The Last Thing You Surrender, page 2
The ship was dying. And he would die with it.
George was embarrassed. What a stupid way to go. Lying there in his skivvies, pinned by his own broken hand inside his own sleeping compartment as his ship keeled over and slipped into the mud at the bottom of the harbor. George told himself he didn’t mind dying. When you put on that uniform and took that oath promising to support the Constitution, you accepted dying, at least in the abstract. At least as a distant possibility.
But to die like this, helpless, without even having a chance to fight back, was more than he could stand. He would never see Father or Mother again. Would Father be all the angrier with him, for joining the Corps and then dying there? Would Mother keep a picture of him in uniform up on the mantel? Would they maintain his room as some kind of shrine to the son who never came home? He had a brother, Nick, who was 15 and a sister, Cora, 14. What would they think of him? How would they remember him?
And then there was his fiancée, Sylvia Osborn.
George and Sylvia had practically grown up together, their families living next door to each other for as long as George could remember. Everyone always said they made a gorgeous couple. He was a shade less than six feet, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a dimpled smile for which he was complimented regularly, but which George thought made him look perpetually 15. And Sylvia was simply a knockout, with a movie-star figure and bright hair that fell in glossy waves to her shoulders.
According to the letters she sent him two or three times a week, she and his mother were even now busy planning the wedding, fine-tuning the menu with the caterer, compiling the guest list, auditioning the band, having the dress made. He was supposed to return home on leave in June. They had planned to be married then.
Sylvia, George was painfully aware, could have had her pick of eligible young men from all the right families. Her family, it was said, traced to the Mayflower itself—no vestige of greenhorn tainted her blood. She was all American, pure as snow. Mother and Father—especially Father—had always counted it something of a miracle that such a girl would want to marry George. After all, Johan Simek—Father had changed it to the more American-sounding John Simon as soon as he could—had arrived in this country from the Austro-Hungarian Empire only in 1895, a penniless boy with nothing but his smarts and his willingness to work hard, and those things had made him wealthy. As Father saw it, for his oldest child to marry someone like Sylvia was to place a capstone on his own achievement. It meant they were officially no longer a family of immigrants, but full-fledged Americans. Marrying Sylvia was like marrying respectability.
“Only in America is such a thing possible,” Father was fond of saying, his voice colored by wonder. But to George, it felt like duty. Not that this was something he could ever have told his father. Joining the Marines without Father’s blessing was one thing. Refusing to marry Sylvia Osborn would have been quite another. It would not have made a difference to Father—indeed, it would never have occurred to him to care—that George wasn’t at all sure that he loved her. Indeed, he found the idea of spending the rest of his life talking about galas, cotillions, and Paris fashions (the only subjects, a far as he could tell, about which Sylvia had either interest or knowledge) to be a fate, if not worse than death, then perilously close. But that no longer mattered. The marriage would not happen now. George lay helplessly on the deck, the gravity of the listing ship pushing him absurdly against the hatch of his sleeping quarters. He would die here. They wouldn’t even be able to retrieve his body.
Sorry, Father. Sorry to let you down.
George was conscious of feeling sorry for himself, but he couldn’t help it. It was all so terribly unfair. Ten minutes ago, he had been in his rack, drifting in the blissful unaware. And in moments, without warning, he had been yanked from that to this. As if to emphasize his miserable condition, water began trickling over the coaming, entering the compartment through the gap made by George’s broken fingers. He had to close his eyes and purse his lips against the saltwater tang.
He decided to pray. What else was left? He was at the end, wasn’t he? Time to accept that. Time to make his peace with God. George closed his eyes. He tried to think past the agony in his hand, the pain in his hip, tried to center himself and think of the right words, words appropriate for a final plea to God, a fitting summation of his 19 years. He wanted large, selfless words that encompassed his imperfections and his love, words that expressed his hopes for his family, words wise and brave enough for a moment such as this. But all he came up with was, I don’t want to die. Help me, God. Help me, God.
The saltwater across his face was now a steady flow.
“Is it somebody in there?”
George didn’t answer. Why bother? Why give cruel fate that final satisfaction? He hadn’t heard anything. Obviously, desperation and wishful thinking had combined to put a voice where there was none. But then the voice that wasn’t there spoke again.
“Who in there? You all right? Need to get off the ship!”
Something vibrated in George’s chest. He lifted his head above the splash of water.
“I-I …”
George had occasionally been frustrated by his stammer, but he had never hated it until this very moment. The words needed yelling, needed outcry. Instead, they were sealed in the vault of his thoughts, and he could not pick the lock.
