by Mendy Sobol
After breakfast, me and Darin went downstairs to the weedy lot in front of the apartment, playing tag, and hide and seek. I brought a duffle bag holding a towel and my only bathing suit and dropped it on the sidewalk. The sun kept rising, smaller and hotter. When it was nearly overhead, and drops of sweat sliding down my legs began feeling like tiny ants crawling up, I knew it was time to get Darin inside and head for the bus stop.
“C’mon, Darin, time to go in.”
“Aw, Mel, can’t we play a little longer?”
“Nope. I’ve got to get going if I want to....”
My words were cut off by the sound of a closing car door and cheery “Hello!” It was my mom, pretty in a floral print sundress and white high heels, hair streaked blonde and permed curly.
“Hello,” she called again, as Darin and I stared at her coming up the walk. I’d seen her often enough in the last six years, knew she married a University of South Florida professor, was living with him in Sarasota. But I never expected to see her here, didn’t have time to see her now.
“Look Mom, Joey’s in the house. I gotta go.”
Her spike heels had been clicking on the cement walk as she came toward us, arms outstretched for a hug. Then she stopped, looking puzzled.
“Melora, honey, didn’t Joey tell you?”
“Tell me what, Mom?”
“Well, with Diana expecting a new baby and all...”
New baby, I repeated in my head, but the words didn’t make sense yet.
“...that it would be better if you moved in with me.”
I looked at Darin, who suddenly started crying. Then back at the apartment toward the sound of a slamming screen door.
“We were going to tell you, Mel. Mom wasn’t supposed to come until tonight.”
Looking over my shoulder at Joey and Diana standing on the peeling white stairs, pushing at my hearing aid with one hand, I watched Joey’s lips carefully, making sure I understood him. Then I turned to mom.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said.
“Melora! You know how I feel about cussin’!”
“Yeah, because you’re so fucking high class.”
I turned to Darin, avoiding mom’s eyes.
“I gotta go,” I said, snatching up the duffle bag, pushing past mom.
“Mel, wait!” I heard someone yelling, but I kept walking as fast as I could without running. With my head turned away, I couldn’t tell if it was mom or Diana, but for the longest time I heard crying, and knew it was Darin.
The bus was late that day, but when it came I got on, thinking, Thank Christ they didn’t follow me! Everything would be okay when I got to the beach, when I could tell Coop, when I could let the surf wash off the way I felt. The driver looked at me funny but said nothing. I knew I was crying, but didn’t care. I sat on the right side window seat where I could spot Coop when he came running down Cyprus, hat back, tie flapping, waving for the driver to stop.
Thinking about Coop made me feel calmer. After all, wasn’t his family even more fucked up than mine? He’d understand. And together we’d figure out what to do. I could live on the beach. I could run away. But I didn’t need—didn’t want—to think about that yet. I just wanted the blocks to fly by, wanted to see Coop flying down Cyprus toward the bus.
But as the bus approached Cyprus, went by without stopping, I didn’t see Coop, didn’t see anything at first except flat black asphalt and a fuming heat mirage of pooled water. Looking over my shoulder toward the corner, the mirage cleared and I noticed a group of blue-uniformed cadets standing on the bank of the concrete drainage canal paralleling Cyprus, the one they called Piss Creek. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I had to go see if Coop was in that crowd.
Pulling the signal cord, I grabbed my duffel, moving to the steps as fast as I could, almost falling when the bus stopped short at the next corner. I jumped from the steps, running back down Palm toward Cyprus and the canal. I could see the cadets clearly, a dozen of them on the bank, still and quiet, and one—no two—down in the creek, one standing knee deep in filthy brown water, the other lying face down. I recognized the one standing—Coop’s roommate Goldfarb. I knew the other one was Coop.
Pushing through the crowd, scrambling down the bank, cement ripped my knees. I stumbled into the water, screaming at Goldfarb, “Get him up! Get him up! Help me get him up!” But Goldfarb stood there, eyes blank, towering over Coop like a befuddled giant. Yanking at Coop’s shoulder, I realized I wasn’t strong enough to roll him over. So I kept screaming at Goldfarb, pulling at Coop, until Goldfarb began moving, kneeling in the water, sliding his arms under Coop at the waist and shoulder, turning him easily, lifting him clear.
