Oh, it was midnight on the ocean, not a streetcar was in sight
I stepped into a drug store, to get myself a light
The man behind the counter was a woman, old and gray
who used to peddle shoestrings on the road to Mandalay
(popular song, ca. 1942)
The morning sun streamed through the frilly cafe-curtains, turning them yellow-gold. Myra wouldn't have mini blinds in her kitchen, even though all her friends had them. They just wouldn't fit the rest of the house, she said. Too modern. The house was a tiny Dutch bungalow, typical of the sort that the veterans bought with their GI loans, a so-called starter home. Only in their case, they had stayed there. Both it and they had been young then, were old now. The house looked the better for the years, neat as a pin and never wanting for a coat of paint. The Plunketts, Thornton and Myra, didn't look quite so good, but like the curtains, they fit the house.
Thornton whacked his soft-boiled egg with his table knife and dumped its contents onto a piece of buttered toast. Healthy habits were one thing, but eggs and butter were something else, and Myra had lost the low-fat battle on that front, long ago. She had, however, persuaded him to give up coffee in favor of hot cocoa, and she now poured a steaming cup for each of them. Then, while he mashed his toast and egg into a disgusting mess with his knife, she went out to get the morning mail. She hoped he wouldn't add too much salt, but she made a point of not watching.
She dropped the mail on the table, put on her glasses, and began to sort through it. Most of it was junk that she put in a stack to trash without opening.
"Another tree bites the dust," he said, looking at the pile, "just to tell the Plunketts how to spend their money. Anything we actually care about?"
"Bills," she said, flipping through the remaining pieces. "And...oh, that's odd."
"No, it isn't. We always get bills."
She gave him a playful scowl. "No, this, silly." She tapped a crisp white envelope with an embossed logo. "You got a letter from the Navy."
"If they want me to re-up, they're about sixty years too late. Throw it away."
"Maybe you should read it, Thornton. There might be some veterans' benefit we haven't heard about."
"You read it, if you want to." He took a loud slurp of cocoa and pretended not to watch her tear open the envelope.
"Oh," she said after a moment. "It's not from the Navy, exactly, just from somebody who's an officer in the Navy. I guess they let them use the official stationery."
"They let officers do any damn thing. What the hell does he want from me?"
She frowned and continued reading. She didn't approve of cursing at the table, never had. But sometimes he just wouldn't restrain himself, and there was nothing at all to be done about that. In her generation, you didn't jeopardize a perfectly good marriage just because your husband was a vulgar lout. Not if you were a proper lady, you didn't. And there were worse marriages, she knew. One of her classmates had actually married a murderer. Imagine!
"Wasn't your old ship named the Salerno, Thornton?"
"That's her, all right. The one I was on for most of the war, anyway. The Sorry Sal, we used to call her. Beat-up old tanker, built in '17 for the First War, in the Atlantic. In '42, they took her through the Big Ditch, slapped on a new coat of paint, and sent her out of Bremerton to run aviation gas up to Alaska and the Aleutians. They had a base up there with P-38s and B-24s, though what for, was beyond me. Fighting the Japs over a bunch of godforsaken islands that weren't worth the powder to blow them to hell in the first place. The sideshow, was what the old chiefs called it. Not much of a war, but then, the old Sal wasn't much of a ship, either. I expect they scrapped her out a long time ago."
"No, they didn't, but they're about to."
"You're goofy, woman. Why would they..."
"Listen to this: 'The USS Salerno will be decommissioned and declared salvage in December of this year. If there are no bidders for salvage rights, she will be towed out to sea and sunk. Meanwhile, some of her former crewmen, enlisted and officer, have obtained permission from the Navy to stage a crew reunion aboard her, at her berth in San Diego. We have caterers and a band lined up, and those who want to can even spend a night on board, in their old quarters. If you are interested in attending, please...'"
"I can't believe they've kept that tub afloat all these years. Wow. And now she's going out for the last time." He stopped chewing his toast and got a faraway look in his eyes.
