Men Die

by H. L. Humes

  Lace was agitated, “Yeah, damnfool Orval had to go and blow his nose on the eagle's sleeve. Good thing he didn't tell that preacher, or he probably woulda stopped the buryin' ”

  “What should we do if they ask us?” Orval asked, almost in a whimper.

  “Ain't gonna ask, Hamfat. We on trial for mutiny, not … not …” Then in a hiss of contempt and indignation, “Man, stop comin' on like a handkerchief head. You not behind a mule now. You still talk like a Mississippi niggah.”

  “I am a Mississippi niggah. And I hold with the ol' Book when it come to bury-in' a Christian, black or white.”

  “Well, you got it both ways,” Lace said sullenly. “Think of them cats that was unloadin' on the dock—got buried in thin air. Ain't nothin' left o' them. Not even footprints.”

  “Yeah, baby.”

  “Good-by, so long, fare-well for-ev-ver”

  “Nuff of this jazz.”

  Sulgrave intervened. “I have to leave. I suggest that you stop arguing about the past and think about the future. You're going to have to answer to a charge of mutiny, and unless you keep your heads …”

  “… we liable to lose them,” Randy finished. “Lieutenant, I know you a man of sense. What should we do?”

  “Stick together. Listen to what your lawyer tells you. Tell the truth.”

  “That's gonna be like pulling a plow with six mules. Ain't going to cut no straight furrow.”

  “That's your lawyer's job.”

  Randy shook his head dubiously.

  At that moment the empty hearse started its engine, which served as a signal for departure. The decorous, soft-spoken knots of people began breaking apart and drifting toward the static procession of cars.

  “Before you go, Lieutenant …” Randy hesitated. “The Commander … I mean, did anyone … ?” Deliberately, he left the question discreetly hanging and glanced significantly toward the grave. The others seemed to turn their attention away, as though not to intrude on a private matter; only Orval BlueEyes refused to disengage his interest.

  Sulgrave took pains to be casual, imprecise. “As long as they have a positive identification—ah, establish that a man is dead, that is, and not merely missing—as long as they have enough to be positive …”

  “What are you tryin' to spit out, Lieutenant?”

  Sulgrave hesitated, then said directly, “I saw the coffin sealed in San Juan. Under the circumstances there was very little else they could do. I signed a receipt for it. Nothing was said.”

  “That still don't make it right,” Orval said.

  Abruptly, Lace said, “Cool it, Lieutenant, here come the seagoin' fuzz—” At Sulgrave's puzzled glance, he added a nod in the direction behind the Lieutenant. “—The Man with the Power.”

  A warrant officer wearing sidearms approached from the prison van at the rear of the clearing line of cars, and saluted as Sulgrave turned around. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but I have orders to have these men back before colors are struck. You know how it is, sir.”

  The attendant seaman guards straightened up, moved closer.

  “Of course.” Sulgrave returned the salute. He turned back to the prisoners; they were all watching him for the expected change in manner, the reversion to strict officer-enlisted man protocol. He didn't disappoint them. “Good luck to you men,” he said. “I'm sure that whatever happens, you'll be properly defended in a fair trial. Listen to your attorney and follow his advice, and remember to conduct yourselves at all times in a manner that reflects credit on you, otherwise you might prejudice your case. During the trial, pay attention and look smart. Things like that can influence the court's opinion of you and shade the verdict-justice is never a simple matter of black and white.”

  Silence. Lace smiled. “Well have it both ways, Lieutenant.” Then he stepped back as they prepared to leave, and saluted.

  Sulgrave watched them as they walked away between the guards, then turned to where the last of the funeral guests were murmuring gloved good-bys to the widow. Vannessa Hake was standing among a small group of intimates that included the aged and resplendent Rear Admiral whom she had introduced to Sulgrave as her godfather, and was being splendidly composed as she received each momentary mourner with good-by (“… so good of you to have come all that way for Severn …”). Except for these restrained exchanges, she was otherwise as impassive as a ballot box; the last of the stragglers filed loosely past, a nod each, a murmur each, and went to their cars. Finally, car doors clicked firmly shut, engines stirred, and the last seven-passenger limousines rolled decorously away, an expensive crunch of curving gravel toward the squat field-stone posts that marked the exit.