Coop’s head flopped back, then jerked forward, brown water sputtering from his mouth and nose. He was breathing, alive, but his gashed forehead streamed blood, his left pinky finger twisted at a sickening angle, white bone sticking out of purple flesh like the pit of a half-eaten cherry.
“Holy shit,” Goldfarb said, “we’ve got to get him to the academy, to sickbay.”
Looking up at the cadets on the bank, realizing there were fewer of them, I shouted, “Help us get him out!” Hands reached down, grabbing, pulling. “Watch his finger! Be careful!”
We got him up the canal’s moss-bearded, algae-covered side. With Goldfarb under one arm and a tall cadet whose name tag read Varzali replacing me under the other, they half walked, half carried Coop’s stumbling, semi-conscious body down Cyprus toward the academy’s sickbay. With each passing block more cadets disappeared down side streets, melting away until only Goldfarb, Varzali, me, and Coop were left.
The nurse on duty, Miss Radford, had us lay Coop down on an infirmary bed, called a doctor, and ordered us outside. Varzali headed to his dormitory, while Goldfarb and me stood waiting in the shadows cast by sickbay’s overhanging eaves. The canal’s water left us caked in a sticky brown mix of algae and dirt, stinking of used motor oil, stinging my torn knees. I tried catching my breath, but the temperature was in the 90s, and breathing the hot, damp air made me dizzy. Finally, I managed a word.
“Civvies.”
“Huh?”
“Fucking civvies. Kids in this town. I fucking hate them.”
“What are you talking about, Melora?”
“For doing this to Coop. I hate them. Hate them all.”
“It wasn’t civvies, Melora.”
“Who...?”
“It was cadets. It was us.”
I looked at Goldfarb, my eyes wide, not understanding.
“Some senior peons—guys who never made officer—had a beef with me and Coop for sticking them with demerits at this morning’s inspection. When they saw us heading out on liberty, they followed, then chased us. It started out in fun—they were laughing and joking, shouting for us to ‘go fly a kike’. But when they caught us at the canal it wasn’t enough. So they pushed us. I stayed on my feet. Coop went down.”
Suddenly, I felt nauseous. I might have thrown up if the sickbay door hadn’t opened behind us, Miss Radford calling out, “Mr. Goldfarb, the headmaster would like to speak with you.” I followed Goldfarb inside and poked my head into the infirmary. Coop looked restless, but asleep. Miss Radford touched my shoulder. “An ambulance is on its way. You should go home and get yourself cleaned up.”
By then it was 5:00, and remembering I’d dropped my duffel on the bank of the canal, I left sickbay and walked across the academy’s west parade ground toward Cyprus. The kids restricted from liberty for demerits, academics, or because they didn’t have enough pocket money to go out, were lining up for evening mess formation into one small company instead of the usual five. I recognized a few faces, but it was the ones I didn’t know who stared after me, while the ones I knew looked away. A carload of civvies roared by on Cyprus, tires squealing, laying rubber, screaming, “Fuck you, faggots!” Inside the old Chevy, backlit by the sun over Boca Grande Bay, I saw a flash of long blonde hair. A few cadets yelled back, flipping birds and Itali
an salutes, but the officers settled them down, ordering them to attention, marching them off to the mess hall.
I walked down Cyprus alongside the canal until I came to the spot where Coop had been attacked. The duffel was gone. Standing there not knowing where to go, what to do next, I waited.
Then squealing tires behind me, and a girl’s squealing voice. “You’re gonna die, greaser!” The blonde girl who’d hassled Coop the day we met, hung out the Chevy’s window, her pale arm twisting toward me. Two eggs hit the sidewalk, two more my hip and shoulder. I was surprised two thrown eggs could have such force, spinning me around, almost knocking me down. I was surprised how much they hurt. But I’d already cried that afternoon on the bus, and I wasn’t going to cry now. Not now, not ever.
