SEA OF CORTEZ
Sandra McDonald
The war is the best thing that ever happened to most of the guys on your ship—a wild storm of global upheaval that flung them out of the flat, dull prairies or gritty coal mines of Appalachia and dropped them right here, stranded on a floating oasis of two thousand men in the South Pacific, a goodly amount of them shirtless at any given time. Certainly the war’s the best thing that ever happened to you. If it weren’t for the Japs, you’d be freezing your toes off back in Iowa City, working in your dad’s shoe store. Instead you’re lying on this wool blanket on this steel deck, and Robbie Coleman’s head is pillowed on your bare stomach. The sky is canary blue and cloudless, the sun smiling directly above the gun turrets.
“What are you thinking about?” Robbie asks, his voice low and lazy.
You’re thinking that Paradise is the dozens of men paired up around you, smoking or dozing or reading dog-eared magazines. Most are bare chested, some are stripped down to shorts and some are casually buck-naked: acres of skin, tight and tattooed and smooth and hairy. The blue-green sea glitters to the horizon in all directions with no trace of land. One day the war will end and all this will vanish like a mirage. All the handsome men will return to where they came from. You will measure old ladies’ feet and lace up winter boots on little kids trying to kick you. You’ll live at home, the bachelor son. Once in a while you’ll go out of town for a secret tryst, but your parents will never meet your lovers and you will die alone, lonely, unfulfilled, longing for the pretty boys of war.
“I’m not thinking about anything,” you say.
Robbie arches his arm and pinches your thigh. Not hard enough to sting. “Liar, pants on fire.”
He’s told you before that you think too much. Which is silly, since he’s the educated one, three months of college in his hometown of San Diego before he decided to drop out and enlist. He’s read every book on the ship at least twice, and that includes two plays by Shakespeare. You hated every minute of high school and never met a book you didn’t want to bury under stale gym socks at the bottom of your locker.
It’s not that you think too much, it’s that you can peer through time. You look at the ship and can see it in the Philadelphia shipyards, a frame accumulating pipes and wires and bulkheads, a vast investment of labor and material. You also see it rusting away on the bottom of the ocean, a habitat for fish and plants and ghosts. The beginning and the end of most things is yours if you concentrate hard enough. Two ends of a pole, like the ones track athletes use for vaulting. You see Robbie, who like you is nineteen years old, and simultaneously picture him also as a baby sucking on his mother’s teat and a bald husk of a man in a hospital bed. He’s surrounded by his kids and grandkids. He dies peacefully, quietly.
But right now he’s alive and questioning so you murmur, “I’m thinking about the movie tonight.”
“I’m on watch,” he says. “Besides, we’ve seen it.”
Everyone has seen it. A soldier goes to a cantina looking for love and eventually Carmen Miranda sashays around with pineapples and bananas on her head. It’s the strangest musical you’ve ever seen. You knew already Robbie would find a reason not to go. On the last movie night you sat in the back, holding hands, little kisses of soft lips and raspy stubble, with the ship’s officers just a few rows ahead, not noticing or pretending not to notice. Hands sliding beneath waistbands. Tongues between soft lips, hands grasping heat and hardness. Nothing the two of you haven’t done before.
Later, though, you saw him clutching a photo of his girlfriend Nancy as reverently as a Catholic holds a rosary. Nancy, who is eighteen and honey haired, her penmanship round and blue on perfumed paper. Nancy with her pert nose and bright eyes and a smile so wide you could fall right in and drown in sweetness.
She’s cute and all, but if you were a woman—and here’s an area you definitely do not think about very often, a boarded-up hurricane cellar of cobwebs, rat droppings, and rusty nails that lead to tetanus—if you’d been born a girl, you wouldn’t be sitting around in California writing love notes to your sailor boyfriend. You’d be working in a steel plant or shipyard, doing your part for the war. On weekends you would wear blouses the color of freshly churned butter, and ride a bicycle so that air flutters up under your skirt, and sleep in short cotton nightgowns with lace on the cuffs and neckline. You would keep your hope chest stocked and organized until the man of your dreams proposed with a gold ring and a long-stemmed red rose.