  Two cars yet remained: one the Admiral's; the other had brought the widow.

  The old Admiral, the godfather, asked, “Are you sure, Vannessa?”

  Sulgrave waited at a measured distance.

  “Uncle Bemis, you're a dear, but I do hope you understand. That's why I didn't want to receive at home.”

  “I suppose people can be a burden at times like this,” he mused.

  “It's just that they're reminders. I've no wish now but to be by myself. I'm going to hide for a few days in Washington. When I get back I'll be more like my old self again.”

  The old man sighed, resigned with dignity. “Well, you've always done things your own way, Vannessa. Only you can know what's best for yourself.”

  “I prefer to be by myself for a time.” She paused. “I don't want to go back to the house tonight. I promise to call you from Washington, but there's no need to worry. I'll be with friends if I need them.”

  After the old Admiral had bussed his goddaughter several times, he admonished Sulgrave to see that she was properly entrained for Washington and that her baggage was taken care of. He fussed over her, and delayed his leave-taking further with more last-minute injunctions. Finally she kissed him good-by and started him toward his car; his driver snapped to and held the door. And he was off, waving through the rear window until the car disappeared through the stone gate.

  “He's such a dear old fussbudget,” Vanna said when he was gone. Slowly they walked toward the other car; the chauffeur started the engine and got out to hold the door.

  As the car rolled out of the cemetery gate, Vannessa reached forward and closed the glass partition. Then she leaned back and took off her hat and veil. “I've saved you the fare back to Washington,” she said. “You don't mind hitching a ride with me, do you?”

  “You mean you're going there in this? What about your luggage?”

  “I firmly intend to start a new life. The first thing I'm going to do is to buy some clothes suitable for a middle-aged widow.”

  Sulgrave said nothing; she was ahead of him.

  She turned and looked at him. “Don't you want to drive in with me?”

  He felt like asking her point-blank why she hadn't asked him before they got in the car, but she answered without being asked. “I was afraid you'd take me seriously about wanting to be alone and make up some irrevocable excuse, just to be polite.”

  “Don't you want to be alone?”

  “Does anyone?” she asked. She turned away to the window, repeated the question. “Does anyone, ever?”

  It wasn't long before Sulgrave realized that Lieutenant Dolfus had more than one pastime. Since they shared one of the lower bungalows, although each to the privacy of his own room, it was hard for Sulgrave not to notice that Dolfus often didn't come back to his quarters when he had the evening duty. Several times Sulgrave noticed that Skully had already finished breakfast in the chow hall before he got there; at first he assumed that Skully had merely risen early, But gradually it became clear that on these occasions he slept elsewhere than in his quarters, or so it seemed. And on weekends he disappeared entirely, leaving sometime after inspection on Saturday and not coming back until Monday morning. For Sulgrave, it was a mystery where he could be. Once he asked him where he vanished to, but Dolfus evaded the question with a vague reference to getting off by himself whe
never he could—”and I like to sleep under the stars,” he said.

  It wasn't beyond imagining. Dolfus had a curious secretive side to his nature which Sulgrave had recognized from the first weeks on the island. Saturday nights he knew where Skully was because usually you could hear him—those were his regular nights for sculpting expeditions. The chatter of the jackhammer drifted over the ridge on the breeze from the east side of the island, but when the work stopped and the men brought the jeep back towing the air compressor, Skully was never with them. If they knew where he was they weren't saying. Once when Sulgrave was on duty, they came back—it was after two in the morning—and Sulgrave helped the boys secure the tools; he asked them where Lieutenant Dolfus was. One of them said, “We left him there sittin' smokin' a cigar and looking at his statue.”

