“Thank you, Lord,” Pastor whispered.
She resented this, though. No question. She felt shallow, equating a man’s demon sufferings with intrusion and inconvenience on her part. But that’s exactly what she felt. This was an intrusion—on her flock, on her ship, on the future of her mission—and she resented it. It wasn’t just inconvenience, either. His presence, dead or alive, could be dangerous.
Lorraine cried behind the closed door of the small latrine. The girl’s bra lay in a tangle of blanket near the foot of the bed; she’d forgotten it in her haste to dress. Pastor pulled it out, staring blankly at the latrine door, running the smooth fabric between her fingers. She turned her head, looking at Davis again. She reached out with her free hand and felt his forehead, running her palm across it, then gently down his cheek. His breathing was growing more labored, and she wondered if he was waking or dying.
This man is a disease,she thought.
Pastor rolled the girl’s bra up in her right hand and shoved it under Davis’s mattress, just to be done with it.
Junior Davis spent six years in uniform, two of them as sergeant. He was sharp. Sharp, shined, creased. Lazy, slouched, slow-talking and quiet in jeans and a T-shirt, he transformed in uniform, starched backbone and chin up, fingers locked in perpetual sergeant’s fists, the best snipe on 1098th’s Mike Boats. He could fix them, sail them, shoot from them. He’d told New Jersey a story, though, how he’d been a pissy mess to start. Every private is a pissy mess to a certain degree, but Junior Davis pushed the envelope.
Already bitter about the judge’s order forcing his Army enlistment, they’d thrown Junior Davis in 1098th’s maintenance platoon right out of boat school and solidified his resentment. He had a dirtbag of a barracks roomdog everyone called Penguin, and basically Junior didn’t give a fuck. He’d wanted to give a fuck, he told Tory, but it was hard when the Army crapped green on him right off the bat like that. So he stayed drunk with Penguin, showed up to formations in wrinkled and greasy BDUs, never shined his boots, never cut his hair. No one in the company’s line platoons knew who he was, and he didn’t give a fuck for any of them. His dirtbag roomdog, the only companion he had, got knocked from specialist to PFC and then straight down to E1 buck private, once for a hot urine test, once for insubordination. Junior Davis woke up one morning, newly promoted to an E2’s mosquito wings, and realized he outranked the four-year veteran who shared his barracks room and lonely life. That night they did a line of crank to celebrate this achievement, then used the hallway pay phone to call the civilian girlfriend they shared, a chick from down near Poquoson; Penguin called her Sweaty Betty. With the lights off in the barracks room and someone else supplying the high, she wasn’t picky about how many soldiers sandwiched into the narrow bed with her.
Three months into this the platoon leader for Maintenance—a first-dot warrant officer almost as slovenly as the rest of them—was booted and replaced with a CW2 named Valentine. This chief was from the LSV attached to 24th ID in Hawaii, and he looked like it. He fired the fat platoon sergeant and proceeded to ram his highly polished jump boot up every lazy ass he could find, starting at the top of the platoon and working down. On day four of his tenure he called Junior Davis into the VSO at Third Port and put him at attention before his desk.
“Why the fuck are you in Maintenance Platoon?” he asked.
“No idea, Sir.”
“New private like you should be out on the boats.”
“If you say so, Sir.”
“Don’t you want to be on the boats, Davis?”
Junior shrugged. “Not sure, Sir.”
“Not sure? What the fuck,” Valentine said. “Why the hell are you here, then, soldier? Sailing is life. Life is sailing. Waterfuckingborne. You want to spend a four-year enlistment in a maintenance shed?”
Davis shrugged again. “Never really thought about it, Sir.”
Valentine nodded. He shuffled some papers around on his desk, then said, “I inspected your barracks room this morning. You and that fat fuck you live with—Penguin.”
Oh shit,Junior Davis thought.
“He’s toast,” Valentine said. “Well, he was already toast, but he’s done for good now. Ate up. No waiting. You know why?”
Junior Davis shook his head no, but he knew. There’d been a collection of baggies under the bottom panel of Penguin’s wall locker.
