Gone to Soldiers (19 page)

“If you're low on sugar, I imagine the Garfinkles would let you have some maple syrup. We've always bought our syrup from them.” He tasted the pears, coughed slightly. “Is that the last of the rum?”

“Afraid so,” she said briskly. With little enthusiasm she spooned up her first bite of pear. She had put in more rum than she had realized. The effect was raw but not unpleasing, at least to her who had spent the day in an unheated aircraft much colder than the fields below it. Once in a while The Professor had a bottle of wine, which he stood beside his plate, and from which he occasionally poured her a sparing glass. The taste of any spirits always made her think of Zach and the days when Jeff and he had been always together and when she had been with them whenever they would endure her company. If I ever leave home, she thought, I will fly airplanes and drink whiskey. She smiled.

The Professor asked, “Do you like it?”

“Yes, I do. If it doesn't please you, I'm sorry, but just leave it and I'll eat it.”

As she cleared the table, she did just that, taking the rummy syrup he had left in his dish and quaffing it from a glass as she scraped and stacked the dishes for washing. They had all gone up on Jumpers Mountain one June night in Zach's junior year and Zach had passed around a silver flask in the shape of a fish from which they had each in turn drunk gin. The gin had made her shudder, but she had felt as if she were sipping the blood of adulthood. It was a rite of passage. She had been in love with Zach and her lips touching the silver of the flask which his mouth had caressed only the moment before had made her more drunken than the alcohol.

The moon was the color of his flask and seemed to float like a fish in a light haze. In town there had been a rich and cloying scent of private but the air here smelled of balsam and spruce. Up on the open cliffs of the mountain they watched the moon just a day short of full rising and she felt as if she looked the moon in the face from the same height.

It had not been foolish to love Zach: she ought to have adored him if only out of the simplest gratitude, for he had shown her the way out of her caterpillar-hood and if she still lived mostly in a cocoon, at least she knew what she wanted to be, like the moon herself, a huntress roaming free through the mountains of the clouds and the rivers of the wind.

Once or twice when she had been behind the wheel of one of Zach's sleek fast cars, she had experienced a joy of extension, of becoming one with a fine and powerful machine that carried her senses beyond herself as it responded to her decisions, her will, her skill. She was not a bad driver, but a sports car seemed inferior to the command of space in flying. The lightest, flimsiest plane with a forty-horsepower engine could penetrate a dimension the most expensive racing Ferrari in the world was denied.

No matter how meager her life at times, she was fully half owner of a plane. She had bought Steve out of his quarter when he had enlisted. The other owner, a lawyer, flew mostly for relaxation and occasionally to visit a client, when that amused him. She felt that the plane was really hers, because she was the one who flew it most of the time and she was the one who repaired it and worked on it and coddled it. Someday she would buy out the lawyer altogether. He talked of getting something fancier after the war. She could keep this one running for years. If she hurried with the dishes, she could manage to type for at least two hours, although her hands were swollen from the cold in the plane. Never mind. She would manage.

The day she got her commercial license finally she was going up on Jumpers Mountain, and she was going to find a bottle of whiskey or gin somewhere, and she was going to sit and sing songs and salute the moon. She would have her celebration. She would tell Jeff, who would rejoice with her, if only long distance. She would then have done one fine thing.

DUVEY 1

Many a Stormy Sea Will Blow

Duvey spent the first three months of 1942 on the Caribbean run, so he was damned glad to ship out on the North Atlantic convoy route instead. He had been working tankers, but no more. He had lost five friends he knew about and probably more he hadn't found out yet. All his pals had cashed in on tankers torpedoed offshore since January, hit close enough to the American shore to smell it and see the lights. Cape Hatteras was the worst, but the whole coast was deadly.

A woman he met in a bar told him that her mother lived in Vero Beach where the Dodgers wintered, and every morning on the beach arms, ears, headless torsos washed up with the twisted metal. Mostly the tanker crew went up in a great whoosh of flame and maybe that was lucky, because the guys who dived off, he had helped fish some of them out of the sea. He'd choose to go up all at once, rather than dive into a burning sea or be “saved” with burns over his whole body, to die slowly in a hospital ward or to hobble around Detroit, the local bogeyman.

