by Carson, Tom
“Skipper?” somebody said, as I either belched or farted. I was too drunk to be sure which end of me was up.
“Lea’ me ‘lone. Fchrisesake all’you lea’ me ‘lone. Don’ know anything either.”
“I think we’re on a sandbar.” It was the exec.
I got on my hands and knees to see how the boat felt. He was right, we were still being tugged by the current but now something was stopping it from doing whatever the hell it wanted with us. The boat was keeling slightly but steadily to starboard, the bow pinned by the water onto whatever was holding it there, like a gray butterfly in a glass case of sea and night.
“Sonvabitch,” I said. “Fits low tide now, we’ll float off when it’s high tide. Fits high tide now, we can build sand castles when it’s low tide. Win-win.”
“If this is a sandbar, then there must be an island,” my exec reasoned. “Besides, I think I can hear surf.”
I looked out over the gunwale, blinking and straining my ears. Part of the night dead ahead of me did look even more like night than the rest did, and along what I had decided was that part’s lower edge there was an occasional faint scrawl of maybe-white chalk, in time to dim crashing. I stood up, grabbing at the gunwale.
“Well, God damn, let’s go, then,” I said, putting one leg over it. “Jesus, I can’t tell you how glad I’m going to be to get off this bucket.”
“Skipper!” He grabbed my arm. “It might be Jap-held.”
“Aw, shit. We’re at war with them, aren’t we? That’s fucking sad when you think about it. Isn’t it just fucking sad?”
“If you don’t get hold of yourself pretty soon, I’ll do it for you,” he said. “Besides, have you forgotten? It’s still out there, Skipper.”
Remembering the black dot in our wake sobered me up P.D.Q. “Can you see it?” I said.
“I don’t need to. Do you—I mean, can you?”
“O.K.,” I said. Trying to clear my head, I dragged my fingers down my cheeks. “No way we’re going to know anything for sure before it’s light. But I want guards. How tanked is Flugelhorn?”
“Three sheets. But awake.”
“Stick him up in the bow with the Thompson—do we still have the Thompson? O.K. You stay put here with the leeward .50 cal. I’ll be back in the stern with my .45. That sound about right to you?”
“Well, I don’t have any better ideas.” He let go of my arm, and I heard him stumbling forward to go figure out which the fuck one was Flugelhorn all over again and get him set up in the bow. I got down off the bridge, landed flat on my fat ass, pulled myself back up again and went toward the stern, tripping over a cigar of God’s that I figured out a second later was the starboard torpedo tube. Making sure the flap on the holster of my .45 was undone, I settled down next to the sternmost starboard depth-charge canister. A couple of unopened cans of 3.2 had rolled back there, so I cracked one to keep myself company. No point in even trying to look at my watch.
I don’t know if I dozed or not. But the soft bumping in the water against the stern brought me back from wherever I was. At first I didn’t even name it bumping, I just knew that it was a new sound I was getting used to, and then my brain jumped with the thought that maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I should find out what it was before I got more used to it and sleepy. I didn’t want to look, but I worked up the nerve by reminding myself that I probably wouldn’t be able to see much of anything. My mouth was all muzzy, and my brain not heart was in it, like a frog. If I opened my mouth, my brain would hop away, and land with a splash in the water. I had no idea if this would be a good thing or not. My brain wasn’t working anyway. Maybe it deserved to be free.
Drawing my .45, I looked down past the stern. I might as well have stuck my head into the folds of a nun’s habit, but it was still true something was down there. It was a shape of black on black that the swells kept nudging forward to tap against the hull, then pulling back again. No question it was driftwood, with one branch sticking up and a knobby part next to that. But it was still driftwood that looked kind of like a man, so I decided to kid myself along for a second by just pretending it was one and seeing how that went.
“Jack?” I said, keeping my voice low. “That you, Jack?”
