The Trinity

by David LaBounty

  “What about since you’ve been here?”

  “Naw,” Hinckley says. “I can’t stand them damn Navy women. They all act like they’re good looking when you know damn well that where they ain’t surrounded by like eighty guys for every girl they’d be nothin’ special. But here, even a fat ugly chick can get a date; they do all the time. And them bloke women…” He gives a dramatic shiver. “Well, they’re just plain ignorant.”

  “Have you known any?”

  “Don’t have to. I can tell by lookin’ at ’em.”

  Chris lights a cigarette and stares numbly at two young sailors playing pool at a table in the corner of the club. They chalk their sticks incessantly and Chris wonders how hard of a game it is to play. There are two girls watching them play, two girls Chris has seen on the base. He wouldn’t call them ugly. He is jealous of the four; they are smiling, enjoying life, and seem quite at ease.

  Chris inhales his cigarette. “Don’t you ever wish you had a girlfriend, you know, instead of hanging around me?”

  Brad is taken aback by the candor of Chris’s question; he has never had anyone ask him about how he should feel.

  “Shit, I don’t know. I guess, hell… I never thought about it.”

  There is silence almost a minute.

  “Well, I want a girlfriend,” Chris says. “I think this sucks, watching other people with girls. No offense against you, but I’d rather hang out with a girl.”

  Hinckley can only nod. He has never talked about girls with anyone before.

  Chris finishes his cigarette and they wordlessly rise to leave. Brad suggests a beer and Chris declines. He doesn’t want to blemish that pure feeling he has enjoyed all day. He wants it to remain clean. He wants his mind to remain clear as he falls asleep and thinks about Karen.

  They go back to the barracks and silently get ready for bed. Hinckley simply pulls off his jeans and socks and grabs a t-shirt and climbs into his rack. Chris brushes his teeth and puts on his Navy-issue sweatpants and t-shirt.

  His body is somewhat tired, but his mind is wide awake as he stares open-eyed at the barely visible ceiling. There are two days before his day watch, and he wonders how he can pass them. Hanging out and reading in the barracks won’t quite do; he knows that he won’t be able to concentrate on words.

  He enters the nocturnal world through daydreams. He envisions himself as Karen’s boyfriend and feels silly for feeling so in awe after just one day of friendship. But something inside him stirred, some emotion that he never thought he could feel.

  It must be love, he decides.

  He sees himself living with her in her tiny apartment in Brechin, spending quiet evenings at home together, both reading silently and then eating together.

  Sex, the thought of sex, doesn’t enter his mind just yet. He is a virgin, and this is something that causes him anxiety. He knows she was married, so she must have a measure of experience. But how much? And why isn’t she married anymore? And is she truly not married in her heart?

  An hour, maybe more, passes in this sometimes blissful, sometimes agitated daydream.

  Then Hinckley interrupts the silence. Chris assumes that he’s been asleep all along, but he, too, has been thinking.

  “I hear you’re going to Father Crowley’s next weekend.”

  Chris is shaken upon hearing his roommate’s voice in what is otherwise an extremely quiet night. There is no sound of traffic or any civilization, quite unlike the nighttime noise of his suburban childhood, the constant roar of expressways and electric lights and industry and civilization.

  “Yes,” he replies, after a moment’s hesitation. “How did you know?”

  “Just do,” Hinckley says. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, just didn’t know when. I’ll be there too, when you go.”

  “I’ve never seen you in church.”

  “Don’t go to church. I met him over in Lutherkirk. We got to talking.”

  “Oh… Really?”

  “Yep. I’ll talk to you about it more tomorrow.”

  Chris hears Brad roll over on his side, and Chris continues to stare at the ceiling. He feels somewhat betrayed or maybe jealous. He thought he was the only young man to have bonded with the priest. He is curious about what the priest and Brad could have talked about. He doesn’t see Brad engaging in any sort of theological discussion.

  Several more moments of confused thoughts occur, and finally Chris falls into a troubled sleep. He dreams about the priest. Instead of Karen driving him around the countryside, it is the priest, and this too makes him happy. He has a friend, an older friend who takes an interest in his state of mind, unlike his mother or father.

  In the dream, Brad drifts in and out of the back seat of the priest’s car, but he is silent, not his normal obnoxious self.

  Chris wakes up. Hazy sunlight comes from behind the drawn shade over the picture window. He peers behind the shade and looks through the damp and foggy window. The buildings of the base are now a darker shade of their true color against a grayish sky as they have been painted by a soft and cold steady rain.

  Brad has gone to work. Chris gets his bearings. His first waking thoughts are of the priest and his dream.

  Then he recalls the previous day with Karen. His thoughts of the priest vanish in an instant.

  The time is 10 a.m., according to the clock radio that he bought at the exchange. He turns it on to Radio Tayside and hears the voice of who he now knows to be Margaret Thatcher, a name from the news at home that he couldn’t connect to anyone or anything.

  She is talking about unemployment, how there are record highs in Great Britain, and what her government will do to alleviate the situation.

  Industry, she says, has to grow.

