In Warsaw, they stopped for Mingo to use the bathroom and buy some cigarettes. Raleigh continued making phone calls while the fat man charged to his Visa card two cartons of Viceroys, a box of peanut brittle, a cream container with a cow muzzle spout and a souvenir Confederate cap.
Oddly enough, the insurance man’s secretary actually answered his office phone. “Raleigh W. Hayes. Mutual Life. Would you hold please?” Hayes then found himself listening to Frank Sinatra warbling, “Lauraaaa…is the face in the misty light. Footsteps…” Had Betty Hemans rigged Musak to his telephone? “‘And you see Lauraaaa.…’ Thank you for waiting. How may I help you please?”
“Betty? It’s Raleigh Hayes. Where’s that music coming from?” “Why, hello, Raleigh! I’m sorry I put you on hold.” “That’s okay. Where’s that—”
“I was just this minute where Lady Evelyn gets the telegram that
Gordon’s plane’s been shot down, and first I thought she ought to faint but then I decided, no, she puts that telegram in her pocket and goes right on dancing with the first GI that asks her.”
“Betty, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Remember Me. My novel! Didn’t I tell you I changed Evelyn from an American girl to British nobility? ’Course, now I have to go back and fiddle with the first five hundred pages.”
“Betty, what’s that music?”
“My record player? Oh, I brought it in to keep me in the forties mood. I’m a mood writer. I took a course at the university, and that’s what the teacher said. I write from mood. Did you find your father?”
“Not yet.” Hayes sighed. “Betty, you know how much I appreciate your coming in and all, so please don’t think I’m not grateful, but what with your novel keeping you so busy, don’t you think we ought to get somebody else to, well, maybe talk to any clients that might call?”
“Raleigh. I sat here for twenty years. I could run this office blindfold. Heaven’s sakes. You’ve got two renewals, one increased coverage, and a new premium package.”
“I have? Since yesterday?”
“But I want to apologize right here and now for hiring Bonnie Dellwood. This place was a pigsty. I really owe you an apology. To look at your files, I don’t believe that girl was familiar with the alphabet. All I can say is the personal items she left behind lead me to suspect California is exactly where she belongs.”
“How could she just go to California? She was due for a paycheck Friday.”
“Life, Raleigh, is an odd affair.” Mrs. Hemans was quoting her heroine, Lady Evelyn, who’d made just that remark to her aristocratic fiancé, when asked why she was leaving him for an American flier she’d met five days earlier. The novelist added that odd affairs were occurring right here in the Forbes Building. The janitor Bill Jenkins kept dropping in every few hours to ask how Raleigh was doing and to request that the following message be passed to him: “Keep laying low.” This morning the dentist had run down the hall shouting that someone had stolen his best Oriental rug off the floor of his waiting room. When the police arrived, they’d taken the dentist away with them to the station for questioning. The police, she said, were absolutely in a fret. They were scared that a maniac was loose in town, or a conspiracy. Obscene fortune cookies had been passed out at the Lotus House, Knox-Bury’s had been vandalized with blue paint. The memorial bust of PeeWee Jimson had been stolen out of the library. A pile of cannonballs on the Confederate Memorial at the Crossways had been pried loose and removed.
“Good God,” Hayes exclaimed. “Who would do that?”
“Well, Chief Hood’s so flummoxed, he’s practically rabid. In fact,” Mrs. Hemans coughed apologetically, “he was in here looking for you with a very nasty attitude. I told him you’d been called out of town on a serious family emergency and weren’t reachable.”
“Oh, Betty, thank you. And you didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. Believe me.”
She gave a warm contented sigh. Raleigh Hayes sounded so much like his long-dead uncle Whittier, that warrior poet with whom, once again, because of her novel, she was so passionately in love.
After an extremely long lunch at an empty motel restaurant that was not prepared to make Mingo breaded veal cutlets on the spur of the moment, and not equipped (or inspired) to prepare his pork chops in less than forty-five minutes, Sheffield took the wheel of the Cadillac. Beside him, Hayes began making in his appointments book detailed notations of all expenses so far incurred on his trip. His father would be handed an exact reckoning. “Fifty to Seventeen,” said Raleigh without looking up.
“I guess I’ve been driving to the beach all my life,” Mingo mumbled, crunching Cheetos. “I guess I know the way.”
