The Longest Night (19 page)

“The bus, I guess.”

“That's a lot of work.”

“Maybe it'll finally teach me a lesson.”

“You don't need a lesson,” he said, with more emphasis than she'd expected. “Sometimes things just happen.”

“Oh. Well, all right.”

“And, ma'am—”

“Nat.”

“Ma'am, Nat, I hope you don't mind if I check in every once in a while. To see if you need anything. I'd want someone to do it for my own wife.”

Nat's eyes darted to his ring finger, bare. He caught this and said, “I mean, if I had a wife. My own wife, or mother—I wouldn't want them to be alone.”

“That's fine,” Nat said. “That's incredibly kind.”

“I can't help it,” he said in a self-deprecating tone, “I'm a Mormon.”

But of course,
Nat thought, and wondered why this had not occurred to her. Most of the locals here were. This new knowledge gave Nat the usual pull of suspicion, but also made him seem more trustworthy, somehow.

When Esrom opened the door Sam and Liddie gathered at his heels, looking bereft. He noticed their expressions and squatted down. “Miss Liddie, next time I see you I'd like to know all the troublemaking that Dennis the Menace doll has been up to. And Miss Sam, you'll have to tell me what you've been taking pictures of with your wooden camera. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” the girls chorused, throbbing with eagerness.

“All right, then. I'll see you all soon,” he said, and waved, ambling down the grassy slope to his truck.

“A
h, home sweet home,” Specialist Mayberry said, throwing his duffel onto the floor and flopping onto a bunk across from Paul, who was reclined on his own with a newspaper. “How's tricks, Collier? Aren't you working today?”

Paul glanced at his watch. “In an hour,” he said.

“Yet again, our schedules keep us apart,” Mayberry said. “How's your precious reactor?”

“She's a gem,” Paul said, and it was true. The PM-2A never got too hot, never set off a false alarm, and never, ever, threw them a stuck rod. While she did her beautiful work Paul obsessively compared every belabored move the CR-1 would make in the same situation, his mind bothered with visions of stuck rods, radioactive steam, inextinguishable uranium-fed fires. He was beginning to think he was imagining things, that the scene at home couldn't possibly have been as bad as he remembered. He'd even confided his fears to the chaplain. “I have bad dreams about it,” he'd said. “I feel…worked up.” The chaplain gave him three aspirin and a glass of water.

Specialist Benson poked his head into the room and said, “We're gonna play pinochle in the lounge, if anybody wants to join us.”

“Sure,” said Mayberry.

“Not me, thanks,” said Paul, deciding he had enough time before work to drop Nat a line. He found his pen and notebook, opened the cover to peer at the photo of her he kept inside.

Benson stepped to Paul's shoulder. “Ooh, is that your wife, the famous Nat?”

Reflexively, Paul flipped it over.

“Yeah, it's her,” Mayberry answered for him.

“Let us see.”

“She's a looker,” bragged Mayberry. “She'll make your wife look like the cleaning lady.”

Benson tried to lean over Paul, mouth half-open, the gap between his teeth showing; something about his expression, the rowdy anticipation, bothered Paul in a gut-pronged way.

“He keeps it in his little book,” Mayberry teased, as if Paul were mute. “He won't show you.”

“How'd you see it, then?” Benson asked.

“I fished it out one time, naturally.”

“To do what with it?”

Mayberry didn't answer. Paul was not looking at him, so for all he knew his friend had simply not thought of a response yet. But in Paul's mind, Mayberry or Benson did something lewd, and before he could stop himself Paul ducked out of the bunk and stood. “Will the two of you
shut up
?” he snapped.

“We were just being appreciative,” Benson said. “We didn't mean to rattle your cage.”

Paul squatted, his back to them. He zipped open his duffel and slid the photo between two layers of folded clothing. The silence was thick, and their eyes were on him. He felt like an ass.

“All right, I'm heading out,” said Mayberry after a minute, and Benson followed.

