V. (4 page)

After teardown Profane set out to find Rachel. She was out, he was informed, with the captain of the Harvard crossbow team. Profane wandered by the bunkhouse and found a morose Wedge, unusually mateless for the evening. Till midnight they played blackjack for all the contraceptives Wedge had not used over the summer. These numbered about a hundred. Profane borrowed 50 and had a winning streak. When he'd cleaned Wedge out, Wedge dashed away to borrow more. He was back five minutes later, shaking his head. "Nobody believed me." Profane loaned him a few. At midnight Profane informed Wedge he was 30 in the hole. Wedge made an appropriate comment. Profane gathered up the pile of rubbers. Wedge pounded his head against the table. "He'll never use them," he said to the table. "That's the bitch of it. Never in his lifetime."

Profane wandered up by Rachel's cabin again. He heard splashing and gurgling from the courtyard in back and walked around to investigate. There she was washing her car. In the middle of the night yet. Moreover, she was talking to it.

"You beautiful stud," he heard her say, "I love to touch you." Wha, he thought. "Do you know what I feel when we're out on the road? Alone, just us?" She was running the sponge caressingly over its front bumper. "Your funny responses, darling, that I know so well. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you're excited. And you burn oil when you're mad at me, don't you? I know." There was none of your madness in her voice; it might have been a schoolgirl's game, though still, he admitted, quaint. "We'll always be together," running a chamois over the hood, "and you needn't worry about that black Buick we passed on the road today. Ugh: fat, greasy Mafia car. I expected to see a body come flying out the back door, didn't you? Besides, you're so angular and proper-English and tweedy - and oh so Ivy that I couldn't ever leave you, dear." It occurred to Profane that he might vomit. Public displays of sentiment often affected him this way. She had climbed in the car and now lay hack in the driver's seat, her throat open to the summer constellations. He was about to approach her when he saw her left hand snake out all pale to fondle the gearshift. He watched and noticed how she was touching it. Having just been with Wedge he got the connection. He didn't want to see any more. He ambled away over a hill and into the woods and when he got back to the Trocadero he couldn't have said exactly where he'd been walking. All the cabins were dark. The front office was still open. The clerk had stepped out. Profane rooted around in desk drawers till he found a box of thumbtacks. He returned to the cabins and till three in the morning he moved along the starlit aisles between them, tacking up one of Wedge's contraceptives on each door. No one interrupted him. He felt like the Angel of Death, marking the doors of tomorrow's victims in blood. The purpose of a mezuzah was to fake the Angel out so he'd pass by. On these hundred or so cabins Profane didn't see mezuzah one. So much the worse.

After the summer, then, there'd been letters his surly and full of wrong words, hers by turns witty, desperate, passionate. A year later she'd graduated from Bennington and come to New York to work as a receptionist in an employment agency, and so he'd seen her in New York, once or twice, when he passed through; and though they only thought about one another at random, though her yo-yo hand was usually busy at other things, now and again would come the invisible, umbilical tug, like tonight mnemonic, arousing, and he would wonder how much his own man he was. One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship.

"What is it then, hey," he'd asked once.

"A secret," with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers arid Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.

She visited him occasionally, as now, at night, like a succubus coming in with the snow. There was no way he knew to keep either out.

IV

As it turned out, the New Year's party was to end all yo-yoing at least for a time. The reunion descended on Susanna Squaducci, conned the night watchmen with a bottle of wine, and allowed a party from a destroyer in drydock (after some preliminary brawling) to come aboard.

Paola stuck close at first to Profane, who had eyes for a voluptuous lady in some sort of fur coat who claimed to be an admiral's wife. There was a portable radio, noisemakers, wine, wine. Dewey Gland decided to climb a mast. The mast had just been painted but Dewey climbed on, turning more zebralike the higher he went, guitar dangling below him. When he got to the cross-trees, Dewey sat down, plonked on the guitar and began to sing in hillbilly dialect:

Depuis que je suis ne

J'ai vu mourir des peres,

J'ai vu partir des freres,

Et des enfants pleurer . . .

The para again. Who haunted this week. Since I was born (said he) I've seen fathers die, brothers go away, little kid, cry.