It didn’t answer. It just came forward, with its one branch waving hello, and then went back again. By now, I couldn’t have told you what was funny, or scary, or stupid, or real, or anything. “Say, Jack,” I told it. “You know I’m always glad to see you, buddy. But if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to have to plug you sooner or later.”
The chunk of driftwood dipped and waved, but didn’t talk. It wanted to let the water do the talking for it, but I didn’t understand water. All these years, and now my brain had finally spilled the beans. It had never known what water was saying and always wanted it to talk slower, which the water never did. Even a five-year-old who’d never seen the ocean before had understood it better than I could.
Well, that pissed me off more ways than I could count. Putting my free hand over one eye to steady my aim, although I might as well have put it over both of them for all the good it did, I put a bullet right into the water that I didn’t understand, the nun’s habit of the night, and the driftwood that was Jack.
Christ. Of course, the next thing I knew, Flugelhorn was spraying everything in sightlessness with the Tommy gun, my exec was pounding a whole belt of .50 cal into that Cheshire-cat smile of maybe-white surf off to starboard, and Algligni, who I hadn’t made part of my plans or even known was awake, had just lobbed a grenade over the port side of the damn boat, where there wasn’t anything to blow up but the ocean. Meanwhile, all the guys who’d been passed out and hadn’t even known about the sandbar, much less anything afterwards, were jumping up or taking cover or running around like headless chickens, all screaming “Jesus fuckV and “God no please I’ll be good” and “Skipper” and “I see it, Ski!” and finally, as the firing died away, “What the hell was that about?,” which came from Flugelhorn in the bow.
“And on a related subject, where are we?” someone else called out.
“I don’t know. But it’s all right,” I hollered back. “I think I killed it. It’s all right, guys! I killed it.”
Nobody had to ask what it was. Feeling my way along, I went forward to the bridge, where the exec was standing with his hands in his pockets, like he didn’t want to admit he’d just tossed a stream of the U.S. government’s best .50-caliber ammo at nothing. I didn’t know why he felt that way, either all of us were embarrassed or none of us were, and it wasn’t like anyone was watching.
“Well, at least now we know there aren’t any Japs on that island, if there is an island there,” one of us said. “Because if they had so much as a mortar on that island, if there is an island there, they’d have blown our heads and our ass in two different directions by now.”
“Yeah,” the other of us said. “So now we know one thing. But out of how many we ought to?”
Whichever of us was supposed to have the answer to that one didn’t, so I told Laprezski to take over from Flugelhorn in the bow and everybody else to try to get some shut-eye, since I guessed we still had a few hours before daylight and there was nothing we could do till then. Even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t been lying about killing the black dot, or driftwood, or whatever it was at least temporarily, I didn’t much want to wander back to the stern. So I settled down across from the exec in a corner of the bridge, with our heads and feet going in opposite directions and only our beltlines matching up. He already had his hat down over his face, and I don’t know if it was the 3.2, the black dot, the excitement or just bone-deep exhaustion, but I was in dreamland on the strangest goddam sail of my life. There was a black dot in our wake.
The Skipper’s Dream
I was still a skipper, but my boat was white, and didn’t have machine guns or torpedoes. My crew was in civvies, and when I looked close, some of them were dames. Two real lookers, one of whom was plainly much too nice a gal for
someone like me to ever think of putting my meathooks on her. The other was a high-class tramp who’d be happy to lay me the day I struck oil, at least if my well was bigger than anybody else’s in line. They were both making fun of a skinny guy who was Algligni until he turned into my exec, and then back into Algligni again whenever the two pretty dames laughed. There was a black dot in our wake.
Meanwhile, I was showing off my new steering wheel, which kept on spinning out of control like a lazy susan that had decided it would rather be a pinwheel and the hell with serving anybody, to an old gent dressed like a popinjay and his wife. There was a black dot in our wake. All the same, I kept on knowing at the back of my neck that there were someone else aboard, and so I looked astern when the two dames ran by me laughing.
