The Last Worthless Evening (4 page)

“You really like it?”

“It's a strong name.”

“That's what I've been thinking.”

“Jason, Louisa, and Jimmy Brooks. Shit. I got to have a kid.”

“A boy?”

The waitress came and I gave her all my yen but the taxi fare, a
beau geste
of a tip. I didn't count it; her eyes and smile and repeated
arrigatos
told me.

“Boy, girl,” I said. “Doesn't matter. Hell, two or three of each.”

In the taxi, one of those blurred rides when you're drunk and know the motion of the car will get you there, but that's all you know, sitting in that speeding and slowing forward movement over streets and past lighted bars you don't see and would not recognize anyway, Willie said: “Okay, let me see it.”

“See what?”

“That knife.”

“Oh.” I lifted and turned my hips and pulled the knife from my pocket. “Here.”

He held it in front of his face, in the light from cars and the street, and looked at its brown wooden handle and dark gray folded blade.

“It's not even long.”

“Legal size. I told you it's—”

“Yes, I know. How did it feel?”

He was still looking at the knife, holding it in two hands now, a thumb and forefinger at either end.

“I had the point at his artery. I pressed it a little, not enough to even draw blood.”

“Was he bigger than you?”

“I don't know. All I saw was his eyes. And how still he was. He wasn't looking at me. His eyes went down and to his left. Toward the knife. Course he couldn't see it.”

“I guess that's where a man would look.”

“It was pure. My feelings. Like everything was in harmony, for the first time in my life. Everything I'd ever seen or heard of done to Negroes. Right there in that fucker's face. In his throat.”

He lowered the knife to his lap, and held it in one open hand in the dark beneath the car window.

“And it was like it was just him and me. Finally it was all concrete, all defined in one man. And I had him. For an end to all of it. It was a fucking catharsis, is what it was.”

He looked down at the knife, and unfolded the blade.

“It's just a plain old knife,” he said. “Carbon steel.” He moved his thumb across the edge of the blade. “Sharp, too.”

“It needs some work. But I haven't been fishing in—Goddammit, how can you live on a ship and never get a chance to fish?”

We had to hold the rails of the brow as we climbed it to the waiting sober Officer of the Deck, and next morning was …

16 August 1961
Iwakuni, at anchor

Hello Camille:

Last night was the ship's officers' party for the Air Group. I'm alone now in our stateroom, waiting for dinner. I don't know where Willie is. This morning when the alarm rang he turned it off and went back to sleep, and I shaved and dressed and went to work. He either skipped lunch or was on liberty today and went ashore to walk around Iwakuni.

It was a formal party. No civilian jackets and ties like they make us wear off the base so communists won't know we're officers and kidnap us and torture all manner of information from us. I have no information, except that we're not supposed to bring nuclear weapons into a Japanese port, but that's what our planes carry and I assume when officers of the Japanese National Defense Force come aboard as guests they know our planes carry nuclear bombs, and I further assume that only the Japanese people don't know this, and if there are any communists waiting in alleys they're not going to grab one Cajun lieutenant (j.g.) and interrogate his young ass about what they already know. Only a few senior officers are supposed to know what our next Japanese port will be, but the bar girls do: the ones in Yokosuka will say, “You go Sasebo now,” and in Sasebo they say, “
Lanegah
go Kobe,” and so on. No: the Navy doesn't allow us to wear uniforms in town because what they're really afraid of is an identifiable Naval officer becoming disgracefully drunk in public. Last night's party was confined to the base: at the Officers' Club, and we wore our whites.

Willie and I dressed together, fastened each other's high stiff collars, then with his cap under his arm Willie stood before the mirror above the lavatory. In the glass were his face, the collar that stiffened his neck, his broad shoulders in white and the navy-blue shoulder boards with the gold stripe and a half, and his deep white chest with the brass buttons going down it to his narrow waist and hips, which did not show in the mirror. I stood to his side, looking from him to his reflection, back to him. An expression was forming on his face, and I waited. Then he grinned.

“I look like a chocolate sundae,” he said, and laughed, shortly, and in his throat.

“May as well put on the cap and gloves,” I said. “Go all the way.”

“Gloves?”

“I think we have to carry the fuckers.”

