The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 27

  There is a little flint stick and a surface to strike it on. He does this once. Twice. Three times, and as he strikes it the third time the earth rattles. “It’s too soon!” he cries, loud enough that the general’s daughter, hanging her stone-washed jeans on the back rail of her father’s quarters several houses away, will lift her head. “You called?” But by that time the singing Marine has slammed the box and whatever has been rumbling toward him just beneath the surface of the earth shudders, receding.

  Distressed and gnawed by hunger but still humming, m-m-m-m, he rolls over and presses himself into the ground. The sensation is not unfamiliar. In the astounding concentration peculiar to certain mystics, he withdraws to sing the song and wait for night to come again. Rousing once, he sees the sun is low and he sets his inner alarm clock for midnight. Then, schooled in resignation, he lies still, waiting.

  When it’s safe he sits up and strikes the tinderbox three times. This time when sparks fly, he will leave it open. Instead of fire, it brings dense, living blackness out of blackness, huge and silent, warm. The lemon neon eyes regard him.

  “I knew you’d come,” he says. The dog drops something in his lap and rests its great head on his shoulder. “And I knew you’d bring food. Money isn’t anything, but you can die of hunger.”

  Closer than close, the dog lies next to him while he eats. It is like sitting with a furnace. When he’s done eating he leans into the thick, dense fur and without having to tell it anything, he makes the dog know everything. After a moment it gets up and shakes itself until electricity flies in the darkness. Then it wheels, action following intention so fluidly that they are as one, and the gorgeous brute seems to melt into nothing.

  Alone, the singing Marine stares into his empty hands and considers his options. His life as he knows it is over here. It’s too late for him to explain himself; only a goddess could do it.

  A goddess. It’s as if the dog has heard. In seconds it’s back, coming over the edge of the little cliff and descending, as silent as it is enormous. Its shape has changed—it seems bulkier, and when the Marine gets to his feet to welcome it he sees this is because there is something on its back: the impossible superimposed on the unlikely. Here is the general’s daughter, pale in the shift she slept in, lying in the dog’s deep fur and sleeping as heavily as if she’d never been separated from the bed she lay down on.

  He tells himself he only needs her to hear him out.

  He tells himself he’s only doing this because he loves her.

  He tells himself this is a long dream and in dreams people love and become as one without actually touching.

  Murmuring, she stirs in her sleep. This is the real general’s real daughter. This is now and in these days you don’t take women unless they invite you.

  He says, “I love her, but not like this.”

  There is that rumble, as of thunder. Growling, the dog cocks its head and before the Marine can put out his hand to stay it or to touch the dangling satiny arm of the beautiful sleeper, it turns and vanishes.

  For the rest of the night and the next long day, the singing Marine considers. There is the song that will not stop singing. There is the general’s daughter, so close that he can climb out of the gulch if he wants to and try to find her. There is the disgrace that has ended his military career and brought him to all this. Is he victim or lover or deserter? He does not know. All he knows is that as soon as it gets dark he will summon the dog again.

  And the dog will bring the general’s daughter. Tonight she is in a faded T-shirt the color of the ocean and she looks like Undine, sleeping deep under water. His heart staggers. If he lays his head against her will she know everything?

  This time he keeps her until morning. And this time, although the singing Marine doesn’t know it, her father the general will note that his daughter is missing, and when he summons the dog again tomorrow night and the dog brings the general’s daughter, the slashed pockets of the shirt she has worn to bed will begin to dribble sequins, laying a glittering trail to the spot where he has hidden her.

  If MPs look and look and can’t find the place, at least at first, he will have the dog to thank. In a brilliant flash of comprehension the animal will strip the shirt with its teeth before it descends into the gully, tossing sequins in a dozen different directions. Not its fault that a few spangled bits cling to its fur as it sets its great haunches and slides to the spot where the Marine is hiding. Here they stay, brute and master and beautiful sleeping girl, who stirs and threatens to wake as the Marine shakes off whatever has been holding him back and too near dawn for anything to be realized, he moves to kiss her.