But they had vanished, and there was only one girl back there. Even before she turned to look at me, naked to the waist and in McHale’s arms in the sawmill at the back of the boat, I knew this must be Screw-Me Susie, the old gal I’d known back in the Zone before the war started and everything else got screwed along with her. Then the two dames from earlier trotted back up to the bow, still giggling, and the next time I looked behind me all the lumber was gone. A fellow of the type that even a couple of the nuns used to call an auntie in trousers stared back at me blandly. There was a black dot in our wake.
Everyone on our boat had started to whoop and wave by then, because the 109 had joined us. Jack had the con. He was wearing sunglasses. He looked great. There was a black dot in our wake. Both the dames took pictures. There was a black dot in our wake. He steered the 109 on out ahead of all of us, and I mean all of us, because the sea was packed with ships. The wind was playing music, and everyone was shouting greetings to each other as all our boats and ships and everything charged across the sea. There was a black dot in our wake.
I saw three ships come sailing on with Maltese crosses on their sails, crowded with civilians all watching the 109 out front, and another that seemed to be a prison ship for people with poor taste in headgear, waving turkey drumsticks and arguing about who was going to get to persecute who when they landed. Other ships packed with groaning and chains, some damn fool in a white peruke standing up in a longboat so he wouldn’t have to help row, and a whaler whose captain kept yelling, “From hell’s heart I stab at thee.”
A kid on a raft with a nigger hollered over to our boat for a tow, and we gave him one on condition that the nigger didn’t get any bright ideas about scrambling in here with the rest of us the next time a squall blew up. But the sea was as smooth as glass, and then I saw it was glass. Well, clearly that explains why it’s as smooth as glass, I thought, feeling proud that I had finally understood something about water, or glass, or smoothness. Then again, there was a black dot in our wake.
And on top of that, just like a black dot in our wake wasn’t plenty enough to cope with, I had lost to McHale at arm wrestling. I had to be the base Santa Claus. I was handing out cruficixes and candy bars as fast as my hands could grab them, and giving rosary beads to anybody that wanted rosary beads and leis to whoever asked for a lei. A teenage Screw-Me Susie, oh Christ she wasn’t even out of high school, said she wanted both. Standing in the lumberyard at the back of the boat, with either McHale or the auntie in trousers winking at me over her shoulder, she still had nothing on above the waist, but had her arms folded crisscross so that I wouldn’t see anything. There was a black dot in our wake. “You can’t have both,” I told her.
“But then how will I cover up my boobies?” she said, holding her arms wide. “It’s only April Fool’s Day. When they get cold, I get cold.” Putting down the chalk that he’d been using to scribble numbers and gibberish all over the black dot in our wake, whoever was standing in the woodshed behind her grabbed her teenaged nips and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed.
I’ll tell you, I slammed my eyes shut to that awful sight like I was throwing away the key to them, and wished I had eyelids on the insides of my eyes so I could close those too. But there was a black dot in our wake, and now I had to open them again, because everyone else on all the ships had started looking at the place that Jack was taking us, which they could see now standing up out of the horizon. Jack waved our boat ahead, giving us the honor of leading everybody in. It was an island—and somehow, still asleep, I knew it was this island, the one whose sandbar we’d spent all night riding. Some gyrenes were planting a U.S. flag on top, I noticed. That seemed kind of pointless or redundant, since I knew we were at peace now and that this island was ours alone, and would be past the end of time. There was a black dot in our wake. Then, even though he was miles away and tiny, the second gyrene from the left turned to me.
“How,” he said.
“What are you asking me for,” I said, “how in the fuck would I know?” And he got hot, and huge, and white. After a few seconds, I understood he was the sky.
There was a black dot in our wake.
The island wasn’t the way I’d pictured it, but it was something. Breakers ran up a white beach. Palm trees let the wind blow up the undersides of their skirts. Here’s a word I found in a jailhouse dictionary once: verdant. Damn, it was verdant. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.
