V. (2 page)

That young wife, Paola. She'd said sixteen, but no way of telling because she'd been born just before the war and the building with her records destroyed, like most other buildings on the island of Malta.

Profane had been there when they met: the Metro Bar, on Strait Street. The Gut. Valletta, Malta.

"Chicago," from Pappy Hod in his gangster voice. "You heard of Chicago," meanwhile reaching sinister inside his jumper, a standard act for Pappy Hod all around the Med's littoral. He would pull out a handkerchief and not a heater or gat after all, blow his nose and laugh at whatever girl it happened to be sitting across the table. American movies had given them stereotypes all, all but Paola Maijstral, who continued to regard him then with nostrils unflared, eyebrows at dead center.

Pappy ended up borrowing 500 for 700 from Mac the cook's slush fund to bring Paola to the States.

Maybe it had only been a way for her to get to America - every Mediterranean barmaid's daftness - where there was enough food, warm clothes, heat all the time, buildings all in one piece. Pappy was to lie about her age to get her into the country. She could be any age she wanted. And you suspected any nationality, for Paola knew scraps it seemed of all tongues.

Pappy Hod had described her for the deck apes' amusement down in the boatswain's locker of the U.S.S. Scaffold. Speaking the while however with a peculiar tenderness, as of slowly coming aware, maybe even as the yarn unlaid, that sex might be more of a mystery than he'd foreseen and he would not after all know the score because that kind of score. wasn't written down in numbers. Which after forty-five years was nothing for any riggish Pappy Hod to be finding out.

"Good stuff," said Pig aside. Profane looked toward the back of the Sailor's Grave and saw her approaching now through the night's accumulated smoke. She looked like an East Main barmaid. What was it about the prairie hare in the snow, the tiger in tall grass and sunlight?

She smiled at Profane: sad, with an effort.

"You come back to re-enlist?"

"Just passing," Profane said.

"You come with me to the west coast," Pig said. "Ain't an SP car made that can take my Harley."

"Look, look," cried little Ploy, hopping up and down on one foot. "Not now, you guys. Stand by." He pointed. Mrs. Buffo had materialized on the bar, in her kimono. A hush fell over the place. There was a momentary truce between the jarheads and sailors blocking the doorway.

"Boys," Mrs. Buffo announced, "it's Christmas Eve." She produced the boatswain's pipe and began to play. The first notes quavered out fervent and flutelike over widened eyes and gaping mouths. Everyone in the Sailor's Grave listened awestruck, realizing gradually that she was playing It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, within the limited range of the boatswain's pipe. From way in the back, a young reserve who had once done night club acts around Philly began to sing softly along. Ploy's eyes shone. "It is the voice of an angel," he said.

They had reached the part that goes "Peace on the earth, good will to men, From Heav'n's all-gracious king," when Pig, a militant atheist, decided he could stand it no longer. "That," he announced in, a loud voice, "sounds like Chow Down." Mrs. Buffo and the reserve fell silent. A second passed before anybody got the message.

"Suck Hour!" screamed Ploy.

Which kind of broke the spell. The quick-thinking inmates of the Impulsive somehow coalesced in the sudden milling around of jolly jack tars, hoisted Ploy bodily and rushed with the little fellow toward the nearest nipple, in the van of the attack.

Mrs. Buffo, poised on her rampart like the trumpeter of Cracow, took the full impact of the onslaught, toppling over backwards into an ice-tub as the first wave came hurtling over the bar. Ploy, hands outstretched, was propelled over the top. He caught on to one of the tap handles and simultaneously his shipmates let go; his momentum carried him and the handle in a downward arc: beer began to gush from the foam rubber breast in a white cascade, washing over Ploy, Mrs. Buffo and two dozen sailors who had come around behind the bar in a flanking action and who were now battering one another into insensibility. The group who had carried Ploy over spread out and tried to corner more beer taps. Ploy's leading petty officer was on hands and knees holding Ploy's feet, ready to pull them out from under him, and take his striker's place when Ploy had had enough. The Impulsive detachment in their charge had formed a flying wedge. In their wake and through the breach clambered at least sixty more slavering bluejackets, kicking, clawing, side-arming, bellowing uproariously; some swinging beer bottles to clear a path.

