Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  “I’ve seen a little of the war,” he said, once we quit laughing. “You know, it’s kind of hard to miss wherever you are, so long as we’re all out here. Anyway, not everyone can skipper a PT boat—somebody’s got to pump gas. And sometimes planes come over here too at night and drop the occasional bomb on my tent, even if I’ve never been in combat up in the Big Gazongas.”

  “Aw, shit. He didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. Which was true, since I knew McHale didn’t mean anything by anything. “Sorry, Nick. That was lousy thanks for good chow.”

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting any thanks,” Nick said, flashing a smile that was a little too eager to show up and then to get itself over with. “You hadn’t finished eating yet.”

  “We have now, though,” I said.

  “Whuffafugoomean?” McHale said, bits of bun showing through his lips. “Ffgotanowononmplate.”

  “Take it with you, for Christ sake, Mac,” I said. “They’ve gotta be done loading now, and we both need as much sun’s we can get. Or do you want to run your boat smack up against Liltiti in the dark?”

  “Maybe that’s what Jack did,” McHale said. “Hell, maybe I’ll be the one who finds him—and then tears him a new one for losing all my supplies, too.”

  “You mean Joe Kennedy’s kid?” Nick said. “Is he still missing?”

  “And presumed dead,” I said. “But I didn’t think he’d ever done a supply run for you, since he’s Binghamton’s pet and always gets the glamor jobs. Do you know him?”

  “Of him,” Nick said. “He doesn’t—or didn’t—know of me, obviously. My family didn’t exactly move in the same circles his did, Stateside. Or here either, I suppose,” he added, glancing at McHale and twitching that my-movie’s-stuck-in-the-projector smile of his like he wasn’t sure if he was making up, sucking up, or just giving up.

  “Well, we better shove off,” I said. “Come on, Mac.”

  “Oh, fine—so let him take me to court, the weaselly shithead,” McHale was saying, as we got down to the dock. “He just got my goat. Tapping his pencil and flipping his burgers and fiddling around with his apron, and doesn’t the dumb son of a bitch know that every Gl in the Pacific theater has seen Mrs. Miniver six fucking times? I swear, I’m going to toss the fucking thing over the side before we make Liltiti, and when I tell ’em what I’ve done those poor bastards in the foxholes are gonna start crying and lining up to suck my dick from pure gratitude. We’re dodging Nip bullets in malaria up to our hips, and they give us Greer fucking Garson to pound pud to? I don’t know about yours and I don’t want to, big buddy, but my little piggy just says uncle and goes ‘wee, wee, wee’ all the way home. You know, sometimes I wonder what in hell we’re fighting for.”

  “You do? Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “I never knew you thought about it. Well, see you back on Tallulabonka tomorrow, Mac, God willing.”

  “Or whoever,” McHale said. “I don’t give a shit, do you?”

  Stern to bow, his boat and then mine worked our way out of the narrow channel between Ireidahonda and Alwok. Then I set a course due south by northwest for Fondawonda, straight on out past the big blue in between Donovan’s reef and Bomarzo. McHale and the 73 peeled off west by north-south toward the Big Gazongas, and pretty soon we lost sight of them in all the gilded fish scales that the sun was putting on the sea.

  I was pretty sure that we could make Fondawonda by sunset even though, because of all the cases of C rations and 3.2 loading down the bow, my boat was making even choppier headway than usual. But there hadn’t been anywhere else to stow them. Remembering what McHale had said he was going to do to Mrs. Miniver; once we were out of sight of Ireidahonda I told a couple of the boys to man the .50 calibers for some target practice. Then I started heaving reels of Blondie’s Blessed Event up in the sky like some damn discus thrower. The sun would catch them just before the bullets did, at least the ones we hit.

  “Bye-bye, Dagwood!” we’d holler out every time another reel hit the water, whether we’d plugged it on the way or not. “Screw you up the ass, Mr. Dithers. So long, Daisy—yeah, ‘give us your friggin’ answer do’ ta thisl Woof!” We felt kind of let down that Hollywood didn’t make longer movies, once we were back to riding in the quiet that settles in at double intensity after any kind of shooting. Because it’s unnerving, you try to keep the voices going anyhow, but they always come out puny and you have to wait until you’ve got some good practical excuse to talk before it sounds normal again.