  He can’t know whether it’s the dog or something inside himself asking: Why don’t you just take what you want?

  When you have been dead and buried you operate in a different context.

  Still he tells himself she knows what she’s doing; he tells himself her eyes are really open. Awake or not, she raises her arms and they fall into a long embrace made sweeter by the inevitability of interruption.

  Almost at once the sun comes up and woman and dog, burden and bearer, recede so quickly that they might as well have vanished, leaving the singing Marine cooling in the dirt with his heart so torn by the pressure of guilt and sorrow and the excruciating pain of these near misses that he sings, too loud:

  My mother murdered me.

  My father grieved for me.

  My sister, little Marlene … ”

  Yes, he probably wants them to find him.

  Which they do in the middle of the bright afternoon, sturdy, clean-shaven jarheads, earnest and spiffy in full uniform in spite of the heat, with polished boots and puttees and the inevitable white armbands, standing over him, and at attention. The hell of it is that as they march him out in the smelly fatigues and the squelching boondockers, they will call him Sir and they will treat him with the courtesy appropriate to a ranking officer even though he no longer deserves it.

  When night falls in the maximum security wing of the brig, the commanding general comes to see him. He posts his aides outside and comes in alone. It is a surprise to both of them. He looks surprisingly like his daughter, but much tougher. They will not exchange words, exactly. Instead the general will ask him:

  “Why?”

  and the singing Marine will not be able to answer.

  Then the general will ask him, “How?” and once again, he will not be able to answer. What comes out of him now is “m-m-m-m” because his heart is breaking and the song he sings will not stop singing itself. Even lost out of his mind in love, he is going to hear it. He will go to his grave hearing it.

  Then he thinks perhaps when he is in the grave, he won’t have to hear it any more.

  “You know what I can have done to you,” the general says.

  The singing Marine does know. He also knows without needing to be told that tradition says he can end all this and make it a happy ending. When he left behind the money in DEEP CAVERNS and took the tinderbox, he came out with the real treasure. If he strikes it once and leaves it open, the first dog will come; if he strikes it twice and leaves it open, he will have the first two dogs here to do his bidding. If he strikes it three times and leaves it open, the finest animal, his champion, his first real friend will surge into the room and together they can make anything happen.

  But dogs have teeth and they will use them. No matter how fine they are, or how brilliant, necessity makes them savage, and like it or not the singing Marine is never far from the grave under the linden tree; he can see its dirt under his fingernails and smell the earth all these decades later.

  Tradition tells him if the dogs kill everybody in charge the personnel on the base will beg him to become the general. He’ll go to live in the general’s quarters and when he goes into the girl’s bedroom this time she’ll be awake, and he will have her, but he is sad now, sobered by so many deaths and other losses that when he looks into himself, he discovers that he doesn’t want to be that person. Crazy, bu
t so was taking the girl and then not using her a different kind of crazy.

  Perhaps because he is an officer, the MPs spared him the strip search, which means that he can feel the corner of the tinderbox digging into the soft flesh of his flank. All he has to do is take it out. But he can also hear himself. “M-m-m-m,” and, “m-m-m-murdered me …”

  And he understands that only when he is in the grave again will the song stop singing. “Sir,” he says in a soft voice, “If I tried to attack you now, would you have to shoot me?”

  Astounded, the general looks up just as he launches himself, and because Marines know how to kill in self defense the general does exactly what is expected, but because Marines know how to kill without weapons he does it completely differently. It is so swift that the lieutenant has no time for last words or even regrets; he slips away into what he discovers with such gratitude that it obscures all love, all loss, all grief and the thought of anyone who might mourn him is silence. The song of love and death and rebirth and violence that he has heard all his life since the linden tree is ending. Ends. Has ended.

