Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  They woke once at dawn when two old ladies in an apartment across a back alley started shrieking at each other. “The bitches,” mumbled Mariana, “they never let me sleep,” and she punched her pillow in irritation and slammed her head into it and went back to sleep.

  In the morning Mariana got up first and pulled on her jeans. Halfway up the zipper stuck in her pubic hair. She tugged for a while, then tried putting soap on the zipper’s teeth, then tugged some more. Finally she inched it closed. She tiptoed across the living room so as not to wake Boeth and took a carton of milk from the refrigerator to feed the cats. As she started to pour, the bottom of the carton split and the milk spattered over her feet and onto the floor. Mariana looked at the milk and burst into tears. Her crying woke Boeth, who sat up on the couch, and Joyce, who came into the room in his underwear.

  “Why are you crying?” Joyce asked.

  “I’m fucking crying” — she squeezed words out between sobs — “over spilt milk.”

  The Poet Nibbles at Some Food for Thought

  The Ebersole heeled over sharply to port and the two young men in Main Plot braced themselves with their palms flat against the deck. The metal-bound loose-leaf book containing the Rules of Engagement slid across the top of the computer and thudded against the bulkhead. Then the ship steadied on a new course and Joyce and Boeth sat listening to the noises a ship makes at sea and the Brandenburg.

  The Poet, who seemed emotionally drained, said softly: “I wish we could go to New York now. New York is a great town in the spring. God how I love the spring. It’s the one thing I miss most at sea.”

  “It’s the thing I miss the least,” Boeth said. “I hate spring.”

  Joyce was genuinely amazed. “I never met anyone who actually hated spring.”

  “See, there you go again. That’s what I mean by innocent. You make hating spring sound like an un-American activity. What you mean is you never met anybody who admitted hating spring. My God, millions of people hate spring, but they don’t go around boasting about it because it makes them sound like a pervert or something like that.”

  “Why?” asked the Poet. “Why do you hate the spring?”

  Boeth looked down at the deck, at the bits of eggshell spread out under his hand. He began to toy with the pieces, trying halfheartedly to jigsaw them back together again. “I hate spring because of the green. Green is for rebirth. Everything and everyone around is coming back to life — except me, and I detest that.”

  “They say April is the cruelest month,” Joyce said. “You know the line?”

  “I know it, but it’s all wrong. August is the cruelest month.”

  “Why August?”

  “That’s when all the psychiatrists go on vacation, in August, leaving their patients stranded for four weeks without a couch. So to a lot of people August is the cruelest month.”

  Here it comes, the Poet thought, now he’s going to tell me about it, about the hospitals and the psychiatrists and the physical scars they erased and the mental scars they couldn’t do anything about. But Boeth only smiled bitterly and shook his head. He finished peeling the second egg and tossed it to the Poet. Then he picked up the first one and tossed it over too.

  “Why do you peel them if you don’t eat them?” Joyce asked.

  Boeth shrugged. “I peel them to pass the time. Why do you write poetry?”

  “I write poetry because I like poetry.”

  “Why do you like poetry?”

  Now it was the Poet’s turn to shrug. “I like poetry … I like it because the whole equals more than the sum of its parts.”

  Boeth laughed nervously. “I’d like to write about the war, but I don’t know where to begin. Tell me something, Poet, how do you decide whether to use the present tense or the past?”

  “You have to have a feeling for the difference,” Joyce explained. “When you use the present — ‘He walks into the room and turns to the girl’ — there is a real sense of immediacy. Nobody, neither the guy walking into the room nor the guy writing the line, nobody knows what will happen next. But when you use the past tense — ‘He walked into the room and turned to the girl’ — it’s obvious that the narrator knows, even if he hasn’t said yet, what will happen next. He knows because the thing he’s describing has already happened. See?”

  “When you write about the war, which do you use?”

  “The past tense. This creates the feeling that there are no surprises, that the narrator knows what’s going to happen.”

  Boeth was interested. “What does the narrator know that the rest of us don’t?”

