He’d forgotten about the inanimate world and any law of retribution. Forgotten that the field-of-two, the twin envelope of peace had come to birth only a few minutes after he’d been kicking tires, which for a schlemihl is pure wising-off.
It didn’t take Them long. Only a few nights later Profane sacked in at four, figuring to get in a good eight hours of Z’s before he had to get up and go to work. When his eyes finally did come open he knew from the quality of light in the room and the state of his bladder that he’d overslept. Rachel’s electric clock whined merrily beside him, hands pointing to 1:30. Rachel was off somewhere. He turned on the light, saw that the alarm was set for midnight, the button on the back switched to ON. Malfunction. “You little bastard”; he picked the clock up and heaved it across the room. On hitting the bathroom door the alarm went off, a loud and arrogant BZZZ.
Well, he got his feet in the wrong shoes, cut himself shaving, token he had wouldn’t fit into the turnstile, subway took off about ten seconds ahead of him. When he arrived downtown it was not much south of three and Anthroresearch Associates was in an uproar. Bergomask met him at the door, livid. “Guess what,” the boss yelled. It seemed an all-night, routine test was on. Around 1:15, one of the larger heaps of electronic gear had run amok; half the circuitry fused, alarm bells went off, the sprinkler system and a couple of CO2 cylinders kicked in, all of which the attendant technician had slept through peacefully.
“Technicians,” Bergomask snorted, “are not paid to wake up. This is why we have night watchmen.” SHROUD sat over against the wall, hooting quietly.
Soon as it had all come through to Profane he shrugged. “It’s stupid, but it’s something I say all the time. A bad habit. So. Anyway. I’m sorry.” Getting no response, turned and shuffled off. They’d send him severance pay, he reckoned, in the mail. Unless they intended to make him cover the cost of the damaged gear. SHROUD called after him:
Bon voyage.
“What is that supposed to mean.”
We’ll see.
“So long, old buddy.”
Keep cool. Keep cool but care. It’s a watchword, Profane, for your side of the morning. There, I’ve told you too much as it is.
“I’ll bet under that cynical butyrate hide is a slob. A sentimentalist.”
There’s nothing under here. Who are we kidding?
The last words he ever had with SHROUD. Back at 112th Street he woke up Rachel.
“Back to pounding the pavements, lad.” She was trying to be cheerful. He gave her that much but was mad with himself for going flabby enough to forget his schlemihl birthright. She being all he had to take it out on,
“Fine for you,” he said. “You’ve been solvent all your life.”
“Solvent enough to keep us going till me and Space/Time Employment find something good for you. Really good.”
Fina had tried to shove him along the same path. Had it been her that night at Idlewild? Or only another SHROUD, another guilty conscience bugging him over a baión rhythm?
“Maybe I don’t want to get a job. Maybe I’d rather be a bum. Remember? I’m the one that loves bums.”
She edged over to make room for him, having now those inevitable second thoughts. “I don’t want to talk about loving anything,” she told the wall. “It’s always dangerous. You have to con each other a little, Profane. Why don’t we go to sleep.”
No: he couldn’t let it go. “Let me warn you, is all. That I don’t love anything, not even you. Whenever I say that—and I will—it will be a lie. Even what I’m saying now is half a play for sympathy.”
She made believe she was snoring.
“All right, you know I am a schlemihl. You talk two-way. Rachel O., are you that stupid? All a schlemihl can do is take. From the pigeons in the park, from a girl picked up on any street, bad and good, a schlemihl like me takes and gives nothing back.”
“Can’t there be a time for that later,” she asked meekly. “Can’t it wait on tears sometime, a lovers’ crisis. Not now, dear Profane. Only sleep.”
“No,” he leaned over her, “babe I am not showing you anything of me, anything hidden. I can say what I’ve said and be safe because it’s no secret, it’s there for anybody to see. It’s got nothing to do with me, all schlemihls are like that.”
She turned to him, moving her legs apart: “Hush . . .”
