In the Land of the Living (6 page)

Now Doc sat down on the picnic table, and Isidore sat down too.

“I think I’ll take a cigarette after all,” Isidore said.

“Usually I’m pretty good at not scaring off the boyfriends,” Doc said. “Ah well, nobody’s perfect.”

“If it’s all right with you,” Isidore said, “I’d like to marry Laura.”

“If it’s all right with me?” Doc said. “Hey hey!” Doc threw an arm around Isidore and raised his glass. “By God, you’re a gentleman and a scholar and a fine judge of whiskey!”

They drank.

“You feel better now?” Doc said.

“Did you know I was going to ask?” Isidore said.

“Laura tipped me off a little,” Doc said.

“But she doesn’t know.”

“Well, she seems to suspect something.”

Isidore raised his glass again. “Fine judge of whiskey—fine judge of women, is what!”

“You’re right about that,” Doc said seriously. “I love her. And I love that you love her.
L’Chaim!
”

They drank again.

“My father made me study Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle,” Isidore said. “I hated it, but I admit there are words in Yiddish we just don’t have. Like
tachlis
. You ever heard of that? It means ‘brass tacks’ or something like that. You don’t get to talk
tachlis
every day, or hardly at all.” The alcohol was beginning to affect him, and he felt so much looser after asking his question that he stood up straight and shook his fist theatrically at the sky and said:
“Tsi zaynen shteyner in himl nor kedey tsu dunern!”

“What was that, now?”

“‘Are there no stones in Heaven but what serve for the thunder?’ By the great Yiddish playwright William Shakespeare. It’s from
Othello
.”

“You just stay out of wars, young man,” Doc said. “How do you say that in Yiddish? My father spoke Yiddish but I don’t speak a word.”

“I don’t know ‘war.’ I just know the Yiddish for getting your ass kicked.”

Doc liked that joke so well that he recited a limerick:

“You made the right choice, Isidore. You’ll never meet another girl with a father like me.” And he told Isidore another one:

And Isidore said the only limerick he knew:

“I asked about boats because my brother is the president of one of the seamen’s unions and he could get you a stint in the merchant marine. You have next summer—your last summer of freedom for the rest of your life—”

“Ugh, don’t say that.”

“No, no, you get real busy and then it calms down again, and then you get real busy again—”

“If I can do it, I’ll do it.”

“You can do it,” Doc said. “I ought to know.”

Doc lit a new cigarette on the ember of the old one and inhaled through it until the end of the new one glowed.

“When you’re at sea, you take the ashes off your cigarette like this,” Doc said, peeling them off with his fingers, “so they don’t fly up in the wind and get in your hair—or worse, somebody else’s. Sailors don’t like ash in their faces.”

They sat in silence and away out in the dark somewhere, a buoy clanged and clanged again. And Doc told him some more raunchy rhymes and they sang sea songs till the youngest Neuwalder girl called them in.

ISIDORE HAD BEEN
to an ocean beach just four times, but it was a holy place to him, and he liked the days of rough seas and high wind best. On a windy day, the sand stirred up into the wind and flowed over the beach in low and sinuous currents like marauding fingers searching for signs of life. Wind blasted the waves in slow explosions that upset the phases of matter and burst the ambits of sea and sky. The screen of lifted sand divided near and far, as did sea-spray, which diffused in the distance into a shining vapor, an almost photographic filter, and made of the far end of the beach a nostalgic scene, a memory, a mystery half-known. As did sea-sun, which changed distant people, lifeguard chairs, kites, dogs, and sailboats to vulcan shadows, burned them down to essence like Giacometti sculptures come to life, dark thin figures engulfed in magic fire and living in a far-off golden realm.

On another day, a colder day, in another mood, he heard the millstone of time turning in the waves, felt the floury sand on his toes like the offals of that turning stone: there on the shore of the ocean you remembered that your mother was dead, and that you would die too. Days themselves were the offals shattered on the wheel of time. He wrote a poem about the sand and nothingness and the lime bones of the clams and birds.
Days are offals shattered on the wheel of time.

And he felt a great hunger for that forlorn communion with nature as he set off to see a little of the world.

At the Brooklyn Port Authority, the men of the
Garfield
sat in plastic chairs like zombies. Except for one sailor who kept cursing the officers and saying, “The goddamn
officers
don’t wait,” the men didn’t talk to each other, but merely smoked or played solitaire or sat helpless and idle like illiterates in a doctor’s waiting room. If you asked them for a light, they seemed almost confused, and couldn’t figure what to do or say. They seemed ill at ease. But at sea, the zombies came right to life, and never stopped talking, least of all Happy.

“You’re in the upper bunk, Cork Fender,” Happy said. “You’ll like it up there in a typhoon.”

The answer to that was easy, really: “Okay.”

“It’s a real nice place to love yourself. ’Cause you ain’t gettin’ no love down here, Cork Fender.”

Isidore threw his duffel onto the top bunk. The tiny room smelled like engine oil and hummed with the distant sound of motors at work. The steel walls were cold.

