Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (4 page)

But maybe now that could include me, I thought. The door was open, since there wasn’t one anymore, and I flew out, ran down the stairs and past all the other doctors and machines everywhere in that awful, horrible hospital, until I was outside. The attendant was leading her away somewhere, and dirty snow had started swirling all around us, it was dirty when it came out of the sky,
and I remembered what the G in my old name had stood for they were right
and I caught her, and I was trying to say, I was
trying to say
Thalia Thalia
and then
Suze Suze
and I said “Susan” and she said “No I’m Tuesday” and the attendant said “I’m a whole weekend, baby, let’s get going” and they did.

Live long and prosper merimee quaquaqua nicknick
oh Isadora ZZT
dirty snow
remember remember
april one one nine seven four
WOn’t get fOOLed ag gag gag
ill again ZZT nick nick and me now would be lost ZZT nick and me now would be lost quaqua nicknick
ZZT
cast off outcast and the cast aweigh can you sail sail away oh I can sir can sir Can Sir
ZZZZZZT
middleaged father 46 year old artificer please go gently nicknicknick ZZT ZZT And I think we had better bag it quit just give up on this land business and reversible thumbs too the works and go back to the beach crawl into the water and be fish with no eyelids our old ZZT huckfins and a gill again the

II

The Skipper’s Tale

ONE DAY BACK IN THE WAR, I WAS SITTING IN THE OFFICERS’ CLUB
on Tallulabonka or someplace with a couple of the other skippers—Kennedy, McHale. We were all in the PTs, which believe me was no fooling, buddy, when it came to going in harm’s way. The truth is, we probably weren’t helping the fucking war effort any more than if our tubs were named for Bar num, but it looked good in the newsreels. Mac Arthur quit the Philippines, we got to play taxicab. I don’t think my boat ever fired a single torpedo that hit anything.

McHale and I went back a ways. My charter-fishing business in the Florida Keys went bust after I made the mistake of taking a boatload of crazy Cubans someplace they wanted to go and I didn’t, so I joined the peacetime Navy in early ‘40. McHale was already in, running a cutter by day and a poker game by night down in the Panama Canal Twilight Zone. That’s where he and I hooked up, chasing the same sassy-hipped piece of local poon and downing brew like there was no tomorrow, which it turned out there wasn’t. So the both of us were right on the spot to volunteer for the PTs when they started training the first squadrons down there, right after Pearl Harbor.

He and I were the old salts in our squadron. That tickled the bejesus out of us both, since we weren’t all that old and had both been failures up to then. Most of the skippers were more like Jack, a lot of fancy-pants rich kids in khakis hot-rodding it on the bounding main. They’d whip their boats around these islands like flivvers on a back road near, I don’t know, Dartmouth or someplace, like they figured Dad could always buy them another if they cracked this one up.

The way things turned out, I guess you could say Jack’s Dad sure did.

He was a pretty cool customer then. Always friendly with McHale and me, but still like he thought that was funny. You knew that half his brain was someplace else, and you could bet your last pair of shined shoes that wherever it was was more interesting, and for damn sure had better food, than Tallulabonka. A skinny guy who liked to wear shades and didn’t keep a Lucky Strike going awake or asleep like the rest of us, even though he’d smoke a cigar once in a while just to show us we shouldn’t take it personal. I never knew where he got the cigars.

We called this joint the officers’ club, but it was really just another shack made out of panfried-looking palm fronds, with flies buzzing around like they knew something we didn’t and one of those damn “Paris, France 10000 Miles” directional arrows stuck on it. Anyway, the three of us were talking hump, the way you do wartime or peacetime and Tallulabonka or home whenever there’s beer and you can’t get a ballgame on the radio. McHale and I were doing most of the jawing.

“Remember ol’ Screw-Me Susie, back in the Zone?” he asked, nudging me with that gap-toothed, dirty grin of his. Which was about the most obscene sight that you could ever hope to see, this side of Minnie Mouse’s snatch. I was, I think, the more sensitive of the two of us, I guess. Well, who gives a blueberry shit.

