Second Skin (New Directions Paperbook), page 17
“Let go, Skipper,” whispering, shuffling, “let me chop him down!”
And then there was the flash of the head, the toss of the long black hair, and Tremlow leapt from the wheel and assumed a crouch. The grass skirt was matted into a smooth bulky fibrous round over the terrible bones of his hips, fell long and sharp and undulating to his bare ankles. Even when he crouched it swished. The wheel was abandoned and the brass speaking tube was calling us, fiercely, shrilly, and moonlight was all about Tremlow and suddenly was also falling flat on a long dark flank that had come out of the grass like a tiger.
“No, no, Sonny,” I whispered, holding the arm, turning away the axe, keeping my eyes on the muscles bunching up to spring, “when I hit him, you take the wheel. We must think of the ship….”
So the bright axe fell under our feet. And Sonny sprang out of the way and I threw up my guard. The moon, I noticed, made luminous scar-shaped blotches on the slick brown of that violent breast and flashed and swam and was scattered in all the sharp folds and blended spaces of that now hissing and roaring grass skirt which was coming at me and barely covered him, swinging, swaying in his headlong strides. He was still grinning.
“Tremlow,” I tried to say when he socked me. He knocked down my guard with a tap of his bright fist, and vaguely I thought that it wasn’t fair, that he was supposed to respect my age, respect my rank, that he was supposed to be down in the shack communicating with the rest of the fleet. Knocked down my guard and socked me in the mouth, and I should have ducked at least because the line of that blow was as clear as hate in the steady eyes, though I still missed the idea, the plan, which was surely riding far forward by then in Tremlow’s eye.
“Wait,” I said, and my mouth was bleeding, “wait a minute… you don’t know what you’re doing… you’ll be sorry, Tremlow.”
But he hit me in the mouth again. Same fist, same mouth, more bloody mud, more pain. Why not the nose, I thought, or the naked eye, or the stomach, why this furious interest in my loose and soft-spoken mouth?
“Tremlow,” I said, tried to say, “you’re on duty…and Battle Stations…the shack…please.”
We went over the rail, off that wing of the bridge and down, down, with his fist wedged among my bloody teeth and the grass skirt flying, and together, locked together in his hate we burst through something—canvas, I thought, the tarp!—and landed together in a black embrace. Faint odor of dried-out bilge. Faint odor of new hemp. And of cork and lead and paint. And feeling another kind of pain, suddenly I knew that we had fallen together into the bottom of the white lifeboat—33 persons—and that we were not alone. For a moment, hearing laughter, listening to Tremlow swear, for a moment my eyes in darkness found the star-shaped hole in the tarpaulin overhead, and for that single moment I watched the gentle moon pulsing to all the limits of the great canted star cut in the canvas. I must have moaned.
Because the star fled and suddenly the fight went on and the tangle of arms, legs, hands, began to twist again in the sloping darkness inside the boat which all the while I never forgot was white, and my whole poor self told me that the others, whoever they were, were piling on. There seemed to be a purpose in that struggle, but still it escaped me. And then hands, the crook of a naked arm, everyone pulling in a different direction in the darkness until all at once they seemed to work together, those hands, that vicious elbow, and I heard the ripping of cloth and felt myself floundering, flopping helplessly, because they had gotten a little rough water cask under my stomach and were rolling me in some odd fashion on that little rough barrel. And in the darkness. Forever in the darkness and crippled, bleeding away my good blood in my poor battered mouth. There was no laughter now.
“What the hell!” I said, or at least thought deep in my heart, and over the barrel then I began to fight like a fish. Oh, I grunted at them, gagging on blood, grinding the top of my bald head into the invisible deck, and I flexed every possible muscle and bucked, did my best to buck, thrashed around good and plenty in the darkness with someone breathing his hot breath into my ear and the cloth ripping away from my flesh as if they were running the tip of a hot wire down the length of my thigh.
And then: “Dear God,” I said, but this too was merely a quick sensation deep in the heart because the grass skirt—wet rough matting of cruel grass—was rammed against me and there was only darkness and a low steady fatigued scuffling sound in the bottom of the white lifeboat along with my last spent cry of pain.
