Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  He’d stopped his boat after discovering an empty skiff tied to one of his lobster pots. Scuba divers. Vacationers robbing the traps for fun. Robby admired them for diving at night. He’d seen Jaws and was no fool, yet he admired them nonetheless.

  Momentum had carried him beyond the skiff. He took a compass bearing to be sure of finding it again in the dim light. He didn’t notice the seagulls calling or the plankton glittering like sparks on the wavecrests. He pictured the divers below — in thirty feet of water they’d likely heard his engine approach. Maybe they panicked and unloaded their catch, Robby’s catch. Maybe they hadn’t heard his engine at all, thought it just another murmur in the underwater hum. So they’d continued along his trapline, emptying traps and leaving them open and useless. They wear wetsuits in these chill waters, ears clamped beneath a layer of neoprene. All sounds are strange, the gurgle of regulators a soothing pulse to babies in the womb. The bottom is sparsely weeded, bushy in spots with eelgrass combed flat by the tide. Approaching the traps can be spooky, the weeds seeming tentacles or mermaid hair, the trapped lobsters seeming great green insects scavenging inside a ribcage. The divers, suspended side by side, a safety cord linking them at the waist, stuff the flailing creatures into sacks tied to their weightbelts. Now and then they gaze into the spaces behind them. They never look up.

  Robby started his engine and reversed course. A slow approach at steady RPM — that’s what the stickers did as they closed on sunning swordfish, before driving the harpoon down and in. The skiff came into view. Robby nudged his throttle and the surge lifted the bow.

  The skiff was forty yards away. If the divers didn’t surface he’d motor past and not look back, a pact made to himself in the spirit of fair play. He jacked the throttle and the engine roared. Whatever happened, Robby wanted it to be extreme. Later he could blame the drugs. In that sense they were a blessing.

  Out front a patch of water ignited, a flashlight rising to the surface. The patch of water looked alive, alien, and with heroic resolve Robby aimed for it. There remained but one glow, one diver. At night, alone. One diver. Robby’s admiration swelled as he slammed the throttle full out.

  The diver broke the surface and made for the skiff. He’s gonna see, Robby thought. Any second now he’ll see. Laden with his lobster haul the diver swam unhurriedly until under the hurtling bow of the boat he turned his head and saw. The hull resounded with a crunch. Robby cut to an idle and wheeled around. He flicked on his running lights. Diesel smoke and rain, tropical in their effect, gave the air a density that calmed.

  Robby drew alongside the skiff and surveyed its interior. Rubber flip-flops, a can of beer — some kid. He reached in for the basket crawling with swiped lobsters, with a practiced eye discarded the shorts and kept the legal ones. He unlooped the trapline from the skiff’s bow cleat and cast the vessel off. Waves rolled around him in soft swirls. He looked but saw no body.

  Guilt wasn’t his strong point. It was something wimps carried, like a comb in a shirt pocket. And there were other factors. He was being robbed, being messed with. Being wired as a monkey didn’t hurt either, yet this didn’t block the flutter of doubt that in Robby was near miraculous. Heading homeward it hit him. His feet were cold. He wanted his shoes. He wished he’d kept his shoes.

  The stern light shone white on his boat’s transom as Robby left the scene. In the water a second scuba diver, a blown flashlight looped to his wrist, saw the boat’s name and would remember it. The diver was young and secretly afraid of sharks. He knew his friend had been killed. The nylon cord linking them had wrenched on impact and now hung straight down, at its end a mass suspended solid and still as Santiago’s fish. He treaded water, straining, struggling to untie the cord from his belt. Visions occurred of bloodscent and feeding frenzies but he kept control. He pulled the cord upward for slack. His fingers fluttering through the black water grazed strange cool neoprene, then skin. His cry ripped the water, every muscle in spasm — yet his hand, brave hand, sought his friend’s reaching dead wrist. Where? He dipped his head to look. In a world of luminous green a flashlight lent a peaceful gleam to the pallid fist that still grasped it, to the arm and shoulder and maskless frog-eyed face in whose center the mouthpiece intruded comically like a bite too big to chew. Though his blood froze the boy would do it, bring the body home. His fingers took their grip. The movement loosed bubbles from his friend’s regulator, the soul going up, the lungs collapsing. With desperate yanks on the lanyard the boy popped his life preserver’s gas cartridge. The preserver inflated. Clear thinking. Poise. But he’d congratulate himself later. First catch the skiff, get aboard, get home. To swim one must paddle and kick, move forward a little. Progress. He’d spat out his mouthpiece and saltwater gagged him. He timed his breaths to the lifting waves, on each lift sighting the skiff bobbing dreamily before him, a vision. He realized he was towing sharkbait. He felt predators circling. Things moved under his flippers, leviathans with appetites for men, in chunks. He switched from breast, to sidestroke. Gradually he relaxed into the role of superhero. Then it happened.

