Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  By the third one, the whole boat was awake, and collected amidships around the bridge. They saw which way I was looking and knew it was bad, that it was worse than yesterday afternoon or even last night, and nobody had thought anything could be worse than last night.

  “Well, Jesus!” I said, my voice not sounding too good, when they all went on waiting, even my exec. “Go on and see what’s there. You’re such a rude bunch of bastards, you know that? It wants to shake hands. It wants to say hello. You damn well do what it says. That’s an order.” I still had the .45 in my hand.

  One after another, all twelve of them went down to the stern to meet their new shipmate. Everybody went in at least pairs, and some in bigger groups. Only Algligni went alone, because nobody else had remembered him. He also stayed there the longest, which got me plenty rattled even if I couldn’t tell you why.

  “Algligni, you moron!” I bawled, even though I couldn’t make it anywhere near as strong as usual. “Are you gonna stare at it for the rest of your life? Get on back here!” When he came back, he had a look on his face I’d never seen before. Nor, probably, had anybody else alive, including Algligni’s mother. It made you feel sorry for him and disgusted with him and scared for him and scared of him all at the same time.

  He was the last one, too. After he got back, everybody stayed bunched up around the bridge, past even the two .50 cals. But nobody wanted to be the one who was the closest to the black dot, and so there was this constant, quiet, bunched-together wiggling going on, which normally would have had all of them punching each other’s lights out in about five seconds but didn’t, because nobody wanted to admit what was happening. Flugelhorn, of all people, was the first one to break for the bow, like it was his by right just because I’d posted him up there with the Thompson gun the night before. He sat down with his backbone scooted up against the tip of it, his hands sort of scrabbling around until he realized that the Thompson wasn’t there anymore.

  “Fuck this!” he yelled at the rest of us. “Fuck all of this!”

  By then, the rest of them were making for the bow too, pushing at each other in the narrow space between the bridge and the torpedo tubes, and yelling in high voices because they had to turn their backs on the black dot to do it. To make room, the ones who got there first started heaving the cases of 3.2 and C rations over the side, some to starboard and some to the deep water to port, making two different kinds of splashing. Soon my exec and I were the only ones left amidships, and then he was gone too. Now, standing in the cockpit, I was the one nearest the black dot. I scrambled ass over teakettle past the front bridge casing and hunkered in the bow with the rest of them, all of us facing the stern.

  Naturally, nobody had remembered to grab any water on the way up there, and the C rations and 3.2 had all been heaved over the side. We didn’t even have any smokes. And the only thing moving was the sun, which kept on getting higher.

  Nobody wanted to say a word. Or had to either, because the thing was that we all understood each other better than we ever had before, now that our world had been so drastically simplified. Since everything was so obvious, it was like all our thoughts were following pretty much the same routes to get to more or less the same places at roughly the same time. Each conclusion that we reached expressed itself in tiny collective nose-liftings and neck-turnings and eye-blinkings and butt-shiftings, which we knew were universal even though the first collective decision we had made was that none of us could or was going to look at anybody else directly. Sometimes, I thought Algligni of all people was maybe a beat ahead of the rest of us, but I wasn’t even sure which one of the pairs of knees or shoulderblades around me he was, and of course I couldn’t look at him to check.

  As one, we remembered the island next to us, and silently contemplated it. As one, we calculated the distance between us and the breakers on the beach to be approximately fifty yards, and as one we owned up that it wouldn’t be too hard a swim. As one, we recognized that the distance might as well be fifty miles, because we’d have to get into the water to do it and fifty yards would give the black dot all the time it needed to overtake us.

  As one, we realized that we had been letting our eyes stray from the stern, and now because we had neglected it something horrible could be about to happen or already starting to happen there, something our eyes would be punished for their inattention by being unable to bear, and so they would bolt like screaming flying fish and horses from our skulls, leaving us blind and at the black dot’s mercy As one, we resumed our watch on the stern. We did all of these things over and over again, as the rising sun climbed and as one we noticed that the deck plates under our palms were getting too hot to touch. As one, we rested our elbows on our hitched-up knees.

