Authors: Robert Olmstead
“No,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Lew reached up with his arms and Henry went down on his knees and Lew held him.
“Jesus Christ, I’d do anything for a cigarette.”
“We’re out,” Henry said.
“We didn’t get to plan our trip very well.”
“We’re almost home, Lew.”
“I had this dream of women and their legs were made of peppermint sticks.”
Henry blew gently on Lew’s face to warm it.
“You have to go,” Lew said, clutching him by the wrist. “This is your last by god chance.”
“There’s time, Lew. We’re going to make it.”
Lew’s grip strengthened and then released. He started singing again, and when he did Henry left his side to scramble up the loose stones that littered the last slope. He climbed three more flights of land. He ducked his head low and ran crawling the last length across open ground to a crest.
He could see the city. He thought this journey to the sea would never end, but there it was. The barrage was constant gunfire from the battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and carriers firing ten miles inland to rain down an impenetrable curtain of steel as the last of the soldiers and refugees left. He lifted the binoculars and glimpsed a Sabre limping to the ocean. Suddenly it exploded and there was fire over the ocean. He lowered the binoculars and his eyes fixed on the horizon. From beyond its watery cutting lip, somewhere in the blue Sea of Japan, the nine sixteen-inch guns of the USS
Missouri
were relentlessly throwing shells into the perimeter destroying the shore installations.
He lifted the binoculars again. A lone jeep was racing through the backstreets, past tin-roofed warehouses and low-slung factories in the direction of the waterfront. They were burning warehouses of rations while the roads entering the city were clogged with the high-piled carts of refugee families. The arterials were shoulder to shoulder with thousands of refugees pushing toward the water. On the distant plain columns of enemy soldiers were streaming south, traveling the road, converging on the perimeter while the Corsairs still tore at them. He could hear the ragged blatting of the bugles.
Dense ice fog was rolling in. The jeep had disappeared and then was a speedboat skimming the water as it fled the shoreline. He watched as the last of the transports departed the harbor.
They were going to blow the city and then they did.
He watched the blast wave pulsing and expanding in every direction, bending the air as it came at him, and then it died a quarter mile from where he stood and was only a change in the air.
“I am not here,” Henry whispered. “I am not here.” He sought a small place inside himself, moving from obscurity to greater obscurity. He lifted on his toes to damp the tremblors traveling through the earth.
The city billowed with black smoke and there was a violent heave beneath his feet as if he were in an open boat on the washing sea. It channeled the earth in great snaking chains through fissures and rock seams and banged and echoed from the face of declivities. In isolated dimensions it continued to bang in the air and behind him and all around him.
When it was over, he went back down the ridge to tell Lew they’d been left behind, but he could not rouse him, could not see his breath, and when he felt his hand to his lips could not feel his breath. His raw whiskered cheeks were gray-white. Inside himself Henry felt a bottomless sense of loneliness.
“Lew,” he said. “Sweet Lew.”
He stood beneath the inflamed coppery sky and balanced his compass waist high in the palm of his hand, but the needle wouldn’t move. He tapped the glass. The needle freed and wobbled north. He pivoted with the compass box as if suspended on an invisible binnacle and faced south-southwest. It was a 150 miles down the peninsula to the thirty-eighth parallel. In country were uncounted enemy divisions and they were driving in that same direction. He put all this down inside himself, inside a room with a door. In his mind he could see the room and he could see the door. He then closed the door and turned the lock.
He inventoried his personal weapons: an M1, a .45, a sheath knife, and spare clips of ammunition.
He cut the dog tag laced into Lew’s boot. He searched the sky as if it held an answer.
He pivoted again and started back up the cold road he’d just come down. In a few hours it would be Christmas Eve.
Part III
As a man will bury his glowing brand in black ashes,
off on a lonely farmstead, no neighbors near,
to keep a spark alive—no need to kindle fire
from somewhere else.
Odyssey
5.540–43
Chapter 29
I
T WAS A CLEAR,
very dark spring night as the
Jean Carol
entered the mouth of the Great Kanawha and began making headway up the river. She was a dying tug, coming apart at the seams, and since departing St. Louis a one-and-a-half-inch pump had worked off the engine to keep her from sinking. In her wheelhouse, engine vibration, accompanied by unwonted rumblings from below, came up through the deck.
The air was warm and breathless as the river flowed beneath like molten silver. The captain, his face lit by the glowing compass inside the brass binnacle, was concluding another recitation, this one of fifteen names. Then he pulled at the bill of his cap and sighed, as if finally his journey were at end.
“Who are they?” Henry asked.
“Names of men.”
“I thought as much.”
“They are men I knew personally who died on this river.” The captain was eating a bologna sandwich and used it to point the river’s curve.
The captain had done the same when the boat entered the Ohio below Cape Girardeau. At the time of entering the Ohio, the list had been much longer. Henry had only met him a few days ago when the captain took him on. He was coming across the country. It’d been the only information the two men exchanged and so it did not seem polite to inquire into the captain’s private ways at the time.
“Anyone waiting on your return,” the captain said.
“I ain’t in no rush. How about you?”
“I don’t either.”
“My aunt.”
“But no one by the description of sweetheart.”
“No,” Henry said.
“But I take it there is someone like that. It seems you are determined to get home, but then again you do not seem to be in a hurry. It leaves me to conclusions.”