“Fine.” And Raleigh went back to his calculations. Outside Beulaville, he looked up and asked Mingo what they were doing outside Beulaville, since it was not on the way to Kure Beach. Sheffield explained that he was avoiding a notorious speed trap about which Sister Mary Theresa had warned him.
“Fine.” A curious and comfortable lethargy overcame the habitually vigorous insurance man. Nestling his head in the Cadillac’s plush velour, he fell asleep, and did not wake up till nightfall. As soon as he opened his eyes, it was clear to him that they were lost. It was clear that if not actually in a swamp, they were closer to swampish elements than major roads are likely to be built, even by the most conscienceless contractors. Even Nemours Kettell, as ruthless a capitalist as the state capitol allowed, would never have had the audacity to construct a highway in such slop and ooze, such boggy weeds and twisted stumps, such marshy sloughs and mangles of trees, as the Thermopyleans now found themselves.
“Mingo! This isn’t Route Fifty. Route Fifty is a highway. Highways are paved!”
But the driver protested that he had followed three separate signs announcing, “Topsail straight ahead,” and since Topsail was on the ocean, and Kure Beach was on the ocean, one was bound to lead to the other. “Look there!” he pointed. “There’s another one. ‘Topsail, one mile.’ I told you.”
When the brights flicked over the faded sign, Raleigh let out so anguished a wail that his neighbor slammed on the brakes, sending the Buddhas on the dashboard into a jigging dance. “You numbskull, Mingo! You ass-brained stupid idiot. That sign says, ‘Topsoil!’ Not sail, soil!”
“Really?” said Mingo.
Minutes later, they glimpsed a deserted shack surrounded by huge heaps of sandy dirt that loomed up like dunes by the road sign, “TOPSOIL 4 SALE.” “Turn around,” Hayes commanded.
“Oh, Raleigh, I can’t stand turning back. This road is bound to go someplace.”
“There’s no road, Mingo! We’re in a goddamn SWAMP! What’s that hitting the car?” Cypresses, up to their knees in brackish water, stood on the tips of their roots and leaned plaintively out to the road; Spanish moss, hanging like ratty boas from their branches, brushed the roof of the Cadillac. “Dammit, Mingo! Turn around.”
“Oh! Look what you made me do, yelling!” The front tire hit something, rolled over it, and then the wheels were spinning uselessly in a boggy rut.
“STOP!” Grabbing the flashlight, Hayes leaped out, sinking instantly to his ankles down in a sponge of molasses. Ahead, behind, and around him was nothing but dismal, Stygian…swamp. They were caught on a rotted knotty tree stump, at which Hayes, crouched in the muck, was peering when Sheffield suddenly accelerated, spraying black gook all over his companion’s face. Hayes stood up and shouted “Fuck!” for one of the few times in his life. He smeared as much mud off his glasses as he could.
“Sorry, my foot slipped.” Mingo opened the door to explain.
“Would you mind?” Raleigh hurled the fat man out of the car, then snatched the ignition key. “You dug us in deeper. Okay. Let me think.” Hayes thought of several ideas. None of them worked. It was impossible to go forward or backward, or to lift the front of the car. Meanwhile Sheffield bounced with sucking pops of noise from one enormous foot to the other. “Oh, yuck, this feels like a swamp,” he groaned. �
��Uh oh, what was that?!”
Hayes listened, glaring into the moonlit shadows of the quagmire. “Owls,” he said, “That ‘whooo’? That’s just owls.”
“Do they bite? I’m scared. JESUS!” A low whooshing sound burst with terrifying quickness from a tree overhead, as an immense bird, its wings as long as Raleigh’s arms, flapped out of the dark and crossed the road.
Mingo ran for the car, but Raleigh stopped him. “No you don’t. We’ve got to unload the trunk and get the jack.” They could hear scurrying rustles all around them as they worked. Hayes, not immune himself to an urban dread of the primeval, kept reassuring them both that alligators and bobcats never migrated from the Okefenokee to more northern swamps, but when something unmistakably alive slithered past his shoe, fear buckled his knees and he staggered. In silent undulation, the snake slid away. “Just a black snake,” he whispered, hoping that was in fact true.