  Skully always managed to have some beer for these outings—it was thus more than a simple honor to be invited— and it was obvious that the boys this night had enjoyed themselves. But there was something arcane about their laughter, about their horseplay among themselves, that made it seem to Sulgrave that he was an outsider. They seemed like a fraternity, at one with each other through the shared pleasures of secret ritual—all just a wee bit heightened by the beer. Sulgrave felt—he had to admit to himself—excluded, even lonely. It wasn't the first occasion; he'd heard them some nights coming back singing, laughing and pie-assing among themselves as they put the tools away. And lying in bed at times like this, or even just hearing the distant chattering of the jackhammer while trying to read a mystery, he felt the bare memory of the pangs of childhood, of being too young to build tree huts with his brother's friends. Or at least not being asked. The memory of hanging around with a new catcher's mitt, hoping they'd ask him—he'd learned the hard way not to ask; not playing was better than risking the clear rebuff. Sometimes he'd be asked if, after choosing up sides, they came out uneven; he learned to play right field with a catcher's mitt.

  He'd been thinking a lot about his older brother recently, perhaps because for the first time in his life he had time to think about him. Simple accident was what the family had said; suicidal recklessness was what his aunt had whispered into the telephone, not knowing he was listening in the hall. The question bothered him, but it wasn't until the night before he was to go away to college that he asked his father point-blank. It was an accident, his father said, but probably suicidal—his brother had gotten into trouble with a girl and was afraid of being kicked out of school. It was a shocking revelation for the young Everett Turner, yet bittersweet; bitter, because he had a gently raised sixteen-year-old's concept of virtue and his brother; sweet, because it had been his father who told him, man to man, adult to adult, equal to equal. From that time on he thought of himself as a man, accepted as a man; the knowledge of his brother haunted him like a responsibility, something he would bear as an adult for the rest of his life. He was twenty-one before he slept with a woman.

  Born on the Massachusetts coast, his childhood ambition was to be a naval architect. But by his sophomore year he had wandered into the mysteries of Shakespeare, and ended well as a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, but not without his first love's having led him into the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps. After a miserable postgraduate year in a Boston advertising agency, he said good-by to Boylston Street and accepted an active commission as an ensign. A quick promotion to lieutenant, junior grade, had sparked an old interest. Now he was nursing his first ambition; when he finished his hitch he was going back to school, and, barring a war, he would someday be a naval architect. He having thus decided to dedicate his life to splendid ships, the navy, in all its bland and inscrutable logic, assigned him to a splendid island.

  By now the novelty of arrival was wearing thin, and the days lagged. He'd invented enough routine to cover his duties, and filled the chinks with reading. But evenings were becoming harder to bridge, and Sunday yawned like a chasm. Several times a week he went over to Little Misery to drink beer, often on Dolfus' invitation. But when it came to the Saturday night event, Dolfus invited no one but his boys. And occasionally he had dined with the Commander (but otherwise Hake was a hermit). Once or twice he'd gone to the recreation hall to play ping-pong or shoot pool, but it was clear that Hake frowned on fraternization with the men, whether because they were enlisted men or whether because they were black enlisted men, Sulgrave wasn't sure. But he suspected the latter. Sulgrave was sure it was one of the things Hake held against Dolfus, though there seemed a touch of bitter envy at the ease of Dolfus' command of his men. Whatever the basis of the antagonism that bound Hake to Dolfus, it was clear that both men preferred to keep it private. Dolfus moved about the base with great discretion, and whether by accident or by design he and the Commander never met casually, but always and only on official business.

  One thing that puzzled Sulgrave was Hake's preoccupation with his library, as he called it. He often read into the far hours of the night—sometimes the special gasoline generator that provided electricity for his quarters didn't sputter off until the hour before dawn—and whenever Sulgrave visited him his quarters were scattered with open books. Nearly all the volumes were closely annotated with cryptic notes in the margins, and often blossomed with slips of different-colored paper apparently marking cross-referenced passages. It was almost as though he were involved in some complex research, yet the typewriter was never uncovered and Sulgrave had never heard it being used. The one time Sulgrave had opened it to use it—to type a short notice for the bulletin board about not wasting water—he'd found the ribbon so desiccated as to be useless.