Then again, I was still looking at it now. I had a head my skull didn’t like, they were going at it the way my parents used to, and the sun had already had an hour or so to stick in its two cents, so my eyes felt like two tired birds that just wanted to fly away from all the noise and mess behind them. Almost the only thing that made me feel easy in my mind, because it was familiar, was the noise of gentle bumping against the stern.
I knew I had to go back there, what with being the skipper and all. Everyone else, even the exec, was still toes up and drooling, making denim hieroglyphics here and there around the deck. The whole damn boat was strange under my feet, I felt I’d gotten to know it so much better in the dark but now it was different. All night, the boat had just been having fun with us poor bastards by pretending something here was something there and something somewhere else wasn’t anywhere at all. I was surer than I wanted to be that I wasn’t going to need it, but I drew my .45 anyway, just to have something in my hand.
Well, I damn near puked. He looked like one of those pictures from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which I know is getting ahead of things warwise. But phosphorus grenades or plain old high explosive could do pretty much the same job on a human body, just not as many of them at once. My first guess was that he must have been blown off a Jap troopship or hit coming out of one of their landing barges, which were even more unwieldy and easily shot up than ours and that’s saying something. Either way, it had happened a couple of days before, because after humanity had gotten done with him the sea had taken its turn. He was coming forward, bumping, and going back. I said a quick Our Father under my breath, and didn’t finish it.
But then, as my brain went on pretending that it cared about the how of it, to keep itself distracted, I started to figure that whatever it was got him probably had to have happened on land, because that one claw reaching up to wave at the world had had time to stiffen with rigor mortis before he hit the water. The other hand was a fist of white bones curled up at the base of his neck against a uniform or flesh burned black, like he’d been trying to loosen his collar, and his face was way past any words in any dictionary except for the teeth that showed, some yellow, some brown, some gold and flashing in the sun. He looked on the outside like what cancer must do to people’s insides, and if it hadn’t been for the star that I could still pick out on his helmet, I might not have known if he was ours or theirs. Coiling up on itself in the clear water in lighter and darker shades of rubbery and mossy green, the long hank of seaweed that had found what was left of him first and our propellers second looked like the vegetative version of the sea serpents warning mariners off of the unknown in old navigational charts, before Columbus came along and made things safe for everybody.
Now, there’s one basic trick to handling something like this, which is to go on looking at i
t. And wait until someone else has seen it at the same time as you before you back off, so that the reality of it keeps getting passed from eye to eye, like a baton in a relay. Then you have some control, and can think in a factual way about what steps you’re going to take to deal with it.
But I hadn’t done that, because they were all still asleep and I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait. Instead, I had already skedaddled back past the depth-charge canisters and toward the bridge, to a place where first he couldn’t peek at me, or then even wave, over the stern. Now it started to sink in on me just how bad a mistake that was. Even if other people saw it, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back and look at it again. I mean, now that I knew exactly how many steps I’d have to take toward the stern before the claw and then the helmet started showing, there was no way I’d be able to make myself take them.
Of course, I couldn’t turn my back either. So I didn’t have any way of finding a canteen for the water my mouth was telling me that it could use pretty badly, getting more and more puzzled that I didn’t respond. My mouth was stupid, it didn’t know anything. But I wasn’t grateful to my eyes, either. That beautiful island and its white beach were all of fifty yards off to starboard, and my eyes weren’t allowing me to spare so much as a glance in that direction.
Damn, I was an idiot. On top of everything else, I hadn’t even looked to see if the bullet I’d fired at the black dot during the night had killed it. I could have found out if I was a liar before anybody else did. But thinking that made me realize that there was still something I could do. Pulling my .45 back out of the holster I’d stuffed it in as I backed away from the stern, I aimed it at the sky, no, the island?, the island, and squeezed off a shot.