In the photograph that Robbie treasures most, he and Nancy are sitting on a beach blanket, laughing, his left arm casual around her shoulder, her head tilted toward him. Nancy’s bathing suit has wide white straps and cones that make her breasts point out like cannons. He says they were visiting the Sea of Cortez. You think that’s in Europe somewhere. Wasn’t Cortez an explorer, like Columbus? If you ask, you’ll sound like a dumb hick. You do know that Robbie thinks a lot about what Nancy would say about him kissing you, what his momma would think, what the chaplain would admonish over the rims of his square black glasses.
What exists between you is nothing unexpected on a floating prison of men who sleep, shit and work together twenty four hours a day for months without relief.
Or so you tell yourself.
It’s not love. It can’t be love. Robbie can only love women.
Here’s what happens: a boatswain’s mate named Williams has a fight with his buddy Lee, who is a cook, apparently because Lee has been spending time with two radiomen, Easton and DeRosa. Everyone calls them Fruit Salad or the Two Fruits, but not when officers can hear. A tolerant captain will look the other way but the fleet admiral has eyes everywhere and he won’t hesitate to discharge a man for being homosexual. You’ve heard of sailors sent to psychiatric evaluation or imprisoned in the brig. They get kicked out with what looks like an honorable rating but is coded on blue paper, so that the Veterans Administration will deny benefits. Anyway, Williams and Lee broke up over Lee’s too-obvious affinity with Fruit Salad. Williams isn’t homosexual, or so he says. He’s got a wife and two kids to prove it. But he needs a pal to blow off steam with, and he decides that pal should be you.
He’s big in the shoulders, with anchor tattoos on both biceps and a thick corded neck, narrow waist and dark, slick hair. He has a dangerous look to him. He’s the kind of man who might throw you overboard if you crossed him, or at least teach you a lesson in a filthy alley. You like that he’s fierce. He asks around and finds out that you don’t like books, so the first gift he gets you is an almost-new issue of a Hollywood tabloid.
“I’m done reading it,” he says, brushing your fingers as he hands it over.
The next gift is a little flask of whiskey that tastes vile but gives you a warm glow on an otherwise bad day of combat drills and foul weather.
The third gift is a backrub late one night in the ammunition room, you standing upright against the bulkhead with your right cheek pressed against the cool metal and your arms splayed as if you are under arrest. His large, calloused hands dig into the tight muscles of your shoulders, blossoms of pain-relief-pleasure. In the secret hurricane cellar of your brain, you imagine yourself wearing a blue silk dress, sheer silk hosiery, a lace bra, black high-heeled pumps. You’re a lady reporter come to do a Life magazine article about the war and he’s lured you down here, is moving his hands down your hips, is thumbing his way into your secret passage. If you were wearing pearls, he’d pull them cool and firm against your throat, or slip them one by one inside you like exquisite gifts.
“Baby,” he breathes. “Baby pie.”
Which is maybe the dumbest endearment you’ve ever heard but you take it, you will take anything you can get. You know that people see what’s happening. People always see. Robbie is a boatswain’s mate like Williams and there’s no way he can be oblivious. You want him to object, get mad, claim you, but he writes daily letters to Nancy and reads his Bible so much that the binding cracks open. You share cigarettes and go to the mess together
and he slings his arm across your shoulders in the same familiar way, but if he’s bothered about Williams, he’s keeping it completely to himself.
Meanwhile there’s a war to fight. You man the 16-inch guns. You fire at Manila, Panay, Leyte, Cebu; places you’ve never heard of back when you were failing geography in tenth grade. The roar of the weapons leaves your head ringing and makes your hands shake. The Japs dive out of the sky in suicide attacks. The antiaircraft guns shoot and shoot and shoot, ships sink on the horizon, you can’t sleep, you can’t eat, and Williams is the one who pulls you into tiny spaces, gets you to your knees, tugs on your ears, stuffs your mouth. There’s no sweet kissing. This is not like cuddling on the deck under the blazing sun. He teaches you how to take him, his tattoos moving like snakes in the dim light, and he leaves you sore and addicted and craving more.
