Men Die Read online

  Lieutenant Everett Turner Sulgrave, determined to search again for life or movement, had left the Commander's remains to the six black victims of his wrath; the prisoners had dragged through the bloody wreckage until Schoolboy and Lace found the head and shoulders. In the spillage of a ruptured sea chest Big Randy grimly rummaged until he found what Orval BlueEyes said was there: a clean set of dress whites, the Commander's best. His famous sword wasn't found till later. The body was assembled for transport—the suit held Bonuso Hake together—in a makeshift coffin, a shipping crate stenciled in black: DELICATE OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS** STORE AWAY FROM BOILERS. And that is how he was flown out—in accordance with his drunken wish, once stated to Sulgrave—to be returned to the river of Annapolis, Severn, which name he bore.

  It was dusk when Sulgrave came and briefly inspected the body before ordering the hasty coffin nailed shut. He had tears in his eyes, even though he had nearly hated this flesh. But he had found the Commander's wife's letters, and in a frenzied, almost religious necessity to understand the significance of his death, had begun their reading. For the last two hours he had sat among the spill of the Commander's belongings reading. He read until the light failed, then went to see the body, one letter still in hand. In the other he carried the red leather box, once upon a happier time a gift of love, embossed with gilt: LETTERS FROM VANNA.

  They closed and sealed the crate, heard the plane before they saw it. They all looked at each other, taking stock of themselves for the first time, six black enlisted men and the one white officer, saw that they were all marked with his, the dead Commander's, dried blood.

  Big Randy spoke first, not deliberately, but musing. “They know outside about us?”

  Lieutenant Everett Turner Sulgrave, USNR, nodded. “Put you down as ringleader.”

  Poke said, “Mutiny. Shee-it.” Disgust, not rancor.

  “That could buy you twenty years, man,” said Orval BlueEyes, who had been the Commander's steward. “You lucky it's peacetime yet.”

  “Shee-it, man,” Poke said. “You can do twenty standin' on one foot.”

  “I got my money on you, man,” Lace said.

  Digger Marples shook his head and laughed, bitter, and looked at the mute box, at the STORE AWAY FROM BOILERS. “You pore ridic'less daid sonuvabitch,” he said. “We still gonna have to live with you.”

  (There is a disconnected scene which also haunts her, minor-keyed, evoked by memory of other funerals: remembered fragments float into mind; of being thrashed by her husband with a razor strop; and of her father, the old dead Admiral, who beat her once for wearing lipstick, at sixteen, a week after her mother's funeral. Sharp memories. In fury and in guilt and in helplessness, she rises naked from the bed and goes to the door. Locks it. Returns to bed, a secret person, and cries. Alone, full of love, she lies on her back, one pillow over her eyes, and locks her pillowed wrists between her legs. Rigid as lonely death, she re-enacts the furious scene, the shattering erotic dream, piecing together memories in her shuttered mind like shards of a smashed mirror. Lost in the lonely cycle of that mystery and that longing, she imagines now the conjunctions of carnal love, the entrances and withdrawals—still lying perfectly still, lost from time—arches her back for several minutes, neck rigid, teeth gritted, eyes blind with tears; is slowly trapped in rhythms of love experienced, in grinding memories of vanished flesh: nearly faints with the animal force of the final illumination.

  Then, calm, abandoned by incubus but terrified by loneliness, she opens her eyes, mindlessly stares at the ceiling: Our Father …)

  The day of arrival had been warning enough, or should have been. Approaching the Anegada Passage, the sea was slick and ripe with heat and motionless except for the ship's oily track. Lieutenant Sulgrave passed the afternoon digesting an uneasy lunch, leaned swearing on the taff rail listening to the unchanging oily throb of the Diesels. To the northeast a rain squall slowly makes up, looming out of the horizontal haze like an old woman in rags; for three hours the gray slattern shufHes alongside several miles abaft the port beam, but it is late afternoon before the sun cools and the ship feels the first whiff of her perfume; as though in answer the hull quivers, the Diesels turn up a knot.

  That squall turned into two days of weather, and Manacle Shoal turned up out of the gray-hanging rain like an obstacle nearly tripped over rather than a proper destination. The black volcanic rocks looked hellish and forbidding, and the rain was too heavy for anything green to be visible.

