by H. L. Humes
“No.”
“He said, ‘This sword goes with my daughter.’ And handed it to him across the table blade first.”
After that she said nothing more, and later, in the failing afternoon of December sun, followed him down the long tunnel of sleep and love.
In the days and nights that followed, they dredged each other's intimate history as though compelled to confess and to know, dragging beneath the bright surface of childhood memories to murky depths of adult secrets; and found in each other an endless reflection of each self, a strangely comforting renewal of life and knowledge. They took their meals in the suite, played word games cheating like children, and double solitaire, even once hide-and-seek, naked, in the dark. There was a radio, a station that played symphonies all night, and they listened to music lying on the plush carpet with pillows. There was never any thought or suggestion of going out, except once, on Wednesday, when she went out while he was sleeping—to buy him a razor.
And she even confessed that for one unbearable minute she'd wanted to kill him—when he had told her of reading her letters.
LT. BEN DOLFUS PUT THIS HERE
MCMXLI
HE SAYS HELLO
On Wednesday morning he was still sleeping when she left a note and slipped out to buy the razor. It was not the appearance of his three-day beard that bothered her, but rather its increasing abrasiveness on her own skin. Also, she knew, she rather looked forward to watching him shave; it had always given her a mysterious physical pleasure to watch the ritual of a man shaving, and she wondered about this as she hurried out of the hotel into the brisk morning street. She distinctly remembered her father, who had had his shaving water brought to him each morning in a brass can with a hot towel over it; and she remembered her husband, who had shaved with such reckless haste that he was forever nicking himself. Her father was slow and methodical, never had to have recourse to the styptic pencil. The way a man shaved, she thought, reflected the inner design of his life. But I really haven't watched enough men to be sure. I never saw Ben shave. She hurried along the sidewalk feeling pleasure as well as purpose in her errand. She felt good, pleased at the thought that for the first time in years she was out on the streets without her lipstick on.
The razor was quickly bought in a drugstore on the corner. She also bought three new lipsticks, each a different color, nothing near the colors she usually wore. She told the clerk not to wrap the articles, paid, and put them in her purse. Leaving the drugstore, she crossed the street and on impulse made for a bench in the small park diagonally opposite her hotel. She sat down, wanting simply to relax by herself and to enjoy for a moment, before going back, the meager warmth of the chill November sun. Across the street, the angled facades of the hotel met and rose like the prow of an enormous ship bearing directly down on her.
She counted up the floors, trying to locate the room. The room. She thought of his jacket hanging over the chair, with its two gold stripes too new yet to be tarnished. Not a lamb any more, but still innocent. The thought of him sleeping in her own hired bed made her feel for an instant's twinge like a spoiler, yet victorious. What am I? He's old enough to be his own man. His beard scratches like a man's beard. She smiled to herself and touched her own cheek, remembering the erotic stir inside her.
Suddenly she felt an immense flood of tenderness for everything around her. Dear hotel, she thought. Dear tree. Dear old bench in the park. Get thee with child … wonder what a mandrake root is. Man. Drake and duck? Root?
Would I have the courage to have it if I were? I have the courage right this minute. I feel good. I want to be good. Be all good.
Two small children, a boy and a girl, were playing with a pile of sticks on the bench next to hers. They were lining up the sticks by wedging them between the slats in the back of the bench. Following her impulse to act, she opened her purse and took out a package of peppermints. She felt almost giddy with pleasure.
“Would you children like a candy?”
The children didn't move, didn't even look at her.
“They're peppermints. Do you like peppermints? They have holes in them. If you have some string, you can make a bracelet …”
Suddenly, unaccountably, the two children turned and ran off to join another group playing skiprope under the supervision of a large woman in a plain felt hat. The woman saw what had happened; immediately she detached herself from the group and came over toward her. She rose to meet the woman; sitting down seemed to be a disadvantage.