  But since I was still the skipper, I had to think separate thoughts too. One of these was that if so much as a Jap dinghy came along, its occupant or occupants could easily take all of us prisoner, because the .50 cals were out of reach and for the life of me I didn’t see much of anything that we could do about that. A related thought was that to get captured might not be all bad, because as cruel as the Japanese were, and believe me we all knew about Bataan, whenever people got taken prisoner their captors still had to give them water. But then I had to admit to myself this wasn’t foolproof-true, since the black dot hadn’t given us any.

  All the same, I knew I had to make some kind of command decision, since that was what my hat and bars meant. So I did. As skipper, I mutely gave the order that we were to do nothing until something else happened. As one, we all obeyed.

  What finally happened, since something had to and did, wasn’t a Jap dinghy taking us prisoner. Instead, we heard familiarly American-sounding, us-ish-sounding engines putt-putting along just out of sight behind part of the island, and a few seconds later another PT boat rounded the bend. It was McHale.

  At first, we just sat there. But then it started to sink in that if they were in sight of us, then we were in sight of them, and we scrambled off the bow and back to our different stations around the boat, me and the exec in the cockpit, Laprezski near the torpedo tubes, Algligni at the portside .50 cal, and so on. Although no longer as one, we all knew the black dot was still in the water. But now McHale’s boat was in it too, and McHale’s boat was bigger and more normal.

  Anyway, we hadn’t moved in time. He’d seen us at it, all right. “What the fuck you doing, holding Sunday services?” he hollered, grinning and bringing the 73 up alongside us but well back off the sandbar, which he had spotted right away. Whatever else he was, McHale was a good sailor. “Don’t you know it’s Wednesday, for Christ sake? What the fuck happened, anyhow?”

  “Radio conked,” I hollered back. “The propellers are fouled. We’re grounded on the sandbar.”

  “Well, why in the hell ain’t you unfouled them?” he hollered, with his engines putt-putting away under his voice as he reversed throttle to hold the 73 at the same distance. He couldn’t see the dead Jap from there. “You got the only fuckin’ PT in the Navy without one man can swim?”

  I knew I didn’t want to answer that one. So I yelled, “How’d you find us, anyhow? Is this island even on the charts?”

  McHale got about the biggest grin I’d ever seen on his face, and probably that anyone had ever seen on it. Except for Whatsername back in the Zone, and I knew I didn’t want to think about her anymore.

  “You’re on the back side of Ireidahonda, you dumb son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Nick’s Fuckin’ Snack Shack is about four miles due east-by-southwest of that pretty beach you all been lookin’ at.” His whole crew was laughing at us.

  “Well, throw us a God damn line and give us a God damn tow back to it, then,” I hollered.

  “You heard ‘im, boys.” McHale put the 73 ahead to get us bow-to-stern, then throttled back and held her there. “Hey, you ain’t run into nobody since yesterday, right?” he called back to me, as one of his boys heaved a coiled line that uncoiled in the air and hit our bow with a thud, where Laprezski and Fluge
lhorn grabbed it to make it fast. “That means you ain’t heard the news.”

  “What?” I bawled.

  “Jack Kennedy’s not dead!” McHale shouted. “A Jap destroyer rammed the 109, which did sink God damn it, and he got almost his whole crew onto an island somewhere not too far from here. Got a message with the location out to an Aussie coast watcher. Binghamton just sent out O’Reilly’s boat to pick all of them up. Bobby should be bringing them in any time now.”

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I hollered. Couldn’t think of much else to say. “Ski! We ready?” I called up to the bow.

  “Aye aye, Skipper,” Laprezski said. I gave McHale a big thumbs-up, he gave me back a circled thumb and forefinger and put the 73 ahead again. Coming back up out of the water, the line tightened and yanked us off the sandbar easy as a pat of butter, and the island—no, the back side of fucking Ireidahonda, and so what—started to show us more of its coastline, which I realized I’d have recognized, dag nab it, if we’d been a little farther out to sea. But something else was coming along with us, and even though I don’t think anybody on the 73 could see it, it turned out that now everybody on our boat wanted to take a look at what we were towing.

