When we entered the holding chamber at the bottom of the giant tank, we were, again, at the very bottom of the Navy totem pole, this time with one hundred feet to swim up. It was one of the major tests that either qualified us for sub duty or put us on top of a freighter or battleship. I wanted to be in a sub, to float in the depths of the ocean, just like I did in my pool in the Truckee. No one knew I lay there in the muddy weeds, ten feet deep below the surface, especially my grandfather. I had disappeared from the world, found my place between water and air. The sub would take me back, a home underwater for four years, only coming up to surprise and to kill. It sounds evil to say I wanted to kill the Japanese, but that’s how we all felt. Every goddamned one of us. Mothers. Fathers. Sisters. Brothers.
We huddled together on our knees in the center of a fully metal room. Pipes and valves stuck out from walls and hung down from the round arch at the top of it, not the ceiling, just the top loading deck. At the front of the compartment, a small oval hatch led to the tank. The rounded walls of the tank expanded out to the side and upward.
I remember feeling wet, even though our bodies, only clothed in white swimming shorts that barely covered my cojones, were dry. The tank had been filled with water, and the moisture of a one-hundred-foot tank seeped out into our base chamber. For a brown kid from Reno, the humidity made it hard for me to breath. I started to gasp for air, doing my best pull in a full breath. Body odor mixed with thick, thick oxygen clogged my throat, so I lifted my head to get as clear as passageway to my lungs as I could.
“Cordova, move to the back of the line, Boot,” Chief Kelly said to me. He must have thought I didn’t want to swim. He must have thought I was scared. None of this was the truth. I just hadn’t gotten used to such thick air. It was like trying to breathe soup.
I moved to the back of the line. I wanted to explain that I really thought I should be first, tell Chief Kelly that this had nothing to do with the tank, the water would be better than being in the tank, but I had learned to always keep my mouth shut when not asked a question.
“Noakes, you’re up,” Chief Kelly said.
Noakes pulled the heavy Mommsen lung over his head. He laid it over his neck. He shoved the mouthpiece into his lips, expanding them outward. Two tubes ran out of it and down into a pouch that lay across his dark, thick chest.
One instructor turned the large lever to open the hatch. He helped Noakes in. A hand reached out from inside the chamber, another instructor waiting to instruct Noakes once the outer hatch had been sealed—the first instructor sealing it immediately after Noakes stepped into the interior chamber. And then he was gone.
Seventeen other Boots entered the tank before me. Two of them, after being locked in the loading chamber, came back out a few minutes later. Their skin dripped with water up to their shoulders, but their hair remained dry. A steady tap on the hatch told the outside sailor to open it up. These two men would not be getting on any submarine. They didn’t even make it into the tower.
Six or seven other Boots had to be pulled from the tank at the lower hatches in the tower. The sound of sailors unlocking the hatches thirty or fifty or eighty feet above us mixed with the slushing of water on metal told the story of soldiers who would have to stay topside on a massive carrier—again, the submarine would not be their home during the war; it was better to find out then, in a tank in New London than aboard a ship off the coast of Japan, hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
I finally walked up to the hatch and draped the Mommsen lung over my forearm, bending down to place the metal of the rounded edge of the hatch’s hollow edge between my legs. Chief Kelly yelled out, “Don’t waste our time if you ain’t gonna do it, Cordova. Just climb back outta there if you’re just gonna make these sailors waste their time. If they take you in there, if they flood the outer tank, and if you chicken out, you will pay to me. These men could be halfway to a shower and dinner by now. So, let me know, you wasting our time? You belong on a cruiser? No shame in that. But only submariners should enter the tank.”
“I’m ready, sir,” I said.
I took the hand of the sailor that stretched out from the interior of the tank and ducked in. Inside, two sailors stood in a small, rounded loading tank. They wore tight swimsuits like me and large swimming goggles that took up their entire face. One officer opened the vent by turning a small lever and then, speaking into a microphone, “Request permission to flood.”
Time slowed down.
Earlier, some of the men had screamed, their voices barely audible through the thick metal that surrounded them. They were the two that never made it through the flooding tank.
Me, I couldn’t wait to feel the pressure of the water on my shoulders, float in it like I did in the Truckee.
“Flood when ready,” a voice echoed through a large, rectangular speaker at the top of the chamber. The instructor pulled a large lever from left to right along a semi-circle angle downward and then back up again, and water began to rush into the chamber at my feet and fill up the tank so quickly that it covered me up to my shoulders in just a few short minutes.
The air pressure in the tank, forced upward and condensed by the rising water, filled my inner ear and clouded my head with a hollow feeling of a dull pain.
“Stay ahead of the pressure. Plug your nose, put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, and blow against the pressure,” the officer said, tilting his head back, placing his thumb and finger on his nose and demonstrating for me.
I placed my index finger and thumb over my nose and blew, releasing and popping the pressure in my ears. It still hurt like hell, but it worked. It relieved the pressure just enough to move forward toward the escape hatch that led to the hundred-foot tank that stretched up above me, where only about half of the men before me reached the surface of the pool.
