The crowd went silent as it watched me walk down the aluminum stairway, where I was met by a ginger-haired medic—whom I recognized as being the one on whom my good-luck loogey had landed earlier. He came at me with a huge Spielbergy Tyvek jumpsuit, bellowing, “Mandatory for potential bowel-related contamination scenarios! Can I ask you, Mr. Gunt, if you have any history of hepatitis A, B or C, cholera or superbugs?”
“Fuck off.”
“No need to swear, sir. There are ladies present.”
Fucking Americans.
The silence continued as everyone watched me don my hazmat suit. I gave up trying to maintain dignity. I’d be out of this fucking sun-kissed dump soon enough. Also, I had just witnessed the first Pacific detonation since 1962.
25
Instead of taking me to a nice clean clinic furnished with a functioning shower, Ginger the medic led me behind the Quonset hut beside the canteen, where three of his pals stood ready and armed with firehoses.
“Look, boys! It’s Billy Elliot!”
“Let the dance of pain begin!”
Bloody hell.
But when you’re caked in your own leavings, you really don’t mind being hit with brutally hard jets of water. Truth be told, it just gets the crap off sooner, though it does hurt like all get out. When the water hits a large enough flap of trouser fabric, liftoff is easily achieved, and more than once I was hurled into one of the canteen Dumpsters, crammed, no doubt, with saltine packaging and empty Pepsi bottles.
And, of course, there was much festive heckling. “Come on, Billy! Eat hose water, you po-faced Limey bitch!”
“Aim for his teeth, guys! Maybe we can ship his teeth to wherever it was his chin went.”
But then I removed my kacked pants and turned away from them. I bent over to let their warm, brackish water rinse away the last of my self-marinade. The tone soon changed when they realized they weren’t so much torturing me as they were administering a fairly efficient enema whenever I unclenched my rusty bullet hole. They soon turned off their hoses and walked away in disgust, Ginger tossing a pair of clean sailor’s trousers to the ground. I togged up.
Right.
The jet. Time to leave.
Just then Neal roared up in a Jeep driven by one of his video-gaming friends, with two more in the rear seat, all of them holding foaming half-full Oktoberfest mugs of beer. “Rejoice, Ray!” Neal shouted. “The trash vortex will soon be gone.”
“Christ, Neal. You’re wasted. Let’s just get to the fucking plane.”
“Not until you have a beer with us, my friend. Everyone on the island is celebrating a new era of hope for mankind.”
“Yes, yes, whatever. We’re the worst thing that ever happened to the planet. But a pint of lager right now would be just the ticket.”
A back-seat goon turned a spigot on an aluminum canister and … voila! A cold, frosty, surprisingly delicious mug of lager appeared. I became drunk with the first swig. “All hail the atomic bomb!”
“To the bomb! The bomb! The bomb!”
It was a matey moment that cancelled out the horror of my cleansing. I climbed in beside Neal and we began driving on the runway, carving donuts and weaving in between other Jeeps filled with soused airmen. The whole island had erupted into an orgy of stress release.
“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it, Ray?”
“Just hand me another fucking beer.” Finally, a bit of light-heartedness after seventy-two hours of total shit.
Neal found an eighties radio channel on the Jeep’s satellite set, and the afternoon turned into a blur of hair-band ballads and puddles of vomited saltines. Around sunset, to the waning sound of Haysi Fantayzee’s hit “Shiny Shiny” from the departing Jeep’s sound system, I found myself utterly cunted and lying in a heap on the ground at the foot of the stairs leading up to the jet. Neal was Angry Dancing his way upward. I crawled after him. Once on board, I heaved my old aluminum medical gurney out the door. It bit the concrete with an aching clang. Elspeth closed the port and, finally, Wake Island was history.
Haysi Fantayzee was a British New Wave band of the early 1980s. Their single “Shiny Shiny” was released in 1983. It’s fun.
26
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so thrilled to hear the landing gear pull up. Neal, Elspeth and I feasted on Advil and microwave luxury meals as we tried to process the biggest twenty-four-hour travel kludge in history.
“I telephoned me mum when I was down there,” said Elspeth. “I told her where I was and she said her brother, Olly, went through Wake Island back in the late 1970s on a transpac boat when he was shipping off to Yokohama.”
“Where’s Olly now?”