  —F&SF, 1996

  In the Squalus

  He was under water for too long; lying in the shell of the submarine for more than thirty hours, he left his body and his living mates and became at one with the dead floating on the other side of the bulkhead. In the last seconds before the lights failed a few men had scrambled into the control room to join the living; Larkin and the others in the bow let them through and then, facing the rushing ocean, they were forced to close the door against the rest, so that there were twenty-six dead sealed in the flooded engine room. The survivors lay together under the great weight of the ocean, Larkin alive with the rest but already cut adrift from them.

  If he was waiting for rescue he was not aware of it; he heard only vaguely the sos the others tapped out on the metal hull. When he took his own turn he was not aware that he did so and he was not listening for a reply. Instead he imagined he heard the voices of the dead reverberating in the metal; he heard the dead in his own ship, in all the drowned ships of all time in growing volume, making a remote but ceaseless boom against the hull.

  As a child Larkin had looked out across flat New Mexico and dreamed of water. In all those dusty summers he prepared his eyes for the ocean, superimposing that great, watery horizon on the desert. With other landlocked boys he would choose the Navy, going to sea with a thirst he did not yet understand. Married, he would take Marylee and their little girl for vacations at one beach after another, lifting his daughter high above the water and bringing her down quickly, so they would both laugh at the shining splash. He may have been certain he would die by drowning, that in the end he would let the water take him; he would be muffled and shrouded by water, water would carry away all his doubt and pain so that in the end there would be nothing left but water, washing over his own skull’s bright, eternal grin.

  Instead Alvah Larkin found himself safe in the Squalus, freezing in the dark. It was only a matter of time before the diving bell clanked against the hull and he would have to begin the tortuous escape. It would kill them if I stayed here, he thought in the last minutes before he gave himself to darkness. Janny, he thought, seeing the child and Marylee arrested in attitudes of waiting: on the rocks looking out to sea, pleading at the main gate of the base, poised, white-faced on the dock. They would always look to the horizon; Marylee would not let the girl look down, into the water. If Larkin stayed where he was they would remain fixed like that forever; still death seduced him and for some hours it seemed as though he would not have to go back. Numbed, he was able to lose track of time and project eternity.

  In the last freezing hours he may have thought he had seen Jonah, or had been Jonah, or was that the face of Christ hovering just beyond the lights streaking his closed eyelids? There was a clang on the hull, the bell, and so he would not find out this time. Instead he had to pull himself back and join the others. When the hatch opened to let them into the bell he would hesitate only a second before going, blinking, into an uncertain birth.

  Inside the bell he heard himself saying, “Yeah, I’ll be glad to get back to the wife and kid.”

  When they were all safe in sick bay, President Roosevelt talked to them; his voice was full of static but sad, expressing national relief. Everybody was going right back into submarines, they told the president; Larkin wanted to get back on duty as soon as possible but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference; it was too late. He could see in Marylee’s eyes that it was too late.

  “Oh Alvah,” she said. “Those poor men.”

  Janny hugged him hard. “Daddy, you were gone too long.”

  He buried his face in her. “But I came back.”

  Marylee said firmly, “Daddy always comes back.”

  So he put Janny down and kissed his wife, understanding as she shrank for a split second that he was surrounded by the dead of the Squalus, he would walk with the twenty-six drowned men at his back for the rest of his life; even as Marylee threw herself on him in all her warmth, murmuring and pretending nothing had changed, he knew how cold his touch must seem to her, cold as the touch of Lazarus; he had been to death and back and it separated them. Without ever talking about it he had been preparing Marylee for years; he had chosen the Navy, he was no better than anybody else and so one day he would probably be lost at sea. She’d never admitted she understood what he was trying to tell her; after all, submarines were safer than surface ships, there was no war, he was Alvah, not just anybody. She had changed in the hours he was entombed in the Squalus. Comprehending, she had accepted; she may even have known that it would be easier for both of them if he hadn’t come back up. She could stop pretending she wasn’t afraid for him. She would never have to lose him again; instead she could grow old with the memory of a husband perpetually in his early thirties, always smiling and sure; returned, he saw all this in her eyes.

