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( Chapter Four: ❛ AMERICAN CITY-SLICKERS ❜ )
SEPTEMBER, 1943
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GINNY HAD A NIGHT OFF FROM THE SWITCHBOARDS ABOUT A WEEK LATER, and Jackie asked if she would accompany her to the Railway Motel for another evening of social grievances among some of the city's most riotous Marines. So, that night, dolled up to the gods, herself and her friend spent the evening in a cramped bar filled with live swing music and somber singing voices.
It reminded her of those speakeasies she'd read about in novels, those underground 1920s bars crammed with girls in dropwaist dresses, dancing in feather boas, temples of virtue where the room positively pulsed with roaring light and technicolour music. Bars like this had a certain lull to it, the blonde had found, a drowse of heaviness that hung thick in the air due to intoxication, the dance floor a bringer of sleazy evenings where the corners of her vision faded into blackness. It was Jackie who was on the dance floor that night though, as per usual, her forehead pressed against her tall, dark and handsome soldier's (just as it had told her in the tabloid!) as they rocked around in a circle together. Sitting on the sideline, Ginny couldn't help but wonder how their date had gone — the brunette never hesitated to spill the beans on things, but she'd kept rather quiet on this one.
Jackie had told the blonde she looked like a dreamboat that evening, before they'd left — perhaps Ginny would have been inclined to believe it if she also donned a pretty new dress and such neat finger waves, and perhaps she would have been more confident in herself too. Jackie assured her, though, that girls would die for hair the colour of lace the way hers was — she wondered if the brunette really meant what she'd said, as dreamlike as she herself was.
The Australian girls crowded across the bar from her table were playing a plethora of drinking games with the Marines, and Ginny watched one woman try to drink vermouth from a tall glass from one's head without spilling. In the Railway Motel, girls were outnumbered three to one; even Virginia herself was sandwiched between two Americans. If she'd have believed in fates, she probably would have believed that theirs were absolutely and utterly intertwined, though, she could almost tell that Hoosier didn't want to be there, even more than her — pessimism was almost oozing out of his skin. Despite seeming reluctant, Ginny quite enjoyed the time she was spending away from home, whereas the American man seemed to be in a constant state of lethargy, and had rubbed his eyes more than once since he'd sat down beside her, the curly-haired Leckie in tow.
"So, Ginny, what do you do around here these parts for fun? Day-to-day, I mean, when us Yanks aren't in such overwhelming proportion," asked Leckie, making an attempt at trying to get the young woman to settle into the flow of an actual conversation rather than just sitting there in a numbing silence, that indeed, was glossed over by the jumpy piano music, but still painful all the same, "Do you have a job?"
"Well," it wasn't that she was reluctant to talk to the Marines; it was just mere disinterest for the most part, plus a bit of old-fashioned indoctrination from her father, "I spend a lot of my time working as a switchboard operator just out of town. Jackie and I are colleagues, you see — that's how we met. The stars aligned, and I walked into her carrying a typewriter and almost dropped it on her foot," Ginny recalled, seeming rather amused by the memory, "And for fun, I play the piano and sometimes garden with my mother, who cares for her roses religiously," and with a cigarette dangling from her lower lip, she politely asked in response, "What do you boys do in the war, then?"
"Shoot Jap bastards and get chewed alive by the local wildlife," Hoosier responded flatly, not sparing her the same glance that Leckie did when he spoke, but adorning that blue, leering stare that was like daggers made from ice, the stare that never quite seemed to melt away.
"What I think Hoosier means to say is that both of our positions are as riflemen, but we're also part of heavy weapons," interjected Leckie, "Our buddies, Runner and Chuckler, are machine gunners, but we sometimes take turns manning them and carrying the equipment around. That's why we spend so much goddamn time together, we're like a mortar squad, you see, or quadruplets joined at the hip."