“Do like I say,” Happy said. “You don’t do like I say, and you might have an accident. You get it? You might get mistaken for one of them niggerheads on deck and get wound up in a rope. You get it?”

“Yeah,” Isidore said, “I think I do.”

“I might accidentally forget to not throw you overboard. You believe that?” Happy stood up and took the measure of Isidore from head to toe. “You believe I could do that? To a six-footer like you? What are you, two hundred pounds? ’Cause I done it before, and not to no cork fender who don’t know which is the bow and which is the head.” Happy scratched his jaw with the stump of the half-amputated ring finger of his left hand. He had a buzz cut and wore army pants and waders and had a blurry American flag tattooed on his left shoulder in ink that had badly bled.

Isidore stuck his hand out and said his name.

“I’ll shake your hand,” Happy said, “sure I will,” and he squeezed Isidore’s hand hard. “And I won’t even wash it after. Isidore? Is a door for slamming?” He laughed outrageously.

“The way you laugh reminds me of my brother,” Isidore said. “So—just so I know who to blame when you throw me overboard—who are you?”

“Who am I? I ain’t your brother. And I ain’t a door like you, Is a Door.” Happy waited, maybe for him to laugh or to jibe back at him. “Ah, I wish Cooper was here! He was a riot! Shit, I love that dumb cracker.” And Happy swatted the air in front of Isidore as if he were swatting at a fly, and crouched before his footlocker, and opened it up.

The footlocker contained at least seven bottles of Red Stag Kentucky bourbon, and some smaller bottles of a lighter yellow stuff, with strips of cloth tape on each that said
LINSEED OIL
in blue marker. Happy pulled out one of the small bottles of yellow oil and poured it into his palm and started oiling his hat, a new sou’wester.

Happy said, “Since you don’t know how to do shit else, they’re gonna give you the watch. And what I’m tryin’ to tell ya is: on the watch. On the bow. If you feel spray out there. Go to the fly bridge or the waves will swallow you whole and no man’s the wiser.” Happy laughed hideously, then stopped. “What are
you
laughing for?”

“Because you’re joking,” Isidore said, and he stopped laughing. “Aren’t you?”

“Oh, you ain’t long for this world, Cork Fender. You got yourself tangled this time!”

In the mess hall, Isidore learned that the other sailors did not call his roommate Happy. He called himself Happy, but they mostly called him Chips because he was the carpenter. And he learned that even though he was called Chips, the carpenter didn’t work with wood. That was the joiner. The carpenter battened the hatches with a ratchet that was kept on his person at all times. A cork fender, Isidore figured out, was something that hung over the side of a boat to buffer its collisions with the pier. “It isn’t so bad if I call you a cork fender,” another sailor explained, “it just means you’re a useless piece of shit!”

“Good old Is a Door,” Happy said. “His father’s name is Is a Floor. And I guess his mother is…Is a Whore. Get it?”

“Ah, Happy,” Isidore said, “you know the way to my heart.”

“I wish Coop was here!” Happy said. “He knows a good joke! Me and Coop, we’ve had some times together! In the marines they cut him loose in the woods of Tennessee and told him to live off the land for a couple weeks—so he broke into chicken coops, that crazy cracker, and ate the farmers’ chickens like a fox!”

The sailors did not exactly talk
to
each other but rather
near
each other. But the food was good. And when Happy challenged Isidore to an arm wrestling match, and Isidore pushed Happy’s hand down toward the table, he pretended to tire and let Happy come back up to ninety degrees and then win. Soon after that, Isidore graduated from Cork Fender to Schooner Rig.

“It means you’re green and you got the wrong gear and you’re fucked!”

The SS
President Garfield
was more than five hundred feet long, so when you were on the watch, alone in the dark at the bow of the ship, sailing fifty feet above the waves at twenty knots, you were not only alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but far from midships and the life that persisted in its heat and light like a campfire in a dark wilderness of waves. Between you and the fo’c’sle there was nobody and nothing besides the inhuman towers of the booms, which groaned like pterodactyls but had no preference between port or storm, between waves or the frigid sand at the bottom of the sea. You were to call the bridge on a little phone if you saw a light. You were to say, “Two points off starboard bow” or however many points it was, or say “port bow” if it was port. It was so black out there, sometimes the lights of your brain mingled with the dark of the ocean and you saw sea dragons with electric scales, and sometimes you heard a malevolent sound against the hull like the serpent arms of a sea monster, pulling the whole ship down, down, down into the inhuman, ugly deep. In the morning, such thoughts looked ridiculous, but the next night, they returned unabated.

The second night on the watch, the boat rode into heavier seas that came before the wind came. He didn’t know what calm felt like or what high seas were, but he did feel a change, a different tension in his legs, and then he heard the waves and felt the spray on his face. He was fifty feet in the air up on the bow and the only wind was from the boat pushing through the still, dank, black air. He remembered what Happy had said and hurried up the deck, under the giant, lonely booms that screeched like pterodactyls and reared disconcertingly back, back, back, so he tumbled downhill toward midships and gripped the rail tight. The bumpy steel of the deck was shining and over the rail was a yawning blackness of no sight or sound. Before he got to the fly bridge, the ship came over the swell. It pitched down the back of the wave and smashed into the next trough with a horrible shuddering and groaning of booms, and the jolt knocked Isidore’s feet out from under him and he slammed down on his tailbone and rolled against the side rail with the speeding blackness just beyond it. He scrambled to his feet, and made it up to the fly bridge as the
Garfield
crashed into another swell and he nearly lost his teeth on the forward rail. Down below, liquid tons of seawater poured into the deck lights, washed over the entire bow, and rained out the scuppers as the booms again reared back and the ship pushed up the face of another swell.