“I—I thought they might like peppermint,” she began when the woman was close enough to hear. She felt unstrung, vaguely accused.
“You mustn't be upset,” the woman said. “It's just that they're deaf. I'll be glad to give them the candy. They didn't hear you.”
As she crossed the street she felt near to tears, and in the very middle of the light stream of traffic she stopped and looked up but couldn't find the window again. Suddenly she was assailed by the panicky thought that he had awakened. He'd failed to see the note and had gone out. Run out? Ridiculous. He would hardly have had time to dress. Foolishness. The moment passed. But she hurried across the street without even looking, and by the time she reached the revolving doors she was slightly breathless and her heart was pounding.
When she entered the room it was just as she'd left it. The temperature was the same; the smell, the light was the same. The note was on the rug where she'd left it, untouched. She snatched it up and crumpled it, as though to destroy the evidence of her absence. Silently she tiptoed through the bedroom into the bathroom; there she removed her clothes. She wanted terribly to be back in bed before he awakened. I shouldn't have gone out. What am I afraid of? Foolishness. Foolishness of age. But it might have broken the spell. Age, she thought, and looked at her face in the mirror. I need him. I'm not strong enough to stand on my own two feet alone yet. Age. Do I look old to him?
She raised her hands to her cheeks to stretch out the tiny wrinkles. Hands. Not my face. My hands. Age. My hands will be my first betrayers.
Suddenly she laughed at herself in the mirror. You've got a young squire asleep in your bed, and you worry about your hands. Foolishness of age, dear girl. She picked a lipstick at random from her purse and started to freshen her lips, stopped midway and looked at her left hand again, and laughed. “You traitor,” she whispered. “Do you know what happens to traitors?” Amused at herself, she made a carmine slash across her wrist with the lipstick. Very funny, she thought sarcastically of herself. Now you'll have to scrub it off. She gazed at the bright wrist. Enough silliness. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria morior, she thought. She hummed a tune as she washed her lipstick off. Enough. To bed, to bed.
When he awoke in the morning, he remembered only the desperate eerie fury of what had seemed the final procreative act, and blocked it out of memory as though it had never happened:
Dolfus was restricted to the Rock, so Sulgrave had taken the Goldilocks doll over to Little Misery; Dolfus warned him to give it to Arielle when Mother-in-Trouble wasn't around, since the girl had had a white doll before and the old woman, for dark reasons of her own, had destroyed it, burned it in the stove.
When Arielle received the doll she was delighted, and he helped her find a hiding place for it up under the boards beneath the shack.
“If I give you babee, you take me to New York?” she asked.
He smiled and said that perhaps someday.
He thought no more about it until late that night when he awakened with her already in his bed. Dolfus was on watch.
And the young smell of her
God yes, the smell of her
On Friday he awoke to find her lying on her side watching him. Some particularly disturbing dream had awakened him, nothing to do with her.
“Did you know that you have a pulse at the base of your neck?” she asked. “I've been watching it.”
“Good morning,” he said without moving. “Or is it afternoon?”
“Your body is hard all over except
for this one little hollow here.” She touched him lightly between the neck and collarbone. “It shows when men wear open shirts. They seem so vulnerable there.”
She stroked his neck lightly with her fingernail. He closed his eyes and fell back into pursuit of the dream that had awakened him.
When he awoke again she was not beside him. He heard the water running in the bath. Immediately he began collecting the fugitive pieces of the dream. It was about Randy. Big Randy. He'd been asking Randy to do a favor, to lie for him. Why couldn't he picture his face? He was big; he had a vague picture of the shape of him, and of the slow way in which he shook his head no. He could hear the cadence of his voice. But he couldn't recall precisely what Randy looked like. He saw Lace clearly, even to the silver ring on his card-player's hand. But Randy remained vague. There seemed something mysterious in that, as though Randy presented a problem that was crucially important to solve.
