The Suicide Run Part 4

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

Under my flashlight's gleam I pored over the cl.u.s.ter of Housman poems in my Pocket Book of Verse, letting the sorrow and resignation take hold of my spirit; there was a note both stoical and ill-omened in this pastoral requiem, and it mated perfectly with my enervation, my feeling of doomsday. I despised myself for being so spineless and disabled, so demoralized, but I could do nothing to avoid the mudslide slowly enveloping me. Finally I put the book aside and lay gazing upward into darkness. I couldn't fight the fatigue any longer and drifted off into a shadowland where fantasy mingled with dream, and I was soon staring down an abomination: myself on D-day, coming undone. Now I saw myself as a figure in a newsreel, a running target. The beachhead was engulfed in flame. The ramps went down and I lurched forward onto the harsh ground, beckoning the platoon to follow me. I stumbled ash.o.r.e through clouds of phosphorus and across an undulating terrain traversed by barriers of wire. A j.a.p machine gun, a Nambu, chattered from the flank and the air was thick with shrapnel, roiling, incandescent; the ground rocked with explosions. I turned to see my men hustling low as they scattered and deployed themselves at the edge of an embankment; some guys were falling now, still clutching their rifles at the instant of their collapse into the sand. I glimpsed white bones and blood, flowing like a sacrament. And just then, frozen with the sight of so much blood, I sank into paralysis. I could make no movement, nor speak a word; in the grip of an overpowering numbness I let my mind shut down. Nearby, one of my squad leaders questioned me with his eyes: Lieutenant, what'll we do? Beyond power of thinking, I made no reply. Through billows of smoke I saw my tentmates; I could tell that Veneris on my right and Stiles on my left were advancing steadily with their men. Over the radio I heard my company commander's frantic roar: Get your troops moving! But the command was without force, without meaning; it could have been shouted in an unknown tongue. My immobility was complete, as if tendrils of myself had burrowed down and sought root in the soil of j.a.pan, rendering me into brainless vegetation. Yet most intolerably-sickening and intolerable-was the look in the eyes of Stiles and Veneris, who, glancing back as they moved through the visible swarm of enemy bullets, turned upon me their measureless scorn and loathing ...

Coming awake, awash in sweat, I felt my pounding heart, and I thought I'd made a strangled noise loud enough to arouse my friends. But they still slept. For what seemed hours I lay still, listening to their breathing. They would have to be sleeping, I thought at last, when on that not-too-distant night I would fulfill the promise I'd made to myself and enact the lonesome little farce I'd rehea.r.s.ed so many times before. I was almost ready. Until this moment, I'd never allowed myself to rehea.r.s.e the first detail of the plan that would lead me into the jungle. But now I let my arm fall to the side of the cot, and I touched with my fingers the cold metal of the carbine cradled in its rack above the flooring. Beneath my hand the barrel of the weapon was oily and slick, and I caressed its surface for long minutes as if touch in itself were rea.s.surance and consolation. Then I drew back my arm. The thought of the coming night filled my mind like an ecstatic heartbeat. What night it would be I didn't know, only that there would be such a night for certain, and soon-the night when at last I stole out of the tent into the cricketing darkness, and there amid the hibiscus and flame trees destroyed my fear forever.

I detected an auspicious note in Isabel's voice when she called from the kitchen and announced, as I began climbing upstairs, that she was brewing some more coffee. "You'll find it in the electric percolator," I heard her say. "It keeps hot. It's a new Westinghouse. Just pour it yourself if you want some later." A speck of cordiality, a soupcon of warmth-could it be that a golden sunbeam was shining in on the stormy weather of our relationship? I sent back over the banister my thanks and proceeded upward to my room. I was beginning to feel better about my stepmother, ready to shuck once and for all the various recriminations I'd stored up for so long, even those I knew were most justified (including the time I overheard her denounce me to my father, after I came in mildly soused at three A.M., as a "degenerate with paranoid tendencies"). Maybe we could live and let live, and the three of us could form an amiable bond of sorts. G.o.d, I hoped so.

Mamie Eubanks had disposed herself-I could see down from my bedroom window-upon an aluminum Sears Roebuck chaise longue in the d.i.n.ky backyard which adjoined our own. She was wearing a two-piece floppy sunsuit, quite chaste in appearance at a time when postwar bathing attire was just starting to exploit the concept of fleshly exposure; still, I could discern her eyewink of a navel and a nice pink tummy which she was presently smearing with Coppertone. Mamie had splendid legs. She propped up against them a copy of The Robe, a bloated wartime best-selling novel about the Crucifixion, and this encouraged me a little about the rapport I hoped we'd achieve, for while The Robe (which I'd actually tried to read) was a witless piece of inspirational claptrap written by a preacher (like Mamie's father), it did have pretensions to literacy and was a cut well above the fundamentalist religious tomes I expected her to be absorbed in. We might be able to talk about bookish matters.

