned leg. But when she saw at last, when she realized the significance of Zell's clumsy stroking of Eve's hip, Elena turned pale. She made a hissing noise and fled into the trees.
Broad back propped against his hut pole, Zell stretched out his thick legs and lounged. Eve caught up a plate and pushed up to the cooking fire, holding it out to Mary.
"Here," she said, "fill this up. It's for Kane."
Without comment, Mary heaped the plate and watched Eve hurry back to her master. Then she offered a scoop of food to Danny. "Here-you're always in a hurry to gulp and run away."
Danny grinned at her. "Not tonight. Am I seeing things, or did the church mouse awaken?"
"Eve? You aren't seeing things. I only hope she doesn't get hurt." Mary's eyes searched him. "Why aren't you going to hide?"
Danny balanced his plate. "Just thought I'd go over and sit with Julie and Ella, if they'll let me."
Mary nodded. "They'll let you."
He sat across from us on a smooth stone. "Get your daily news yet?"
I smiled at him. "It's no longer news, but still surprising. Eve-quoting scripture and holding herself so aloof and unattainable."
Ella said: "People in the scriptures had lovers and babies."
Danny ate well, cleaning his plate, commenting in quick, bright asides about our life here, without rancor, without bitterness. It was as if something dark and menacing had moved back into the shadows.
"You're feeling better, Danny," I said. "It shows. I haven't heard you laugh before-not that way."
Soberly, Ella watched him for a moment. "He looks better, too, with a little meat on his bones; almost healthy."
"Sun, work and food," Danny said. "I'd forgotten what they were like."
Ella was still serious. "Why, Danny?"
He blinked. "Why, what? Why did I run out on sun, food and work?"
I touched Ella's arm, but she ignored me. "You know that's not what I mean. Why are you an alcoholic?"
The bantering mood went out of his face. "I don't know. I've looked, but I can't find the why. Call it a part missing from my make-up; call it a spare wheel normal people don't have. I don't know the reason I crawled into the bottle, and I'm past caring." He stood up, stared over our heads into the darkening sky. "Yes-I'm a long, long way from giving a damn."
After he had walked away, Ella chewed at her lips. "That hurt him."
"Somebody has to make him take a good look at himself," I said.
"You're right," Ella said. "But won't that make him run away from what he sees? Won't he go get drunk again?"
I picked up our empty plates. "He might, but he can't have very much more whiskey hidden away. He might as well get it out of his system, drink up what he has left and get it over with."
Nodding, Ella said, "Then when it's gone, maybe we can help him. He'll need us then, really need us."
I was silent for a while. A vague, formless thought pushed at me. Not a thought, really; not something logical and concrete, a perception, oddly insistent.
"Ella," I said softly, so that the others wouldn't hear, "you always say 'we.' I'm slowly beginning to admit to myself that Danny means more to me than a lost boy who needs a mother. Does he mean something more to you, also?"
Ella stiffened, her eyes wide. "I-I-it's just because of you, Julie. I-I love you and I want to help you. Why-I wouldn't do anything to hurt you. I'd never do that, Julie-never.
I took her hand. "I know you wouldn't, Ella. And I wouldn't hurt you. We're too close for that. If Danny ever gets sober, and the goodness in him comes out-why-why, then if you find yourself in love with him that-that will be f-fine."
"Don't," Ella said. "Don't. I can't think about love. This is a crazy place, a mad world where the old rules don't apply, but I can't think about love. I-I don't want to think about it. Julie, you don't remember it any more, but I'm colored. Even if you didn't want Danny, he wouldn't want me. Not like that; not real and fine. Not like that."
I brushed at my eyes with a hand that was suddenly trembling. "It wouldn't matter to him. Not if he's what I think he is, what I hope he is."
Ella's mouth softened, quivering. "Hey,-here we are, talking all crazy about loving a man, and worrying about getting in each other's way, while all the time, Danny Mixon might be all wrapped up in somebody else."
"No," I said slowly, "no, he isn't wrapped up with anyone, with Sako, that was just one of those things. He didn't mean it anymore than she did."
"After he sobers up," Ella persisted, "he might mean it. If he sobers up, that is. If he doesn't tear himself apart when the whisky runs out, and if he doesn't run off and try something foolish."
"We won't let him," I said. "You help me, Ella-and we won't let him."
"And if he straightens out and finds someone else-maybe Sako, maybe Joy or that anxious teenager?"
I tucked my legs beneath me and smoothed my skirt. "If that happens, there's nothing we can do about it, I guess. At least, we'll see him as he really is; at least we'll know the truth."
"If," Ella repeated. "The whole situation is full of ifs. If Kane Zell doesn't care who Danny chooses at the time. And that man is going to care-if for no other reason than to show Danny who's boss."
I nodded, and we went together to clean our plates, and to help Mary Tetson ready the fire for the night. Already, the swift darkness was cloaking the trees around us, and the other women were going to their huts.
Danny was off somewhere in the night, and the Japanese women, tired from their secret labors, slept soundly. Joy Santee sat staring into the flickering fire.
We heard the laughter from Zell's hut-loud and ringing free and unashamed. There in the dark, Eve Short was learning all the things she had wanted so belatedly, so desperately, to know.
"You know," Ella said, "that doesn't sound like Eve at all. It sounds like a stranger laughing."
"It is a stranger," I said. "We don't know her, and I don't think Eve knew her, before this."
Ella was thoughtful, musing without coy shock at the sounds flowing with increasing tempo from Zell's lair. "Julie-maybe it's like they say; maybe good can come out of bad, after all. Zell-that man is an animal, a dirty, deadly animal; yet he's making Eve happy. Isn't that good out of evil?"
"No." I said. "It may be greater evil; in the end. She's awakened now. She's thrown off the shackles of her belief. Zell can kill that, and he will-when he throws her out and takes himself another woman."
"But doesn't Eve realize-"
"No. I think Eve Short, for the first time in her life, is in love. It's a sick love, granted, but after being a slave to a religion all her life she is beginning to realize that the body is something good, not evil as the church says."
Danny had run out of whiskey.
I stood at the edge of the trees, with Ella close behind me, and watched him shake the last few drops out of the final bottle into his gaping mouth. All the tapering off, the stretching out of his supply had prolonged this moment, but now it was here.
The last drink hadn't been enough to quiet him. Or perhaps it had, but his mind, facing the stark fact of no more alcohol, had jumped the gun. The fear was branded upon his face, the frantic craving for one more drink, just one more.
Fascinated, I watched his hands. The tremors were there, faint as yet, but growing stronger with each passing second. They would get stronger still, more powerful, spreading through his body until they shook him apart.
Ella and I hurried onto the beach. He looked up at us, eyes pleading. "Sako," he muttered. "She's out there working the plane again. I wonder-I wonder if she's been through the pilot's compartment. They carry bottles, sometimes. I wonder if she's looked there."
"Danny," I said, "don't think about it."
He snarled at me. "Don't think about it? That's easy for you to say; it's easy for all of you. None of you know, damn you."
Ella tried, too. "Danny, why don't you come into the shade with us, and we'll-"
Suddenly, he was on his feet, trotting away from us, ripping off his tattered shirt, racing for the ocean.
"Danny!" I screamed, but it was too late. He was already swimming, heading for the marker log, puffing and straining as he fought the waves.
No, I thought raggedly, we didn't know the ugly, clawing craving that would drive a man to this, force one more swallow of alcohol-a search that might very him to expend all his waning strength on a search for well be hopeless from the start.
Danny's feet lifted. He plunged under water.
Wetness lapped my feet as I whipped out of shorts and halter. The whiteness of my hips and breasts was startling against the rest of my browned skin. I pushed out into an oncoming wave and rode it until I could myself for the bobbing marker log.
"Keep going!" Ella called, and as I rolled with the next stroke, I saw her dark head moving in my wake. We were together.
My hands clung to the wet roughness of the log for a moment while I pumped air hard into my straining lungs. When the oxygen dizziness came, I nipped my feet high and dived.
I met Danny as he was struggling up through the sun-shot green depths, and took his pawing hand to help him to the surface. Heads touching, we bobbed out into the air. Ella reached for us, grabbed Danny's shoulder, and dragged him to the log. Arms hung limply over the market, eye closed, Danny floated limply, gasping for air, his face white.
"Idiot," Ella said, "you'll drown down there."
Lips against the rough log, Danny muttered it would be better than the DTs.
"Damned fool," Ella said. "He'll drown just trying to make it back to shore, unless we help him. Here-take his other arm and we'll push him back."
It took little effort to pry his fingers away from the log. Kicking, pushing with one hand and stroking with the other, we coasted him through the waves and brought him to shore.
We had to help him stand up, had to prop him between us to slip the shorts onto his wet body. We were unconscious of our own nakedness pressing against him.
He lay quivering on the sand then, fingers twitching, head rolling sickly from side to side. "Shoulda' let me go," he mumbled, "tougher this way."
We stared at his hunched body, then at each other.
"What can we do?" I whispered.
"We may have to sit on him," Ella said. "We might have to stop him from hurting himself. Let's get him into the shade. If you'll go get some fresh water, I'll stay with him."
I snatched up my shorts and halter, worked my damp body into them. "And after that?"
Ella was drying herself with cupped hands. "I've got a hunch Sako has already pretty well stripped the plane, and is holding things out from Zell. Maybe she found a first aid kit."
"Do you think she'll give it to us?"
Ella nodded. "If it was one of the others, I wouldn't bet on it. But Sako-likes us. Try her. If she found a kit, there may be Seconal in it, or morphine."
"Morphine? But wouldn't that be dangerous?"
"No more than the spasms he might go into. Let's take him to the trees now, and you hurry back with the water."
I couldn't find Sako. I raced to the hidden raft, to the signal pile, but I couldn't find her. When I came back with the water, my throat was burning and my lungs ached. But one glance at Danny told me I didn't know what pain was.
The sickness pushed up out of his knotted belly. He retched, gasped, tried to get rid of the stuff in his throat. Only bitter water came out; Ella wiped his mouth. "Hang on, Danny."
"Oh hell; oh hell, hell, hell."
He was between us, and we were helpless. "I know, Danny," I said. "Stay in there and fight. Punch it out, Danny."
The phrases were unfamiliar to me; somehow I'd put them together from half-remembered nights at the Army smokers, from the things my husband used to say, when he trained the fighters. My husband? Had I ever had one?"
His lips peeled back. "I shoulda' figured it out. shoulda' got some coconuts and fermented 'em, or some potatoes, anything-Julie, Ella-you'll do that for me, won't you? Please? Please, dammit."
I put my hand on his forehead. The skin was hot and tight. "Can you swallow some water, Danny?"
"I don't need water. I need a drink. Get me a drink, Julie."
Ella's dark eyes were pain-softened, commiserating. "There are no drinks, Danny."
The shakes hit him hard, then-quick-raw spasms that raced through him. He retched again. His eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled up.
"I hope he stays out for a while," Ella breathed. "Look at him sweat and shiver."
"What's going on inside must be worse," I said. "I feel so damned helpless."
"All we can do is wait it out. When he comes to again, we'll force water down him. He's dehydrated. If he throws it up, we'll just feed him more-until it stays down."
My fingers knotted together. "Will he-will he die?"
"Who knows? Can you handle him while I go after some broth? I'd better get it before Zell knows."
I nodded, "He's so weak, anyone could handle him. And-thank you, Ella, for helping Danny-and me."