Valentine knew he knew, but didn’t pursue it.
“There were a lot of books on top of your wall locker,” he said instead. “Paperbacks. Those yours?”
Not knowing whether it was right or wrong, Junior Davis nodded yes.
“More books in your room than in the rest of the barracks combined,” Valentine said. “You must be pretty smart. You think you’re smart, Private Davis?”
Davis shrugged. Then nodded. Yes.
“Yeah, well fuck that. But I’ll take your word for it. Those books are why you’re here right now and not getting a piss test up at the company with your friend the Penguin.”
Davis opened his mouth to speak but Valentine held up his hand.
“Shut up, Private. Don’t say a fucking word.”
“Sir, yes Sir.”
“You look like shit, Davis,” he said.
“Sir, yes Sir.”
“You’re stinking up my platoon and you look like shit. Do you know that?”
“Sir, yes Sir.”
“You’re stupid because you could be cakewalking this bitch. You could have your beer and your pussy and whatever else you been fucking around with up in the barracks and nobody would pay you the slightest attention if you’d just starch your fucking uniform.” Valentine leaned back. “People been riding your ass, Davis?”
“Sir, yes Sir.”
“I’ll bet.” He shook his head. “Stupid. You’re stupid. This is the Army, Davis. It ain’t rocket science. It’s 50 percent showing up on time and 45 percent looking good when you get there.” He shrugged. “If you look good, no one’ll blink at you twice, Private.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way, Sir.”
“Well start thinking. And get your goddamn uniforms to the dry cleaners at the PX.”
“I don’t have a car, Sir.”
Warrant officers are sergeants at heart. Sergeants who get saluted. You have to attain sergeant’s rank before applying for warrant officer school, and even twenty-year warrants retain a sergeant’s bearing. Valentine proved it now by looking at Davis as only a sergeant can, neck extended and locked, eyes wide, incredulous at the idiocy set before him.
“You don’t have a car,” he said quietly.
“Sir, no Sir.”
“How far is it from the barracks to the PX, Private?”
“About a mile, Sir.”
“About a mile.”
“Sir, yes Sir.”
Valentine looked down at his desk. “So do you think, Private Davis, that a motivated soldier like yourself, a highly trained and professional communist killer, could walk a mile, once maybe twice a week, in a trade-off for being able to drink your beer and read your fucking books and be left alone?”
“I think I could do that, Sir.”
It was decision time, and Junior Davis made his decision. He was a quick study. Penguin was gone by the time he got back to his barracks room, as if he’d never been there, never to be seen again. Davis cleaned the room—sanitized it, Army style, on his hands and knees, with a sponge and buckets of hot water and bleach. He walked the mile to the PX that night with his green laundry bag over his shoulder and paid the Korean woman twenty dollars extra for instant service; he stepped into the Class 6 while he waited, his last few dollars for the month going to a case of Bud cans and few packs of generic smokes. An hour later he was walking the mile back to the barracks, beer and starched uniforms in hand. It was a Friday night, and he spent it polishing his combat boots and low quarters. Monday morning everything on him including his dog tags was shined to a high buff. His new squad leader and coxswain put him on the boats that
afternoon, throwing line at dock bits until he could loop one without touching metal.
All this had been news to Tory back then. The Junior Davis she met when she was a private looked like he’d been in starch all his life. It was one of the reasons she latched onto him. He dressed and acted, actually, a lot like her new squad leader, a sergeant named Wagman, just in from Hawaii. They had the same bark, the same standards. It wasn’t a surprise then when she learned Dick Wags was also a product of the Chief Valentine school of soldier reform, and although Dick Wags and Junior Davis were never really close, they had that between them and admired it in each other. The Valentine cult, Tory called it, the society of over-achieving, hard-driving, massively alcoholic soldiers—but she said it with a smile. Once, over beers with Dick Wags in the backyard of Valentine himself, Junior said, “We’re survivors of the Valentine prescription. But my New Jersey here is a Valentine self-medicator.”
And that was true enough.
