Kantika, page 26
From a catwalk near the stern, he looks out to a fair sky streaked with scudding clouds. For the moment, the horizon is clear of enemy planes. In the distance, the other ships of the task force cluster like a pod of whales, an oddly peaceful sight. He is alone, no one else around. He’s made a few pals in the Navy but mostly keeps to himself. It turns out that he is skilled at his job. He likes its hands-on, technical nature and the feeling of camaraderie and shared goals, just as he likes to teach the newer crewmen how to stay calm in a crisis and, by repetition and focusing the mind, perform under stress.
Because he refuses to brownnose his superiors, he sometimes gets stuck with the crap jobs when he’s not at the guns—being lowered in a harness to hose off the side of the ship with diesel oil (a task that brings back memories of being forced to oil the floor at Pops’s store) or scrub duty or hauling trash, but even this he accepts, having found, through actual distance from home, a kind of inner distance: The world is big and he is small, just one of 3,500 people on the ship. It’s too late to save Avuela, gone almost a year, but he is nonetheless important; the fate of the world, of the Jews, depends partly on him. At the same time, he’s a cog in a wheel, necessary but useless on his own. His ready supply of anger, with him since he left Spain, if not before, finally has a target. It’s good to be angry here. Useful. They’re shown films full of severed heads and skeletons at the Rape of Nanking and given colorful posters—Death Trap for the Jap!—to fan their rage.
At almost 7:00 a.m., he is still topside, biding time before returning to the chow line below deck. If you ignore the time difference, it’s his mother’s birthday. He didn’t manage to send a card, but he whistles “Happy Birthday to You” into the salt breeze and thinks of her—how she sings, how she smells: of floral perfume and garlic and onions from her cooking, and a skin scent, full of light but also soil, hers alone. More than most mothers with grown sons, she still touches him, massaging his back, cupping his face in her hands. When he joined the Navy, he was still seventeen so she’d had to sign the papers. She’d resisted mightily at first, but he’d already dropped out of high school to go to work as a newspaper copy boy at the New York Times, and over many months, with Sam’s support, he’d convinced her that this war had a higher moral purpose. She didn’t hug him the day he left; she was shaking too hard. “I’m sorry,” she’d said, grabbing his sleeve. “I’m very sorry, I’m not feeling well. May El Dyo be with you. If you die, I’ll kill you. Now go, before I lose my mind.”
It’s chilly out, maybe in the low fifties, with a rising wind and choppy sea. David’s scalp itches and his stomach growls. Big Ben—their nickname for the ship—starts to ease her blunt nose in the direction of the wind and speed up, preparing for the next group of planes to take off.
The explosion lands near the center of the flight deck, followed by another closer to the stern, enveloping David in black diesel oil and the sugary smell of high-octane gasoline. He’d heard nothing to warn him, seen nothing drop from the sky. Not far from the catwalk where he stands, flames start shooting out. His first thought is that the explosion is the result of some problem with the planes docked too close together, slamming into each other and rupturing a fuel line, or maybe a rocket wasn’t secured and took off. But as he squints into the murk, more explosions and fires tunnel in several different directions, and it occurs to him with the bright irreality of a comic book that, with no prior warning or call to General Quarters, they’ve been bombed.
What to do? What to do? His teeth have started violently chattering, and he feels like he might piss his pants. He can’t go to his station—his guns may as well be on another planet ringed in flame—but he could help put out fires or drag the wounded to safety. The boatswain’s mate is nowhere to be found, but David needs no command to know that turning away is an act of cowardice and abandoning ship a crime. But if you’re already dead meat? If it’s a lost cause? If you can’t see beyond your nose and the whole world is ending? If you’re a ready-to-shit-yourself sorry excuse for an eighteen-year-old boy, or an insect scrabbling for its life?
He moves one foot, then the other, extending his hands like a sleepwalker, and takes a few cautious steps away from the flames. With the hard toe of his boot, he locates the base of a 20-millimeter gun and edges past it, hoping to find a life preserver left on deck. Then he’ll help, he tells himself. Then he’ll turn around and go back in, knowing that if the ship goes down, at least he’ll float. He can hardly see; the air is full of ash. Step this way, m’ijiko. Put on your life vest. I don’t have it, Ma, I left it at my station. So find one. Now.