  The books in Hake's quarters were of all sorts, and in the few times Sulgrave had dined with him he'd learned that the Commander could talk intelligently on all subjects, that is, when he wasn't absorbed in a book at the table. But on these occasions Hake seemed more interested in testing Sulgrave's opinions, particularly his opinions on great men in history and events that shaped them. And though generous with facts, he rarely owned to an opinion. In fact, taken altogether, the casual recluse existence and slack manner of dress in quarters contrasted so violently with his sword-bearing, white-gloved ceremonialism of the Saturday morning dress-white inspections, that Sulgrave was hard put to imagine them as extensions of the same man. In quarters, when reading, he wore heavy tortoise-rimmed glasses that gave him the intense, almost stooped look of a scholarly fanatic; the beetling black brows beetled even more with the glasses on and made more remarkable the pale, questing eyes. And yet on parade he stood tall and white and infallible, became even more forbiddingly resplendent as he walked slowly before the solemn ranks of rigid eyes-front, his own eyes narrowed to slits, seeing everything, unerringly finding fault. On these occasions he was the quintessential symbol of authority and discipline. Even his one official idiosyncrasy—the ceremonial Navy cutlass he wore with such address—only served to reinforce the stern impression he sought to create. Among the enlisted Negroes he had a hard reputation, and they nicknamed him Admiral God only partly for satire and mainly for fear of his cunning punishments. On inspection, even Sulgrave stepped wide of the Commander's wrath, bewildered less by the dazzling uniform than by the double image he had of the man inside it.

  It was during one of these inspections, curiously enough, that Sulgrave unwittingly cemented a genuine friendship with Dolfus and thus won entry into the life of the island. Up to that time he had hardly suspected the existence of a social life, thus would never have imagined that he was being excluded from it. Beyond Skully's Saturday night “art class” (which was what he'd since learned the men called it)—beyond that event for the select few, there was only the recreation hall and the “juice locker” (which he'd learned from the same source was the enlisted men's name for the Officers' Club, the padlocked kerosene icebox on Little Misery). That there was a more intricate life pulsing beneath the calloused skin of insular routine, seemed so improbable that it never occurred to him to wonder about its apparent absence.

  The fire drill was
a gesture absolutely characteristic of Hake. Sulgrave had finished checking the hectic progress of the Saturday morning clean-sweepdown, and, satisfied that the master-at-arms had everything under control, had gone to his quarters to shower and change into dress whites and to await the precisely prescribed minute when he would mount to the Commander's quarters and accompany him in his stately descent to the operations area. There they would be joined by Dolfus, who would report that all facilities and personnel were ready for inspection; then would commence the two-hour round in the dreary heat, through the chow hall, the machine shop, radio shack, the dispensary—through all the small hut-like temporary buildings that were but ludicrous parodies of their counterparts at Norfolk, at Boston, and at all the immense and complicated places where at that same moment the same rigorous ritual was being pursued. And on all the ships at sea—at least all those in the same time zone. The thought gave Sulgrave a moment's pause; Hake's inspections seemed less like comic opera when seen against annihilated space and time. It was then one navy, one ideal entity, one organism, and nothing so symbolized that oneness as the unvarying ritual of Saturday inspection. It was a day of trial and judgment and atonement, only half a day of rest, a stern Sabbath. At least at noon they would be done with it, if nothing went afoul.

  Sulgrave checked his watch and wondered where Dolfus was. It was getting late, and he'd been still tinkering with a bulldozer when Sulgrave had left the motor-pool area. Suddenly, as if in answer, Dolfus' boondockers boomed on the bare boards of the veranda and he burst in covered with grime and dripping sweat. He stood a moment breathing hard, and let his sun-blind eyes adjust to the cool gloom of the bungalow.

  “You better jack your ass up,” Sulgrave said, glancing at his watch. “The Old Man should be just about ready to strap on his snickersnee by now.”

  “Him and his goddamned sword,” Dolfus said, catching his breath. “He wants this island honeycombed, let him carve it out himself. How the hell can I catch up on a schedule when he insists on pissing away a whole half working day on these brass-assed inspections?”