She hesitated. "I'm not so sure I'm doing it for you."
"It doesn't matter. It's only important that he gets well."
"That's right," Ella said, and moved off through the trees.
Here, sitting through what might be a death watch over this man, I had to think about Ella and me-and Danny Mixon. If I loved this man, why was it so? The closeness with Ella might be a primary cause, my wanting the same things she did, the parallel outlook we were developing together.
Was it party because Ella and I were sisters in every sense but the legal definition of the term, and that our unconscious sibling rivalry had grown secretly, keeping pace with our deepening affection for each other?
I listened to Danny's ragged breathing, to the salt wind in the trees, and thought of a simpler answer. I was a woman, and love had come again to me. Ella was a woman, too-separated from her own race by her emotions, cut off from other races because she was what she was. Yet she wanted what all women desire a man who would love her.
How could I hurt Ella? How could I tear away from this lovely, lonely girl, all the tender things she had never been allowed to possess before? I had been loved once. Was it greedy of me to insist upon a second helping? I didn't think so.
A twig snapped beyond us. "Ella," I said.
But there was someone with her-Kane Zell.
Ella's mouth was set, her eyes hard. "He heard Mary telling me to mix some of that sugar cane juice with the water for Danny, and he came along."
I said, "I tried to give him some more water. He can't hold it down. Isn't there anything else we can do?"
Zell laughed. "Yeah-get him a case of booze."
I ignored him. "Maybe the sugar water will work-"
Zell's hand closed on my shoulder, hard and hurting. "Why mess with that drunk, baby? Now if you're lookin for a man-"
Ella helped me. Scornfully, her voice cut at him. "If Julie was looking for a man, you couldn't qualify."
He let me go, his face darkening momentarily. But then he grinned wolfishly. "That goes for you, too high yella'. When you get ready-and you will-you'll have to come to me. Mixon won't make it."
Ella slid a few feet away from him, poised to flee. "I'll never be that ready."
"The hell you won't. Your drawers come off like any other high yella's-quick and easy. You'll come to see me some night."
Ella stared at him, moving farther away, putting distance between them. "The only place I want to see you," she said distinctly, "is in hell."
Breath hissed between his clenched teeth, but Ella darted away into the trees like a frightened deer, running high and fast on her toes.
"Zell," I said, "be satisfied with what you have; be satisfied with Eve Short. Don't force yourself on women who hate you."
"like you and the nigger? Listen, I got you, too-both of you. Maybe you don't know it, but you're mine-like Eve is mine, like everybody on this whole damned island is mine. Ella belongs to me, you belong to me. When I decide to lay you, I'll do it, and both of you will take it and like it."
I couldn't look at him. Instead, I watched the sick sweats come and go on Danny's unconscious face. "What does that prove?" I asked. "That you're bigger and stronger than us? An ape could do the same thing, but it won't make him a man."
"What the hell do I care?" Zell grunted. "I get what I want, any time, any place. I always get what I want."
"You only think you do," I said.
His grin was white and savage. "If there's anything I can't have, I don't want it."
"Poor Kane," I said. "Nobody has ever loved you, have they?"
"Poor Kane? Poor Kane? Hell, I'm right on top of the whole damned world! Don't you go feelin' sorry for me. I got everything I ever wanted, right here."
I sighed. "Not really, because there are things right here that you can't have, that you never had."
"Crap! What's on this island that I can't have if I want it? If you're talkin' about you and that high yella-"
"That's not what I'm talking about."
"Then what the hell are you talking about?"
"What Danny Mixon has right now," I said softly. "He has someone to worry about him, someone to care if he lives or dies."
Zell snorted. "That lousy drunk can have that crap. It don't mean a damn thing to me. I'm boss. You think anything else means much? I got my women and a full gut. Nothin' else counts. Ain't nothin' important, if I can't eat it, wear it, or screw it."
I said nothing, and he glared at me for what seemed ages. "Well, he demanded, "that's right, ain't it?"
"No," I said. "There's respect, friendship and love."
His laugh was choppy, brittle. "I got respect; it's the same as fear. I don't need friends, and love? Another word for a quick lay."
"Didn't your parents love you? Wasn't that different?"
"My parents? That's a laugh; that's a real big yak. Pa was a drunk-a no-good, lousy drunk, just like Mixon there. He never loved anything but a jug in his whole rotten life."
"And your mother?" I asked softly.
He whirled away from me, quick as a startled tiger, and padded into the trees.
"Zell?" I called.
No answer. He was gone. Had I found a soft spot in him? Had I probed an old hurt that had never healed? It was possible. For one moment Zell had seemed shaken and uncertain-but only for that moment. He'd go off somewhere and think about it, and he'd come back hating me.
Then what? Then he would have to prove himself to himself once again, and no doubt, with me. He'd have to humble me, degrade me, in order to regain his superiority.
It would be me. I was sure of that.
Danny stirred, mumbling in some terrible dream. I lay a fresh, water-soaked cloth on his forehead. At least, I had saved Ella Martin from Zell.
And in doing so, I had probably destroyed myself.
Danny rolled over, arms flailing, wiping at his chest in a frenzy.
"Hush," I soothed. "It's all right, Danny. Everything is all right."
CHAPTER 8
We suffered together, Danny and
Ella and me. From camp, we brought a swath of nylon to keep off the night dew, brought our simple bedding. We sweated it out with Danny, and shook it out with him.
He was never fully awake, never completely asleep, writhing with the horrors conjured by his fevered mind. He retched and cramped, and fought against steel fingers that probed his belly.
We soothed him in the nights, cooled and bathed him, and in the few lucid intervals, fed him sugar water and a sip or two of coconut milk. Once we got half a bowl of broth down him, and watched the shudders lessen with the slower sweats. On the second night, his sleep seemed real.
Ella and I were tired, too, edgy from the strain. "Maybe that's it," she said. "I hope it is. He's been going through hell."
Wearily, I nodded. "It wasn't as bad as I expected, though. He didn't try to kill himself."
"He was too weak. But even so, he might have tried it, if we hadn't been here."
"We'll stay until he's all right," I said.
"Of course."
Danny's eyes fluttered open. "Julie."
"Yes."
"Water. Some water?"
His face was thin, colorless, but some of the fear had gone from it. "How long has it been."
"Three days," Ella answered.
"Thank you-both of you. I don't know why you bothered."
Ella and I just looked at each other.
This time, Danny didn't say "and now what?" Perhaps he realized the future was up to him, and him alone. He could get physically well, built up with food-or he could ferment coconut milk that would carry him back into the drunken haze.
I wondered how many times he'd been on the wagon before, how many times he'd fallen off. I imagined that almost anything would set him off again-irritations, resentments, peeves that stuck and festered until they grew out of all proportion. Then he would get drunk again, and again and again.
The shakes were gone now, but the psychological needs were still desperate with him, almost as painful, almost as desperate as the craving for a drink. If he didn't work on those, the rat race would begin once more.
Danny slipped back into sleep, and this time we joined him, warming him with our bodies, pressing to him from each side, holding his thin flesh tightly to us, comforting him with our breasts and thighs.
We awoke with a jolt, with the harsh, jeering tones of Zell's voice ringing in our ears.
He stood over us, blood caked halfway up his forearms, the carcass of a pig slung carelessly over his shoulder, reddened spear in one hairy fist. "Real pretty," he grunted. "Real pretty."
Uncoiling swiftly, Ella came to her feet. I sat up, staring at him. Danny opened his eyes.
"Yeah," Zell said, "shrugging to drop the pig onto the sand with a sodden thump. "A pretty picture almost like GI nurses on a psycho ward."
Ella moved back a step, and the big man grinned at her. "How's the drunk?"
"Sober," I said. "He's still sick, but he's sober."
Zell laughed. "Yeah-until he can get up and brew him some rotgut to drink. Then he'll get drunk again. Ain't that so, Mixon?"
"I don't know," Danny said.
"You know, all right. You ain't no different than the rest of the winos."
"I guess not," Danny said.
Zell glanced at Ella, then back at me. Without warning, his hand snaked out and dragged me up beside him. He did it so damned easily. Fingers cruel in my flesh, he held me at arm's length, looking me over. His other hand cupped around my left breast and squeezed.
I didn't try to pull away, and I held my face still. Chin up, I kept my eyes level and carefully blank. Zell's mouth twisted. He released my breast, ran the hand slowly down my stomach, across one hip, then pulled me closer and tightened his fingers on one haunch, kneading the flesh.
"You're a hell of a woman," he said softly. "Too much woman for a lousy drunk."
I didn't move. I heard Ella's breath hissing. The hand clamped around by buttock moved from side to side, shaking my body, forcing me to sway with it.
"Yeah," Zell said, glancing at Ella moving back from us, glancing down with contemptuous, hard eyes at Danny's strained face, "a lot of woman."
Suddenly I was against his massive chest. His mouth thrust grinding into mine. He tasted of wood smoke and wildness, of savage passions. A hand forced between my thighs, rough, prodding, hurting my mound.
Zell's teeth clashed against mine, forcing my mouth wide. I fought to keep my balance, to keep myself from folding weakly to the sand.
Then, surprisingly, I was free, stumbling back as Zell crouched away from something.
I saw Ella, her arm drawn back, a jagged chunk of coral held high. "You son of a bitch," she spat.
With one blurred motion, she flung it at his head with all her strength.
Zell moved his head a casual inch, and the rock whipped past. "Don't pick up another one," he said, "or I'll have to run you down and rip out your guts. I don't want to do that right now, because I'm savin' you. But your turn's coming'-nigger."
Stark and ugly, the word hung in the silence that followed it, slashed into the air with razor strokes.
"I was wrong," Ella said. "You're not a son of a bitch, after all. You're a miscarriage that lived and crawled up from the pigpen where your sharecropping mother dropped you."
She whirled and ran up the beach, hair flying behind her. Zell's toes dug into the sand as his legs tensed to hurl him after the girl.
"Zell!"
The big man's eyes followed Ella's racing figure. "Run! Run, yella' girl-you can't hide. I'll come get you."
Danny had propped himself on shaky elbows. "Zell!"
With an effort, Zell looked away from Ella. The hard, tight muscles across his belly relaxed. When he turned to stare down at Danny, his eyes had a feral glow in them. "Yeah, drunk?"
Danny wet his lip. "I can answer your question, now."
"Question? What question?"
"You asked me if I'd brew up something and get drunk."
Zell grunted. "So?"
Danny said it slowly, deliberately. "I'm going to shape up. In order to beat you to death, you bastard."
Zell's eyes widened. Frowning at the wasted man at his feet, a faint flicker of interest played across his broad face. "Well, now. Listen to the drunk talk big. Can't lift himself off his scrawny butt, and talkin' like a man."
Zell dropped to his heels, rocked forward with his hands on his knees, his face close above Danny's. "You know somethin'? " Zell said, "I hope you don't get drunk. I hope you eat 'til your belly stretches and you get some solid meat on your bones. I hope you bust a gut tryin' to get into shape, until you're close to bein' a man as you can get. You know why I hope all that, Mixon?"
"I have an idea," Danny said.
"No," Zell said, "you don't have any idea. I hope you get strong enough to stay on your feet a long time, a good, long time-when you get guts enough to jump me. 'Cause I'm gonna' kill you, Mixon, and I want to kill you slow. That's why I hope you get into some kinda' shape-so you won't die too quick."