“Tell me what you want,” he orders in the dark, but you can’t even tell yourself the truth, how can you tell him? You want lace underwear that rides against your thighs, and a garter belt snug around your waist, and a bra to fill with breasts you’ll never have. You want cherry-red lipstick and tiny bottles of perfume to spritz on your neck. You can see Williams home after the war, calling his wife “baby pie” as he nails her into a new white mattress in a four-poster bed. She will look like Robbie’s girlfriend Nancy. She will swell with a new baby, a satisfied gleam in her eyes. You will eat your mother’s meatloaf and listen to the radio with your father and go to bed with a pistol under your pillow, dreaming of the day you can shoot yourself in the head.
You lie and tell Williams that you want more whiskey. Any warm glow is a good one.
For three days, your ship is part of a task force attacking Japanese airfields. A dozen cruisers, battleships, carriers and destroyers assail Luzon. Their pilots dive out of the sky, trying to smash your decks and turrets. You can’t even count how much metal is screeching across the sky. Your sense of the future starts to fail. Maybe the war will never end. It will simply stretch on forever, reeking of gunpowder and deafening with its monstrous noise, the sea tossing you up and down with angry swells.
There’s a reason they don’t let women out here, you think. To witness destruction is to take it in, like inhaling poison, and once inside you it can never be expelled. Your strictly imaginary womb aches for the babies who will never be born because their fathers have been wiped away from the planet by steel and fire. But eventually this battle does end, and you crawl into Robbie’s rack because you’re too tired to climb into your own. He finds you there a half hour later, roughly shakes your shoulder.
“It’s not big enough for two,” he says, even though men are double-racked all around you. Some are weeping with relief and being comforted, with small words and soft gestures, by their buddies. They have seen too much.
“Let me sleep,” you plead.
Annoyed, he hauls you out. You land on your knees on the deck.
“Sleep alone,” he says.
You go find Williams. He’s upright, exhausted, his face dark with stubble, a cigarette burning unnoticed in his hand. He’s talking to one of the Two Fruits. When he sees you, his face gets all tight. You think he doesn’t want to be seen with you. But then he pushes you into his rack and crawls in right after you, an impossibly tight fit, his body crushing yours. You want to be crushed. You want to be held immobile and safe, a woman safe in the arms of her man.
“Close your eyes, baby pie,” he says roughly.
The next morning, the seas are so rough that cooking is limited on the mess deck. You don’t mind, because just looking at food exacerbates your growing seasickness. As you sip bad coffee you hear the ship’s latest scandal. One of the officers found pornography and women’s underwear in the boatswains’ locker and there’s going to be hell to pay. It’s not regular pornography but “perverted” stuff—men posed in women’s lingerie, men with fake breasts, men in long slinky dresses. Your face burns because you want to see it.
“The captain threw it all overboard,” you hear Robbie say. “Rotten filth.”
That afternoon a typhoon blasts through the task force, an unannounced guest at an already terrible party. Planes slide off carriers or smash into bulkheads. Three destroyers capsize and sink to the bottom of the Pacific. Your ship rolls so dangerously to starboard and port and starboard and port that men scream for fear you’re about to go right down alongside the destroyers. This is what terror really is: knowing in your heart that you will drown entombed in metal, seawater rushing in to flood and trap and smother you. It will hurt. You will scream, but that will just let more water invade you. You will convulse and choke and scrabble for help that never comes. Then your body will hang suspended in dark cold water forever, a watery grave from which no one is ever rescued.
Eight hundred men die in the storm, every death frantic and painful.
You live. You’re safe, you don’t drown, you emerge onto the deck to a gray windy sky with the typhoon extinguished. The captain orders a shipwide muster and head count. Three sailors are missing and presumed to have washed overboard in the confusion of the night. The youngest is BM3 Robert Allen Soward, of San Diego, California.