The U-boats were having the war all their own way, lurking off the coast and playing shooting gallery with the tankers against the lights of Miami, Charleston, Savannah, New York. The cities weren't even blacked out. Seamen's lives were cheap. The heroes were in the Army and Navy, but the seamen were dying at much higher rates, and if anybody onshore thought the war would be won without the food, the oil, the matériel they were carrying, they were as crazy as he had always thought most people to be. If England was going to hold out and if the United States was going to get into the war effectively, the ships had to deliver their cargo.

He had made his choice. He was not going to dress up like a brass monkey and salute some asshole who happened to have gone to Annapolis. He had always been a working stiff and he would stay one. This was the real work of the war, as he understood it, and he was used to seeing cities from their ports and their bottom sides. They'd fought and pissed blood for their union, and they were going to war under union rules and union wages. The National Maritime, a CIO union like Tata's, had taken them from forty dollars a month for lying in garbage and filth to a hundred dollars a month and now they had hazardous bonus pay of another hundred. A lot of jerks behind desks wanted to cut their wages, but when the shipowners gave back the huge profits they were making, then they'd take a pay cut: that's what the union said, and that's what he said.

When he thought of it, he scrawled a letter home, because he didn't want Mama worrying. He was careful what he said, filling his letters with questions and tall tales. She thought he was safe out of the Navy because he wouldn't have to fight. Better she thought that way. He would say nothing to set her wise. He had always brought trouble home to her, but he didn't like to. As the eldest, he knew how difficult her life had been.

He was a hard case in his way, for sure, grown up in the basement of the Depression and pinched for almost everything he might have wanted. Arty couldn't see past the end of his nose. Ruthie might make something of herself. She had a streak of goody-goodyness that made him puke, but she was a straight kid and helped Mama. She might even get through college some year, the first graduate in their family, if she wasn't fool enough to get married. Marriage finished people off. Women started having babies and pretty soon they looked just like their mothers and had nothing to say but what their mothers had said. Men got that worn-down stooped look and started bulging over their belts.

It wasn't for him. He'd never even come close. He liked women he wasn't about to bring home. The only kind of girl worth the bother was one used to supporting herself, a waitress or a bar girl or a manicurist or a whore who didn't belong to a pimp, one who knew how to take care of herself so she didn't bring you a disease. The sweetest girl he'd ever had was colored, Delora with coppery skin and long fine, fine legs and an ass she only had to carry down the street to bring men to their knees. But having a colored girl was trouble. They almost couldn't go anyplace for a meal or a drink without him getting into fights with white jerks or fights with colored who didn't want him messing with their women, they said, as if any woman of the same color belonged to them as a set. He didn't mind a scrap, but not every time they left the house.

He'd grown up near colored, and he could never understand the fuss whites made. Take a Russian Jew and a Swede, or a Scotsman and a Sicilian, and they were just as different. But every time you tried to talk to a guy who was nutso on the subject, he would go on about, Would you want one to marry your sister? As if that's all those black guys were wanting all the time, to come and marry somebody's cross-eyed gimpy sister. Sure, they'd be curious to get in bed with a white woman the same as he'd been curious about a colored woman the first time, but after that it was an individual smile or way of walking or a line that made you laugh that hooked you.

Detroit had a big colored population, growing all the time because the colored came up from their dead-end lives in the South to get work in the factories. He figured that like the Jews, probably the smartest ones were those who wouldn't take it anymore in the black equivalent of the shtetl and just had to find someplace they could get ahead and make a decent life. The colored in Detroit were often smart, snappy, lively people who walked around with a load of anger for the shit they had to take.

There were six black guys on the
Montauk
, down in the engine room. They kept to themselves mostly, and while he passed the time of day with them when they came face-to-face, he didn't have much to do with them. There was one other Jew on board, the radioman, but he was an officer. If somebody asked him if he was a Jew, he said he was, but he never volunteered the information unless he knew he was talking to another Jew. You said you were a Jew, they wanted to start in on you. They thought all Jews were patsies and you had to be twice as tough.