But they must have had an accomplice stationed on the deck because the darkness bolted then, myself and water keg and kneeling men all knocked together, smashed, set whirling in the very darkness that had been tipped, freed, cut loose, was now falling. Surely there was an accomplice who pushed her out and cut the cables, because one moment I was tumbling in the darkness and the next I was standing straight out of the star-shaped hole with my hands raised up and my eyes thrust up into the moonlight. The lifeboat was falling but I was standing inside the star with my head in the air and my eyes fixed on one tiny figure far above who was leaning out over the deck, throwing down a rope. It was Mac. Mac with his vestments flying and his tiny face white with fear, Mac who flung down the rope and, hand over burning hand—I was free on the end of that rope when the lifeboat struck—pulled me back aboard.
Struck, yes, and the splash reached up and soaked my legs even while I clung to the rope and twirled slowly around and around on the end of it.
“Pull her up, Mac,” I whispered, “for God’s sake…”
There were three lifeboats, as it turned out—Tremlow was in the lead—and on the cold deck I lay half-naked and propped on my side and watched the three of them turn away from us in the moonlight and sail away. Three white sitting ducks in the moonlight. And perhaps I should have unlimbered one of the three-inch guns and ordered them picked off. It would have been easy. And they deserved it. But I lay on the deck half-naked and wet and shivering and thought I saw Tremlow small and dark and confident at the tiller of that first white gently rolling boat. So I let them go. Merely watched and wondered what the sun would do to Tremlow in that grass skirt, wondered what he would say when he was picked up. Claim to be a survivor of a torpedoed ship? God knows. Or perhaps, I thought, perhaps they would never be picked up.
“Let him go on dancing,” I said to Mac and tried to smile.
They disappeared like three drops of milk dissolving in a creamy soup, those three boats. And wiping my nose, rubbing myself gently, lying at Mac’s feet on our wet and unyielding deck I watched them, watched those three little white boats until they were gone. Follow the leader, I thought. And later, much later, I reported the group of them to be missing in action and told the old man we lost the boats in a storm.
The floating paradise, the brutal act, a few memories on a distant shore….
…dropped to my knees beside her and took her cold hand—no rings—and confessed to her at long last that Fernandez was dead. That I had found him dead at the end of my final shore patrol on Second Avenue. That I thought she should know.
Yes, I thought she should know. And yes, I told her the truth, made my confession, got it off my chest that night the snow fell into the trembling arms of the larch trees on our black and ragged island rooted fast in the cold and choppy waters of the Atlantic. Yes, I told her, my own daughter. For her own good. For her own good and mine, for our mutual relief. And yes, yes, I thought she might spare herself if she knew the truth, might spare her own life somehow. But I was wrong, of course.
The truth. Yet wasn’t I deceiving her even then? Wasn’t I sparing her certain details, withholding others, failing somehow to convey the true tonality of the thing? Well, I should hope to God! Because how could I or anyone else convey the true tonality of Second Avenue, kneeling as I was by Cassandra’s little lumpy four-poster—little nightcaps secreted for years under that embroidered pillow—in the cold dark room in that prim rotting house with fresh white snow on the sagging eaves and those dark trenches—Puritan graves—awake and listening in the cellar? No. Second Avenue could not survive that moment in a winter’s night. Then why did I wait, why bother to talk to her at all? Because I should have acted then and there, should have done something on the spot, so to speak, in the middle of the flickering darkness of Second Avenue. Yes, I should have left the body, bodies to be true to fact, exactly where I found them in the flickering chaos of the cheap room in that Second Avenue hotel, flophouse, whatever it was, and posted a guard and driven the gray Navy pickup truck back to that other cheap hotel myself, and waked her and bundled her into a blanket and driven her, still half-asleep, back down those twenty or so wet blocks and carried her up the broken tiles of those stairs and into the room of blood where she could have taken a good look at him with her own eyes. Yes. That’s what I should have done. I know it now. But I waited.
