It Takes Two (27 page)

“Joke food is still food,” Bud said, picking up a cocktail fork. “Never had nothing like this. Looks fresh, though.” He speared a mock penis and dunked it into a puddle of pearly horseradish mayonnaise. “What did the sinking teach you?”

“Taught me it’s luck that counts.”

“Your luck? In not drowning?”

“Yeah. But more than that. It was luck that I slept on deck the night the sub found us. Luck that I had a pneumatic life belt with me. Luck that I found a raft within a few hours. Rotten luck for the men who went insane from swallowing seawater. No luck at all for the almost nine hundred men who…didn’t come back.”

I ate an oyster and washed it down with Regal.

“Look, man,” said Bud. “Don’t—if you don’t want to talk about this. Do you?”

“No,” I said. “Yes. Not much. I got through debriefings at Guam on pills and alcohol.”

“You want some of this?” He held up his half full bottle of Regal. I nodded. He poured.

“There was an officer in my raft,” I said. “Another lieutenant, who’d gone over the side in the dark with a quart of scotch in his hand.”

“You had shipwreck supplies in the raft, didn’t you?”

I ate a second oyster. “No, nothing. No food or water. But having the whiskey to sip for the first couple of days kept us from going crazy. Anyway, that’s what the Navy doctors decided later.”

“My platoon was in Okinawa by then,” said Bud. “There were stories about the sinking in
Stars and Stripes
. Got written up again when your captain was court-martialed after the war.”

“Can’t stomach scotch whisky anymore.” I laughed. “I throw it right back up.”

Carmen’s hand reached out of the darkness, collected empty bottles and set down fresh ones. The pool deck beneath us seemed to move, as if I was on a ship again, only drunk and confused by the wartime blackout.

“Chowder’s coming right up,” Carmen said.

When he was gone, Bud topped off our mugs and smiled. “Maybe beer is your luck now. Not water. Nor scotch.”

“I grew up on the water,” I said. “Out on Tampa Bay fishing with my uncle. Winning swimming races in high school. Thought I was God’s redheaded gift.”

Bud leaned back, still smiling. “Water was our good luck anyhow, wasn’t it? Out on your fish boat that time?”

I grinned, remembering that second fishing trip. We’d anchored, stripped off our clothes, dived into the water and almost immediately begun messing around. Once we’d gotten too aroused for any face-saving jokes to stop us, I’d kissed Bud’s neck, wrapped an arm around him lifeguard style, and started hauling him back to the boat. “We ought to lie down,” I whispered, my hard cock cutting the water like a mast. “Stay with me, Buddy.”

And he did. We hauled up the metal ladder, moved forward to the cabin, sat down side by side on one of the bunk, and quickly worked out patterns of exploring each other all over again.

I kissed the scar on his neck and gently massaged his backbone with my hands. He let me pet him that way for a minute or two, then he leaned back, panting, gently stroking his phallus and balls with both hands, ready to go wherever I decided to take us. I got between his legs and teased his thighs with my fingertips. Then I took his hands in mine and spread them apart, over his head, pressing them against the mattress and raising myself to cover him. Our bats began to nuzzle like inquisitive eels.

When I released his hands, he left them where they were. “You about got me, ah, there, ah, about got me there,” he whispered. “Coach, Coach, fucking Coach. You with me? You ready? Teach me, Coach.”

Kneeling over him on all fours, I brushed his ears, neck, armpits and chest with my mouth. But as soon as I tried to kiss below his belly button, he twisted frantically, and pulled my face back up to his.

“That ain’t the way now, Coach. What we’re doing is the best I’ve ever. Can’t get no…you just keep with me, Coach.” Rising off the mattress, he took one of my hands and wrapped it around his slugger, doing the same to me with his other hand. He pulled so hard he almost hurt me.

“That’s it,” he’d said, loosening his grip but then suddenly tightening and tightening again. “I never,” he’d said. “I never. Come on with me. Come on, ah, with me. There, there. Oh.”

“Go ahead and talk,” Bud said, setting down his fork. “Tell me about your ship.” He picked up his beer and sucked down deeply. “Tell me about feeling safe.”