“Shit. I forgot to wash them.”

I was about to say it, but he looked away from the mirror, at me, as though he could read the words across my brow.

“I know,” he said. “No one will notice.”

“They won't be
on
your hands. Just
in
one of them.”

“Maybe I should have joined the Air Force.”

“Maybe they have whites too.”

“We still talking uniforms?”

“I think we're talking gin. Let's do it to it.”

He put on his cap, adjusting it in the mirror, and took a nearly immaculate pair of white gloves from the shelf of his wall locker, and we left the room and climbed ladders and walked passageways and climbed ladders to the quarterdeck, where a lucky ensign was the OOD, though he probably thought he was missing festivities rather than being spared them, and we smartly saluted and as smartly requested permission to leave the ship, then faced the stern and saluted the flag, and went down the accommodation ladder and joined the others sitting in the officers' launch, gently rolling in the
Ranger's
shadow. When the coxswain got underway we all took off our caps and held them, and Willie and I turned our faces to the sunlit breeze. Japanese taxis waited at the pier and took us to the club. Willie and I stayed outside for a cigarette in the setting sun. Then we went in, to the long wide room reserved for the party. So already you can see it: hundreds of white uniforms and Caucasian faces, though few truly white but pink, florid, olive, tan, all colored by duty at sea or in the air or booze or ancestral blood, and the three black faces: the flight surgeon and the personnel officer from the Air Group, and Willie: faces which in truth looked better than all of ours, the black skin richer, somehow stronger, juxtaposed with the length and breadth and depth of the uniforms as white as altar cloths.

Late in the party Willie talked to the wrong man; or the lieutenant-commander, a pilot, saw him, stalked him, cornered him. By the time I joined them, and stayed for the rest of it, then went outside with Willie, then sat beside him in the taxi and then on the launch going out to the lights and silhouette of the ship, there was no longer reason to ask who had, as the saying goes, struck up the conversation.
Struck
is the right word, and I suspect it was the lieutenant-commander who, compelled by booze and the undeniable voices in his blood, saw Willie for the twelfth or twentieth time of the evening, and went to him. During the entire party, pilots talked to each other in groups, and often a hand was in the air, moving like a jet turning, diving, climbing. We of the ship's company stayed with each other too, except the Captain and Executive Officer, who talked with the Air Group Commander and his squadron commanders; and the Admiral, who moved about, patting people's backs, always with that smile of authority, confident of welcome, confident that no one will say or do anything to alter the spreading lips, the mellow voice. I imagine the lieutenant-commander standing at the bar, talking with pilots, glancing to his side and seeing Willie again, and this time he had to make his congee from the gold-winged brethren and follow or be drawn by his history. I see his walk across the room as a series of geometric angles and half-circles around men standing unnaturally erect while talking shop. Yet his true azimuth, that of his heart, was as straight as a carpenter's chalk line.

Willie and I had started drinking together, but the hors d'oeuvres table, the bar, and other friends separated us for a drink, for two, until gradually we were together only for a few minutes at a time, and I had forgotten him for perhaps a half-hour when I saw them. They were some seventy feet away, a young forest of white uniforms between us. They were of equal height, Willie standing straight, the lieutenant-commander leaning toward him, his sunburned face close to Willie's, his hands moving: the one with the drink swinging back and forth as he spoke, or his free hand rising and falling. Willie's left arm was at his side; he held a drink in his right hand, his arm at a forty-five-degree angle, near-motionless, as though he were assuming some military stance. Twice, as I watched, he raised the glass and sipped; then he lowered the drink and his elbow stopped his forearm and held it level, stationary. I left the people I was with and went to him, my route as angled and skirting as I have imagined the lieutenant-commander's was, and my true course as straight as I have imagined his, and also following or being drawn by history.