“Snakes?” howled Mingo, and with a furious abandon, singlehandedly threw the steamer trunk out onto the side of the road beside the plaster bust. When the jack wouldn’t hold, Raleigh ruthlessly wedged Sheffield’s suitcase under it. When the stump wouldn’t budge, he wedged two pairs of Vera’s voluminous Bermuda shorts under the rear wheels. “Now,” he panted, “the idea is, listen to me, Mingo…”
“I hear something. I hear voices.”
“The idea is, we give a good shove, and we, more or less, fling the car back off the jack and over the stump. That’s all we have to—Let go of me!”
Sheffield was hiding behind his friend, whispering in his ear. “Listen! Raleigh, Raleigh, Raleigh, it’s spooky. It’s like ghosts or werewolves or something. Isn’t it?”
“No.” But now he could hear it too. A grunting noise.
“…Huh Ouu. Huh Ouu. Huh Ouu.”
Hayes pried the other man’s finger out of his shoulder. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” On the other hand, the chant rumbling nearer and nearer did not have a particularly benign sound. Whoever the voices were, they were male, they spoke English, and there were a lot of them. Out of the black stagnant woods, their rhythmic shouts grew louder and sharper, punctuated by clanking rattles, until Raleigh—frozen as a squirrel—distinctly heard the words of a grunted choral song.
Huh Ouu Huh Ouu Huh Ouu. I screwed a gal in Carolina. She had warts in her vagina. Huh Ouu Huh Ouu Huh Ouu.
“My God,” Hayes murmured. In the moonlight, he could dimly see large bulky shapes swaying toward them down the road. At least a dozen men trotting triple file, and all apparently wearing large backpacks and a great deal of loose metal.
Huh Ouu Huh Ouu Huh Ouu. We can lick the U.S. Navy.
We eat raw meat, and piss out gravy. Who you gonna call?
Maaaariiines!
Who you gonna call?
Maaaariiines!
Mingo leaped out from behind his neighbor. “It’s the Marines!” “Great,” Hayes replied, as a big beam of light hit him in the face. “Halt!” shouted the man marching in front. “I said, HALT, you
dumb fucks!” With thuds and rattles, his followers stopped. “Excuse me,” began Hayes, but was yelled down by another “Halt!” as he and the Marine met in the road and blinked into each other’s flashlights.
“It’s a coon!” snickered a young voice in the crowd. “A raccoon or t’other kind?” another voice guffawed. The leader wheeled on them. He was, Hayes could now tell from
the three curved stripes above crossed rifles on his sleeve, a sergeant, an extremely young sergeant, lanky but well muscled, with a big nose and narrow-set eyes. He pointed his spotlight at the troop. “Who said that?” No one moved. “Who’s the asshole comedian?” No one spoke. “All right.” He walked back to them. “All of you. Hit the ground. I said, DOWN. Flat! Right down! That’s it. Now get those faces in it. Rub ’em in it.” To the amazement of the Thermopyleans, the entire file of Marines fell to their knees and then to their chests in the black boggy mud, where they rolled their faces fervently from side to side while the sergeant paced among them, periodically shoving his foot down on someone’s shoulder blades. Finally he commanded, “UP!” and they rose, dripping muck and spitting. “All right. Big joke. Now you all look like coons. Am I right? I said, am I right?”
“YES, SIR!” they shouted.
“Whaddah you look like?”
“COONS, SIR!”
“What else are you?”
“MARINES, SIR!” they stumbled hopefully.
“No, you’re not. You’re assholes. You’re garbage. You’re losers.
That’s why you’re out here tonight. And last night. And tomorrow night. Till you stop being assholes, which is what you are. What are you?”
“ASSHOLES, SIR!” By now, Hayes, realizing that the original remark about “coons” must have been a racial slur on the black mud all over his face, was scrubbing away at himself with his shirt. “Excuse me,” he began again.
The sergeant came within inches of his nose. “What are you jokers doing out here?”
“Where are we?” Hayes asked.
Laughter from the shuffling file died instantly when the sergeant waved his light over the front row.
Mingo bobbed forward with his hand out. “We’re lost. We accidentally took a wrong turn, I guess. I’m Mingo Sheffield of Thermopylae. What’s your name?”
The Marine did not offer to shake hands, but instead flashed his beam directly in their eyes. “I didn’t ask you who you were. I asked you what you were doing here. You’re trespassing on U.S. government property. This property belongs to Camp LeJeune. This is a United States Marine base, no unauthorized personnel allowed. I suppose you’re gonna tell me you didn’t know that.”