I matched him, beer-wise. “You want the whole story?” He nodded, his smile dead serious.

I began at the real beginning.

“The ship was my home for fifteen months. I went aboard right out of supply school. Saw some action in the far Pacific. We carried Admiral Spruance’s flag for a while. Then took a kamikaze at Okinawa, ended up back at Mare Island in California for overhaul in the summer of 1945.

“The ship was fast. But old, like I said. And expendable. Which is probably why the War Department assigned her to deliver the Hiroshima A-bomb to Tinian Island. We drove out there like a freight train on a straight track. Went from San Francisco by way of Pearl. The ship even set a record. From Farallon Light to Diamond Head in 74 hours and change. Still stands. Nice trip. Anyhow, we handed over the bomb at Tinian. Not knowing what it was, but speculating to hell and back. Then we continued across the Pacific. We didn’t make it all the way, of course. Guam, next port after Tinian, was our last call.”

The raw oysters were roiling my stomach, making me nauseous. I pushed the plate away.

“Not that I had anything to do with operations,” I said. “I heard most of this from my cabin mate, Mike Rizzo. He was an engineer. From Baltimore. Tough little guy.”

Lou Salmi noiselessly removed the appetizer plates and set down bowls of chowder. “It was like managing a hotel,” I said. “I was in charge of billets, messing, commissary, supply, officers’ cooks plus odds and ends like laundry and wardroom cleanup.”

I picked up my soup spoon, sipped the chowder, didn’t taste anything. “I had thirty-two stewards, cooks and mess mates assigned to me. Not one came back after the sinking. When the torpedoes hit, I could have been down in the galley drinking coffee. Or refereeing some dumb fight in the cooks’ quarters. Or I might have been racked out in our cabin up forward in officers’ country. Died with Mike.”

Bud was steadily devouring his chowder. “Lucky you didn’t sleep in the cabin, huh?”

“I’d be dead if I had. Both tin fish hit forward. Thirty feet of our bow was blown off. Not many officers got out.”

“Only your luck was right, and you did.” Bud was telling me to go on. “Soup’s fine,” he added.

“Mike was my best luck, maybe,” I answered. “I was minus one roommate at the time he came aboard. I’d just been made billeting officer, so I could have kept the bunk open until Rita Hayworth earned a commission. But other guys were jammed in three and four to a cabin. I took the next junior man aboard.”

The beer had flavor, the soup still didn’t. I glanced up to gauge Bud’s reaction to my story. His eyes were on the chowder. I plunged ahead.

“Found a half I didn’t know was missing. And we got…close, fast. Closer than I’d been to anybody else. Sometimes we slept in the same bunk. The door had a lock.”

“Lucky for you,” Bud grunted, his attention still on the soup. “Lucky nobody got nosy.”

“Lucky as hell,” I agreed. “But that late in the war, there was a lot of looking the other way. The exec officer told me about two different incidents of enlisted men found naked together in the blackout. ‘Body buddies,’ he called them. He didn’t do anything except send them to the showers. Maybe he was testing me, wondering if Mike and I were a pair.”

“You was lucky to have somebody,” Bud said, his voice low. “Even if it was against regs. You know what happened to too many couples during the war—like Sergeant Wash Davis and his wife. He goes off, gets decorated, comes back and finds her whoring.”

“You sure Mary didn’t shoot both of them?” I asked—my mind making fuzzy connections—then added, “You know, I just hired her as a maid.”

Bud looked at me like I was crazy. “Jesus, Dan. You need your head examined.”

“Naw, I’m just an old softie. Who else was going to hire her?”

“Better watch your back,” he said. “You can push Lady Luck an inch too far.”

