by Carson, Tom
If I could only say
alia Mennin
If I could only say
Suze
Now I didn’t have a name anymore, but there didn’t seem to be much call for one. Here on the Cleaver Ward, Ira’s old bunk was still empty, and one day I saw its mattress was gone, letting the bare framework underneath show. Wearing a red sweater Edsel Ford had given me before he too went away, I had taken to standing at the window in his place, since he’d made good his escape and it seemed like someone ought to watch the traffic. I never started saying “Me,” though. I still knew the difference, and I wasn’t that far gone.
The cars went past and by and on out of the frame, but then one stopped to drop off a new prisoner. When the pirate who had captured her let her out and caught her arms to show her to us up here in the Cleaver Ward, I saw she had no top on, and that struck me as hard, since it was still and always winter and now there was dirty snow on the ground. Even Captain Teach must have thought so, because he’d just let her put on a dirty prison shift with stains down the front. Then the wind did a wild dance and kicked the light brown hair back off her face, and two green eyes looked up as if the wind had come from me. “Her,” I said, and pressed my fingers to the hard, hard glass. Next to me, Holden’s face was just as hard. “That cooze was sleeping with a professor, man, can you believe it?” he said. “I know which one, too—I thought he was after me! I wouldn’t have gone along, but I did think better of his taste back then. By the way, I’m sorry about your dad. But if you ask me, she deserves whatever she gets.”
But maybe now that could include me, I thought. The door was open, since there wasn’t one anymore, and I flew out, ran down the stairs and past all the other doctors and machines everywhere in that awful, horrible hospital, until I was outside. The attendant was leading her away somewhere, and dirty snow had started swirling all around us, it was dirty when it came out of the sky, and I remembered what the G in my old name had stood for they were right and I caught her, and I was trying to say, I was trying to say Thalia Thalia and then Suze Suze and I said “Susan” and she said “No I’m Tuesday” and the attendant said “I’m a whole weekend, baby, let’s get going” and they did.
Live long and prosper merimee quaquaqua nicknick oh Isadora ZZT dirty snow remember remember april one one nine seven four WOn’t get fOOLed ag gag gag ill again ZZT nick nick and me now would be lost ZZT nick and me now would be lost quaqua nicknick ZZT cast off outcast and the cast aweigh can you sail sail away oh I can sir can sir Can Sir ZZZZZZT middleaged father 46 year old artificer please go gently nicknicknick ZZT ZZT And I think we had better bag it quit just give up on this land business and reversible thumbs too the works and go back to the beach crawl into the water and be fish with no eyelids our old ZZT huckfins and a gill again the
II
The Skipper’s Tale
ONE DAY BACK IN THE WAR, I WAS SITTING IN THE OFFICERS’ CLUB on Tallulabonka or someplace with a couple of the other skippers—Kennedy, McHale. We were all in the PTs, which believe me was no fooling, buddy, when it came to going in harm’s way. The truth is, we probably weren’t helping the fucking war effort any more than if our tubs were named for Bar num, but it looked good in the newsreels. Mac Arthur quit the Philippines, we got to play taxicab. I don’t think my boat ever fired a single torpedo that hit anything.
McHale and I went back a ways. My charter-fishing business in the Florida Keys went bust after I made the mistake of taking a boatload of crazy Cubans someplace they wanted to go and I didn’t, so I joined the peacetime Navy in early ‘40. McHale was already in, running a cutter by day and a poker game by night down in the Panama Canal Twilight Zone. That’s where he and I hooked up, chasing the same sassy-hipped piece of local poon and downing brew like there was no tomorrow, which it turned out there wasn’t. So the both of us were right on the spot to volunteer for the PTs when they started training the first squadrons down there, right after Pearl Harbor.
He and I were the old salts in our squadron. That tickled the bejesus out of us both, since we weren’t all that old and had both been failures up to then. Most of the skippers were more like Jack, a lot of fancy-pants rich kids in khakis hot-rodding it on the bounding main. They’d whip their boats around these islands like flivvers on a back road near, I don’t know, Dartmouth or someplace, like they figured Dad could always buy them another if they cracked this one up.