"All right," Danny said. "That's fine. I'll give you the chance."
Zell looked at him scornfully. "You'll let me know when you think you're ready."
"I'll let you know."
"Be sure now," Zell said. "Don't forget. Don't let me have to remind you."
"You won't have to remind me," Danny said. Zell stood up and flipped the pig's carcass over his shoulder. He didn't look back at Danny or me, but we heard him laugh.
I came to brace Danny's head on my thighs, to look down at his closed eyes, at the thinness of the lids with the blue veins in them, and the puffy dark circles. "You shouldn't have," I said. "It didn't make any difference to me-not any real difference."
"I've always heard," he said, "that sometime in each man's life, he must draw a line and say to the world: I won't be pushed from here. I guess I just drew my line."
Angrily, I said, "He wasn't pushing you. He was pushing me."
"I was part of it. He wanted to see what it took-for me to act like a man. If it wasn't you, he'd have found some other way."
"You didn't say anything-until he started after Ella."
Danny nodded. "He was finished with you, for the moment, anyway. You didn't fight, run, nor respond to him. Ella made him angry; he might have chased her down and killed her."
"Was that the real reason you waited?"
Danny's eyes popped open. "What other reason?"
"I don't know; I really don't know. I'm sorry I asked."
He puzzled over this, then shrugged. "May I have some more of that sticky water?"
"Yes, of course. Do you think you can hold it down?"
"Have to start trying," he said. "I don't know how much time Zell will give me."
I held the cup of water to his lips. "You don't have to meet him as you said. You don't have to face him in a fight. When you're stronger, wait until he's asleep and hit him with something."
Weakly, Danny grinned at me. "That's quite a suggestion, from a civilized woman."
"Don't be a damned fool. In civilization one has the right to protect his life. If you don't kill Zell, he'll kill you. We can make a plan to kill him."
"We?"
"Yes." My eyes were level now, unashamedly direct. "We-you and I and Ella."
His thin hand was soft against my cheek. "Julie-why are you doing all this for me? Why are you standing beside me, against Zell?"
I whispered, "There's no use denying it. I'm in love with you, Danny Mixon."
"No," he said. "You don't know what you're saying. There's nothing to love; nothing left. You're mixed up because I'm better in your sight than Zell. It's just because there are no other men to choose from."
"I've been over all that," I said. "Why or how doesn't matter. I love you, and that's that."
Danny tried to say something else, but I bent my head and kissed him, feather-soft, light, caressing. I tried to make my lips say all the things in my heart. I kept them upon his for a long time.
When I finally moved back, he said, "Julie, Julie-I don't know what to do, what to-"
"Don't say anything. Don't even tell me that you love me-until you're sure; if you're sure, ever. Because there's something else you might as well know, too--as long as this is my day for being frank."
"What else?" he asked.
"Ella," I said. "There's not only me, but there's Ella. She's in love with you, also."
Ella stayed out on the fringes of camp that evening, but I moved boldly to the fire as if nothing had happened, as if the battle line had never been drawn.
His plate empty, Zell toyed with a spear, honing the bayonet blade against a rock. Eve short sat beside him, looking good in the shorts and halter she now wore. Her body, no longer fettered and bound, bloomed in its full glory, but Zell didn't seem to notice.
"Darling," Eve pouted, "there's plenty of fish stored in the cave, and lots of smoked, salted meat. You don't have to go out to hunt at night."
She didn't see Zell as I saw him, didn't realize that he had to keep busy, keep killing.
Without preamble, he said: "Move your stuff out of the shack this evenin'. "
Eve whitened. "Move? But-but why, Kane? What have I done?"
"Nothin'. It's time for a change, that's all."
"I-I must have done something to make you angry with me. What was it, Kane? Tell me-please tell me."
"I already told you. Nothin'. "
"You're joking, then. You must be joking."
Zell stared at her, heavy lids half-concealing his eyes.
Eve's hand went to her throat. Her voice was mechanical, scratchy. "But I love you, Kane. Haven't I proved that, in every way? I did all the things you wanted, even-even when they hurt. Didn't I do everything you said? Didn't I?"
Zell stretched and scratched his chest. "Yeah. You're good in the sack, baby. I'll get around to you again."
Eve swayed. "Just like that?"
"Just like that. You got it straight."
"Who is it? Who do you want more than you want me?"
"I ain't decided. One of the young ones, I guess."
"But why?-why?"
Zell snarled at her. "Look-I like pork roast, huh? It's good. But I don't want it three times a day. I want somethin' else once in awhile, somethin' different."
"You're an animal!"
Zell grinned at her. "And a strong one, huh?" Eve leaped up, fists clenched, eyes glittering. "I hate you-I hate you!"
Eve had forgotten the rest of us were listening. Kane hadn't forgotten; he just didn't give a damn.
"Sure," he said. "You hate me-until your turn comes up again. Then you'll have hot pants. If you can't wait around, why don't you try to sneak in a lay with Mixon-if them other women will let you?"
Eve sucked in her breath and stood trembling while Zell got up and shambled away. Seeing him go like that, she tried once again: "Kane, I love you."
He answered over his shoulder: "Crap."
Joy Santee stepped out into his path, placed herself before him. Zell stopped. "Well?"
"You told Eve to get out," she said.
"Yeah."
Joy's mouth was a thin line. "Kane-"
"I know what you're gonna' say. No; no dice. I got somebody else in mind."
"Kane-I'll be good to you, Kane. Don't-don't make me beg like this."
He grunted. "Do you good. You made a lotta' guys sweat it out, in your time; you made 'em beg pretty please. You acted like your snatch was gold-plated. How's it feel to know you only got a paper ass, baby?"
"Oh, you bastard; you rotten bastard."
Zell laughed. "Go see Mixon-or Jessie, if you can't wait."
Joy turned from him. Her lips quivered, but she wouldn't let them soften, would not allow the held-back tears of anger and hurt to break from behind her lashes.
The rest of us were quiet, waiting. Ella and I drew closer together as Zell stood over us.
"Relax," he said, "it ain't your time-yet."
Easily, in that casual, deceptive walk of his, Zell moved past the waiting women until he stood before Elena Marquez. Her eyes were wide and very black.
"You," Zell said.
Elena swallowed. "N-now?"
"Why not?"
"B-but, I mean-I'm not fixed up right. I'd like to take a bath and-"
"Quit stallin'. You been askin' for this every time you wiggled by me. You ain't scared now, are you?"
"N-no," Elena said. "No, I'm not scared."
Elena put aside her plate and stood up. She swallowed again and put her hand into his.
They passed Jessie and Helen, and when Elena's eyes met the other girl's, Elena lifted her chin, and with her free hand made an utterly feminine smoothing motion across her hip.
When she stooped to go into the shack ahead of Zell, the talk sprang up around the fire again. Talk covered the sounds that would soon filter out of the hut, sounds we didn't want to hear. But one woman stood stiffly, hating. Eve Short wasn't saying anything.
Danny Mixon had been sober for two weeks now. The tremors were gone, although he mentioned internal shakes-in reality a weakness crying out for support no longer there, for an opiate no longer available. In time, that weakness would be gone too.
For days, he had simply eaten and rested, then he began the long walks that had a dual purpose-to tire him for sleep, and to loosen and strengthen his leg muscles for the more rugged exercise to come.
In the evenings, with only Ella and I watching, he began the gut-wrenching sit-ups-only a few at first, but slow and straining. At the end of a week, he started roadwork. trotting doggedly along the sands. He hadn't talked about me, nor about Ella. He'd put us resolutely out of mind, with time for nothing but training.
It was slow going. His body wouldn't stand up under the exertion. It had been mistreated for too many years. But Danny stayed with it, forcing himself, struggling to recapture muscle and vigor. But he sweated-not the cold sick sweat of alcohol, but a good, warming, loosening lubrication.
Ella began to stay away from us, vanishing in the mornings, returning late. Danny asked about her.
"She's giving me a chance," I said. "She's waiting for you to make a choice."
He frowned, sweat oiling his tanned face. "Choose between two women who think they love me? Only because I'm handy, because I'm less repulsive than Zell, maybe. What the hell, Julie."
"Look at it like this," I said. "Suppose this island held only two women, and a bunch of men? Wouldn't the women seek out the men they valued most?"
Danny shook his head. "You'll have to ask a wiser man than me. Zell and I might be the only ones not burned to a crisp. We might be the last men in the world. We are-in this corner of the universe, anyway."
"And before long," I said, "there may very well be only one. Danny, why do you insist on meeting Zell man-to-man? It's silly; it's stupid."
"It's something I have to do," he said, and jogged off down the beach again, arms pumping, rolling his body.
I found Ella stitching shorts in our hut. "You might as well give up the disappearing act. Danny's not paying any attention to me."
"I saw him," she said. "He's working hard, shadow-boxing. He's fixing up a long bag at the end of the beach, too."
"You're a little angry because I told him about you," I said.
"Not really. I feel like running whenever I see him, but that's all. But it's just as well, out in the open this way."
"I think so, too," I said. "And whatever he decides about us, whoever his choice, that will be all right, too. We won't allow that to make any difference between us."
Ella pursed her lips. "If he makes a choice. If he's around to make one. I'm afraid for him, Julie-afraid of this crazy thing with Zell."
"But he does look a lot better, these days."
"I'm proud of him," Ella said. "He has something to work for-his self-respect. He's doing things for us, too. Zell hasn't tried to paw either one of us since that day."
I shrugged. "Some twisted idea of conquest, I suppose. To the victor, the spoils. Zell would think like that."
She said, "I'm still afraid for Danny."
"I am, too. But I won't let Zell destroy him, if I can help it."
"If we can help it," Ella corrected. "It won't be easy. Zell is bad-really bad."
"He's not immortal. It's strange, isn't it-sitting here and calmly talking about murdering a man?"
Ella shook her dark curls. "Not murder, and not a man."
"Actually it's self-defense, but the false yardsticks of civilization don't fit here."
Ella's gaze was penetrating, direct. "Right. But you and I haven't realized that, have we?"
I blinked at her, "What do you mean?"
"Well, here we've been stewing about both of us wanting the same man. We've been worried sick that he might choose the other, and about how we'll act when that time comes. We've been readying ourselves to play the martyr, chin up, better to give than to get-and it's all so foolish."
"I still don't see-"
"You said yourself the old yardsticks don't fit. Think about that. All right, with that for a base, what's our problem? One-you and I love each other; two--you and I love Danny Mixon; three-we don't want to hurt each other. So what's the solution? It's simple, Julie, so simple. But we've been measuring by the old yardstick so long we couldn't see it."
My mouth hung open. "Do you mean-"
"Sure, why not? Why can't we both have Danny Mixon? Why can't we both be wives to him without being insanely jealous of each other? The Mormons did it for many years; tribes all over the world do it; why can't we?"
I was silent, thinking; then I said: "You're right. The solution is simple, after all. I had to complicate it with social mores, with greediness, really. Why couldn't I share Danny with you, or you share him with me? I can be content knowing he's happy, and that you're happy, too."
"Me, too," Ella said breathlessly, excitedly. "Maybe even happier, because we're sharing. I want so much for you to be happy, Julie."
"You're a wise woman, Ella." Although somewhere very deep within me a note of discord had been struck. I barely noticed it at the time.
"You taught me to think clearly. You taught me the world isn't peopled with stupid savages. No matter what happens here, Julie-I'll always be glad you were here with me."