Just then, her father appeared. A hulking broad-shouldered man, country-bred, he had a ruddy face and the muscular presence of one who had done much manual labor. I had only talked to him on a few occasions and found him polite and soft-spoken with the gawky reticence of an unlettered pastor from the backwoods of Southside Virginia. I suspect he knew I was an infidel. We'd had very little to say to each other, and while his manners were gentle I also sensed something watchful and tightly wound about him; his eyes could grow murky and his jaw become set and grim. I imagined when the holy spirit of the evangel took a firm grip on his tailbone he could really get worked up into a frenzy, especially about sin; I wouldn't want to cross him. Now I saw him approach Mamie and she, looking up, beamed brightly while he stroked her blond curls with fatherly affection and, after some whisperings I couldn't make out, gave a laugh and said, "Praise the Lord!" That's what they must shout at each other all the time, I thought-that and "G.o.d love you!" and "Yes, Jesus!" What a f.u.c.king family. As I continued my vigil from my peeping tom's roost I saw her absently hike up the hem of her sunsuit bottom, exposing a fetching amount of upper thigh as she vigorously scratched herself there. For some reason it was profoundly arousing. But it also made me feel like a spy. The heat was becoming truly a menace, and I turned away, thinking I'd try to wash away my l.u.s.t.

Showering off in my tiny bathroom, I made plans for another summer day. I had once again the foretaste of idleness alternating with creative effort. I actually caught myself joyously shivering in the knowledge of my freedom. It was as if I'd recovered from some near-fatal disease. I still was not used to my leisure. I'd almost forgotten that on this morning I hadn't been forced to jump out of bed before dawn, nor would I have to stand in jungle mud while a torrent of rain filled my mess kit, or become comatose with boredom at a lecture on foot care, or eat a foul meal of unnameable particulars, or wait in futile nauseous hope for a letter in the mail, or salute some repellent fathead of a captain (of which the marines, despite its high standards, had a few) or ... the catalog went on forever. Civilian pleasures were like an ongoing rapture. In fact, hardly once in my Marine Corps career, except during those precious few days of leave, had I had the time to saturate myself in a shower, as I was doing now, for as long as I d.a.m.ned well pleased. An old ditty popped into mind: Hallelujah, I'm a b.u.m ... Hallelujah, b.u.m again!

After the shower I dressed in one of my more ample sport shirts and baggy slacks-no more form-fitting khaki, binding at armpit and crotch. I glanced at the telephone and was instantly galvanized into a decision. Mamie Eubanks. Any further delay would cause me to lose my resolve for good. While gawking again into Mamie's backyard I dialed her number, indelibly memorized, then simultaneously heard its ring and saw its summoning effect on Mamie; she leaped up, threw The Robe on the ground, and scampered into the kitchen. I developed a fist-sized lump in my chest and began to breathe in deep unnatural inhalations. I was so afraid I might betray my feelings-my nervousness, my fear, my unseemly hots-that I was on the verge of slamming down the receiver when I was stopped by the sound of her chirpy voice: "Eubanks residence. Good morning."

"This is Paul, Paul Whitehurst," I said. "Howya doing, Mamie?"

"Paul? You mean Paul next door? Oh Paul, I'm glad to hear from you!" The tone was encouragingly receptive.

"I just thought I'd call you up." My throat produced an unseemly tremolo as I spoke. "Your momma told me the other day that you'd be back from wherever it was you were. Was it down in Carolina?"

"Yes, I was in summer school at Bible college. Out near Boone, in the mountains. It was so cool there. I can't believe this heat, can you? It's like a furnace."

"Weatherman said it was supposed to cool off a little late in the afternoon." I hesitated, then pressed on: "Look, Mamie. I was wondering if you might not be free tonight. We could have a bite to eat, go for a ride."

There was long, rather intimidating silence. Finally she said: "I don't know, Paul. I'd really like to. But my daddy likes me to be home early."

"How early?"

"Ten o'clock." She's twenty years old, I thought, and her old man's still keeping watch like a Weimaraner.

"Well that's all right," I replied. "I could get you back by then." I had begun to gain confidence.

"Also," she went on, "I've got choir practice at five-thirty I wouldn't be able to get away till seven."

Three hours for fun, or whatever. We discussed the matter in detail. I began to feel better. Despite the impediments she was placing in my way, I was relieved that my scheme was falling smartly into an operational mode. I could still pick her up at the First Baptist Church (where I might dally long enough to see her in her robes, watch her lovely face uptilted as she sang "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" or perhaps "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms"), cruise by the Peninsula Drive-In for a hamburger, and yet have time enough-an hour and a half, perhaps two-to park at the secluded overlook by the World's Greatest Harbor, where, on the broad front seat of my father's secondhand but immaculate Pontiac, I would become more closely acquainted with this creature. For there was no doubt about it: she had me hopelessly snared, and I could scarcely believe that I'd let myself fall for a dewy Christian seraph. All my wiser instincts told me that I was headed not for bliss but its antipodean double-trouble-yet I could not help myself. "Mamie," I said, just before hanging up, "I'll see you at the church at seven."

"G.o.d bless," she replied, disheartening me.