“Can’t you see,” growing excited though it was now the last thing he wanted, “that whenever I, any schlemihl lets a girl think there is a past, or a secret dream that can’t be talked about, why Rachel that’s a con job. Is all it is.” As if SHROUD were prompting him: “There’s nothing inside. Only the scungilli shell. Dear girl—” saying it as phony as he knew how—“schlemihls know this and use it, because they know most girls need mystery, something romantic there. Because a girl knows her man would be only a bore if she found out everything there was to know. I know you’re thinking now: the poor boy, why does he put himself down like that. And I’m using this love that you still, poor stupe, think is two-way to come like this between your legs, like this, and take, never thinking how you feel, caring about whether you come only so I can think of myself as good enough to make you come . . .” So he talked, all the way through, till both had done and he rolled on his back to feel traditionally sad.
“You have to grow up,” she finally said. “That’s all: my own unlucky boy, didn’t you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We’re older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different. Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and whenever you decide to come back after that.”
He was snoring, for real.
“Dear, how pompous I’m getting. Good night . . .” And she fell asleep to have cheerful, brightly colored, explicit dreams about sexual intercourse.
Next day, rolling out of bed to get dressed, she continued. “I’ll see what we’ve got. Stand by. I’ll call you.” Which of course kept him from going back to sleep. He stumbled around the apartment for a while swearing at things. “Subway,” he said, like the hunchback of Notre Dame yelling sanctuary. After a day of yo-yoing he came up to the street at nightfall, sat in a neighborhood bar and got juiced. Rachel met him at home (home?) smiling and playing the game.
“How would you like to be a salesman. Electric shavers for French poodles.”
“Nothing inanimate,” he managed to say. “Slave girls, maybe.” She followed him to the bedroom and took off his shoes when he passed out on the bed. Even tucked him in.
Next day, hung over, he yo-yoed on the Staten Island ferry, watching juveniles-in-love neck, grab, miss, connect.
Day after that he got up before her and journeyed down to the Fulton Fish Market to watch the early morning activity. Pig Bodine tagged along. “I got a fish,” said Pig, “I would like to give Paola, hyeugh, hyeugh.” Which Profane resented. They moseyed by Wall Street and watched the boards of a few brokers. They walked uptown as far as Central Park. This took them till mid-afternoon. They dug a traffic light for an hour. They went into a bar and watched a soap opera on TV.
They came rollicking in late. Rachel was gone.
Out came Paola though, sleepy-eyed, benightgowned. Pig began to shuffle furrows in the rug. “Oh,” seeing Pig. “You can put coffee on,” she yawned. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Right,” Pig muttered, “right you are.” And glaring at the small of her back, followed zombielike to the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Soon Profane, making coffee, heard screams.
“Wha.” He looked into the bedroom. Pig had managed to get atop Paola and seemed linked to her pillow by a long string of drool which glittered in the fluorescent light from the kitchen.
“Help?” Profane puzzled. “Rape?”
&nbs
p; “Get this pig off of me,” Paola yelled.
“Pig, hey. Get off.”
“I want to get laid,” protested Pig.
“Off,” said Profane.
“Up thine,” snarled Pig, “with turpentine.”
“Nope.” So saying, Profane grabbed the big collar on Pig’s jumper and pulled.
“You are strangling me, hey,” said Pig after a while.
“True,” said Profane. “But I saved your life once, remember.”
Which was the case. Back in the Scaffold days, Pig had long announced, to anybody in ship’s company who’d listen, his refusal ever to don a contraceptive unless it was a French tickler. This device being your common rubber ornamented in bas-relief (often with a figurehead on the end) to stimulate female nerve ends not stimulated by the usual means. From Kingston Jamaica last cruise Pig had brought back fifty Jumbo the Elephant and fifty Mickey Mouse French ticklers. The night finally came when Pig ran out, his last having been expended in the memorable battle with his onetime colleague Knoop, LtJG, a week before on the Scaffold’s bridge.
Pig and his friend Hiroshima the electronics technician had a going thing on the beach with radio tubes. ET’s on a destroyer like the Scaffold keep their own inventory of electronic components. Hiroshima could therefore finagle, which as soon as he’d found a discreet outlet in downtown Norfolk he proceeded to do. Every so often Hiroshima would heist a few tubes and Pig would stow them in an AWOL bag and run them ashore.