  Joyce thought a second. “I guess what he knows is that everyone who takes part in a war is a victim.”

  After a while Joyce asked casually: “You hear anything from Mariana?”

  “I got a letter when we refueled from the Taluga. It started off with a headline in big red letters that said ‘FOOD FOR THOUGHT.’ Under that she listed half-a-dozen items. One said tombs for unknown soldiers glorify war. Mistrust anyone in uniform, soldiers, bellboys, Western Union messengers, that was another. And she quoted Henry James — about how a hotel spirit was coming to America which would make life like living in a luxurious hotel, with all the choices left to the management. Except for the part about luxury, it sounds like a description of the Eugene Ebersole, doesn’t it?”

  The Poet shook his head. “She never lets go, does she? Didn’t she have anything personal to say — about us, about New York, about me?”

  Boeth took a folded paper from the back pocket of his dungarees and began to read it to himself. “Yes, she says she hopes you’re okay. She says …” Boeth’s voice petered out.

  “Come on, read it.”

  “She says you confuse her. One minute you put all your emotions on the table the way a child lays out cards for a game of solitaire. The next, you hold back part of yourself as if you were keeping a jerry can of gasoline in reserve. She says when you talk about politics your sentences sound like second pressings.” Boeth looked up and shrugged. “That’s what she says.”

  Joyce avoided his eye. “She’s —”

  “Very intuitive,” Boeth supplied.

  “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say …”

  But Boeth wasn’t listening. He was back in New York waving and saying “Be my guest” and watching Mariana and Joyce disappear into the bedroom. He was slowly grinding the phonograph needle across the grooves and creating a sound that matched his emotions.

  The Brandenburg tape ran out and Boeth got up and turned off the machine.

  Joyce asked: “What do you think of this Sweet Reason business?”

  Boeth responded too quickly, too lightly. “Whatever else he’s doing, he’s making time on this antiquated chicken-of-the-sea pass more quickly.”

  “That’s what you said about peeling eggs.”

  “You have a good memory, Poet. It’s one of the standards by which I measure things — eggshells, Sweet Reason leaflets, you name it. Every hour under the belt is another hour you don’t have to worry about again.” Boeth glanced at the clock on the bulkhead. It was five minutes to midnight. “Sometimes it seems as if all human activity is designed to make time pass more quickly.”

  “The trouble with Sweet Reason,” the Poet said, “is he’s not doing what he’s doing well.”

  Boeth said: “Did you ever think, Poet, that if something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly?”

  Yankee Station

  THE SECOND DAY

  The Ship’s Barber Sees Red

  The ship’s barber, a sour-grapes superpatriot from Detroit named Joe Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski, spotted it first. His head thrown back, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his taut neck muscles, he squinted up at the mast and poked Lustig in the ribs.

  “Is it?” he asked angrily. “Supposed to be like that?”

  Cee-Dee happened to be on the bridge as a result of a conversation he had with Lustig the night before in the barber shop, a converted paint locker bac
k aft equipped with a used swivel barber’s chair Richardson acquired in exchange for a potato-peeling machine and the musical services of Tevepaugh at another ship’s picnic. The compartment was so cramped (Cee-Dee insisted on having some spare chairs and a small table for magazines) that there was no room to swivel in, so Cee-Dee danced around the barber’s chair like a sparring partner, ducking and squinting and lunging and nipping nervously away as he went. A mirror hung from the bulkhead, along with an American flag, copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettsyburg Address, a “God Is On Our Side” bumper sticker and a poster that said “Fuck Communism.”

  Arranged in a half-moon over the spare chairs — and looking like a homosexual’s rogues’ gallery — were eight framed pictures of various styles of haircuts clipped from a Barber’s World Cee-Dee had swiped from the eighteen-chair shop on the Norfolk Naval Station. Actually, the pictures were there for atmosphere; Cee-Dee himself could only give one basic cut, a rounded-off, high-necked affair that left a tuft of hair falling across the forehead like the brim of a baseball cap. “Ain’t nobody gonna take you for one of them friggin’ college faggots when I’m through wit you,” Cee-Dee would boast.

