The Trinity (26 page)

One more thing I want to tell you about me. I read a lot. Horror and war stories mostly, anything to take me away. Do you read? I imagine if you’re going to be married to me than you probably do. But if you don’t then that’s okay too.

Take care, and until we meet.                                                                      

                                                                         Chris

Chris and Karen agree to meet outside the base gate early in the afternoon following their last mid-watch. The passing of the hours of the morning gives them enough time for minimal sleep without wasting the day.

The day is unusually warm and the sky is a cloudless and brilliant blue as Chris waits outside the gate minus his coat, smoking a cigarette with his pale face turned towards the sky, his skin absorbing the warmth of the sun.

Karen pulls up in her car that he has already seen parked outside of their work site, a late 1970s Austin Mini, brown body, beige top. The car itself is no taller than the base of Chris’s sternum. He gets in, surprised at how low to the ground he is sitting, as if his rear-end will feel every bump in the road.

He doesn’t recognize Karen at first and he is shocked at her appearance. He has only seen her in the dungaree uniform, her thin body continually clad in denim and hidden underneath her blue working jacket. Her long hair has also always been put up into a sort of bun to keep it above her collar in accordance with Navy regulations.

Today she is wearing blue jeans that are slightly fashionable and an argyle sweater, fitting her figure much better than her uniform. Her hair is also down, and she is wearing just a hint of makeup.

Chris sees her as an entirely different person, and despite the difference in years, he finds her attractive. He is as attracted to her as he has been to anyone else in his life.

Still, he sees that same trace of sadness written in her eyes, as if nothing in this world can make her truly happy.

She says hello without taking her eyes off the road. It is Chris’s first time in the front seat of a car for quite some time, and the view is quite different from that of the back seat of a taxicab. The road is spread out before him. They head south on the A92.

“I thought we’d see Arbroath Abbey first,” she says. “It’s close and cheap and there is a bit of history there, fairly important in relation to Scotland.”

They drive in silence. Chris studies the nearby hills and sporadic trees aching to return to the color of green. The same hint and smell of spring that he encountered in the Michigan air is present here. He can feel the world trying to awaken upon the conclusion of the dark winter. Far away, just before the horizon to the west, the higher hills still have a smattering of white on top.

Arbroath is perhaps a twenty-minute drive along a mostly empty highway save the occasional farmhouse or cottage along the road. Chris again looks longingly at the North Sea. Despite the warmth in the air, the sea itself looks very cold.

They arrive in Arbroath, a town not much different in size from Brechin. Karen navigates the narrow streets through the city center confidently and they arrive at the abbey.

It is an enormous and majestic ruin. Chris learns that it was founded in 1178 by King William the Lion. He can’t comprehend an age so far back; his knowledge and imagination cannot perceive the breadth of the elapsed years.

They walk through the grounds, past the walls that are mostly intact, though the roof has long since decayed. Karen speaks indirectly, as if to a classroom, though Chris is her lone listener.

“This abbey,” she says, walking along a wall, her index finger casually grazing it, “is a significant part of Scottish history. The Scots then—almost as they are now—were subject to English rule. Early in the fourteenth century, Robert the Bruce secured Scotland’s independence with a series of victories over the English, but the English king, Edward II, still claimed Scotland as part of his kingdom. The pope then had jurisdiction over all such matters in the Christian world and summoned Bruce to Avignon. Bruce ignored the pope and around 1320, a group of nobles signed a letter and sent it to the pope, stating that they would never again be subject to the dominion of the English. That, of course, changed.”

Chris understands very little of what she says, though he does learn more of the distinction between the English and the Scottish, realizing that they are indeed two separate nations, not like different states in America.

They drive south again.

Chris asks Karen questions about the country, about the things she’s seen. He notices that her mood is as light as it has ever been since he’s known her. She almost seems happy driving through the countryside, briefly illustrating the history of the Arbroath Abbey.

“Do you like it?” he asks while lighting a cigarette and cracking the window and enjoying the novelty of being a passenger in what would be the driver’s side of an American car. “Do you like it here in Scotland?”

“Yes,” she replies, “as well as anyplace I’ve been stationed.”

He knows she has been in the service for almost six years and has never thought to ask her where she’s been. Now he does.

“The first place I went to was Guam. The weather was good, but you can only travel so far on an island, and only see the sights so many times. I’m not big on beaches, anyway, you know, laying around and trying to get tan, never my thing. The next place I went to was Adak, Alaska. Miserable, and thank god it was only a year and a half. It’s this little tiny island at the end of the Aleutian Islands that is treeless and windswept and as bleak as the moon. I read a lot there, took some college correspondence courses, but quit. That part of my life is over. I know I won’t teach again…” And on this last statement, her voice trails off and the trace of happiness she just recently displayed starts to fade.

“After Alaska,” she continues, “it was time to re-enlist or separate. My four years were up. The Navy offered me my choice of duty stations, so I looked on a map and my eye caught the British Isles. I asked if there were any bases in this country and I was given quite a list, more extensive than I imagined. All the way from the northern tip of Scotland to the shores of the English Channel. Even though I wasn’t happy in Adak—it was the longest eighteen months of my life—the possibility of going back to Maryland was even more disturbing. So I re-enlisted, with the condition of being stationed somewhere in the United Kingdom. So here I am.” The faint smile again returns.

They approach the city of Dundee, coming in along East Dock Street, past the cargo ships alongside mighty docks, the tenement towers rising in the distance. Chris is excited at the sight of a city. But they don’t stop; they circumnavigate the city center and continue southward. Chris is burning with curiosity. What was so terrible in Maryland? He is still too unfamiliar with her to ask, sensing that if she wants him to know the privileged details of her life, she will tell him.

