The Med (18 page)

As he got into it, though, his depression retreated. The marines cleaned their weapons every day at sea. Silkworth said it kept the salt air out of them, and though they suspected that was bullshit, there was always something nice about getting your hands on the gear. He leaned the four-foot barrel securely in a corner of the compartment and unpacked the gear box. Bore punch, reamer, swabs, a new pack of steel wool, the familiar green can of Oil, Preservative, Small Arms. The compartment quieted down as the men curled in bunks and chairs and began to disassemble rifles, machine guns, and sidearms. Liebo dealt the cards.

First of all, Givens thought, a nice coat of oil on the outside. He steel-wooled the twenty-four-hour-old preservative off the deep screw-threads down to bare steel. The can pinged as he tipped glistening yellow oil onto a rag and laid it on. He turned the mortar tube end over and squinted into the three-inch-wide barrel. Clean and gleaming. He scrubbed it out, feeling the slickness with physical pleasure against his fingertips, the slight roughness where the fins of the ten-pound shells had scraped going out in Sicily and Spain and LeJeune, and before that from dozens of deployments by marines long moved on, sergeants or mustang second looeys, or gone from the Corps. He liked to imagine the men who had done this before him, ministered to this same hunk of unfeeling metal, masculine in its length and power, feminine in its hollowness and texture. Had they cleaned this same barrel in Nam; it was old enough; in Cambodia; in Lebanon? Where were they now? Medal of Honor winners, shitbirds, psychos, congressmen, used-car salesmen … who knew the names and histories of the men who had scraped oil and powder soot from this same tube before him?

“Spades,” said Hernandez. Liebo reached behind him and turned on his cassette, and the BeeGees hit the thick air of the compartment.

Reversing the barrel again, Givens set the bore punch up with a cloth swab and reamed it through. Beside him Washman hummed tonelessly over the baseplate. The patch came out clean. He poured on more oil and ran it through again and then set it aside. He put the allen wrench on the firing pin and broke it free, cleaned it, oiled it, screwed it carefully back and tightened it.

That was it. He was done for the morning. He looked at his watch. It was zero-eight-thirty.

“Now what?” said Washman, picking at a pimple on his chin. “Should we take it back, Will?”

“Naw. We can look busy better with it here. If we take it back Cutford'll just give us something else to do.” Givens looked enviously at the two privates, deep in their cards, and then crossed to his bunk and stood beside it, looking at his guitar.

It lay lashed to the underside of Liebo's rack with shoestring, tempting him silently. His fingers itched for the smoothness of the pearl inlay, the thin hard steelness of the strings. He had taken it up to the fantail the evening before, and strummed it gently in the sun's lingering. There had been other men there, talking and smoking. But he didn't have to obey them, talk to them, be someone for them. Just for a moment, he could be the way he always felt, deep inside. Alone. Apart. Different.

He could be himself.

Willard Givens had picked up his first guitar at fourteen. The men at the lumberyard had handed him a cranky old flat-top his first day there, and waited. Just waited, their faces like flat stones, white and black, leaving the questioning and the discovery to the boy.

His mouth shaped an unconscious smile, remembering the country music. “Lucille.” “Blue Suede Shoes.” Fun, sometimes rowdy songs, the men had played them at breaks from the whining saw, sitting together on the fresh-cut planks, still sticky so that your overalls glued themselves to the smooth white pine. One would play a mouth organ, folding it into a gray-stubbled jaw like a chaw of tobacco. They would pass around a bottle sometimes, sometimes a wide-mouthed jar. He was too young for it, and the others, too, were sparing; if you got careless the big unshielded Cramer would pull off a thumb like a man pulling a splinter from a dog's paw.

And then sometimes an older man had taken it and picked mountain tunes, music that Will had known even then he would never hear again, unless he remembered it; and he had listened with his mouth open, his resiny fingers itching for that old handmade guitar, and known that it would never be like this again.

Once I had a girl on Rocky Top

Half bear, the other half cat

Wild as a mink and sweet as soda pop

I still dream about that.

