The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “I’ll go,” Oval said.

  Bonnie looked at John.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “No, I’ll go,” Oval said. “It’s my responsibility.”

  “You’re too tired,” Bonnie said. “You’re too tired and worried about Thelma. You stumbled on the threshold when you came in tonight. Your eyes are bloodshot. I won’t let you go.”

  “What difference does that make?” Oval said, turning back to his saucepan.

  “That I won’t let you go?” Bonnie cried, hurt to tears.

  “No, no, dear,” Oval said to the boiling water. “The rest. The rest of it.”

  Bonnie ran up behind Oval and grabbed him, pink sweater sleeves sliding up her pale round arms. “You can’t do it! John’s young and he can do it! Sit down and I’ll get you something decent to eat! Sit down, now!” She pulled him away from the stove, their legs awkwardly tangling. One of Oval’s legs buckled and they nearly fell together to the floor. On one knee, holding Bonnie to keep her from falling all the way to the floor, Oval looked again to his steaming saucepan. Bonnie cried.

  This, after a second or two, began to have in John’s mind the eternal quality of a vignette. He left the kitchen, got his Ike jacket for the cool night air and rode down Los Robles to the Peg o’ My Heart Drive-in, where he quickly ate a sandwich called a Hammurabi—ham and, he supposed, Babylonian barbecue sauce—laying it down on an honest base of lima beans. He had no business even thinking about Bonnie, whose concern for Oval was on another plane entirely, near to a desperation he was probably not capable of.

  He rode on to the Co-op, suddenly remembering Thelma, poor Thelma, whom he had forgotten again. Would that cold forgetfulness always lie in wait for him?

  On a short break around eleven that night he and Urban were out together. Urban unwound the scarf from his rigid face. Some animals seemed to grin when they didn’t; others looked fierce when they weren’t. In Urban was the dangerous quality of a beast who was, if silent, unreadable.

  But he spoke: “I don’t see what she wants with me. My disability pension? My GI insurance? She knows I’m a freak and a nut. She could get rid of the niño easy enough—I offered to pay for it.”

  John could hear the words, but from behind the scars came only a glare. He said to Urban, “She acts like she loves the shit out of you.”

  “I know about a doc in LA he’ll do it for five hundred, a real doc, too, but she acts like Baal is in the Church if I mention it. She wants to have the kid. We got hitched yesterday at the Town Hall, so no matter what happens the kid won’t be a bastard, but what she wants with me, I don’t know. I don’t know why she ever climbed in my bed. The mackerel-snappers are funny that way—they don’t think it’s much of a sin to fuck. Well, she got caught. I thought I was dreaming the first time she came padding up the stairs in her little bare feet. I thought it was before the war and I had a face and clean hands, more or less. I was a Baptist then, a young stud from the Ozarks with the Devil’s rod hung on him like a bloodsucker, like a viper bit him in the crotch and wouldn’t never let go.”

  “Why don’t you think she loves you?” John said. “Women are funny that way, I’ve heard.”

  “From Oval, yeah. He’s been banging my ear about it. He wants to marry us in his church as soon as the lima beans slack off. He says he wants to consecrate our union in the love of Christ.”

  “Do you love her?”

  Urban held out his hands, to show them. “With these? You can’t see the blood on them, but I can.”

  “Well, aside from that, do you love her?”

  “The love of Christ! The Christ I saw with my own eyes is a different Christ than Oval ever dreamed of. He’s fed up with all this love shit. He’s sick of the two-legged devils that play with fire.”

  Urban looked at his watch and sighed with resignation much gentler than his words. It was time for them to go back into the unforgiving winds of the machine. John wondered how Maria made love to the burned man. He wondered if she kissed him on the slot of a mouth and caressed the terrible mask.

