The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  He offered her one of the beers he’d stashed in the refrigerator, but she shook her head. “You make me feel guilty,” she said.

  “What do you think you make me feel?”

  “I’m so sorry! We shouldn’t feel this way toward each other, none of us! Something’s gone wrong with CSW, with the Divine Harmony we should manifest—that the God of love is the Lord of our lives. Oval’s crazy over that machine and his lima beans, and I’m not good enough to take his place. I can’t always show love and tolerance. When the doctor was explaining about Thelma I could see his lack of care. I could see it and I couldn’t forgive it. He meant that it would be just as well if she died and he said it right in front of her, as if she couldn’t understand. Because he said ‘bronchial,’ and ’renal,’ and ’mortality,’ she wasn’t supposed to understand. He as good as said she wasn’t worth all the effort. I can’t forgive it!” She put her long hands on her face.

  “Are they doing anything for her?”

  “She’s terrified of the oxygen thing they stick up her nose. She knows what they feel. She may not know all they say but she knows what’s really important. Oval said once, ‘The mind is only the tail—the soul is the dog.’ ”

  “What’s Oval going to do?”

  “He’s off work in the morning, so he’ll see then. I don’t know. But how lonely she must be tonight! We’re praying for her, all the Healing Echelons. If you know a prayer, John, if you believe in anything, pray for poor Thelma.”

  Soon Bonnie said good night, and he took his bath. Again he put Thelma and her problems aside. He couldn’t do anything about Thelma anyway, and to pray was such an alien idea, so much against his morals, or something that felt very much like morals, that the request made him freshly aware of the insanity he’d fallen among.

  He didn’t feel that the day was over, so he dressed and rode down Los Robles to Concha, guessed left and followed Concha until he came to Jimmy’s Palace, a standard sort of bar in a little square building with a red neon sign. There was the familiar worry about having to show his identification, but this time Les saw him come in, so it was all welcome and introductions. Jimmy himself shook his hand and brought him a draft on the house. Dianne, or Streaky, about whom John had faint but lustful thoughts, had, it seemed, forsaken Jimmy’s and now hung out at the Baccalaureate Club over near TJC. Too bad, Les said. Les had to be at work at I A.M., so John had a couple more with him and his friends, who talked of cars. Les was restoring a ’33 Cord, Pete was putting together what he called a “Chevroplane,” a ’32 Chevy body, chopped and channeled, of course, with a ’36 Hudson Terraplane straight-six engine, highly milled and modified because it had great tolerances. Joe was dicking around with a ’34 Packard straight-eight roadster with a stroke as long as your goddam leg he’d paid two hundred and fifty bucks for. Les suggested that John’s motorcycle would look less ridiculous if he cropped the fenders; right now it looked “grandma.” Pete changed the subject by asking if they’d all registered for the new draft law Truman just signed. John hadn’t heard about it, and when told that everybody had to register felt a small twist of apprehension, which soon passed. “You’re a vet,” Les said, “so you’ll be 4-A.”

  “You hear he also intergrated the services?” Joe said.

  “He what the which?”

  “Intergrated the niggers. No more nigger outfits.”

  “Ninety-sixth wasn’t a bad outfit, I heard.”

  “Well, it’s going to be all intergrated now, thanks to Harry.”

  “I’d hate to be a spook in my old outfit. Captain T. N. Jones ate niggers for breakfast.”

  “I hope old Harry knows what he’s doing.”

  A connoisseur of these inflections, John found them strangely nonvirulent—but then the subject was usually brought up by the virulent, and it hadn’t been here. From the jukebox came, again, a song he made a note to listen to carefully sometime: “Hey, Okie, tell Arkie Tex has got a job in Californy…”It went on about orange-juice fountains and streets with curbs of gold. But there was an actual orange-juice spigot at the Tulaveda Produce Co-op, provided with paper cups so you could drink orange juice anytime you wanted some. And all the lima beans your heart desired—fact and myth in this peripheral land.

  Les got up. “I got to go freeze my nuts,” he said. “I ain’t happy till I’m up to my ass in lima beans, same as John here. Right?”