“Absolutely not,” Hayes nodded.
“I’m Field Sergeant David Stein. I’m gonna ask you for some identification.”
“Absolutely, of course,” Hayes agreed. Holding out his driver’s license, he attempted to make clear the innocence of their predicament, while Mingo, despite all efforts to silence him, kept trying to start a conversation, with remarks like, “I guess you thought we were spies. Do you have a lot of trouble out here with spies and terrorists and things like that?”
Sergeant Stein looked carefully at the two men, at their car and its KISSY PU license plate, at the bust of PeeWee Jimson lying in the mud, at Vera’s flowery bermuda shorts under the wheels, and at the rotted tree stump that had snagged them. He took off his helmet to pull on his wiry matted hair. “Dumb,” he said, and Raleigh sadly nodded. “Okay, garbage heads,” Stein yelled at his men. “Fall out and move this car.”
“YES, SIR!” The pack of teenagers uncoiled with a gleeful energy, and stormed yelling forward as the Thermopyleans sprang away, startled, into the bog. Shoving together against the front bumper, and seizing this brief opportunity to break loose from the constrictions that chafed them at boot camp, the Marines howled at the top of their lungs, raised the Cadillac off the jack, and pushed it at a run fifty yards back before Sergeant Stein’s “HALT!” harnessed their romp. “Now pick up all this junk and put it back in the car,” he ordered; so at least the travelers did not have to lug the bust and trunk down the road in pursuit of their Cadillac.
“Thank you,” Hayes said.
“Go a mile, take a left, go two, take a right. I oughta turn you jokers in, but fuck it. Just get out of here before somebody shoots first and checks you out later.”
“Thank you,” Hayes grimly repeated.
To his disgust, his obese neighbor now slapped his fat thighs together and saluted. “God bless you. If it hadn’t been for y’all showing up…well, you saved our fannies, I guess. I want you to know, I love the Marines. Honest. I mean, I was never in the Marines. But I always wanted to be when I was little. I saw The Halls of Montezuma at least five or six times. With Richard Widmark. And I think Jack Palance was in it, too. Anyhow, if you ask me, you’re doing a great job defending the world and I don’t care what anybody says.”
“Thanks. Why don’t you get back in your car,” advi
sed Stein.
“I just want you to know how I feel. I’m really sorry about your friends getting killed in Lebanon. You try to help people and then they let a terrorist do something awful like that. It makes you wonder.”
“Mingo, let’s go.” Hayes pulled his friend back from the young sergeant, who was scrutinizing him in an unpleasant way, perhaps trying to decide if these idiotic remarks were facetious—whereas, of course, the babbling Sheffield was entirely incapable of irony.
With Hayes at the wheel, the Thermopyleans backed slowly down the road, while Mingo waved good-bye out the window to the small file of soldiers, now marching once more through the dark mud, chanting their adolescent obscenities.
So rattled were both men by their misadventures that as soon as they found the highway, they looked for a place to have a drink; Raleigh himself suggested it. The place they found was further evidence that, although not yet at their destination, they were indeed in the vicinity of an ocean. It was a roadside seafood spot called Captain Nemo’s, and it was crowded indiscriminately with every variety of fish, from tiny crappies to a hammer-head shark painted bright blue, all mounted and labeled on the walls, and suspended by wires from the ceiling, and caught in dangling nets over the heads of the customers. There was a plastic octopus drooping almost into Raleigh’s hair as he stood at the bar. “Yeah?” said the proprietor, on whose Tshirt a man with a wooden leg stood grinning in a whale’s mouth that was held gaping open by a giant whiskey bottle wedged in its jaws. The shirt was printed, “I had a Whale of a time at Captain Nemo’s.”
“Whiskey sour on the rocks,” Mingo told him. “And have you got good french-fried onion rings?”
“A beer,” said Hayes. “And a scotch. And a telephone.”
“You want me to mix ’em?” the bartender asked loudly for the benefit of three young men standing around a beeping video game. They laughed.
In the bathroom, Raleigh hung his Hawaiian shirt on an oar while he scrubbed off as much of the black mud as he could with no soap and no towel but toilet paper. Then he telephoned collect to his wife. A strange woman answered, “Mothers for Peace. Starry Haven office,” and gave the operator another number where Mrs. Hayes might be reached. Raleigh recognized the digits as his own Forbes Building office number.
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