The way things turned out, I guess you could say Jack’s Dad sure did.
He was a pretty cool customer then. Always friendly with McHale and me, but still like he thought that was funny. You knew that half his brain was someplace else, and you could bet your last pair of shined shoes that wherever it was was more interesting, and for damn sure had better food, than Tallulabonka. A skinny guy who liked to wear shades and didn’t keep a Lucky Strike going awake or asleep like the rest of us, even though he’d smoke a cigar once in a while just to show us we shouldn’t take it personal. I never knew where he got the cigars.
We called this joint the officers’ club, but it was really just another shack made out of panfried-looking palm fronds, with flies buzzing around like they knew something we didn’t and one of those damn “Paris, France 10000 Miles” directional arrows stuck on it. Anyway, the three of us were talking hump, the way you do wartime or peacetime and Tallulabonka or home whenever there’s beer and you can’t get a ballgame on the radio. McHale and I were doing most of the jawing.
“Remember ol’ Screw-Me Susie, back in the Zone?” he asked, nudging me with that gap-toothed, dirty grin of his. Which was about the most obscene sight that you could ever hope to see, this side of Minnie Mouse’s snatch. I was, I think, the more sensitive of the two of us, I guess. Well, who gives a blueberry shit.
I swigged some down. “Oh, what a gal,” I said.
“Hell, yeah. I think there was one time she took you on for lunch—and about three more of us on for dinner. Talk about a night that’ll live in Infamy, N.J.” He always told his crew that’s where he was from. “Ony thing I can’t remember,” McHale had started to bust a gut, “is which one of us lost the coin toss, and had to buy her her fuckin’ ginger ale afterward.” As I blinked and swigged some more, Minnie got another workout, with McHale’s eyebrows wig-wagging her in. “You ever do anything like that, Jack?” he asked.
“Well, I never had to pay for the ginger ale, if that’s what you mean,” Jack said, with a nice smile. “Back in college,” and he knew we knew which one, so Harvard was just another fly buzzing around, “my housemates would complain because I never had any cash on me. But I never got used to carrying it, or keys either. Never had that clear a notion of just what pockets were for, men. But you know, Mac, the funny thing is,” he grinned, “they always let me into the Stork Club anyway. And even though I’d be happy to bring you two fellows along with me, I’m not completely sure you’d make the grade.”
It’s hard to explain, but it wasn’t snotty. It was more like Jack had just taken us into the Stork Club with him, and we’d had a great time there. Later in the war, when I switched over to the submarine service, my boat picked up a shot-down carrier pilot who was a senator’s son or something, and this bird was frantic to pretend we were all the same kind of Americans. The guy just didn’t get how we wanted him to act as different as we knew he was, so we could make up our own minds on what we thought of that. But that wasn’t how Jack worked his rap sheet. He knew his life probably sounded pretty damn swell to you if you were most people, so he’d let you be part of it for a second, quick joke about Baaastin here, fast flashbulbs-at-your-best-table smile there. At the same time, even so, as soon as he let you be part of it, it was like he wasn’t anymore. He’d gone someplace else again, and not Boston either. Like I said, hard to explain.
“Say, Jack,” McHale wanted to know. “You ever bang a movie star? I know your dad knows a couple or a few, so tell us. Well? Didja ever nail one of those broads?”
“Not yet,” Jack said, looking out past Dickins
on Inlet at the U.S.S. Monroe. Then it was like he’d decided he had to give us a little more of himself on this one, taking himself away first as usual. “Even though, believe me, Mac, a couple of times I was this close,” he said, holding up a thumb and finger of the same hand that was holding his cigar. “And not in my father’s house, either,” he added, which made me think there might be more to this whole being-rich business than McHale or me was ever going to know. “But what the hell, piss on that noise—I guess the war got in the way.”
“War got in the way of lots of things for everybody,” I said, not sure where that one had surfaced from. I guess I hadn’t been able to help but think how maybe I hadn’t known old Screw-Me Susie like McHale had known old Screw-Me Susie. But even so, I was probably missing life back in the Zone, where the beer wasn’t 3.2, she had shacked up with just me for a whole weekend once when Mac got detailed over to the Cristobal district on SP duty, and nobody was dying. If you like gals whose morals are as loose as what they use to prove it with is tight, there’s nothing like being on American soil but out of sight of the padres and schoolmarms, with Old Glory flying when you step outside afterwards like a roof between you and God.