Before heading downstairs for a cup of Isabel's coffee I rummaged through my dresser drawer and placed certain items in my pockets, preparing for the daily foray into town. Handkerchief, cigarettes, Zippo lighter. I'd recently bought a new Sw.a.n.k wallet to replace the one I'd hung on to out of sentiment but for sanitary reasons had had to dispose of: months in the Saipan boondocks had made its crevices crummy with an odorous green mold. Into the new model I slipped a crisp new twenty-dollar bill, which should last me for most of a week, especially since my drinking spot down in the center of town still soaked its customers only five cents for a large gla.s.s of draft beer, ten cents for a bottle. Financially, I could hardly be regarded as a plutocrat, though for a bachelor I felt solvent enough owing to the largess of the government; veterans like me who belonged to what had been dubbed the "52-20 Club" received a check for twenty dollars each week for a year, payoff of sorts by the U.S. Treasury Department for getting out of the mess alive.

I put the wallet with the twenty dollars in my hip pocket, and as I did so my eyes lit upon one of the three souvenirs I had brought back from the Pacific. Marines, crazy for j.a.p souvenirs, scavenged mementos of all descriptions from the gore of the battlefields: Samurai swords, flags, I.D. bracelets, officers' pistols, fancy leather belts, watches, rifles, combs, rice bowls, almost anything one could yank off a corpse.

Some keepsakes were particularly loathsome-gold teeth, dehydrated body parts such as fingers and toes, acquired by the few marines most likely capable themselves of atrocities. I knew a corporal of my battalion who carried with him two prunelike talismans-the dried t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of a soldier he had personally dispatched in the frenzy of battle on Tarawa. He didn't seem to me a monstrous sort though, and in fact I thought him rather nice; saving a couple of j.a.p's nuts was really the expression of a marine's immeasurable hatred of the enemy-a hatred felt by nearly all marines-which most stateside Americans could not fathom.

I had acquired a shiny bayonet of tempered steel. Also a flag with the Rising Sun. But my most valued souvenir was the small round locket I'd won one steaming night on Saipan in a poker game. Luck alone might not have accounted for the prize-I wasn't all that sharp a poker player-but the loser of the locket, a regular warrant officer from regimental headquarters, was half-p.i.s.sed from a bottle of Gordon's gin he'd won that same night in another game and so gave up the lovely bibelot on a dopey call. The locket was worth winning. It was exquisite: burnished gold inlaid with an ivory j.a.p ideograph in filigree and suspended by a delicate chain. It had a nice heft and a satiny feel when I stroked it. For a long while, rather stupidly, I had thought it to be a solid object, not noticing that it opened up as lockets are supposed to do and in this case revealed a photograph. It was a snapshot taken on a ferryboat. Two little girls who appeared to be sisters-I judged about four and five years old-gazed over the back of a deck chair; they wore identical straw hats with bows tied at the front, and they looked like owlets with their eyes solemn and depthlessly dark.

The picture at first disturbed me; I came close to gouging it out and throwing it away. It added a measure of squeamish self-reproach to the discomfort I already felt at owning such a memento, with its hint of the macabre. But to destroy the charming portrait was an act of such self-conscious guilt that it seemed absurd; the empty s.p.a.ce would be an even greater reproach. So I kept the picture in the locket and from time to time stole a peek at the ferryboat children, always making my mind an absolute blank whenever my thoughts began to stray toward the father from whose dead neck my trophy had been torn.

Downstairs Isabel had retired to the alcove off the living room that served as a kind of makeshift office. She was not an idle housewife. As a part-time occupation she still taught nursing at the nearby hospital, which kept her busy with written examinations and paperwork, and she also seemed to spend many hours doing what I gathered were benevolent things for the Episcopal Church; as much as she pained me, and as unbearably narrow as I viewed most of her perspectives, I had to concede that her heart was sometimes in the right place. She believed in charity, not only because her church plumped for the eleemosynary spirit but because (it was like swallowing nails for me to admit it) she did have an impulsively generous side; this took such an elemental form as feeding any of the stray cats that roamed the neighborhood or, in fact, feeding me-after all, she didn't have to bestow upon me the good breakfast I had just downed that morning. I felt like a s.h.i.t (for an instant) for so grudging her occasional moments of grace; the sound of her fingers devotedly clacking away at her typewriter gave me a twinge of what might actually have pa.s.sed for loving-kindness.

But it was just a twinge and over immediately. I poured a cup of coffee from Isabel's new Westinghouse percolator. Listening to the voice of Lou Rabinowitz on the radio-the voice of Isabel's nemesis-I realized that her New York Jew had managed to achieve a promotional coup perhaps unprecedented in the Old Dominion. For surely never before in the annals of Virginia crime-at least in the annals of those four dozen Negro men who over the decades had shambled to their extinction for having forcible s.e.xual congress with a white woman-did a wretched felon find such a champion as Lou Rabinowitz. It was he who had summoned the chutzpah to get Booker Mason on the front pages and cause the notoriously reactionary Virginia media to publicize what he called the "monumental" injustice about to take place that evening in Richmond. And he plainly relished his champion's role. His voice had the querulous tonality of the Bronx, along with all the dental consonants, but it also possessed the rabbinical fervor of a man who was descended (as he was quick to point out in regard to his name) from a long line of rabbis.