Profane sat at the end of the bar, watching hand-tooled sea boots, bell-bottoms, rolled up levi cuffs; every now and again a drooling face at the end of a fallen body; broken beer bottles, tiny sawdust storms.

Soon he looked over; Paola was there, arms around his leg, cheek pressed against the black denim.

"It's awful," she said.

"Oh," said Profane. He patted her head.

"Peace," she sighed. "Isn't that what we all want, Benny? Just a little peace. Nobody jumping out and biting you on the ass."

"Hush," said Profane, "look: someone has just walloped Dewey Gland in the stomach with his own guitar."

Paola murmured against his leg. They sat quiet, without raising their eyes to watch the carnage going on above them. Mrs. Buffo had undertaken a crying jag. Inhuman blubberings beat against and rose from behind the old imitation mahogany of the bar.

Pig had moved aside two dozen beer glasses and seated himself on a ledge behind the bar. In times of crisis he preferred to sit in as voyeur. He gazed eagerly as his shipmates grappled shoatlike after the seven geysers below him. Beer had soaked down most of the sawdust behind the bar: skirmishes and amateur footwork were now scribbling it into alien hieroglyphics.

Outside came sirens, whistles, running feet. "Oh, oh," said Pig. He hopped clown from the shelf, made his way around the end of the bar to Profane and Paola. "Hey, ace," he said, cool and slitting his eyes as if the wind blew into them. "The sheriff is coming."

"Back way," said Profane.

"Bring the broad," said Pig.

The three of them ran broken-field through a roomful of teeming bodies. On the way they picked up Dewey Gland. By the time the Shore Patrol had crashed into the Sailor's Grave, night sticks flailing, the four found themselves running down an alley parallel to East Main. "Where we going," Profane said. "The way we're heading," said Pig. "Move your ass."

II

Where they ended up finally was an apartment in Newport News, inhabited by four WAVE lieutenants and a switchman at the coal piers (friend of Pig's) named Morris Teflon, who was a sort of house father. The week between Christmas and New Year's Day was spent drunk enough to know that's what they were. Nobody in the house seemed to object hen they all moved in.

An unfortunate habit of Teflon's drew Profane and Paola together, though neither wanted that. Teflon had a camera: Leica, procured half-legally overseas by a Navy friend. On weekends when business was good and guinea red wine lashing around like the wave from a heavy merchantman, Teflon would sling the camera round his neck and go a-roving from bed to bed, taking pictures. These he sold to avid sailors at the lower end of East Main.

It happened that Paola Hod, nee Maijstral, cast loose at her own whim early from the security of Pappy Hod's bed and late from the half-home of the Sailor's Grave, was now in a state of shock which endowed Profane with all manner of healing and sympathetic talents he didn't really possess.

"You're all I have," she warned him. "Be good to me." They would sit around a table in Teflon's kitchen: Pig Bodine and Dewey Gland facing them one each like partners at bridge, a vodka bottle in the middle. Nobody would talk except to argue about what they would mix the vodka with next when what they had ran out. That week they tried milk, canned vegetable soup, finally the juice from a dried-up piece of watermelon which was all Teflon had left in the refrigerator. Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible. Picking the seeds out of the vodka proved also to be a problem, and resulted in a growing, mutual ill-will.

Part of the trouble was that Pig and Dewey both had eyes for Paola. Every night they would approach Profane as a committee and ask for seconds.

"She's trying to recover from men," Profane tried to say. Pig would either reject this or take it as an insult to Pappy Hod his old superior.

Truth of it was Profane wasn't getting any. Though it became hard to tell what Paola wanted.

"What do you mean," Profane said. "Be good to you."

"What Pappy Hod wasn't," she said. He soon gave up trying to decode her several hankerings. She would on occasion come up with all sorts of weird tales of infidelity, punchings-in-the-mouth, drunken abuse. Having clamped down, chipped, wire-brushed, painted and chipped again under Pappy Hod for four years Profane would believe about half. Half because a woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria:

Demain le noir matin,

Je fermerai la porte

Au nez des annees mortes;

J'irai par les chemins.