“Not me,” McHale said. “Hell no I wouldn’t mind some available pussy, even if it had Ethel Merman’s face riding shotgun. But I’m in my fuckin’ prime out there, and don’t nobody forget it. Me and Bilko have a bet going about which one of us is going to come out of this son of a bitch with more loot.”
“So do we and the Russians, I think,” Jack said. “At least, that’s what my father’s friends are saying, now that they’ve spent some serious time in Washington at a dollar a year.” He smiled, but not at us. “ ‘While England slept,’ “he muttered, like it was an old song title or something.
It was late in the day. Off in the sky, a Douglas SBD Dauntless torpedo bomber was heading out above the sun, far off and so close to immobile that it looked like some lonely kid’s model. “Wonder what’s going on?” McHale, who had seen it, said. “Those birds don’t usually go out alone.”
A minute later, it was still hanging there. “Man, those Dauntlesses are slow,” McHale said. “No wonder the Japs knocked so many of them out of the sky, when they were coming in at Midway.”
“So we build some more,” Jack shrugged.
“What for?” McHale was getting exasperated. “So the Japs can knock them out of the sky?”
“Look, Mac,” Jack said, his face pivoting on the stub of his cigar. “Whatever you are, you’re not dumb. Even Binghamton knows that. But you still don’t know what this war is about. It isn’t about us out here in the South Pacific, trying to look like heroes and not get killed at the same time. It isn’t even about Midway. It’s about whether they run out of planes before we run out of planes, and—well, I don’t know if either of you fellows has ever seen Detroit, and I know I’ve never seen Tokyo. But Mac, all fooling aside? You’d love these odds at Aqueduct.”
“Oh, fine. Fine,” McHale said. “That’s great, Jack, and I’ll be sure to have the chaplain write both my wives it’s a done deal. But so then tell me, why ain’t I in Washington? Or Detroit? What the fuck are we doing here?”
“Trying to look like heroes and not get killed at the same time,” Jack recited, kidding him along. “Anyway, what happened to being in your prime—your fuckin ‘ prime, Mac? You want to let Bilko win walking away?”
“I’d like to stay in it, that’s all,” McHale grumbled. “My fucking prime.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Jack said. He stood up, with a grin like autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets in the middle. “Well, gentlemen. Pleasant dreams,” he said. “I’ve got a night patrol, and just how did you two sons of bitches get out of it, anyway?”
Well, little buddy, you’ve probably figured out it was the next morning when all of us on Tallulabonka heard that the 109 hadn’t come back. No sign of Jack or any of the crew. Mostly because he thought he should, Binghamton sent a couple of boats out to cruise around the Telmi Strait for traces, and they didn’t even turn up any debris.
That’s how it went in the war, but McHale was down in the dumps about it. “God damn goddam everything to bastard shit anyway,” he bitched. “Jack didn’t know it, but one of my boys from the 73 had six Imperial quarts of booze and two Nip flags with fake bloodstains hidden in one of the 109’s depth-charge canisters. And now it’s all just getting sharks drunk and nervous at the fucking bottom of the Telmi Strait.”
Four or five days later, Binghamton ordered McHale and me to hightail our boats down to Ireidahonda for a couple of fast supply runs. Whenever we weren’t in action, they’d use the PTs to ferry ammo, rations, 3.2 beer, movies and replacements around to all the different cogs of the war effort on all the little islands. It wasn’t bad duty so long as you remembered to keep an eye peeled for half-submerged sea mines in the channels.
From the half-dozen or so times we’d done it by now, both me and McHale already knew old Nick. He was the supply officer on Ireidahonda and its kid sister island Alwok, and a good one. Had a tent up called “Nick’s Snack Shack” to feed hamburgers to the pilots and bomber crews that used the airstrip there, played poker like it was chess or something and his opponent wasn’t you, got along with officers and EM both. But there was something anxious about the way he did every-damn-thing, all the way from Hi Nick to See ya ‘round—like he was watching you with his lips and ears, not just eyes, to make sure you were up to speed on what a relaxed and ordinary Joe he was, and thought well of him for it.