To that, Ginny laughed through the cigarette between her teeth, and the cadence from her made Leckie smile his classic smile: straight-teethed and slightly open mouthed. She found, she was put at ease by him, but soon enough, he spotted a woman he knew walking past the window of the Railway Motel through the bar's blinds, and insisted on leaving the bar in her pursuit, calling Stella! Stella! like a broken record.
Luckily for Ginny, though, this gave her room to move around a bit in the booth they'd all been packed into. She felt like she could finally breathe again, especially now that she was at least two or three feet away from Hoosier, whom she accepted another light from, asking, "So what is it actually like out there? In the Pacific, I mean. Iwo Jima, and that."
"We weren't at Iwo Jima," Hoosier responded, glowering down at his hands rather than looking at her for even a second, "Jungles and rain, jungles and sand and sea. Even the bugs are try'na kill you. The best you can do is just sleep through it all."
"Sounds like hell," she commented with a grave look on her face, her eyebrows upturned as she tapped away the ashes of her cigarette. When she took a final drag before stumping it out, she held the smoke for a second before allowing it to slink back out from between her lips and curl translucently up towards the ceiling like the thin phantom of a snake. It gathered at the ceiling with all the rest of the passive smoke from every other cigarette-bearing person in the vicinity. Hell was only an ocean away. She added, "Did you fight, then?"
"Yeah, for a time," he mumbled. She could hardly fathom how the conditions out there must have been — having enemies in the climate as well as the constant, lingering threat of the Japanese. "But we got broken real nice into Melbourne afterwards, so everything was dandy in the end. Nice little parade you threw for us, with all the banners and flags ... and the trumpets."
Ginny harrumphed. Yes, she remembered it well: so many streamers, like the whole boardwalk was a technicolor movie. They were tied to the rungs of the fences holding in the citizens as they crammed themselves together, packed onto the shipyard balcony. Waving and smiling and holding up American flags and banners that they'd made at home the weeks before saying things like "australia welcomes U.S.A" and "Welcome to Melbourne!" — some even waved handkerchiefs.
Ginny hadn't done anything particularly marvellous for the occasion, but Jackie had braided white, blue and red ribbons into her blonde hair as a favour, and it was all bundled up in a ring around the back of her head, looping down at the base of her neck and up by the crown in a braid that reminded her of a milkmaid. Jackie had worn red lipstick and had a miniature American flag on a cocktail stick speared through her ponytail. It was mainly women and some children, with a few old men scattered here and there.
The Temple Band beneath them were older men, fathers too old to join in the war effort, and they wore SALVATION ARMY peaked black caps and uniforms to match, their trumpets thrilling through the air. She remembered it well. The men hadn't seemed so happy — actually, the expressions on their faces had made her inclined to believe that they weren't best pleased with the celebration at all. She remembered them all in their ruddy kits, "I'd never seen people who looked so sad," she admitted.
Hoosier huffed, "Yeah, well, we weren't exactly in the mood."
You say that as if you ever are, she wanted to respond, but instead, it came out as, "Do you ever look at people when you're talking to them?" and she sort of lost her breath as she said it, facing the sculpture of his side profile as he smoked and stared into oblivion. She regretted it instantly, and sensing that she wasn't due a reply any time soon, she turned away, ducking her head and delving into her handbag, pretending to look for something.
She felt movement next to her, and when she turned her head back towards him, he was sat right beside her again, and what struck her the most was that he was staring directly into her eyes. "What, like this?" — Ginny felt that same heat rush into her cheeks as she looked back at him, — "We should go out sometime."
Despite this, his eyes were still cold and hard and unforgiving. Those were the same eyes that had drank her in on the tram over a month ago. The same ones that tore her apart right now. She swallowed thickly and actually reeled herself in for once, considering what she was going to say before she spoke, "Yeah? I'm not attracted to men who treat me like shit. Women like men who are nice to them."
"Well, I like you, and you ain't even that nice to me."
"Am I obliged to?" she quirked a fine eyebrow at him questioningly. Honestly, he didn't seem too phased by her rejection of his offer, but then again, he didn't seem too phased by anything. She folded her arms across her chest and added, "A word of advice, cobber: you want a girl? Take a bath."