One night Knoop had OOD watch. All an OOD usually does is stand on the quarterdeck and salute people going on and off. He is also a sort of monitor, making sure that everybody leaves with their neckerchief straight, fly zipped and wearing their own uniform; also that nobody is swiping anything from the ship or bringing anything on board they shouldn’t. Lately old Knoop had been getting hawkeyed. Howie Surd the drunken yeoman, who had two grooves worn bare in the hair of his leg from adhesive-taping pints of various booze under one bellbottom by way of providing the crew with something tastier than torpedo juice, had almost made it the two steps from quarterdeck to ship’s office when Knoop like a Siamese boxer fetched him an agile kick in the calf. And there stood Howie with Schenley Reserve and blood running over his best liberty shoes. Knoop of course crowed in triumph. He’d also caught Profane trying to take over five pounds of hamburger swiped from the galley. Profane escaped legal action by splitting the loot with Knoop who was having marital difficulties and had somehow come up with the notion that two and a half pounds of hamburger might serve as a peace-offering.
So only a few nights after that Pig was understandably nervous, trying simultaneously to salute, produce ID and liberty cards, and keep one eye on Knoop and another on the tube-laden AWOL bag.
“Request permission to go ashore, sir, hey,” said Pig.
“Permission granted. What is in the AWOL bag.”
“In the AWOL bag.”
“That one, yes.”
“What is in it.” Pig pondered.
“Change of skivvies,” suggested Knoop, “douche kit, magazine to read, dirty laundry for Mom to wash—”
“Now that you mention it, Mr. Knoop—”
“Radio tubes, also.”
“Wha.”
“Open the bag.”
“I would like, I think,” said Pig, “maybe to just dash in ship’s office there for a minute to read the Naval Regulations, sir, and see if maybe what you are ordering me to do might not be a little, how would you say it, illegal. . . .”
Grinning horribly, Knoop made a sudden leap in the air and came down square on the AWOL bag, which went crunch, tinkle in a sickening way.
“Aha,” said Knoop.
Pig came up for captain’s mast a week later and got restricted. Hiroshima was never mentioned. Normally larceny of this sort is rewarded with a court-martial, the brig, a dishonorable discharge, all of which strengthen morale. It seemed however that the Scaffold’s old man, one C. Osric Lych, commander, had gathered round him an inner circle of enlisted men, all of whom you could call habitual offenders. This troupe included Baby Face Falange, the machinist mate striker, who periodically would put on a babushka and let the members of the A gang line up in the compartment to pinch his cheek; Lazar the deck ape who wrote foul sayings on the Confederate monument downtown and was usually brought back off liberty in a straitjacket; Teledu his friend who one time avoiding a work detail had gone to hide in a refrigerator, decided he liked it and lived there for two weeks on raw eggs and frozen hamburger until the master-at-arms and a posse dragged him away; and Groomsman the quartermaster, whose second home was sick bay, being as how he was constantly infested by a breed of crabs which unhappily only thrived on the chief corpsman’s super-formula crab-killer.
The captain, having seen this element of the crew at every mast, came to look on them fondly as His Boys. He pulled strings and indulged in all manner of extra-legal procedure to keep them in the Navy and on board the Scaffold. Pig, being a charter member of the Captain’s (so to speak) Own Men, got off with no liberty for a month. Time soon hung heavy. So it was of course toward the crab-ridden Groomsman that Pig gravitated.
Groomsman was the agent in Pig’s near-fatal involvement with the airline stewardesses Hanky and Panky, who along with half a dozen more of their kind, shared a large pad out near Virginia Beach. The night after Pig’s restriction ended, Groomsman took him out there after stopping by a state liquor store for booze.
Well, it was Panky Pig went for, Hanky being Groomsman’s girl. Pig after all had a code. He never did find out their real names, though did it make any difference? They were virtually interchangeable; both unnatural blondes, both between twenty-one and twenty-seven, between 5’2” and 5’7” (weights in proportion), clear complexions, no eyeglasses or contact lenses. They read the same magazines, shared the same toothpaste, soap and deodorant; swapped civilian clothes when off duty. One night Pig did in fact end up in bed with Hanky. Next morning he pretended to’ve been drunk out of his mind. Groomsman was apologized to easily enough, having it turned out hit the sack with Panky under the same misapprehension.