  In docking the small motor ship, one of the Negro pier hands caught his hand between the bollard and the steel bow line just at the moment of strain; the coxswain slacked off on the foredeck winch instantly but too late, and his mates led the injured man off the pier cradling his destroyed right hand like a fallen bird. The cry of greeting, that incredible shout of animal agony that ripped through the hubbub of the fore-deck, was what should have warned him.

  Benjamin Dolfus, Lieutenant Senior Grade, USN, was on the dock to meet the small contingent of technicians who accompanied Sulgrave. He took Sulgrave's salute absent mindedly and introduced himself. He had blood on his sleeve from helping free the injured dock hand, and was obviously in no mood for trivial amenities.

  “Your gear will be brought ashore and stowed in your quarters, Mister Sulgrave. Unless you have a pressing need for my companionship, I'm going to leave you and go have a drink.” He stared morosely out at the rain, at the shrouded sea. “Goddamned rain deadens sound—that boy didn't hear your boatswain. Be lucky if he keeps more than his thumb.” Then he looked squarely at Sulgrave, asked, “Why didn't you stay home?”

  For no reason, a shudder passed through Sulgrave, a visible shudder; he had a mental vision of the fingerless black hand. Like a man collapsing, or finally remembering to collapse, he dropped his false-face of formal greeting. Dolfus saw it.

  “You're—what?—twenty-four?” Dolfus asked.

  Sulgrave nodded. “Twenty-three. In a few days.”

  “Well, you're old enough to drink, anyway. They call me Skully here—” He lifted his rain hat just high enough for Sulgrave to see that he was completely bald. “You may as well join the party.”

  Though he was bald, Dolfus wasn't old. Sulgrave estimated his age at perhaps forty, old perhaps for his rank; he was probably a mustang, he thought, a man risen through the ranks almost against his will.

  “We'll go to the Officers' Club,” Dolfus said. “Leave everything right here. Nobody steals anything on an island. At least not my crew.” He said my crew with unmistakable pride, and followed the remark with a long look toward the dock, where the stevedores, stripped to the waist and shiny black in the rain, were already unloading packing cases. Then he said, looking hard at Sulgrave, “Everything on this rock is black except you, me, and Admiral God.”

  “Who?”

  “Just keep it in mind. You're outnumbered and surrounded. Before you meet the admiral of this unsinkable flagship, I think I'd better take you in hand. I had expected someone with more experience. Your orders, please.”

  Sulgrave handed over the BUPERS folder with his papers in it. Dolfus weighed it in his palm and said, “Naval ROTC, am I right?”

  Sulgrave nodded.

  “Bachelor of the Liberal Arts. Yale? Amherst? Harvard?”

  “Harvard.”

  Dolfus raised his eyes heavenward. “Well, let's keep it a secret, all right?”

  “Anything you say,” Sulgrave said, uncomfortable.

  “I've said it.”

  Manacle Shoal was the name for the small complex of rocks and islands of which Manacle Shoal Rock was the largest, The curiously shaped hourglass reef that protected the islands from the open sea looked on the chart like a pair of handcuffs with the string of islands forming the connecting chain.

  The Officers' Club was not on the main island—the “Rock” as it was called by Dolfus—but was reached by flat-bottomed boat from the eastern end. The Commander had ordered that no civilians, native or otherwise, would take up quarters on t
he Rock; thus the usual community that springs up around a naval base existed on a neighboring island. It was a short jeep ride to the eastern end of the Rock, then two minutes by ferry—a curious bargelike affair that looked like a garbage scow, with an outboard motor that kicked up a spectacular rooster tail as it drove the sluggish craft across the narrow shallow channel. It had a drop-front for driving the jeep on to it. As Dolfus observed, it would have been easier to leave, the jeep, but for the drenching rain.

  There were few comforts among the pleasures of Little Misery—Dolfus informed Sulgrave that this name was not an invention but was how the island was named on British charts. There was a barber, a smiling man with a distinctly oriental face, and several women who did laundry for the men on the base who could afford the luxury. “Mr. Sung,” Dolfus said, referring to the barber, “is a Surinam Chinese. They're the Jews of the Antilles. The doctors, the dentists, the intellectuals. Superior people, sharpened by adversity.” He looked at Sulgrave, observed, “Nobody wants them, because nobody can survive without them.”