"You could go, Thornton. San Diego isn't that far. You could take the train. You always liked the train, and..."
"Huh?" He shook himself, as if trying to wake up. "Go? No. No, that wouldn't be right. I couldn't do that."
"Wouldn't you like to see your old ship? See how fat all the other sailors have gotten, while you..."
"No, you don't get it. It would be like a party, see."
"You could stand a good party."
"No, it's just wrong. There shouldn't be any parties."
"Everybody says World War II was the good war, the clean war, the war when everything made sense."
"Everybody. Hollywood, TV, the newspapers, everybody. It was a great crusade, a swell little boy scout outing, the sensible thing to do. That's the way we see it now. But I'll tell you, up there in the north Pacific, not a damn thing made any sense. We were on a junk fleet, fighting a sideshow war, and none of it mattered at all. But you could still get killed. I used to look around at the crew, the idiots and the goof-offs and the cons, and... "
"Sure. Didn't I ever tell you? Convicted criminals. Murderers, rapists, armed robbers, I don't know what all. Lifers, some of them. They got out of prison for the duration if they'd serve on a ship, see. The Navy was that hard up for men. They were just like regular crew, only they never got shore liberty, except if they managed to sneak off. Then the SPs would beat the living bejeezis out of them when they got caught. Why they tried was anybody's guess. In places like Dutch Harbor and Attu, there wasn't a whole lot to sneak off to."
"There was a woman behind every tree, you used to say."
"Damn straight. And there wasn't a tree in a thousand miles. Horrible place. Anyway, I used to look at them and think, 'That's what's wrong with this war. The right ones never get killed. When it's all over, those scum that I have to serve with will still be around, and the world will be just as messed up as ever.' And it is. Because the wrong ones died."
"Well, nobody died on your ship, did they? And a good thing, too or else where would I be now?" Married to Lawrence Heinke, the dairy farmer, is what she thought, but she kept that to herself.
"They tried," he said, staring off into space again. "Damn Japs tried to kill us. They torpedoed us once, you know. I ever tell you that?"
"We stood at the rail and watched it come, like the finger of doom, pointing us out, marking us for death. Everybody just stood and watched. What the hell else were we going to do? Some sub had us dead to rights, targeted broadside, and the whole ship full of high-octane av gas."
"But it was a dud," she said. She had heard the story enough times to know it as well as he did.
"That's right," he said. "The torpedo was a dud. Knocked a big dent in the side of the hull and then just sank without a pop. And it must have been their last one, because they didn't shoot at us again."
"And nobody died, after all. So if you want to go to this reunion, you..."
"Not then, they didn't. But after that everybody went a little crazy. A few days later was when one of the cons killed Jonesy."
She gave him a cautious look, carefully putting down her cup. "I don't think you've ever told me that story. You aren't just making something up now, are you?" That was as close as she ever came to telling him she thought he was, for all his good qualities, a habitual liar. His stories always had some kind of basis in fact, she knew, but sometimes the beginnings and ends were not cut from the same fabric at all.
He shook his head. "It's never seemed like such a good thing to tell."
"He was a rookie ensign, a spit-and-polish one-striper, straight out of OCS, trying to impress the world, always playing big shot. From the deck up, a real gung-ho pain in the ass. He wasn't even a real officer, with a job like the exec. or the engineering officer, but he acted like God almighty. And he had a habit of going around at night, trying to shake up the watch standers, playing 'yessir, nossir,' games, pretending we were back in boot camp. Everybody hated his guts."
"Be quiet and listen. A few nights after the business with the torpedo, I was standing the midnight watch on the fantail, with a convict named Alvarez. Ran his mouth constantly, this guy did, mostly about how tough he was and how nobody better mess with him and how much he hated Jonesy. Just ranting. I thought he was some kind of mental case, so I was agreeing with him, just to keep him halfways calm. But then, he opens up his peacoat and shows me a blackjack and a length of pipe he's got stuck in his belt. He hands me the pipe and says, 'If that sonofabitch comes around tonight, let's hit him over the head and throw him off the stern. Who'll ever know?' I was scared out of my mind, wondering what the hell I'd got myself into."