The pool rose up around me. It settled on my shoulders and reached the top of the escape hatch that led out into the ascent tank. The instructor nodded at me again. I gave him a thumbs up.
He reached down into the water, unlocked the escape hatch, and opened it up, pushing it out away from the flooded tank and into the much larger, taller tank on the other side where two other instructors swam, this time in full SCUBA gear. Then he pulled the hatch all the way open and waved for me to enter.
It was time. I was excited. In the flooded tank, my body slowly became weightless with the water rising up around me. I felt freed from all the shit the world outside had put on, from Chief Kelly doubting me and from the way my grandfather looked at all of us like we were parasites. Just like I felt at the bottom of the Truckee or in the pool of water next to it where Manuel and I lay tired and happy after we had beat the shit out of each other, I felt relief.
The instructor in the tank with me tapped on my head, my signal to drop down, place my right foot through the hatch and into the tall tank, and then slope my body down through the hatch and out the other side. I did it carefully and quickly, taking a giant breath, placing the mouth piece of my Mommsen lung into my mouth and breathing. I flipped my body around and faced the flooded tank. An instructor connected me to a cable that reached all the way to the top, and then, without warning, he let me go.
I exhaled. I placed my arms over my head and let go of the hatch. It felt like flying. My feet kicked me upward, pushing me to the surface as my lungs emptied. The feet markers on the wall passed by so fast, and then I popped out of the water at the top, breathless and dizzy and happy as a goddamned squirrel who had just found his nut.
The instructors at the top of the tank pulled the lung from me and swam me over to the ladder.
“Nice work, Cordova, the best today,” Chief Kelly said. He had ascended the stairs while I prepped to swim and patted me on the back, nodding his head and then walking away. I had done exactly what I’d gone there to do.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Della
1942
I SPENT THE SUMMER HELPING AROUND THE HOUSE, MOSTLY. AT night, on the weekends, I would dri
ve into town, the raggedy landscape of the west all around the city of less than ten thousand people, and I would buy vodka and lime juice to mix them together, the closest thing to a well-made drink in Trinidad. I’d sit in the park and watch cars drive by and men come in and out of the local tavern. They were all the same, really, miners and farmers. I admired their hands. My dad never chose to spend his nights at the bar after work, but I forgave them somehow when I watched them, tired and raggedy, nearly falling into their seats just inside the bar’s door.
I tried to enter the bar once. I was run off by two prostitutes who owned the place, not in a business means but in a territorial claim.
I just felt like trying. There was no way I was going to drink vodka at home, not with my teetotaling mom and my overly proud father, so, instead, I sat in the park and imagined I was back at school, only one hundred miles from the ocean and Boston Harbor, where I had never been but knew I would see soon enough.
One night, before the sun fully set, a young man plopped his borracho ass right next to me on the bench as if I’d asked him to join me. He had deep blue eyes and wore a suit. He placed his hand on the wooden slats next to his legs and tapped his fingers again and again until I said, “Hello,” just to stop his incessant need to get my attention. I had one week left until I jumped on the train back to Mount Holyoke. And I could barely wait. The time had drawn out so long that I felt, at times, like the spin of the earth had slowed.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. I sipped my vodka and flipped the pages of my book, the words just barely visible in the grey light between day and night. I shifted my body away from him. I hoped he would just leave me the hell alone and let me slide into my evening with my drink and my reading.
He slid closer to me. What a dipshit.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“You’re sitting too close to me,” I said.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Dostoyevsky,” I said.
“A communist?” he said.
“An author,” I said.
“A communist author?” he said.
“A brilliant thinker,” I responded.
I placed my copy of Notes From the Underground between my hip and the bench.
His face wrinkled. He slid a bit closer to me, leaning over to see if he could read the book’s spine. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and lunged for the book, his hand pawing at it. The back of his hand brushing up against my thigh violently.
I stood up. And I slammed the hard-backed book across the man’s face.
He clenched his fists, swinging one toward me.
I saw it all as if I had been there before—the fear in a man’s eyes that I wasn’t afraid of him. The same look I saw long ago when my father caught the blow meant for me from the KKK man. I ducked out of the way, and his weight carried him forward to the ground, his arms flailing with the momentum behind him, leaving his face to break his fall.
I grabbed my vodka and walked away from the park.
“Communist!” the man yelled. “Communist literature!”
Then men from the bar flooded out into the street. They too started calling me names like Red Bitch and Red Blood and Stalin Lover and Whore of the East.
Instead of running from the men, once I got a couple hundred feet away from them, I turned my body back in their direction and lifted my middle finger in the air, dropped down into my father’s new car with my finger still raised to them, and shut the door. I split the crowd like the Red Sea as I drove, my middle finger like Moses’ staff making it happen.
The next morning, I woke up, packed my clothes, gave all of my family long, full hugs, and I boarded the train to Massachusetts. I asked my father for a little loan, which he happily gave me, telling me that he would never accept repayment.
“Go do good things, Della,” my father said.
My mother could only bring herself to nod. Age had softened her. Finally, goddamned, finally.
