A Tidewater Morning (2 page)

He scratched at his face, ignoring the hoodlum flies—stowaways from Saipan—that buzzed around him. His shaving cream was scented with lavender, which seemed as incongruous as the mere fact of his shaving at this hour—until it occurred to me how very
Halloran
it was. He wanted to make the landing, aborted as it might be, with a reasonably unstubbled face and could be too busy all the rest of the day and night to complete his toilet. I suspect that he also liked to keep his handlebar graphically emphasized. I admired this touch of panache, and I recalled that he had ordered the rest of the battalion to shave themselves, too, whether they needed it or not—and some were young enough not to need to. With Halloran this was not chickenshit but class, and the kids ate it up. I felt passionately that Stiles and I would not have been half the platoon leaders we were had it not been for the example of Halloran. It was total infatuation.

“Hiya, Dougie,” he said to Stiles, then to me: "Hiya, Paul, how’s your hammer hangin’? Sit down and take a load off.”

“Thank you, sir,” we said in unison, easing ourselves down on his bunk.

“So the long-awaited confrontation with our reptile foe, me laddies, is going to be but a wee scuffle, without a shot fired in anger.” He continued to shave while he uttered these words, which were intended to sound Scottish, I supposed, but resembled no dialect or accent I had ever heard. To me it was a small wart, but such an attempt at mimicry marked the height of his sense of the comic. Even now, through the lather, he was grinning at what he had just said. He had a touch of swarthiness—I supposed he could be described as black Irish—and the dimpled smile that plumped up his cheeks, and his hearty midwestern voice, gave a distant impression of Clark Gable. With whimsical affection I once thought that if you could distill the sheer masculinity he exuded, make of it some volatile essence, you would have an adman’s triumph—a cologne called Cock and Balls, smelling of leather, sweat, and gunpowder. At that time he was for me the matchless Marine officer. He was a graduate of the Citadel, where he had focused on engineering and had been made to read Longfellow. He had never heard of Franz Joseph Haydn, Anton Chekhov, or William Blake. But because I was one of his votaries, this ignorance was a virtually uncorrectable defect that made no difference.

Dropping the brogue, he glanced by way of the mirror at Stiles’s book and said: “What learned pundit are you sticking your nose into now, Dougie?”

“Hobbes, sir,” Stiles replied, “an English philosopher of the seventeenth century. The book’s called
Leviathan.
It’s probably his chef d’oeuvre.”

In the mirror I could see Halloran grinning. “Give me an abstract. Is he Bolshie or anti-Bolshie?”

After a hesitation, Stiles said: “Well, it’s hard to be specific, sir, since his historical context was so complicated, and he predated Marx by so many years. I suppose you could say that in his concept of the State as a kind of supermonster he was providing us, willy-nilly, with one of the earliest critiques of the Communist form of totalitarianism. But then at the same time you could hardly call him an advocate of democracy.”

“He’d be to the right of that other guy, then—what’s his name, John Locke?”

“Oh, certainly,” Stiles said. “By comparison Locke would be a true liberal.”

Halloran ruminated for a moment, holding his straight-edge razor poised in midair. “How much influence did this guy have on Marx? As much as Hegel?”

“Oh, God, no,” Stiles said, “no one influenced Marx so much as Hegel. Oh, I’m sure Marx had read the great English social philosophers—Hobbes, Locke, Bentham—but he pretty much discarded their ideas and created his own system.”

“That Marx,” said Halloran, shaking his head, “that fucking Marx. What a shitload of trouble.”

He paused and flipped a blob of foam from his razor, the straight-edge blade murderous-looking and slender, the only nonsafety razor in the outfit, to my knowledge, and nearly the only one I had ever seen. It was among the colonel’s trademarks, like the handlebar mustache or the silver-inlaid Colt .38 special police revolver he wore on his hip in a luxurious cordovan leather holster so energetically spit-shined that once, collapsed down beside him during a training problem on a Saipan beach, I saw my face bulbously reflected in it, as in a fun-house mirror. Both the Jerry Colonna mustache and the revolver were nonregulation; mustaches were allowed but they should not be recherché, and the standard-issue sidearm was a .45 automatic. The automatic, it was commonly noted, was not really reliable, hard to aim (though once aimed it could pulverize an ox). But it was less for this reason that Halloran sported his more glamorous sidearm—and the flamboyant handlebar—than for their dash and style, to which his status as a legend entitled him. The Marine Corps is rigorous, even Prussian, in many of its fetishlike requirements, but there is something affectingly lackadaisical in its toler ance of reasonable eccentricities shown by favored oddballs; unlike the Prussians, the Marines, thanks to this good-natured view, have been helped in saving themselves from dementia.