"Hell, no, I didn't tell him 'no.' For all I knew, he'd just as soon bash my brains in first, and Jonesy's right after me. I was too shook up to say anything. I nodded my head and kept my mouth shut and stood the longest damn watch of my life, wondering what I was going to do."
"But you didn't hit officer Jones over the head, did you?"
He furrowed his brows, as if making the difficult decision all over again. "As luck would have it, he never showed up that night. I went off watch shaking like a leaf, and I swore never to pull the duty with that screwball again."
She wondered how he could have avoided it, being a mere enlisted seaman, but knew better than to contradict him when he was getting into the flow of the story.
"The next night, we ran into a storm. Thirty-foot waves, and black water coming over the bow, so they sent the deck watch below. This same con, Alvarez, was on lookout in the crows nest at midnight."
"They still have crows nests on modern ships?"
"Back then, they did, anyway. Radar was a hot new item, and unimportant ships like ours didn't have it yet. The crew was still the eyes of the ship. And even steamships need masts, for the radio wires and the cargo sheaves, and stuff. It's the best place on the ship for a lookout station. It was enclosed, with windows, but you still had to climb an open ladder to get to it. So anyway, Alvarez is standing lookout in the storm, and he phones down to the bridge to report that Jonesy just fell out of the crows nest. 'Sure, sure', they say; 'get off the line, if all you got on your mind is making jokes'. Only the next day, they find Ensign Jones wrapped around the main cargo boom like a wet dishrag. Fell about sixty feet before he hit it. Never had a chance."
"That's terrible! And this convict person pushed him?"
"They never proved it, as far as I know, but that's what I always figured. The next day, the weather calmed down and we made port in Anchorage. They were going to have a board of inquiry. But my old man back home had a heart attack and they airlifted me home, so I missed it. Emergency mercy leave, they called it. When I got back to the war, the old Sal was somewhere out at sea, so they put me on a brand new destroyer escort, the Pruitt, out of Oakland. We got about halfway to Japan before the war was over. If Alvarez went to trial, I never heard about it."
She was about to challenge a point of his story, but she saw that not only had he resumed the far away look, he now had a tear running down his cheek. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. Surprisingly enough, he squeezed back.
"I was just a dumb, scared kid," he said. "How was I supposed to know the right thing to do?"
"But you could still go to the reunion. Maybe somebody knows..."
He shook his head emphatically and she nodded her understanding. Then, not knowing what to do next, she picked up the letter again.
"Thornton, are you sure about the name of the young officer?"
"I'm not likely to forget it, am I?"
"Well, no, I suppose not. But that's the name of the officer who wrote this letter."
"See? He's not an ensign anymore, he's a retired commander, but the name is definitely Jones."
His face turned sullen. "Well, it's wrong! Somebody has a sick sense of humor, that's all. I don't want to hear any more about it!"
"Yes, Thornton." She began to refold the letter, then noticed a handwritten subscript that she hadn't read yet.
In case you can't make the party, I thought you might like to know about the board of inquiry that you missed. Seaman Alvarez's death was officially ruled an accident. Even though you were the last one to see him alive, up in the crows nest, the Navy managed to come to that conclusion without your testimony. He was probably drunk on jungle juice when he fell, and nobody missed him all that much, anyway. So breathe easy.
Hope you can make the reunion. It should be a hell of a party.
Myra dropped the letter as if it were on fire, for suddenly she knew why he would not, could not, ever look at the Salerno again. He had pulled duty with that screwball again. He... "Oh, my God, Thornton."
"I was just a kid." The tears came in sheets now. "I was scared and I didn't know what to do. I just wanted..."
She repeated it quite a lot of times.
© 2005 by Richard A. Thompson.