Second Skin (18 page)

“Tremlow?”

“You got the name on your lips. You ought to know. That’s him. Now this devil thought up a party and worked the whole thing out hisself and I was down there on the fantail too—old nigger spy, that’s Sonny—and I want to tell you I never seen a party like that before. It sure stirred them up. You know how? Hula-hula, that’s how. I tell you, when he done the hula-hula, he had them men in the palm of his hand.”

“Tremlow?” I said, “Tremlow doing some kind of Hawaiian dance?”

“That’s right,” but whispering, drawing me back into the protection of a funnel and pointing firmly, contemptuously, out to a white stretch of the deck where half a dozen of them suddenly raced by dragging burden, victim, spoils of some sort through the green glow of that southern night. “Yes, hula-hula. That’s what I mean and with all the trimmings. He danced that dance hisself. And you know what? He got them full of intoxication, that’s it, downright intoxication, with all that hula-hula stuff, got them cheering and bumping around and dancing themselves, the way he beat around there in the middle of that moonlit fantail with two fellows playing those little tinny stringed instruments and two more beating on galvanized iron pots for drums. He even had a real grass skirt that swooped all the way down to his ankles and a shirt fixed over his head so you couldn’t tell whether he was a chief or one of them hula-hula girls. It did
the trick, so I guess it didn’t matter which he was. That devil…”

Another shot, another brief turbulent huddle, the arc and soar of something pushed, tossed, heaved and then sailing overboard. And the deep green velvet night was in my face, the whole ship glistened under its coating of salty moisture, and now there was the moon itself adrift in its own mirrored ocean and the ship was in the sway of the moon, and Tremlow, so Sonny said, had done his dance.

“It must have been amusing, Sonny,” I said, and I was hanging on tightly to the moonlit ship though she was still, flat in the water like a melting iceberg. “But I hope they don’t bother Mac. He’s discouraged enough already, eh, Sonny?”

“That chaplain? That chaplain’s on the skids. We coming to each man for hisself now, you wait and see….”

“Yes. But wait a minute,” I stopped short, caught hold of his sleeve, leaned out over the rail, “there, do you feel it, Sonny? Quick, what’s happening?”

Rigid. Black wet nose in the air. Long black paw held up for silence. And then: “Turning.” And moving his head then until his white hallelujah eyes were again fixed on mine, and looking at me and sighing with the hopelessness of all nigger warnings and prognostications, he repeated the word: “Turning.”

“Changing course, Sonny? Are we? Out with it, is she changing course to starboard?”

“Turning,” he repeated, “turning to port. Now you’re the one wants to secure the pilothouse, now here’s your chance.”

“On the double,” I said, and the axehead lunged, the ship was straining, moving into the tension of a giant curve, leading us into some forbidden circle. And then the PA was coughing, whistling, piping the madness of its call to Battle Stations and suddenly and dead ahead of us, the green moonlight and black shadows assumed a more solid and dangerous shape: lifeboat, bridge wing, pilothouse, it was all there, each piece in its proper place and rising in tiers and frosted together like the sections of some giant wedding cake. Then hand over hand and up the last green frosted rungs and feeling the whole of that starboard
bridge wing heeling down slightly under the centrifugal force, strain, of that tight turn, and bringing each other to a standstill at the open door of the pilothouse where he, Tremlow, was clutching the spokes and even yet trying to get another degree out of the locked wheel.

Moonlight. Green brass binnacle. Green brass barometer. Madness on the decks below, clatter of falling helmets, bodies stumbling, falling, diving into gun mounts, and up here in the wheelhouse our near-naked wireless operator, Tremlow, at the helm of the ship. Sonny began to swing high the axe, but I stayed his arm, for a long moment could only stand there waiting, holding my breath, surveying that ludicrous scene of Tremlow’s plan. Because there was Tremlow in the moonlit pilothouse, alone on the bridge, and he was wearing only the long grass skirt and the sweat of the dance was still bright and slick and heavy on his arms, his shoulders, his long muscle-banded back.

“Let go, Skipper,” whispering, shuffling, “let me chop him down!”

