Free Butler Did It! by Sally Pomeroy Page A

Against the original sheet steel was primer brown followed
by olive drab, fire-engine red, ambulance white, pea green, taxicab
yellow and on top a neutral blue gray, neither sky nor water. The
bow of the beast was painted a bright orange, someone’s idea of a
duckbill. The wrench wizards down in maintenance had long ago given
up trying to make the Rusty Duck look pretty, saying it was akin to
dressing up a wino in a tutu. Here and there, the multiple layers
of paint were chipped and flaked off by accident or design,
revealing hidden layers of color, like a partly sucked jawbreaker.
Of course, every surface was highlighted by random blotches of
rust, advancing mercilessly against the thick bastions of
paint.
    While cosmetically the wizards weren’t
doing much, they had made one significant improvement to the
vehicle. The two hundred seventy cubic inch gasoline engine had
been replaced with a heavy-duty diesel that boosted its speed in
the water from a lackluster five and a half knots to an impressive
eighteen knots. Of course, these same boffins also had a running
pool on when the new engine would tear thru the ancient hull of the
DUKW, sending it to the bottom.
    As a tribute to the DUKW’s noble
history, the original nose art applied during the war had been
carefully copied with every paint job. Just behind the orange bill,
a large red-rimmed bulls-eye with a rather lecherous cartoon duck
smoking a cigar and toting a fifty-caliber machine gun was
prominently displayed on both the port and starboard sides. From a
distance, the nose art looked a bit like an eyeball, which usually
caused any first timers to stop in their tracks and gawk horribly
as it passed. Those still hypnotized by the sight of the Rusty Duck
passing, couldn’t fail to notice the faded lettering high on the
stern directly over the propeller.
     
    SCREWGE
    WET DUCK, ARKANSAS
     
    The driver, Maurice Lapin, one of the
old timers and the purser of the Pelican, and pulled the Rusty Duck
into the shade of an overhanging palm tree, killed the engine, and
tossed a boarding ladder over the side for the convenience of
anyone wanting to climb back aboard. After dragging a battered lawn
chair to the bow, he settled onto his lofty perch, becoming a
rather bizarre hood ornament on the nose of the Rusty
Duck.
    The crew of the Pelican had spread out.
Several began sunning on the white sand, many romped in the surf, a
few were relaxed in the meager shade provided by the overhanging
palm trees, but all were drinking beer and having a good time. The
largest group set up a game of volleyball along the surf
line.
    Tommy Cooper was working industriously
on the creation of his sand sculpture masterpiece. He was delighted
with this particular beach for its quality of sand. There was just
enough lime clay in the sand to make it a perfect sculpting medium.
The sand would support its own weight better than ordinary beach
sand. The tiny shell fragments scattered throughout lent structural
stability to the sand mix, which allowed him to experiment with
designs that ordinary beach sand could never hope to achieve. He
was also surreptitiously testing his new Special Sand Sculpture
Cement; a subtle combination of seaweed, salt, calcium, and sea
foam. He was hoping to produce an ionic binder, reducing
evaporation and allowing the sand grains to bind for a longer
time.
    Close to a mangrove thicket, under the
shade of the palm trees, Yan Yu Chan sat in a lawn chair sipping a
beer and reading a cheap detective novel. He wore a garish orange
and red Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a liberal coating of
zinc oxide on his blunt nose. Lying nearby was Elizabeth Barrett
O’Neil or EB, as she was known aboard ship. Today was her first
opportunity to get off the ship in over four months. She was bored
and feeling very neglected by her boyfriend, Tommy. She passed the
time casually watching a group of scantily clad males playing a
very dirty game of volleyball in the shallow surf.
    There was no