Chapter Sixteen: Melora
Mr. Belasso let me clean up at the restaurant and sleep that night on some sofa cushions in the back room. When he closed and went home, when it was dark and quiet, I fell asleep. Sometime before dawn, I had an ocean dream. Only in this one, the sky was dark and cloudy, the waves high and rough. And I was fucking scared. So in my dream, for the first time ever, I stayed on the beach far from where the surf was breaking.
In the morning, I talked Mr. Belasso into letting me work full time. The pay wasn’t much, but included my own place in the storage room and all the pizza I could eat.
“What about school?” Mr. Belasso asked me.
I lied. “I finished my classes. I’ve got enough credits to graduate in June.”
Coop wound up in the emergency room where they set his broken finger and put on a cast that went up to his elbow. He missed a week of school but was out of sickbay the following Monday. He didn’t much feel like going out on liberty any more, so he signed up to earn merits working weekends in the John Paul Jones library. As soon as he was sure the librarian, Mrs. Oyeda, only came in to work on weekdays, he asked me if I wanted to hang out with him there. And that’s how I met the IPI 700.
Instead of spending our weekends on St. Francis Key, we spent them on the old computer, learning more every minute, amazed at what it could do, amazed at what we could do. Coop, pecking away at the keyboard with the fingers of his undamaged right hand, showed me a navigation program he’d improved, adding lines of code taking into account known currents, such as the Gulf Stream. I didn’t know anything about computers or navigation when I started, but I liberated a couple of the 700’s phone-book size manuals and took them back to Mr. Belasso’s. After pulling a few all-nighters reading, and with Coop’s help, I was up to speed. Soon I one-upped him, creating a new program that let navigators input adjustments for changing winds, tides, and currents.
Next, I went to work on a program for Mr. Belasso, producing graphs showing exactly how much he could turn down his PizzAzziP pizza oven for each ten degrees the outside temperature rose during the day. I thought he’d laugh, but instead he studied my graphs carefully, lowering the oven temperature three or four times each day, raising it again in the evening. At the end of two weeks he announced, “Melora, this thing you did,”—waving the dog-eared computer paper at me—“it’s saving me a bundle on gas and air conditioning!”
“Up to 22% in summer,” I said. I figured that out on the 700, too.
Mr. Belasso smiled. And damn, did that feel good!
My favorite thing was when I discovered how to encrypt codes into other people’s programs. Coop jumped out of his skin one night when his work disappeared from the monitor, replaced by a message—
DON’T TURN AROUND… THERE’S SOMEONE BEHIND YOU!
Of course once I taught Coop how to do it, we kept surprising each other with messages and pranks.
May passed quickly, the days hotter and longer. After Coop’s graduation in June, he’d head home to New Orleans, starting college at Tulane in the fall. I knew changes were coming but tried not to think about them. I focused instead on my days at Belasso’s and my weekends at the library with Coop and the computer.
On the first Saturday in June, me and Coop were working on the 700, sharing its lone keyboard, when Mrs. Oyeda walked into the library with a Navy officer. Gold circled the sleeves of his dress blue uniform jacket, with more gold above the bill of his cap and more gold on his fingers—a plain wedding band and a bulky Naval Academy ring. Coop snapped quickly to attention. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there waiting, feeling scared. I didn’t think they could do anything to me, but I figured Coop was in some really deep shit.
“At ease, Lieutenant Cooperman,” Mrs. Oyeda said. I expected anger, but her voice was gentle. Then came the shocker—“Commander Rusk is here to speak to Miss Kennedy.”
How the fuck did she know my name? And why the fuck did Rusk want to speak to me? Was I under some kind of military arrest for breaking the Access Law?
Coop tried standing at ease, but his body looked stiffer than when he’d been at attention. Holy shit, I thought, we’re both screwed!