As he became wider awake the immediacy of the dream wore off. Whatever message there might have been was lost. The sense of urgency of the waking moment vanished and left in its place an unfamiliar feeling of garish uneasiness that wouldn't shake off, a rootless anxiety utterly new to him.
He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. There's no meaning in it, he thought. He was acutely aware of the sounds from the bath. How could Hake not have enjoyed her? And Hake was dead. Skully must have loved her somehow. And Skully was dead. Fve been where they've been, he thought. I've tasted every inch of her. Nothing's happened to me. I am what's happened to me. I am nothing. And I'm better off.
Vaguely his mind registered a change in the sound from the bath: the water was running out of the tub. He closed his eyes and went needlessly back to sleep. The last thing he thought of was Skully and Hake—what were they each thinking when they died? Did they think of each other? Skully said once that Hake had a Samson complex …
Down the fugitive alley of another dream: balled as a bat, blind as an egg, here we go marching headlong headstrong headshorn Uncle Samsson, content to pull the temple down arrears …
The amphibian circled down from the west out of a bleeding sunset, and landed in the milky blue bay just as the seven survivors started down the hill toward where the dock had once been. In that stripped and blackened landscape they looked like pallbearers descending with their burden into hell, for among the twisted wreckage embracing the bay fires still burned. Wooden structures had vanished with the trees, leaving not a hint of their existence; only steel and concrete remained to mark out ruins. The air was hot and still, and all the earth around was cracked and ruptured where raw gigantic handfuls had been ripped skyward. Down below, where nearly all the men had been, there was not much evidence of death except in bits and pieces. The rock had been plowed open as though by God.
The plane crew secured their anchors and came ashore in two emergency rescue rafts. They brought with them lighting equipment, and used the last minutes of fast reddening twilight to set up light poles and generators on what was left of the pad of concrete that had once been the foot of the dock.
It was slow and treacherous going for the group coming down the obliterated path from Commander's country, and in the thickening nightfall the seven survivors were at first unnoticed from below. It wasn't till one of the crew yanked the starter cord of the first generator that the rest of them paused in their task to look about; with the rising putter of the generator, the glowing floods came on. They flung their feeblish garish light across the dead immensity of destruction, and the men of the aircrew saw the seven sole survivors bearing the awkward oversized coffin of the Commander. They were coming down slowly, picking their way; seven men in macabre procession, a funeral without mourners. No one moved. No one spoke. The generator puttered like a dotted line through the ghastly silence of white light.
When the box was set down, like a gift at the rescuers' feet, still no one moved. Finally Sulgrave spoke. He addressed no one, simply stood looking down at the death at his feet, and said, “The Commander.”
A silence. Then the Warrant-pilot said, “Well put him aboard in the morning.” Then he said, “We have a doctor …”
“Don't need no doctor,” Big Randy said sharply.
The doctor stepped forward. “How many bodies are …”
A snort of impatience interrupted him. It was then that Lace first said what he would say many times again before this day was forgotten. “Most of them cats got buried in thin air,” he said. “Left nothin' behind but footprints.”
Randy suddenly turned his back and sat down hard on the Commander's box, stumbling as though dizzy. He put his head in his hands and rocked himself slowly like a man doubled over in pain. This time, as he cried, he didn't make a sound.
It was just before they boarded the plane the morning after the blast—the amphibian had remained in the bay during the night—that he learned of Randy's macabre revenge for his younger brother's death. By then the coffin was already loaded aboard the plane. It was Orval who spilled the beans.
He'd taken Orval with him to make one last-ditch search for the sword in the wreckage that was the Commander's quarters. It was when he told Orval what he was particularly-searching for that Orval began skirting around the question of the body. Would they open it before they buried him? Would they ask who put him in dress whites?
Finally Sulgrave squared the steward with one question: “What's wrong, Orval?”
Guilt was too plain in OrvaPs face for Sulgrave to accept his “Ain't nuthin' wrong, sir. I was just asking.”