"What, then, is the next step, Lou?" asked the male interviewer.

"Since the Supreme Court has once again abdicated its responsibility, we have only one option left and that is to request that the governor grant clemency."

"Do you think there's any chance of that?"

"The governor is a man of compa.s.sion and a Christian gentleman. His record in granting commutations is better than average among southern governors, in cases where there has been a miscarriage of justice. And this is the worst miscarriage of justice you can imagine."

"Then you think there is something wrong with the law as it stands?"

"I think there is something inherently evil in a law which inflicts the death penalty upon a man for s.e.xual intercourse, even when it is not consensual. When in fact it was forced. I do not pretend my client is a saint. Mr. Mason is admittedly guilty of rape but not of murder or even a degree of manslaughter. Furthermore, Mr. Mason is about to suffer the supreme punishment for a crime for which no white man in Virginia has ever been executed. This is a moral obscenity."

I felt a spinal tingle as I realized that, almost at the same time, my ears had experienced two "firsts": the scabrous phrase "s.e.xual intercourse," which I'd never heard spoken on the radio before, and the simpler word "mister," an honorific so rarely preceding a Negro's surname that it sounded like a joke. Meanwhile Isabel, attracted by the voice of Rabinowitz, had moved toward the breakfast nook and now stood with her head tilted for the interview. Her face wore a look of grim disapproval, and I immediately regretted that the garrulous lawyer with his blunt heresies might get her goat again, thus disturbing the morning's ticklish composure, the balance of our delicate accord. I had the vain impulse to turn the radio off.

"Listen," Rabinowitz was saying, "I keep insisting that the guilt of my client is not in dispute. In a reasonable disposition of Mr. Mason's case he would be given a very long term of incarceration which would satisfy the Commonwealth. Rape is not countenanced lightly in any state in the Union. But I don't want to hide the fact that aside from the aforementioned miscarriage of justice there are matters of principle involved here. We are determined to break down historical prejudices which for centuries have kept Negro men chained in fear. Since the time of slavery the s.e.xuality of white women has been used as a way to tyrannize Negroes-"

Had Rabinowitz's words been poisoned darts soaring across the ether from Richmond to embed themselves in Isabel's broad face she could not have reacted with more instantaneous pain and outrage. "He's a liar!" she shrilled. "What tyranny? Everyone knows the truth about nigra men! This Mason is a perfect example! I mean, the little Jew's client! He flat-out admits that this Mason just cynically and brutally had s.e.x with that poor woman, whatever her name is-thank G.o.d they never reveal it-just to get back at her for some imagined insult! He admits it and in the same breath implies that white women are at fault for their own victimization-"

"Isabel!" I intercepted. "He's right!" Thinking even as I spoke: I've got to get the f.u.c.k out of this house. "He's trying to emphasize a larger truth, don't you see? He's not trying to get Mason off the hook; he says that over and over. Nor is he blaming white women. He's merely trying to say that there's a horrible, unbearable tragedy taking place down here in the South in 1946, and Negroes are getting crucified as usual for sins committed by white people." Suddenly I let my mouth get away with me. "Why in the h.e.l.l can't you be a little more tolerant!"

She was glaring at me. Her eyes were naturally protuberant and whenever she became roiled, as she was now, they appeared close to popping from their sockets. When I got so utterly fed up with her (and I was really getting fed up) I felt grateful that she was not beautiful; as it was, a small but real upwelling of pity, pity for the blotched and homely face she presented to the world, tended to moderate my rage and prevent the showdown that might have ensued had the old man hooked a broad a bit more attractive. And a showdown was what I desperately wanted to avoid. G.o.d, I didn't want a showdown. Thus the solemn liberal piety I had just uttered, even with its severe coda, was really a quickly contrived subst.i.tute for the ma.s.sive verbal bludgeon which had in truth nearly escaped my mouth, scarily.

She still glared at me. And I, sending back a prolonged counterglare, set down my coffee cup, wheeled about, and strode again to the front porch. My mouth was parched. I felt all my limbs quivering, and the stress had sent an aching jolt of adrenaline to my kidneys. The porch was like a steam bath. While once more I strove to calm myself I spied my father's binoculars; I began to scan the harbor, more as a diversion, an escape from Isabel, than anything else. The Missouri swam into sight, so clear now and well-defined that I could see the white caps bobbing on the heads of the sailors swarming along the decks. Farther north, toward the entrance to the bay, a freighter churned sedately seaward; it was a Danish vessel, I could tell from the large white MAERSK emblazoned on its side. The bold letters were not all that common on merchant ships, and for a moment I was put into mind of another ship with a vivid startling emblem, cruising across the harbor many years before. As I walked with my father along the seawall my eyes had picked out a bright red globe on the side of a freighter; even at ten I knew that a ship riding so high was carrying no cargo, and I pointed it out to my father with a question. "It's a j.a.panese merchantman," he said, and his voice was edged with contempt, or perhaps anger. "That's what they call the Rising Sun on the side. That ship's going up the James to Hopewell and take on a load of sc.r.a.p iron, or maybe nitrate, or both. Either way, it's a crime." I asked him to explain and he replied: "The nitrate they'll use to make gunpowder, the sc.r.a.p iron they'll use to make guns. And both of these they'll use on American boys someday, when we're at war. It's a crime, son." I remember him pulling me close. "I got half a mind to write our congressman, tell him we're supplying the enemy." Could he have been thinking, even then, that his only offspring might someday meet the j.a.panese in battle?