"And I," I said, hugging her tight. "I'm glad, too. There was nothing left for me out there. I felt everything was gone, that I was a shell. But you and Danny have made me live again-and it's good-good."
We melted with each other, a partly physical, partly mental blending that brought me closer to another human being than I had ever been before.
Surely, Danny Mixon wouldn't find a flaw in our reasoning. Surely, he'd see things the way Ella and I did and be happy with us and for us.
There was only one point that both Ella and I were overlooking.
Kane Zell was going to kill Danny Mixon.
CHAPTER 9
DANNY MIXON WORKED LIKE HELL. He toughened hands and arms by chopping wood, hardened back and belly by volunteer stints in the vegetable garden. And every evening, he ran steadily and doggedly along the beach, spraying sand, putting mile after mile of roadwork behind him.
He looked different, and he was-stronger, clear-eyed, tanned. I watched him often, and wished I knew more about boxing, remembered the things my husband had said about the Army fighters he trained. It was strange, but I could think of Jim Curtis without sorrow now. , Danny was alive, so he was important. I watched him, hoping with all my heart that what he was doing would be enough to protect him from the brute strength and evil power of Kane Zell.
Danny moved nicely as he ran, stopping suddenly to pivot, jab, hook off the jab with his right hand high. There was beauty in him as he worked, beauty and an efficiency that was beginning to take on a high polish. He said he felt it, that he sensed the return of speed and timing he had once had, but that his reflexes were still off, that his punches lacked the old kick. I didn't know about that; I knew only that his body was a fine, gleaming machine now.
He needed a timing bag, but we had to make out without one. There were no swivels on the island, no springs and resilient leather. But I was proud of the authoritative snaps his wrapped hands made when they hammered flashing into the makeshift body bag he had put together.
But a constant fear nagged at me. Would all this be enough? Was it possible for a man to shake off the effects of many years of dissipation, to roll back time? I wondered if the years could be sloughed away like excess skin. Zell was so monstrous, so frighteningly animal. The kill and science of a stand-up fighter might not be enough to stop him-even if the fighter was young and in his prime. Danny wasn't either.
While he was resting, Danny talked about Zell: "If he's like a lot of big men, he's disdainful of anything except raw strength. Men like that sneer at professional fighters, say that they look pretty in the ring, but that the fighter would get his brains scrambled in an alley brawl.
"They talk like that until they actually meet a pug in an alley, and find out the hard way that location doesn't have a damned thing to do with speed, know-how and a punch; or with condition, either."
Danny made a habit of looking past me these days. He did it now, staring over my head and out to sea. "But I'm not kidding myself," he said. "A pug can be cute and tricky, but there comes a time when he's got to stand flat-footed and punch it out. If the other guy can take all you throw and keep coming, you've had it."
His face had a going-back look. "Then," he said softly, "then a fighter is on his back with a mouthful of blood, trying to stop the lights from spinning while the referee tolls off a count he can't quite make out."
He didn't say it, but I knew what he was thinking. Here, there'd be no referee, no rules to protect a downed fighter, no bell to save him. Here, if Danny went down, he'd never get up again.
He left me and ran down the beach once more, legs churning, bobbing, and weaving. I watched him go, and was suddenly conscious of someone close by. I turned wearily, expecting Zell. Joy Santee stood staring after Danny.
"I wouldn't," I said.
Her mouth tightened. "You've had your chance."
"It's not over; nobody rang a bell on me-or on Ella."
Joy was taut, restless, a deep need naked in her eyes. "I don't love the guy. I just need him."
I shook my head. "Danny has trouble enough. Don't make more for him."
Joy's fingers clenched. "What the hell do you want me to do, go make eyes at Jessie?"
"Not if you don't want to. Joy-maybe you're blowing this out of proportion. Maybe you want something because you've been told you can't have it."
Her eyes turned savage. "Why-because Zell took that damned kid, instead of me? Listen-Zell, Danny-or anyone else would do me right now. You may be able to sit on your emotions, but that's not for me. You and Ella can play the waiting game, but not me. I want a man-any man."
"Let him alone, Joy," I said. "He'll be fighting for his life soon. Don't complicate things."
She smiled archly. "Don't say I didn't warn you. I'm going to make Danny Mixon, and before the battle of the century. I don't think he'll be around afterward."
Damn her, I thought as she roll-hipped away. I was still staring hate after her when Ella approached and kneeled beside me. She had been chasing down the succulent land crabs, and had a bag filled with them.
"I heard part of that," she said. "Danny's a man, you know."
"And may not resist a direct offer?"
Ella's eyes were sleepy. "He'll be coming back up the beach soon."
"One of us-instead of her?"
"Is that cold-blooded, planning like this?"
I gave her half a smile. "Women have been planning such meetings since the beginning of time."
"But-"
"Afraid?" Her mouth trembled. "I guess I am."
"We talked it over," I reminded her. "We decided if Danny was such an idiot, we'd have to make the first move, remember?"
"I know, but it doesn't help. Suppose-suppose he doesn't want to love either of us?"
I said, "We'll work at it."
She held out a hand to me. "I have a shell-pink on one side, gray on the other. Shall I toss it."
"I'll take-gray."
Ella hesitated, then spun the bit of shell into the air. We followed it with our eyes, not breathing. The gray side was up.
I let my breath sigh out. "I-now that it's up to me, I'm not so sure."
Ella seemed relieved. "Now who's being silly? I don't-mind; Julie, really. In fact, I'd rather wait and let you t-tell me if-if Danny's-"
"Gentle? He will be, Ella-I'm certain he will be."
I wasn't certain at all, but I had to go through with it now. We'd crossed the point of no return.
Ella scooped up the bag. "He's coming. You just have time to get to the coral."
"Wish me luck," I said.
Ella caught my hand. "I do, Julie. You know I do."
Then it was all up to me. I hurried to the coral spire we'd chosen for the ambush. Once behind it, we-Danny and I-would be sheltered from the view of anyone looking that way. I came around into its shadow and waited. Danny's approaching footsteps matched the beating of my heart, quick and heavy.
I stepped into his path. "Hello."
He stopped. "Hello-again."
"I picked the spot," I said. "It's private here."
Danny wiped at his sun-bronzed cheeks. "Julie-I don't need mothering now. I don't need nursing, either."
I didn't have to tiptoe to reach his mouth. I shook my head. "I know every argument you have in mind-that you're no good, that you're an alcoholic, that you've nothing left to take from-and you'll top it all off with that bit about your just being available."
"Isn't that it?" He said.
I hesitated. "Danny-I won't say this would have happened in other circumstances. It wouldn't have happened while I was with Jim. While he was my husband, there couldn't be anyone else. If you had come along then, I would have ignored you."
His eyes were clear and steady. "And now?"
"Now he's dead. As far as we're concerned, so is the world. We're alive-you and I."
"Am I alive, Julie Curtis?"
"You're being born again, this time through your own desire to live. You're getting a second chance-and so am I. Let's live, and love."
"Julie-"
I didn't have to tiptoe to reach his mouth. His lips were warm and soft. His arms slid around me, holding me easily, gently. His mouth moved away as he tried again.
"If you-"
"Shut up," I murmured. "Words were always weak things. Now they're useless."
My fingers stroked across the back of his neck, tightened to bring his face down to mine. This time his mouth wasn't soft, but hard, hard, owning to breathe flame into my own. My breasts flattened against his chest; my hips, my thighs reached to his, first exploring, then locking fiercely to him.
His hands searched across the small of my back, knowing the tense muscles, the swell of my hips, and he held tightly to me as we drifted to the sand together. Danny's body was white and gold and scented with musky maleness. My breasts were proud, offering themselves to his touch; there was bright sun on the marble of my stomach, bright sun on my furry mound. I was a woman again, taking, taking-in soft flame and dark comfort.
It was gentle, gentle, a wonder spinning deeper and deeper-a tenderness so magnificent, so intense that it became flesh-locked ecstasy that shook me, shattered me in spiraling glory.
From very far away, a wind blew. Somewhere in the distance, waves kissed at a dim shore. Very slowly, the world stopped spinning. The wind crept closer and the waves whispered nearer.
"Danny-" I whispered, "oh, my Danny."
He stirred, and I stirred with him.
"I love you, Julie Curtis," he said.
Lightly, my fingertips made a path through his hair. "I know, I know."
"I have never loved before."
"Only in other times, in gone times and gone places, "I said.
"So it doesn't count."
"It doesn't count, Danny."
"Now-now should be forever," he said against my cheek.
"It will be."
"Yes," he said, "yes, Julie-my darling."
Then we didn't talk. We listened to the wind and to the sea, and to our own breathing, and our forever stretched out beside us and before us. I told myself we'd never look back to what had been.
Nor to what might have been.
Joy Santee came across the campsite to me. She looked at me for a long moment, then said spitefully: "You did it. You look so damned bubbly you make me sick."
Ella half-stifled a giggle, and Joy turned on her. "You-what have you got to be happy about?"
"I'm happy for Julie," Ella said.
Joy stamped a foot. "Everybody-but everybody-has flipped. Don't you think you're in love with Danny, too? Doesn't it bother you that Julie made it with him?"
Ella said softly, "Not in the least, but you wouldn't understand."
"Oh wouldn't I?" Joy's face was ugly. "I understand you both claim to be in love with him, that you're planning to set up a cute husband-sharing act. Think you'll get away with it? The hell you will. Wait until I've had my ins with Danny Mixon."
Ella stared at her. "But-he wouldn't."
"Oh no; not much. Listen, no itchy-tailed women on this island are going to hoard a man-even if they could. And they can't. You show me a male who won't bed something new, the first chance he gets."
"Not Danny," Ella said flatly. "Danny won't."
"You idiot!" Joy snapped. "You'd better hope to hell he will. If he won't, where do you think that leaves you?"
Ella looked down at her hands. "I-I don't care. As long as he's happy with Julie-"
Joy waved both hands in the air. "Happy, happy-my ass."
I nudged Ella. "Let her rave. She knows she's missed the boat."
Joy snarled at me and switched-away. I counted the faces around the fire-Ella and me and Joy; Mary Tetson sweating over the cook pots, Helen Fergus and Jessie Marawski; sullen Eve Short; Claudia and Bess and Ilsa-colorless and with so little personality that they hadn't figured much in the island society. Elena Marquez was off with Zell in the forest. That left the Japanese girls-Michiko, Sako, Kyoko. They'd be at their raft. Danny was training. All present-or accounted for.
I thought of the raft, of the escape it implied, when and if it was ever finished and launched. Some of us would have to try it, I supposed. Some of us were unhappy, discontented; so much so that we'd risk our lives at sea, rather than remain. Was it all because of Zane's cruelty? There was also the sexual imbalance, the shortage of men.
And something else. If there was a man for each of us, wouldn't some of the couples have worked incessantly to return to the world they knew?
"Position" would beckon, as would "prestige." Wasn't most of mankind so bound to rabbit-warren society and symbols that they couldn't be content to just live?
Among us now, who would want to leave-if Zell allowed it?
Zell himself? Certainly not. Absolute monarch, sex-driven, soulless, mindless, Zell was master here, happy as he could be anywhere on earth.
Joy Santee? Of course, she wanted to leave. Outside, she could put a price tag on being a woman again.
Jessie Marawski? Twisted man-woman, she might not want to go back to a society that hated her kind.
