The Last Worthless Evening (6 page)

So I went to him, as quickly as I could, holding level the cold glasses, while gin and tonic dripped down their sides onto my hands, and I kept my gloves pressed between my bicep and ribs. I could not hear my feet on the grass and earth. I heard beyond the wall laughter and voices without words, sounds that had been merry until Percy, but were mocking now.
So
, I said to myself.
This is what it is. To be outside
. I could hear our drinks too: their soft fizz and the dull clicking of ice in liquid. Willie knew I was coming. I don't believe he could hear me, but he knew. When I drew within five or six paces of him, walking on his right so I could step beside him and put a drink into his hand free of gloves, I saw that, while his bent neck and head were nearly still, his shoulders and his arms at his sides were moving up and down, not jerking, but with the involuntary and rhythmless motion of resisted weeping. Then I was beside him. I did not want to violate him by looking at his face, but my eyes moved to it and quickly away from the tears on his cheeks, and I looked down at his hand. I lowered the drink in my right hand, touched the knuckles and back of his hand with it. We were still walking. He took the drink and brought it to his lips, sniffing deeply and spitting before his first swallow. I took my gloves from under my arm, then could drink. He stopped and said: “I'm out of cigarettes.”

Still he looked ahead. I shifted my drink to the hand with the gloves and pulled a flattened pack from my trouser pocket and shook it till a cigarette pointed at Willie. He turned to me and took it. But as with my lips I pulled another from the pack, he faced again the direction he had walked. I held my lighter to his cigarette, then to mine, and drank with my gloves wrapped around my glass, as Willie did. I faced his side, watching now his wet eyes and cheeks, his open mouth breathing against the tears he still held back.

“I
hate
white people,” he said, and they came then, loudly, his waist bending, straightening, bending, his upper arms pressed tightly against his sides, while his hands with drink and cigarette trembled beneath his face. Now I could not look away from that face. Nor could I touch him. All my life I have seen girls and boys and women cry, but until last night the only man I had seen cry—really cry, not damp eyes at a movie's end or when a man is talking with love about one of his children—was Daddy the night his brother died. I was fourteen then, and all I could do was sit across the room and watch him convulse in his chair, trying to keep his palms over his face, but his neck writhed away from them, his arms fell to his heart, his belly, and pressed them. Yet I have seen my mother and aunts and sisters and you crying at some pain of the heart, even keening, and still able to walk, to move from one room to another, even to the kitchen to boil water and make coffee or tea, even to speak with coherence—broken by sobs, yes, but still coherence. Yet I've never seen a man do that. Willie's face was both younger and older than he was. His control of it while listening to Percy was gone, and with that control something else was gone too, as if the flow of tears and the wet moaning—
oh oh aah
—as he both fought and surrendered to crying, were taking from him all the strength he had developed in his twenty-five years on earth: not only the strength to be resilient, but to be humorous too, and gentle. He had the face of a brokenhearted child. Yet at the same time he looked old: old as the infirm look, finished, done in by something as inexorable as nature.

Then I was touching him, and it was my flesh that closed the short space between us while my mind held back, bound by its inertia, by its wish that none of this from the seventeenth century until 1961 had ever happened in America, by its sad desire to be no part of it, to have seen and heard none of it since my birth in 1936, and by its conviction that the pigmentation I was born with was, against my strongest will, responsible for every tear falling from his face, every moan he could not contain, every quick and terrible motion of his arms and head and stomach and chest, so that he looked like a man fighting for his life against an enemy neither visible nor large: some preternatural opponent clawing and biting the skin and bone that covered Willie's heart. But my flesh ignored my mind. It dropped my cigarette, and my left hand and arm slid across Willie's back, drawing my body to his, my hand pushing itself between his left arm and side, and though I did not weep but only watched his face, my body moved as though it wept with him, for I held him so tightly, and my torso rocked back and forth, and my waist bent and straightened, and pulled my face down and up.