He longed now to pick up the Gianelli and coax out those first few notes of “Steal Away.” But no. That would be too much if the Top, or worse, one of the officers, decided to come through the compartment. Cards you could hide, but not a guitar. Instead he flipped back his mattress, then settled himself at the table, opening the book to where pencil and paper had been stuck in it. Hernandez dealt, and Liebo checked his hand, grabbing absentmindedly for the discard pile as it began to slide with a long heave of the ship. He glanced at Givens' lowered eyes.

“What you reading there, man?”

“Fuck book,” said Hernandez.

“No. Just a schoolbook.”

“That your engineering, Will?” Washman asked him.

“Yeah.” He turned the book briefly to show Washout a page of graphs.

“You really understand that stuff? What kind of engineering is it?”

Washout's open-mouthed admiration made him feel good. “Naw,” he said modestly. “I don't get half of what it says. This here is all about engines, how the heat gives you the power. Pretty heavy stuff. But someday I'll know how they work.”

“Sure he will,” said Hernandez. “Someday I'm going to be President, too.”

“Maybe you could,” said Will. “Why not?”

“Come on. I'm Chicano, man. You're no college-boy type yourself.”

“I could go. They got that education bill for us.”

Both Liebo and Hernandez lowered their cards at that one. “What the hell you talking about, man?” said Liebo. “You bein' real, Givens? It takes a shit-pot full of bucks to go to college. That little GI bill check won't cover diddley-squat.”

“No, but I could save some.”

“Save some from
what?
”

“Paychecks, Dippy. Remember, the money they give you every couple of weeks? The stuff you spend on liquor and women?”

“I know what a paycheck is,” said Liebo. “An' I recall I wasn't the only one scarfing up a little nookie at Lily's the other day. But forget that. A private's pay don't hardly keep you in snacks and beer. If you got a car, too, that cleans your paycheck, man. You can't save any out of that.”

“Save a couple bucks a month, that could add up. Over a four-year hitch you could come out with enough for the first year,” said Will. They laughed. “Okay,” he said, angry, looking down at the book again. “You asked me.”

“Two,” said Hernandez, returning to the cards, and Liebo dealt. Harner stared silently at the play. Washman cast about the compartment for awhile, glancing at Givens but not interrupting his pencil-chewing, and finally pulled himself up into his bunk. Their corner settled into silence for a time, varied by the creak of steel and the clatter of small objects across the deck as the ship began a series of heavy rolls, an old whore in the familiar embrace of the sea. The steam heaters clanked, and the hot air of the closed compartment banked itself against their braced bodies.

“Oreo!”

Oh, shit, thought Givens, and got the book under his mattress just as Cutford banged open the hatch. He filled the oblong opening perfectly, broad and high as the hatchway, his eyes darting suspiciously about the space.

“What you want, Cutford?”

“Goin' on a little expedition,” said the corporal. Behind him two other black marines giggled and punched each other. “Know you gettin' bored back here with your swan pals, Oreo. We don't want you to forget who you are, you know. Come on, boy. Goin' to vary our diet a little.”

“I'm cleanin' the mortar, Corporal.”

“Fuck that,” said Cutford, closing in on the four of them. He leaned forward over the table, which had miraculously bared itself of pasteboard; Hernandez and Liebo looked up at him innocent-faced, holding cleaning gear and pieces of their weapons. “Let's go, Givens. Warning you, man … not associatin' with your brothers, that might get you in a host of troubles.”

Givens caught the shutter-click of Washman's scared glance, the slower, more judgmental regard of Harner, saw the careful way Liebo and Hernandez kept their eyes fixed on their hands. They wanted nothing to do with the corporal. Neither did he. But the irrevocable likeness of their skin meant that he had to respond somehow. He felt his thighs tighten against the underside of the table as the ship began another sickening coast. He abruptly loathed it all, the ship, the closed steel honeycomb of drones that was the world of marines afloat; but most of all, he hated Cutford. Hated his race-warped mind, hated anyone who saw them, him and the corporal, as the same, simply because of their tobacco-dark comradeship.

He was not like Cutford. He did not want to be like Cutford.

And yet, the corporal waited.…

“Okay, man,” he said, lapsing into the accent the corporal had addressed him in. “Comin'. Washout, see the mortar gets checked back in.”