Chapter Thirty-Three
John
1942
WE WERE GIVEN A ONE-WEEK BREAK TO GO HOME. I GAVE Noakes a hug and caught my train west toward Reno, Nevada. It would take me two days to get home and two days to get back, so I would get three days in Reno. I planned to stop in Elko for one night to see Maria, and to stay one night in Reno visiting Paulo and showing my grandfather exactly who I had become: a sailor in the US Navy. It would be quick trip, and to be honest, I really believed it would be my last trip to Nevada, ever. Manuel would not be there. I was going, mostly, to say goodbye to him, to his memory, and to our childhood that I was glad to have survived and left.
DURING THE TWO-DAY JOURNEY WEST from boot camp, I moved from car to car, sitting with old people and young people and, many times, with other soldiers on their way home, sharing our first taste of booze since before the previous eight weeks of running and drills and nightly raids of our bunks. We talked about our chiefs. We talked about girls, though I had never really had any to speak about at that point, but we never talked about going to war to die.
I got a little homesick, staying silent for longer than I could handle. But what really, what was I homesick for?
In Reno, I walked out of the station, but instead of heading directly to the Truckee River and following it along its banks a few miles toward where I had spent the last eight or so years of my life, I wandered through the city I had never really known—not like the familiar, beat-down mining town of Trinidad.
I walked down Douglass Avenue. The bright neon signs read Harrah’s Bingo and Reno Casino and Horse Booking and Cafe, thirty-five cent meals. With fresh money in my pocket, I stepped into a small cafe with a neon, rectangular sign that hung above its doorway and ordered steak and eggs, something I could have never done before joining the military. I sipped on my coffee until almost noon, accepting pats on my back from old men who walked by me. I managed to disregard a few comments like, “I’m proud of you. Even spics can have honor in this war.” I let it go. Drank my coffee and stared at the beautiful young waitress who served me.
Her skin was creamy and smooth like milk and her eyes were as blue as new snow reflecting the skies above.
She brought me so much coffee that I had do everything I could to act like I could drink it all without running to the bathroom to take a leak. For some reason, that seemed like weakness to me, and to be honest, in that moment, I felt like if I left, the connection we had would disappear, go away, fall out the door when a customer opened it onto Douglass Avenue, or even worse, shift toward another soldier who came home and just got off the bus. She was beautiful.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, when I had to go to the bathroom so bad, I stood up, walked up to her at the counter and I asked if I could come back later to take her to dinner.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be here at 6:00 p.m. and probably very hungry.” Her voice melted me.
I told her thank you, touched her hand gently, gave her my best smile and walked out onto Douglass Avenue smoothly. Once I got out of her sight, I ran around the corner, dropped my seabag on the ground, and covered the wall with two gallons of coffee and water.
A Reno policeman walked around the corner right as I was zipping up and yelled, “You can’t pee here. This is not a toilet.” Then he stopped in his tracks, raised his hand to me, and said, “Sailor, good luck out there.” He pointed west toward the Pacific Ocean and then rolled his sleeve up. He was older, maybe in his fifties. Covered by his sleeve, on his arm, a large anchor tattoo shone black against his skin in the late-morning sun.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Be safe,” he said. “And don’t piss on your dress blues.”
I found the Truckee River and headed toward my grandfather’s house. But something stopped me along the way.
The Catholic Church, rising up out of the ground, a stalagmite of rock and cross and brick, framed my grandpa’s Cadillac that sat out in front. The car was as black and as clean and as shiny as the firs
t day I saw it, a rolling symbol of my parent’s death, the vehicle that stole us away from our home and my father’s chile garden in Trinidad after we laid my parents to rest. There were no other cars in the lot. Just his. Alone like a devil that wasn’t invited.
For a moment, I didn’t know really what to do. Walk into the church? Or maybe walk home, steal away some time with Paulo and my grandma before the old man came home from praying to whatever sadistic god he prayed to. That sounded like the best idea, but the curious part of me really needed to see why his car was the only one there. The feeling of my dress blues gave me confidence, so I straightened my back to face the man I hated, strode up the stairs, pulled the large, ornately decorated wooden doors open, and walked in.
A toddler cried in the front pew.
My grandmother’s head turned back toward me, her face covered in a flowing white veil.
My grandfather stood in front of the altar, just off center of it near the priest, staring at me from the red carpeted stairs where he perched himself in front of my brother Paulo and my sister-in-law, Ida, my older brother’s widowed wife. Paulo turned and looked down the aisle. His mouth opened. His eyes widened. But he quickly reached for Ida’s hands, pulled her toward him, and gave her the sealing kiss of marriage.
He was only a boy, eighteen years old, and he had just married his oldest brother’s widow and become a father to her boy.
Part of me was proud of him. The other part of me wanted to slug him so hard in the gut that he would double over. But I didn’t get the opportunity to sort through any of those feelings about my younger brother marrying my older brother’s wife and raising his kid.
I stood there with my eyes and palms raised to the ornate ceiling, not in admiration but in a sign of pure wonder how this had all happened so quickly after I left, and my grandfather’s open hand smacked my face like I was still a child that he could toss around. Blood spattered on my dress blues, and I brought my hands down from the sky and clenched them in tight fists in my grandfather’s face.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 16