Prescient though he was, I doubt that he actually foresaw his little boy grown up to be a marine leading his troop of doomed warriors into some distant Armageddon; still, he had a good amateur historian's nose for future catastrophe and was aware, as most of his fellow office workers were not, that the gray behemoths he helped build and that had begun, at almost yearly intervals, to slide down the ways into the muddy James were not meant for show but would someday be floating platforms to launch aerial raids on the wicked troublemakers of Europe and Asia. He was hardly an intellectual, but he had read much about war and its politics; for thirty years his involvement with the making of warfare's potent machinery had led him to the conviction that such expensive gear couldn't be allowed to rust. And on the dreadful day of Pearl Harbor, when I called him excitedly from boarding school, I was struck by the dark sorrow in his voice but also by the absence of surprise.

When I set the binoculars down I glimpsed close by, hurrying down the sidewalk bordering the beach, a familiar figure: moving briskly in the heat, it was a phantom from yesteryear. Good G.o.d, I said out loud, it's Florence. Diminutive, hunched over in a white hospital uniform, she was trudging along at surprising speed, and I was a little breathless after I hustled down the porch steps and finally caught up with her. "Flo," I said. "Flo! It's Paul, remember me?"

She stopped and turned about, an old Negro with gray hair gone almost white, her expression a little perplexed, the yellowish eyes soft and ruminant. Tiny blisters of sweat covered the black brow. Suddenly, recognition washed across her face like light. "Paul, Paul!" she exclaimed, and then gave a glorious whoop of laughter. "Lawd have mercy, it's really you!" We fell into each other's arms.

"Let me hug you, sweetie!" she said in a m.u.f.fled voice, then drew back to appraise me. "I can't believe it's really my little Paul."

"It's me, Flo," I said, "it's me. Come back to the land of the living. It's so good to see you! What on earth are you doing in those white clothes?"

"I started workin' at de hospital last week," she replied, jerking her head toward the red brick building down the harbor. "I gits off de bus on Locust Avenue and I walks by yo' house every day. I only works mornins. Ain't a day goes by I don't think of you, pa.s.sin' by de house." She looked me up and down. "My my, you is some big boy now. I always thinks of you as jes' a little skinny ol' thing. But Lawd, chile, you has growed!" She hugged me again, clasping me to her warm and nurturing self as she had so often during the ten years and more of my boyhood when, laboring in the house during my mother's long illness, she had acquired the mantle of my mother's surrogate, feeding me-sumptuously-keeping me clean, acting as nursemaid and benign disciplinarian, as quick to chastise me for truly rotten behavior as she was to loyally connive at my minor wrongs, sheltering me from parental anger with artful lies. Florence-or Flo, as I called her-had toiled six days a week (excepting only Thursday afternoon) from early morning until far past dark, when she joined the throng of shabbily dressed Negro women stomping down kitchen stoops all over the town, each clutching paper bags of supper leftovers or a can of Campbell's soup (in a process called "totin'") that augmented their weekly salary of three dollars.

It was Flo and her sisterhood that often waited patiently in pouring rain to deposit three pennies in the trolley car's coin box or, later, when buses began their routes, a nickel, to reach the ramshackle enclave whose boundaries were made evident as soon as concrete and asphalt gave way to rutted dirt. It was only quite recently, in the creeping dawn of a new social awareness, that the section more or less ceased being called n.i.g.g.e.rtown. She'd been born in the past century on a long-gone-to-seed Tidewater plantation, the ninth daughter of ex-slaves and the thirteenth child born out of twenty, and to me it had always been a miracle that, having had no schooling, she had learned to read reasonably well and even to write, her scrawled messages possessing both a mannerist charm and a hilariously cryptic profundity. All of a sudden, staring into that lively wrinkled face, I was swept by two emotions in excruciating conflict: love, intense love for this sweet shepherdess of my childhood, and shame-shame that in the many months of my homecoming I had neglected to seek her out.

"I was three years in the Marine Corps, Flo," I said. "They put some weight on a guy."

"I heard you was a marine," she replied. "Dat is some bunch of brave boys. Did you git yo'self hurt?"

"No," I said, "nothing happened to me. But I was a long long way from home and I really got lonesome."

"Did dey feed you good? Bet you didn't get no fried chicken with giblet gravy like Flo used to fix you!" She grabbed my arm and squeezed it, with a tickled hoot. "When you was little you could tuck away mo' fried chicken an' rice than three grown-ups. Je-sus!"

"I kept dreaming of that chicken. I was on this island out in the Pacific called Saipan. Not a day went by that I didn't think about your fried chicken."

"How's yo' daddy?" she asked, and her eyes grew filmy and tender.