  John left then, too, and rode back up Los Robles in the cool midnight air, passed the dark house where Bonnie lay sleeping and climbed a mile or more up toward the Sierra Madre until the town ran out. He stopped and looked down at the lights of Tulaveda. The muted streetlights kept their night vigil throughout the town, defining its planned avenues, streets and pretty arbors. When were all the people—Okies and Arkies and everyone—going to go home? He could not define the principle of impermanence here. It was not just that the town was built upon dust, that he stood on the side of a mountain made of dust, or that all of its water came from far away, through tubes—which seemed as strange as if the air to breathe also came through tubes—and yet water was sprayed everywhere for frivolous and cosmetic reasons, the supply unlimited. Timbuktu on its parched sand would seem more permanent, or a base camp in Antarctica. Maybe it was a matter of effort. There was no weather here, the sun always pale in a pale sky, the air nothing but there. No wonder it was a place of toys and goofy simplifications.

  Maybe the freezing machine was a bit of needed reality—one of Sylvan Hearne’s remembered Winota winters when the wind from Canada was so cold a touch of skin to metal meant instant necrosis—its purpose to serve the honest, unpretentious lima bean. Of course, the machine held worrisome secrets from its inventor, but that too was at least real.

  The next day, after Oval had been to the hospital, they sat against the lockers and had a few minutes to talk. “Bonnie says you might go visit Thelma tonight,” Oval said. “That would be so kind and thoughtful of you.”

  “Maybe I will,” John said.

  “You know she’s very sick this time. She always gets these colds, but lately she’s had other complications, too. If they can get her to breathe a little better we’ll just bring her home and do what we can for her. She’s dying, you know. We’ve known it for a year or more. She just hasn’t got what it takes to fight off sickness. Something’s missing. Something Marge and I didn’t manage to give her. I don’t know. She’s always been such a happy child, a loving child, and she has such a marvelous talent for drawing.”

  “And your wife, Marge—she just ran away and left it all to you?”

  “Poor Marge. She was too sensitive, Johnny. She just couldn’t take it. She meant well enough, and she tried, but some people just aren’t up to what life deals them.”

  “Don’t you ever say anything bad about a woman?”

  Oval was surprised by the question. “What do you mean by bad?” he said.

  “Like a selfish bitch?”

  “That’s just a name. Names don’t mean anything. The fact is, I respect, love and adore women. I’m not saying they haven’t given me a lot of grief, but most of that was my own fault. They have warm, generous hearts, bless them. They want to give. Their blessed gift is in giving.”

  He’d been hearing a familiar echo in Oval’s voice, and it was Bonnie’s voice—the lilt, the accent, the mild descending order of the phrases. He wondered which of them imitated the other, or if their common sweet refrain of love, over and over, humorless, clear-eyed, high-minded, pretentious and sincere, had somehow homogenized their manners and their voices. Urban Stumms, who now came frosted and lurching from the thick door of the machine, seemed more a creature of his world.

  Oval got up, zipping his worn flight suit. It wasn’t quite yet his time to reenter the machine, but of course he said, “Take a few more minutes, Johnny. I’m warmed up,” and went in.

  “Thirty-two thousand on this watch,” Urban said. He unwound the wool scarf he had to wrap around his face because of the scar tissue. John examined the st
iff mask for the pure white of frostbite but found none this time.

  The machine had been running so well they’d gone to two men inside instead of three. Les oversaw the conveyor belt, and up the line in swirls of steam from the blanching, rows of women in white smocks bent over the flow of lima beans.

  More than a week ago he’d given Urban back his pistol barrel. Because Urban had become so dutiful and even proprietary about the machine and its production, he’d stopped thinking at all about Urban and suicide. Here, it seemed, was a worthier enthusiasm than self-punishment. The man who had burned Tokyo and seen Jesus Christ in a Kawasaki Ki-61, who had tried to murder Christ with twin fifty-caliber machine guns, now seemed happy in his duty. Maria was pregnant with his child and that, too, must have made him reconsider doomsday. Details of the wedding were being worked out, as was Urban’s current faith, for that matter. He and Oval, when their breaks coincided, discussed this in serious, private voices.

