The Mark Twain Steamboat was anchored for the night, but Davis noted that a Tom Sawyer Island motorized raft appeared to be bringing some guests from the island. The raft could fit thirty visitors, but the captain was depositing only four back on the mainland, two men and two girls. The men were in their sixties, tripping and stumbling, wearing coonskin caps, guffawing and grasping at their dates. The two girls were done up in raunchy Disney-squaw garb—fringed leather bikinis and skirts, eagle feathers, braids.

“All aboard!” said the raft operator, a young man in an unkempt country-boy Huck Finn costume.

“I’m way too sober,” Lawford said as they all climbed on.

“We have heap big firewater on the island,” the raft operator said robotically, cranking up the motor and steering the craft to Tom Sawyer Island.

“It’s weird how no one seems to notice you two,” Charlie said. “I mean, not only no autograph requests, but it’s as if they don’t recognize you!”

“No one notices anyone because this event isn’t happening, man,” Davis observed. “You’re not here, I’m not here, no one is here.” The raft operator nodded approvingly.

As they chugged forward, Charlie could see more of the island, some of which was illuminated by tiki torches and lanterns. A fishing pier sat by the docks, adjacent to an old mill, and off in the distance at the northern tip sat what appeared to be a cabin on fire. Beyond the party sounds of music, murmurs, and revelry came the rhythmic warpath drumbeats of the Ugga-Wugga Wigwam tribe from Peter Pan.

The operator tied the raft to a post in the Tom’s Landing dock and as Charlie disembarked, he noticed shapes on the muddy shore illuminated in the moonlight. It was a young woman on her back, naked from the waist up, gazing patiently if dead-eyed into the sky, and a big, broad, heavy, hairy man on top of her.

The sight transported Charlie back to a night in France during the war. Along with the rest of First Battalion, 175th Infantry, Charlie landed at Omaha Beach on June 17, 1944. He and Company K seized Isigny-sur-Mer, secured the bridge over the Vire River, recaptured Saint-Lô, and proceeded northeast. By late August, Charlie and his weathered platoon had reached a bank on the eastern estuary of the Seine River southwest of the Pays de Caux. The nearby city, German-occupied Le Havre, was France’s biggest channel port, and beginning in the early evening of September 5, the Royal Air Force dropped almost ten thousand tons of bombs on the town, destroying more than 80 percent of the buildings and killing two thousand French civilians. Soon, from the ocean, the monitor HMS Erebus and battleship HMS Warspite began pummeling the port town with more than four thousand long tons of shells.