Paul sat back down on his bunk. The only sound in the room was the heater's weak rattle, never quite keeping the room at fifty degrees. By now he was too flustered to think of anything to write to Nat, anyway. “Be careful. I love you” was really all he wanted to say, but she was going to stop taking the message seriously if he sent it again, the same way people said “Drive safely!” to one another and then immediately disregarded it because they were just making a ten-minute trip to the convenience store.

After a few minutes, realizing the guys weren't returning, he opened the duffel bag and took out the photo again. There she was, nineteen-year-old Nat, smiling in front of the pleated curtain at the back of the booth. Her smile was almost shy; her eyes looked not into the camera but past it, at Paul, as if asking him why he'd wanted her to pose for this silly thing. He'd wanted a picture to take back to Fort Irwin with him.

He'd always loved Nat's tilted smile, the small dimple on the right where her mouth went up higher. Though the picture cut off just below her shoulders, he could see the straps of her swimsuit tied behind her neck. He remembered that purple swimsuit, its salt-and-coconut smell, and the way it sat right on top of her collarbone and tied at the nape of her neck. He wished, even now, that he could untie it. The thought of those straps sliding down over her shoulders, from this distance in space and time, was decadent and riveting.

He wondered when she'd gotten rid of that swimsuit and wished he'd asked her to keep it. But that was six years ago—so much had happened since then.

He'd met Nat on a liberty weekend while he was stationed at Fort Irwin. He and a couple of army buddies had made the drive out to San Diego, craving the ocean, craving mountains and color and being among people who weren't wearing tan uniforms. They felt nearly insane with joy as they approached that seaside town, where bright pink bougainvillea seemed to curve up every trellis and the ocean glinted an unbelievable, darker-than-sky blue.

Paul had seen the ocean before, but it still amazed him. It made the world seem vast. The guys around him were laughing, joking, hamming around, and showing their muscles. Paul sat, smoking, and listened to the ocean's thump and rush as it bashed the world clean. It was so opposite the quiet world of forest and pond he'd grown up in, where leaves sank and rotted into the water, butterflies sucked mud in silent groups, toads spun jelly tapes of spawn like rolls of film. The ocean turned over whole, tiny lives in an instant, without a care.

“That farmer's tan, Collier,” said one of the soldiers. “It's killing me.”

Paul flipped him off with a grin. This gesture did not come naturally to him, but he'd learned that it was a somehow satisfying response when someone made fun of you and you didn't feel like talking back. People always laughed and seemed pleased, which was strange.

There were eight or nine girls in a group near them, and a satellite pack of guys who seemed to know the girls and had set up their towels close to them. “Those chimps have moved in,” one of the soldiers said, eyeing the young men, who were batting a volleyball back and forth among themselves. “It's like they pissed a ring around that whole section of beach.”

“I think the girls have sighted us.”

Another soldier sprang up, suddenly vigorous. “I'm going in!” he said. “I'm going in that goddamn water.” And he ran for the ocean's edge like his pants were on fire.

Paul waded in a minute later, pointed his arms above his head, and made a shallow, bellyish dive. Everything was tinted green from below, the sun shining through turbulence, waves tossing gold dust everywhere. He bobbed out almost to his buddies, hoping they did not notice that he stayed where his toes could touch bottom.

“Well, I'll be. Look who's coming in,” one of them grinned. Paul followed his gaze. The group of girls moved from the beach down toward the water. They dithered a bit at the shore, dabbling their feet in the foam, sneaking glances at the young soldiers when they could.

It was a great feeling to be noticed, as Paul knew they would be. What they had was a fleeting thing. They were young, and on leave, and riveting in their carefree maleness. This was not wartime anymore, so there was no longer that urgency that had once melted women; it was more of a game now, with a less certain winner, and that made it more fun. The girls could toy with them a little.

And then the sun glinted off the back of something, some huge shiny gray thing, and Paul's heart stopped. Had he imagined it?

“Hey,” he said. Something in his voice made everyone look up.