“Damn right,” I agreed, swigging beer. “Anyway, I was sleeping on deck on the Lady
Indy
every night I could. Ventilation in quarters was half of zilch, even with most of the hatches and watertights undone. Below decks didn’t ever cool off in the summer Pacific, night or day. And running under wraps like we were—to save fuel!—meant even less air got piped below. So a lot of guys would drag mattresses or blankets out on deck. It was total snafu. We sailed without an escort because the
Indy
had the capability to outrun Jap subs. On paper, that is, at service speed! Ha. We were all alone and moving as slow as a cow on a path. I guess the brass figured there weren’t any subs around. They were wrong. Missed it by one.”

I shoved the chowder away. “I slept topside, on a ledge port side of the aft stack. It was a spot Mike and I and a few other officers took turns using. My number came up, I was off watch from eight to eight, right place, right time.”

“You weren’t hurt when the torpedoes hit?” Bud had emptied his soup plate and begun working on mine. His growly voice seemed unchanged.

“First blast rolled me off the ledge onto a pair of sailors standing watch. We were still in a pile when the second one went off.”

“Where was your friend Mike?”

“The fish hit just after midnight. He was scheduled to go off watch in the forward engine room. So he may have been relieved by then, and back in our cabin. Or he could have been still on duty. Or, who knows, wandered somewhere else. But his luck was bad. And so was mine, losing him.

“And, of course, I couldn’t do anything. It was pure-hell confusion. My battle station, the wardroom, was burned out by the time I got moving. So I started checking life preservers on sailors. Being sure the strings were tied right. Any fool could see the ship was going to sink. And she did, in twelve minutes flat. Sank like a knife. Rolled over to starboard, went down by the bow. I walked down the port side. It was exactly like wading toward the deep end of a swimming pool. I inflated my belt, found a raft a few hours later and got into it, then pulled one badly burned deck ape aboard and paddled free.

“We drifted all night. My burned sailor was delirious. I heard other yells and screams at first, and whistles. But gradually…nothing. Once, I thought maybe he and I were the only survivors. But the wind had just blown us away from the main group. Toward dawn, we drifted into the lieutenant with the whiskey. He was riding a couple of potato crates, which I lashed alongside. The man was good company, an optimist. I can’t ever remember his name.

“My burned sailor died that afternoon, couldn’t stand the sun. We tried making a tent out of my blouse but it didn’t help. The lieutenant and I put him over the side and watched him sink. The water was clear, just as green and clean as a bottle of 7-Up. He sank and sank, got littler and littler. Then this big old white-bellied shark swam by and tore his legs off.”

“Jesus,” muttered Bud. He was massaging his forehead and brows with a balled-up fist.

“It was his good luck to be dead by then,” I said. “Sharks got plenty of other men right in the water. Men that were still alive. Plenty of bodies, and parts of bodies, floated by us.”

I told him about thirst and sunburn; about meeting another two-man raft with oil-soaked gunners aboard; about being taken aboard the destroyer escort USS
Doyle
after four days and nights; about being hospitalized at Peleliu for exposure and returning to Guam for debriefing and recuperation.

While I talked, Lou delivered our platters of shrimp and steak and later brought coffee and slices of cake.

“The worst thing about the sinking,” I said at last, pushing away my cup, “was the flat fear. Not of my own death but of Mike’s. Being left alone. When he didn’t turn up on the
Doyle
, there was the chance some other ship had him. When he wasn’t at Peleliu, well, maybe some other island. See, his name didn’t appear on either the preliminary survivor lists or the killed-in-action lists. That was because, I found out later, nobody still alive had seen him after Sunday at ten P.M. I gather he didn’t get off the ship. Nobody got out of the engine room. I had to go around pleading for information. I got some funny looks, but also a good deal of sympathy. Lots of men’s buddies were lost, so my story didn’t ring any different.

“Finally, they listed him ‘missing, presumed killed.’ I cried for two days. Didn’t leave my berth except to go puke every so often. Third day, this psychiatrist came in, had a clipboard with forms on it—a set of questions he wanted to ask me. Asked about the sinking, about my dreams, mostly about Mike. He didn’t ask me to betray him—us. Nothing like that. But I got the message. Next day, I straightened up, shaved, put on a clean uniform and started pulling strings to get a ship.”

Bud’s head kicked back. “You didn’t want to come home? War must of been over by then.”