  Cee-Dee always did the sideburns last — crossing the Ts after finishing the sentence, he called it. Standing directly behind the customer and squinting into the mirror to get the right angle, he would chop away with his mechanical trimmer, first on the right side, then on the left, then a touch on the right again, then a correcting smidge on the left until both sides had risen, like rungs of a ladder, to the top of the ears.

  “Not too short on the sideburns,” Lustig had said, trying not to move his head as he spoke. He was leafing through one of Cee-Dee’s dirty magazines that, more than the haircuts, is what kept the customers coming back for more. The pages, worn thin and greasy from fingering, were full of garter belts and paraffin breasts — the kind of thing that turned Lustig off rather than on. But he studied them with the proper amount of intensity, grunting here or sneering there to keep up appearances.

  “Enough, enough,” Lustig had said, glancing at his exposed ears jutting conspicuously from the sides of his head. “There’s not much you can do with the ship rolling and pitching like this. I’ll straighten them myself.” (“What did you do — flunk sideburns?” Lustig thought to say when he reviewed the scene later.)

  Cee-Dee had held a small mirror behind Lustig so that he could see the back of his head in the mirror in front of him. It was a touch that Cee-Dee had picked up from a $1.25 barber shop in Detroit and reserved for his officer customers.

  “Looks great, just great,” Lustig had said, studying the back of the head that was supposed to be his in the mirror. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Whata cunt, huh?” Cee-Dee had said conversationally, nodding down at the girl peering up at Lustig from the magazine. “There’s a cow on the cover, but inside is real good stuff. Well, they say you can’t judge a book by the cover.”

  (Later Lustig thought to respond: “Some people can’t even judge it by its contents.”)

  Cee-Dee had begun unpinning the sheet that kept some of the hair off the customer. “Hey, Mister Lustig, why did the XO put that note in tomorrow’s plan of the day about no sightseers on the bridge?”

  “Because the skipper was pissed by everyone and his uncle rushing up there when that plane went down today.”

  “I guess that means I’ll never get to see the friggin’ bridge,” Cee-Dee had said.

  “What do you mean never?” Lustig had asked. “Haven’t you ever been on the bridge?”

  “Nope, I never been. I been on the Eugene Ebersole a year come August but I never thought to go till I read you can’t. Ain’t that something. Closing the barn door after the horse’s skedaddled.” The aphorism was wildly inappropriate but Lustig didn’t want to embarrass Cee-Dee, so he let it pass.

  “Listen, Cee-Dee, I got the four-to-eight tomorrow morning. After reveille you grab a cup of coffee and come up and if anyone stops you, you say the coffee is for me, that I asked for it. And put three sugars in it, okay?”

  “That’s friggin’ decent of you Mister Lustig, to go to all that trouble for me.”

  “Is it,” Cee-Dee said moments after he arrived on the bridge, coffee in hand, “supposed to be like that?”

  “Is what supposed to be like what?” Lustig asked. He and Cee-Dee were on the signal bridge along with two signalmen, Angry Pettis Foreman and Jefferson Waterman.

  “The American flag — is it supposed to be like that? A friggin’ disgrace, that’s what it is.”

  Lustig followed Cee-Dee’s gaze. He could see the The Stars and Stripes shedding their wrinkles into the morning air. And he could see — “Oh my God Almighty” — that the flag was upside-down.

  “What do you mean upside-down?” the XO yelled into the phone when Lustig woke him with the news.

  “Upside-down! What do you mean upside-down?” Captain Jones fumed when the XO burst into his cabin.

  “You know what an upside-down flag means,” the Captain told the XO after the two of them had trooped to the signal bridge to see the apparition for themselves. “Good Christ, imagine if the people on the aircraft carrier had spotted it, eh? We’d have been laughed out of the war zone.”

  Jones covered his eyes to keep the vision at bay.