Chapter
20
Lorraine hung to the small metal sink in Davis’s cabin latrine, staring in the silvered mirror secured to the bulkhead, wiping her eyes. The ship rolled and she rolled with it, her face moving in and out of view. She filled a plastic cup with stale ship’s water from the tap and choked it down. Rubbing the back of her wrist across her mouth, she watched herself float in the mirror. Pastor’s assumption wasn’t entirely correct. Close, but not completely correct.
Lorraine had been up to the room twice today. First, just briefly, not even inside, this morning, she’d helped him back from the dining hall. Davis had been very quiet on the walk up—he was always quiet, the boy was like a stone—and at the door he’d said, “Thank you, Lorraine.” When she stepped in behind him, he’d said it again, “Thank you, Lorraine,” but stood there in the doorway, holding tight to his bleeding arm, like he didn’t want her to come in. “Listen, I better get some rest,” he’d said.
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Right as rain, Lorraine,” he said, and she giggled. She’d reached out and grabbed his hand then, squeezing it, but he was already half backing through his door and then the door was closed.
She’d had to work through the midday. Today was the galley, washing dishes. There were a bunch of girls in there today, all of them talking and passing the time, and Lorraine tried not to think about things too much. She showered after her shift. What with rationing they were only supposed to shower every three days, and short ones at that, but she snuck in anyway. None of her three roommates were back in the cabin, a nice change. It was hard to find any privacy on this ship. She powdered herself all over, luxuriating in a moment’s aloneness and the infrequent state of nakedness. She dressed in clean shorts and her last clean T-shirt, a purple one they’d sent from church back home in Indiana, to let her know they were thinking of her out here on the high seas.
This was the first she’d worn the shirt. A terseness had crept into the last few letters she’d sent home, and recently she’d stopped writing altogether. When the T-shirt had arrived from the pastor’s wife—in a package wrapped in brown paper bag, with a pound of stale brownies in foil—she’d shoved it in her drawer without a glance. Being out here was a mistake. Maybe this worked for some, this kind of life and service, but this was a mistake for her. She’d been out here three months and couldn’t do it much longer. Her pastor at home had talked her into it, talked her into joining the ship mission, when she’d lost her boyfriend and her job. Her boyfriend—Frank—was a member of Lorraine’s congregation; so was his wife. He was also Lorraine’s boss, branch manager of the bank she’d been a teller at since graduating high school. It was complicated.
A few weeks after he’d been transferred to Lorraine’s branch Frank started staying late, to help her close, even though it wasn’t his job to do that; he was allowed to go at five. He’d stand very close as they counted bills and closed-out drawers. He smelled good, she thought, with a thick chest and clean-shaven face. He never tried to take her out and ply her with drinks. It just was what it was, no pretending to be anything else. The first time had been on the old couch in the break room, with the burnt-coffee smell and the yellow refrigerator. She thought it was kind of cute when she realized he’d had it planned, fretted over, mapped out: “Lorraine, maybe if you don’t have to rush right out the door tonight…” It was cute. She put him out of his misery by kissing him, somewhat taken aback then at how ravenous he became. Like a switch thrown. Hands shaking, kneeling on the couch between her parted legs, he’d been so nervous he didn’t even get the condom rolled on all the way. But she’d put her arms around him, held him, not letting him feel bad, and they’d tried again with slightly better success.
Frank got bolder as time went by. They never took it out of the bank, and never, ever during business hours, but they seldom went back to the break room again after closing. This was fine with Lorraine; the old couch was itchy, and she had to eat her lunch in there. It was hard talking to the girls with the thoughts of that stuff just steps away from their table. Besides, she thought he looked stronger, more like himself, standing, holding her upright in a corner of his office. A few times he made her stand at the closed drive-through window and pretend to be with a customer—Good evening, Mister Montgomery! Do you want that all in twenties?—while he knelt before her under the counter. Once he wanted to be the banker at the window, and she knelt under the counter, his ultraclean smell filling her mouth. He had a smooth, pale penis that tasted like detergent. They had sex in the bank every day after closing, five days a week, for three months. There were only two breaks; once he took two days off to have a wart removed from the side of his foot, and once he took a week’s vacation with his wife and two daughters to Disney in Florida. Lorraine had never really been completely comfortable with things—his office, for instance, was covered with family photos—but while he was in Florida was the worst. In the bank she could pretend a different reality, that it was just the two of them, but a man doesn’t go to Disney alone and the weight of his kids became too much for her to bear, the thought of seeing his wife in her trim, fancy pink stuff on Sunday mornings at church too much. She told it all to her pastor, the whole story spilling out through tears after Thursday-night Young Women’s Bible Study. The pastor came by the bank on Friday morning with a leaflet for the missionary ship. She was young, she was directionless, she needed a change. That’s what he said. When Frank came back to work on Monday—his pale skin reddened from the Orlando sun, neck peeling—Lorraine resigned with a simple explanation: “We can’t anymore, Frank. It’s not right.” She went through the door promptly at five, leaving him to close alone. He came by her apartment that night. He’d never been there, and she’d never seen him in anything but a suit; he looked funny to her in chinos and a green polo. “How am I going to make it without you?” he pleaded, standing in the doorway, trying to push his way in. “You can’t come in, Frank,” she said. “It would be a mistake. It’s all been a mistake.” She was trying to close the door but he was persistent. Finally she took her keys and walked him out to his silver Buick. She wouldn’t get in, but she let him kiss her, standing by the trunk in the dark parking lot, his whole body so desperate. She pulled his rock-hard detergent-fresh dick out and with a couple quick strokes finished him off, poor Frank apologizing for the mess and then crying.
It wasn’t until later, alone in her apartment with the TV on, that she thought his sobbed sorrys might be for the whole mess, the whole thing, not just the stickiness that hit her shirt tonight. And then she felt even worse and did some crying of her own because Frank wasn’t a bad man, any more than she was a bad woman, it’s just how it was and they were weak, she thought, like most people they were weak, and like her pastor said at this point in her life she needed some time to cool off and get straight with God and with herself.
“And what a fantastic opportunity!” the pastor had said, those massive teeth of his framing the laugh. “Floating in the Caribbean sun! Wish I could go along.”
There’d been no answer to her knock. She’d thought about it a moment, then turned the knob and eased the door open. The cabin was almost completely dark, her eyes still narrowed from the afternoon sun. She heard him before she saw him; “Is dat you, Santee Claus?”
Lorraine giggled. No one else on this ship would have said something like that.
Davis was on his back in bed, sheet up around his chest, leaning against a pillow. She could smell the alcohol immediately, a heavy fume thick in the air. There was another smell, too, under the alcohol. She couldn’t tell what it was. He saw her eye go to the bottle sticking out from the top drawer of the night table next to him. “Care for a drink?” he said, and patted his hand on the mattress next to him.
She took a step toward him, next to the bed, then said, “I’d better not. They could send me home.”
“Would that be so bad?” he said.
She giggled again. “No.”
He pulled the bottle up and put it to his lips, taking a swig.
“What is it?”
“Rum.”
He patted the mattress again, and this time she sat down. “Maybe one sip,” she said. He wiped the top of the bottle with the edge of the sheet and handed it to her. She took a big swallow and grimaced, eyes going wide. She held it, then swallowed hard. “Strong!”
“Lorraine, Lorraine,” he said.
She took another swig and handed off the bottle, lying back flat on the bed, across his legs.
“Oh this boat.” she said. She closed her eyes then opened them, focusing on the ceiling. “I don’t know. I’m trying hard, I really am. But…” Her right hand had come to rest on the sheet over his stomach. She gripped the sheet in her fist, pulling it in a ball, then smoothed it out. Davis took a drink from the bottle, then said, “Don’t let it get you down, Lorraine.”
She turned her head to look up at him, and smiled. Her fingers were moving in circles now on the sheet over his belly. “You’re a sly one, Mister Chief Engineer,” she said, then swung her legs onto the bed and crawled up on him, chest to chest, nose to nose. “Hey there,” she said, and he laughed.
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