  Which we had. My senior torpedoman was a little fellow from Chicago name of Laprezski, we just called him Ski. “Hey, Skipper,” he called up to me. “You really think those Seabees are gonna need all this beer?”

  “Don’t think I wasn’t searching my heart and asking for guidance about that self-same question, boys,” I said. “But we’re gonna look awfully damn stupid turning up off Fondawonda with nothing but a shovel.” Even so, a dark mass had already started showing on the horizon to starboard beyond the cases stacked in the bow, so I knew it was now or never. “Well, a couple dozen cans more or less aren’t gonna make much of a nevermind,” I called down. “Pass one on up here to me, willya? Do. Not. Throw. The beer can at me. Not at eighteen knots, Algligni, you idiot. Pass.”

  Well, it was the usual foam and minnow piss. But it tasted better with the salt air gluing new skins on our warm faces, the .50 cals sticking up port and starboard like praying-mantis architecture on some insect cathedral, the gray torpedo tubes turning into big thumbs pointing the way every time we slewed, and the orange and pink purple of the lowering sun making toy-sailor silhouettes out of my crew as they did less and less of whatever they did and Fondawonda started hiking herself up on her elbows in front of us, the way Susie used to in the good old days in the Zone, and our boat scooted toward her like a spoon on a gigantic blue bedspread. I knew my buddy McHale didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of use for God, or for any of His works except McHale, and sometimes I was tempted to agree with him about everything but the last part. But the Lord was sure a breathtaking stage manager for some mighty rotten vaudeville revues, and I guessed I wasn’t the first or last to think so. Even dogs probably did, whenever they took a break from sniffing and relieving themselves in a corner of the floorboards.

  When it’s your place of work, you sometimes forget that the sea is the sea. But I had seen somebody else realize it once, when he was small. That was when I still had my own boat in the Keys, and rented it out for excursions. The little boy I remembered best from that time couldn’t have been over five, and maybe I ought to’ve said the hell with the money and told him and his folks to come aboard anyhow, but I didn’t.

  You know how kids that age behave like they haven’t figured out yet how to manage being all of themselves at the same time? When this one raced out onto the pier, he was nothing but a pair of legs. With knees that weren’t used to being bare in winter, and looked like they’d blink if they could. But seeing the whole Atlantic there, with nothing between him and it, turned him into just a face.

  It was like he’d forgotten which job his eyes had, which one his mouth did. Just kept widening them all, for insurance. If he’d been older, he’d have goggled like that at the first dame he saw naked. So I had a picture of how it felt for a little kid to take in all that blue for the first time, and understand that grown-up men went out on it until they got too tiny to be spotted by everyone they’d left behind on land.

  The memory of it used to knock on different doors around my skull like it was looking for a room. I never could put a name to the mood he sometimes popped up from, except that it was where I stashed the stuff I knew better than to ever try bringing up around McHale. He’d probably have gotten a bang out of being the guy who wiped the glow off that kid’s mug.

  I hadn’t. But I knew his father couldn’t afford to charter my boat even for the minimum three hours, and had already tried to spare Dad the embarrassment of having to hear that from me head-on by doing my best to act disgruntled and damned busy swab
bing out bait buckets as soon as I saw him coming. He’d just gotten out of a sad-looking black tow truck with “Egan’s Garage, Rochester Minn.” painted in white script on the cab door, a mighty mystifying sight in Florida until I spotted his missus sitting inside it. One look was enough to tell me that the reason he’d brought her all the way down here from up there in the middle of the Depression, despite being so short on ghelt that he had no other transport but his work vehicle, was to give her a chance to do the last of her coughing in sunshine.