Beneath the lieutenant-commander's gold pilot's wings were ribbons from Korea; he stopped talking to turn, hear my name from Willie, shake my hand as Willie said: “And this is Lieutenant-Commander Percy.” His eyes were brown and had that wet brightness, that intensity, of alcohol and vocal excitement. He said: “Pleased to meet you, Gerry.” My concern for Willie dissolved in adrenaline. Percy was from the South. Then I knew I had already known it, from his lips: they were thin and shaped by his pronunciation into a near-pout, as if they slouched toward his chin, and their corners drooped. They would have been sensual, were it not for a lethargic certainty about them, making him look pampered. They also grinned widely. And when he was intent, as he listened to my name and looked me up and down without appearing to, weighing my character, my worth as an officer, and later as he listened to me, or to Willie the one time he spoke, his lips were straight and grim, a mouth you would expect beneath eyes looking at you over a pistol barrel. I was trying to place his drawl when Willie said: “The Lieutenant-Commander is from Georgia.”

“Atlanta?” I said.

“Oh hell no. Place called Rome. Little place. You're a Southern boy yourself.”

“Yes sir. Louisiana. Sorry I said Atlanta. I'm from Lafayette— a little place—but people always think I'm from New Orleans. I mean even after I've told them.”

“That's because they don't know us. Atlanta. New Orleans. Memphis. Words to them. Cities. They don't know our culture.”

“Little Rock,” I said.

He missed the expression on my face (or the one I felt there) and the tone of my voice (or the one I heard there); I believed I was cold and challenging.

“Right,” Percy said. “Little Rock. They saw it on
T-V
. Saw the 82nd Airborne following the orders of their Commander-in-Chief.” He looked at Willie. “Which I would have done too. Like that.” He snapped his thumb and a finger damp from stirring his bourbon and ice, then with his cocktail napkin wiped the drops from his palm. (Yes: I am not adding that as a prop; I could smell his drink, probably sour mash.) He wore a gold wedding ring. “Same as if Kennedy sends me to Russia. People up North didn't see Little Rock. They saw a dumb governor and some dumb high-school kids and God knows what all, come to look at the soldiers. But they didn't see our culture, that's what they don't know anything about. Little places like Rome and Lafayette. In the bayou country, weren't you?”

“Yes sir.”

“How long you been in now?”

“Four years and a couple of months.”

His eyebrows raised and he cocked his head, looking at me with something like warmth. Hair in his eyebrows was bleached by the sun, but they were mostly brown, like his short hair.

“Almost a lieutenant. You staying in, then?”

“Yes sir.”

“You two are roommates.”

“Willie puts up with me.”

“See?” He looked at Willie, then back to me. “You two boys're shipmates. Liberty buddies. Go ashore and get drunk together. Right?”

I told him yes, sir, we did some of that.

“That's what I been telling Willie here.” He looked at Willie; then he shifted his feet to face him, leaving me as a point in the triangle, watching them. “The real Southerner is like Gerry. Not some poor ignorant son of a bitch that can't get along with Jesus Christ Himself, and's never learned you judge a man by what he is. Not by what he looks like. Or what he's called. Course I worked with more colored people growing up back home than I have in the Navy. But that'll change. Among the officers, I mean. We got plenty enlisted colored people.”

“Negroes,” I said.

He looked at me, with those shining eyes. Then his lips changed. They were open, perhaps on the last syllable of
people
. But they closed, straightened, and for a moment I could sense his absolute command over the demons in his soul. Then he grinned and with a turn of the head brought the grin to Willie. I watched Willie.

“Fine with me,” Percy said. “I don't care what a man wants to be called. Long as he does his work, and does it the best he can. ‘Sailor' is what I call them, whether they're black or purple or green. Or a pale scrawny white boy grew up in New York City.
But
—” he raised his glass so it was level with Willie's face, his nose and eyes, and pointed the forefinger. Willie looked at it. “
But
. If they fuck up, I come down. And I mean I come down hard. We got planes to fly, Willie. Them's not laying hens on that flight deck. And there's pilots in them. And two other men aboard the big ones. And we know what all those planes are for: one purpose, and one purpose alone. Get the fuck on that catapult and up in the air and drop the loads. There won't be a ship left to come home to. You know that. Gerry knows that. You boys'll get nuked up the ass by the big fish. About thirty minutes after the whistle blows. At
most
. And we'll run out of fuel. But
af
ter Moscow. We all know that. So when a sailor fucks up I call him a bunch of things. But I'll tell you this: if that man is a Negrah, Walt Percy don't call him a nigger. I might call him a worthless dumb son of a bitch. But not nigger. If you'll pardon the word. Because I'm trying to make a point.”