  At one in the morning he was working sector 1, guiding the warm boxes into the frozen trays, when he felt, rather than saw, a new tension in the chains. Urban had just come in to take over for Les in sector 3, and had gone up the steel ladder. Tex was outside. The tension he felt was like a hardening of the jaws, no other symptoms, and then it seemed to have passed. His trays moved with their normal squeaks and pauses, so it must have been his imagination, a squint of the eyes, some thought unrelated to the machine broadcasting itself into the outer world. The inner-outer world here, created and chilled for Phaseolus lunatus. He wondered why Dory had never answered his postcard. The others had. His mother had sent him ten dollars, which he’d in no way requested. He’d had a card from Gracie, Loretta and Miles, and from Estelle Hilberg a note on engraved stationery. “Give my love to Sylvan,” she’d written. Oval, no longer Sylvan, had smiled ruefully at that. But not a word from Dory. He felt guilt, like a blush; had he treated her so badly, so meanly, that she wouldn’t write to him? He never knew the rules. He wondered if he’d ever know them. Maybe her answer had been lost in the mails, but he knew better; the ordinary processes of the world were always more efficient and predictable than you wanted to think they were.

  The machine stopped. The bell clamored faintly through the package slot, the fans whined far above, where Urban was shouting, so he couldn’t make out the words. His hands were numb but could still grasp the ladder rungs. Urban’s shouting seemed too urgent and he heard the word “help,” which made him afraid. He ran along the plank in sector 2 and up the ladder to sector 3, where Urban and Les were huddled together, looking at something they both held on to. It was one of their hands but at first he couldn’t tell whose. Les was saying, and had been saying, “Oh God damn it Jesus oh Jesus oh fuck God damn it,” continuously in a soft, furry voice. “God Jesus damn it all…” It was Les’s hand that they both looked at. What was left of the glove was still on it. “Jesus fuck it shit damn it,” Les crooned. It was his left hand, not bleeding very much, just oozing from the ragged palm of the glove.

  “We got to get him down the ladders,” Urban said. “He already fainted once.” The shortest way was down to sector 4 and out the back hatch in sector 5. They guided Les to the first ladder and manhandled him down, one on each side, dragged him by his clothes along the plank and then down the ladder to sector 5 and out the hatch. He fainted again for a moment as they let him down onto the cement floor. A cart pusher was sent to the office to tell the watchman to call an ambulance. They got out of their flight suits and tucked them under Les, a sleeve under his head.

  “I didn’t feel nothing,” Les said. He held his hurt hand in the other, squeezing it. “Christ, it felt kind of funny, so I looked and that was the first time I knew what the fuck happened. Jesus, I guess I slipped a little and stuck it right in a fucking sprocket. I was so numb anyway.”

  “I should have relieved you sooner. I was a couple minutes late,” Urban said.

  The watchman, having called an ambulance, came with a first-aid kit. John cut off the rest of the glove with his knife and there the hand was. Les had his thumb and two-thirds of his little finger left. They dusted sulfa powder on the stumps and put on a pressure bandage, tying the strings tightly. The carts were already rolling by with the packages of lima beans. “Starting to sting now,” Les said. It was starting to bleed, too; the bandage was already a red ball. “Shit,” Les said. “It’s really starting to sting.”

  Urban felt for the artery but any pressure made Les yelp. “Christ, let her bleed!” he said.

  “I should have relieved you sooner,” Urban said.

  Tex had found them by going all the way through the machine, where he’d seen the blood on the planks and on the white packages. He took off his flight suit and put it over Les. “Shock,” he explained. “Don’t want him going into shock.”

  John gave Les a lighted cigarette, and Les, looking very gray and sick, s
aid, “Hell, I got a thumb and part of a pinkie, so I’ll still be able to hold a butt.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Tex said. “Anyway, you still got your good right hand.”

  “I guess you never noticed I’m a lefty,” Les said.

  When the ambulance came Les walked to it, the attendants close beside him. The watchman said he’d called the plant manager because all accidents had to be reported immediately. They were to leave the machine off, the fans on, and be back at eight in the morning.

  “Did you call Oval?” John asked.

  “You live with him, don’t you? Why don’t you tell him.”

  The cart pushers who normally took the boxes from the machine would help the other cart pushers take the beans from the line.

  “Oval won’t take this too well,” Urban said. “But you better not wait to tell him.”