"Oh, he's fine. Still working in the shipyard. Still keeping up the same old grind. He likes what he's doing, you know, Flo. He loves his ships."

"I misses Mr. Jeff. I misses yo' daddy." Her words gripped me with a feeling of loss, and also resentment. Once again-Isabel. For after my mother's death Isabel's arrival on the domestic scene had guaranteed Flo's almost immediate exit; it was an abrupt vacuum that created in me near bereavement when, returning from boarding school one Thanksgiving, I discovered that my beloved mammy (if I dared use the obsolescent word) was banished forever. "A hopeless personality clash, Isabel versus Florence," my father had explained, trying to comfort me. "Each of them just too set in their ways."

Now I should have known better than to bring up her name. "He seems happy with Isabel, Flo. She knows how to take care of him."

Flo glowered suddenly and there was acid in her voice. "Hmpf. Dat lady ain't got no soul, chile. No soul at all. You lucky you was a marine."

I changed the subject. "So what are you doing at the hospital?"

"Ise an attendant for de old folks," she replied with a slight air of mockery. "I does de bedpans and I cleans up de barf. Dem old folks is always barfin' everywhere. But I has to make some money. My two boys is over in Portsmouth at de navy yard, and dey gives me some money but it ain't much." As she spoke I felt pain at the thought of her comedown in dignity-the truly inspired culinary artist, the onetime chatelaine of a tiny but contented household brought so low, squatting on her hands and knees upon a grungy floor, swabbing up barf. "But I makes do," she added.

"Well listen, Flo, I hope to see you sometime, I really do. I have thought of you so often and I just failed-" I broke off in embarra.s.sment. "Maybe we could get together."

"Oh Lawd, chile, I'd love to see you. Ise home every day excep' de mornins. Same old house. I ain't got nothin' to do except listen to de radio. I loves my soap operas. Life Can Be Beautiful, Guidin' Light, Right to Happiness, all of dem." She gave a giggle. "Ise a soap opera fiend."

I hugged her again and then she turned and was gone toward the hospital, leaving me in a fierce momentary tussle with anger and the blues and dealing with a crowd of memories. Then I gave thought again to my morning schedule.

Parked on the street outside the house was my father's Pontiac. The car, which was at my disposal most of the time, was central to the routine I'd established for myself that summer. Most mornings I'd drive up to a pleasant neglected park on the James River, a quiet place where enormous hovering sycamores provided a dappled shade for some rickety but functional picnic tables. There in this nearly deserted s.p.a.ce I'd sit with a yellow legal pad and a bunch of sharpened pencils and scribble away at what I deemed to be my "creative writing"; the awkward but heatedly felt short stories I was setting to paper were the result of the authorial virus I had contracted my first year in college, leaving me with a chronic fever that plainly was not about to subside. I'd been emboldened to further effort-no, it was sometimes a quiet delirium, so high were my hopes-by the not quite acceptance of a sketch I'd submitted to Story magazine, that paragon among short-fiction outlets, whose reader had appended to my rejection slip the electrifying postscript Do try us again! How intoxicating to me were the exclamation point and the imperative quality of that superfluous "do"; for days I repeated the words like a mantra. I took novels along with me-Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Cather, Wolfe. Alternating writing and reading made the mornings pa.s.s quickly, and there was always the mesmerizing prospect of the James, six miles wide here at its mouth and a river so much a part of an essential chapter of American history that even I, who all my young life had swum in it, sailed upon it, caught crabs in its shallows, even once nearly drowned beneath its brackish waves, could find myself freshly amazed at the fantasy it evoked.

There was scarcely a time, gazing out on that expanse (too sluggish and muddy to qualify as majestic but still a serious waterway), that the freighters and tankers lumbering upstream didn't vanish before my sight and a single tiny vessel float into view: that Dutch galleon tacking against the wind, heading for Jamestown with its chained black cargo. In a cla.s.sroom moment I would never forget I listened to Miss Thomas, our distant and opaque sixth-grade teacher, blurt out part of a history text (In 1619, known as the Red Letter Year at the new English settlement, a shipment of slaves arrived, transported from Africa ...), never taking her eyes from the book, her voice a mechanical mumble, the bland-faced spinster completely oblivious of the great stream just outside the window which had borne this craft to its cosmic destination. Wasn't it right out there? I called out suddenly, interrupting her, startling my cla.s.smates. Wasn't what? she replied, startled too. The Dutch ship that brought the slaves. For an instant I'd seen it, the galleon, its c.u.mbersome hull high in the stern, dingy, sails set, wallowing westward through the river's undulant swells. Why yes, she said firmly, I suppose so. I suppose it was out there. She returned to her page, obviously annoyed. The kids whispered together, eyeing me suspiciously. I felt a sudden flush of embarra.s.sment, wondering at the apparition on the river, and at the reckless, almost angry compulsion that had caused me to try to make my dull-witted teacher come alive to the spirit of the past spooking this ancient sh.o.r.eline.

