The Last Worthless Evening (8 page)

He quickly looked up at me, apologetic, then defiant as his face lowered to the page.

“We was on the pier,” Ellis said, and Gantner was typing. “I was by myself. I mean I left my buddies in the bar. I was tired. I was going broke too. I mean, they'd pay for me, but you know how it is. So I was standing on the pier, watching the boat coming. It was crowded, you know.” He had been looking directly at me, and he still did but now his eyes were not really seeing mine, and his voice softened, as memory drew him back to the pier, and the man he was there, with the life he had there. “People close up against one another.” I saw a motion to my right and looked at it: Gantner's face rising from the words under the keys, his eyes looking at mine. “There was some loud ones behind me. Southern boys. But they wasn't saying nothing. To me, I mean. Or doing nothing. After a while I forgot they was even there. They was loud, but I didn't hear hear it no more. I was just watching them running lights and thinking about sleeping and tomorrow.” Gantner was very fast; it seemed that Ellis's words themselves struck the keys. “I got liberty tomorrow too. I had liberty tomorrow. I was thinking about where to go, and how much money I ought to bring. When was the next payday, and would it be before the next port. I must have stepped back. I guess I did. No reason. I was just thinking and I stepped back. I bumped one of the white boys. One of the Southern boys. He said— He called me nigger. Something about ‘Watch what you doing, nigger.' Something like that. So I turned on him. Mister—” His eyes came back from memory, focused on mine. “Fontenot. Nobody's called me that since I was too little to do nothing. When I got my size maybe two, maybe three guys, they called me that. But they didn't come out so good.” His size was not height, or in his shoulders and chest; he was a normal young man, five-nine or so, a hundred and sixty, but I knew he was telling the truth about the two or maybe three. It was in his eyes. He'd hang on like they say a snapping turtle does, and even if you finally beat him on strength alone, you'd end up wishing you had never seen him, and you'd make certain you didn't see him again. He lowered his head, looked at the space of deck between his thighs. Then slowly he shook his head. Twice, three times, more. He did not raise it when he spoke again. “But that white boy. On the pier. I wish— We didn't even hit one another. I grabbed him and got him in a headlock. He was a heavy boy. We was kind of turning. Like spinning round, and I was holding onto his head. Then we went off the side. The water's deep there. We went down a ways before he let go my body. He had me around here.” Still looking between his thighs, he pointed at his waist. Then he said it: “Around my waist.” Under Gantner's quick fingers the keys clicked to a ring, and he slid the carriage back and the keys clicked again, dulled by the three pages and two sheets of carbon paper. “Soon as he let go I did. I swam right up. I was scared too. I mean, I didn't take a big breath to go underwater. I didn't know I was going under no water. I didn't have any air left. I started getting scared I was swimming to the bottom 'stead of the top. Then I was at the top and breathing. I mean that's all I could do, was breathe. And swim to the pier and grab the ladder. I wasn't even thinking about that white boy. I climbed up and—” Still he looked at the deck, but his head twitched upward, his neck tightened; then he let them ease down again. “Mister Fontenot's right. They must have known, on the boat. There was people on the pier. Sailors looking down at the water. When I come up the ladder. I just didn't think nothing then. I just wanted to keep sucking air, and get out of the water. Get on the liberty boat. And then the Shore Patrol come behind everybody and was yelling everybody get on the boat. So that's what we did. When I got on I checked for my wallet and I still had it. My watch was still ticking too. Then I just sat low as I could, keep out of the wind. I guess that's it.”

Still he looked down. Gantner typed three more lines, and there was no ringing when he finished the last one. Then he spaced twice and typed faster than I could count but I knew the letters before they came, so I heard with each click the spelling of Kenneth D. Ellis. Then the room was silent. Gantner lit a cigarette, and Ellis looked up at me.

“Do you want to sign this?” I said.

“Sure, I'll sign it. Mister Fontenot, sir.”

“Ellis.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing will happen.”

“Looks like a lot is happening. And a lot going to happen.”

“Listen to me, Ellis. If they thought you were a man who goes around killing people, they'd have told me to put you in the brig. They didn't, did they?”

“No sir.”