Eve Short. She was in love, bad discarded the teachings of her past. He sexuality had found release here, and maybe she had mistaken passion for a finer emotion.
Elena Marquez, girl-woman. In time, she might miss the gaiety she'd left behind, the youth she had lost. Elena might go.
And Helen Fergus, loved by a woman and possibly loving back. The night would come when Zell would tear her away from Jessie. Being taken by him could either drive her forever into the shadow world of homosexuality or release her. Would she want to leave the island?
Faye Herman-definitely. Faye was push-button oriented, gossip-starved. Faye was suburbia. She would go.
Mary Tetson? Not so sure. She was aging, needing to be needed. She wanted to accomplish something in the world; why? To make up for the lack of good in her past? Mary might decide to stay on here.
The others? The Japanese and the others? Escapees all, frantic to get away.
That left Ella and Danny and me.
None of us had anything-or anyone-to return to.
I stared into the cook fire, knowing that I was building upon dreams, there might not be a world out there for any of us, that the raft was yet unfloated, that Zell may have discovered it and was only biding his time.
And even if the raft got away, the sea was vast and merciless. Its riders could starve or die of thirst; they could be swept away by angry waves. And if they ever reached land, what they'd find was only a guess.
"Julie?"
"Yes, Ella."
"Was he-was he-gentle."
"He was. He is."
"That's-wonderful," she murmured.
I put my hand on her smooth warm arm. "Ella, go to him. Go to him right now. Find out for yourself."
"I-I can't. Not so-so casually."
I squeezed her arm. "All right. I'll take you to him, then."
"You-you'd do that? You'd."
"Do anything for you," I said. "And for Danny. Come on."
We found him in the gathering twilight, alone by the edge of the sea that was being stained by the setting sun.
"Danny," I said quickly, before I lost my courage, "it-this is offbeat, I know. But-but if I don't mind, you shouldn't. I brought Ella to you. Please-please love her, Danny."
A shadow was across his face. I couldn't read his eyes. "Julie, you're flesh and fire, snowflakes and ease. No man could ask more."
Ella tried to tug free. I held to her. Swiftly, I thumbed apart the knot that held Ella's halter in place. Her fine breasts sprang free, gleaming in the scarlet light.
"She's beautiful, Danny," I whispered. "She's beautiful and fine and sweet. I love her; I want you to love her, too."
Ella was quivering all over. "J-Julie-don't-leave me.
"Not ever," I said. "Not now and not ever."
When I slipped off Ella's shorts, she said to him: "I'm a Negro."
"You're a lovely girl." He said.
I moved back from them, moved away and sat down, a watcher in the sand. I didn't feel guilty, this time. I didn't feel anything but warmth, a glow that spread through me as Danny took Ella in his arms and lowered her tenderly to the beach.
She was dark and rounded bronze in the crimson rays of the sinking sun. She was curling midnight against the white sands, molded flame, supine, eager, waiting. Danny kneeled over her. Softly, he touched his lips to her hair; lightly, his mouth moved over her pulsating flesh.
Each step was a slow step to another one. Ella's fear dimmed, the tenseness fled, and they were together. Her teeth were locked into his lip as she lifted to him, as she thrust and lifted and writhed with him. The drumbeat that rocked them, caused a quaking in my stomach. I felt it grow faster and louder and more wild until it filled the universe, until it burst with a spasm of mighty thunder. On Christ! How could I let her have him?
Warm and salt, Ella's tears glistened on Danny's cheek and clung damply to his mouth. She had half-words for him, sweet, stumbling words that attested to all things her body had already said.
Danny didn't say anything. He just lay there-spent.
It wasn't working out-I wanted to vomit; to cry; to be beaten for my stupidity. I could never share him with anyone. He was what I loved and valued more than anyone else in the world. I might have lost him now. What if he loved Ella? How could he respect me?
As I looked at their two bodies still joined, I wondered if I had thrown away the greatest love I could ever have. If I, by some chance, hadn't, I would fight for Danny! I'd be so good for him that he'd never look at another woman again.
That chance, I'd have to take. I thought again, watching Ella and Danny sigh away from each other, I thought that women always plan the future, even when there's no promise of one. There would be no future for me, if Danny didn't win over Kane Zell. And I didn't win over Ella.
CHAPTER 10
Tension seeped into the air that night. It was the anticipation felt when Zell was about to change women, a fluttery, fearing, eager sort of anticipation.
Ella and I had Danny between us. I signaled her with my eyes, then held to his arm. "Danny-no matter what happens, or who it happens to, promise you won't do anything about it. You're not ready yet."
His jaw was knotted. "If Zell tries to-"
Ella said, "Danny, don't lose yourself to us now. Don't get taken away from us."
He didn't answer. We waited; all the women waited. And when Zell scraped the last morsel from his plate, it came. Handing his plate to Elena, he said, "Take it to the trough, and you don't have to come back."
Although we were listening so hard we could have heard him whisper, Zell lifted his voice: "I'm gonna give somebody a break tonight."
He paused for effect, then snapped it into the silence: "You!"
His thick forefinger was pointing at young Helen Fergus. She shrank back, pretending that it was someone else.
"You," Zell repeated. "Helen-come on over here."
Helen became smaller. She didn't move.
"Okay," Zell grated, "so I'll come over there.
"Jessie," Helen wailed, "Jessie-you said you wouldn't let him hurt me."
He was near them then, bulky, menacing. "That right? How you gonna' stop me, Jessie dear?"
She stared up at him, flint-eyed and pale.
Zell grunted in scorn. "Come on kid, I'm gonna' show you how different it is with a man."
Helen started to cry.
"Course," Zell said, enjoying himself, "it might hurt some. But you can holler all you want. Look at it this way, kid-you keep playin' around with other women, you might go queer yourself."
Shoulders shaking, Helen put both hands to her face.
"You rotten bastard," Jessie hissed, eyes glittering. She came to her knees, facing him across the fire. Her elbows were bent; she looked like a wrestler.
"Come ahead," Zell invited. "You been needin' a bust in the mouth.
Jessie didn't stand up. Her hands flashed out, lifting, scooping, and most men would have been trapped by her swiftness. Zell's animal instincts saved him. He caught the burning branches on one forearm as Jessie followed them across the fire, thumbs spread and hooked for his eyes.
He clamped her hands in his own and grinned at her. Slowly, her face whitening, Jessie went to her knees, arms high, her hands locked into his. Zell's forearms writhed under their covering of black fur, and there were sounds like the popping of peanut shells.
Jessie screamed, a hopeless wail full of agony.
Zell released her hands and she pulled them close to her chest, cupping the broken fingers, rocking back and forth on her knees.
Zell laughed and stepped past to stand over Helen. The girl's face was a study in tear-streaked terror. He leaned to snatch her up, to make a bundle of her limp arms and legs. He carried her into his hut.
Danny was first to move. He went to Jessie and I gasped in horror as he chopped one swift, accurate punch to her chin, a blow that toppled her over onto one side.
"Quick," he ordered, "Mary-Joy-set those fingers while she's out and can't feel it. Splint them tightly, then put her hands in cold water and keep them there. She's going to hurt-hurt like hell when she comes to, but maybe she won't be crippled."
Danny stood up then, and stared toward Zell's hut. His shoulders rolled and his fists were solid chunks. "Not now," he muttered. "Not now, Zell, but soon. Damned soon."
And from then on, he refused to touch either Ella or myself. I was glad, Ella didn't know my decision yet, but I had to have Danny for myself. At dawn, he went back into training, stepping up the pace, forcing his body to toughen up or to collapse.
I watched him work at the heavy bag, watched him flicking a long jab at it; jab, jab, feint and the right hand fired down the slot, his wrapped fists thudding into the stubborn give of the bag. His hands were tough now, the skin thickened by hours of soaking them in salt water. I hadn't understood why he put brine compresses over each eye, too, until he explained how a cut could blind a fighter and finish him. Danny wasn't missing a trick.
He pulled out every gimmick he'd ever learned in the ring, sharpened and polished them tirelessly. Even I could see the punching muscles over his sloping shoulders begin to swell, and new muscle ridged his belly.
Danny said he was no longer a middleweight, but a full-fledged light-heavy now. He was still many pounds below the massive weight of Zell, of course, but he felt fine and looked better.
He had Ella and I help him perfect his timing. At first we were afraid we'd hurt him, but after he slipped away from awkward punches, ducked under a left, and picked off our tries to hit him in mid-air, we bore down. When I sighed and panted to a stop, it would be Ella's turn, and both of us worked hard at our job.
And one day he said: "Fm ready."
I frowned at him. "Are you sure?"
He smiled at me. "Past a certain point, training doesn't help. I've got a good edge right now, and I want to hold it. There's one other way you two can help me."
Ella asked, "How, Danny?"
"By letting me stay a hermit until it's over. Go back to camp and sleep together. I'll stay here, on the beach."
Ella lowered her eyes; I grinned. "For how long, hermit?"
"Until Zell pushes it. He may start the party by grabbing one of you. I think he might."
"I wish it didn't have to be," Ella said. "I wish he'd just let us alone."
I said, "I wish you weren't such an idiot, that we could gang up on him and beat him with clubs."
Danny looked at me, at Ella. "You're probably right, but this is a thing I have to do. It's the chance to stand tall again, to prove I can stand alone."
"You don't have to prove that to us," I said.
"I have to prove it to Danny Mixon," he said.
Ella shifted from one foot to the other. "I-maybe I know something that will change this. The Japanese girls are getting ready to sail."
I blinked. "So soon? I thought-"
Danny wasn't surprised. "I saw the raft. A good job, solid and seaworthy. How do they plan on keeping it secret from Zell? They have to battle it down from its biding place and get it into the ocean."
Ella gnawed her rich lips. "They don't plan to hide any more. Michiko made a bow and some arrows; the others say she's good with it. Sako and Kyoko have spears, and Joy's with them. Elena and Eve Short, too. They're going to fight him if he tries to stop them."
Danny looked thoughtful. "They're banding together; good. If s a start. How about the other women-Mary, Jessie, Helen?"
"I'm not sure," Ella said. "Michiko didn't tell me too much; just invited me along."
"She's gotten over her foreigners-phobia, then," I said.
Danny said, "She needs all the hands she can get, for the raft. But she needs help right now, too-to move the thing, to set up protection against Zell. Where is he right now, Ella?"
Ella shook her head. "Hunting, I guess. He wasn't in camp when I left."
"Let's go," Danny said.
Michiko was surprised to see us, and a little edgy until she was sure Danny only wanted to help. And after he explained the guard need, she welcomed us.
We worked like madwomen, placing poles under the lashed-together logs, inching the huge platform laboriously down the sands to the rim of the bay. It was slavery, but it was also a labor of love for most of them. The raft meant home; it meant escape, freedom, civilization.
Only Eve Short worked slowly, as if her heart wasn't in it, and she frowned often.
Halfway down the dunes, with Sako at the pole ahead of mine, the raft suddenly lost motion. Sako wasn't pushing; she was staring in back of us. I turned and saw him.
He looked twice as big, outlined against the skyline. Shaggy-haired, huge, dominating, he roared down at us: "You damned fools!"
Michiko slipped aside, her quick hands going to the flooring of the raft.
Zell came striding toward us. "You think I didn't know about this? Think I'm so stupid I couldn't hear hammers, couldn't find tracks leading to that raft?"
Danny moved toward him, hands lifted.
"No!" I yelled.