And then there was the flash of the head, the toss of the long black hair, and Tremlow leapt from the wheel and assumed a crouch. The grass skirt was matted into a smooth bulky fibrous round over the terrible bones of his hips, fell long and sharp and undulating to his bare ankles. Even when he crouched it swished. The wheel was abandoned and the brass speaking tube was calling us, fiercely, shrilly, and moonlight was all about Tremlow and suddenly was also falling flat on a long dark flank that had come out of the grass like a tiger.

“No, no, Sonny,” I whispered, holding the arm, turning away the axe, keeping my eyes on the muscles bunching up to spring, “when I hit him, you take the wheel. We must think of the ship….”

So the bright axe fell under our feet. And Sonny sprang out of the way and I threw up my guard. The moon, I noticed, made luminous scar-shaped blotches on the slick brown of that violent breast and flashed and swam and was scattered in all the sharp folds and blended spaces of that now hissing and roaring grass skirt which was coming at me and barely covered him, swinging,
swaying in his headlong strides. He was still grinning.

“Tremlow,” I tried to say when he socked me. He knocked down my guard with a tap of his bright fist, and vaguely I thought that it wasn’t fair, that he was supposed to respect my age, respect my rank, that he was supposed to be down in the shack communicating with the rest of the fleet. Knocked down my guard and socked me in the mouth, and I should have ducked at least because the line of that blow was as clear as hate in the steady eyes, though I still missed the idea, the plan, which was surely riding far forward by then in Tremlow’s eye.

“Wait,” I said, and my mouth was bleeding, “wait a minute… you don’t know what you’re doing… you’ll be sorry, Tremlow.”

But he hit me in the mouth again. Same fist, same mouth, more bloody mud, more pain. Why not the nose, I thought, or the naked eye, or the stomach, why this furious interest in my loose and soft-spoken mouth?

“Tremlow,” I said, tried to say, “you’re on duty…and Battle Stations…the shack…please.”

We went over the rail, off that wing of the bridge and down, down, with his fist wedged among my bloody teeth and the grass skirt flying, and together, locked together in his hate we burst through something—canvas, I thought, the tarp!—and landed together in a black embrace. Faint odor of dried-out bilge. Faint odor of new hemp. And of cork and lead and paint. And feeling another kind of pain, suddenly I knew that we had fallen together into the bottom of the white lifeboat—
33 persons
—and that we were not alone. For a moment, hearing laughter, listening to Tremlow swear, for a moment my eyes in darkness found the star-shaped hole in the tarpaulin overhead, and for that single moment I watched the gentle moon pulsing to all the limits of the great canted star cut in the canvas. I must have moaned.

Because the star fled and suddenly the fight went on and the tangle of arms, legs, hands, began to twist again in the sloping darkness inside the boat which all the while I never forgot was white, and my whole poor self told me that the others, whoever they were, were piling on. There seemed to be a purpose in that
struggle, but still it escaped me. And then hands, the crook of a naked arm, everyone pulling in a different direction in the darkness until all at once they seemed to work together, those hands, that vicious elbow, and I heard the ripping of cloth and felt myself floundering, flopping helplessly, because they had gotten a little rough water cask under my stomach and were rolling me in some odd fashion on that little rough barrel. And in the darkness. Forever in the darkness and crippled, bleeding away my good blood in my poor battered mouth. There was no laughter now.

“What the hell!” I said, or at least thought deep in my heart, and over the barrel then I began to fight like a fish. Oh, I grunted at them, gagging on blood, grinding the top of my bald head into the invisible deck, and I flexed every possible muscle and bucked, did my best to buck, thrashed around good and plenty in the darkness with someone breathing his hot breath into my ear and the cloth ripping away from my flesh as if they were running the tip of a hot wire down the length of my thigh.

And then: “Dear God,” I said, but this too was merely a quick sensation deep in the heart because the grass skirt—wet rough matting of cruel grass—was rammed against me and there was only darkness and a low steady fatigued scuffling sound in the bottom of the white lifeboat along with my last spent cry of pain.

But they must have had an accomplice stationed on the deck because the darkness bolted then, myself and water keg and kneeling men all knocked together, smashed, set whirling in the very darkness that had been tipped, freed, cut loose, was now falling. Surely there was an accomplice who pushed her out and cut the cables, because one moment I was tumbling in the darkness and the next I was standing straight out of the star-shaped hole with my hands raised up and my eyes thrust up into the moonlight. The lifeboat was falling but I was standing inside the star with my head in the air and my eyes fixed on one tiny figure far above who was leaning out over the deck, throwing down a rope. It was Mac. Mac with his vestments flying and his tiny face white with fear, Mac who flung down the rope and,
hand over burning hand—I was free on the end of that rope when the lifeboat struck—pulled me back aboard.