“So being under arrest is just a formality. I'm charging you with disorderly conduct. They'll appoint an investigating officer. Tomorrow, to get it done with. When he's talked to you, you'll be free. To go on liberty. You can do whatever you want till he sees you. You just have to stay aboard.”

“What about that boy?”

“You didn't drown him.”

“We went into the—”

“Ellis. Somebody provoked you. You wrestled with him. You both fell in the water. You swam out. He didn't. It's not like you held him under till he was dead.”

“But—” Then all fear and confusion and his resignation to whatever fate he had imagined left his eyes, and they showed sadness, not of grief but remorse.

“You didn't kill him, Ellis. They won't even charge you with assault and battery. I'm sure of it.”

“That's not it.”

“I know it's not.”

We looked at each other, his eyes imploring mine for forgiveness I could not grant, because I was not his friend; and imploring me too for some cleansing, some blessing short of removing him from the pier and restoring him with both energy and money to the bar with his friends, where he would drink with them and catch a later boat, long after the white boy who called him nigger was asleep in his bunk.

“Why don't you read that and sign it,” I said. “Then get that shower. And some warm sleep.”

As though rising after a long illness, he slowly pushed himself up from the chair, straightened his back, and was standing. Gantner pulled the sheets of paper from the typewriter and handed them to Ellis; then he stood and put on his cap and stepped toward the hatch, and I moved aside for him. He crossed the deck and stood at the rail. I looked at Ellis reading. Then I went out too and stood beside Gantner; we did not speak. After a while, and at the same time, we bent our waists and leaned on the rail, looking down at the sea, and I remembered as a boy loving to stand on those old wooden bridges over bayous, standing for an hour or more, watching the current.

Stark and his chief were on the eleven-o'clock liberty boat. I looked down into it and saw Stark, in his sport jacket and loosened tie. They came up last, Stark first up the ladder, then the chief, who was in uniform but did not salute either aft or me; and Stark, in civilian clothes and bareheaded that forbade saluting, did not go through the performance of standing at attention to face aft, then me, either. Nor did they request permission to board the ship.

“We got him,” Stark said. “Where's your coffee?”

We followed Gantner into the compartment and he got two clean mugs and filled them. The chief took off his cap and tossed it on the desk.

“They put us to work,” the chief said. “We were shitfaced.”

“We started at noon. Lunch. Saki, and then everything.”

“It was vodka. Nothing but vodka after the saki. We're sitting on the pier. Waiting for the first boat going to the ship. We'll stow away on the Captain's gig, if that's first. We don't give a shit: we're going home, set the eyelid integrity watch before we drop dead. Here comes the Shore Patrol. And Mr. Stark, he's eager, he volunteers.”

“Bullshit, volunteered.”

“Mr. Stark, when you say, ‘Over here,' that's volunteering.”

“He's right. I volunteered.”

“I was about to myself,” the chief said. “See, at first we thought the kid was alive. Shore Patrol guys running around, armbands, duty belts, nightsticks. Hollering. ‘Is there a qualified diver on the pier?' Mr. Fontenot, try sometime hollering, ‘Is there a qualified diver on the pier.' That is very official cop-like hollering. So Mr. Stark says, ‘Over here.' He raises his hand too. So do I. Trouble was standing up.”

“That's when I told them maybe we were not in the proper condition for underwater work.”

“His exact words. Swear to God. Then they tell us the poor son of a bitch's been under there fifteen or twenty minutes. So Mr. Stark says our gear's aboard our ship. This don't work with the fucking Shore Patrol. Guy says, ‘We have gear in the shed.' Leads us off to his little shack, opens some lockers, out comes all this fucking scuba gear. Even knives. So we drop our clothes and put on the suits and the guy hands me a knife. I say what am I going to do with it? He says he don't know, it's part of the gear. So I say, ‘Think of some place to stick it.' He just looks at me. Mr. Stark puts his on the desk in here. I say, ‘Think hard.' He don't get it. He's looking at a drunk old chief dressed up like a reptile. I think they're soft, those Shore Patrol guys.”

I looked at Gantner sitting on the desk; he had pushed the typewriter against the bulkhead, and his buttocks touched it. He looked at the chief and said: “So who was he?”