"That's right, baby," Zell said. "Take care of the drunk. Keep him outa' my way until I finish kickin' tail on the slopeheads. They come first. That damn raft ain't never gonna' touch water."
A slim, erect figure darted out, stopped balanced before Zell. Michiko Kuwaye held the bow ready, an arrow notched on the string. The arrowhead glinted in the sun, light reflecting off honed and shaped metal.
Zell froze.
Michiko drew the string smoothly, with a deftness that told of experience. I remembered the Zen bowmen of Japan, the uncanny archers who could split bamboo poles from the back of a running horse.
Zell must have remembered, too. He whirled to run, his powerful legs thrusting hard against the sand, his upper body straining forward in abrupt flight.
He was nearly to the trees when the arrow drove into him, when it tore cunning barbs deep into his flesh and grated on bone.
Zell screamed-not in terror, but the mad bellow of an enraged beast, the roar of a wild thing made insane by pain and anger. We heard him crashing through the trees, smashing his way through them, ripping branches and flinging them aside, still mouthing that throat-twisting snarl of madness, he echoes lingered for a long time.
Joy San tee said what most of us felt: "He-he'll come back and kill us all."
Michiko glared at her. "Next time, I'll hit him better."
Danny shook himself. "First we'd better get that raft into the water, and set up a guard with whatever weapons we have. Michiko will have to be protected, since she's the only one who can handle that bow."
"I am not afraid," Michiko said.
Ella said, "You should have killed him with the first arrow. Now we'll all have to be afraid."
"Ella's right," Danny said. "Zell is more dangerous now, like a wounded animal. We have to keep him away, or he'll pick us off one by one. When that wound festers, he'll go off his rocker."
"Good," Michiko snapped. "We have the raft; we'll leave the wounded pig to lick his wounds here-alone."
"That would be okay," Danny mused, "except I don't see your food and fresh water loaded up. Someone has to go get those things, and Zell is going to be close by, every minute. He's still got that spear."
I came over to him and put my arm around him. Ella just looked at us.
He put one arm around me. "We have decided to stay here."
"Zell," Michiko spat, "Zell will murder you all." I pressed my cheek into Danny's shoulder. "It's worth the chance." Ella said nothing. She knew.
Everything went wrong. Zell's attack had upset us, thrown everyone into a panic that dwindled to just enough fear to make us all clumsy and inept
The pole I was using snapped in my hands when I thrust it too far under the logs. Up ahead, Joy Santee's hand slipped; she fell into the raft and brush-burned an ugly wound across her cheekbone. Mary Tetson skinned a knee.
And since Zell's coming, Eve Short had been useless anyway. She kept looking off into the forest where he'd gone.
To top it off, the sky was darkening in mid-afternoon. The chill wind that came with the clouds was strange and penetrating. The crests of the palm trees off the beach began to sway sickeningly.
Danny watched the sky, frowning. Then he motioned us together. "We'd better not take any chances, girls. Leave the raft where it is, bring your weapons, and we'll all head for the cave."
"Danny?" Ella said.
"Typhoon," he said. "We'd better not let it catch us in the open." Typhoon!
The dread word rang through the group, shuddered down all our spines. We hurried. Stretched out single file, with Michiko leading, her bow strung and ready, with Danny and a coral club bringing up the rear, we hurried.
At the campsite, we paused just long enough to collect containers of fresh water, to clutch at bedding; then we raced on up the slope toward the cave. We were thankful now that it was food-stocked and sturdy, that we had a place to hide from the fearful wind that was beginning to pluck at our clothing and snatch at out hair.
At the cave mouth, we stopped, huddling to one another, until Danny could come up from the rear and joined forced with Michiko. They went inside slowly, carefully, but Zell wasn't hiding there. We tumbled in after them, gathered to tremble and listen to the rising howl of the fierce winds outside.
I had to put my lips to Danny's ear. "The raft-what about the raft?"
"It's heavily built, Julie. The girls knew what they were doing when they made it. They put it together to withstand the poundings of the sea. It should hold up under this storm. It's a good thing we didn't get it all the way down to the beach. It would have been lost by now."
I thought about that, for the other women's sake. The raft's mast would be gone, of course, and maybe the planking and some of the lashings. But those things could be redone, remade with a little time and effort. If Zell didn't succeed in another attempt to break up the sailing. He'd never allow his herd of mares to sail away from him; not Kane Zell, the ruling stallion.
Ella occupied herself with the others while I crouched close to Danny, whose attention remained riveted on the mouth of the cave. He kept the club of coral ready, stayed just a foot inside the entrance, where the searching winds slapped at him. I knew he was watching for Zell.
It would be a good time for the big man to sneak in upon us, a fine time for him to catch us disorganized and frightened in the storm. He could use the lightening-slashed darkness for cover, and come unheard through the wild keening of the typhoon, through the crashing trees.
The wind came in spasms, now screaming insanely and hurling itself across the trees and at the cave, now falling away to a watery mutter. The lightning flashes cracked the sky, heavy artillery for the bayoneting rain. Under the savage battering, the entire island seemed to shudder, to writhe, and the universe was filled with ear-splitting sound.
For some reason, Danny came to his knees. I watched him as a streak of lightning outlined his poised body. He was staring fixedly into the dark, tense, waiting.
Zell was upon him almost before he knew it, and certainly before I realized he was anywhere near the cave. Later, Danny told me that no sight, no sound had warned him of Zell's presence. It was something else, something totally alien to the fresh-washed air-the swift fragment of an odor. The scent reached Danny fleetingly; a wild smell, a feral odor that came and passed swiftly. But it was enough to warn Danny.
He rose from his knees and brought the heavy stone club down and out with all his strength, striking at a dark spot which would be head-high to man. The club slammed into something.
Lightning sputtered and Danny saw a hand, wide and hairy, twitching on the earth near his feet. It was Zell's hand. Danny hefted the club again and chopped down at the hand as sudden dark fell once more. The club thudded into empty sand.
Crouching, Danny prodded the blackness with his club, feeling into the shadows, coiled to slash at anything his weapon touched. He felt nothing. I hoped he wouldn't feel anything. I sat rigidly, not daring to breathe.
Danny waited, staring into blackness. Zell had been hit; he had been knocked down and hurt-but not badly; not badly enough. My stomach twisted and grew cold, thinking of Zell back upon his feet, somewhere out there in the violent darkness, cat-silent, cat-mad and waiting for Danny to come out.
I slid to Danny, tugged at his arm. He eased back, the club balanced on one shoulder, still watching the path occasionally lighted by flaring lightning, watching the jumble of zigzag rocks. I didn't have to ask him not to leave the cave tonight; Danny realized that Zell probably wouldn't try to come in again. His surprise attack had failed.
But I thought of the others to come, the other attacks, the hundred cunning ambushes Zell must have in mind. Zell was combat seasoned, a line soldier. He could work out dozens of devious plans. Sooner or later, one of the girls might wander too far from the group, and Zell would have her. Sometime in the days to come, while we worked to repair the raft, a girl would stray too close to the brush-and Zell would have her.
What then? Zell was blind mad; he was hurt and savage. He might murder the first girls, but I thought he'd save most of them. Michiko Kuwaye would surely die-the moment Zell got his powerful hands upon her. Jessie Marawski was probably marked for death, too. She'd be of no sexual use to Zell.
The others I didn't know. Zell might torture Ella or me, just to strike back at Danny. But I didn't think he'd kill us. He didn't realize that there was nothing between Ella and Danny, now.
I shivered in the darkness, and Ella's fingers closed tight upon mine. She whispered to me, "It's all right. But don't leave me now. I'm afraid. Vividly, I could picture Ella's golden body being covered by Zell's hairy flesh. Ella would struggle; she'd fight, and Zell would tear her apart
Myself-I tried to visualize me, spread by Zell's terrible strength, supine under his thrusting body. I tasted the wildness of his brutal mouth again, and the flavor sent chills through me. I couldn't stand Zell; he would have to beat me unconscious. I couldn't possibly accept his body-not after having had Danny. I would die in Zell's brutish mauling, shrivel and fade if forced to suffer my thighs being dirtied by his rutting.
I flinched when Danny put his mouth to my ear so he could make himself heard above the roar of the storm.
"I caught him a hell of a shot with the club." Danny said. "But he recovered so damned quick. I couldn't get in another blow."
The cold worked itself deeper into my body. With a heavy coral club, Danny had smashed Zell in the head. The blow had only knocked him down. Zell had rolled away, vanished before Danny could hit him again. Was it humanly possible for Danny Mixon, for any one man, to defeat such animal power, such animal ferocity?
I wasn't sure. Danny would have skill and speed on his side, and experience that perhaps Zell didn't have. But Zell-ape-like, deadly and primitive-Zell might batter Danny down and break his spine.
That would end it for all of us. Especially for me, but also for the rest of the women. Without Danny's help, they might be split wide open the next time Zell came charging at them. He might get past Michiko's arrows, snap her neck with one might sweep of a massive hand. And afterward, he'd see to it that none of them-of us-ever had the spirit to try escape again.
Danny was talking to me once more. "I'll have to try and bring it to a head before we get the raft into the sea," he said. "Zell and me, I mean."
"Yes," I answered, thinking that it would be better if we could bring our enemy into the open while there was still safety of a sort in our numbers, while there were still many women on the island who hated Zell enough to kill him.
Outside, the wind was slowly dying, dropping its fury to a thin and reedy whine, smelling of salt, of struggling things flung up out of the sea. I thought of typhoons I had read of, of hurricanes I'd seen in newsreels, and knew we had been lucky, that our island must have been on the fringes of the storm.
But would our luck hold? Could we get rid of Zell before he slaughtered any of us, before he murdered Danny Mixon?
Danny slipped away after patting my arm. He was back in a few minutes, able to speak normally now that the wind was whimpering itself into silence.
"We're one girl short," he said. "I counted noses when we came in, but one is missing now. She must have sneaked outside somehow, and we didn't see her."
"S-sneaked out? But why? Why would anyone leave the cave and go out where Zell is prowling around: And who, Danny-who?"
"Eve Short," he said thoughtfully. "And she must have gone out deliberately to find Zell and be with him."
Now Zell had help.
The next day came quietly, chastened by the passing of the storm. Only the trailings of the great wind fingered across our island, probing shamed-faced at stripped and splintered tree limbs, skipping lightly and apologetically across the scattered sands.
I came out into sunlight and stretched gratefully. It had been a long night, and a tense one. Now there were many things to do-the raft had to be checked for damage and repaired; fresh food had to be gathered. But now these things had to be done in force, by the entire group, instead of each of us fanning out to assigned jobs. It was going to be more difficult, but we didn't dare relax. Kane Zell would be watching and waiting.
Cramped, shaken by the fury of the night, the women gathered about Danny. I felt proud for him, glad for him, because now he was strong, and because all of us were dependent upon him. Danny had taken his rightful place as a man.
"Zell is around," Danny reminded us all. "I hurt him last night, but not so it will slow him up much. We'll have to keep a constant watch, and we'll have to stay together. Michiko-is your bow all right?"
She held it out. "The wind would have taken me first."
Mary Tetson asked: "You say Zell came last night, during the storm? Maybe he was just looking for shelter."
"No. He came to kill me-and probably a few more of us."
"And Eve," Mary said. "Did she go to him."
"We think so," Danny said.
"All right," Michiko said. "The raft-what about the raft?"