“All of you,” he said. His eyes were closed. I watched their lids, and his open mouth that still held tears, but his voice was more dry now. Then abruptly he looked at me. I was startled out of the silence our bodies had given my mind, and I could feel it gathering itself again to pull me away from Willie, to make again that space between our shoulders and sides and arms so I would stand alone and become under the night sky of Japan the apotheosis of slave traders and owners and the Klan and murderers and Negro-beaters and those who inflict their torment economically, or with the tongue, or with silence, and eyes that look at a Negro as if he were not even a tree or rain but only air. So I held him more tightly. My squeeze made him gasp, and with his sound my brain emptied, was pure, clean, primordial, and Willie's eyes changed: their bright anguish softened, and they focused on my face, and I felt, I
knew
, Camille, that suddenly he saw not a white man but me.

“I have to tell Jimmy,” he said. He stopped to breathe: a deep breath, then another. If all his tears had not been spent, he would have cried again. But only his voice did: soft, nearly a whisper. “Someday I have to tell my son he's a nigger.” Again he breathed. Then his right arm pushed backward between us, and I lightened my grip on him so it could move around my waist, and then I tightly held him as his hand holding his drink pressed into my right side, and his arm pulled me to him. “One year old. I have to tell him, Gerry. Soon. Too soon. But before he finds out.”

Our free arms rose together as we turned to face each other and embraced with both arms and I could not hear the party inside, only our breathing and the faint scraping of our whiskered cheeks. We stood for a minute, perhaps less. Then we stepped back and drank, our glasses lacking at least a swallow spilled, and I drew out my cigarettes, more flattened now, and we shaped them round, and smoked and drank in silence as we walked toward the entrance of the club. Walked slowly, I looking at my watch—the taxis for those who were leaving the party early would arrive at ten-thirty, only eight minutes away—and Willie wiping his face with his gloves.

We got the first taxi that came and quietly finished our drinks in the back seat, tossed ice and limes out the windows, and left the glasses to roll on the floor. At the pier we waited for the others, the small taxis of officers who wanted the eleven-o'clock launch. We heard it coming, its engine low out on the water. We stood at the edge of the pier, on the opposite side from where the launch would tie up, and looked down at the dark water that always seems fathoms deep at night, and we looked out to sea at the lights of the
Ranger
. I had one cigarette left, a Pall Mall, and I broke it in half and handed Willie his. Taxis came in a fast column, their headlights shining for an instant on our faces. Willie's face now was the one I had known until tonight: an expression of repose, though now I saw clearly what I must have seen on the night he first entered our room, though I had not remarked it then, for my life, my past, had taught me to expect it. Now his face reminded me of a painting I saw long ago of an American Indian, a Cheyenne or Sioux, an old chief: he wore his war bonnet, and in the set of his jaw and lips, the years in his eyes, even in the wrinkles on his face, was the dignity of a man, sorrowful yet without self-pity, who has endured a defeat that will be part of him, in his heart, until he dies.

Officers climbed loudly out of taxis, slammed doors, called to friends standing on the pier or sliding and twisting out of other cabs. The launch's engine had grown louder, and now it slowed as the coxswain approached the pier. Behind Willie and me the officers clustered. The launch drew alongside, and Willie and I turned together and followed the others into the boat, and took off our caps. Men talked above the wind. For a while I looked at the
Ranger
; then I looked away from it, high above the faces across from me, at the stars and the silent sky, and the wind blew on my face and dried the sweat in my hair. Willie and I were last to leave the launch. I walked behind him up the accommodation ladder. On the quarterdeck he saluted aft, then the OOD, and spoke for the first time since we stood outside the club. He requested permission to come aboard.

We went quietly to our room, abreast in the passageways, Willie going first down the ladders, and the ship itself quiet, its steel having absorbed and separated the others returning from the party. He entered the room first too, and we quietly undressed, as we had on other nights when we came back to the ship so drunk and tired that merely undressing was a bother, and hanging the clothes in our lockers a task. He got into his bunk and I turned off the light and walked from the door in the dark toward the bunks, then saw them, and climbed the ladder near Willie's feet and crawled onto the mattress and pushed my legs under the blanket and between the crisp sheets a Filipino had tucked with a hospital fold during the day. I shut my eyes and saw and heard Percy, saw Willie's face as Percy talked, and his face later, outside the club, and I opened my eyes to the gray overhead in the dark.

“Gerry.” It was his voice again, the one I had known. “I'm sorry I said that.”

“Fuck sorry.”

“The man got to me.”

“You don't need to tell me that.”

“Yes I do.”

“Okay. But just once, Jason.”