I couldn't explain why, but Negroes and their teeming presence in my boyhood-the whole conundrum of color and slavery's cruel bequest-had begun to absorb me, battering on my imagination and forcing me to express the mighty grip that black people had on my heart and mind, moving me to scratch it all down in the apprentice stories I sweated over day after summer day at the picnic table by the James. I had just embarked on a trip to Faulknerland-Light in August was my first exposure to his stormy rhetoric, and I was smitten. My G.o.d! I saw immediately how riven by the torment of race this writer must have been, from the very dawn of his life. He intimidated me with his talent, to the point of making me wince as I marveled at his incantatory rhythms; I knew I could never approximate his gifts, or the surging energy, but the great tragic themes he tackled-of race and mingled blood and the guilt imprinted on the souls of white southerners-were ones that challenged me, too.

I'd work for three or four hours on my raw little tales-about Lawrence, my favorite black barber, or the wisdom of Florence; or once, in an essay in horror far beyond my depth, about a lynching in North Carolina my father had witnessed as a boy-and then by early afternoon it would be time to call it quits. Time to collect my yellow sheets and my two dozen pencils worn down to the wood, to clean up the cigarette b.u.t.ts I'd left in a litter around the picnic table (compulsive tidiness-"policing the area"-fostered by the Marine Corps), to recap the thermos of coffee I always brought along to help jog up my brain cells-all this before driving downtown to the Palace Cafe for a bite to eat and the pleasure that was, quite simply, my greediest antic.i.p.ation.

I loved the Palace Cafe. And I loved getting drunk there. Its therapy lay in the power of the four or five beers that I guzzled to ease, almost after the first half bottle, the racking misery of my time in the Pacific. That time was never entirely absent from my thoughts, creating a constant gripe in my psyche like a throbbing gut; the effect of a few swallows of the good suds was as a.n.a.lgesic as a shot of morphine. It was what the rustic folk of the Tidewater called a "high lonesome," this daily bender of mine. It was a gentle, civilized bender, solitary, introspective, mildly (not maniacally) euphoric, and always cut short before the onset of confusion or incoherence. I prided myself on a certain drinker's discipline.

The Palace Cafe was a barnlike tavern on the town's main drag; the blue-collar shipyard workers who were its chief clientele, and who dined on its pork-chops-and-potatoes menu, had usually cleared out by the time I arrived, a little after two in the afternoon. I seated myself under an outsized electric fan that stirred the heavy air, odorous with pork. I had the place more or less to myself then, and I would dreamily relax in the same greasy booth, listening to the jukebox and its grieving and lovelorn country troubadours-Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells-who could pluck at my heartstrings with fingers different from those of Mozart but, in their own way, almost as deft and seductive. They, like the cold astringent beer, caused the Pacific and its troubles to gently recede, even as ornate daydreams of the future filled their place. It was like a rage: I knew I must become a writer! So I'd sit there and reread my sketches, buoyed toward a vision of myself ten years hence, or twenty when my work had flowered, then fully ripened, and the fumbling novice had been crowned with the laurel branch of Art. While adrift in these largely deranged fantasies I made a concession to the needs of nutrition by lunching on potato chips and pickled pigs' feet, the latter a specialty of the house.

And then there was my favorite waitress, Darlynne Fulcher. Part of the appeal of going to the Palace Cafe was Darlynne and her flirty lewdness, a lewdness neutralized by her (to me) advanced age-she was well past forty-and by her truly daunting looks: big porous beak, spectacles, top-heavy hairdo, the works. A nice voluptuous body offset this enough to make plausible her raunchy style, though at the outset I must have sat in my booth five or six days running, taking scarcely any notice of her, before I heard her murmur, as she plopped down a beer: "You look like you need some p.u.s.s.y." It was not at all a come-on; in fact, I realized it was a way to break the ice, to good-naturedly test the bounds of my dogged solitariness. Actually I welcomed the intrusion, since I enjoyed Darlynne's simple-hearted fooling around about s.e.x ("I bet you got a good-sized d.i.c.k on you, guys with prominent noses are well-hung"), while at the same time she understood my basic need to be let alone, immersed in my remedial bath of Budweiser. In the moments when we did talk, during the late afternoon hours as she'd stand there, hands on one hip, patiently shooing away the flies, I discovered that some intimate communion we'd established made it possible for me to say a few words about the war. What I had to say wasn't much though it was more than I'd spoken to anyone before, certainly more than I'd said to my father or Isabel.

"From the first time I seen you sitting here I knew something was eating at you. It's the war, ain't it? Did something happen to you?"

The question required some rumination. "Well, yes and no, Darlynne."

"I don't mean to pry, you know. My cousin Leroy was shot up real bad over in Europe. He doesn't like to talk about it either."

"No, I wasn't shot. I never got shot at. It was something else I'd had a problem with." I halted. "But I'd better not talk about it." After another pause I said: "It was in my head-my mind. It was worse than being shot at."

She plainly understood my wanting to drop the subject. "How come a nice-looking boy like you don't ever have a girlfriend?"

"I don't know. Most of the girls I used to know-the college girls-are away for the summer. Gone to places like Nags Head or Virginia Beach. Or they have summer jobs in Washington or New York. Anyway, they're gone."

