by H. L. Humes
But on occasion the wind brought other news—the sound of the Commander's phonograph—and no one felt good. As far as the men were concerned, the white boss was getting drunk privately; the only consolation was that Dolfus, the only white man anyone gave a shit for, wasn't with him. Old Skully seemed to make a point of being duty officer whenever there was music up the hill. But the men knew also that when the Commander stopped juicing and came down, there'd be three or four days of hard times. For always following these bouts, there would be a redoubling of cleanup details, of barracks inspections, of policing grounds and painting rocks white, almost as though old Admiral God were making his penance public and his atonement a communal undertaking. At times like these the Commander would wander around the base poking his gloved finger into garbage cans, mattresses, tool cribs, “looking for trouble to make,” as the boys in the gallery put it. And they gave him thus his name: Commander Meander. Till the day he died he never heard it.
But though the Commander could be a thoroughgoing stickler in matters of discipline, there was also in his nature a certain caprice that made his punishments unpredictable. Sometimes a minor infraction would earn a man a month in the empty bunker that served as the brig; on the other hand, it was not unusual for a serious violation—an attempted knifing or a barracks theft—to be dismissed with nothing more punitive than extra duty in the chow hall. A man caught through his own stupidity or carelessness was more likely to incur the Commander's wrath than a man tripped up by temperament or fate. And drunkenness, in the tradition of the “old navy,” was nearly always a mitigating circumstance. Once, shortly after work on the base had begun (the tale, almost a legend, had been embellished in a hundred retellings by the time Sulgrave heard it), nine enlisted men from an earlier construction battalion now departed, had stolen a case of liquor from the hold of an anchored supply ship, and after ferrying a kidnaped jeep across to Little Misery, staged a midnight party that ended three hours later in a drunken figure-eight joyride among the shacks and coco trees of that scattered settlement. The eight men hung on the jeep (there had been nine, but one fell off and broke his arm, although he didn't know it till next morning) and careened back and forth past Mr. Sung's then new barber pole, changing drivers full tilt; the object was to see how close they could come on each pass without hitting it. But on the twenty-fourth pass someone's knee hit the light switch while changing places at the wheel, and they took the candy-striped pole with them. They almost took Mr. Sung in his nightshirt as well; the nimble barber leaped up into the house just in time. (But by his own account he wasn't so nimble coming out again; in the moonless darkness he couldn't have seen that the wooden steps were gone with the pole.)
The damage to the jeep had not been unnoticeable even in the dark, and must have exercised a sobering effect on the unauthorized occupants. For one thing, both headlights had been permanently extinguished and the windshield was cracked and crazed from the passing blow of the barber pole—it had sailed up over their heads and into the night behind them—and without a moon, seeing was difficult. More accurately, seeing was impossible. But the supreme logic of drunkenness had dictated that the vehicle be returned to the base, and all hands were turned toward the achievement of that miracle. The story came out at the inquiry afterwards. Walking abreast of the blinded jeep, they covered the ground to the cut in less than half an hour; only once did they stray into soft sand and have to heave the jeep back onto the beaten track. When they reached the cut, they lowered the ramp on the flat-bottomed ferry and drove the jeep aboard without mishap. That much was agreed on.
What happened next depended in its flamboyant details on which version one heard, but Sulgrave reduced the reducible facts to these: The stolen jeep was put aboard the ferry, the ramp was secured, the ferry pushed off and turned around. But it was several minutes before the outboard motor finally kicked over and started. The men had picked out a star that would take them across the narrow cut at right angles to the beach behind them, but they followed their star without being aware that a strong current was running and was carrying them sideways out to sea. A few men were said to have become concerned when the looming shape of the Rock occluded the guide star, but abandoned their uneasiness when a few moments later they felt the prow lift as it slid up solidly and grounded onto smooth sand. The kicker was stopped and, by the flare of a cigarette lighter, was covered with its tarpaulin in seamanlike fashion. The last of title bottle was reportedly passed around in congratulation and farewell before debarkation. When the ramp was lowered one man staggered out and got his shoes wet, came back, and climbed aboard the jeep. No one thought anything of it. Assuming that the extra weight in the ferry had caused the short grounding, the others logically followed his example and piled aboard the jeep to ride ashore. Anticipating that the overloaded jeep might bog down before reaching high hard ground, the driver put the machine in four-wheel drive and backed up in the ferry to get a good run. Then revving the engine to a high whine, he shouted Here ive go, let out the clutch, and drove full-tilt across the narrow sandbar that defined the reef's entrance to the cut, into eight feet of water of the open bay.
Sulgrave learned that the source of the liquor was never even officially inquired into. An inquiry had been held, of course, and all eight survivors (including the one with the broken arm, whom Mr. Sung had found sleeping beneath his house the next morning) were brought before Captain's Mast and given punishment. Yet, compared to the seriousness of the crime, the consequent punishments were light. The men forfeited pay and had to recover the jeep on their own time, were then remanded to the bunker for a short stay. But the serious part of the tragedy seemed to be blamed on the victim, the man who was driving the jeep as it plunged off the ramp. For he was drowned. In this instance the men agreed with their skipper; the Commander, it was said, had little respect and even less pity for a sailor who couldn't swim.
Looking back, Sulgrave could see that he'd known, long before he'd admitted it to himself, that disaster was certain. At first it was an impersonal realization, remote, impalpable, like Europe at war. But slowly it became part of his life to know that he was living in the shadow of irremediable death, that not only would the war spread from Europe to the rest of the world but that he, Sulgrave, was destined to help it spread. He understood vaguely that he was assisting at his own destruction, but it wasn't until Dolfus showed him death beneath his feet that he clearly understood. After that, he saw doom in the hollow of his hand.
As with everything Dolfus did, he did it indirectly. He asked Sulgrave if he would like to accompany him on an informal inspection of recently arrived munitions; they had been unloaded and stowed in unfinished bunkers and stacked under tarpaulins until new bunkers could be cut out. It was clear from Dolfus' remarks that he was apprehensive.
“They're crowding me,” he said. “Getting in my way. They're trying to move in before the house is built.”
“Isn't this bad practice?” Sulgrave asked.
Dolfus mused. “Bad practice? Depends on circumstances. They're sending the stuff down, so we have to put it some place. I guess there's no choice, would you say?”
“Couldn't they wait until you're further along?”
“Well, now. Before I came down here they showed me a British geologist's report that included this rock as one of the Limestone Caribbees. He was completely wrong. He made that report from an armchair, because if he had ever set foot here he would have seen that the coral is only an overlay.”
“So it's taking longer than you thought.”
“It's taking longer and it's tougher on our equipment. But we're holding fairly close to the original schedule. Washington wants a base? We give them a base.” He fell silent. Then he halted in his stride and thoughtfully patted the nose of a three-inch shell that weighted down the tarpaulin of a waist-high stack of its mates. “Hello, buster,” he said, as though patting a friendly dog.
“What does the Commander say?”
“Commander Bonuso Severn Hake is not h
appy with this assignment. He thinks it was given him as punishment for blundering onto that sand bar, and he's probably right. Therefore he is not about to complain that the rock here is too hard. He's not about to ask for a slowdown in shipments. His job is to build a stockpile of rocks for little boys to throw in case there's a street fight. But I'm afraid his Slamson complex is getting out of hand. This isn't much of a temple, but it's all we got.”
“But you think he's taking chances, is that it?”
“What would you say?”
Sulgrave looked around at the stacked munitions. “I'd say that no one had better drop anything until you get this stuff underground.”
Dolfus smiled. “There's a whole boatload of torpedoes coming in tomorrow.” He gave the tarpaulin a final smoothing pat, and turned and looked fully at Sulgrave. “You build bunkers on the theory that sooner or later there'll be an accident, and that at least the bunker will localize it. Nice theory.”
“What will you do?”
Dolfus snorted. “What will I do? What will you do? We're both afflicted.”
“What can I do?”
“You can do or die, that's what you can do. We're both living on the skinny edge of nowhere. Keep it in mind. As the diplomats are fond of saying, it's an explosive situation.”
Sulgrave puzzled for some days over Dolfus' motives; except that Dolfus had sharply alerted him to the palpable reality of the danger, he seemed to have no wish to go further. He seemed to accept the possibility of disaster as a commonplace. In fact, he seemed easy with the idea that the island was doomed. At first Sulgrave had taken his references as jokes, jokes meant to ease the tension. Once Dolfus had settled an argument between two of his men with the comment, “It won't make any difference when we're gone, and we're all going. This rock will go sky-high tomorrow, so why argue?” The argument was halted. It was clear that Dolfus wasn't making a joke; he meant precisely what he said. It was slightly chilling to Sulgrave to realize that Dolfus had thought it all out carefully, rationally, and yet was able to accept the risk and live with it. It wasn't until much later that Sulgrave learned that Dolfus was living in acceptance of much more than mere risk: that the Rock would be destroyed before any of them escaped was, for Dolfus, a fatalistic certainty, a quiet conviction. He conceived of his job as being to keep his men busy, reasonably happy, and to prevent their suffering over trifles. He saw them all as innocent, and doomed. That he himself would share their fate didn't seem to alter his compassions.
Dolfus' conviction of doom was, for Sulgrave, contagious. As he became more and more sharply attuned to the Commander's almost compulsive need to take shortcuts, entertain risks, and otherwise cut corners, it began to seem to Sulgrave too that sooner or later there was bound to be an accident. What was most curious, most ominous, was that the only sane reason for hurrying the work along at such a heedless pace would be the imminence of war; but this was the one reason the Commander had no resort to. The Commander didn't believe in the imminence of war. He professed to see the European conflict as having no effect on American destinies, and he therefore was certain America would never enter the war. The grim lessons of the First World War, he argued, were still too much with the American people. And when Congress passed the Selective Service Act by only one vote, he was certain they would never pass a declaration of war.
