Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (6 page)

Well, I sure didn’t know how to dissuade a kid. Not this one, anyway: “You mean like
serpents
?” he said, like just getting to use the word as a practical term was making today Christmas for him. “Do you fight them?”

“Only when I have to.”

“With swords?”

Confused, I looked around my boat’s deck. There was a mop there. “Whatever comes to hand, I guess.”

“I could help. I want to fight them. Mama could watch me fight them. Please, Poppy!” He tugged at Egan’s belt.

Even beforehand, I wasn’t sure if what I’d thought of doing was a good idea or not. But I figured it might be easier on Egan this way. “Listen,
son. The truth is, your dad would let you go if he could,” I told him. “I’m the one says you can’t.”

“Why not?” the kid said, and I could tell that his father was tenser than he was about hearing the answer.

I crouched down, putting my face close to his. “Because I’m a sea monster,” I said. “
YEEAARGH
!
BLAAGH
!”
jumping up and waving my arms.

Well, he sure scooted. He gave a yelp and backpedaled right out of my new shadow, grabbing blindly for his father’s hand. As soon as he found it, he stood his ground, too, and bit back his scared look. But he was still dumbfounded, and I could have picked up his old expression and tossed it to the gulls for all the use his staring eyes and legs that quivered with plans to run if necessary had for it now.

“Why, you son of a bitch,” Egan said, herding the kid close. “And here I thought you were all right, too. Guess I made a mistake.”

I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had only been trying to make sure his boy wouldn’t blame him, or guess at the real reason they couldn’t go on the boat. But I also saw it didn’t matter, because the only difference between what I’d done and what McHale, who I didn’t even know back then, would have in my place was that McHale wouldn’t have had good intentions. Or felt confused and crappy afterwards, as if I had committed more of a sin by trying to do right than I would have if I’d just been the hard-case S.O.B, that Egan thought I was.

“I guess you did, brother,” I told him. “Now shove off. Can’t you see I got work to do?” Then I turned back to the bait buckets, because I didn’t want to watch him take his son back down the pier to his lousy tow truck and his coughing, dying wife.

All that the years since then had done for me was get me fatter. But it was strange to think that little Jacky Gilbert Egan was practically old enough to be out here in the war with the rest of us now. Unless I had put him off oceans for life, he might’ve already lied about his age to sign up for the Navy. Or maybe the Marines, since the jarheads took them young.

I guessed I hadn’t lied to him in the long run about the monsters, only about being one myself. But my beer can was empty, and all of a sudden
I had no idea why all this had sprung to my mind. After a while, I called down, “Hey, Algligni! Hand me up another. The rest of you guys get one more, too. One,” holding up my finger where everyone could see it.

I was just crumpling my second can when the motor conked. You think it gets quiet when guns leave off firing, try the first ten seconds after that grinding you’re so used to just up and quits being there in your ears and under your feet. If there was a Richter scale for silence, we’d have been off it.

Well, those PT engines always were as nervous as a filly on her first day at the stud farm, and I was counting on my machinist’s mate, a crazy Kraut from Pensacola whose handle was Harry Flugelhorn, to get us under way again. But after forty-five minutes, he put his greasy face, that all of a sudden there wasn’t enough sun left to light, out of the hatch and said, “Nothing doing, Skipper. Motor’s fine. I think something’s fouling the propellers.”

That’s when, looking astern, we all saw the black dot in our wake. It kept dipping in and out of sight in the low swells, and I couldn’t make out what it was even with binoculars. I wasn’t even positive it was connected to the boat, and I didn’t see how something that far off could be what was messing us up. But somehow, from your first sight of it, you knew that it had been there for a while.

“God damn it,” I said. “One of you dumb assholes volunteer to go over the side and try to unsnaggle whatever is snaggling the propellers.”

“Are you nuts, Skipper?” Ski said. “These are shark-infested waters.” That was his fear, and he always expressed it exactly the same way: “shark-infested waters.” He must have read it once in
Life
or some damn rag back in Chicago, and it had stuck with him. Damned if I know why he hadn’t joined the Army instead. “Anyway,” he said, “we don’t even know what that
thing
is back there. Maybe it’s a shark.”

A drunk and nervous one, I thought. I was trying to make a joke in my head, but thinking it just got me jittery. “Shit,” I said. “O.K. So we radio the Seabees for a tow. They’ll laugh their asses off. God damn it. Get ‘em on the blower, Algligni.”

“Radio’s busted, Skipper.” Man, did he look scared.

I’ll tell you, I sure blew my stack then. I pulled off my cap and slung
it at the deck, which I had never done before. “
Algligni
/” I hollered. “What the fuck are you telling me, the radio’s busted?”

“I mean it doesn’t
work”
he said.

“Well, can’t you fix it, for Christ’s sake?”

“Tried to.”

“And?”

“I failed?”

I picked my cap up, smacked it against my leg. “Oh, this is fucking
great,
“I said, shaking my whole face at him and putting the cap back on with the brim pointing starboard before I got it squared away.

The boat was starting to roll in the current, had nothing to fight it with. “Doesn’t matter anyways,” my exec said, I wish I could remember his name. He’d started this war in Arlington, Virginia, and he was going to end it there, too. Kamikaze. “If they had boats on Fondawonda, they wouldn’t need us to ferry all this crap around for them in the first place.”

For the first time, staring blankly at him, I noticed how much my exec looked like an older, shrewder Algligni. Then again, they were both in the same boat, and so was I. “Shit,” I said. “Well, shit.”

I was trying to get an idea, but I didn’t even know what I ought to be having an idea about. Water was lapping the hull with little slaps, sounding happy that now it could be heard. The black dot was still there behind us, getting harder to pick out of all the deeper blue. I took one look and gave up.

“Well,” I said, “hand me another. You guys go ahead, too.”

“Maybe once we drift in a little closer to shore,” I hollered when my third can was empty, “I can talk one of you ‘fraidy-cats into taking a swim and unsnafuing the goddam propellers.” But I knew there wasn’t much chance of that, and not only because the blur of Fondawonda was getting farther away, not closer, and fading back into being more of the horizon. From the looks in their eyes, I could tell that the boat was going to have to fetch up somewhere in Kansas before any of
them
went over the side.

Besides, I knew any skipper worth an unexpected belch wouldn’t ask his boys to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, and I wouldn’t have gone in the same water as the black dot if they’d told me I could have
Betty Grable any damn way I pleased afterwards. For just a second, she winked at me over her shoulder even so, and believe you me she wasn’t standing up in that cornball pose or wearing that holy bathing suit of hers either, but then it was night and I don’t just mean not day. It was more like the sun had turned into a giant bowling ball, and was sending out rays of ink and black and dark the same way it did light when it was really there. We had stars by the bucketload but no moon, and the water lapping as we drifted had become the ordinary noise, the way our engines should’ve been.

After a while, the rest of them stopped waiting for me to give the O.K. before they got themselves another brew. We had cases of 3.2 ripped open all over the bow, and of C rations that we had opened by mistake, and we kept on bumping into them, and each other, and the nice torpedo tubes, the insect guns and who knows what-all in the dark, trying to find out from our fingers and each other’s information where the boat ended, so we could be sure we were pissing out of it. Every time I told myself I’d better taper off, I’d think of the black dot in our wake. I started to almost mourn the time when we could see it, instead of just knowing it was there.

“Skipper?” somebody said, as I either belched or farted. I was too drunk to be sure which end of me was up.

“Lea’ me ‘lone. Fchrisesake all’you lea’ me ‘lone. Don’ know anything either.”

“I think we’re on a sandbar.” It was the exec.

I got on my hands and knees to see how the boat felt. He was right, we were still being tugged by the current but now something was stopping it from doing whatever the hell it wanted with us. The boat was keeling slightly but steadily to starboard, the bow pinned by the water onto whatever was holding it there, like a gray butterfly in a glass case of sea and night.

“Sonvabitch,” I said. “Fits low tide now, we’ll float off when it’s high tide. Fits high tide now, we can build sand castles when it’s low tide. Win-win.”

“If this is a sandbar, then there must be an island,” my exec reasoned. “Besides, I think I can hear surf.”

I looked out over the gunwale, blinking and straining my ears. Part of the night dead ahead of me did look even more like night than the rest did, and along what I had decided was that part’s lower edge there was an occasional faint scrawl of maybe-white chalk, in time to dim crashing. I stood up, grabbing at the gunwale.

“Well, God damn, let’s go, then,” I said, putting one leg over it. “Jesus, I can’t tell you how glad I’m going to be to get off this bucket.”

“Skipper!” He grabbed my arm. “It might be Jap-held.”

“Aw, shit. We’re at war with them, aren’t we? That’s fucking sad when you think about it. Isn’t it just fucking sad?”

“If you don’t get hold of yourself pretty soon, I’ll do it for you,” he said. “Besides, have you forgotten?
It’s
still out there, Skipper.”

Remembering the black dot in our wake sobered me up P.D.Q. “Can you see it?” I said.

“I don’t need to. Do you—I mean, can you?”

“O.K.,” I said. Trying to clear my head, I dragged my fingers down my cheeks. “No way we’re going to know anything for sure before it’s light. But I want guards. How tanked is Flugelhorn?”

“Three sheets. But awake.”

“Stick him up in the bow with the Thompson—do we still have the Thompson? O.K. You stay put here with the leeward .50 cal. I’ll be back in the stern with my .45. That sound about right to you?”

“Well, I don’t have any better ideas.” He let go of my arm, and I heard him stumbling forward to go figure out which the fuck one was Flugelhorn all over again and get him set up in the bow. I got down off the bridge, landed flat on my fat ass, pulled myself back up again and went toward the stern, tripping over a cigar of God’s that I figured out a second later was the starboard torpedo tube. Making sure the flap on the holster of my .45 was undone, I settled down next to the sternmost starboard depth-charge canister. A couple of unopened cans of 3.2 had rolled back there, so I cracked one to keep myself company. No point in even trying to look at my watch.

I don’t know if I dozed or not. But the soft bumping in the water against the stern brought me back from wherever I was. At first I didn’t even name it bumping, I just knew that it was a new sound I was
getting used to, and then my brain jumped with the thought that maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I should find out what it was before I got more used to it and sleepy. I didn’t want to look, but I worked up the nerve by reminding myself that I probably wouldn’t be able to see much of anything. My mouth was all muzzy, and my brain not heart was in it, like a frog. If I opened my mouth, my brain would hop away, and land with a splash in the water. I had no idea if this would be a good thing or not. My brain wasn’t working anyway. Maybe it deserved to be free.

Drawing my .45, I looked down past the stern. I might as well have stuck my head into the folds of a nun’s habit, but it was still true something was down there. It was a shape of black on black that the swells kept nudging forward to tap against the hull, then pulling back again. No question it was driftwood, with one branch sticking up and a knobby part next to that. But it was still driftwood that looked kind of like a man, so I decided to kid myself along for a second by just pretending it was one and seeing how that went.

“Jack?” I said, keeping my voice low. “That you, Jack?”

It didn’t answer. It just came forward, with its one branch waving hello, and then went back again. By now, I couldn’t have told you what was funny, or scary, or stupid, or real, or anything. “Say, Jack,” I told it. “You know I’m always glad to see you, buddy. But if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to have to plug you sooner or later.”

The chunk of driftwood dipped and waved, but didn’t talk. It wanted to let the water do the talking for it, but I didn’t understand water. All these years, and now my brain had finally spilled the beans. It had never known what water was saying and always wanted it to talk slower, which the water never did. Even a five-year-old who’d never seen the ocean before had understood it better than I could.

Well, that pissed me off more ways than I could count. Putting my free hand over one eye to steady my aim, although I might as well have put it over both of them for all the good it did, I put a bullet right into the water that I didn’t understand, the nun’s habit of the night, and the driftwood that was Jack.

Christ. Of course, the next thing I knew, Flugelhorn was spraying everything in sightlessness with the Tommy gun, my exec was pounding a whole belt of .50 cal into that Cheshire-cat smile of maybe-white surf off to starboard, and Algligni, who I hadn’t made part of my plans or even known was awake, had just lobbed a grenade over the
port
side of the damn boat, where there wasn’t anything to blow up but the ocean. Meanwhile, all the guys who’d been passed out and hadn’t even known about the sandbar, much less anything afterwards, were jumping up or taking cover or running around like headless chickens, all screaming “Jesus
fuckV
and “God no please I’ll be good” and “Skipper” and “I see it, Ski!” and finally, as the firing died away, “What the hell was
that
about?,” which came from Flugelhorn in the bow.