  Twenty feet ahead, halfway to the skiff, a brown dorsal fin sliced up through the water paralleling a second fin, a third and fourth. He didn’t scream. No need. His heart had quit and he’d be unconscious when the sharks began to feed. The fins rolled in unison under the water and up again, scythelike dorsals on rubbery backs. Porpoises! Or small whales — mammals at least, like us! He screamed, laughed and screamed and slapped the water and cried. He’d watched enough public television to know he was saved. No sharks now, the cowards. Soon his outstretched fingers touched the fiberglass skiff. He secured the cord attached to his friend around a stern cleat. He barely could climb aboard for his aching arms. Face smeared with mucus, throat parched as he gulped his friend’s 4 A.M. beer, he sprawled across the center seat and let the rain wash over him. After a moment he sighed, “Wow.” In the water the whales had vanished, leaving behind not even bubbles, already an island myth.

  Three

  For two months in spring, 1972, Willoughby Claire commanded an aerorifle platoon in an Air Cav troop attached to an infantry division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. For a much longer time than was healthy, this brief wartime tenure seemed the most important thing that ever happened to him. Eventually, though, it began to fade in his estimation of reasons for his inadequate life. But an ugly stunt pulled by his father one evening swiftly reversed Willoughby’s many strides of forgetting. He again could feel blue, hate the world, spit at Jesus, and have none of it be his fault.

  Losing his left foot to a fragmentation grenade contributed crucially to Willoughby’s Vietnam fixation. There it was, or wasn’t, each day when he had to fiddle with ointments and talcum powder, his stump sock and metal prosthesis. The attentuated shin, inflamed and misshapen, was a blatant reminder of other things in his life that hadn’t gone as hoped. The phantom pain was barely an itch now; you learn to live with the handicap. So the fact that the grenade had been rigged by soldiers in his platoon ultimately proved the sharper spur to his grim nostalgia. Willoughby didn’t know why his men tried to kill him. But the mystery bore only so much obsession before it became strictly a self-serving exercise. Letting it go, he started waking each day in expectation of joy befalling him quite soon.

  Ronald Reagan was three years into his second term when Willoughby’s father — Sergeant Jackson Claire, United States Army, retired — poured gasoline on himself and his La-Z-Boy and touched a lighted cigar to the armrest. A suicide note was found in Jack’s truck parked down the road from his Virginia farmhouse. In the note he blamed his wife totally, his blood on her hands and so forth. There was no message for his only child, a message in itself.

  Willoughby didn’t see his mother till the day of the funeral and even then he refused to speak to her. She’d skipped the church service, joining the burial party at graveside, driving, he noticed, her boyfriend’s car. She kept a respectful, excommunicant’s distance
as mourners turned their backs on her. Out of the corner of his eye Willoughby had searched her face for signs of damnation and guilt, was satisfied her set expression masked these and worse regrets.

  He was a wreck those first days after his father’s suicide. Flashing back to his fragging in Nam seemed a positive breakthrough, and he’d set to the hunt with a whistle and smile. From the Veterans Administration in Washington he obtained the address of his fellow fraggee, a staff sergeant named Dale Parker who’d been with him in Willoughby’s bunker when the thing blew. He packed a duffel with his few unburned clothes and two thousand dollars in cash, his savings. He should have saved more all these years, but he was a partner in the farm, Dad always had said, not a mere employee. It turned out Willoughby owned neither the property nor the truck he’d driven for years — both were Willoughby’s mother’s by survivorship. So he left town on a bus, perversely heartened by this last blow to his pride.