"We'll go see," Danny answered, and led us off.
The raft sat firmly in its bed of sand, its deckhouse torn away, lashings ripped. There was only the stump of the mast left. The food cache had been partly scattered, partly buried. But there was no major damage, nothing that couldn't be re-gathered or fixed within a day or two.
Typhoons had swept this island before, crippling foliage. It would soon right itself and grow back. In some ways, the storm had been a boon to us, for the shore was littered with stunned crabs and roped with edible kelp.
But another storm waited for us in the jungle, plotting, hating, healing itself and waiting to unleash murder on our heads. I stared into the bruised and tattered trees, wondering how long Zell would wait. We made a fire near the raft and breakfasted on boiled crabs, and talked about Eve's desertion.
"She went to him, all right," Ella said. "She knew he was hurt and needed her. It's a shame she has to waste love like that on a beast like him."
Danny said, "She took some food, too. I checked the cave's stores this morning. Dried meat and fruit-and some cloth we had put aside. She was thinking all the way, knew Zell would need bandaging."
"She was thinking with her heart." Ella said. "If she used her head, she'd leave him alone to die."
Sucking on a crab claw, I tried to picture the meeting of Eve and Zell in the jungle. She'd be trying to find him, but he would find her, instead. He'd stalk her like a blood-hungry cat, cut her off, then pounce.
She'd be frightened, but determined. She'd show him the packet of food, the bandages, and tell him of her love, tell him she came to him to stand against the rest of us.
Zell would be tired and mean, his eyes red-flecked and feral. Would he laugh at her and smash her down? I didn't think so. He needed Eve, needed the help she could give him. She would be extra eyes, extra ears. Zell would keep her alive. He might even-make love to her, so she'd be bound that much closer to him.
But Eve was a fool, if she thought her loyalty would mean anything to the man. He'd use her, as he had used her before, welcoming her sensuous body, welcoming her aid against us. Then he'd slap her back into her place as just another member of his harem, relegate Eve to the position of just another mare to be taken upon the whim of the ruling stud.
We went to work on the raft, and the work progressed swiftly since it was out in the open. Two of us stood watch at all times, one at each end of the beach, keeping far enough back from the tree line so we could shout and run, if Zell and Eve appeared. We never saw either of them. We could only guess what they were up to, in the forest. Eve would be treating his wounds, feeding and comforting him. Zell would be lying up like a wounded panther, resting, gathering strength for the final assault upon us.
Mary Tetson thought differently, and her view was shared by few of the other girls. Their idea was that Zell had been beaten, decisively and for good, that he was afraid to face smother arrow from Michiko's bow.
We continued to work on the raft. Two days went by, three-pure, sunswept days in the wake of the scarring storm. On the afternoon of third day, we were struggling the raft over its road of peeled saplings once more. Lifting, straining, pushing, we worried it down the final slope of the beach. One more day would see it afloat.
We would set the new mast in place then, and store the food and water, rope the smaller raft of coconuts behind. The coconuts were Danny's idea. Filled with water and plugged, they'd be a constant supply of cool, life-giving drink for the passengers.
Guard was easier, for there was only a clean beach to watch, a strip of sand without cover for Zell to creep through. If he came for us now, he would have to come out in the open, where we could meet him head on. The sea at our backs protected us, but Danny saw to it that we didn't feel too safe about that approach, either. He reminded us that Zell could swim, that he might rise out of the ocean like some dripping sea monster and fling himself in our midst before we knew it. So we patrolled the sea, too.
Danny called me to his side. "Now is the time for Zell to make his try. Sometime between now and morning would be best. If he wants to stop the others from leaving, he'll have to jump us before high tide tomorrow. If he's decided to let them go, we're in for real trouble."
"We'll be together," I said. "We can give it one hell of a try."
"We'll double the guards tonight," Danny said. "Nobody walks alone. Two by two, and changing every hour. One more thing-spread the word that the guards are to pull in closer, to stay where I can see them within the circle of firelight. I'll go stoke up the fire, make it bigger. We want to see Zell when he attacks. If he catches us flat-footed, he'll hurt somebody before we even get a chance at him."
"Danny," I said. "You've given up that crazy idea of fighting him? Alone, I mean?"
"No," he said, and his jawline was firm. "No-it would be better that way. For me and for all of you."
"But-"
"It has to come," Danny cut in. "Keep back, when it does."
Danny and I walked post together. He was armed with the sturdy coral club, while I had one of the spears the Japanese girls had rigged. We were careful, watchful, never allowing our attention to wander. And minute by minute, the tension built within us, within the other doubled sentried, gathered force and pressure in the bellies of the women who tried to sleep and couldn't.
If we hadn't been alert, we would never have heard the thump in the sand. It came at the very end of our post, down where the shadows circled to dance at the edges of the firelight, where the encroaching trees were nearest to the beach.
"D-Danny," I said, and pointed my spear outward, its butt snugged into my hip, the way Danny had shown me.
He was poised, the club nicking back and forth, ready. "It's only a coconut. See-there in the sand?"
"It didn't fall away over here by itself," I warned.
"No," he agreed, "it didn't. Zell tossed it out hereand not to try and hit me with it. He wanted us to find it like this. I wonder why?"
"Be careful, Danny."
He was quick, darting out and back. Nothing flung out of the darkness at him, but my hands were slippery on the spear shaft. "What-what is it?"
Danny's fingers were cupping the fibered husk. He worked a wooden plug out of the shell, and I caught the thick, cloying odor only the fraction of a second after he did.
Liquor.
Not rum, nor whiskey, nor gin-but some potent brew with a heavy alcoholic content. The smell filled our nostrils-sick-sweet, penetrating. With it came mories for Danny Mixon. I saw his face tighten, saw his lips turn suddenly dry.
"D-Danny-you won't-won't-"
"You smell that?" he asked. "It's the odor of a thousand mahogany bars, of tinted bottles all in a row. It's the odor of blue mirrors and deep-thumping music, the scent of quiet, too-of sleep without dreams, of a comforting blackness that hold no cares and no sorrows."
Danny's hand shook. "My opiate," he said. "All the answers in the world; the robe of forgetfulness, the blessed friend to the ill at ease; hope for the hopeless."
"Don't," I choked. "Don't drink it; that's what Zell wants, Danny! He wants you drunk again, helpless again, a-a-"
"Weakling," Danny finished. Then he lifted his voice to the waiting blackness. "No dice, Zell. I don't need the stuff; I don't even want it. I hope you saved some of this for yourself."
Danny corked the husk, threw it spinning into the night. "Here, Zell! You need this more than I do, because you're scared, big man. You're scared shitless-or you wouldn't have tried that trick. Where are your guts, big man? Did they leak out of that hole in your tail when you pulled the arrow?"
Deadly, hovering silence.
Danny frowned. "I thought that might bring him out."
Ella had come up to us. She touched Danny's wrist. "Does-does he have to be brought out? Can't we do it any other way?"
Danny looked down at her. "He has to be brought out."
"All right then," Ella said. "I can get him out. I-I wasn't going to say anything about this before, but now I guess I have no choice. We won't have any peace until you beat his head in, Danny. Okay-here it is: I'm pregnant."
I gasped. Danny rubbed one hand across his chin. "Are you sure? I guess all men ask that one, don't they? And I guess the answer is always the same. That's fine, Ella; fine, if you want it this way. But I don't see-"
I did. I said: "Danny-the bomb; the bomb that sent us down in the plane. Radiation-it's supposed to make men sterile, sometimes. I remember reading-" Danny snapped his fingers. "Yes-and Zell-" Ella ended it with: "Zell slept with several women. Nothing happened. You and me-and something did happen. That means Zell is sterile and you aren't"
I stared into the dark. "That little piece of news will drive him crazy."
"Let's not wait any longer," Ella said, and stepped out before us. She stood with vagrant rays of firelight playing over her golden beauty, stood wide-legged with her hands on her smooth hips and her lovely head thrown back.
"Hey!" she shouted. "Hey-you-Zell! We know you're listening. You're watching me right now! Well, listen to this. You're not a man at all. You hear me? No man at all, Kane Zell! You're a nothing. You're sterile. You can't make a baby. How many women have you slept with here, Zell? How many? And how many of them are pregnant? There's been plenty of time for it-plenty!
But I'm pregnant, nothing man! I'm pregnant, and you never touched me. You're not the big, bad studhorse any more, Zell-you're a gelding! But Danny is a man, you hear me? Danny Mixon is a real man!"
Danny reached for Ella, drew her quickly back between us. "All right! that's enough. If he doesn't come out for that-"
A sound struck out at us, a ripping noise like a limb being torn from a tree, splintering and shattering the night. It was followed by something else-a rising, wordless roar of utter hate and insensate rage. The scream beat across the sand and stirred the hairs on the backs of our necks.
"Soon as it's light!" Zell shouted, the words tearing out of a hate-clotted throat. "Soon as it's light, you bastard! I'll rip your guts out!"
Sounds threshed away through the trees and it was quiet again. In the brittle silence, Ella said, "I guess he heard me loud and clear."
CHAPTER ll
At DAWN, IN THE first chill and foreboding streak of light, Zell came onto the beach. A step behind him was Eve Short, hurrying, saying something to him. As they came closer, I made out the words.
"Kane-Kane-don't do it; what they said doesn't matter."
He snarled at her. "Don't do it? You heard the nigger. She said Mixon is a better man than me."
"But he's not-you know that."
Zell stopped, eyes feeling warily among us for Danny. Danny stepped out of the crowd. Zell slammed a meaty fist into his palm. "The nigger's pregnant-you ain't, the Japs ain't, the kids ain't-just a broad I never laid."
"Kane-"
"How come?"
Eve's face was twisted, desperate. "It's not your fault-the radiation-"
Zell spat. "Why me and not him? Why didn't it bother that drunk son-of-a-bitch?"
"I don't know, but it doesn't make any difference to me. And I'm the one you love."
"Love?" Zell grunted. "Love? What the hell is that?"
He swept Eve back with one hand. She fell kicking into the sand.
Zell roared at Danny. "You ready, Mixon?"
Danny nodded. "I'm ready."
"That slopehead bitch with the arrows," Zell said.
Danny didn't look away. "Michiko-put down the bow."
Her voice rang out. "Only if he throws that bayonet away."
Zell's teeth gleamed. His fingers flicked the bayonet from his belt. It drove point down into the sand.
Behind Danny, Michiko said: "The bow is put aside. Kill him, Danny."
Slowly, Zell walked into the arena. He seemed bigger than ever before. The half-healed scar of the arrow was red along his hip; there was still a dark spot over one flat, wicked eye. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he came, and the muscles across his deep chest writhed in their black fur.
My heart said Danny-Danny-Danny, but he didn't hear it. He waited until Zell was just out of reach, until the big man's hands came up, knotted, reaching. Then Danny drifted in, slid quickly away in a half circle. Zell's head rocked back from the pair of stinging jabs that had flashed in to land over his right eye.
I shouted, and Ella cried out. Zell grunted and red flamed in his eyes. He reached out for Danny, trying to get his hands on the moving figure before him. Danny's left rapped him again and again, and Zell's clawing fingers caught only air.
Zell made a noise deep in his barrel chest and threw himself forward with snake swiftness. Danny went low, bobbing far to his left, letting Zell's clubbing right hand go past. Danny leaned into his own right, digging it belt-high into Zell's body, just under the ribs. Feet shifting, he watched Zell wheel in fury, and spun the whistling hook in with the weight of his body behind it.
