The Last Worthless Evening (7 page)

So mine is not true loneliness, but closer to the love that saints feel for God: a sad and joyful longing. Like St. Teresa of Avila, whose heart held so much love of God that, in harmony with the earth, she transcended it too, was beyond it, reaching for union with Him. If Teresa imagined ascending through the sky I stand under tonight, then wife-lover that I am, abiding companion of Camille, my strong and wise and gentle woman, I traverse the sky to sit with you at breakfast. For about now you are in that cramped kitchen, and I can see you, smell your morning flesh and hair, and your first coffee and cigarette, and the bacon slowly frying and the biscuits in the oven as you read the
Chronicle
and enter your day.

I believe at night the world leaves us. We do not see it. It is gone. We are left with what little of it we can see, and without those distractions lit by day, our focus does more than simply narrow: it sharpens on what for most of us is the world—our selves. So the malaise that is held at bay by the visible motion and stillness under sunlight—people and cars and buildings and highways and woods and fields and water—can in the enclosing dark of night become despair. What does Ernie do now, at watch on the bridge at night, or in Japanese cities? Could bars stay in business if we all worked from midnight till eight, going to whatever home in the morning sun rising with promise, instead of the setting sun, harbinger of twilight and dusk, then night?

So now, seeing little more than the small deck I stand on, and its rail, and hearing only the water gently washing at the ship's hull, I receive the world less through my senses than through my spirit. But with the lovely smell of the sea. And I look at it too, unable to see anything that is not a prominent silhouette on its surface: another ship, a small boat; I cannot see the myriad waves, only a softly swelling darkness and a swath of moon-shimmer. Far beyond my vision of it, the Pacific ends at the sky, a horizon I see only because of the stars. They are low in the sky at the dark line of the ocean. I am writing on the podium that holds the log, and I stop for minutes between sentences, even words, to look up at the sky covering you like a soft sheet, though it is mid-morning in Alameda, and you are awake, you are in motion. I am on the starboard side, facing east, but I may be looking toward Oregon or Mazatlan. But these stars in their sheet cover you. As I cover you: in the ocean that touches the earth where you sit in the kitchen, and under the sky that is above you and east of you too, I am with you. My spirit, my love, move in the water, and through the air beneath the stars. Perhaps St. Teresa felt this about God during the day, praying, eating, talking to a nun about whether it would rain before noon or the clouds would blow.

I wrote all that, or got to the last sentence of it, at about ten-fifteen. Now it's eleven-forty-five. Romantic, spiritual, whatever the mood was, it's gone now, as distant as last month. I stopped writing because the OOD phoned and told me to watch for a sailor on the liberty boat that left the pier at ten o'clock. A Negro sailor, in a wet uniform. The Shore Patrol had radioed the OOD, told him there had been a fight on the pier, between a white sailor and a Negro sailor, and they had fallen into the water. The Negro had come out and climbed onto the pier and then into the liberty boat. The white sailor was still underwater, and divers were looking for him. The OOD told me to arrest the Negro, get his statement, and have the original delivered to him. He said there was no need to send the Negro to the brig.

The phone is on the podium with the log. I went to the hatch of the compartment where Gantner sat in one of two chairs: a small place with a gray wall locker, a coffee percolator, white mugs from the mess hall, a desk with strewn memorandums, ashtrays made from coffee cans, a typewriter. Gantner looked up at me standing at the hatch. He is a tall, lean man, probably my age. For moments we looked at each other. Then he stood and swallowed coffee without lowering his eyes from mine. Then I told him and he drained the cup and wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said: “Shit.”

He put on his cap and followed me to the top of the ladder and we stood at the rail, looking east at the sea, listening for the liberty boat. Soon we heard its engine, distant, to our left, beyond the bow. We lit cigarettes.