  He was nobody now, just another hillbilly bussing north from nowhere. Like jungle guerrillas he was hid in the scenery. Some cycle was coming around.

  By no means was he thinking straight and this was evident in his plan: drop in on Sergeant Parker at his home in Albany, New York, become cohorts in a joint vendetta and not quit till justice was done. He didn’t consider that Parker might have other things to do, such as live his life. Willoughby wound up detesting him. After two nights in the Parker family’s guest room he slipped out at four in the morning, not leaving a note but thoughtfully making his bed. His visit, however, had brought a significant windfall, which felt boobytrapped for coming so easy — a letter sent to Dale Parker just last year by their old platoon sergeant, the heart of which went,

  [EXT]

  I don’t know if this will reach you but if it has keep reading. When you and the LT were fragged two soldiers did it and I knew about it and let them. They wanted Willyboy not you. It doesn’t matter who they were as I was in position to stop it. They were very upset after the action at Devil’s Elbow, and they thought Claire was worthless. The war is long over and maybe all slates are clean and maybe not. If not, you can find me at . . .

  [/EXT]

  Last night on the mainland Willoughby had bought a half-pint of gin at a family pharmacy. He’d been shy about the purchase, the liquor obviously to be consumed alone, like pornography. He’d meant to get drunk and revel in his bleak purpose, but after three sips in a darkened movie theater he’d capped the bottle and left it under his seat.

  He wandered out to a miniature golf course — more his speed, he knew — where to his surprise he attracted the fond attention of a young woman there with her three children. Disconcertingly, the kids seemed unfazed by their mom chatting up a strange man. Keeping a suspicious eye on them, Willoughby found himself making friends with the woman and then making love with her on her living room rug, the kids gone to bed, two boys and a girl, his pants around his knees.

  One night stands were new to Willoughby and new to the woman as well, her children’s blasé acceptance of him an act they put on for Mom’s sake. Yet he and she played it like pros, kept it light, kept it fun. A half hour later she read his mind: “I know, you want to go.” On his way out he told her she’d taken a big risk inviting him here — he could be a killer, she didn’t know — and she must never do it again. “Are you a killer?” When he answered, “Yup,” she smiled and saluted him playfully. He returned the salute and told her she was swell.

  Back at his motel, Willoughby was too nervous to sleep. In a few hours he’d board the 6 A.M. ferry to a place called Penscot Island. He hadn’t seen the ocean in many years and his memory of it had blossomed extravagantly, the way a past love seems a great love in the absence of any contenders. He was journeying to Penscot in search of an enemy. A feeble excuse. It was a place to go, mostly.

  Aboard the Penscot ferry, Willoughby, emboldened by last night’s sexual confidence boost, asked a woman to move her stuff that he might claim the window seat beside her. “There are other seats free,” she protested.

  “I like the view.”

  “It’s fog and rain.”

  “I like it.”

  The woman cleared aside her packages and drawstring purse. She saw Willoughby as a test. She liked tests. Glancing at him, she shied from her reflection in his sunglasses, glasses that evidently had been sat on, for they hung skewed on his face in the style of a streetcorner schizophrenic, long-haired and underwashed.

  The ferry pulled from the loading pier in a quake of froth and diesel. Willoughby spent a moment gazing out his window before pivoting to study the woman, now absorbed in a book. As she turned a page a small crucifix slipped from a fold in her sweater. He leaned to inspect the silver figure soldered to its cross, his inspection ascending along her necklace and breastswell, the brittle clarity of her neck and jaw, her pale lips and straight sharp nose to her eyes, which met his with a look suggesting back off. He stammered, “Just checking out your cross and stuff.”

  She lifted it in the cradle of her palm. “Would you like to see it? It’s very old.”

  “I’d as soon stick with mindless conversation, starting with my name’s Willoughby Claire.” He extended his hand. “What’s yours?”

  “I’m Sister Bernadette.”

  Horror, conveyed in an ardent handshake. “A nun?” She nodded. “Why no uniform?”