  They dawdled at the lockers, though, trying to talk themselves through what had happened. “The poor bastard,” Tex said. “What’s he going to do now? He sure ain’t going to play the piccolo.”

  “There’s three fingers in the machine somewhere,” Urban said.

  “He ought to use the rest of his GI Bill,” John said.

  “He says he ain’t college material,” Tex said.

  “I should have relieved him sooner. If I’d only…”

  “You put your ass in the gears, the gears don’t say, ‘No, thanks,’ ” Tex said.

  John said he thought he’d felt a difference in the chains around the time it happened, but that was impossible.

  “No,” Urban said. “You had a premonition. If you’d trusted it you might have saved his fingers.”

  “You know I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “That kind of thing don’t care if you believe it or not. If I relieved him one minute sooner he’d still have all of his hand.”

  “You sound like it’s your fault. It’s not your fault,” John said. “It’s not my fault and it’s not your fault.”

  “Yeah, and Christ loves us all,” Urban said.

  John got back to the parsonage at two-thirty. A light was on upstairs, but he wasn’t sure whose room it was. He didn’t want to tell Oval; it seemed a dangerous thing to do. Maybe he was having another premonition. He tried to think that Oval might as well get some sleep, but that didn’t work, so he went up the stairs, quietly on the thick brown runners, trying to get his mind made up. Light came from a door down the hall, but from the first black open door at the top of the landing came clear voices.

  “Please, please, my dearest. Please, my dearest heart.” It was Bonnie’s voice, small with pleading.

  Oval groaned. “Don’t, dear. Please don’t.”

  “I love you. I know you love me. Don’t you love me?”

  “Of course I love you, dear.”

  “Then it’s right. It’s right. I know it’s right.”

  “Oh, God,” Oval groaned.

  “Is it me? Is it anything I’ve done? What can I do?”

  “No, no. It’s wrong. It’s just wrong. I’m too old for you. There’s Thelma, there’s my faith in doubt. My spirits are in chaos. It’s not you, dearest—you’re beautiful and true in Christ’s love. But not me, not me.

  Bonnie sobbed.

  John turned and carefully went back down the stairs. He went to his room, shut the door and lay on the bed. His spirits were in chaos, too, else how could he be disgusted at himself for hearing what they’d said, at the banality of their words, at his jealousy of his father, at his father’s pitiful, idiotic hesitation?

  She was in the wrong room. She should say that to him. He was a voyeur, an impostor sneaking into his father’s place, entering her soft, feathery thighs. It was as if he were in a car skidding on ice, yearning for the way he wanted to go but forced by momentum sideways, toward danger. They were both real, the two upstairs, existing separately from him, having their own intense feelings, no matter how he judged them. They could die of their feelings, saying the same dumb words and dying of them.

  He saw Dory, so clearly she startled him. She watched him. She needed him but was suspicious. She couldn’t trust him. The dark, waterfowl eyes saw the truth of his unfaithfulness and were sad. “What truth, damn it?” he said out loud, but of course got no answer. But this was all his own imagination; he hadn’t seen a ghost or had a premonition. He could be wrong about everything. Right now she might be in the back seat of Robert Beggs’s father’s Plymouth. Stop this. She wasn’t a virgin anymore, so there was no mystery. They’d leave the dance at the Casino, park, and pretty soon they’d be in the back seat and she’d think, what the hell, it’ll feel good and the bastard that seduced me is out in California screwing Streaky the bandanna girl, which he might very well have been doing under slightly different circumstances. Yes, it was Dory, slipping off her panties as she had only for him.

  Toward waking he dreamed that Les was taking his baby’s temperature with a rectal thermometer. Les pulled it out and tried to read it but couldn’t because of the fecal matter on it, so he casually stuck it in the baby’s mouth to clean it. The baby just looked goopily at his father and licked his lips. Perfectly normal. John Hearne observed this, but was not neutral. He suggested to Les that no matter how customary it was to cleanse a rectal thermometer in your child’s mouth, there was a danger of infection. The dream chose not to have Les respond.

  He awoke in broad daylight, in his clothes and boots, still grimy from the machine, remembering that he should have told Oval about Les and about being back at the Co-op at eight. It was nearly eight. He found Bonnie in the kitchen.