Yes, I waited those two or three months, and they made all the difference, they tipped the scale, shadings of the true tonality were lost, and certain details were kept to myself. Cassandra never knew, for instance, that I took care that she should not be alone that night. Small matter, yet it might have helped. And I never told her how my stomach felt as if it were going to boil over like a car radiator. These and a few other small points omitted, gone. And I shall never forgive myself the loss. A hair’s breadth might have kept Cassandra from killing herself, merely a hair’s breadth. Now I shall never really forgive myself the loss.
But if I missed those many years ago I won’t miss again. So now for everything, for what I told her as well as what I didn’t tell her in the upstairs bedroom of the cold island house, everything I can think of now to restore a little of the tonality, to set to rights my passion. A small recognition, a brief scene of blood, some light on our lost affections.
There was the regulation .45 caliber Navy automatic, for instance, stuck like a four-pound T-bone steak point down on my hip. And a web belt—too small, they were always too small for me—buckled around the girth of my white tunic and squeezing me, puckering the skirt of the tunic with deep awkward pleats. And the dark bright blue brassard on my arm—white letters SP a mile high—and then the gaiters. Little canvas things with laces and hooks and eyes and canvas straps to go under the instep, little canvas sleeves to bind the ends of the white trousers to the fat ankles, and it must have been two o’clock in the morning, Eastern War Time, when I sat on the floor in our shabby room in the cheap hotel trying to fasten on the gaiters, puffing, struggling, moving my lips in silence because Cassandra and Pixie too were both sleeping in the single bed. And finally the cap, my old white garrison cap—eagle going to seed on the front, golden threads of the eagle turning black—the old cap pulled square on my head to simulate, if possible, the policeman’s style, the policeman’s look of authority. My rig, my poor rig. Thank God she never saw me in that rig.
It was raining. Once more we were across the street from a Greyhound terminal, though it was an eastern rather than a Pacific terminal and though we were in a hotel instead of a Chinese restaurant, and it was raining. A vaguely familiar terminal, the return to a hardly altered darkness, the city-wide relentless song of the rain, and in a wet envelope in my pocket, my orders. A final shore patrol for Skipper. More shore patrol, more drunks in a dream, more faces inside the cage. Didn’t they know I had had enough, that I was done with the sea? At least I with held this information from Cassandra, kept her from knowing that she would be alone that night while I, her father, was off exposing himself to God knows what harm. So we crossed the street in the rain at half-past one in the morning—no more 0130 hours for me, no more—and ran for the nearest doorway and in the red-eyed pain of interrupted uneasy slumber we shook ourselves like dogs in front of the desk clerk and piled into the dingy, self-service elevator.
Even from across the street and through the rain I spotted that hotel for what it was: a place for suicide.
“Where are we, Skipper?” she asked once, but I shook my head. I needed time, I needed silence, I had to think. The elevator had a tic in its ratchets and one of the push buttons had fallen out, it banged from side to side in its dismal shaft and smelled like the flooded lavatory of the bus we had just escaped from. There was a crumpled six-inch black headline in the corner. We groaned and banged our way up the shaft.
A place for suicide obviously, and my orders were in my pocket and Sonny was three or four thousand miles away that moment in Southern Cal. Surely I couldn’t seek help from the clerk who had sent us up with malice, oh, with what obvious malice to the fourteenth floor which was really the thirteenth floor, I knew. Never have I been taken in by the number fourteen in a cheap water front hotel but have always known beforehand that other number it concealed. The light went out when we reached the fourteenth—thirteenth—floor and, knowing I could not trust Cassandra alone, I gasped, fumbled for the door lever in the darkness, caught my fingers in a joint that was packed with grease.
So we disembarked quickly into the bare corridor, and as I was turning the key in the lock I saw the figure down on its knees with scrubbing brush and pail at the far end of the corridor and I knew that for the moment at least Cassandra was safe. A lucky break on our unlucky floor.