  So we had the conversation that neither of us wanted to, because Egan knew what I’d been trying to tell him by carrying on with my chores. But he had to ask me any way, because of that mute profile in the passenger seat. She wanted to keep their boy beside her, but he probably didn’t know she was dying or even how to spell “tuberculosis,” and he scrambled out of the truck to run down to the pier after his dad. That’s when he stopped short, looking like he’d just found his next mother—not even knowing yet that he was going to need one, but staring at the ocean with everything he had in him, as if the gray eyes under his sandy hair had already set sail straight for the horizon and the rest of him had to catch up somehow.

  “Are we going on the boat?”

  “Not today,” his father said. “This man says it’s too—dangerous, right now. He thinks we should come back when the sea is…”

  “Smaller,” I said, trying to help him out.

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Jacky Gilbert,” his dad faltered-”you should be.”

  “No. I want to go on the boat. You said we would.”

  “Your dad’s right, son,” I told him, still trying to help. “You can’t see them, but there’s whales out there, and—sea monsters, and-”

  Well, I sure didn’t know how to dissuade a kid. Not this one, anyway: “You mean like serpents?” he said, like just getting to use the word as a practical term was making today Christmas for him. “Do you fight them?”

  “Only when I have to.”

  “With swords?”

  Confused, I looked around my boat’s deck. There was a mop there. “Whatever comes to hand, I guess.”

  “I could help. I want to fight them. Mama could watch me fight them. Please, Poppy!” He tugged at Egan’s belt.

  Even beforehand, I wasn’t sure if what I’d thought of doing was a good idea or not. But I figured it might be easier on Egan this way. “Listen, son. The truth is, your dad would let you go if he could,” I told him. “I’m the one says you can’t.”

  “Why not?” the kid said, and I could tell that his father was tenser than he was about hearing the answer.

  I crouched down, putting my face close to his. “Because I’m a sea monster,” I said. “YEEAARGH! BLAAGH!” jumping up and waving my arms.

  Well, he sure scooted. He gave a yelp and backpedaled right out of my new shadow, grabbing blindly for his father’s hand. As soon as he found it, he stood his ground, too, and bit back his scared look. But he was still dumbfounded, and I could have picked up his old expression and tossed it to the gulls for all the use his staring eyes and legs that quivered with plans to run if necessary had for it now.

  “Why, you son of a bitch,” Egan said, herding the kid close. “And here I thought you were all right, too. Guess I made a mistake.”

  I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had only been trying to make sure his boy wouldn’t blame him, or guess at the real reason they couldn’t go on the boat. But I also saw it didn’t matter, because the only difference between what I’d done and what McHale, who I didn’t even know back then, would have in my place was that McHale wouldn’t have had good intentions. Or felt confused and crappy afterwards, as if I had committed more of a sin by trying to do right than I would have if I’d just been the hard-case S.O.B, that Egan thought I was.

  “I guess you did, brother,” I told him. “Now shove off. Can’t you see I got work to do?” Then I turned back to the bait buckets, because I didn’t want to watch him take his son back down the pier to his lousy tow truck and his coughing, dying wife.

  All that the years since then had done for me was get me fatter. But it was strange to think that little Jacky Gilbert Egan was practically old enough to be out here in the war with the rest of us now. Unless I had put him off oceans for life, he might’ve already lied about his age to sign up for the Navy. Or maybe the Marines, since the jarheads took them young.

  I guessed I hadn’t lied to him in the long run about the monsters, only about being one myself. But my beer can was empty, and all of a sudden I had no idea why all this had sprung to my mind. After a while, I called down, “Hey, Algligni! Hand me up another. The rest of you guys get one more, too. One,” holding up my finger where everyone could see it.

  I was just crumpling my second can when the motor conked. You think it gets quiet when guns leave off firing, try the first ten seconds after that grinding you’re so used to just up and quits being there in your ears and under your feet. If there was a Richter scale for silence, we’d have been off it.

  Well, those PT engines always were as nervous as a filly on her first day at the stud farm, and I was counting on my machinist’s mate, a crazy Kraut from Pensacola whose handle was Harry Flugelhorn, to get us under way again. But after forty-five minutes, he put his greasy face, that all of a sudden there wasn’t enough sun left to light, out of the hatch and said, “Nothing doing, Skipper. Motor’s fine. I think something’s fouling the propellers.”

