Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (5 page)

“Sure they don’t need any 3.2 on Liltiti?” McHale asked him, with a wink that told me not a lot of it would get there if they did.

“Hell, no, they don’t, Mac, and you know it,” Nick said. “The Big Gazongas are a combat zone.”

If you don’t know, little buddy, 3.2 was the low-alcohol-content brew that Uncle Sam shipped all over the Pacific. The idea was we wouldn’t get too drunk, and brother, they knew what they were doing. You practically had to glug the cubic equivalent of Lake Superior to get as deep in the bag as every sailor, GI, and gyrene was determined to get anyway at the drop of a hat, come hell or high 3.2. Put it this way, in the Florida Keys I’d been damn near as skinny as Bogart. Now, well, last Christmas McHale and I had had to arm-wrestle every day for a whole week to see who got stuck being the base Santa Claus that morning, putting on a wool union suit and some cotton batting in that heat to go around and Ho-ho-fuck-the-Navy-ho-ingly hand out Lucky Strikes and gum, which they got most days anyway, to the EM. I usually lost.

While they were loading up our boats, Nick took the two of us over to the Snack Shack for some burgers. Maybe we should have been down to the dock supervising, but Nick seemed like he was desperate to make a good impression on somebody, and just now we two were the only citizens
around. He flipped the burgers himself, pretty awkwardly but with concentration to make up for that, you could tell he was sick with fear at the thought that you might try to start an interesting conversation with him during it. It was really too damn hot for burgers, but McHale and me always were a pair of firehouse dogs when it came to any kind of meat on a griddle.

“Either of you want coffee with these?” Nick asked, putting down two burgers for each of us. “I’ve got some brewed.”

“Always got time for good Joe,” McHale said. “And if I’m reading that can’s label right, you’re talking about real Maxwell House—not that powdered crap we drink on patrol.”

“I guess I’ll have some too,” I said. So he brought us each a cup. Had none for himself.

“These are fuckin’ good, Nick,” McHale said through his first burger. “What were you in civilian life—short-order cook?”

“Lawyer.” The way it dropped out of his mouth and hit his shoe like a dead mouse, I could see that it was a thing he’d spent his whole life expecting to take pride in once he finally got to be one, and now he was someplace where he couldn’t. It was all a little strange, what with the way he had an apron on and wasn’t eating with us, as if he’d made a lastminute snap decision that we’d like him better if he didn’t. His face was all about sweating out tough choices about things that didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

“Ever pull any sea duty, Nick?” McHale asked him.

“ ‘Fraid not! I’m a shore rat. I guess the Navy knows best—anyway, I try to do mine,” he said with a queasy smile. If McHale wanted to piss on him for that, the smile said, he’d hold McHale’s johnson while he did it. Hating him with his teeth and dark eyes the whole time.

“Oh. Well, you’re not missin’ much.” McHale took another bite. “ ‘Cept the war, of course,” he said thoughtfully, chewing.

I really didn’t want to bust out laughing along with him, but it
was
funny. After a second, Nick reached around and took the apron off, and started to brush the table clean of the bits of bun and beef McHale had just spewed out.

“I’ve seen a little of the war,” he said, once we quit laughing. “You know, it’s kind of hard to miss wherever you are, so long as we’re all out here. Anyway, not everyone can skipper a PT boat—somebody’s got to pump gas. And sometimes planes come over here too at night and drop the occasional bomb on my tent, even if I’ve never been in combat up in the Big Gazongas.”

“Aw, shit. He didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. Which was true, since I knew McHale didn’t mean anything by
anything.
“Sorry, Nick. That was lousy thanks for good chow.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting any thanks,” Nick said, flashing a smile that was a little too eager to show up and then to get itself over with. “You hadn’t finished eating yet.”

“We have now, though,” I said.

“Whuffafugoomean?” McHale said, bits of bun showing through his lips. “Ffgotanowononmplate.”

“Take it with you, for Christ sake, Mac,” I said. “They’ve gotta be done loading now, and we both need as much sun’s we can get. Or do you want to run your boat smack up against Liltiti in the dark?”