I swigged some down. “Oh, what a gal,” I said.

“Hell, yeah. I think there was one time she took you on for lunch—and about three
more
of us on for dinner. Talk about a night that’ll live in Infamy, N.J.” He always told his crew that’s where he was from. “Ony thing I can’t remember,” McHale had started to bust a gut, “is which one of us lost the coin toss, and had to buy her her fuckin’ ginger ale afterward.” As I blinked and swigged some more, Minnie got another workout, with McHale’s eyebrows wig-wagging her in. “You ever do anything like that, Jack?” he asked.

“Well, I never had to pay for the ginger ale, if that’s what you mean,” Jack said, with a nice smile. “Back in college,” and he knew we knew which one, so Harvard was just another fly buzzing around, “my housemates would complain because I never had any cash on me. But I never got used to carrying it, or keys either. Never had that clear a notion of just what pockets were
for,
men. But you know, Mac, the funny thing is,” he grinned, “they always let me into the Stork Club anyway. And even though I’d be happy to bring you two fellows along with me, I’m not completely sure you’d make the grade.”

It’s hard to explain, but it wasn’t snotty. It was more like Jack
had
just taken us into the Stork Club with him, and we’d had a great time there. Later in the war, when I switched over to the submarine service, my boat picked up a shot-down carrier pilot who was a senator’s son or something, and this bird was frantic to pretend we were all the same kind of
Americans. The guy just didn’t get how we wanted him to act as different as we knew he was, so we could make up our own minds on what we thought of that. But that wasn’t how Jack worked his rap sheet. He knew his life probably sounded pretty damn swell to you if you were most people, so he’d let you be part of it for a second, quick joke about Baaastin here, fast flashbulbs-at-your-best-table smile there. At the same time, even so, as soon as he let you be part of it, it was like
he
wasn’t anymore. He’d gone someplace else again, and not Boston either. Like I said, hard to explain.

“Say, Jack,” McHale wanted to know. “You ever bang a movie star? I know your dad knows a couple or a few, so tell us. Well? Didja ever nail one of those broads?”

“Not yet,” Jack said, looking out past Dickinson Inlet at the U.S.S.
Monroe.
Then it was like he’d decided he had to give us a little more of himself on this one, taking himself away first as usual. “Even though, believe me, Mac, a couple of times I was
this
close,” he said, holding up a thumb and finger of the same hand that was holding his cigar. “And not in my father’s house, either,” he added, which made me think there might be more to this whole being-rich business than McHale or me was ever going to know. “But what the hell, piss on that noise—I guess the war got in the way.”

“War got in the way of lots of things for everybody,” I said, not sure where that one had surfaced from. I guess I hadn’t been able to help but think how maybe I hadn’t known old Screw-Me Susie like McHale had known old Screw-Me Susie. But even so, I was probably missing life back in the Zone, where the beer wasn’t 3.2, she had shacked up with just me for a whole weekend once when Mac got detailed over to the Cristobal district on SP duty, and nobody was dying. If you like gals whose morals are as loose as what they use to prove it with is tight, there’s nothing like being on American soil but out of sight of the padres and schoolmarms, with Old Glory flying when you step outside afterwards like a roof between you and God.

“Not me,” McHale said. “Hell no I wouldn’t mind some available pussy, even if it had Ethel Merman’s face riding shotgun. But I’m in my fuckin’
prime
out there, and don’t nobody forget it. Me and Bilko have a
bet going about which one of us is going to come out of this son of a bitch with more loot.”

“So do we and the Russians, I think,” Jack said. “At least, that’s what my father’s friends are saying, now that they’ve spent some serious time in Washington at a dollar a year.” He smiled, but not at us. “ ‘While England slept,’ “he muttered, like it was an old song title or something.

It was late in the day. Off in the sky, a Douglas SBD Dauntless torpedo bomber was heading out above the sun, far off and so close to immobile that it looked like some lonely kid’s model. “Wonder what’s going on?” McHale, who had seen it, said. “Those birds don’t usually go out alone.”