Zell wobbled and shook his head. Blood seeped from a split eyebrow. "You bastard."
Danny coasted away, hands high, breathing easily. "You talk a good fight, Zell."
My man was good. He was a fighter, a real one, and he was beating hell out of Kane Zell.
Zell leaped, hooking his left hand in a long sweep, his right fist clumsily protecting his head. Danny pulled back, moving his feet only to plant them a little more firmly in the sand. Zell snorted as his swing jerked him off balance, twisted him forward and to one side, his jawline exposed.
Danny fired the right. His knuckles caught Zell at the angle of jaw under the ear, a soft and tender spot. The punch and the momentum of his own body pitched Zell forward onto his face.
Ella screamed into my ear. Other women cheered, yelling and clapping. I watched in stiff silence. I knew that Zell was going to get up.
Danny skipped back as the big man rolled over and leaped to his feet. Wiping at his gashed eyebrow, Zell brought his hands up slowly, pulling his elbows in close to his ribs, hunching the big shoulders up around his head. Now he moved carefully, setting his feet.
He would be more dangerous now, I thought. Zell's wildness had passed, had subsided into something cold and deadly. Zell has found respect for his opponent and realized he'd have to take punches. He moved on, willing to be battered, confident of his ability to absorb punishment.
Danny moved, circling, flicking the left, not whipping it in, because he could easily break it on the top of Zell's head. He feinted it high, then went in and chopped to the body. Zell's clubbing blow caught him on the shoulder before he could get out.
The punch hurt Danny. His legs took him out of danger, sliding him away from the steadily plodding Zell. He shook his arm to bring back feeling. Zell grinned.
Danny flicked the left and dropped a right into the ribs, centering on a possible soft spot. Zell cursed and forgot his protective shell. When the big man grabbed at him, Danny straightened and volleyed swift punches at the unguarded face, putting them together in practiced combinations.
Zell was stung; he wavered. Danny's foot skidded in loose sand and Zell's right hand caught the top of his head. The force of it spun Danny reeling away, off balance. Zell was after him, wasting a moment to roar and cock his arm.
The moment was enough. Danny's right hand eeled out from his shoulder, straight out with the thrust of his foot against the ground and the pivot of his hip. The punch caught Zell coming in, and added the momentum of the big man's rush to its power. The kick of its landing jarred Danny's shoulder.
Zell staggered. He rocked again under the hook that followed the right hand, and ducked forward into the chop Danny brought up in a short arc.
Zell went to his knees. Rifling, Danny moved away. Zell shook his shaggy head and pawed at smashed lips, at the steady trickle of blood from his eye.
"That's okay," Zell said slowly, "that's okay. I can take it longer'n you can dish it out."
Danny gulped air and massaged his right hand. I saw the wonder in his eyes, and knew that punch was one of the best he'd ever thrown-and Zell had taken it. Now Zell was up again and coming on.
Back and forth over the scuffed sand they circled, at the steady trickle of blood from his eye. Danny moving back, skipping in to land a flurry, jabbing, jabbing, moving. Zell stalked him doggedly, rocking under the blows, grunting, but coming on.
We watched in taut silence now, awed by the power and drama of the battle. Zell reeled from one attack, swaying close to us. Suddenly one hand darted out and caught Michiko's bow. Zell laughed through soggy lips and snapped the weapon like a straw.
Danny hit him again before he could get his hands up. Zell shook it off, sweat and blood spraying from his head, a terrible intentness in his eyes. He walked toward Danny.
Danny's left hand was sagging now, not so quick to lift into position. One knuckle was blue and swollen, a bruise along the forearm where Zell had landed one. He sucked air, trying to stay away and rest the arm.
Zell wouldn't allow him to rest. The big man's face was a gory smear, battered and slashed. Both eyebrows pumped blood now, and he wiped at them so he could see. His nose was flattened, and grated with sickening noises when he breathed. His lips were thick, raw ribbons, stretched wide for air.
But he kept coming, and Danny couldn't move away as fast. Once he stopped to try and end it, to find a target that would bring Zell down again, and it was a mistake. Danny was hit and down. A concerted gasp rose from us.
He rolled away barely in time to avoid getting his head kicked off. He came up groggy, back-pedaling with the aching left hand in Zell's squashy face, sticking, sticking, until the blurs went away and the nausea in his belly settled. I saw the avidness in Zell's eyes, the hungry contortions of the man's butchered mouth.
Danny's legs were going-slowly, still keeping him away from the killing blows that came more often now-but they were going, losing their spring. He came down off his toes, stuck the tired left into the gore of
Zell's eye and planted his feet solidly for the follow-up right.
It snapped down the slot, a go-for-broke desperation shot that fighters throw when they can feel the bout slipping away from them, when the air is burning in their lungs and sticky in their teeth.
This one caught Zell on the point of his chin, flush, with the sodden thump of a meat axe into a chopping block. Zell swayed forward, his hands dropping, the red dimming in his eyes. Danny leaned into a left hook, pushed another right into the broken nose, another hook into what was left of Zell's eyebrow.
Zell tottered, eyes glassy. Tired, very tired, Danny slid his right foot back and braced it. His target was helpless. He threw the right with every ounce of his remaining strength.
I heard bones break in the hand with the whiplash impact upon Zell's jaw.
Zell fell toward Danny, hands pawing. They found Danny and clenched. The great arms fumbled around his waist. In blind instinct, Zell clung to him, holding himself up. The arms tightened. Danny gasped and tried to pull free. Zell squeezed, his gory face jammed tightly to Danny's.
Danny twisted away from a lifted knee. Zell's arms were a vise crushing breath from straining lungs. Danny lifted his left hand, searching across slippery flesh until he found an eye socket. His thumb hooked in. He dug and pried until Zell screamed through his broken mouth and staggered back.
Danny reeled after him, striking with slow, painful hooks with his left hand. The right dangled at his side. Another left hook and another-and I strained my throat, screaming to Danny that he was punching at empty air.
He wiped blood and sweat away from his eyes and saw Zell at his feet. The big man was on hands and knees, head wobbling, pushing at the sand, but not able to lift himself.
Danny's knees unhinged and he would have collapsed, but I was there to hold him, to prop him erect.
"Danny, Danny-" I cried.
He peered blindly at me, and stumbled along until I let him go. He lay on his back, chest heaving. I splashed water over him. His lungs were overworked bellows, straining, pumping air in and out. A swallow of water then, and his eyes cleared. He winced from the pain of his broken right hand.
"Zell?" he muttered.
"Down," I said. "Oh my darling, you're so hurt." Danny's eyes closed and his head sagged back. Somebody screamed.
The sound lanced through me, through Danny, strident in warning, breaking on a high note of terror.
Danny sat up. Across the sand, Kane Zell stood wavering like a tall tree in a high wind, and clutched in one hand was the carbine bayonet.
Michiko ran at him, stabbing with a spear, but Zell flung out a paw and piled her onto the sand. Danny pushed erect, staring in disbelief at the stubborn strength of the man. He used one weary arm to block Ella and I.
One of Zell's eyes was gone. I could see it hanging. But he was still deadly, still determined.
Zell's words were difficult to make out, mumbled through dripping lips: "Bastard-kill you-bastard-"
Behind him stood Eve Short, her face white, mingled hurt and fear in her eyes.
"Bastard-" Zell grunted and took a shambling step. "-rip your guts out-lay them other two-lay the nigger-lay the widow on your grave-"
"Kane!" Eve's voice was shrill. "Kane-you don't want them! You promised-just the two of us!"
Zell moved forward, the bayonet gleaming in his fist.
"Kane! You love me?"
"-lay 'em all," Zell muttered. "Lay 'em on a grave-"
Eve was swift, flashing across to the supplies piled beside the raft. She bent and came up with a whisky bottle full of water. A sweep of her arm broke the bottle against the logs and left her with a many-ton-gued bottle neck, its jagged shards brighter than Zell's bayonet.
"No more!" Eve screamed and ran at him. "You're mine! You won't take another one-I'll kill you first!"
She was on his blind side. He didn't see the jagged weapon she slammed into his face until it was too late. I saw his good eye swing to it then.
It was the last thing he ever saw.
Eve twisted the bottle neck. Its brittle edges cut Zell's other eye out as neatly as a surgeon's scalpel.
The noise Zell made was something none of us ever want to hear again. It struck to the soul, agonized and hopeless. Zell dropped the bayonet and kneeled, hands fumbling at one empty eye socket, at one pulped eye socket.
Eve stared down at him. Her fingers let go the bottle neck Her whimper matched his as she took the shaggy, mewling head in her arms.
I covered my eyes.
There was only one other sound on the entire beach. Michiko Kuwaye was laughing.
CHAPTER 12
We found Michiko directing the loading of supplies. The sullenness and much of her arrogance was gone. She was going home.
"Congratulations, Danny," she said. "You were magnificent."
"I was lucky," Danny said. "But we didn't come to talk about that."
"What, then?" I said, "Zell. We think he should go with you."
"What?"
"Think about it," Danny said. "The raft is Japanese style, with that big sweep on its stern. When the wind dies, someone will have to push the sweep. It's hard work."
Michiko stared at him. "You want him away from your woman?"
Danny nodded. "Partly, but also for Eve. She wants to leave the island, but not him."
Michiko tossed her head. "That one! She kills and loves in the same breath. Very well, Danny. They may both come, but he will work hard-very hard. Tell him that."
I said, "We'll have to tell Eve. Zell lost more than his eyes. He just sits and mumbles."
Ungainly, the raft floated at the beach, its deckhouse ugly. With luck, it would make the trip. High tide bumped it up and down.
They were aboard, and the sea was pink and gold, eager to be off to far places. We kissed them all good-bye-everybody but the hulk of Kane Zell. Elena Marquez cried; so did Helen Fergus. So did Sako and Kyoko. Jessie shook hands like a man. Ella was smiling bravely as I kissed her good-bye.
Voices chorused as the sail lifted, as we helped shove them away from the sand. Zell pulled at the long oar, his face blank. The sail bellied out in the morning wind.
We waved at them, then stopped and watched the sail dip beyond the sea. I held Danny in the crook of one arm.
I wondered if they'd make it, if they'd find a shattered world, or none at all. I wondered if they'd be sorry they left.
And I wondered if anyone would ever read the story I've told, the scribbled pages I put together over the months. The story of one man's heroic battle with himself to live as a man is able; to live; the story of
Danny Nixon's intransigent stand to preserve his life and self-respect. I wonder.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
MILITARY AIR TRANSPORT SERVICE is closely tied in with the Army, and so gets itself jammed with Army red tape and head-in-the-sand censorship. There's also another agency involved, more secretive, even quicker to cover up.
It's called the Atomic Energy Commission. It doesn't admit mistakes.
Did an A-blast down a place that was simply reported as "missing?"
Julie Curtis's manuscript says so.
Officials from here to the Pentagon won't say a damned thing.
So I believe Julie. I have to. I look at the water-stained, wrinkled, smudged pages that were brought to me by a beautiful Negro woman who came the long way around.
Japanese newspapers made quite a splash over the raft that sailed out of nowhere. Stateside newspapers were strangely quiet about the event.
But maybe you're like me-and just don't give a damn about official silences.
Maybe like me, you'll wish two people well-and you'll hope their island is left to them.