Je mendierai ma vie

Sur la terre et sur l'onde,

Du vieux au nouveau monde . . .

He had been short and built like the island of Malta itself: an inscrutable heart. She'd had only one night with him. Then he was off to the Piraeus.

Tomorrow, the black morning, I close the door in the face of the dead years. I will go on the road, bum my way over and sea, from the old to the new world . . . .

She taught Dewey Gland the chord changes and so they all round the table of Teflon's wintry kitchen, while four gas flames on the stove ate up their oxygen; and sang, and sang. When Profane watched her eyes he thought she dreamed of the para - probably a man-of-no-politics as brave as anyone ever is in combat: but tired, was all, tired of relocating native villages and devising barbarities in the morning as brutal as'd come from the F.L.N. the night before. She wore a Miraculous Medal round her neck (given to her, maybe, by some random sailor she reminded of a good Catholic girl back in the States where sex is for free - or for marriage?). What sort of Catholic was she? Profane, who was only half Catholic (mother Jewish), whose morality was fragmentary (being derived from experience and not much of it), wondered what quaint Jesuit arguments had led her to come away with him, refuse to share a bed but still ask him to "be good."

The night before New Year's Eve they wandered away from the kitchen and out to a kosher delicatessen a few blocks away. On returning to Teflon's they found Pig and Dewey gone: "Gone out to get drunk," said the note. The place was lit up all Xmasy, a radio turned to WAVY and Pat Boone in one bedroom, sounds of objects being thrown in another. Somehow the young couple had wandered into a darkened room with this

"No," she said.

"Meaning yes."

Groan, went the bed. Before either of them knew it:

Click, went Teflon's Leica.

Profane did what was expected of him: came roaring off the bed, arm terminating in a fist. Teflon dodged it easily. "Now, now," he chuckled.

Outraged privacy was not so important; but the interruption had come just before the Big Moment.

"You don't mind," Teflon was telling him. Paola was hurrying into clothes.

"Out in the snow," Profane said, "is where that camera, Teflon, is sending us:"

"Here:" opened the camera, handed Profane the film, "you're going to be a horse's ass about it."

Profane took the film but couldn't back down. So he dressed and topped off with the cowboy hat. Paola had put on a Navy greatcoat, too big for her.

"Out," Profane cried, "in the snow." Which in fact there was. They caught a ferry over to Norfolk and sat topside drinking black coffee out of paper cups and watching snow-shrouds flap silent against the big windows. There was nothing else to look at but a bum on a bench facing them, and each other. The engine thumped and labored down below, they could feel it through their buttocks, but neither could think of anything to say.

"Did you want to stay," he asked.

"No, no," she shivered, a discreet foot of worn bench between them. He had no impulse to bring her closer. "Whatever you decide."

Madonna, he thought, I have a dependent now.

"What are you shivering for. It's warm enough in here."

She shook her head no (whatever that meant), staring at the toes of her galoshes. After a while Profane got up and went out on deck.

Snow falling lazy on the water made 11 P.M. look like a twilight or an eclipse. Overhead every few seconds a horn sounded off to warn away anything on collision course. But yet as if there were nothing in this roads after all but ships, untenanted, inanimate, making noises at each other which meant nothing more than the turbulence of the screws or the snow-hiss on the water. And Profane all alone in it.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and there he'd be, in alien country.

But the door behind him opened again. Soon he felt Paola's gloveless hands slipped under his arms, her cheek against his back. His mental eye withdrew, watching their still-life as a stranger might. But she didn't help the scene be any less alien. They kept like that till the other side, the ferry entered the slip, and chains clanked, car ignitions whined, motors started.

They rode the bus into town, wordless; alit near the Monticello Hotel and set out for East Main to find Pig and Dewey. The Sailor's Grave was dark, the first time Profane could remember. The cops must have closed it up.

They found Pig next door in Chester's Hillbilly Haven. Dewey was sitting in with the band. "Party, party," cried Pig.