Chapter One

Sitting Ducks

Harry Jeffries was cruising, counting the days till his divorce papers came through and he could make his getaway from San Fancisco. He was an ironworker, his trade was bucking hot rivets, and his place of employment was the Golden Gate Bridge, the south tower, hundreds of feet above the waters of the bay. In his last week on the job--his last days as a married man--the world below appeared to him like a map laid out to show his life and times, past and future. Turn one way and there was the city, the cold-water hotel where he had been living out of a suitcase, separated from his wife and little daughter, the bars where he drank when he was not working, the blind alleys in the Tenderloin where he gambled when he was not drinking. Turn the other way and there was the blue Pacific, stretching off to the west--and the instant he was single again, that was where he was headed, over the horizon and out. On the stroke of noon, August 21, 1941, his big moment came up, and all the married men who worked on his level of the tower cheered and beat on the steel girders with their sledges and wrenches, wedding bells in reverse, as he climbed down off the bridge, free at last.

He and his friend Oklahoma Atkinson had their ship's passage booked for that same afternoon, and before the day shift on the tower downed tools they were sailing in style out through the Golden Gate.

They were going to be gone for nine months--which would make it June of 1942 when they came cruising back, flush with money, set for life. They had it all worked out.

They had met at the building trades labor temple. Harry was hanging around waiting for a poker game to materialize when Oklahoma came walking in with his little tin suitcase, looking all wide-eyed and countrified. They got to talking, and they clicked right off. They were a pair, a couple of healthy young physical specimens, the same age, twenty-six, the same height and weight, six feet one, one hundred ninety-five pounds, full of beans, purpose-built for bridge building. They organized things so that they could work the same shift in the same gang.

And they started running around together after hours, nightclubbing along North Beach, picking up women. Harry was the date maker. On the bridge he was known as Hollywood--a snappy dresser with slick hair and a movie-star moustache--and in the clubs no one was speedier with a silver Ronson when some goodlooking blonde sitting at the bar crossed her legs and tapped her cigarette. Oklahoma with his average man's Zippo was forever a step behind, meaning he was the one who always drew the goodlooking girl's less good-looking friend.

Not that he was complaining. Before San Francisco he had not seen a great deal of the world, not much beyond the flatlands for a day's drive or so around his tiny little hometown, and a military base or two from his hitch in the peacetime army of the United States, one lowly private soldier among thousands, grateful just to be fed and clothed and in out of the cold in the worst years of the Great Depression. Now here he was in the big city, with Hollywood Harry ordering up the high life.

Harry had started out a poor boy too, and that pointed him toward the service the same way as Oklahoma. Not the Army, though, the Marines. An elite corps--Harry liked the sound of those words. So he signed up with the reserves. But he never did make it to the real Corps. In the dark days of the 1930s recruiting lines in the big cities were as long as soup kitchen lines, and because the Marines were elite, for every one keeper they came across they could afford to throw back dozens. Harry was well set up, big and strong, but he was bowlegged; when the recruiters stood him at attention, daylight showed between his knees, and that was enough to wipe him out. It was a blow to his pride. He had to settle for the Navy.

His big cruise, aboard the battleship U.S.S. Colorado, took him from Bremerton in Washington State down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and up the East Coast to New York. It was the time of the World's Fair, and Harry was detailed to march with his shipmates in a big parade along Fifth Avenue. Passing the Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper on earth, some of the young sailor boys got carried away and tilted their heads back to gawk; they lost their step and bumped into each other and fell down in a heap and took Harry with them.

Harry did not need the embarrassment. He was doing the parade the hard way already. In Havana, on liberty, his first ever night of catting around in a foreign port, he had picked up his first ever dose of the clap. All the way north to New York he had to suffer the Navy's fearsome gonorrhea treatment, standing at a trough, a nozzle stuck up his urethra to drench his inflamed plumbing with purple potassium permanganate, let that drain out, then take a syringe of Argyrol straight up. He made the Fifth Avenue march feeling sorry for himself, his greatest item of value and distinction tied with a butterfly bandage, and for extra protection a leather Bull Durham sack, so that the gonorrhea drip would not weep all over the crotch of his Navy whites.

By the time his ship got back to the West Coast the drip had dried up. But in Seattle he found a more serious sort of woman trouble to get himself into, a shotgun marriage, and that turned into a curse worse than the clap.