The single bed, the broken radio, the cigarette burns on the chiffonier, the stains on the toilet seat, the broken window shade which came down in my arms. A room in the wartime metropolis of the world for Cassandra, a cut above a flophouse for Cassandra, just the place for her, with its hairs on the pillows and old disreputable impressions on the gray sheets. How little I knew.
“Are you trying to look like Mussolini, Skipper? You look like Mussolini, Skipper, you really do when you hold your chin out that way.”
I smiled. “You’re tired, Cassandra,” I said, “you better hop right on in. Big day coming up, Cassandra.”
So it was 2 A.M. and mother and infant were sleeping together in the narrow bed with the loose springs which on many another night gave quick unconcealed clamor to the hidden desires of young servicemen, and I was lacing my gaiters in the middle of the floor and staring at the rain-refracted puddle of neon light that my feet were in. It always rained hardest between midnight and early dawn, I thought.
And then hat, gun, gaiters and envelope of orders and I was ready, paused for a last look at the two of them in the lonely bed. “Grandpa’s going on shore patrol,” I whispered, “be a good girl.” I carried a straight-backed chair with me and left the door ajar when I stepped into the hall.
I set down the chair, cleared my throat, beckoned slowly with my finger. From far down the hall she peered at me, dropped the brush into the pail. She swept away the wings of hair with her wet hands and gasped, rolled her eyes at me, climbed to her feet and bundled up the rags of her skirt and came to me as if I were pulling her in steadily on a golden string. She was plucking herself into a vague new shape, her eyes were white and fixed on mine, to those young eyes I must have looked like General Douglas MacArthur in the bare corridor of that disreputable hotel.
Sixteen years old and haggard, dismayed by the faint lingering sensation of her missing youth, confused by her age, already a sallow and lonely legend of the late-night elevated trains. Scrub woman and still a child. And staring at the phantom officer high in that vulgar building while the rain fell.
“Late for you, Sissy,” I said. “Pretty late for you, isn’t it?”
Something crossed her face then and she wiped her nose and tried to conceal what must have been a pain in her side. I drew her close to me—fragile jaw, transparent flesh, a certain color in the hair, human being despite the rags, the tin pail, endless vigil on the fourteenth floor. I glanced at the crack in the door, the chair, and back to the girl with her eyes, bright nose, lame spirit, carfare rolled up in the top of her stocking.
“Now, Sissy,” I said, “can you sit in the chair? Do you think you can do that?”
She looked inward for some obscure source of moral vision, then measured the distance to the chair, then looked long and hard at me, then, “That’s it, that’s it,” I said, and then she sat down.
“Now, Sissy, listen to me. I must go down in the elevator now, and I will be gone until the light comes through the window over your bucket and brush. You see it, Sissy? Now you must stay in the chair until I return. Don’t let anyone go into the room, don’t let the lady come out. And if you hear the lady moving about in the room, you go to her and stay with her. Do you understand me. Sissy? You must keep awake and take care of the lady. Take good care of the lady.”
And stinking elevator, empty desk, rain in the street. And at the curb and occupied, I knew, there was the small gray windowless pickup truck with its official number and spotlight on the driver’s side. It had the unmistakable look of all penal vans, the rain was a thin film over its dents and bruises. Each dent, each chip in the official gray paint meant a thrown brick or a struggle in the street, a punchy body smashed against the side of the gray truck and beaten up, carried away. I sighed, craned up for a final sight of the fourteenth floor and straightened the big blue brassard on my arm and climbed into the truck. The engine kicked over and we pulled out into the deserted thoroughfare of glistening worn trolley track and black girders of the elevated overhead, began to cruise, to weave rhythmically between the girders.
Twenty blocks of girders, fruit carts shrouded for the night, occasional strip-tease theaters—light bulbs, ticket booth, bright naked posters in the rain—while armed merchant ships waited on both the rivers and GI’s drank their late glasses of beer or Ne-dick’s orange juice. Cruising down Second Avenue through the rain, killing a last official night toward the end of the war, fat and uncomfortable and fatigued—gaiters too tight, poor circulation— until, as luck would have it, we saw the crowd and the chief who was driving popped on the light, the little spotlight, and speared the crowd.