Things cruised along all idyllic; spring and summer brought hordes to the beach and Shore Patrolman (now and again) to chez Hanky Panky to quell riots and stay for coffee. It came out under incessant questioning by Groomsman that there was something Panky “did” during the act of love which turned Pig, as Pig put it, on. What this was nobody ever found out. Pig, not normally reticent in these matters, now acted like a mystic after a vision; unable, maybe unwilling, to put in words this ineffable or supernal talent of Panky’s. Whatever it was it drew Pig out to Virginia Beach all his liberty and a few duty nights. One duty night, Scaffold bound, he wandered down to C&O compartment after the movie to find the quartermaster swinging from the overhead whooping like an ape. “After-shave lotion,” Groomsman yelled down to Pig, “is the only thing that gets to the little bastards.” Pig winced. “They get drunk on it and fall asleep.” He descended to tell Pig about his crabs, having lately developed the theory that they held barn dances among the forest of his pubic hair on Saturday nights.
“Enough,” said Pig. “What about our Club.” This was the Prisoners-at-Large and Restricted Men’s Club, formed recently for the purpose of hatching plots against Knoop, who was also Groomsman’s division officer.
“One thing,” Groomsman said, “that Knoop cannot stand is water. He can’t swim, he owns three umbrellas.”
They discussed ways of exposing Knoop to water, short of throwing him over the side. A few hours after lights out Lazar and Teledu joined the plot after a blackjack game (payday stakes) in the mess hall. Both had been losers. As were all the Captain’s Men. They had a fifth of Old Stag conned from Howie Surd.
Saturday Knoop had the duty. At sundown the Navy has this tradition called Evening Colors, which around the Convoy Escort Piers in Norfolk is
impressive. Looking at it from any destroyer’s bridge you would see all motion—afoot and vehicular—stop; everyone come to attention, turn and salute the American flags going down on dozens of fantails.
Knoop had the first dog watch, 4:00 to 6:00 P.M., as OOD. Groomsman was to pass the word “Now on deck attention to colors.” The destroyer tender USS Mammoth Cave, alongside which the Scaffold and its division were moored, had recently acquired a trumpet player from shore duty in Washington, D.C., so tonight there was even a bugle to play retreat.
Meanwhile Pig was lying on top of the pilot house, a pile of curious objects beside him. Teledu was down at the water tap aft of the pilot house, filling up rubbers—among them Pig’s French ticklers—and passing them to Lazar who was putting them next to Pig.
“Now on deck,” said Groomsman. From over the way came the first note of Taps. A few tin cans down the line, jumping the gun, started lowering their own flags. Out on the bridge came Knoop to supervise. “Attention to colors.” Splat, went a rubber, two inches from Knoop’s foot. “Oh, oh,” said Pig. “Get him while he’s still saluting,” Lazar whispered, frantic. The second rubber landed on Knoop’s hat, intact. From out of the corner of one eye Pig saw that great nightly immobility, dyed orange by the sun, grip the entire C.E. Piers area. The bugle knew what he was doing, and played Taps clear and strong.
The third rubber missed completely, going over the side. Pig had the shakes. “I can’t hit him,” he kept saying. Lazar, exasperated, had picked up two and fled. “Traitor,” Pig snarled and threw one after him. “Aha,” said Lazar from down among the 3-inch mounts, and lobbed one back at Pig. Bugle blew a riff. “Carry on,” said Groomsman. Knoop brought his right hand smartly to his side and with his left removed the water-filled rubber from his hat. He started calmly up the ladder on the pilot house after Pig. The first person he saw was Teledu, crouching by the water tap, still filling rubbers. Down on the torpedo deck Pig and Lazar were having a water fight, chasing each other among the gray tubes now highlighted vermilion by the sunset. Arming himself with the stockpile Pig had abandoned, Knoop joined the struggle.
V. Page 42