  “We’re a progressive order.”

  He chided her, “That ain’t right. You come on more or less regular and here you are, bride o’ Jesus.”

  “And you come on as some kind of cracker when clearly that’s an act.”

  He recoiled, “Damn,” turning back to his window and its gray harbor view as if told to stand in the corner.

  The woman felt charmed, potent, a little bad. She wasn’t a nun, never had been. “Sister Bernadette” was a put-on, an impulsive experiment. Yet she seriously was considering the religious vocation as a natural extension of her recent retreats to a convent in northern Connecticut. She had it in her. Sex she could take or leave; as with getting fuzzy on alcohol, she’d always regretted it before it was over. A profounder expression seemed the easy rapport the cloistered nuns shared; stepping lightly in black habits they strolled arm in arm like European schoolgirls. But the calling’s greatest attraction was her own receptiveness to it, as if her life’s disappointments had cut a template the convent perfectly fit. Hence the miracle she couldn’t explain: God’s seeming interest in her.

  She asked Willoughby, “Is Penscot your home?”

  “Not hardly. Is it yours?”

  “Just visiting my sister.”

  “One of many.”

  “My natural sister.”

  “Well, if one’s an angel, the other’s gotta be trouble.”

  Amused, she allowed, “Perhaps.” Her presumption of misdoings on her younger sister’s part was an educated guess. She hadn’t seen Lois since Lois’s wedding four years ago, when she’d married that idiot Robby Cochran on Penscot. Returning now to say goodbye, she was hoping Lois would care a little, make a fuss and implore her to reconsider. She wanted a home, something like family, to miss from within the cloister. Mom and Dad were long divorced, remarried, and swamped with loving stepchildren. Lois was it.

  As if at a mixer Willoughby asked, “So what’s a nice girl like you wanna be locked up in a nunnery for?”

  “No one is locked up. I love God and that’s the best way I’ve found to express it.”

  “Ask a silly question — ”

  “Listen. If you could talk without attempting to mock I’d appreciate it. And if you took off those glasses. It’s distracting to see myself whenever I look at you.”

  “Done.”

  Willoughby had his mother’s light eyes and shoulder-length black hair. Like his late father, he had a physical tic of sucking his cheeks in hawkishly, giving an impression of malnourishment and distemper. He cracked his knuckles. Sh
e said, “I see you were in the military.”

  He glanced down at his ring with a smirk. “West Point.” He waggled his finger. “I never take it off. So proud, you know?”

  “Class of?”

  “Seventy-one.”

  “My year. Then what?”

  “Vietnam. Boring, I know.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Oh, it was different.”

  “Then you retired?”

  “And been bumming around ever since.” Not true, of course. But fifteen years of living at home with his parents was a bit of biography he appreciated as socially damning.

  “May I assume you had troubles?” Her tone was musical. She was enjoying this charade.

  “Not a one, Sister.”

  “I’m a good listener.”

  “Not on the first date.” He was mad at himself for running on. It broke from his game plan of sullen menace. His anger vented when, in a tic of her own, she touched her crucifix. “Negative,” he snapped preemptively. “Last thing I want outta you is a Jesus pitch.”

  Her eyes squinted as if gauging a target. “I wouldn’t waste my time. Or His.”

  Yeow, he thought — and from a nun to boot! He retreated to the view out his window. Through the rain he made out a vein of beige beach between the slate ocean and sky, its gradual compression to a sliver striking him with intimations of dread, as if the vanishing land were a ship he ought to be going down with. The last time he’d seen the sea it had caused the same feeling — at his grandmother’s funeral a decade ago. She’d been a midwife renowned in Willoughby’s home town in the Cumberland foothills. One of her specialties was predicting precisely when a woman’s labor would start. She based her calculation on the phases of the moon, telling young Willoughby that the moon beckons babies as it beckons the tide, that water breaks, blood flows, souls depart the infirm, all on account of the moon. Ignorance fueled the apprehension, his own and his grandmother’s, in her case voluntary. Though she lived but a day’s drive inland she’d never seen, would never deign to see, the ocean. She preferred it unknowable, as something cosmic and holy rather than something you surf on.