  At six o’clock he was in sector 3 when a sprocket stopped turning and immediately lost several of its teeth. The chain slid from it and the trays began to tilt. He hit the kill switch just before the trays began to bend, which would have made them unusable. It was luck that he’d been looking in the right direction, and in fact happened to be staring at the sprocket that froze, because he’d been thinking about how to avoid going to the hospital and in dangerous ways wasn’t really doing his job. It was just luck. Even as the teeth sheared and fell he was not quite there, but then he was, and was able to act.

  “A number two sprocket!” he shouted down through beams, trays of white boxes, chains and hoarfrost. The fans still roared above him but the chirping of metal had stopped. Urban pushed a thirty-six-inch pipe wrench up the ladder and climbed after it to help him loosen the sprocket’s two-inch nut. It would not loosen. They’d had enough experience to know that the next thing to give would be the welded frame it was mounted on rather than the more easily replaceable shaft, so they called for a blowtorch. Oval came up with a new sprocket. Just as his head and hands appeared he missed a rung of the ladder and the sprocket rolled along the plank and went over the side, down into the machinery. “Goddamit!” Oval cried in exasperation.

  “I’ll get it,” John said. Urban had given Oval a look, just his slits and dark pupils visible.

  “We’ll need a torch to unfreeze this one,” Urban said.

  John went to the end of the plank and let himself down a story and a half on beams and chains, thinking of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and how it wouldn’t be quite so funny if the machine started up. He crawled back along the floor in six inches of snow and luckily found the sprocket, then had to swim backwards to get out again. He was about at the end of his ability to control his hands when he got to the secondary hatch, the one with ARBEIT MACHT FREI over it, and let himself out into the hot air of late afternoon. The bell was ringing. Oval was about to enter the other door with a blowtorch and a hammer. Then the bell stopped ringing and Oval’s head jerked around toward it. His mouth opened and he uttered a groan of sad disappointment, as if he were saying, “Oh, no.” He pulled at the spokes of the locking wheel on the door. The silence of the bell meant that the machine had started up again. John ran up to help him with the wheel, and as they entered, the bell began to ring again. Oval ran across the heaps of lima beans to the ladder and shouted, instantly hoarse, “What happened? What happened?”

  At first nothing answered but the mechanical wind. Oval dropped the torch and hammer on the frozen beans and climbed the ladder, John behind him. In sector 3 were too many people, soiled green flight suits crowded on the plank, shoulders pushed against the machinery. Jack looked around, surprised by Oval’s shouting. John pushed ahead of Oval, who seemed unable to move forward and yell the one question at the same time. John expected to see someone hurt, flesh and clothing crushed between sprocket and chain—fingers, a hand.

  Urban turned away from what he was doing and straightened up, staring at Oval. “Take it easy,” he said. “It’s okay, Oval. We had to go forward a few inches to free the shaft. Take it easy, now.”

  “What! What!”

  “We heard John go out the other hatch. Everybody was accounted for.” Urban pushed past John to get to Oval. “We thought you heard us say what we were going to do. You said something just before you went out, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, my God,” Oval said, finally understanding. “Oh, dear God.”

  “You got to take it easy, Oval.” Urban looked up at Oval and Oval bent down over Urban, exhausted, his jaws bluish white.

  “You go take a break. We can handle it,” Urban said.

  John still had the sprocket, which he handed to Urban.

  “You go on out with Oval,” Urban said to him. “Too many bodies up here as it is. Go on, now. Go on, skipper,” he said, gently pushing Oval toward the ladder.

  Oval went down. John followed and brought up the torch and hammer. “Tell him it’s okay,” Urban said.

  Outside, Oval sat on the pile of corrugated boxes, slumped back against a locker, still trying to catch his breath. “Whew,” he said.

  “Whew. For a minute there.”

  “Me, too,” John said.

  “Aren’t you off soon, Johnny?”

  “Why don’t you go? I’ll stay on,” John said with a hopeful, dubious yearning for the opportune.