Later, some survivors will say it was God who took them by the hand. Others will claim they were saved by human heroes: Father Joseph O’Callahan, the ship’s Catholic chaplain, who directed firefighting and rescue parties and led men below to dampen magazines threatening to explode, or Lieutenant Junior Grade Donald A. Gary, who discovered three hundred men trapped in a blackened mess compartment and returned several times to guide them out. But David is no hero, nor is he saved by one. He is alone on the catwalk, and after witnessing what happens to his fellow sailors that day and the sheer randomness of how events play out, he will no longer believe in God. Walk up here a little, to your left—get a move on, don’t stop now. His mother is on deck. After, when he tells her this in a rare moment of disclosure, she’ll shrug, pat his head and say, I’m your mother, what did you expect? Of course I came.
He stumbles to the gun shack, where he picks up the sound-powered phone to offer help or ask for it, but there’s only static, and then the power fails and the shack, poorly lit in any case, goes dark. The place is used to store ammunition, and while he feels momentarily safe with a roof over his head, he realizes he’d better scram; if the shack is hit, it will explode. He opens the hatch, turns on the sprinkler system and returns to the deck, where he sinks to his knees and crawls, still looking for a life preserver. When he bumps into the railing, he stands, coughs wildly from the smoke, steps away from the bars and stumbles on. There is no one nearby. Scores of men must be caught in the hangar deck and mess hall, now a sickening tower of fire punctuated by exploding rockets. He is breathing in acrid oil, diesel fuel, spitting up black stuff, crap. Every once in a while, the wind opens up, and he gets a few gulps of fresh air before the smoke returns.
Then a guy pops up, out of the blue, from somewhere along the catwalk. This is how David will recount it later—“a guy popped up, out of the blue”—though there is no blue in sight. The man might be an officer; he’s too burned to tell, the air dark from soot and smoke. He tells David that the two bombs on the flight deck blasted through the hangar deck into the mess hall, but we shot down the plane—we got it! He starts walking away. David says, “Wait, where the hell are you going?” “I’m going forward,” says the man. “Forward, what do you mean, you can’t—there’s fire all around!” The officer looks back at him and says, “If I were you, I’d get the hell off this ship, I’d jump.” “Why don’t you, then?” asks David. “I can’t,” the man says, “not with these burns—I’d be shark meat in the water, I’ll have to take my chances here. But you get the hell off, kid, there’s nothing you can do here. Save your skin. I’m telling you to go.”
With that, the man disappears. He’s just … gone. Like a ghost. As David stands there, weak-kneed, coughing, he remembers how he used to horse around with Al about jumping off the ship from Spain, pretending he was about to leap or push his little brother off. Now he won’t jump for all the tea in China. The water must be seventy feet down—they’re four stories high—and moving fast. He’d be a fool to jump. He’d kill himself.
In basic training in upstate New York, he’d learned to tie knots and build stamina by running around the grinder until his pulse pounded and his vision turned red. He’d spent hours watching filmstrips of the Japanese overrunning villages, raping women, leaving trails of dead. In Navy Ordnance School in Maryland, he’d learned how to fashion a life preserver from his own clothes and jump from a twenty-foot diving board. To avoid doing serious damage, you tucked your chin, locked your knees and ankles and gripped the fabric of your trousers with straight arms. As a boy at the public pool in Astoria, before his mother got scared of polio, he learned to swim when a bigger boy snatched the rubber tube keeping him afloat and he went under in a churning, breathless thrash, then somehow worked his arms and legs and tunneled up to fill his lungs with air, swimming several yards of flailing doggy paddle before Pops appeared to fish him out and thump his back.
Now, when the breeze comes up and the air clears a little, he makes out an opening in the railing. In the distance, screams, the sound of worlds collapsing. His hands are empty. He has no time to fashion a life preserver from his clothes. He fumbles to open the chain, then takes off his helmet and makes himself stiff and straight like a knife, tucking in his chin. It all comes back to him, what to do, as if someone were reading the instructions in his head.