“Maybe that’s what Jack did,” McHale said. “Hell, maybe I’ll be the one who finds him—and then tears him a new one for losing all
my
supplies, too.”

“You mean Joe Kennedy’s kid?” Nick said. “Is he still missing?”

“And presumed dead,” I said. “But I didn’t think he’d ever done a supply run for you, since he’s Binghamton’s pet and always gets the glamor jobs. Do you know him?”

“Of him,” Nick said. “He doesn’t—or didn’t—know of me, obviously. My family didn’t exactly move in the same circles his did, Stateside. Or here either, I suppose,” he added, glancing at McHale and twitching that my-movie’s-stuck-in-the-projector smile of his like he wasn’t sure if he was making up, sucking up, or just giving up.

“Well, we better shove off,” I said. “Come on, Mac.”

“Oh, fine—so let him take me to
court,
the weaselly shithead,” McHale was saying, as we got down to the dock. “He just got my goat. Tapping his pencil and flipping his burgers and fiddling around with his
apron, and doesn’t the dumb son of a bitch know that every
Gl
in the Pacific theater has seen
Mrs. Miniver
six fucking times? I swear, I’m going to toss the fucking thing over the side before we make Liltiti, and when I tell ’em what I’ve done those poor bastards in the foxholes are gonna start crying and lining up to suck my dick from pure gratitude. We’re dodging Nip bullets in malaria up to our hips, and they give us Greer fucking Garson to pound pud to? I don’t know about yours and I don’t want to, big buddy, but my little piggy just says uncle and goes ‘wee, wee, wee’ all the way home. You know, sometimes I wonder what in hell we’re fighting for.”

“You do? Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “I never knew you thought about it. Well, see you back on Tallulabonka tomorrow, Mac, God willing.”

“Or whoever,” McHale said. “I don’t give a shit, do you?”

Stern to bow, his boat and then mine worked our way out of the narrow channel between Ireidahonda and Alwok. Then I set a course due south by northwest for Fondawonda, straight on out past the big blue in between Donovan’s reef and Bomarzo. McHale and the 73 peeled off west by north-south toward the Big Gazongas, and pretty soon we lost sight of them in all the gilded fish scales that the sun was putting on the sea.

I was pretty sure that we could make Fondawonda by sunset even though, because of all the cases of C rations and 3.2 loading down the bow, my boat was making even choppier headway than usual. But there hadn’t been anywhere else to stow them. Remembering what McHale had said he was going to do to
Mrs. Miniver
; once we were out of sight of Ireidahonda I told a couple of the boys to man the .50 calibers for some target practice. Then I started heaving reels of
Blondie’s Blessed Event
up in the sky like some damn discus thrower. The sun would catch them just before the bullets did, at least the ones we hit.

“Bye-bye, Dagwood!” we’d holler out every time another reel hit the water, whether we’d plugged it on the way or not. “Screw you up the ass, Mr. Dithers. So long, Daisy—yeah, ‘give us your friggin’ answer do’
ta
thisl
Woof!” We felt kind of let down that Hollywood didn’t make longer movies, once we were back to riding in the quiet that settles in at double intensity after any kind of shooting. Because it’s unnerving, you try to keep the voices going anyhow, but they always come out puny and you have to wait until you’ve got some good practical excuse to talk before it sounds normal again.

Which we had. My senior torpedoman was a little fellow from Chicago name of Laprezski, we just called him Ski. “Hey, Skipper,” he called up to me. “You really think those Seabees are gonna need
all
this beer?”

“Don’t think I wasn’t searching my heart and asking for guidance about that self-same question, boys,” I said. “But we’re gonna look awfully damn stupid turning up off Fondawonda with nothing but a shovel.” Even so, a dark mass had already started showing on the horizon to starboard beyond the cases stacked in the bow, so I knew it was now or never. “Well, a couple dozen cans more or less aren’t gonna make much of a nevermind,” I called down. “Pass one on up here to me, willya? Do. Not. Throw. The beer can at me. Not at eighteen knots, Algligni, you idiot. Pass.”