“No one by that description. It’s been a long time.”
“No plans?”
“Maybe do some fishing.”
“You have unsettled business.”
“I’d like to harden up. I had the grippe and I haven’t felt right since.”
The words lay in his mind as he spoke them. He did not know how much harder he could become. He did not know how much harder a man he could be than he was.
“You seem hardy enough,” the captain said, and then he said, “Life’s a hard school.”
In that moment, anything could have been said between them and they both knew it. For days they’d stood watch together in the wheelhouse, with Henry assuming the responsibilities of the engineer. The engineer had injured himself while in a state of drunkenness.
“What was it like?” the captain said.
“It doesn’t describe well. It was very cold. It’s warmer here.”
“I was in the war before this one,” the captain said.
“We got carved up pretty good.”
“It’s okay to kill people if you don’t enjoy it.”
“Your heart does get hard. I would have gone anyway,” Henry said. Then: “How do you stop knowing what you know?”
“By an act of your mind.”
“What if that doesn’t work?” Henry said.
“Maybe you find something else to know.”
“Like what? God? Church?”
“I wouldn’t recommend either but anything that heals.”
“They don’t heal.”
“No. I don’t believe they do,” the captain said. “At least not what you have.”
It was a conversation neither of them wanted or needed to have, the old man because he could not remember and the young man because he could not forget. Henry shook out a pair of cigarettes and lit them, passing one over and watching its ember cross the light of the small green-lit room as he did.
“It does make you appreciate the things you do in life.”
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Sometimes I think I’d have rather been there than anywhere else in the world.”
They left behind the ever-burning lights of the towns and now there were only cabin lights pinpointing mountain darkness or in the hollows and beneath the trestles of the train-clattered bridges, the passages from glens into old oak. They traveled the waterway below stumped-out meadows and parallel to the wooden bridges where turbulent white water necked in rocky narrows before commingling with the water of the Kanawha.
Before them, the river was a flowing ribbon where scarves of fog were beginning to collect and it wasn’t long before they entered a cold unmoving wall. The distant west had all but vanished in banks of fog and darkness. Somewhere back there were the charmed shabby cities, the cold, the sunlight, the great trees in their vast forests, the rocky mountains, the river colliding with the ocean, the ocean, Korea, Lew Devine.
“How long you say since you’ve been back?”
Henry looked across time, past a blur of painful memories, and back again. He shrugged.
The engine slowed and coughed and then it stopped altogether and then there was silence.
“What in hell,” the captain said.
Henry opened the side door of the wheelhouse and stepped out. He closed the door and descended the ladder to the lower deck. He was met with the smell of bilge water, oil, grease, tobacco. Down below, in the engine room, the engineer was still drunk and cursing whoever it was who’d started up the engine again. The engineer had been drunk since Cincinnati, where he’d stumbled and clasped hold of an exhaust pipe and burned his hands. When he let go, he left the skin of his hands still hissing and crackling and smoking on the pipe’s hot surface. The blisters covered his palms and his hands were red and swollen and seemed to pulse. He’d refused first aid and so the wounds were now black and leaking fluids.
Henry helped the engineer back to his cabin where he kept a parrot and locked him in. He then restarted the engine. When he returned to the wheelhouse the captain asked him where the engineer was and he explained.
“It’s for the best,” the captain said.
“He’s in there with the bird.”
“Sometimes I think that bird is not so good for him.”
“The bird doesn’t seem to mind.”
“How’s that tooth?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “It’s back in Huntington.”
“Then how’s your tooth hole?”
“Aching a little.”
They continued on through the envelope of fog, the running lights held in a sconce of whiteness. The searchlight was no good as its glare was returned to them in the window glass and blinded them in its hold. The vibration of the engine and the thump of the rods seemed to increase.
“This is the Christliest fog I ever seen.”
“It’s a bad fog,” Henry said.
There was a brief slashing rain and it tore into the river water. Fingers of lightning quivered around them. They moved slowly ahead as the windows beaded and streaked with rivulets of fog. The captain asked if he had another cigarette, and Henry lit one and placed it between the captain’s lips. The captain slowed even more and then they were barely moving, just holding against the current. They rolled slightly to the starboard, the stern came up and they regained even keel.
“I believe we touched something,” the captain said. “You get in shallow water a boat will suck down and scrape. You better have a look see below.”
Henry came back up with a jar of hot coffee wrapped in a cloth. The captain lived for the most on black coffee, countless cigarettes and tots of brandy. He uncapped the jar and handed it to the captain, who drank staring straight ahead into the nothingness that lay before them, as if the wheelhouse had become but a small world on an eternal river. He told the captain everything seemed to be okay down below.
“What’s he doing down there?” the captain said.
“Chewing the rag with the bird.”
“What are they talking about?”
“Children.”
“I need you to go forward and listen so as I can tell where I am.”
Henry went down the ladder and moved into the bow as the captain shut down the engine. A warm rain had begun to fall. However warm the night, the rain and fog cut him like a whetted knife. There was no dividing line between the air and the water, the low amorphous cloud having no definable base, but he could hear the current trickling under the gunnels as they continued forward.
The memory of Mercy descended upon him. It was as if a dream from which he could not awaken. She was with him and her skin was cool and the strength in her arms and legs held him and he could not move. Her mouth was wet and she was kissing him so hard he ached.