"What was that airborne boy's problem," Profane asked her the first time she translated it for him. "Who hasn't seen that, It happens for other reasons besides war. Why blame war. I was born in a Hooverville, before the war."

"That's it," Paola said. "Je suis ne. Being born. That's all you have to do."

Dewey's voice sounded like part of the inanimate wind, so high overhead. What had happened to Guy Lombardo and "Auld Lang Syne"?

At one minute into 1956 Dewey was down on deck and Profane was up straddling a spar, looking down at Pig and the admiral's wife, copulating directly below. A sea gull swooped in out of the snow's sky, circled, lit on the spar a foot from Profane's hand. "Yo, sea gull," said Profane. Sea gull didn't answer.

"Oh, man," Profane said to the night. "I like to see young people get together." He scanned the main deck. Paola had disappeared. All at once things erupted. There was a siren, two, out in the street. Cars came roaring on to the pier, gray Chevys with U. S. Navy written on the sides. Spotlights came on, little men in white hats and black-and-yellow SP armbands milled around on the pier. Three alert revelers ran along the port side, throwing gangplanks into the water. A sound truck joined the vehicles on the dock, whose number was growing almost to a full-sized motor pool.

"All right you men," 50 watts of disembodied voice began to bellow: "all right you men." That was about all it had to say. The admiral's wife started shrieking about how it was her husband, caught up with her at last. Two or three spotlights pinned them where they lay (in burning sin), Pig trying to get the thirteen buttons on his blues into the right buttonholes, which is nearly impossible when you're in a hurry. Cheers and laughter from the pier. Some of the SP's were coming across rat-fashion on the mooring lines. Ex-Scaffold sailors, roused from sleep below decks, came stumbling up the ladders while Dewey yelled, "Now stand by to repel boarders," and waved his guitar like a cutlass.

Profane watched it all and half-worried about Paola. He looked for her but the spotlights kept moving around, screwing up the illumination on the main deck. It started to snow again. "Suppose," said Profane to the sea gull, who was blinking at him, "suppose I was God." He inched on to the dorm and lay on his stomach, with nose, eyes and cowboy hat sticking over the edge, like a horizontal Kilroy.

"If I was God . . ." He pointed at an SP; "Zap, SP, your ass has had it." The SP kept on at what he'd been doing: battering a 250-pound fire controlman named Patsy Pagano in the stomach with a night stick.

The motor pool on the pier was augmented by a cattle car, which is Navy for paddy wagon or Black Maria.

"Zap," said Profane, "cattle car, keep going and drive off end of the pier," which it almost did but braked in time. "Patsy Pagano, grow wings and fly out of here." But a final clobber sent Patsy down for good. The SP left him where he was. It would take six men to move him. "What's the matter," Profane wondered. The sea bird, bored with all this, took off in the direction of N.O.B. Maybe, Profane thought, God is supposed to be more positive, instead of throwing thunderbolts all the time. Carefully he pointed a finger. "Dewey Gland. Sing them that Algerian pacifist song." Dewey, now astride a lifeline on the bridge, gave a bass string intro and began to sing Blue Suede Shoes, after Elvis Presley. Profane flopped over on his back, blinking up into the snow.

"Well, almost," he said, to the gone bird, to the snow. He put the hat over his face, closed his eyes. And soon was asleep.

Noise below diminished. Bodies were carried off, stacked in the cattle car. The sound truck, after several bursts of feedback noise, was switched off and driven away. Spotlights went out, sirens dopplered away in the direction off shore patrol headquarters.

Profane woke up early in the morning, covered with a thin layer of snow and feeling the onset of a bad cold. He blundered down the ladder's ice-covered rungs, slipping about every other step. The ship was deserted. He headed below decks to get warm.

Again, he was in the guts of something inanimate. Noise a few decks below: night watchman, most likely. "You can't ever be alone," Profane mumbled, tiptoeing along a passageway. He spotted a mousetrap on deck, picked it up carefully and heaved it down the passageway. It hit a bulkhead and went off with a loud SNAP. Sound of the footsteps quit abruptly. Then started again, more cautious, moved under Profane and up a ladder, toward where the mousetrap lay.

"Ha-ha," said Profane. He sneaked around a corner, found another mousetrap and dropped it down a companionway. SNAP. Footsteps went pattering back down the ladder.