  There was something about Dolfus which Sulgrave found intensely distracting. For one thing the man never seemed to stop thinking—brooding would be a better word for it. The nickname given him by his men precisely suited the cast of his face. It wasn't that he was thin or that he looked like a skull, but rather that there was a hollow-eyed nakedness to the face, an admonition against vanity. He looked as though he had brooded long on the riddle of his own mortality, and had found no answer worth attention. Yet there was a smiling quality to the face, even in repose: white wrinkles about the corners of the eyes stood out sharply against the deeply tanned cheeks; and the corners of his mouth turned up now and then as though bewitched by something, a private thought, a joke, something not quite funny but which threatened at any moment to turn funny. When he did smile, he managed to do it privately; that is, he didn't share his pleasure, but turned his face away almost as though embarrassed.

  The Officers' Club was a joke, of course. Except for the beach, which was white and gradual to the water, there was nothing in the way of decor. The “bar” consisted of a single ancient kerosene-fired refrigerator that kept beer admirably cold, even though it smoked ominously and had to be cleaned once a day of soot. Dolfus opened two cans of beer and removed his hat. At precisely that moment the sun broke through the rain and vanished again. The rain started to diminish. Dolfus looked up, shrugged. “Three days of this,” he said. He was not complaining, simply reporting a fact. Sul-grave nodded, uncertain.

  They sat under the canopy of plaited palm branches and watched the tiny roll of surf that curled the lake-like edge of the lagoon before them. Then Dolfus said, with weary seriousness, “You're going to be his aide. You'll have to know what you're in for, what you're going to have to learn.” I see.

  “This island,” Dolfus said disgustedly, “or, rather, that rock, was uninhabitable when we came here. Nelson once used it as a supply base, even had it commissioned as H.M.S. Manacle Cay so that he would have unequivocal command over it as a ship of the line. Now we've turned it into a rat's nest of tunnels and bunkers and are stuffing it full of ammunition. It's an unsinkable ammunition ship.”

  “Do you think the United States will be in the war?”

  Dolfus laughed that curious private laugh, averted his face behind his hand. Then he said, “The Commander doesn't think so. He's convinced that the President is personally responsible for his being here. According to him, he's being punished.”

  “Punished?”

  “He ran a tin can aground off Oahu. The next time he's drunk, you'll hear all about it.”

  “He drinks?”

  “He drinks.”

  “I see.”

  “I don't think you see at all. Understand me, Sulgrave, if I didn't like him I wouldn't take the trouble to brief you. One of your jobs will be to keep him away from my men when he's drunk. He has an obsession about blacks, and I'm afraid that one of these days he's going to say something that's going to get him killed.”

  Sulgrave nodded.

  “There's a lot of tension here, as you know. Otherwise you wouldn't have been sent down. I have my job to do—which is to carve out about two more miles of tunnels and ventilation spaces—and I have the men to do it. These men are good and these men are black.”

  “Construction battalion?”

  “Part of one, yes. The rest of the outfit is building airstrips around the Lesser Antilles. I also have some Special Battalion troops for stevedoring and ammunition handling. I was hoping they'd send an experienced ordnance man down, or at the very least an old-time gunnery man.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Yes. They sent you. But I'll get used to the navy someday. Don't worry about it. That's the way it always happens, I suppose. The river boat comes up the Yangtze, the new arrival disembarks, portmanteau in hand, is met by the Old China Hand. Who invariably says, ‘I somehow expected they'd send an older man.’“ Dolfus sighed. “However, I guess it's the Old China Hand who has aged without knowing it. I'll get used to it,”

  To their left, out of sight behind a cluster of shacks, a child had started wailing, screaming actually—a small girl's voice that was full of fear and pain; she kept screaming, “No no no no no no …” Sulgrave noticed that Dolfus was alive to the sound from the beginning, though his awareness showed only in a tiny frown, a frown almost of distraction rather than irritation.