A minute later, it was still hanging there. “Man, those Dauntlesses are slow,” McHale said. “No wonder the Japs knocked so many of them out of the sky, when they were coming in at Midway.”

“So we build some more,” Jack shrugged.

“What for?” McHale was getting exasperated. “So the Japs can knock
them
out of the sky?”

“Look, Mac,” Jack said, his face pivoting on the stub of his cigar. “Whatever you are, you’re not dumb. Even Binghamton knows that. But you still don’t know what this war is about. It isn’t about us out here in the South Pacific, trying to look like heroes and not get killed at the same time. It isn’t even about Midway. It’s about whether they run out of planes before we run out of planes, and—well, I don’t know if either of you fellows has ever seen Detroit, and I know I’ve never seen Tokyo. But Mac, all fooling aside? You’d
love
these odds at Aqueduct.”

“Oh, fine. Fine,” McHale said. “That’s great, Jack, and I’ll be sure to have the chaplain write both my wives it’s a done deal. But so then tell me, why ain’t I in Washington? Or Detroit? What the fuck are
we
doing here?”

“Trying to look like heroes and not get killed at the same time,” Jack recited, kidding him along. “Anyway, what happened to being in your prime—your
fuckin ‘
prime, Mac? You want to let Bilko win walking away?”

“I’d like to stay in it, that’s all,” McHale grumbled. “My fucking prime.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Jack said. He stood up, with a grin like autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets in the middle. “Well, gentlemen. Pleasant dreams,” he said. “I’ve got a night patrol, and just how did you two sons of bitches get out of it, anyway?”

Well, little buddy, you’ve probably figured out it was the next morning when all of us on Tallulabonka heard that the 109 hadn’t come back. No sign of Jack or any of the crew. Mostly because he thought he should, Binghamton sent a couple of boats out to cruise around the Telmi Strait for traces, and they didn’t even turn up any debris.

That’s how it went in the war, but McHale was down in the dumps about it. “God damn goddam everything to bastard shit anyway,” he bitched. “Jack didn’t know it, but one of my boys from the 73 had six Imperial quarts of booze and two Nip flags with fake bloodstains hidden in one of the 109’s depth-charge canisters. And now it’s all just getting sharks drunk and nervous at the fucking bottom of the Telmi Strait.”

Four or five days later, Binghamton ordered McHale and me to hightail our boats down to Ireidahonda for a couple of fast supply runs. Whenever we weren’t in action, they’d use the PTs to ferry ammo, rations, 3.2 beer, movies and replacements around to all the different cogs of the war effort on all the little islands. It wasn’t bad duty so long as you remembered to keep an eye peeled for half-submerged sea mines in the channels.

From the half-dozen or so times we’d done it by now, both me and McHale already knew old Nick. He was the supply officer on Ireidahonda and its kid sister island Alwok, and a good one. Had a tent up called “Nick’s Snack Shack” to feed hamburgers to the pilots and bomber crews that used the airstrip there, played poker like it was chess or something and his opponent wasn’t you, got along with officers and EM both. But there was something anxious about the way he did every-damn-thing, all the way from Hi Nick to See ya ‘round—like he was watching you with his lips and ears, not just eyes, to make sure you were
up to speed on what a relaxed and ordinary Joe he was, and thought well of him for it.

This time, his clipboard had my boat hauling C rations, smokes, a dozen cases of 3.2, a shovel, and
Mrs. Miniver
to a crew of Seabees building a new airstrip over on Fondawonda. McHale was taking ammo and
Blondie’s Blessed Event
to an Army recon platoon on Liltiti, which was the smaller of the Big Gazongas. But then Nick started tapping a pencil against the clipboard, and I swear you could see sweat whiter than his skin start on his hairline and make his five o’clock shadow slick.

“Wait—wait,” he muttered, like Halsey would have his hide if he got this one wrong, or maybe just for the hell of it. “No, now I’m, uh, ‘god damn’ sure!,” flashing a weak smile. “They’ve already had
Mrs. Miniver
on Fondawonda.” I’ll tell you, that put a Minnie on McHale’s mug. “I’m switching the movies.”