  Chris showers, the plans of the day unsure. He dresses slowly, the AM radio playing statically in the background. He hears a Thompson Twins song that was played incessantly on Detroit radio his last year in high school. Despite not being fond of the song, he finds his feet tapping rhythmically to the music and his lips silently mouthing the lyrics. He feels light, despite the dreariness outside, the specter of loneliness that shrouds his life, and the fact that his family has all but abandoned him.

  The world, this life, is wrought with possibility.

  The galley is closed. It won’t open for lunch for another two hours.

  He finds his billfold and counts his money. Thirty pounds and twenty dollars. He decides to go off base on his own.

  He walks to the lobby of the barracks and calls a cab. He will go to Brechin.

  He puts on his Navy pea coat over his civilian clothes and walks towards the gate while staring at his feet, his breath visible and cloud-like in the chilly and moist air.

  Walking past the chapel, he looks up, getting the feeling that someone is watching him.

  Father Crowley is standing inside the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. As Chris looks up, Crowley’s face brightens with recognition. He waves to Chris and beckons him in.

  Chris shakes his head and points to his wrist, indicating that he has a time commitment.

  The priest’s face is immediately crestfallen, as if Chris has distressed him greatly.

  This look of disappointment concerns Chris, but he forgets about it as he spots the taxi already waiting for him outside the gate.

  He climbs in and instructs the driver. “Brechin.”

  “Aye, where in Brechin?

  “I don’t know… Somewhere in the middle, I guess. Someplace I can eat.”

  The driver nods. He thinks Chris is peculiar, but a fare is a fare. Silently, they ride the ten minutes past farms and pastures and cottages and woods until they approach Brechin.

  Chris is deposited in front of a storefront café, and he enters and studies the very short menu. Too early for lunch and too late for breakfast, he sits at a rickety table with a linoleum top and orders two sausage rolls, as that is all that is being offered at the present time. The café is nearly empty save an older man in a dirt
y overcoat who stares at Chris grimly over the rim of a tepid cup of tea. The waitress is friendly and aloof and doesn’t cater to Chris the way he is accustomed to in the restaurants in Michigan.

  The rolls are greasy but relatively palatable, and he thinks he will eat them again if the opportunity arises. His eyes never leave the picture window; he watches the activity of High Street, studying the cars and pedestrians as they pass by.

  He is hoping to see Karen’s Mini, or Karen herself, drive or walk by.

  He leaves the café and wanders around Brechin, much the way he and Brad did a few weeks prior.

  This time it is different. He is looking for someone. The whole point of his trip to Brechin is the possibility of seeing Karen.

  He wanders along the narrow and clean sidewalk. His Americanism is made even more obvious by his choice of outerwear. His hands are thrust into his pockets, and his collar is upturned to keep out the wind and the cold and gentle rain that is now falling sideways.

  He looks up, studying the windows above the businesses that look like they may have apartments inside. He makes several trips up and down the four blocks that make the center of Brechin.

  He wonders what he will say if sees her, standing in a window or on the sidewalk.

  Would he let her know he was looking? Or would he make it seem happenstance? Or would he be too happy to think? He may be too happy to talk.

  He decides to put that situation in the hands of fate and continues to look up and down along the sidewalk, picturing how his day would go if he does indeed run into Karen. They could have lunch again, and maybe he would tell her about his family at home. Maybe she would invite him to her apartment. He could sit next to her on her couch and watch television in the comfortable manner that he suspects happy couples do.

  His neck is craned in futility; he doesn’t see Karen anywhere. After nearly an hour of walking up and down High Street and its adjoining side streets, he decides to surrender his search. He eyes a pub and ventures inside.

  He drinks a pint but does it quickly, as he is quite alone in the crowded pub, belying the lack of people outside. He returns to that awkward feeling of being alone in a crowd, merely a listener in a room chattering with animated conversations.

  He finds a cab in a queue just uphill from the pub.

  The cab driver doesn’t even ask Chris where to go. He knows.

  Chris returns to his room, lies down on his bed and stares at the ceiling. He will do little else except venture out for food until it is time to go to work.

  Though his search for Karen was fruitless, he decides it was a good thing to do, to strike out on his own, to see a little bit of the country.

  The middle part of the week is the happiest for Father Crowley. There are no Masses to prepare for or suffer through, and no church related activities. No one comes to the office to discuss a spiritual crisis on Tuesday or Wednesday; the requests for answers to life’s problems usually come just before and just after Mass, when he is usually ambushed by tense faces with eyes full of expectation.

  He hates those kinds of faces because they expect him to act a certain way.

  They expect him to act priestly.

  But Tuesday and Wednesday nights are his. He can sleep without dread and relax the entire evening, drinking wine, listening to records.

  On this Wednesday night, he takes a large map of Scotland and places it on the wall above his sofa. Underneath that map, he affixes four smaller maps depicting the city centers of Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

  He stands on the couch, naked underneath his bathrobe, his right hand occasionally pulling at his penis, his left hand holding a sterling silver goblet of wine, a vessel that he found at a resale shop in Dundee during one of his travels. Odin probably drinks wine this way, he thought as he greedily snatched it from a dusty shelf.