He jumps. Into air, into space, eyes squeezed shut. Leaping from so high, he is thrust deep into the water. He can hear the thumping of the screws, four huge propellers that move the ship, each one the size of a room. You get caught in that and you’re minced meat. Does he open his eyes to the churning salt sting? Curse, beg, barter, pray, ask forgiveness from his captain or the ship? The words he says to himself imprint indelibly in his mind—I’ll be damned if I get trapped down here like a drowning rat—and he swims like hell to get back up.
When he clears the surface, his vision is limited, the sea choppy and cold, but he has the presence of mind to register three things: (1) There must be other people with him in the water, survivors or dead bodies, (2) there are Allied boats close by but also surely enemies and sharks and (3) he’s got to get away from the burning tinderbox of a ship.
Time drains of meaning, then. Space, too. He swims, his whole self a forward-thrashing muscle or the trace memory of movement, like the shimmering trails left by the snails in the garden at Provença, when he went snail hunting with Josef after dark. He is hardly a body, just a pulsing vector in the sea, an eel or jellyfish. Maybe he passes by floating or sinking rubble or a drowned man. Maybe he brushes something sharp or soft, yields with a foot or fingertip, grabs hold. Somehow he takes off his heavy Navy-issued lace-up shoes and lets them sink. For a long time, no one speaks to him. No one—not even his mother, not even God—offers to save him, and no one asks him to be saved. His eyes are mostly shut, his ears clogged with water. If he thinks in any language, it’s the first one, Spanyol, from his childhood, but he’s not really thinking. Later, he will describe this time to a friend as a rebirth. “Did you become a Christian?” his buddy will ask, and David will guffaw. “Me? Ha! Not a chance, but something happened—I, I dunno, I realized I’ve got one life, that’s all, to use or piss away.”
Finally, he hears shouting in the distance. He swims toward it, and it turns out to be a pilot floating with a yellow Mae West life preserver. “Am I ever glad to see you,” David gasps when he reaches the pilot, who says, “I’m glad to see you, too, it’s lonely out here, where’s your life jacket?” David tells him he jumped off the ship without one, and the pilot says to grab on to his, then grimaces. “Listen,” he says, “I think I was blown off deck—my legs are all messed up.” He’d been standing near the elevator on the port side, waiting to hear the order, Man Your Planes. The elevator got blown up in the explosion, and he was flipped high into the air over the edge of the ship, his ankles snapped from the force of the push.
If David hadn’t come along, the pilot would have soon been dead in the water, not being mobile. His life jacket is visible and might attract help; David can hold on to it and rest. “I guess we better stick together for a while,” David says as he grabs on to the pilot, holding tight as a swell lifts them, fills their mouths with water, then sets them down. They seem to float together indefinitely before they hear shouting. Summoning his strength, or what remains of it, David starts to tow the pilot toward the noise.
In the distance, he makes out a large floating device, a rope and cork raft loaded with sailors who jumped or were thrown or blown off the ship. As they draw closer, he sees that some of the boys are weeping, crying for their mothers, and gasping and coughing as if still underwater. Seeing them so filled with terror makes him calmer for some reason. He exits his self, floating above the scene with the dawning knowledge that he might actually survive this day and live to tell the tale. He can see the top of his own soaked, stubborn skull, and it’s the damnedest thing—he’s still a kid, only eighteen—but the figure he sees is bald and old, or maybe bald and new, a baby just come into the world.
David gets as close to the raft as he can, and at a certain point, he says to the pilot, “Look, I’m really sorry, pal, but I’m losing steam, I can’t sustain my energy to get to that raft with you, but I’ll have them pull you in the rest of the way—don’t worry, I won’t leave you in the drink.” The pilot says, “Go ahead, good luck to you.” David leaves him behind to swim toward the raft, and he just about reaches it—he’s so close, maybe four feet away—but as he raises his hand to touch it, he finds he can’t move. He’s made it all this way, but he is done. They come toward him. He’s dead in the water, but somebody reaches down, grabs him by the collar and hauls him up.
A sailor jumps off the raft, swims out and tows the pilot the rest of the way. Does David sleep then? Shiver? Dream? Later, he will remember all the bare toes on the boat, rows of them, curled and cold, and lying pressed up against two strangers. The sea is calm so they only rock a little, and the pilot flaps and bucks like a fish out of water—his legs must hurt like hell—and David’s eyelashes, when he half opens his eyes, are coated in salt, the new world rimmed in lacy white.