  That’s when, looking astern, we all saw the black dot in our wake. It kept dipping in and out of sight in the low swells, and I couldn’t make out what it was even with binoculars. I wasn’t even positive it was connected to the boat, and I didn’t see how something that far off could be what was messing us up. But somehow, from your first sight of it, you knew that it had been there for a while.

  “God damn it,” I said. “One of you dumb assholes volunteer to go over the side and try to unsnaggle whatever is snaggling the propellers.”

  “Are you nuts, Skipper?” Ski said. “These are shark-infested waters.” That was his fear, and he always expressed it exactly the same way: “shark-infested waters.” He must have read it once in Life or some damn rag back in Chicago, and it had stuck with him. Damned if I know why he hadn’t joined the Army instead. “Anyway,” he said, “we don’t even know what that thing is back there. Maybe it’s a shark.”

  A drunk and nervous one, I thought. I was trying to make a joke in my head, but thinking it just got me jittery. “Shit,” I said. “O.K. So we radio the Seabees for a tow. They’ll laugh their asses off. God damn it. Get ‘em on the blower, Algligni.”

  “Radio’s busted, Skipper.” Man, did he look scared.

  I’ll tell you, I sure blew my stack then. I pulled off my cap and slung it at the deck, which I had never done before. “Algligni/” I hollered. “What the fuck are you telling me, the radio’s busted?”

  “I mean it doesn’t work” he said.

  “Well, can’t you fix it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Tried to.”

  “And?”

  “I failed?”

  I picked my cap up, smacked it against my leg. “Oh, this is fucking great, “I said, shaking my whole face at him and putting the cap back on with the brim pointing starboard before I got it squared away.

  The boat was starting to roll in the current, had nothing to fight it with. “Doesn’t matter anyways,” my exec said, I wish I could remember his name. He’d started this war in Arlington, Virginia, and he was going to end it there, too. Kamikaze. “If they had boats on Fondawonda, they wouldn’t need us to ferry all this crap around for them in the first place.”

  For the first time, staring blankly at him, I noticed how much my exec looked like an older, shrewder Algligni. Then again, they were both in the same boat, and so was I. “Shit,” I said. “Well, shit.”

  I was trying to get an idea, but I didn’t even know what I ought to be having an idea about. Water was lapping the hul
l with little slaps, sounding happy that now it could be heard. The black dot was still there behind us, getting harder to pick out of all the deeper blue. I took one look and gave up.

  “Well,” I said, “hand me another. You guys go ahead, too.”

  “Maybe once we drift in a little closer to shore,” I hollered when my third can was empty, “I can talk one of you ‘fraidy-cats into taking a swim and unsnafuing the goddam propellers.” But I knew there wasn’t much chance of that, and not only because the blur of Fondawonda was getting farther away, not closer, and fading back into being more of the horizon. From the looks in their eyes, I could tell that the boat was going to have to fetch up somewhere in Kansas before any of them went over the side.

  Besides, I knew any skipper worth an unexpected belch wouldn’t ask his boys to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, and I wouldn’t have gone in the same water as the black dot if they’d told me I could have Betty Grable any damn way I pleased afterwards. For just a second, she winked at me over her shoulder even so, and believe you me she wasn’t standing up in that cornball pose or wearing that holy bathing suit of hers either, but then it was night and I don’t just mean not day. It was more like the sun had turned into a giant bowling ball, and was sending out rays of ink and black and dark the same way it did light when it was really there. We had stars by the bucketload but no moon, and the water lapping as we drifted had become the ordinary noise, the way our engines should’ve been.

  After a while, the rest of them stopped waiting for me to give the O.K. before they got themselves another brew. We had cases of 3.2 ripped open all over the bow, and of C rations that we had opened by mistake, and we kept on bumping into them, and each other, and the nice torpedo tubes, the insect guns and who knows what-all in the dark, trying to find out from our fingers and each other’s information where the boat ended, so we could be sure we were pissing out of it. Every time I told myself I’d better taper off, I’d think of the black dot in our wake. I started to almost mourn the time when we could see it, instead of just knowing it was there.