He'd been sure it was a shark. Things could have gone very differently: He might have panicked, gone thrashing onto the beach screeching like a schoolgirl. He was spared by one of the young women who pointed and called, “Look, dolphins!”

“Dolphins,” Paul laughed with relief, as if he had known. And there were dozens of them, maybe twenty feet away, arcing in and out of the water like swiftly drawn commas. They were very fast. A few came close enough that Paul could see their squinty eyes, their blowholes like little cranial belly buttons, water coursing down sleek sides. Paul even forgot the girls for a moment, though they had drifted closer, watching. Within a couple of minutes, all the dolphins were past.

The spell was broken. Laughter and shouts could again be heard from shore. Paul turned back and saw all the bright pea-sized people lounging on the beach, unaware of what had just taken place. They would be no worse off for not knowing, but Paul felt privileged, enriched, somehow.

When he looked back to the people in the water with him he noticed that, just on the other side of his friends, a dark-haired girl had swum up. His eyes skipped over the guys and lingered on her. Before he could force himself to look away she had turned and smiled at him, a full smile, delighted at what they had seen. It dawned on Paul that she had skipped over the people in between them, too.

As evening fell, the large group of young men near them built a bonfire, and a huge, beefy blond fellow shouted, “Hey! You guys army?” When they hollered back yes, he invited them over. Paul spotted the dark-haired girl sitting across the fire from him, holding a beer and chatting with a friend. She did not appear to be attached to any fellow in particular, which cheered him.

He felt tongue-tied and out of place with these civilian kids. His graphed and gridded army life, with all its specifics and regulations and endless acronyms and isolated bases, seemed a world away. He was twenty years old. He was scuffed around the edges. Most of these kids were just a year or two younger than him but they seemed shiny and unmarred by life, new pennies found on a sidewalk.

Around the bonfire silhouettes lounged and reclined. Paul set his sights on the dark-haired girl, hesitated, and then walked over, perhaps too briskly. He sat beside her and pushed his feet into the sand. One of his small toes was weirdly shaped from childhood frostbite and he didn't particularly want her to see it.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, not seeming surprised by his arrival. She was sitting with a towel over her shoulders, her fingers laced around her knees. Her face and feet were shadowed then sparked with light, over and over.

“I'm Paul,” he said and held out his hand.

“Natalie,” she said, shaking it.

“That's a nice name.”

“Everyone calls me Nat, actually.”

“Nat is a nice name, too,” Paul said. A beat passed and his mind churned for something to say. “That was amazing, seeing those dolphins.”

“Wasn't it? They're beautiful. They come up and down this coast all the time.”

“I've never seen anything like that before,” Paul said, a little disappointed to hear that the event wasn't as rare as he'd thought.

“A couple years ago,” Nat said, “this huge pod of dolphins went by while I was out swimming. There must have been at least two hundred, jumping out of the water as far as you could see in either direction.”

“I wish I could have seen that.” He meant he wished he had been there with her to see it, realized she might have divined his meaning, and then felt mortified.

“I think they call it a dolphin stampede. Where are you from?” she asked. “The Midwest?”

“No. Maine.”

“I've heard it's beautiful there, with all the lighthouses and cliffs,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Paul, though he had never seen either of those things.

She'd grown up just a few miles away, she said, and had two brothers, much older. They had both moved out of the house, had children of their own, and she was the only one left with her parents. Her father owned a medical supply business, and her mother was a secretary.

The wind shifted direction, and she waved smoke out of her face with a small cough. “My parents think I'm spoiled. They grew up in Dayton, Ohio.” She shook her head, frowned. “They think I have no direction because I'm so much younger than my brothers and they've kind of let me run wild.”

“Oh. What does that mean?” Paul asked.

She chewed her thumbnail, thinking, and didn't seem to hear the question. “See, my mom wants me to have
some
direction, as she calls it, but not too much. Just enough to become a stenographer and get married. But I hate typing! I can't even type.”