  In the car going home from the base he said, “Do you still want your new baby?” Marylee kept her eyes on the road but he thought she said “Yes” and he said with urgency, “Then let’s have your baby.”

  It didn’t keep the drowned ship out of their bed. She had to know why he was always cold and anxious and couldn’t sleep. He put his face close and tried to tell her everything: how the skipper had kept them quiet and organized after they closed the last watertight door; how they were put on watches, keeping order in the timeless chaos of the dark; why the skipper could not let anybody mention their shipmates, trapped a few inches away, any more than he could let them contemplate the ocean, separated from them only by the metal hull. His dead shipmates. He was trembling in the dark bedroom. “But they were there.”

  “You heard them pounding and calling.”

  “Nobody heard them. They were all dead.”

  She tried to comfort him. “Then there was nothing you could do. There was nothing anybody could do.”

  He turned away from her. But I knew they were there. How could he explain?

  Marylee filled the house with friends, trying to crowd out the dead. She was pregnant again; she would fill the house with his children, sending them clattering into his silence to diffuse his memories. But he knew they were still there, and the knowledge marked him. Even after the boat was raised and the bodies were taken out and returned to their families, they were still in the Squalus for Larkin; even after the salvaged boat was renamed and recommissioned, the twenty-six men were in the Squalus and the Squalus lay in the dark waters off Portsmouth, so that whenever Larkin met another of the survivors they got too drunk and talked too much, neither listening to the other but talking because they had to; together they had to shut them out.

  It was important that he stay in subs. After Pearl Harbor he would take command of his own S-boat; immuring himself in the close air and the smell of heavily oiled machinery, he would dive and look for them. During the war he managed each patrol by the book, performing perfectly; he was aggressive and cautious in appropriate measure, never jeopa
rdizing his crew. Nobody aboard could know that once he was alone in his cubicle he would sit on the edge of his bunk, pale and sweating in his khakis, and drop his head into his two hands and draw within himself and listen, offering his own life and theirs too, if necessary, for the lives of those who were already lost. Toward the end of the war he would begin to drink too much, beginning another kind of immersion.

  At home the summer after the bell brought him to the surface, he would take Janny down on the rocks by the water and sit while she played. Because he knew she wasn’t listening, he talked about all of it, and when she said nothing in response he was able to imagine that she understood everything he told her.

  “I had to come back.”

  “Daddy, look at the bird.”

  “I had to come back for you and Mommy, I had to keep faith. Does that make any sense to you?”

  He imagined that she turned to him, saying, Daddy, you had to come back for us. Otherwise we would have died.

  That’s what I thought.

  We were waiting and waiting.

  I knew you were. That’s why I had to come.

  There was nothing else you could have done.

  He said, “It was for you.”

  “What, Daddy?” She had disorderly curls and her freckled skin was so white that he could see the blue veins running underneath; she was too beautiful to have come from him and Marylee, she was their hope.

  “I said, come here and let me tuck in your shirt.”

  As it turned out it was she who was faithless; Janny fell through the ice and drowned on the longest night of the winter. Larkin went out to look for her in the deep midnight pitch of five p.m., and in the swirl of dank air knew he had never left the Squalus. Marylee was with him, already sobbing; when she stumbled he grabbed her arm and caught her up but his gloves were thick and his fingers cold and even though he saw them closed around her arm, he felt nothing. After a while the police found them and took them home; somebody had located Janny finally by the book bag frozen to the ice next to the black hole she had made, plunging through. Now they would break the news to the Larkins, setting them down in the midst of arrangements, the first sympathy calls, visitors leaving them each with a firm push that meant: continue. If Larkin had known, trapped in the Squalus, that this would happen, he would have offered his life for her, but when he thought about it he would always wonder if instead, in some occult foreknowledge, he had offered her life for his, whether he had in some way sent the child down to look for the others, if not to redeem them then to join them in some pledge of his own faith and ceaseless grief.