Well, it was the usual foam and minnow piss. But it tasted better with the salt air gluing new skins on our warm faces, the .50 cals sticking up port and starboard like praying-mantis architecture on some insect cathedral, the gray torpedo tubes turning into big thumbs pointing the way every time we slewed, and the orange and pink purple of the lowering sun making toy-sailor silhouettes out of my crew as they did less and less of whatever they did and Fondawonda started hiking herself up on her elbows in front of us, the way Susie used to in the good old days in the Zone, and our boat scooted toward her like a spoon on a gigantic blue bedspread. I knew my buddy McHale didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of use for God, or for any of His works except McHale, and sometimes I was tempted to agree with him about everything but the last part. But the Lord was sure a breathtaking stage manager for some mighty rotten vaudeville revues, and I guessed I wasn’t the first or last to think so. Even dogs probably did, whenever they took a break from sniffing and relieving themselves in a corner of the floorboards.

When it’s your place of work, you sometimes forget that the sea is the sea. But I had seen somebody else realize it once, when he was small. That was when I still had my own boat in the Keys, and rented it out for excursions. The little boy I remembered best from that time couldn’t have been over five, and maybe I ought to’ve said the hell with the money and told him and his folks to come aboard anyhow, but I didn’t.

You know how kids that age behave like they haven’t figured out yet how to manage being all of themselves at the same time? When this one raced out onto the pier, he was nothing but a pair of legs. With knees that weren’t used to being bare in winter, and looked like they’d blink if they could. But seeing the whole Atlantic there, with nothing between him and it, turned him into just a face.

It was like he’d forgotten which job his eyes had, which one his mouth did. Just kept widening them all, for insurance. If he’d been older, he’d have goggled like that at the first dame he saw naked. So I had a picture of how it felt for a little kid to take in all that blue for the first time, and understand that grown-up men went out on it until they got too tiny to be spotted by everyone they’d left behind on land.

The memory of it used to knock on different doors around my skull like it was looking for a room. I never could put a name to the mood he sometimes popped up from, except that it was where I stashed the stuff I knew better than to ever try bringing up around McHale. He’d probably have gotten a bang out of being the guy who wiped the glow off that kid’s mug.

I hadn’t. But I knew his father couldn’t afford to charter my boat even for the minimum three hours, and had already tried to spare Dad the embarrassment of having to hear that from me head-on by doing my best to act disgruntled and damned busy swabbing out bait buckets as soon as I saw him coming. He’d just gotten out of a sad-looking black tow truck with “Egan’s Garage, Rochester Minn.” painted in white script on the cab door, a mighty mystifying sight in Florida until I spotted his missus sitting inside it. One look was enough to tell me that the reason he’d brought her all the way down here from up there in the middle of the Depression, despite being so short on ghelt that he had no
other transport but his work vehicle, was to give her a chance to do the last of her coughing in sunshine.

So we had the conversation that neither of us wanted to, because Egan knew what I’d been trying to tell him by carrying on with my chores. But he had to ask me any way, because of that mute profile in the passenger seat. She wanted to keep their boy beside her, but he probably didn’t know she was dying or even how to spell “tuberculosis,” and he scrambled out of the truck to run down to the pier after his dad. That’s when he stopped short, looking like he’d just found his next mother—not even knowing yet that he was going to need one, but staring at the ocean with everything he had in him, as if the gray eyes under his sandy hair had already set sail straight for the horizon and the rest of him had to catch up somehow.

“Are we going on the boat?”

“Not today,” his father said. “This man says it’s too—dangerous, right now. He thinks we should come back when the sea is…”

“Smaller,” I said, trying to help him out.

“I’m not scared.”

“Jacky Gilbert,” his dad faltered-”you should be.”

“No. I want to go on the boat. You said we would.”

“Your dad’s right, son,” I told him, still trying to help. “You can’t see them, but there’s whales out there, and—sea monsters, and-”