Four mousetraps later, Profane found himself in the galley, where the watchman had set up a primitive coffee mess. Figuring the watchman would be confused for a few minutes, Profane set a pot of water to boil on the hotplate.

"Hey," yelled the watchman, two decks above.

"Oh, oh," said Profane. He sneaky-Peted out of the galley and went looking for more mousetraps. He found one up on the next deck, stepped outside, lobbed it up in an invisible arc. If nothing else he was saving mice. There was a muffed snap and a scream from above.

"My coffee," Profane muttered, taking the steps down two at a time. He threw a handful of grounds into the boiling water and slipped out the other side, nearly running into the night watchman who was stalking along with a mousetrap hanging off his left sleeve. It was close enough so Profane could see the patient, martyred look on this watchman's face. Watchman entered the galley and Profane was off. He made it up three decks before he heard the bellowing from the galley.

"What now?" He wandered into a passageway lined with empty staterooms. Found a piece of chalk left by a welder, wrote SCREW THE SUSANNA SQUADUCCI and DOWN WITH ALL YOU RICH BASTARDS on the bulkhead, signed it THE PHANTOM and felt better. Who'd be sailing off to Italy in this thing? Chairmen of the board, movie stars, deported racketeers, maybe. "Tonight," Profane purred, "tonight, Susanna, you belong to me:" His to mark up, to set mousetraps off in. More than any paid passenger would ever do for her. He moseyed along the passageway, collecting mousetraps.

Outside the galley again he started throwing them in all directions. "Ha, ha," said the night watchman. "Go ahead, make noise. I'm drinking your coffee."

So he was. Profane absently hefted his one remaining mousetrap. It went off, catching three fingers between the first and second knuckles.

What do I do, he wondered, scream? No. The night watchman was laughing hard enough as it was. Setting his teeth Profane unpried the trap from his hand, reset it, tossed it through a porthole to the galley and fled. He reached the pier and got a snowball in the back of the head, which knocked off the cowboy hat. He stooped to get the hat and thought about returning the shot. No. He kept running.

Paola was at the ferry, waiting. She took his arm as they went on board. All he said was: "We ever going to get off this ferry?"

"You have snow on you." She reached up to brush it off and he almost kissed her. Cold was turning the mousetrap injury numb. Wind had started up, coming in from Norfolk. This crossing they stayed inside.

Rachel caught up with him in the bus station in Norfolk. He sat slouched next to Paola on a wooden bench worn pallid and greasy with a generation of random duffs, two one-way tickets for New York, New York tucked inside the cowboy hat. He had his eyes closed, he was trying to sleep. He had just begun to drift off when the paging system called his name.

He knew immediately, even before he was fully awake, who it must be. Just a hunch. He had been thinking about her.

"Dear Benny," Rachel said, "I've called every bus station in the country." He could hear a party on in the background. New Year's night. Where he was there was only an old clock to tell the time. And a dozen homeless, slouched on wooden bench, trying to sleep. Waiting for a long-haul bus run neither by Greyhound nor Trailways. He watched them and let her talk. She was saying, "Come home." The only one he would allow to tell him this except for an internal voice he would rather disown as prodigal than listen to.

"You know -" he tried to say.

"I'll send you bus fare."

She would.

A hollow, twanging sound dragged across the floor toward him. Dewey Gland, morose and all bones, trailed his guitar behind him. Profane interrupted her gently. "Here is my friend Dewey Gland," he said, almost whispering. "He would like to sing you a little song."

Dewey sang her the old Depression song, Wanderin'. Eels in the ocean, eels in the sea, a redheaded woman made a fool of me. . .

Rachel's hair was red, veined with premature gray, so long she could take it in back with one hand, lift it above her head and let it fall forward over her long eyes. Which for a girl 4'10" in stocking feet is a ridiculous gesture; or should be.

He felt that invisible, umbilical string tug at his midsection. He thought of long fingers, through which, maybe, he might catch sight of the blue sky, once in a while.

And it looks like I'm never going to cease.

"She wants you," Dewey said. The girl at the Information desk was frowning. Big-boned, motley complexion: girl from out of town somewhere, whose eyes dreamed of grinning Buick grilles, Friday night shuffleboard at some roadhouse.