Struck, yes, and the splash reached up and soaked my legs even while I clung to the rope and twirled slowly around and around on the end of it.

“Pull her up, Mac,” I whispered, “for God’s sake…”

There were three lifeboats, as it turned out—Tremlow was in the lead—and on the cold deck I lay half-naked and propped on my side and watched the three of them turn away from us in the moonlight and sail away. Three white sitting ducks in the moonlight. And perhaps I should have unlimbered one of the three-inch guns and ordered them picked off. It would have been easy. And they deserved it. But I lay on the deck half-naked and wet and shivering and thought I saw Tremlow small and dark and confident at the tiller of that first white gently rolling boat. So I let them go. Merely watched and wondered what the sun would do to Tremlow in that grass skirt, wondered what he would say when he was picked up. Claim to be a survivor of a torpedoed ship? God knows. Or perhaps, I thought, perhaps they would never be picked up.

“Let him go on dancing,” I said to Mac and tried to smile.

They disappeared like three drops of milk dissolving in a creamy soup, those three boats. And wiping my nose, rubbing myself gently, lying at Mac’s feet on our wet and unyielding deck I watched them, watched those three little white boats until they were gone. Follow the leader, I thought. And later, much later, I reported the group of them to be missing in action and told the old man we lost the boats in a storm.

The floating paradise, the brutal act, a few memories on a distant shore….

…dropped to my knees beside her and took her cold hand—no rings—and confessed to her at long last that Fernandez was dead. That I had found him dead at the end of my final shore patrol on Second Avenue. That I thought she should know.

Yes, I thought she should know. And yes, I told her the truth, made my confession, got it off my chest that night the snow fell
into the trembling arms of the larch trees on our black and ragged island rooted fast in the cold and choppy waters of the Atlantic. Yes, I told her, my own daughter. For her own good. For her own good and mine, for our mutual relief. And yes, yes, I thought she might spare herself if she knew the truth, might spare her own life somehow. But I was wrong, of course.

The truth. Yet wasn’t I deceiving her even then? Wasn’t I sparing her certain details, withholding others, failing somehow to convey the true tonality of the thing? Well, I should hope to God! Because how could I or anyone else convey the true tonality of Second Avenue, kneeling as I was by Cassandra’s little lumpy four-poster—little nightcaps secreted for years under that embroidered pillow—in the cold dark room in that prim rotting house with fresh white snow on the sagging eaves and those dark trenches—Puritan graves—awake and listening in the cellar? No. Second Avenue could not survive that moment in a winter’s night. Then why did I wait, why bother to talk to her at all? Because I should have acted then and there, should have done something on the spot, so to speak, in the middle of the flickering darkness of Second Avenue. Yes, I should have left the body, bodies to be true to fact, exactly where I found them in the flickering chaos of the cheap room in that Second Avenue hotel, flophouse, whatever it was, and posted a guard and driven the gray Navy pickup truck back to that other cheap hotel myself, and waked her and bundled her into a blanket and driven her, still half-asleep, back down those twenty or so wet blocks and carried her up the broken tiles of those stairs and into the room of blood where she could have taken a good look at him with her own eyes. Yes. That’s what I should have done. I know it now. But I waited.

Yes, I waited those two or three months, and they made all the difference, they tipped the scale, shadings of the true tonality were lost, and certain details were kept to myself. Cassandra never knew, for instance, that I took care that she should not be alone that night. Small matter, yet it might have helped. And I never told her how my stomach felt as if it were going to boil over like a car radiator. These and a few other small points omitted,
gone. And I shall never forgive myself the loss. A hair’s breadth might have kept Cassandra from killing herself, merely a hair’s breadth. Now I shall never really forgive myself the loss.

But if I missed those many years ago I won’t miss again. So now for everything, for what I told her as well as what I didn’t tell her in the upstairs bedroom of the cold island house, everything I can think of now to restore a little of the tonality, to set to rights my passion. A small recognition, a brief scene of blood, some light on our lost affections.