“Miss Kennedy, Commander Rusk is here from the Navy Department reviewing cadets who are applying for admission to Annapolis. While you would not be eligible for one of those appointments, and Mr. Cooperman has chosen not to seek an appointment,”—her eyes shot a disapproving look at Coop, then came quickly back to me—“I’ve been aware of your, um, activities for quite some time, and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest if I showed Commander Rusk your work. As a result, he’s interested in talking to you about enlistment in the United States Navy.” That’s when I noticed a sheaf of green and white computer paper under the Commander’s gold-braided arm, printouts from the navigation program I’d left behind in the library.
“The Navy could use someone with your ability, Miss Kennedy.” Rusk’s voice was deep, with the gentle drawl of Maryland or Virginia. “The recruiter for St. Francis served with me on the Nimitz, and if you’re interested, I’d be happy to set up a meeting.”
Coop, aware I was staring, not saying anything, nudged my foot with his.
“Uh, thanks. I mean, thank you.”
Things were moving too fast, and too unexpectedly, but Mrs. Oyeda came to my rescue—sort of. “Mr. Cooperman, let’s leave the Commander and Miss Kennedy alone for awhile so they can talk.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
But when they left, Commander Rusk didn’t want to talk. Instead, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, he sat down at the keyboard, started showing me programming languages I’d never seen and programs I’d never dreamed possible. The Navy was gigantic, and most of the complicated shit the Navy did was done with the help of computers. Not like in my world. If Mr. Belasso needed a fifty-pound sack of flour, he called the flourmill, and in a day or two they sent a delivery guy with the flour. At the end of the month, Mr. Belasso got a bill in the mail and mailed the flourmill a check. When the Navy needed to figure out how many tons of flour thousands of ship’s bakers needed each month, how to deliver it to hundreds of ports around the world, and who to pay, the Navy used computer programs. And that was the simple shit!
It was hard to believe any of this was for real, but I had to ask. “Would I get to do stuff like that in the Navy?”
“You bet.”
“And would I get out of St. Francis?”
Rusk smiled. “I guarantee it.”
“Then where do I sign up?”
Commander Rusk hooked me up with the local recruiter a week later. He was a likeable old Chief Petty Officer named Karcher who seemed happy his former skipper had already made all the decisions about my enlistment—“Greased the skids” as he put it. The paperwork was in order, ready for my signature, the box after the question “High school graduate?” marked “Yes” even though I’d told Rusk I dropped out. On the medical forms my height and weight were correct, but in the test results column the word “normal” had been typed after everything from “Allergies” to “Vision”—including “Hearing.”
“Uh, Chief? There are some mistakes here on my....”
“The Commander didn’t authorize me to make a
ny changes,” Karcher interrupted, handing me a pen. “Just go ahead and sign. I’m sure we can clean up any typos later.”
I reached for the pen, my hand hanging in mid-air. “Y’know, Commander Rusk promised I’d be able to work with computers. And he promised he’d get me out of St. Francis.”
Chief Karcher smiled. “Miss Kennedy, when you sign this paper, you’re in the Navy. You’ll go where the Navy tells you to go, do what the Navy tells you to do. I ought to know—I’ve been following orders for thirty-five years.”
That stopped me cold. I barely knew Rusk, and I’d heard stories about women in the military. What if he was some kind of perv? And the Navy? Jeez—I’d never paddled a fucking canoe! What the fuck was I getting myself into?
At least Karcher was honest about giving up my freedom. My freedom—yeah, that was a fucking joke. Freedom to be stuck in St. Francis for the rest of my life. Freedom to work shit jobs. Freedom to sleep on a couch in the storage room of a pizza joint.
But what about Joey, Darin, and Diana? What about Mr. Belasso? I’d miss them, and they’d miss me. I’d miss the Gulf, too, if the Navy shipped me some place like, y’know, Antarctica.
Then I thought about the 700 and how programming made me feel. Smart. Powerful. Alive.
Karcher set the pen down in front of me. “Your call, Miss Kennedy.”
I signed. The truth is, I had about as much choice as a draftee.
My enlistment began July 1, soon after Coop’s graduation. At first he wasn’t too happy—“Jeez, Melora, it’s like going to John Paul Jones, only with live ammunition!”—but Coop understood the Navy was my only way to keep programming, my only ticket out of St. Francis.