Who knows how long they’re on that life raft before a destroyer, the USS Marshall, comes along. On deck, David is given warm broth, wrapped in a wool blanket and led to crew’s quarters, where a clock reveals that he was in the water for five or six hours—the longest and most timeless hours of his life. The pilot is taken to officers’ quarters. David, who just knows that the man’s name is Tom and that they probably saved each other, will never see him again, though years later, he’ll try, unsuccessfully, to track him down.
The USS Marshall picks up some two hundred men that day. Their families are told only that the ship was bombed, the men MIA. For security reasons, neither the sailors’ location nor their status as survivors can be shared. Other ships pick up other sailors. At first, the Franklin survivors are held in confinement to be court-martialed for desertion. Captain Gehres—Asshole First Class, David calls him—gives orders for this, even for the men who were literally blown off the ship, but the captains of the other ships say this is a travesty, these boys were in an inferno fighting for their lives. The survivors—nobody calls them heroes—are terrified to look back and terrified to look ahead, as the fate of Gehres’s court-martial is unclear, and they know a successful trial ends with life imprisonment or death.
Is it then, as fear of court-martial circulates from cot to cot, or later, when they’re allowed, under strict supervision, onto the gutted, listing Franklin to look for possessions (David finds none), that he recalls a spectral figure stepping out of the smoke, a man, an officer, burned and raw, advising him, telling him, to jump? David invents the story of the burned man without quite meaning to, as an alibi for future use or a companion for his own racked conscience because a captain goes down with his ship and a loyal crew should, too, and while part of him knows that saving himself was the only real option, the rest of him isn’t so sure. Some of the crewmen made a braver choice that day, heading into the inferno, running hoses to put out the fire, trying to save the sailors and the ship.
The accused deserters are not allowed to stay on the Franklin as she is towed from Japanese waters and then, her boilers miraculously repaired, travels on her own steam to Pearl Harbor and later to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she is rebuilt, and then to Bayonne, New Jersey, where she lies mothballed until she is sold for scrap in 1966 and, rumor has it, eventually repurposed by the Japanese.
Even after the court-martial charges are dropped (it turns out that Gehres screwed up by not calling General Quarters, despite having received an alert about approaching Japanese planes), David holds on to the story of the spectral officer, repeating it—with all these burns, the guy said he’d be shark meat!—until it takes on the burnished patina of fact. He remembers, even mourns, the burned man, how raw he was, how red, a body with no envelope, a skinless hunk of meat. How, despite his condition, the man paused to offer advice to a lost boy on the catwalk: you better get the hell off.
In time, David comes to regret the fabrication and repetition of the burned man story, and his mother steps in to take the officer’s place. This is the truer story: She was with him on the catwalk when he jumped. Does that explain why she wouldn’t accept that he was almost surely dead at sea, why she covered her ears when the radio was on and stopped reading the news, and they all thought she’d gone loka, grief-crazed, unable to accept the tragic truth? El Dyo, she kept saying, wouldn’t take my firstborn child on my birthday. Stop worrying, everyone, stop tearing your hair out, he’ll be back. Then one morning, some weeks after the bombing, with David still MIA, she set about making his favorite food: borekas and flans, tishpishti cake, and that afternoon they got word that David was alive but with no details, it was all still secret. She said see, what did I tell you, he’ll be home soon, and invited the neighbors over to share the feast.
The day David actually came home, she prepared all the same dishes. Sam closed the store and got Luna from the Bronx, and Jack, Suzanne and Frank stayed home from school so that everyone was there but Al, who was on an army base in Virginia. David was too fragile, too tired, too jumpy to eat or celebrate, so Rebecca lay down with him on his childhood bed and held him as he trembled. She did not interrogate him or comment on his ragged state or try to clean his clothes. She held him. She’d gained weight in his absence and had new crow’s-feet around her eyes, but she smelled like herself—of flowery perfume, lemons and the garlic she’d been chopping for the feast, and that other smell, the one he couldn’t name until he was far away and missing her, of light and soil.