I closed my eyes and remembered the wind on my face in the launch coming back, tried to feel it moving over my skin in the closed and air-conditioned room, and I saw the stars again, in the sky larger than the sea. They began to disappear, as though rising from the sea and the earth and my vision, and I saw the black of sleep coming, when below me Willie made a sound like laughter, a humorous grunt, and said: “My people, my people …”

He shifted, rolled to his side, and I lay on my back and for moments with closed eyes saw the stars again and focused on them until I knew from his breathing that Willie was asleep, then I let go of their tiny silver lights and received the dark.

11 September 1961
Okinawa, at anchor

Hello Camille:

There is not only a mystery in night itself, but it is intensified at sea. I am standing the eight-to-midnight watch, not the OOD on the quarterdeck, but the Duty Officer at the accommodation ladder for enlisted men. I drink coffee and smoke (not allowed on the quarterdeck, or here either, but not seen on this deck, at least not by officers). My assistant is a seaman second class, and he is also quiet. Our duties are simple enough. Every hour the enlisted men's liberty boat comes alongside from Okinawa, and we stand at the top of the ladder and as each sailor steps aboard he salutes aft, then salutes me and requests permission etc., and I grant it and he goes below. Our only important duty is to make sure a friend or, lacking that, one of the Masters-at-Arms takes below and puts to bed a sailor who is dangerously drunk: helps him down the steep ladders, and lies him in his bunk, on his side, so he won't drown if he vomits while asleep. Some of them have been drinking ashore since liberty call at noon.

And there is an interesting instruction left with the log for the oncoming Duty Officer: we are told to watch for sea snakes, which have been seen near the ladder. So Gantner (the seaman second class) and I peer down at the water as the liberty boat approaches. We are unarmed. Instructions like these make me wonder why they are not accompanied by a shotgun. The Navy seems to trust only the ship's Marines to handle any firearm smaller than a five-inch fifty-four. Ha: they don't know that tonight's Duty Officer, shepherd of the young and drunk and recently laid, is a slayer of many cottonmouths and copperheads with his cheap but accurate Hi-Standard .22 revolver. I'm not only at sea and can't fish, I can't even shoot a sea-going cottonmouth. A very lethal one at that. So Gantner and I watch the water beneath the ladder that angles out from the ship, so we can yell to some poor bastard stepping from the boat to the ladder that he is about to be struck by a terrible snake, and before he even hears us he will have in his blood a poison that, as far as I know, does not have an antidote. But it adds excitement, or at least alertness, to our hourly stand at the head of the ladder. And at times makes me nostalgic for my snake-infested boyhood: a sure sign that the night and sea are at work on me, for in truth I have little nostalgia for that boyhood, and none at all for the sudden appearance of a poisonous snake in my path or, worse, beside or behind the spot where I have just stepped. What quick— no: startled—draws from the holster, what terrified fusillades with the .22. Remember? How many times did we picnic on a bluff over a bayou, or row a skiff on one, without coming as close to a cottonmouth as city people do to pigeons?

At night I feel more deeply. And my loneliness now is also like the feeling I sometimes have at Mass, at the Consecration or while singing or receiving the Host; and sometimes watching the sun set; or sometimes taking the hook from a fish's mouth; and always picking up a dove I have shot and holding its warm body and stroking its soft gray feathers; or listening to jazz, a female vocalist, in a dark club with people at every table but quiet and listening too. So it is not true loneliness, like Ernie's when I was on the
St. Paul
and for the seven months of our deployment his wife did not write to him and when we got home to the band playing on the pier and you waiting in your red dress and all the wives and children and lovers waiting she was not there, and he stayed on the pier till he was alone on it, then took a taxi to the apartment he knew had not been his home for months; he only did not know precisely why; and the key was under the mat and the apartment was empty save for his things in cartons on the bare living-room floor, and taped to one of the boxes a letter saying she had left him for a doctor she met and fell in love with at the hospital where she was a pretty twenty-two-year-old nurse coming home alone at night for seven months out of every twelve, to letters from the Western Pacific, silk from Hong Kong, pearls from Kobe, colored photographs of ports as the ship approached them, a kimono and happy shirts from Japanese markets, and the stereo he had brought home the year before. I remember the day he rode the train from Yokosuka to Tokyo and back and carried the stereo aboard.