  Just for a second, after the seaweed uncoiled and started to pull it, it got jerked across the bit of sandbar that showed above the waves, and we saw more of it than we ever had before. Then it got yanked back into the water, not making much of a splash, and disappeared again. Only now that we were moving one hell of a lot faster than we had been once it latched onto our propeller the afternoon before, the long hank of seaweed got taut, and started to rise out of the sea, glistening. At the end of it, the dead Jap started rising too.

  Soon he was out of the water up to his sternum, with one claw clutched against his collarbone and the other raised above his head, and his freshly wetted teeth glistening more than ever in the sun. In the skipping of the waves around it, you could see where the seaweed had him snagged around the waist.

  “Oh, shit,” my exec said. “Oh. Shit.”

  But you can never figure people. Now, the boys all thought it was funny. They were whooping and pointing as it came on behind us. Laprezski came back from the bow to see what the hell was up, and someone slapped him on the back and hollered, “Look at it, Ski!”

  Well, it took them a second, but not much more. As far as they were concerned, this was the funniest damn thing anyone had said since the creation. “Look at it ski!” they kept bawling at each other,. “Look at it skil”

  McHale and a couple of the boys on his boat had started looking back our way, wondering what was going on. I was thinking, as a skipper, that maybe this whole business wasn’t so good for discipline. On top of that, I knew it wasn’t going to be so funny if we were still dragging that corpse when we put in to the dock on the other side of Ireidahonda. If he was still half as savvy as he had been back when he was running his poker game in the Zone, McHale, for one, would probably guess what had happened, and that would be all she wrote as far as a tolerable life around the base was concerned.

  “McHale!” I yelled. “McHALE!”

  He looked back, and I saw him put a hand to his ear. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “More speed!” I hollered at the top of my lungs. “GIVE US MORE SPEED!” For what I had in mind, I needed that thing up out of the water as high as it could ride.

  McHale looked baffled, and I saw him yelling “What.” “SPEED!” I hollered, scooting one thumb upwards in front of my chest and rapidly stacking degrees in the air over my head with the other hand. He still looked confused, and no wonder. But we were too light for gunning the engine to put the 73 at any risk, and that was all he needed to worry about. It would just make our ride choppier, and why should he care if that’s how we liked it? He shrugged and pushed the throttle forward.

  I looked back. It was fully out of the water up to its waist now. Grabbing the Thompson gun out of the cockpit, I went back to where Flugelhorn was standing, next to the engine-room hatch, and practically tossed it at him. The Kraut was our best shot.

  “Harry,” I said. “I want you to blast that thing to kingdom come. I don’t care about the seaweed. Just get rid of the Jap. Now. Everybody else get the hell out of his way.”

  “Me? Aye aye.” Flugelhorn went down to the stern, past the depth-charge canisters, and crouched there, propping the gun against the gunwale to steady it. His first burst kicked up some flickers and spouts of water not too far from the corpse, and I saw his shoulders hunch as he braced to try again. He better do it damn quick, too, I thought, before McHale had time to wonder what in hell we could be shooting at. But the second burst just kicked up more water, and Flugelhorn yanked the Thompson’s empty magazine out. “Skipper,” he called back, “need more ammo.”

  Before I could start back to the bridge to see if we even had one more full magazine, a heavier gun started bucking right next to my God damned ear, and practically right over Flugelhorn’s head. It was Algligni at the portside .50 cal, and I hope never to see anybody look like that again. It was worse now than when he’d first seen the corpse. Which, when I checked back, was disintegrating, the raised arm flying off and the rest getting torn apart like a paper bag filled with something black. A second later, with nothing left to tow, the seaweed smacked back into the surf behind us.

  The rest of the trip in was quiet, since we didn’t know anymore what we thought about anything, or maybe what anything thought about us. Mostly, we were sort of sheepish, I mean all of a sudden there wasn’t anything particularly special about us anymore, now we were just a PT boat getting a tow with a big hunk of seaweed fouling its propellers.