  His father looked at him. He didn’t know what the man was thinking; he just looked at him neutrally, as if thinking long thoughts not necessarily about the moment at hand. There had been more than a little panic in the man. For good reason, maybe, if there ever was a good reason for panic. Yes, but who was John Hearne to judge anyone? Under the steady gaze of the blue eyes his attempted excuse not to go see Thelma shivered and fell away. It didn’t matter what anyone thought; he’d said he would do it and because of that it would be intolerable not to do it.

  He stood the Indian Pony in the visitors’ parking area, next to a cement wall so if it fell over it wouldn’t fall all the way over. He was in a slightly traitorous way sick of the motorcycle because apprehensive of its dangers. Right now he was more or less generally apprehensive. She would recognize him, and then what?

  At the desk in the lobby he asked for her room or ward, which he’d neglected to ask Bonnie or Oval about. People came and went, not sorrowing or crying, though some looked pinched and flushed. He took the stairs rather than an elevator. Stairs were only tiring if you walked up them instead of running lightly. He ran, but was not in a hurry. At the nurse’s station he asked for her. Was he a relative? “Her brother,” he said. How sweet, the nurse seemed to imply. She took him to a large room where there were eight or ten beds, none of the others occupied. Thelma’s was surrounded by movable partitions.

  “See? See? A visitor!” the nurse said. Thelma stopped making a thin, airy sound he interpreted as a mild whine of hopelessness. She was a heaped, bloated-looking mound on the narrow bed. Her round face was yellowish. From an ordinary-looking welding oxygen tank, except that the gas bubbled through a suspended jar of clear liquid, came a rubber tube that was taped to her forehead, cheek and upper Up before it went up her flat nose.

  “She stopped taking out her nasal catheter,” the nurse said. “I don’t think she knows what it’s for but it must give her some relief.”

  “John!” Thelma said. The nurse left.

  “Hello, Thelma,” he said. “How you doing?”

  She held out her short hand, her thumb like a huge peanut. Her hand was dry, grainy, substantial, and had the ability to grasp. It took him away, into himself, then became less intolerable, his hand mostly forgetting what it held.

  “I thick, mawful thick,” she said. He guessed she was glad to see him but she was distracted, trying not to be.

  “I know, Thelma,” he said.

  “I cwy’n I can hep it!”

  They didn’t like her whining, of course.

  “When can I go home, John?”

  “I don’t know. When you’re better. When you
feel good.”

  “I fee good home, John.”

  He recognized the feeling that had once been for him white clouds passing over green and blue Minnesota. She’d felt good at home, so a kind of logic he could name but no longer believe made perfect sense to her. She panted shallowly, her tongue visible.

  “They want to make you feel good so you can go home,” he said.

  “I draw pichures for you.”

  “Beautiful pictures,” he said. Her grasp on his hand relented and her hand went back to her side, the bulb of flesh below her arm flattening on the sheet.

  “I don fee good, John.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He wondered what she knew about her fate, or anyone’s. She always seemed to know just a little more than he thought she did. The talent she had was like a sharp light that must in some ways illuminate the murk she’d been condemned to at birth, or at conception. She understood space and the positions of planes and lines in space, then had the really rare ability to translate three dimensions into one, deliberately losing certain qualities for the sake of art. Maybe that wasn’t intelligence but it was a brilliant understanding, a brilliant sacrifice most of the people in the world could never make.

  “My gonna die, John?”

  He thought of saying, We’re all going to die, Thelma. But that wouldn’t do. “No, don’t think of that,” he said.

  “See Mama John Bonnie Daddy in heaven,” she said. Her hand went to the tube taped to her lip and grasped it firmly, as if she’d forgotten what it was.

  “Don’t touch that,” he said quickly. “Don’t pull on it.”

  “My node itch it.”

  “It helps you breathe. Don’t…”

  She pulled the tube out. It was longer than he’d thought—nearly a foot of it, slimy with mucus. She coughed and gasped as she rubbed the red place on her upper lip where the tape had been. He looked for a button of some kind that might call the nurse, but couldn’t find one so went out into the hall.

  “John! John!” Thelma called, then began bawling what might have been the same word. The nurse was not at her station and he looked peculiar half running down the corridor. Visitors in civilian clothes looked at him. He nearly ran into the nurse coming around a corner. She put a hand to her strange hat, blue with white wings, pinned to her brown hair.