Guys asked him about himself, he said, “I'm from Detroit, Jack, where the cars are fast and the women are faster. We're born on wheels and we burn alcohol like gas.” That gave them a handle.

Duvey's nickname was Dave the Rave because of his success with women in port. Duvey had figured out while he was still in high school that the only women worth his time wanted it as much as he did, and so it was a matter of settling that you liked each other enough and when and where, and not a matter of begging and arm-twisting and promising what you hadn't the wherewithal to deliver, Christmas in July.

April 24 the convoy formed up. His ship was heavy with wheat, loaded in Montreal. They had sailed down the St. Lawrence, then waited off Halifax where this convoy was organized. Convoy HX-152 was impressive as it sailed out of the roads: thirty-four ships, escorted by an aged destroyer and three corvettes, about which sailors said they would roll their guts out on wet grass. The convoy was a handsome sight, a parade of ships out into the Atlantic with a light chop and mild sun on their faces. US-PBY Catalina patrol planes kept an eye on them from above. There was a former liner transporting Canadian troops, a tanker, a bunch of old tramps of varying registries, nationalities and degree of seaworthiness, a tidy Norwegian freighter with its own deck guns, looming freighters sprouting cargo booms.

The
Montauk
itself was the newest boat he'd ever sailed on, a Liberty ship that had only gone out twice before. All the Liberty ships were slow, but they were okay, reliable unless something hit them amidships, in which case they broke open like a loaf of sliced bread. The crew's quarters were in the deckhouse, four bunks to a room, forty-four on board including the officers. The deck machinery was steam driven and the engine was good. There were even tiled showers for the men. He'd been on ships where a bucket was all the clean you got.

Fog shrouded them on the second day, till they couldn't see their neighbors to either side or in front or back. Convoying was only beginning on the Caribbean and coastal routes, so it was new to Duvey. On the Great Lakes, you'd see another ship in the Detroit River or in the locks, but out on the lakes, you were never within hailing distance. It alarmed him to travel in such a herd of unwieldy cargo ships in a heavy fog, each ship closer to the others than he found safe or comfortable. They had no escort of planes overhead to watch for U-boats, but the day passed without an attack. The fog closed in around them thick and clammy and dank, air that felt like gaseous ice. Two of the ships suffered a near collision. One of the corvettes had to hang back to round up stragglers.

They continued without air cover for the next four days, until at midnight on April 29/30, Duvey heard an explosion. Even through the fog he could see a column of flames that meant a tanker had been hit, probably the
Fitzpatrick
. He could hear firing. The destroyer was laying depth charges on the sub, by the sound of it. Heavy smoke drifted across the water, mixed with fog. The reek of petroleum made him feel a little sick. He heard another heavy explosion. His body stiffened against the impact. Any minute now the
Montauk
might be next. Automatically he touched the buttoned pocket with his papers and his cash tied in a knotted condom. If he survived torpedoing, he would have them; if he didn't and the body washed up, he'd be identified.

The destroyer reported oil release from depth-charging a U-boat, but half an hour later, the
Belle Starr
was torpedoed. She was badly damaged and drifting. The
Montauk
had to detour around.

With no moon, no stars, no lights on any of the ships, they moved into a murk of smoke from burning ships and the damned smothering fog. All the ships were chattering to each other, for if they had tried to observe radio silence, they would have rammed each other and sailed right over the ship in front. That meant the U-boats, who were operating in one of the wolf packs he had been hearing scuttlebutt about, could home in on the signals of each ship in turn. The corvettes were bouncing around chasing after the subs like harrying dogs.

In a short while the
Montauk
began to cross debris, the bits and pieces of what had been that day a ship full of living seamen. Vaguely to the right they could see flames on the waters, the sea itself on fire, blurred by the fog. Men were screaming over there. They began seeing the little red lights of seamen in the water, the lights that bobbed on their life jackets. During an attack they were not supposed to pick up survivors, but the captain decided since they weren't under direct attack, they'd get whoever they could.