"College girls won't give you a good time. You need a real h.o.r.n.y country girl. My baby stepsister's just broke up with her husband, this jerk. She's hot. She really needs a good time. I'm gonna fix you up with Linda."

It hardly mattered that Linda never materialized, content as I was to sit with my amber bottles and my fantasies, my pumped-up auguries of future glory, and with the thrill of the woeful rapture that always seized me when Ernest Tubb's steel guitar struck the first chords of "Try Me One More Time."

Outside I could see the late-afternoon shoppers hurrying homeward. Gathering up my ma.n.u.scripts I'd give Darlynne a hug, swat her on her big rump, and head homeward myself, steering the Pontiac with focused care, untroubled, optimistic from head to foot, deliciously tranquilized. I'd be going back to college soon, and this dismal battleground would be forever behind me.

ELOBEY, ANn.o.boN,.

AND CORISCO.

Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco. These form a group of small islands off the west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, and I pondered them over and over again when we returned to Saipan, where I would lie in my tent and think with intense longing of the recent past-that is to say, my early years.

During the philatelic period of my late childhood only a few years before, a phase that followed my obsession with raising pigeons, I had somehow come to own a moderately rare stamp from "Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco." By moderately rare I mean that the Scott catalog priced the one I owned, a used specimen, at $2.75, which in those Depression days was a large enough sum to make a small boy's stomach squirm pleasurably, totally apart from the aesthetic pleasure of the stamp itself. A note in my alb.u.m revealed that "Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco" was under the governance of Spain, more specifically Spanish Guinea. The stamp portrayed a "vignette," as Scott always described the world's scenic views, of a mountain peak and palm trees and fishing boats in a tropical harbor; the general coloration was green and blue (or, according to Scott with its painterly precision, viridian and aquamarine), and there was a t.i.tle beneath: Los Pescadores. Keen-eyed, I had no trouble picking out the fishermen themselves, who were Negroes and wore white turbans and were busy at work tending their nets against a backdrop of aquamarine harbor and viridian mountains, behind which the sun appeared to be setting. There were other stamps in my collection that I greatly admired-a huge Greek airmail in gorgeous pastel facets, rather like stained gla.s.s; a gaudy number from Guatemala featuring a quetzal bird with streaming tail feathers; a glossy octagonal from Hejaz festooned with Arabic script; the Nyasaland triangle, shaped to accommodate spindly-legged giraffes-but none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places as the one from that archipelago whose name itself was an incantation: Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco.

Back on Saipan I found myself an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places of my stamp collection and yearned for nothing better than to be stretched out on the floor of the living room, merely dreaming of one of those places rather than being actually in one. In the tent, half-drowsing in the wicked heat, I would convert my ident.i.ty into that of a small boy again, re-creating in memory ever younger incarnations of myself. In the stamp collection sequence, for example, it would be Sunday afternoon: sprawled on the crimson rug I would lick little cellophane hinges while my mother, her steel-braced leg propped on a stool beneath an afghan, read the sepia-tinted rotogravure section of the New York Times, and my father, seated at the antique walnut secretary, penned one of his innumerable letters regarding the Whitehurst family genealogy. Warm, too warm (for in the winter my mother was always cold), the room contained the lingering smell of the roast chicken we had eaten for Sunday dinner, and the whole sunny s.p.a.ce, coc.o.o.n-like, was wrapped in layers and layers of sound: the New York Philharmonic from the table-top Zenith radio. Forest horns and kettledrums. Swollen ecstasy. Johannes Brahms. Sunday's murmurous purple melancholy.

Another scene from a younger time: my father alongside me as we lay at the edge of the bank above the muddy James. He was teaching me to shoot. The .22 bullets were greasy to the fingertips, the odor of burnt powder both sweet and pungent as the casings flew from the chamber. Squeeze slowly, he would murmur, and my heart would skip a beat when I saw the green whiskey bottle turn to flying shards in the sand. Younger, much younger, I felt the ceramic bowl chill against my legs while he taught me accuracy in peeing. Stand close, son were his words; hit the hole. I couldn't locate any memories of my father earlier than this, nor of the protectiveness and safety he embodied for his son lost in the Pacific distances. Anything earlier than this would have meant oblivion, prememory, only my father's seed and my mother's womb. And that womb, likewise protective and safe, was from time to time another place I longed for in the persistent ache of my dread.

For in truth the embryonic fear I'd felt on the ship had swollen hugely. I was scared nearly to death. While previously Okinawa had been an exciting place to dream about, an island where I would exploit my potential for bravery, now the idea of going back there nearly sickened me. Thus I found myself in a conflict I had never antic.i.p.ated: afraid of going into battle, yet even more afraid of betraying my fear, which would be an ugly prelude to the most harrowing fear of all-that when forced to the test in combat I would demonstrate my absolute terror, fall apart, and fail my fellow marines. These intricately intertwined fears began to torment me without letup. And though I continued my jaunty masquerade, more often than not dread won out. And when that happened I would seek my tent, if I had the chance, and lie on my cot gazing upward at the st.i.tch and weave of the canvas, and try to exorcise the dread, whispering: Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE.