A Tidewater Morning, Page 2

  Dropping the brogue, he glanced by way of the mirror at Stiles’s book and said: “What learned pundit are you sticking your nose into now, Dougie?”

  “Hobbes, sir,” Stiles replied, “an English philosopher of the seventeenth century. The book’s called Leviathan. It’s probably his chef d’oeuvre.”

  In the mirror I could see Halloran grinning. “Give me an abstract. Is he Bolshie or anti-Bolshie?”

  After a hesitation, Stiles said: “Well, it’s hard to be specific, sir, since his historical context was so complicated, and he predated Marx by so many years. I suppose you could say that in his concept of the State as a kind of supermonster he was providing us, willy-nilly, with one of the earliest critiques of the Communist form of totalitarianism. But then at the same time you could hardly call him an advocate of democracy.”

  “He’d be to the right of that other guy, then—what’s his name, John Locke?”

  “Oh, certainly,” Stiles said. “By comparison Locke would be a true liberal.”

  Halloran ruminated for a moment, holding his straight-edge razor poised in midair. “How much influence did this guy have on Marx? As much as Hegel?”

  “Oh, God, no,” Stiles said, “no one influenced Marx so much as Hegel. Oh, I’m sure Marx had read the great English social philosophers—Hobbes, Locke, Bentham—but he pretty much discarded their ideas and created his own system.”

  “That Marx,” said Halloran, shaking his head, “that fucking Marx. What a shitload of trouble.”

  He paused and flipped a blob of foam from his razor, the straight-edge blade murderous-looking and slender, the only nonsafety razor in the outfit, to my knowledge, and nearly the only one I had ever seen. It was among the colonel’s trademarks, like the handlebar mustache or the silver-inlaid Colt .38 special police revolver he wore on his hip in a luxurious cordovan leather holster so energetically spit-shined that once, collapsed down beside him during a training problem on a Saipan beach, I saw my face bulbously reflected in it, as in a fun-house mirror. Both the Jerry Colonna mustache and the revolver were nonregulation; mustaches were allowed but they should not be recherché, and the standard-issue sidearm was a .45 automatic. The automatic, it was commonly noted, was not really reliable, hard to aim (though once aimed it could pulverize an ox). But it was less for this reason that Halloran sported his more glamorous sidearm—and the flamboyant handlebar—than for their dash and style, to which his status as a legend entitled him. The Marine Corps is rigorous, even Prussian, in many of its fetishlike requirements, but there is something affectingly lackadaisical in its toler ance of reasonable eccentricities shown by favored oddballs; unlike the Prussians, the Marines, thanks to this good-natured view, have been helped in saving themselves from dementia.

  “So you think this Hobbes can help you devastate Marx when you get down to that book you’re planning to write?” Halloran asked.

  “Yes, sir, absolutely,” Stiles said. “A man whose evil has been so vast and pervasive has had to draw his ideas from many sources, and I don’t want to miss even a fragment of the thought that might have been provided by any of his predecessors.”

  “Well, as I say, I keep wishing you luck.” He paused again. “That fucking Marx sure brought us a shitload of trouble.”

  I rather hoped this part of the conversation would cease, since I’d heard it or its equivalent several times before. In the Marines, political talk among officers has traditionally been constrained by a lurking delicacy that makes it almost forbidden (it is forbidden in officers’ wardrooms, along with religion and sex); but the Bolshevik menace, I had discovered, could be fair game. Like most regular officers Halloran was a political dumbbell, and Stiles had become his mentor. As for myself, I was considerably less interested in politics than Stiles was, and his involvement could become annoyingly overheated. But suddenly and mercifully the matter evaporated. We watched for a moment while Halloran swabbed his cheeks with a towel, then patted on talcum powder. Shortly, I knew from past observation, he would carefully wax the mustache with something he called “twice-precious goo” from a jar he had acquired in San Francisco’s Chinatown. But even as he stroked his cheeks, exhaling in satisfaction, we heard over the churning of the ship’s engines a far-off booming sound, sensed an ugly vibration in the air; for an instant all three of us cocked our ears. Then we relaxed. It could have been anything, way out on the sea: a kamikaze obliterating a destroyer, a flattop like Intrepid or Essex being torpedoed, an ammo ship reduced to iron filings and vapor—anything. Halloran, still peering into the mirror, silently mouthed the words “Fuck it.”

  “Sir,” said Stiles, “what’s this scuttlebutt about the division going back to Saipan? Is it true that we might not ever make a landing?”

  “I can’t say for sure, Dougie,” Halloran replied, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s all sorts of poop filtering down from G-2 that we won’t be needed. Now, please, don’t ask me why. But the word’s out that in Washington, or Pearl, or wherever such decisions are made, they believe our two divisions plus the dogface divisions will be quite enough. If this is so, it’s back to our old island and all that wild nightlife in Garapan.”

  “But Jesus, sir!” Stiles was on his feet, slamming his fist into his palm, all agitation and protest. “This is a farce! We didn’t come out here these thousands of miles to sit around that stinking little island and watch our hands and feet rot off. We were trained to kill Japs, for Christ’s sake! And now there’s this phony operation tomorrow just to tease us. That wouldn’t be so bad if we knew we were at least being held in reserve, that we’d be landed sooner or later. But this To go back to Saipan and turn into zombies! It’s”—his voice rose querulously—“it’s intolerable!”

  “Calm down, Douglas, me boy,” Halloran said amiably, lapsing into an Irish brogue now, excruciating but somewhat more convincing than the Highland cadence; he was, after all, of Irish descent. “In the Corps ye’ll learn to endure frustration and take orders like the foine young lad you are. If you don’t make Okinawa, you’ll surely make the mainland. Then on the mainland, it’s me foine belief, ye’ll get to kill yourself half a dozen of the little ringtail baboons—maybe half a hundred. Also,” he added with a lewd wink, “you’ll get a lot of that sidewise nooky.” He was alluding to the Marine Corps pleasantry, exhaustively repeated, that the Japanese pudendum was horizontal.

  “But the mainland! God knows when that’ll be. Anything could happen. We could get sick, have an accident—anything!” Stiles stopped for a moment, resumed in a milder voice: “With all due respect, sir, and no offense, but you’ve personally taken care of a bunch of those baboons. We haven’t.” He spread his arm in a gesture that included me, wearing an expression that made him seem embarrassingly close to grief. “We haven’t laid eyes on a Jap!”

  There was another dullish crump crump, closer now, near enough to make the colonel’s eyebrows twitch. “Kamikaze,” he said, and stretched out his body toward the porthole. “Fucking Japanese lunatics,” he murmured in a flat, emotionless voice, searching the ocean. “Insane sons of bitches. Fucking dogs, whole fucking empire. Eighty million animals with rabies.” He drew back from the porthole, licked his lips, inhaled, strove to say something else, then trailed off with a valiant but somehow inadequate “Dog fuckers.” Suddenly a sparkle lit in his eyes—it was plain he was finished with Stiles’s spunky dissidence—and he said: “Well, let’s have a drop of whiskey, me boys, and I’ll tell you a little story.”

  And suddenly I didn’t want to hear a story. I was seized once again by the despondent, haunted mood that had overtaken me on the deck. I felt that sharp homesickness again and yearned to return to sleep. But I had to hear (or pretend to hear) the story, even though Halloran was one of the worst storytellers I had ever listened to. Someone (it may have been Stiles) remarked that when Halloran got halfway through a story, even Halloran began to go to sleep. Lest I be misunderstood, this had nothing to do with intelligence but arose from a particular deafness—not
just a lack of savoir faire but deafness to all social nuance, like a hymn singer caroling with glorious self-confidence Sunday after Sunday in just noticeably the wrong tempo and a halftone flat. Halloran was such a splendid fighting man that everyone pardoned his buffoonery. Stiles, who revered Halloran as much as I did, but who like wise wondered what made the man tick, once laid it all out to me in what I thought was a deft analysis. Happy Halloran was a professional Marine. He was 101 percent Marine Corps—member of a fellowship of knights, professor of a faith, a way of life to which he had consecrated himself as fiercely as any guardian of the Grail. Okay, Stiles went on, this Illinois knight served his squire’s discipline at Culver Military Academy. Then the Citadel, where the intellectual level was on a par with that of a night school for the mentally retarded. Then the time served with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai just before Pearl Harbor. The Americans, along with the British and the French, had made a playground of Shanghai for years. Probably the only time as an adult he’d had any taste of a civilian atmosphere—eating wonton soup and trying to make out with all that fabled blond White Russian pussy. Then at last these years of war—virtually the rest of his life (except for a brief Stateside assignment)—spent among the sweltering Pacific isles, fighting an enemy he hated with such barely governed rage that he choked when he uttered its name. Wouldn’t you, Stiles said to me, be a little—ahem—peculiar, I mean not quite like the rest of us college kids, if that was the earliest chapter in the story of your life as an American boy?

  The colonel poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into three mess-kit cups and sat down on the edge of the bunk opposite us. It was strictly illegal to drink aboard ship—but, of course, fuck it. Like all Marines who had been in the Pacific for many months, Halloran was scandalously rich through accumulated and unspent back pay. “I gave a Navy supply officer seventy-five bucks for this bottle,” he said, grinning, and held the fifth of amber-hued bourbon up to the light. “Old Forester. Only the best for gents of the Second Battalion. I don’t think I told you this story before, fellows—”

  A beer guzzler, I had tasted whiskey only half a dozen times in my life; I didn’t yet quite know how to handle the awesomely poetic exhilaration I felt when it began nibbling away at my brain cells. I took a hefty sip and experienced instant vertigo: this canceled out any need to try to follow Halloran’s narrative. The only story I wished I could hear—an account from his own lips of the fabulous episode on Tarawa that had won him the Navy Cross (and, of course, our houndlike devotion)—was obviously the only story that he, like any hero with appropriate modesty, could not tell. Instead (oh, Jesus, I thought), here began another tale about Shanghai, the poor guy’s golden time of whoopee amid a totally regimented life. Would it be about Svetlana, the honey-haired White Russian “countess,” suspected agent for the Japanese, who tried her sultry best to squeeze out secrets from Halloran, the junior intelligence officer? (It was a story with brilliant possibilities, and it should have had zip and suspense, like a good Hitchcock movie, in addition to some juicy sex, but Halloran had told it so confusedly that it lacked all of these, especially the sex. “Svetlana was just a slut” was his raciest observation, which reinforced my view that, like most military academy men, he was basically quite prudish, all talk and small action, and had probably gotten less ass than even I had.) Or would it be about Chinese beer? Halloran could do a minimum of forty-five minutes on the brewing of Chinese beer and still be working up to matters of bottle design and the way the head foamed.

  “Shanghai.” I heard the word and I shut Halloran off from my mind as if I had snapped a switch. The eyes of many people, when confronted with a bore, glaze over; one can actually see the glaze as it steals over their vision, a gradual lusterlessness that becomes like that of raw oysters long exposed to air. I, by contrast, have always had the knack of being able to maintain pinpoints of light in my pupils, giving the bore a false impression that I am listening. Thus, as Halloran wound himself up in his reminiscence, and my nostalgia deepened, I sank into a reverie while two interlocking memories flickered in my head like scenes from a home movie. The faraway explosions had made me envision an aircraft carrier in its death convulsion; I had a swift image of oily smoke boiling heavenward, the deck listing, sailors tumbling into the sea like scattered windup toys. This dissolved, gave way to the memory of the launching of the flattop Ranger, America’s first aircraft carrier, which, at the age of seven, I believed to be largely the creation of my father—although he was actually only a medium-level draftsman at the shipyard, where he took me (drugged with sleep at three in the morning) to gawk and marvel.

  And it had been thrilling to watch the mechanics, at once brutish and delicate, of setting loose the behemoth into its natural element—of freeing from its uterine dry dock into the strife-torn seas the “biggest, most complex and costly movable object made by human hands” (my father’s words). It had required nine hours, this monstrous parturition, set into motion long before dawn by gangs of floodlit chanting Negroes swinging oak battering rams that knocked down, at precisely timed intervals, one after another of the scores of telephone pole—sized pilings that for months had held in equipoise thousands of tons of inert steel. “A marvel of technology!” said my father. I was enraptured by this sight: the sweating black figures sang in a rhythmic chorus, wild, scary, African. It was controlled bedlam, and it was also splendidly dangerous. Now and then a pole would split apart nastily, or topple the wrong way, and the Negroes would drop the ram with a thunderous noise and scatter for their lives (unprotected to any degree, I might add, by collective bargaining). Their labor ended at the stroke of noon, when two events took place almost together. First, in an act of godlike finality, Mr. Gresham, an engineer colleague of my father’s , hunched down deep in a pit beneath the hull, pressed a button that detonated a dynamite cap, blowing off the top of the single upright that remained. “Imagine such a delicate balance!” my father whispered, or rather shouted above the crowd’s roar as the mass of gray steel, bunting-bedecked, began to slip ever so gently toward the muddy James. What a sight—this new sweetheart of the seas being birthed, lubricated in its passage down the ways by dirty white masses of tallow as high as snowdrifts. The tallow slithered out from beneath the keel in gigantic curlicues and sent afloat to the festive onlookers a smell of rancid mutton. At nearly the same instant that Mr. Gresham pushed his button, I heard Mrs. Herbert Hoover warble: “I christen thee Ranger!” I noticed that her slip was showing, and then she went clunk with the bottle, clunk again at the prow sliding away from her before she solidly connected, showering the Ranger and herself with a purple sacrament of Prohibition grape juice. A week or two later, in one of the newsreels, I actually caught a blurred half-second glimpse of myself, gaping up at my father adoringly.

  But there is something else you forgot, I thought, as I sat in Halloran’s cabin and felt the bourbon warming me, making my lips grow numb. You forgot your father’s voice on the ride homeward: “Someday planes will fly off that ship and bomb the Japanese.” You believed your father as you believed—then—in God, but did not believe this, believed only that it was a joke he was making about war. War was in the movies, war was not something that ever happened, not to Americans …

  “I had this pal in Shanghai then,” I heard Halloran say. “A Marine gunner named Willie Weldon. He was a little older than I was, an old China hand who’d been with Rupertus’s battalion back in the mid-1930s, when the Japs were kicking up their usual shit.” I suddenly realized that I had let my Halloran switch go to the On position, and I nodded and smiled again, half-listening. “Well. Willie Weldon was one of the biggest swordsmen that ever came down the pike. The rank of gunner really fit him. This guy was absolutely crazy for gash. Anyway, I told Willie I’d introduce him to this friend of Svetlana’s . A gal named Ludmilla, a really good-looking stacked White Russian broad who lived in a great flat right off Bubbling Well Road.” He paused and scratched his chin. “No, it was near the Nanking Road, I remember, because
Bubbling Well had been blocked off to traffic—”

  You’re losing me, Colonel, I thought, ready to drift away again. Un raconteur de tongues histoires, I wanted to tell him, must be direct, linear, must not encumber his tales with the distracting names of thoroughfares, above all must be deft and relevant, relevant: For God’s sake, keep the ball moving! “I think her name was Ludmilla, or maybe it was the other one, Olga. Fuck! I can’t remember. No, wait a minute—”

  Whenever, I thought—switching Halloran off again—whenever I was overtaken by a spasm of metaphysical creepiness, and the sheer unreality of this endless war enfolded me like a damp, mildewed shroud, I thought of my father. How could he have been so prescient? How could he have known those many years ago that I would someday be in a situation like this? How did he ever imagine that his son would grow up to be a killer, not only willing but eager to kill—to anticipate killing with crude, erotic excitement? He didn’t know the last part. But of course it now seemed inevitable that he—a man who helped build huge war machines but who was a peaceable soul with an exquisite sense of history—should have visualized the trajectory of his son’s life, ending here in these remote and unknown archipelagoes before he was old enough to vote. And I recalled, with a luminous, mnemonic clarity that amazed me, a long-ago day when he virtually predicted my presence on a ship like the USS General Washburn, making its cumbersome passage to the out landish coast of Okinawa …

  The title of the story in The Saturday Evening Post was “The Curse of the Rising Sun,” and I was reading it in the back of the family Oldsmobile, broken down with engine trouble beside a peanut field near the VirginiaCarolina line. At eleven I could read Post fiction with contemptuous ease, but I was not quite old enough to avoid being troubled by the fantasy—a 1930s version of spy thriller spiced up with a touch of futuristic horror. In the front seat my mother, her leg in a steel brace, gazed stolidly forward through the fading light of an October afternoon while my father labored over the steaming engine. I was the classic only child—snotty, self-absorbed—and I offered neither solace nor help, curled up in the back with my chronicle of the nightmare that engulfed America “in the early 1950s.” It was untethered hell. Colossal submarines the size of ocean liners had disgorged their weasel-faced hordes at a dozen landing sites from Seattle to San Diego. Paralysis had ensued as the nation failed to mobilize its defenses. California had become another Manchuria, prostrate, in thrall. San Francisco lay pillaged, the people destroyed like insects. Feeble resistance had allowed Los Angeles to be overrun; the palaces of the movie moguls were occupied by smirking officers, rattling their samurai swords and defiling starlets. (I remember one captioned line drawing: “I saw your film in Tokyo,” said Colonel Oishi sneeringly to the cringing Gloria, “A pretty dance. Now you will perform for me another kind of dance.”) As Part One began to wind down (I peeked ahead and discovered that “The Curse of the Rising Sun” was a serial in three segments), a certain Major Bradshaw of U.S. Army Intelligence, based with the Defense Command in Denver, spoke on the telephone to his wife back east, imparting the news that the Imperial Fifth Army, a legion of fiends specializing in babies and old people, was advancing across the Arizona desert toward Phoenix, where her parents lived. She sobbed; he counseled courage. Troops from Texas were on the way. Continued next week.