It took some doing, and some threatening questions. But finally Orval couldn't contain his fear of divine retribution. “Randy don't fear none of the Lord, Lieutenant. I ain't very religious myself. But when it comes to buryin' …”
And then it came out that they couldn't find all of the Commander, only the head and upper torso. The rest they'd made up with assorted arms and legs, some white, some black. “They might sure be a piece of Mister Skully in that suit, Lieutenant. We put in all the Commander we could find, though.”
Sulgrave, jolted, hid his own sudden awed chill, said nothing while he tried to figure out the possible consequences. They resumed the search more intensively, while to himself he asked OrvaPs questions. In the end they found the sword, broken, under a rock.
When Lace and Randy came back from Little Misery, where Sulgrave had sent them to check on the state of things, Sulgrave said nothing about the body for the moment.
“Mr. Sung got 'em all off in the schooner. He didn't know but what there'd be a second blast after the first,” Randy said.
“Mr. Sung is still there?” Sulgrave asked, astounded.
“He's pickin' up the coconuts off his place. They all got shook down,” Lace said.
He'd never seen a full-grown woman so defeated. She was actually on her knees before him toward the end. But the news broadcast had told him enough for both of them to know that his leave was canceled, and nothing she could do —smashing the radio, crying, cursing him, begging him— could change even then what they both knew overshadowed their life in the room together.
“Every man I've ever loved killed, God damn it.” She plucked at the rug as though uprooting grass. “Every one of them. My son. My …”
“Please get up. Please get up. I've got to check in. You know I'll be back.”
“You'll never come back. Just a few days longer, please.” He laughed, trying to jolly away her hysteria. “You know I've at least got to present myself. I might be assigned right here, who knows?”
“But just a few more days. Please, please.”
“But why? I can come back as soon as …” She rocked from side to side on her knees, held her fists to her temples. “I don't know,” she whispered hoarsely. “I'm crazy. Please don't laugh at me. I want to have a baby. Please, God, don't laugh at me. I wasn't sure before.”
He didn't laugh. He was struck dumb. An overmastering sense of tenderness, pity, panic, love—he couldn't separate the tangl
ed snarl of conflicting feelings—brought him to one knee beside her. She was crying easily now, head bent, the back of her hand in her mouth. He lifted the soft hair off the back of her neck and gently bit the nape. “I love you/' he said.
He tried to lift her but she shook him off. “Go,” she said harshly. “Get out.”
He rose and took his coat over his arm, feeling wrong and harsh in the clothes he hadn't worn for so long. He looked back only once, as he closed the door. She was still crying, head bowed, blindly waving him to go on, to leave quickly. She was wearing the same feminine spill of white froth and ribboned ivory lace that she'd been wearing that morning of another century. She looked like a weeping angel. A dull senseless helpless misery came over him as he closed the door, and everything inside him turned to stone.
“Did you go to Mother-in-Trouble's?”
“Yeah,” Lace said. “The shack stood up, but everything else is a mess.” He shook his head, remembering. “Twisted scene. You know that turpentine tree in the yard there?”
Sulgrave nodded.
“There's a yella-haired doll hanging from it. Hung by the neck.”
The old woman, he thought dully.
As they left, the radio operator of the amphibian received a message that two rescue ships had been sent, were within two hours of the island. When they took off, Sulgrave had the pilot circle the island before they gained altitude. From the air the two converging ships were visible in the binoculars. “They won't have much rescuing to do,” the radio man said, shaking his head.
“Got a lot of cleaning up,” Lace said.
She stood before the mirror dry-eyed and exhausted, numb to further feeling. She studied herself, her face. It was wan, terribly drawn from crying. Slowly she opened her lipstick, twisting the brass tube till the carmine tip emerged erect, very deliberately made up her mouth. Then she reached for her brush, absently started brushing her hair, wondering again if there were life in her womb. Sunday, she thought, today is Sunday.