  Dolfus continued, “This rock may be unsinkable, but it's not indestructible.”

  “Do you have special hazards in handling and loading?”

  “We have a special hazard—Bonuso Severn Hake, who, unless I miss my guess, is overpowered by his conscience to the point where he despises himself. Makes him dangerous. I do care if he kills himself….” He said it as though he'd been accused of not caring. “But I'll be damned if I see the justice of taking a bunch of black innocents down with him.”

  “I don't see what you're driving at.”

  “Don't worry about it then. When you see how much TNT we've got stowed here you'll see what I mean. This is an experiment in folly—but then war's folly too, so it cancels out, I guess. This island is expendable—understand that. Even the dumbest lout among my men knows that this place could go up any day, probably will go up someday—and not just from enemy action either. You may as well base your life here on the idea of doom—at least until you're out of here dive.”

  “You sound pessimistic.”

  Dolfus nodded, looked wise. Then he smiled. “Old Mithra-dates, he died old.”

  “You don't believe we'll be in the war, either?”

  “No,” Dolfus said. “But that has nothing to do with it. I believe that there will be war, and that we'll lose it. I believe that with this war we are witnessing the beginning of the end. But who cares?”

  “I see,” Sulgrave said. “What are you doing in the navy?”

  “What I've always done. I'm hiding.”

  By midafternoon the restless sun was out, the sky was clearing, and Sulgrave could see for the first time the unbelievable tropical green that softened the black seaward rocks of Manacle Shoal. It was as though the rain had awakened these islands from sleep. The beach steamed in the drying sun; the wind was still.

  It wasn't for several weeks that Sulgrave learned that Dolfus had held several choice teaching posts, was in fact a Rhodes Scholar, and that his long-term enlistment in the navy had been an act of intellectual defiance of a sort that Sulgrave would never come to understand. For Dolfus, as it turned out, believed in Armageddon; the end of his world was, to his mind, clearly at hand.

  One thing remained in Sulgrave's mind from that first afternoon. One small incident. It set the eerie tone of his entrance into hell: the unseen crying child whom Dolfus ignored at first screamed again from time to time; finally, in what seemed a rage of exasperation, Dolfus arose, set down his beer and stalked off toward the shacks. When after twenty minutes he still hadn't returned, Sulgrave, feeling very much the outsid
er, wandered over to the shacks. What he saw was Dolfus in full-running, red-faced argument with an old fat native woman wearing laceless brogans who still held a switch in her hand. The beaten child was nowhere to be seen. But lurking behind Dolfus was another older girl of about fourteen, a beautiful child-woman; she was the first to see Sulgrave approaching and clucked a warning. Dolfus switched from patois to common English, and as he tried to end the conversation—the old woman unwilling—the young beauty tugged at his sleeve. Distracted, he turned to listen to something whispered in his ear—Sulgrave knew it concerned him—that ended in a low suggestive snigger and a copulative movement of the hips, an astounding gesture for a child. Dolfus turned angrily on the girl and the old woman cackled with a kind of self-righteous amusement. Dolfus walked away from them, rejoined Sulgrave.

  As they walked back to the shade of the club, Dolfus was glum. “You'll know all about this place sooner or later. The old witch is called Mother-in-Trouble. You wouldn't think that a lovely thing like her could come out of that, would you.”

  “She's the girl's mother?”

  “She's insane, of course, beats Girlchild for no reason at all. I still can't get used to the way people …”

  “Girlchild?”

  “You didn't see her. Actually, her name's Gretchen, but it became Girlchild in the mouths of these people. Girlchild is not hers—it's her niece.”

  “And the older girl?”

  Dolfus said nothing for a long moment as he opened two more beers. Then, “Her name is Arielle, and she delivers the laundry to the base. Mother-in-Trouble is a laundress. They came here a few months ago—they're all temporary. This place used to be nearly uninhabited. Camp followers, I suppose you say. Working for the Yankee dollar, God damn it.”

  “Where did she get a name like that?”

  “Arielle? Gretchen? Both are childed by the same father. He lived with the two sisters, I'm told. Was a Spaniard. Named Cintas. Loved Shakespeare, among other things.”