  “Thelma died,” she said, and sucked in her breath. She looked faded, her jaws pale and her eyes congested and weepy. Thelma was to him then a tiny point of light, just winked out, nothing at all physical, purified of all that. He tried to make an appropriate sound. He’d known her only a short time, with much repulsion, which she’d seen and forgiven, but in her knowing him there had been no change at all, just the assumption of the best in him, no beginning or ending.

  “When did it happen?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Oval heard this morning. He’s gone to the hospital, but he didn’t have to.”

  “I’d better get down to the Co-op,” John said. He told her what had happened to Les.

  “The poor guy! How awful!” she said, then thought for a moment. “I hope Oval can take that too.”

  There were two suitcases by the door and two thick wardrobe bags over a chair back.

  “Yours?” John asked.

  “I was going to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “For selfish, terrible reasons!” she cried. Still making little sounds, she picked up her two suitcases and half ran down the hallway and up the stairs.

  The plant manager and Tex were waiting at the machine. “Where’s Forester?” the manager said. He looked out of place and even more impatient because he wore a seersucker suit and tie and if he touched anything he’d get dirty.

  “His daughter died last night, so he went to the hospital this morning.”

  “Oh!” The breath went out of him.

  “I think he’ll be in soon,” John said. While they were quiet he had time to notice that there were fewer women on the lines. The cart pushers were a little less frantic at the conveyor belt, too. Perhaps the season was dying down.

  “When he shows up…when he comes in, come and get me.” The manager went off toward the glassed-in offices.

  “His daughter was kind of…slow, wasn’t she?” Tex said in order to get things into the proper perspective.

  “Yeah.”

  “Urban told me not to tell no freak jokes in front of Oval.”

  “Where is Urban? He ought to be here,” John said.

  “Ain’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

  He wasn’t immediately concerned; people showed up and sometimes they didn’t show up. Sometimes they had reasons and sometimes they didn’t. Except that Urban Stumms was not that tolerant of the affairs of men, fixed as he
was upon revelation, not coincidence.

  Meanwhile he and Tex lounged upon the corrugated cardboard by the lockers, putting in their time for pay. Tex, wanting to change the mood of the moment, said, “Feller says, ‘Doc, ah took them suppositories, but for all the good they done ah maught’s well shoved ’em up mah ay-us.’ ”

  Urban had mentioned his GI insurance. Strange for an Ovarian Apocalyptic to keep up a life insurance policy. What was a Nazi oxygen tank doing in Tulaveda Municipal Hospital? From the machine, “Oval’s Folly,” came the lower-register hum of the fans, hardly audible through the insulated walls. ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Maybe the chalked words gave him the premonition, if that was what his vision could be called, because the event had already happened. The premonition was of his discovering it He put on his cold-weather gear. Tex said, “I’d never go into that goddam contraption unless I had orders,” and watched him.

  The latch wheel, not having been turned for six hours or more, was impossible to turn, the iron dogs probably frozen into their slots in the frame. He got the thirty-six-inch pipe wrench and levered it through the spokes until the wheel gave and the door was free. He entered in a brief haze of fog, hearing now the higher whine of the fans that caused the constant unfresh wind. His skin tightened immediately as he lost surface warmth. Urban, in his flight suit and boots, lay on a bed of loose frozen lima beans, his hands at his sides. John went to him thinking accident, emergency, the urgency of it swelling his arms. Hoarfrost glittered over Urban, equally on his clothes and skin. He tried to lift Urban’s head and shoulders, but he was all one piece. There was no question of life still burning somewhere within this piece of stone. He lifted him, wondering again how small and light he was, put him under his arm as if he were a branch, or plank, and took him out of there.

  Tex came running. “Holy mackerel,” he said in a normal voice, “it’s Urban.”

  In the moist heat Urban’s scar tissue grew furry, as if the mask grew fine white hairs, but then the hairs melted at their tips. John laid him down on the cardboard. Webs of frost glinted for a while in the eye holes, the uneven nostrils and the mouth slot.