“So you think this Hobbes can help you devastate Marx when you get down to that book you’re planning to write?” Halloran asked.

“Yes, sir, absolutely,” Stiles said. “A man whose evil has been so vast and pervasive has had to draw his ideas from many sources, and I don’t want to miss even a fragment of the thought that might have been provided by any of his predecessors.”

“Well, as I say, I keep wishing you luck.” He paused again. “That fucking Marx sure brought us a shitload of trouble.”

I rather hoped this part of the conversation would cease, since I’d heard it or its equivalent several times before. In the Marines, political talk among officers has traditionally been constrained by a lurking delicacy that makes it almost forbidden (it
is
forbidden in officers’ wardrooms, along with religion and sex); but the Bolshevik menace, I had discovered, could be fair game. Like most regular officers Halloran was a political dumbbell, and Stiles had become his mentor. As for myself, I was considerably less interested in politics than Stiles was, and his involvement could become annoyingly overheated. But suddenly and mercifully the matter evaporated. We watched for a moment while Halloran swabbed his cheeks with a towel, then patted on talcum powder. Shortly, I knew from past observation, he would carefully wax the mustache with something he called “twice-precious goo” from a jar he had acquired in San Francisco’s Chinatown. But even as he stroked his cheeks, exhaling in satisfaction, we heard over the churning of the ship’s engines a far-off booming sound, sensed an ugly vibration in the air; for an instant all three of us cocked our ears. Then we relaxed. It could have been anything, way out on the sea: a kamikaze obliterating a destroyer, a flattop like
Intrepid
or
Essex
being torpedoed, an ammo ship reduced to iron filings and vapor—anything. Halloran, still peering into the mirror, silently mouthed the words “Fuck it.”

“Sir,” said Stiles, “what’s this scuttlebutt about the division going back to Saipan? Is it true that we might not
ever
make a landing?”

“I can’t say for sure, Dougie,” Halloran replied, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s all sorts of poop filtering down from G-2 that we won’t be needed. Now, please, don’t ask me why. But the word’s out that in Washington, or Pearl, or wherever such decisions are made, they believe our two divisions plus the dogface divisions will be quite enough. If this is so, it’s back to our old island and all that wild nightlife in Garapan.”

“But Jesus, sir!” Stiles was on his feet, slamming his fist into his palm, all agitation and protest. “This is a farce! We didn’t come out here these thousands of miles to sit around that stinking little island and watch our hands and feet rot off. We were trained to kill Japs, for Christ’s sake! And now there’s this phony operation tomorrow just to tease us. That wouldn’t be so bad if we knew we were at least being held in reserve, that we’d be landed sooner or later. But this To go back to Saipan and turn into zombies! It’s”—his voice rose querulously—“it’s intolerable!”

“Calm down, Douglas, me boy,” Halloran said amiably, lapsing into an Irish brogue now, excruciating but somewhat more convincing than the Highland cadence; he was, after all, of Irish descent. “In the Corps ye’ll learn to endure frustration and take orders like the foine young lad you are. If you don’t make Okinawa, you’ll surely make the mainland. Then on the mainland, it’s me foine belief, ye’ll get to kill yourself half a dozen of the little ringtail baboons—maybe half a hundred. Also,” he added with a lewd wink, “you’ll get a lot of that sidewise nooky.” He was alluding to the Marine Corps pleasantry, exhaustively repeated, that the Japanese pudendum was horizontal.

“But the mainland! God knows when that’ll be. Anything could happen. We could get sick, have an accident—anything!” Stiles stopped for a moment, resumed in a milder voice: “With all due respect, sir, and no offense, but you’ve personally taken care of a bunch of those baboons. We haven’t.” He spread his arm in a gesture that included me, wearing an expression that made him seem embarrassingly close to grief. “We haven’t laid eyes on a Jap!”