It seemed at that moment he’d made a terrible mistake, and his hunger was still a hunger, but not for the alien desert waves. He saw in his mind the lamp at home on the bedside table, and the oven mitts on a hook by the kitchen window, and the exact place beside the sink where Laura kept her hairbrush, and her bathrobe, warm and dry in the early morning hours.

“I can’t say I’m sorry you didn’t drown,” Happy said.

The upper bunk seemed to roll through an arc of 180 degrees and to try to dump Isidore out of his bed each time, or to punish his aching tailbone, and every other minute the foghorn, which was next door, would blow Isidore’s ears out.

“Sleep tight, sweetie,” Happy said. And then he added, “You ain’t been in my locker, have you?”

Isidore answered in the negative.

“I told you what I did to the kid I caught stealing from me? The little kid in Vietnam, cleaning the ship? I caught him in my locker. So I said, ‘You want to go in my locker?’ And you should know by now I’m a stone-cold killer, Schooner Rig. I held his wrist with one hand and with the other I took my whiskey bottles out of the locker and put them under my mattress. And I stuffed the little gook inside my locker and locked him up inside. It was tough to get him in there. I had to fold him up. And you think I let him out?”

Isidore felt like puking. He kicked his foot against the ceiling to moor himself in the bunk. “Yes?”

“Fuck no! I put him in the hold. And when we got out to sea, he been in there a day and a half and he wasn’t screaming no more and the locker smelled like a toilet. And I said to myself, ‘Chips, you can’t use this locker no more for your whiskey bottles. It smells like a fucking toilet.’ And I threw the whole thing overboard. What do you say to that?”

“I say, I’m glad I can’t fit in your footlocker.”

Happy hooted and laughed hard at that. “I say, you’re right about that, Schooner Rig!”

Isidore could hear the Red Stag bourbon sloshing in the footlocker, and in a rhythm syncopated with the bottles in the locker another bottle sloshed in the lower bunk, along with personal noises of lips and wet exhalations.

Daylight did not bring calm. They adventured through mountains of water big enough to spin ten thousand tons; white trails of foam rinsed down the dark mountain waters like branches of lightning. When the wind came in, the waves got even bigger, and the bulkhead lamps popped and fell down and rained on the halls a ruin of mosaic glass. In the hold, crates went wild and blew up into splinters and nails.

It occurred to him that ships did sink, that misfortunes were littered over history like shipwrecks on the sand beds of the world, and he tried to talk to Laura in his mind.

“Don’t drown,” she seemed to say. “Don’t get killed by a drunk.”

“Where are you?” he said.

And there was no answer, even in his mind, a silence like a death. In the middle of the night, when it began to rain hard against the porthole, he wondered if he’d ever get home or if he might die there alone in this raw black cold wet desert place and he’d sink and his bones would be gnawed by cold, blind hagfish. Death seemed so lonely—he felt death out there in the sea and it seemed that Laura was the only thing attaching him to the earth. Without her he might sink to the bottom of the sea or fall off the earth and into the bottomless black hole of space.

But then the foghorn stopped blasting and he fell asleep, and in the morning the ocean was calm. At 6
A.M
., they went down into the hold, where pillows and feathers and socks had spilled everywhere and the splinters and nails grabbed your clothes and your skin. And though they had cowhide gloves, they had to take them off and tuck them inside their belts to hold a nail or use a tape measure, and their blood began to spatter the bright broken wood. But he felt grateful, in a way, for the disaster, because of the industry and the exercise of matutinal reason it demanded of him after his night of dancing with death.

“You’re a strong bastard, ain’t ya?” Happy said with an air of approval as he watched Isidore toss away a broken plank. “Last time this happened was in the South China Sea. Coop was there. He’d tell you. You come into the China Sea and there’s all these little Chink fishermen in their junk boats in the dark, like a bunch of fireflies all over, little boats lighting their way with lanterns, fishing for eels. They’re too stupid to get out of the way, those junks! Or too slow. I must have run down a hundred of ’em in one night at the wheel, the stupid Japanese fuckers.”

“Hey, give me a hand with this, Happy,” Isidore said, lifting up one side of a broken crate and blowing at a floating feather. Happy helped him lift it.

 “South China Sea is a beautiful place for pussy, Schooner Rig. Between me and Coop, we probably fucked every hooker in Hong Kong. I told you I got a tattoo on my prick in Hong Kong?” Happy said. “A little spot right there on the end. When it’s hard, it says ‘Josephine Cunningham.’ You get it, Schooner Rig?”