It was not that the Commander didn't want war. He did. It was merely that, bitterly, he saw that the fates were conspiring against him to deprive him of a future. War would lead to a better command than the present one; therefore, since the Commander couldn't believe in a better future, neither could he believe in war.
His only vengeance for his present ignominy, his only penance for past error, would be to finish this useless idiotic task ahead of schedule. He saw risks in what he was doing; but the only real danger lay in failure. Above all, the job would be done.
There had been another time, another funeral. His older brother had been named Bruce Mifflin Sulgrave III, after his father and his father's father, and was already a sophomore at Harvard while Everett Turner (the family always called him Everett Turner from the day he revolted from the infant nickname Tarry, this a matter of some pride at the time, later at boarding school in retrospect a dubious victory; yet habit by then prevailed) was still encompassing the awkward mysteries of darkening body hair and changing voice. The day he learned of his older brother's death was a permanent snarl in his memory, a moment in time that would never come undone, a knot in a wet rope that slipped through the hands to a jarring stop, halted, and slipped on. What he did the day before he couldn't remember, nor what the day after. But of that day, particularly of that very shocking moment, he remembered every sight, every smell, every mood of light and shadow. The texture of that wintering afternoon was as clear as the rough feel of the back-yard tree he climbed after his mother told him the news. He climbed the tree to think, to study the fabric of his feelings—for he didn't like his brother really, or thought he didn't then—and it was there, in the crotch of a red maple, that he learned for the first time that jealousy is the scar of untended love. He was jealous of his older brother, the favorite, “the big cheese,” who did what he pleased, but as he thought of the good times, of the times before Bruce had lost interest in him in favor of stupid girls, the scab of resentment cracked and fell away. And when he thought that it was Bruce who had even taught him to climb this very tree, then it was too much. He sat swinging his legs in the dusk and falling leaves of late November and cried. He cried for lost love, for love embittered and thus wasted, and for a brother who might be watching him from somewhere in the sky but who would never again sit listening to kitchen sounds in the crotch of a red maple.
He had, he calculated later, been singing the Te Deum— they'd worked on it all afternoon in preparation for the Thanksgiving services—when the family was receiving the news. The choir would have to work even later because he had been cashiered as lead treble—Old Pussyfoot had tried him in the alto section but even there he'd croaked and piped on the forte hallelujahs. In the end he'd sassed the old tub of lard, and that was that. He was out altogether. As he walked home, kicking through the drifts of curbside leaves and smelling the sweet smoke of autumn, he worried whether the choirmaster would report the sassing incident to his mother, decided that he would omit that from the reasons for his dismissal. He walked home like a man fired from a job he'd many times wished to quit, finding that freedom too had its ambiguities. For one thing, it depended on how you came by it.
The moment he entered the house he knew that something was wrong.
For Thanksgiving they had the funeral to digest. Several aunts and cousins had stayed over to swell the ranks of the bleak feast and to offer what comfort they could with their helpless mortal presence. But the strongly missing son gave the family a dismembered soul, and the redolent turkey was stuffed with love and with tears. His mother had worked the morning on it, as was her habit, and had insisted that they carry on. Yet she was powerless to forget that her recipe for turkey stuffing was the favorite of her favorite son. During dinner she faltered only once, when grace was said, but she caught herself and raised her chin, and his father caught the tiny movement and said, Perhaps you're right after all. And she said quietly, He's with us. From that strange moment, from the awesome weight of the silence that followed, Everett Turner never was beyond hoping that there was a God. And yet he hoped against hope, which seemed to him even then to make that hope important.
And now, no longer a child, he stood in a warrior's uniform, bareheaded before a warless warrior's grave, steadying the widow on his arm. It was unusual procedure, but it had been at her specific request that he stay with her. The light of the cold November sun was like the light of his brother's funeral and yet he was no closer to the mystery. The raw earth of the open grave was like a fresh insult, and someone had tried to cover it with a fantasy of grass; the brilliant carpet of artificial putting-green that covered the hump of dirt made a bitterly funny joke of natur
e, for nature's grass knew its season and was brown. The only other color was the flag, which was draped over the coffin with its blue field reversed, to be seen aright only by the corpse beneath it.
The senior officers had come last in the procession; the six black enlisted men, discreetly guarded, stood in the first rank by Hake's coffin, the last survivors of his last command, and mortal prisoners of his wrath. With bowed heads, white hats in hands, they listened as the prayers were given and then as one man rumbled a loud and real Amen. From behind them Amens answered, like echoes answering thunder, and then the first volley from the honor guard shivered the air. Three times their annunciation blasted skyward, a fierce and puny warning to any lurking evil who would invade the crucial open heart of the departing soul of the dead. Then, slowly, taps.