  Once he’d inched us back up the channel between Ireidahonda and Alwok, McHale did a hell of a job of putting us in at the dock, cutting the line and veering off with his own engines reversed right after he’d given us just enough momentum to drift in close enough for the swabbies along the dock to hook us with their grappling poles and make us fast. Then he brought the 73 around to tie up on the other side, and he and I met on the gangway going down to the beach.

  “So what really happened, big buddy?” he asked with a big grin and a bigger har-har-har, clapping me on the back. “And why the hell were you towing a target? You telling me you can’t find anything real to shoot at around here?”

  “Aw, hell, big buddy, I don’t know,” I said, throwing an arm around his shoulders and figuring he’d never know how big a favor he’d just done me. I hadn’t come up with any kind of story at all. “The boys were getting pretty rusty on their gunnery, so I had them rig it this morning to pass the time.”

  Before he could ask me why we hadn’t unfouled the propellers first, which I would have if I was him, we saw Nick and his clipboard coming down the beach toward us, the sand flying off his shined black shoes. Oh, hell, oh, well. At least he didn’t have that anxious smile on his pan anymore.

  “I should have known the two of you got together to pull this one,” he said, blinking at us. “The Seabees on Fondawonda want to know where the hell their God damn supplies are. And the Army on Liltiti wants to know what happened to their movie. And well, I guess I did make the wrong call on that one, because it turns out they’d all seen Mrs. Miniver before. But you know what? They’d still rather masturbate to Greer Garson than nothing. And you know something else? I didn’t have an answer for either of them.”

  Still blinking, he looked from McHale to me and back with dark eyes that were hurt and angry, almost like some frustrated coyote’s. And puzzled more than anything else.

  “You really had it in for me, didn’t you?” he said. “You really wanted to just stick it to me.”

  “Aw, fuck that, Nick,” McHale said, “it wasn’t like that. We-”

  But now Nick was looking past us. Just as his darting eyes shifted, we heard another PT’s engines out on the water, and heard something else too. The something else seemed so out of whack with this particular moment that for a second I honestly co
uldn’t have placed it to save my life. But it was human voices, singing.

  “Jesus loves me, this I know

  “For the Bible tells me so…”

  It was the crew of the 109. As O’Reilly’s boat came up the channel, we could see them all sprawled around every which way in its bow, half naked, sunburned, and dead tired. But they had plenty of water, at least now, and they were singing and swigging from their canteens. Farther back, near the depth-charge canisters, an improvised canopy had been rigged up. That was where, I heard later, they were keeping McMahon, the crewman who’d been so badly burned that Jack had had to tow him as they swam by a life-belt strap held in his teeth.

  The boat wasn’t putting in at this dock, which was full anyway. It was going on up the channel, where there was a field hospital. But Bobby O’Reilly had brought it in close to shore so everyone there could see the men who had been saved, and wave if any of us felt like it.

  I didn’t spot Jack right away, because he wasn’t in the bow with his crew. He was sitting in the cockpit, bare-chested, leaning back with one leg hooked over the casing and his face tilted up to the sky. He wasn’t singing, but he was sort of idly tapping time with one hand on the outside of the bridge.

  He was wearing sunglasses.

  Next to me, McHale had started laughing. “Look at him! Six days on a rock out in the middle of the blue nothing, and he looks like a damn movie star! Where the fuck did he get those shadesl Damn!”

  He turned to me. “Big buddy, you know how come I’d like to be rich—really, really rich?”

  “The money?” I said.

  “Nah. You’d know everything McHale said. Then he started waving one hand over his head, and cupping his mouth with the other, and yelling. “Hey Jackl OVER HERE, JACK!”

  Jack heard McHale even over his own crew’s singing, which wasn’t all that powerful, and hiked his neck up to look our way. I’m not even sure he recognized us, but the arm that had been tapping time came up for a second or two. The hand at the end of it waved. Then the boat slid on out of sight up the channel, and when I turned, Nick was standing there in the sand with his black shoes and his, clipboard, staring after it.