“Sure, Will.”

The two men with Cutford looked him over insolently as he followed the broad back out of the compartment. He knew them: troublemakers from the second platoon, former noncoms. They had both been reduced in rate, for what he did not know. Sleight, a bucktoothed twenty-seven-year-old, was from New Orleans. Randy Jenkins, a street-smart, heavy-lidded player from Harlem, was not much older than he was. Neither welcomed him or offered to dap. “Les' move, Oreo,” said Cutford, turning, and the corporal's heavy hand half-led, half-shoved him toward the ladder down.

“Where we goin', man?”

“Like I said, goin' to improve our diet. Or do you like that whitey shit they dish out in the mess lines?”

“It's better than I got back home.”

“Shut up, Oreo. Get movin'.”

The sounds of the troop compartment, the omnipresent whine of the blowers died away as they wound down ladder after ladder into the untenanted guts of the old ship. The air was cooler, the bulkheads dirtier, the overhead lights flickering or burned out. They were below the berthing areas, in the deep spaces where only the crew was supposed to go. He glanced up from the bottom of the ladder; the three faces stared down at him, closed, dark, and hostile. “Where to now?” he asked the corporal.

“That passageway.”

“We not supposed to be down here, man—”

“Shut up, Oreo. They got rovin' patrols. Might hear us. Sleight, you got that key?”

“Here, man.”

“Let's have her.” Cutford matched the key to a stenciled number on a bulkhead, then led the way down a darkened passageway. Their steps echoed against expanded-metal cages, padlocked hatchways. He stopped at the fourth door and checked the number again, then looked back at them. “Randy … the ladder.”

“Right. I got it.”

“What's in there?” asked Givens, looking back to where Jenkins lingered at the foot of the ladder, staring upward.

“Reefer space … yeah, it fits.” The padlock clicked and Cutford swung the hatch open a foot or two. Givens backed away as fog oozed out from the crack, bringing a chill breath of refrigeration. “Steaks,” said the corporal, his eyes fixed on the blackness inside the half-opened door. “Go on, Oreo. Find us some steaks.”

“Me?”

“You, boy. Motivate your black ass. Ought to be a light in there someplace.”

“Cutford, I don't want any—”

Cutford pushed him in. He stumbled on the coaming, caught himself on a pipe, then jerked his hand away; it was scalding cold. Utter darkness surrounded him. The door stayed open, though, and he could see a little in the light from the passage. A square mass of boxes walled off one side of the compartment, hoared with translucent frost. “I can't see a thing,” he whispered back, and the door yielded a little more light.

Steaks, steaks … he traced the words on the frost-webbed cardboard.
PORK LOINS. FORMED POTATO FRIES. VEAL PATTIES.
Sweat clammied under his thin skivvy shirt, the still air bit at his fingers as he brushed away icy webs.

PRECUT STEAKS.
His fingernails scrabbled at the box. It was in solid, bound under layers of frozen meat. Got to unstack all these, he thought. And fast. It wouldn't take long to freeze in here, like a side of this meat. Help me, Jesus. He clawed the top layer down and stacked them quickly at the other side, knocking the wooden battens aside. Down here the roll of the ship was less, but from time to time it caught him off guard and he stumbled across the deck, weighted down with a heavy box.
STEAKS.
He wrenched it free. Did they want the whole thing, or just a couple for each man? He staggered toward the door.

“Cutford?”

“What,
Oreo?” The corporal's whisper snapped through the chill air.

“I found some. How many you want?”

“Eight or ten. Can't take too many at a time or they'll start missing 'em and change the lock. Hand 'em out, Oreo.”

“Got a knife, man?”

“Here.” A stainless Corps-issue pocketknife clattered to the deck. Givens scooped it up and sliced cardboard, narrowly missing his numb fingers, and pried at the mass of solidified flesh inside. The slabs came up unwillingly, peeling off from the block, and he thrust them out through the crack. “That enough?”

“Couple more … shit!”

“What is it?”

“Some asshole coming down the ladder. Keep quiet, man.”

The hatch closed. He stood petrified in the dark, staring at where the door had been, a steak in one hand, the knife held blade outward in the other.