There was another dullish
crump crump,
closer now, near enough to make the colonel’s eyebrows twitch. “Kamikaze,” he said, and stretched out his body toward the porthole. “Fucking Japanese lunatics,” he murmured in a flat, emotionless voice, searching the ocean. “Insane sons of bitches. Fucking dogs, whole fucking empire. Eighty million animals with rabies.” He drew back from the porthole, licked his lips, inhaled, strove to say something else, then trailed off with a valiant but somehow inadequate “Dog fuckers.” Suddenly a sparkle lit in his eyes—it was plain he was finished with Stiles’s spunky dissidence—and he said: “Well, let’s have a drop of whiskey, me boys, and I’ll tell you a little story.”

And suddenly I didn’t want to hear a story. I was seized once again by the despondent, haunted mood that had overtaken me on the deck. I felt that sharp homesickness again and yearned to return to sleep. But I had to hear (or pretend to hear) the story, even though Halloran was one of the worst storytellers I had ever listened to. Someone (it may have been Stiles) remarked that when Halloran got halfway through a story, even Halloran began to go to sleep. Lest I be misunderstood, this had nothing to do with intelligence but arose from a particular deafness—not just a lack of savoir faire but deafness to all social nuance, like a hymn singer caroling with glorious self-confidence Sunday after Sunday in just noticeably the wrong tempo and a halftone flat. Halloran was such a splendid fighting man that everyone pardoned his buffoonery. Stiles, who revered Halloran as much as I did, but who like wise wondered what made the man tick, once laid it all out to me in what I thought was a deft analysis. Happy Halloran was a
professional Marine.
He was 101 percent Marine Corps—member of a fellowship of knights, professor of a faith, a way of life to which he had consecrated himself as fiercely as any guardian of the Grail. Okay, Stiles went on, this Illinois knight served his squire’s discipline at Culver Military Academy. Then the Citadel, where the intellectual level was on a par with that of a night school for the mentally retarded. Then the time served with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai just before Pearl Harbor. The Americans, along with the British and the French, had made a playground of Shanghai for years. Probably the only time as an adult he’d had any taste of a civilian atmosphere—eating wonton soup and trying to make out with all that fabled blond White Russian pussy. Then at last these years of war—virtually the rest of his life (except for a brief Stateside assignment)—spent among the sweltering Pacific isles, fighting an enemy he hated with such barely governed rage that he choked when he uttered its name. Wouldn’t you, Stiles said to me, be a little—ahem—
peculiar,
I mean not quite like the rest of us college kids, if that was the earliest chapter in the story of
your
life as an American boy?

The colonel poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into three mess-kit cups and sat down on the edge of the bunk opposite us. It was strictly illegal to drink aboard ship—but, of course, fuck it. Like all Marines who had been in the Pacific for many months, Halloran was scandalously rich through accumulated and unspent back pay. “I gave a Navy supply officer seventy-five bucks for this bottle,” he said, grinning, and held the fifth of amber-hued bourbon up to the light. “Old Forester. Only the best for gents of the Second Battalion. I don’t think I told you this story before, fellows—”

A beer guzzler, I had tasted whiskey only half a dozen times in my life; I didn’t yet quite know how to handle the awesomely poetic exhilaration I felt when it began nibbling away at my brain cells. I took a hefty sip and experienced instant vertigo: this canceled out any need to try to follow Halloran’s narrative. The only story I wished I
could
hear—an account from his own lips of the fabulous episode on Tarawa that had won him the Navy Cross (and, of course, our houndlike devotion)—was obviously the only story that he, like any hero with appropriate modesty, could not tell. Instead (oh, Jesus, I thought), here began another tale about Shanghai, the poor guy’s golden time of whoopee amid a totally regimented life. Would it be about Svetlana, the honey-haired White Russian “countess,” suspected agent for the Japanese, who tried her sultry best to squeeze out secrets from Halloran, the junior intelligence officer? (It was a story with brilliant possibilities, and it should have had zip and suspense, like a good Hitchcock movie, in addition to some juicy sex, but Halloran had told it so confusedly that it lacked all of these, especially the sex. “Svetlana was just a slut” was his raciest observation, which reinforced my view that, like most military academy men, he was basically quite prudish, all talk and small action, and had probably gotten less ass than even I had.) Or would it be about Chinese beer? Halloran could do a minimum of forty-five minutes on the brewing of Chinese beer and still be working up to matters of bottle design and the way the head foamed.