  Captain Jones Puts a Foot into a Mine Field

  “For your information,” the Captain told the two black signalmen frozen in attention a few minutes later, “an upsidedown flag is the international symbol hoisted by a ship in distress. More recently, it has become a symbol used by a small minority of sniveling, bleeding-heart, un-American fifth columnists for a country in distress.”

  Sitting at the edge of his bunk, Jones struggled to regain his composure. “This may be the work —” he began, trying to control the sudden twitching in his lower jaw. And he spat out the rest of the sentence: “— of Sweet Reason.”

  “Cap’n, can me ’n’ Jefferson here say sumpin’?” Angry Pettis Foreman asked. He and Waterman had stood the four-to-eight signal watch, which made them, as the XO bluntly put it when he paraded them down to the Captain’s cabin, “prime suspects.”

  Captain Jones thought of sending for Proper to conduct the investigation, then decided that they would take that as a sign of weakness. “Come ahead, son,” he said.

  “Cap’n, suh,” Angry Pettis said, threading the brim of his white sailor’s hat through his fingers. “Me ’n’ Jefferson here we raised that flag, but we raised it right-side-up. I swear that we raised it right-side-up. Ain’t that the actual situation, Jefferson?”

  “That’s correct, Captain,” Waterman said. “We’re not your Sweet Reason.”

  Captain Jones wanted desperately to believe that they had raised it upside-down by accident. That way he wouldn’t be dealing with another Sweet Reason incident. “There are three possibilities,” he had explained to the XO before confronting the two signalmen. “Either they raised it upsidedown by accident, in which case the whole thing is simply an unfortunate mistake, or they raised it upside down on purpose, in which case one of them is Sweet Reason, or they raised it right-side-up but somebody else came along and switched it to upside-down, in which case we’re right back where we started with this Sweet Reason business.”

  “There are three possibilities,” Jones told the two black signalmen. And he ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand, careful to label them “one” and “two” and “three” so the blacks could follow the complexities of the situation.

  Jones paced the cabin as he spoke and came to a stop squarely in front of his barbed-wire collection. For an instant his head looked as if it had been crowned with thorns. “Well,” he said finally, “which is it?”

  “Which is what, Cap’n?” Angry Pettis said blankly.

  “Which is it — one, two or three?”

  “Which was number tree again?” Angry Pettis asked, and when the Captain told him he said: “That’s it, then. Number
tree, Cap’n.” To underscore the answer, Angry Pettis held up the third finger of his left hand.

  Jones was about to dismiss them when he thought of something. “It was dark when you raised the flag, wasn’t it?”

  “Darker than a witch’s tit, Cap’n,” agreed Angry Pettis.

  The Captain’s eyes narrowed. “Then how could you be sure it was right-side-up, eh? Tell me that. How could you be sure?”

  “Why Jefferson here, he held the flashlight while me, I clipped the flag to the halyard, Cap’n. I remembers them stars was up. Ain’t that so, Jefferson?”

  “That’s correct, Captain,” Waterman said coldly.

  Jones took a turn around the room. Then he wheeled toward the two signalmen again and tried a new tack. This time he was looking for a motive. “Do you men think the navy is an equal opportunity employer?”

  “An equal what?” Angry Pettis asked.

  But Waterman understood the question. “No I don’t, Captain. Most blacks in the navy end up as stewards or in the deck gang chipping and red ledding. We don’t get a chance at the technical ratings that could qualify us for good jobs when we return to civilian life.”

  “But you’re not a steward — you’re a signalman,” Jones snapped.

  “Sure, and when I return to civilian life I’ll try and find a job teaching semaphore to Boy Scouts!”

  Jones bristled. “Now just one moment. I’m not sure I like your tone.”

  At this point Angry Pettis figured it was time to get belligerent. Cocking his head, narrowing his eyes, relaxing into a spidery, loose-jointed slouch, he laid a restraining hand on Waterman’s arm. “Cool it, baby,” he said. Then he turned toward Jones and added quietly: “I told you we raised that flag right side up, Cap’n. Now there ain’t no call for you to lean on us jus’ cause we is black.”