“You know those Goddamn piers,” he said. He was not nervous, or expectant, or, as many men would be, excited. His voice was bitter, and I looked at his face and then back at the sea, wondering where he had been, what he had seen in his life. “A lot of drunk guys. A lot of guys just worked up about being ashore, just a little drunk. Everybody crowded together. Just guys. You ever notice that, how it's different when it's just guys?” I looked at him but he was listening to the engine, steady and louder, and staring over the water, perhaps at the horizon. I looked at the sky above it. “Somebody bumps somebody. That's all. And it flares up like a gasoline fire. Shit.” He drew on his cigarette, then threw it down at the water, threw it with enough force to break something, if it had not been a cigarette, and if the sea could break. “Some poor fucking drunk kid.”

I leaned over the rail and dropped my cigarette and watched its glow falling, watched it instantly darken, and twice the cigarette washed against the hull, then disintegrated, and I could not see the last inch of paper. I knew from the engine that the boat was making its turn, and there it was, a long boat coming widely around our bow, and I felt Gantner watching it with me as it came out of its port turn and was broadside to us, then turned starboard and came with slowing engine toward us from the stern, and I watched its red and green running lights and listened to the engine slowing, then it was idling with its port side at our ladder, and I stepped away from Gantner and stood at my post. I heard him step behind me, felt his weary sadness, like that of a young man who has been to war, or who as a child lived too much for too long with cruelty or poverty or death, and I felt that he was not in his twenties, but older than the Ship's Captain, older than the Admiral, half at least as old as the sky and sea.

They walked up one at a time, performed their protocol, men ranging in age from eighteen to forty, and all of them to some degree drunk. But tonight they did not even have to try to disguise it. They were men whose bodies were still drunk, yet their faces were sober, some marked with that exaggerated and suddenly aging solemnity of a drunken man who has just heard bad news. Not one, even the youngest, spoke to me with the alcoholic warmth that, like an old friendship, is heedless of rank. Not one smiled. They saluted aft where in daylight the flag would fly, they turned and saluted me and said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir,” and I said “Permission granted,” and they walked quickly off the deck, through the hatch, and down into the huge ship that sat as still as a building on land. The Negro was one of the last to come aboard. His white uniform clung to his skin, and he was shivering with cold, and I could feel him forcing his arms to his sides, away from his chest that wanted their hug and its semblance of warmth. His cap, tilted cockily forward over his right brow, was dry, except for its sides that had soaked water from his hair. It must have fallen off on the pier, before he went into the water. He turned his back to me and saluted the darkness, then faced me and saluted and before he spoke I said: “Just step behind me, sailor. Until the others have come aboard.”

Two more sailors stepped on deck before I realized I could do something for the man whose shivering behind me I either heard or believed I did. I looked over my shoulder at Gantner, standing beside the Negro, watching me, looking as if he did not know whether he was a policeman or bystander or even a paraclete.

“Take him inside,” I said. “Give him some coffee. And see if there's a foul-weather jacket in that locker.”

He did not answer. I heard their steps on the steel deck, both of them slow, but I could detect the firmness of Gantner's, his feet coming down hard like those of an angry man, but one resigned to destiny; and the other's, soft, wet, and cold, wanting not motion but to be dry and prone between sheets and under blankets, his knees for a while drawn toward his belly, then, as he warmed, straightening until he lay at full length, even the memory of cold gone from his flesh. Soon the last sailor, a seaman first class who gave me the only sign I received from any of them—an abrupt and frowning shake of his head as his arm rose from his side to salute— disappeared through the hatch and left me alone on the deck. I stood at the railing and watched the liberty boat pull away from the ship.

Then I went through the other hatch, into the compartment: the Negro sat huddled in a chair, wearing a foul-weather jacket that was too large but not by much, its front closed above his wet trousers. His cap was on the desk beside his mug of coffee, and he was smoking one of Gantner's cigarettes and his other hand was wrapped around the mug. For warmth, I suppose. Gantner sat beside him, almost in the same pose, dry and warm but looking cold, looking near-huddled, and I thought of a blanket for him and fleetingly of the sky I saw as a starlit sheet covering you, then the Negro looked up and started to rise but with my hand I motioned him to sit, my palm pushing in his direction as though it touched his chest, not air. Then as Gantner's feet shifted to stand I pushed again at him, and he settled back. I asked him if he could type and he nodded and said yes sir and I told him to get carbon paper for an original and two.