This time, his clipboard had my boat hauling C rations, smokes, a dozen cases of 3.2, a shovel, and Mrs. Miniver to a crew of Seabees building a new airstrip over on Fondawonda. McHale was taking ammo and Blondie’s Blessed Event to an Army recon platoon on Liltiti, which was the smaller of the Big Gazongas. But then Nick started tapping a pencil against the clipboard, and I swear you could see sweat whiter than his skin start on his hairline and make his five o’clock shadow slick.
“Wait—wait,” he muttered, like Halsey would have his hide if he got this one wrong, or maybe just for the hell of it. “No, now I’m, uh, ‘god damn’ sure!,” flashing a weak smile. “They’ve already had Mrs. Miniver on Fondawonda.” I’ll tell you, that put a Minnie on McHale’s mug. “I’m switching the movies.”
“Sure they don’t need any 3.2 on Liltiti?” McHale asked him, with a wink that told me not a lot of it would get there if they did.
“Hell, no, they don’t, Mac, and you know it,” Nick said. “The Big Gazongas are a combat zone.”
If you don’t know, little buddy, 3.2 was the low-alcohol-content brew that Uncle Sam shipped all over the Pacific. The idea was we wouldn’t get too drunk, and brother, they knew what they were doing. You practically had to glug the cubic equivalent of Lake Superior to get as deep in the bag as every sailor, GI, and gyrene was determined to get anyway at the drop of a hat, come hell or high 3.2. Put it this way, in the Florida Keys I’d been damn near as skinny as Bogart. Now, well, last Christmas McHale and I had had to arm-wrestle every day for a whole week to see who got stuck being the base Santa Claus that morning, putting on a wool union suit and some cotton batting in that heat to go around and Ho-ho-fuck-the-Navy-ho-ingly hand out Lucky Strikes and gum, which they got most days anyway, to the EM. I usually lost.
While they were loading up our boats, Nick took the two of us over to the Snack Shack for some burgers. Maybe we should have been down to the dock supervising, but Nick seemed like he was desperate to make a good impression on somebody, and just now we two were the only citizens around. He flipped the burgers himself, pretty awkwardly but with concentration to make up for that, you could tell he was sick with fear at the thought that you might try to start an interesting conversation with him during it. It was really too damn hot for burgers, but McHale and me always were a pair of firehouse dogs when it came to any kind of meat on a griddle.
“Either of you want coffee with these?” Nick asked, putting down two burgers for each of us. �
��I’ve got some brewed.”
“Always got time for good Joe,” McHale said. “And if I’m reading that can’s label right, you’re talking about real Maxwell House—not that powdered crap we drink on patrol.”
“I guess I’ll have some too,” I said. So he brought us each a cup. Had none for himself.
“These are fuckin’ good, Nick,” McHale said through his first burger. “What were you in civilian life—short-order cook?”
“Lawyer.” The way it dropped out of his mouth and hit his shoe like a dead mouse, I could see that it was a thing he’d spent his whole life expecting to take pride in once he finally got to be one, and now he was someplace where he couldn’t. It was all a little strange, what with the way he had an apron on and wasn’t eating with us, as if he’d made a lastminute snap decision that we’d like him better if he didn’t. His face was all about sweating out tough choices about things that didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
“Ever pull any sea duty, Nick?” McHale asked him.
“ ‘Fraid not! I’m a shore rat. I guess the Navy knows best—anyway, I try to do mine,” he said with a queasy smile. If McHale wanted to piss on him for that, the smile said, he’d hold McHale’s johnson while he did it. Hating him with his teeth and dark eyes the whole time.
“Oh. Well, you’re not missin’ much.” McHale took another bite. “ ‘Cept the war, of course,” he said thoughtfully, chewing.
I really didn’t want to bust out laughing along with him, but it was funny. After a second, Nick reached around and took the apron off, and started to brush the table clean of the bits of bun and beef McHale had just spewed out.