Weapons of choice

The duty wasn't excessively heavy. Mostly they had to ferry a lot of sea trunks and personal luggage out of the hotel and into a truck for transfer to graves registration. A couple of the former occupants did have some curious and inconvenient items, like the pilot who'd acquired an antique mahogany dining table on a tour of China and had somehow managed to carry it through two other postings. Moose, Slim Jim, and four other guys were needed to shift that baby.

As tempting as it would have been to pocket a curio here or there, Davidson knew not to tempt fate. Mohr had eyes in the back of his box-shaped head and he was a lay-down certainty to be watching like a hawk. No, Slim Jim was a patient crook, content to pretend he wanted nothing more than to escape the prison camp of the cane field. If he behaved himself and didn't give the chief reason to get on his case, he might just get enough wiggle room to do some real business before long.

So he lifted and grunted and sweated with the others, grumbling occasionally, as was his style, complaining about officers who lived like royalty, and bullshitting about how he'd stayed in plenty of joints that'd make this place look like a flophouse. They finished up at 1730 with a few more hours of work to go. A strict curfew was in place from 1800, however, so Mohr herded them back onto the bus for the trip back to the cane field.

The bullshitting wasn't nearly as loud or energetic on the way home. Talk turned to Midway, to curiosity and speculation.

"I heard they put a new heart in Smithy," said a voice from the dark in the rear of the bus. "Like a fucking windup clock it is, I heard. All gears and wires."

"Crap," said someone else. "It'd rust in there."

"No," said Chief Mohr, "that one's true. I visited Smithy myself on that big Marine Corps flattop they got. They split him right open, took out his old heart, and put in this new one, made of some kind of miracle plastic or something. Reckon it'll be beating a hundred years after he's gone."

"I heard they all got machines inside them, that they can talk to each other without even speaking out loud."

"No way."

"Yep, and they can grow you new skin and muscles and stuff, if you get a piece shot out of you-"

"— or burned off."

"That's right. And they got that jelly they put on the burns. You seen that shit? It smells something terrible but I tell you what, guys got that stuff on them, it's like they can't feel a damn thing from those burns, and when it comes off they just patch you up with some o' that skin they grow in a bucket. It's like you never got burned."

"What if they fucked it up, though. Gave you some nigger skin when you're meant to get white. You'd be a sorry-looking piece of shit then, wouldn't you? Like a zebra."

"It wouldn't take," said Moose, quite earnestly, over the laughter. "You couldn't put black on white. They's two different types. Wouldn't work-just like if you got the blood types wrong and mixed 'em. It'd kill you."

Moose was particularly pleased with himself for that analogy. And for Moose, it was a decidedly sophisticated piece of reasoning.

"We coming back in tomorrow?" Slim Jim asked Mohr. "To finish the job?"

"I don't know, Davidson. Could be that some of the others need a break, too."

"Screw them," someone called out, saving Slim Jim the trouble. "Those lazy bums didn't put their hands up today. Why should they get a reward tomorrow?"

Mohr said he'd think about it.

"Hey," said Slim Jim, "did anyone hear about the pill they got gives you a boner for three days straight?"

The next day the same sun that beat down with such malice in the burned-out cane field felt dappled and wonderful downtown in Honolulu. Slim Jim was so happy he had unknowingly slipped into his Downtown Strut. Davidson hadn't had cause to break out the Strut since getting busted and press-ganged into the navy. But this morning, he felt like he was walking with the King.

They had finished work at the Moana by 1030 and Chief Mohr, in an unprecedented show of slack, had given them liberty for the rest of the day. They were free as birds until 1700 hours, when the bus would take them back to camp. Slim Jim had quickly shaken off Moose Molloy and headed straight for Hotel Street. It was said of this quarter of Old Honolulu that you were as much at risk here as storming a Japanese pillbox. If the cops didn't get you, the crooks surely would. Dozens of booze barns and cathouses lined the narrow pavement. Bouncers and con men, vicious Kanaks, the Shore Patrol, syphilitic hookers, drunken sailors-there were a thousand ways to get into trouble down on Hotel Street.

Slim Jim Davidson felt right at home.

He had joined a long line outside one of the cheaper bordellos and remained there until he was certain Chief Mohr had disappeared into Wo Fats bar and grill. Then, pointedly mumbling about how a man could die of horniness in such a slow line, he stepped off, apparently determined to seek a quicker release.