“The poor son of a bitch at the bottom? Kid named Andrew Taylor. Eighteen fucking years old. Mr. Stark found him. Mr. Stark has all the luck: he is a happy man with his wife, and thank the good Lord he is also the one to find the guy. Holy shit, Mr. Stark.”

“What.”

“Every time we fall into shit, your friend Mr. Fontenot, he's right there with us.”

I said: “Where was he from?”

“Mississippi,” Stark said.

“It was a Negro,” I said. “The white kid—”

“I know,” Stark said. “They told us. They got witnesses up the ass. Guys from some other ship, waiting for their boat. Let me tell you, man. I'm still fucked up. I've never seen a dead man outside of a coffin. And at the bottom of the water, and at night. There was a barge tied up at the pier. So apparently—apparently, shit: it's the only way—Taylor came up under the Goddamn barge. Probably he panicked then.”

“They didn't go in holding their breath,” I said.

“There you go,” he said, and looked at the chief, who nodded and drank some coffee, then looked at his cap on the desk.

“We went under the barge first,” Stark said to me. “Chief went one way, I went the other. I've got fucking vodka and rice wine in my blood and I'm scared I'll find him. I went down, it's muddy around the pier, and all I can see is what the light hits. And I can see the chief's light down at the other end. I keep moving and shining the light on the bottom. Then, Jesus, I see his hands. They're at the end of my light. That's all I can see. These white hands. Reaching up, and moving back and forth with the tide. Like this.” He put his coffee on the desk and extended both arms straight at me, his hands vertical, the upturned palms toward my face; when he slowly moved them from side to side, his body swayed. Then he dropped his arms and expelled breath, and picked up his mug and drank. “I turned my light to the chief and waved it up and down till I saw his light coming. Then we brought him up.”

The chief was looking out the hatch, his eyes focused above the deck and past the bulkhead, on the night above the sea.

It's past midnight now, and I'm sitting at my desk. Willie left its fluorescent light on so I could find my way. I crept into the stateroom and took off my uniform and I'm sitting here wearing that silk kimono and trying not to hate Andrew Taylor's father, or his mother, or whoever first said in front of him or allowed him to use out of habit the word that killed him. I can even say out of habit, though its source is greed for money or hatred or arrogance or some need to have inferiors, but all of these sound too simple, so perhaps I shall remain with the awful complexity of habit. And with fate too, though maybe after all fate is the conclusion of the patterns of history, and not a toss of cubes by the dark dicemen. But whatever it is, comprehensible or without meaning, it not only placed Kenneth Ellis and Andrew Taylor on the same pier at the same time and gave them long enough together on that pier for Ellis to step backward and bump or only touch Taylor, and for Taylor to say something, one hardly provocative sentence that ended with the word
nigger
; but it also put them both on an aircraft carrier that, simply because of its size, can only moor at the pier at Yokosuka, and must anchor off the other ports, and so forced Ellis and Taylor to return to it in a boat. Had they been stationed on the same destroyer they would have gone to it tonight, walked separately on the pier where their ship was tied, and separately boarded it, for the deep long sleep of boys.

In the darkness of our bunks Willie sleeps, and I cannot. I write, and listen to his soft breathing. He is on his left side now, facing the bulkhead, his back to me and my shaded light. It is his final position when he sleeps, though later I shall hear him shift a leg or move an arm, or turn his body once or twice, while I lie above him. I had hoped he would be awake when I came to our room. But I was relieved when I saw his shape under the blanket and sheet, and the back of his neck and head on the pillow. Yet I also wanted to tell him, and before writing to you I sat here watching him, and wondering whether he would want me to wake him and tell him now, or wait till morning. And having written this I wish he had been writing to Louisa, or reading in his bunk when I opened our door. But he sleeps. So I will turn off this light and quietly climb to my bunk above him, and quietly get under the covers, and take care to move lightly on the mattress while I lie awake and smoke and see Ellis in the chair looking at me but seeing himself standing on the pier, thinking of sleep and tomorrow's liberty and money, and while I see Taylor's hands, their palms turned upward to the surface of die sea, to air, to die dark bottom of die barge, and moving in Stark's light as gently as petals of a gardenia, floating with the ebb and flow of the tide. I shall let Willie sleep until the alarm wakes him.