  He stands with his legs slightly apart for balance, as the coach is old and sagging, and his body rocks back and forth. He feels like a general mapping out his strategy. In his mind, the scenario is clear: first, some low-level sorties, some indications of warning to let them know they’re here and they mean business. And then the final blows, dealt in such a fashion that their effects will be heard around the world.

  First, we take Scotland, he thinks, drinking the wine in an undignified fashion, the excess liquid running down the corners of his mouth, streaking red on his fleshy chin.

  Then maybe England, and after that, who knows? He calculates that he has just under two years left on his tour. After that… He could end up anywhere if he stays in the Navy. He doesn’t want to waste any time at all.

  He needs to replenish his Trinity, to make his triumvirate complete.

  He thinks of Chris. A week from Friday and he will be here, in this house.

  Crowley will pull out all of the stops: steak, maybe prime rib, beer—plenty of beer—perhaps ice cream, whatever, whatever Chris wants.

  He wants Chris to feel like family.

  He will use the same approach that he used on Rodgers and Hinckley, one of paternal friendship. His years of priestly discernment tell him that Chris is hungry for that sort of attention, for an older man to take an interest in his life.

  He steps down from the couch and goes to a kitchen drawer and rummages through a clutter of utensils and small tools and finds a red felt-tip pen. He climbs back on the couch and places a solitary dot on the Aberdeen map as well as one on the map of Dundee.

  He places several dots on the maps of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

  He then takes the pen and draws a swastika on the face of the Scotland map. He takes a long drink of wine in triumph. A twinkling of light above the map tells him that the gods are pleased. He can feel the faces in Valhalla smiling upon him.

  Chris eats breakfast in the galley quite hurriedly on the morning of his first day watch signaling the end of his long break.

  The break has been brutal, especially the last day, hanging about in his room or in the barracks lounge, watching the television, perpetually tuned to the Armed Forces Network. The same propaganda over and over again—news broadcasts depicting servicemen and women doing honorable things—with just a little real news thrown in and the occasional and very mild sitcom from a few years back shown for laughs.

  But his mind was anywhere other than the television. He was deciding how he would act with Karen the first day back to work. It would be different. The last time he saw her at work, she was merely his supervisor.

  Now she is the object of much emotional—and maybe a little physical—desire.

  Various scenarios play through his head, starting with not speaking to her at all. He could act totally aloof and maybe a little obnoxious. Girls in school always seemed to go for the obnoxious sort.

  One problem—he doesn’t know how to act obnoxiously.

  Then the other extreme. This fantasy allows him to confront her immediately and tell her how he feels and that he is deeply and madly in love with her. In response, her eyes become teary and she presses her face against his and they kiss passionately.

  One problem—he doesn’t know how to kiss, at least not more than a peck on the cheek.

  He puckers his lips while watching the television, not caring if anyone else in the lounge notices. He shapes his lips, first tightly, as if they kissed on the outside, and then more openly, as if his lips would surround hers.

  In this daydream, his lack of experience haunts him, and he favors it with an approach a little more subtle.

  He will be himself and try to be kind and maybe a little more amiable, not as morose as he can sometimes be. He also expects her to act differently, too. She may not feel the same about him as he does her, but they did form a bit of a bond that day. Surely, she will look at him differently, not as some lowly seaman.

  He eats only a bowl of cereal poured from a small cardboard box of the same kind he took on his few camping trips in northern Michigan with his Boy Scout troop. His career as a Boy Scout was short lived; his parents weren’t exactly e
ncouraging and he grew embarrassed at showing up at functions that required the attendance of parents. Typically, neither of his would show up.

  Thoughts of those days in early junior high are with him as he crumples the empty box violently, but then they quickly fade. He is seeing Karen today, and all those people and memories are many years and miles away.

  He arrives at the site early, twenty minutes before his shift begins. The pair that he is relieving eyes him with curiosity. He wants to be at work early, to be in place as Karen arrives.

  He receives the pass-down from the seaman that he relieves, a thin sailor with two years of seniority on Chris who always fails to be promoted due to marginal behavior, fighting in the club because of alcohol, late for work, out of uniform due to the length of his haircut. He is referred to as a burn-bag by Karen and by members of the day staff of their division. A burn-bag is merely a brown paper bag that one would find in a grocery store where classified documents are disposed of until the bag is full and then stapled shut before being taken to an incinerator to be burned. A burn-bag is a generic term for any sailor in the communications field whose military bearing or performance is sub-par.

  Chris strives to avoid that label; he makes sure his hair is cut and his uniform clean and wrinkle-free. He is always on time; he has always hated being late. Being late makes him tense.

  Chris reads the entries in the logbooks; the mid-watch had been a quiet one. There are only two entries, and little concentration is required. He assumes his station and stares at the door with much anxiety.

  He is shaking.

  The hands of the clock move very slowly as he alternates his glance from the clock on the wall to the door. He is waiting for 6 a.m.

  She arrives just as the hands of the clock are exactly opposite one another.

  Chris is sweating.

  She smiles upon seeing him and then turns her glance toward the supervisor she is relieving. He tells her little and she sits in the desk assigned to the supervisor and sifts through a pile of messages, sorting them here and there. She doesn’t look at Chris.