You don’t believe it—not when your chief tells you, not when the captain confirms it, not when everyone in your corner of berthing slaps your shoulder and tells you they’re sorry. The sea is too big, the waves too choppy, the ship is almost out of fuel. There is no chance of recovery.
“But I’ve seen him,” you tell them. “He dies as an old man, surrounded by his kids. I can see it right now. He’s in a bed, and they’re surrounding him.”
Eventually the ship’s doctor gives you some little white pills, makes you sleep twelve hours in the infirmary and sends you back to work.
Grief is a sword. It splits your spinal cord from head to toe, making you unsteady on your feet. You walk into bulkheads and trip over hatches. Grief is also a knife. It slices through your brain and makes you forget he’s dead. You think you see him in the mess, in the showers, on deck when the sun breaks through. It’s a finely honed razor that leaves a million tiny cuts on your hands and face. They sting when you touch his locker or turn your face into the pillow you stole from his rack.
When did your vision fail? What can you trust, if not the inner sight that points you to the inevitable future?
You decide that he’s still out there in the water, swimming his way back to Nancy and sunny California. He will be rescued by a passing ship, swaddled in blankets, reunited with his one true love. He will die old and beloved, not cold and abandoned to the ocean.
This fantasy helps in only the smallest possible way.
It’s the beginning of 1945. The Japanese are not yet exhausted enough or horrified enough to surrender. You still have Williams, but he still has a wife and he has secrets, too. He gets packages in the mail but opens them in private. He barters tobacco and chewing gum and candy but won’t show you all of the bounty he earns in return. Every morning when you wake you see your bleak, gray future unfolding in Iowa City. You think, sometimes, that it would be easier to drop off the side of the ship and sink into darkness, let the whales and sharks and fish finish you off. Cortez explored the sea and so will you, your every cell scattered by tide and swell.
But then the ship puts in for repairs at Ulithi, an atoll with crystal clear lagoons and gorgeous long beaches and sunsets like blood oranges. There are beer parties and midnight movies and a lot of men sneaking off into the jungle for some private R & R. Williams takes you to a cove where the ocean washes in and out just a few feet away. He spreads a blanket on the sand and crawls all over you and takes you apart inch by inch. You participate as required, thinking of Robbie adrift on currents and calling for your help. His hands and voice grow rougher.
“I don’t know what you want,” he says.
You don’t know, either.
More ships pull into port. The Seabees finish up a big rec center on Mogmog Island and there’s a rumor that Bob Hope will be flying in next month with a USO
army of singers and dancers. In the meantime, the Morale Committee is organizing a musical revue. Every ship will provide volunteers to do skits and numbers. The Two Fruits are first to sign up. They ask you to perform as well.
“Why me?” you ask.
DeRosa says, “Gets your mind off things.”
“I can’t sing.”
Easton says, “It’s a chorus. You can just mouth the words and let the stronger singers carry it.”
You ask Williams if you should do it, but he has no opinion on the matter. Maybe he’s losing interest in you. You saw him talking to his old buddy Lee the other day, Lee with the thick blond hair and bright blue eyes. You’re disposable. Maybe you deserve to be disposed of. You tell Easton and DeRosa that you’ll volunteer but when you get to practice you realize they left out the crucial detail that the entire show is in drag—grass skirts, coconut-shell breasts, wigs, makeup.
“Absolutely not,” you say, and try to flee.
The Two Fruits grab your arms and turn you back. “It’s just for fun. No one cares.”
The other chorus members from your ship are a laundryman, a barber, a corpsman, a chaplain’s assistant, a radarman and three yeomen. They know how to put on makeup. They argue about the costumes. Too late you realize that every single one is homosexual and you’re probably going to be branded as one, too, but what does it matter? The world is ending in fire and Robbie is floating in the Pacific and Williams wants to put his hand down someone else’s pants. This might be the only time in your life that you will get to dance on stage for the hundreds of drunk and cheering men. You certainly won’t get cheered back in Iowa City.
“I want the blond wig,” you tell them. “I want pink lipstick and a seashell necklace.”
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