The afternoon starts to recede as Chris glances at Dundee in the rearview mirror.

“Where are we going?” he asks, starting to feel very far away from the base, though they are still less than fifty miles away.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just driving. It’s kind of nice not driving alone for a change.” She too lights a cigarette and the drive continues. They approach the town of St. Andrews and park in front of large and ancient and luxurious building with a vast beach leading to the North Sea behind it. Chris can make out a golf course surrounding the building, a dull green and bleak and treeless golf course. Even the low grass seems to perpetually bend in the wind.

They get out of the car and stand shivering in the wind, the day much cooler now than it was when they started. “Do you golf?” Karen asks Chris.

“No, I never have.” Golf is a sport Chris has given little thought. He has always thought it to be the province of the rich. No one in his family has ever played golf.

“Well,” Karen relates with a little tinge of disappointment, “this is where it started.” And she sweeps the golf course with her hand.

“Really?” Chris says with an equal tinge of interest. This is a bit of history he can understand, standing in the birthplace of a sport.

“But if you don’t golf, then there is very little to appreciate.” She climbs back in the car and they drive up a hill leading into the center of St. Andrews, a picturesque university town, the main street laid in stone, the older and ornate gray buildings well maintained and warm looking.

They find a Chinese restaurant. Karen tells Chris that most of the fast food to be found in this country is either from Chinese restaurants or kebob houses run by families from the Middle East. Chris is surprised to learn of the foreign presences in Scotland. He assumed only America was a country of immigrants. He thought the rest of the world consisted of its own ethnic enclaves: Italy only home to Italians, Russia home to only Russians, Japan strictly Japanese.

He tells Karen of his surprise upon finding a Chinese restaurant, especially with employees that appear to be solely Chinese.

“The Chinese are across the world—Europe, North and South America. The world is smaller than you think.”

Chris orders a Szechuan meal, chicken and rice, and Karen eats something similar. It is spicy, spicier than the carryout storefront Chinese restaurants of his childhood in suburban Detroit. He drinks glass after glass of water and orders soda, the Coca-Cola cans much smaller than those in the States. The can fits neatly in the palm of his hand. The daylight still persists as they leave the restaurant, an almost fancy establishment with cloth napkins, the tables pre-set with gleaming silverware and crystal glasses.

Chris still needs to see a castle. The solution is easy; Lutherkirk supports such a structure. They head north back to the base and Chris feels fulfilled somehow, the day being wrought with experience and a sort of friendship that he didn’t expect and Karen taking on a less gloomy countenance than he expected.

Still, her past, her personality, remains a mystery. The conversation they have as the Austin Mini points north centers on their common workplace, the idiosyncrasies of the chief and the ensign, their poor leadership, the disorder of the message center, the permissible laziness of the other watch members, who constantly leave piles of messages for Chris and Karen to sort and deliver, even after the most quiet mid-watch. Their complaints are common, no different from any other insubordinate in a situation that can’t help but be bureaucratic.      

As the signs loom on the A92 indicating that the village of Lutherkirk is near, Chris asks Karen a simple question. “Why did you join the Navy?”

She is silent for more than a moment. Lighting a cigarette, she answers, “I was married, once upon a time, and then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I hated my job, I had no special place in my heart for the state of Maryland, nor was I especially close to my family or my former husband’s family. I saw an ad in the back of a magazine. It was a glossy sort of ad, you know, an aircraft carrier steaming off into the sunset, a Mediterranean port with whitewashed quaint buildings in the background. I thought ‘Why not?’ I love to travel, I love a challenge, so why not? Of course, they wanted to make me an officer, suggesting that the enlisted life is somewhat sub-par to that of an officer, but I would have had to wait for an opening at Officer Candidate School. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to go right then or not go at all. So I signed the same stack of papers that you did, took the oath, and away I went. It was less than a week between my first visit to the recruiter’s office and my trip to Orlando.”

They turn off the main highway and travel on a secondary road that forks, one fork leading to the base and the other going to the village of Lutherkirk. The road is unmarked and shrouded in trees. Karen turns her headlights on as the dusk becomes even more imminent on this road that is always in the shadow of trees.

Despite being only a few miles away, it is Chris’s first visit to the village that the base is named after and is inexorably linked with.

Karen continues her thumbnail sketch of her entrance to the Navy, which leaves Chris craving more information.

“At first,” she says while exhaling a cloud of blue cigarette smoke that splashes against the windshield of the Mini, “I regretted my decision. Boot camp was not fun, as you know. The barracks stank with the scent of women. Having been married, I know that an unhygienic woman smells more than a sweaty man. Hopefully you will never have to endure that smell, but take my word for it, it’s bad.” She draws on her cigarette and Chris studies her lips adorned with lipstick that he has never noticed before, her eyes squinting shut as the smoke enters her lungs. “I had never been thrust into the midst of so many different types of people. I expected something like college, more like a dorm, you know? But college put me with girls like me, girls who grew up the same way I did. But boot camp, they came from all over, and I realized more fully than any cross-country trip had ever taught me how vast and different our country is from state to state and region to region. After the shock wore off, I stopped looking down my nose at everyone and decided to fit in as quietly as I could. I made a few friends, girls I smoked with outside when the smoking lamp was lit, but I chose to remain somewhat anonymous. It was hard. I was older than everyone else in my company, and the company commander kind of singled me out. She probably wasn’t much older than me, a first-class boatswain’s mate, and she looked it. She was tough. She was from New England somewhere, I think, because of her accent, probably Boston. She hated me. She knew I went to college and I think she resented me, figuring I was a loser for joining the Navy relatively late in my life, as if I couldn’t handle it in the outside world. Which is somewhat true.”