I'm not piss easy like the rest of them, she wanted to tell him aloud as she stared at him with her eyebrows lowered, waiting for him to crack, and it may be a surprise to you, but believe it or not, I don't want to be your Aussie girlfriend. You can think again if you think I'm sending you salacious photographs for you to dog-ear and clutch like a good luck charm when you're sent back out there to get "chewed alive by the local wildlife". Hoosier never cracked, though. He went back to smoking.
There was just something about him that was so easy to detest; especially for Ginny now, as she watched contradicting parts of his personality clash in one big confusing mess. How can someone act like they care so little if they actually do? The worst thing about the whole situation was she couldn't tell if he was being serious or it he was just playing some cruel trick on her.
"Ginny," said a voice, and the blonde's head snapped in the direction of it so quickly that her neck could have broken. Where she had been expecting Leckie, or possibly Lew, she saw Gordon Love, and she felt a pang of relief wash over her. He asked, "May I have your hand?"
"Hand?" Virginia laughed, "Hell! Arm, leg, I'm yours," and took the open palm he offered her. He'd grown a moustache since she'd last seen him. His dark hair looked neater than usual, and his blue eyes more comely than usual. Usually, they were cold and unwelcoming and not interested in smalltalk. Perhaps it was just the circumstance or the atmosphere or maybe even Gordon's uncharacteristic olive button-up shirt, but Ginny was very happy to see him that evening.
"What was going on there?" he asked her as they drifted onto the dance floor and he persuaded her into the strange waltz that the formerly bouncy piano music had reduced down to. When she looked over her friend's shoulder back to where she'd been sitting previously, blue eyes were boring holes back into her. The Marine's eyes were brighter than she remembered them. Brighter than Gordon's, even.
"I don't know," she said, her tongue running over her lower lip, almost thoughtfully. "I think that American man just asked me out on a date with him."
Gordon seemed mildly alarmed by the prospect, and he scrunched his eyebrows together for a moment, "Well? What did you say? Those American men will break your heart, Ginny. You know your father thinks you deserve better than some city-slicker."
He was right: Ginny's father would absolutely murder her if he ever found out she was courting a GI. He constantly brought up statistics that he'd read in the newspaper at the dinner table, like how two million French soldiers had become POWs after being sent out to fight in Germany, and one in ten of their wives back in France who had to become prostitutes to support their families. He believed he was right to not want that for his daughter, and for a long time, Ginny had sided with him. She told him she'd never be so stupid.
After a moment of hesitation, the blonde responded, "I said no, of course. Trust me, there's dishwater with more personality than that one. I'd rather go on a date with a mop!" but somehow, she managed to sound unconvinced of her own words.
Within a second, the waltz music was gone as if it had never been there in the first place, and the lethargic beat was replaced with swing music once again. Gordon disappeared off to find his coat, and Ginny slinked back towards the booth to pick up her handbag, as to make her leave. Over in their corner, Leckie had returned and Hoosier was replaced with Wilbur or "Runner".
"Who was that?" Leckie inquired as the blonde reached over him to pick up her things, "We thought you would have been dancing with Hoosier."
"Oh, yeah," Runner snickered. "How is Hoosier?"
She wrinkled her nose in disgust. "What are you asking me for? I don't even care."
Immediately after she'd finished speaking, the double doors to the bar were burst violently open and men marched inside in their Marine uniforms, with black bands striped around their biceps, each stamped with MP. The piano playing was cut off instantaneously and everyone in the Railway Motel paused what they were doing and turned towards the doorway, "Listen up!" one of the men barked. "Every marine in this establishment will produce a liberty pass or will return immediately to his billet!"
One hell of a scuffle ensued afterwards as the men all scrambled for their escape, and Ginny decided that she was lucky to get out of there when she did; but now, she was entangled in a whole new kind of mess.