Then the Negro moved. He was quick—motions of efficiency, not fear: he stood and carried his chair away from the desk, and Gantner, still sitting, pulled his chair to the typewriter and got paper and carbons from the desk drawer; I watched him roll them onto the carriage. The Negro stood behind Gantner and to his right, stood behind the chair, holding its back. He was directly in front of me, looking at me, his face more quizzical than afraid; but he was frightened too, and I knew then that Gantner had not spoken to him; then I knew, though I treated it as a guess, that he did not know the other sailor was dead. I told him to sit down, to have coffee, to smoke, and he pushed the chair closer to the desk and reached for his mug, but Gantner picked it up first and, twisting to his left, filled it at the percolator and placed it back on the desk, in the circle it had made before. The Negro took it. Gantner raised my mug toward me. I shook my head. He put his cigarettes and lighter and an ashtray on the edge of the desk near the Negro, then filled his coffee mug and lit a cigarette, and the Negro did too, then Gantner rested his on the ashtray, and his hands settled on the typewriter keys, so softly that not one key moved. Then I looked at the Negro, at his waiting eyes.

“I'm placing you under arrest,” I said. “That does not mean the brig. You will simply go to your bunk. Tomorrow an investigating officer will talk to you.” He was no longer quizzical, and he wasn't more frightened yet either: he was alert and he was thinking, with the look of a man trying to remember something crucial, and I imagined the pictures in his mind and then the last one, the one that changed his face: a sudden slackening, and now he was afraid, and more: in his eyes was a new knowledge, a recognition that his entire life, in this very moment, was finished; that is, his life as it had been, as he had known it. “You're free to make a statement,” I said. “Gantner will type it and you can sign it. And you must understand this perfectly: anything you say can be used against you in a court-martial.” Gantner began to type; I paused, then understood he was typing the beginning of such statements:
Having been informed of my rights
and so forth
I do hereby make the following voluntary statement
… “You can also remain silent. You can say nothing at all. Just get up and go below and get out of that wet uniform and take a hot shower. And go to bed. That won't be held against you either.”

“Mister—”

“Fontenot.”

“Mister Fontenot? What am I charged with?”

He was from the North.

“The other sailor. The one you fought with. He didn't come up.”

“He didn't come up?” Now the knowledge, the recognition, was deeper, it was all of him, and I felt he was sitting in an electric chair watching me at the switch. “How come? How come he didn't just swim on up?”

“They don't know. They're looking for him.”

“Wasn't
sharks
in the water. They sure he never swam to the pier? I mean, I never looked for him. I just made it to the liberty boat. I didn't even know the man. Just a white boy on the pier. I looked around the boat, once we was underway, but I didn't look real good. I was cold. I just tried to stay warm.”

“Nobody said anything to you? On the boat?”

“No, Mister—”

“Fontenot.”

“Mister Fontenot. No, sir.”

“I think they knew.”

“I don't know.” He shook his head once, looked again as though he were trying to remember. “I just wanted to get to the ship, and do like you said.”

“Like I said?”

“Yes sir. A hot shower and—”

“Oh.”

He started to rise, but not to stand: his arms straightened and pressed down on the sides of the chair, so his weight shifted up and toward me.

“They
sure
that white boy didn't come up?”

“Nobody saw him. The Shore Patrol was there. They didn't see him. What's your name?”

He eased down on the chair.

“Seaman apprentice Ellis. Kenneth Ellis.”

“Middle initial?”

“D. It's for Dalton.”

“Where are you from, Ellis?”

“Detroit. Mr. Fontenot.”

“Do you want to make a statement?”

“Yes sir. Yessir, I'll make a statement.” He reached for his mug and cigarette, almost burned down now, and his fingers trembled. He looked at Gantner. “Want me to go slow?”

Gantner did not look up from the page in the typewriter.

“I'm fast,” he said. “Don't worry about me. Take a cigarette when you want one. I got a carton in my locker and there's enough here to get me through this fucking watch.”