“I-I n-n-n …”
“You in there? You need to get out of here!”
“I need help!”
Finally the vault came open and the words broke free. Then he couldn’t stop the flow. “B-broke something when I fell out of my rack. Then the hatch slammed on my fingers and the ship listed and jammed me up against the door and I can’t get myself free. Stupid mistake. I’ve been lying here …”
“Okay, okay,” said the voice on the other side. “I’m going to get you out of there.”
“Yes!” cried George. “Yes! Thank God you showed up! Thank God!”
“Don’t thank him yet,” said the voice on the other side. “This might hurt some.”
Before George could ask what “this” was, he felt the hatch pushing against him. The man on the other side had put his shoulder to it. It wasn’t easy. The listing of the ship meant that he had to push uphill, and the man’s feet kept slipping in the rising water. But slowly the hatch came open until George was able to pull his hand free.
Paradoxically, once it was no longer pinned by the hatch, his hand hurt worse, pulsing with an insistent throb that made George growl low in his throat. His hand was a mess. His fingers were crooked, his skin had turned a ghastly white, and the palm had swollen till it resembled a child’s catcher’s mitt.
But George had no time to lament his injury. The hatch was still pushing, driving him back, his busted hip sending up new bulletins of pain. And as the door came open, the seawater rose, drifting lazily into the compartment under a film the color of rainbows. There was oil and hydraulic fluid in the water. The ship was bleeding. George was processing this when the lights gave a zapping sound, flickered a couple times, and then went out. The emergency auxiliary lights came on, painting the compartment in an eerie pallor.
“Oh shit,” said the man on the other side of the hatch. “Got to get out of here.”
For a crazy moment, George thought the man was about to abandon him, save his own skin. And who could blame him if he did? Instead, the man wedged himself into the frame of the hatch, got his foot up against it, and pushed, grunting with the exertion of moving George’s weight uphill, until he was able to step through. Gravity closed the hatch again. The man knelt and George got his first good look at him.
To George’s surprise, he was a hulking colored guy, one of the boys who served up chow and swabbed the enlisted men’s mess. George’s mind fumbled for his name.
“Gordy?” he said. He made it a question because he wasn’t sure. He’d always had trouble telling the colored messboys apart, and truthfully, there’d never been much need to worry about it. One was as good as another when all you needed them for was another scoop of scrambled eggs or a refill on the coffee.
The dark face above him split into a grin of recognition that told George he’d gotten the name right. “Mr. George? How you get yourself in this kind of predicament?”
“Busted my hip real good when I fell out of my rack. Broke my hand in that door when the ship started listing. Truth to t-tell, I thought I was done for. I’m darn lucky you came along.”
The Negro put a hand under George’s left armpit, another under his right elbow, and helped him lift himself upright.
“Ship’s keeling over to port,” he explained. “Got to get you up the ladder quick. Ain’t got much time.” He draped George’s right arm over his own neck and braced George around the waist.
Then Gordy pulled the hatch open. More water came in, covering George’s bare feet. Gordy helped him get his leg over the coaming. The ladder was to the right, down a passageway too narrow for two men, side by side. They turned sideways, Gordy leading and George following as best he could with his cripple’s hop and skip. Their progress was torturous.
“I’m s-s-slowing you down,” said George. He felt guilty.
Gordy stopped and turned toward him, though George could not see his face in the shadows. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “You think maybe I ought to leave you here and just go on by myself?”
George was stunned at first. Then he felt himself smiling. He had been ready to belly flop into his own self-pity and this Negro he barely knew had called him on it. George was amused despite himself. “Okay,” he said, “I can take a hint.”
“All right then,” said Gordy in a voice that seemed to hide a chuckle of satisfaction. “Let’s go.”
The ladder was around a corner only a few feet away, but it was slow going. Water sloshed about their calves. It was hard to keep balanced, braced against one another as they were, the deck tilting crazily, turning the journey toward the ladder on the starboard side into an uphill climb. Gordy was huffing with the exertion. He was virtually dragging George, and with his right leg useless and left hand mangled, George could do precious little to help.
He renewed the prayer.
Help us, Lord. Please.
The ship moaned as it died, a soft keening that seemed to come from all directions at once. George knew it was only metal creaking as pressure changed, as bolts snapped, as things came apart, but there was something about it that made him sad for the old ship. Her dying moans were like the sound of lonely ghosts at midnight.
“Hate that sound,” said Gordy as if reading his mind.
“You and me b-b-both,” said George.
Finally, they reached the ladder, and Gordy paused there a moment, contemplating it. George saw what he saw. It was too narrow. There was no way Gordy could help him up to the next deck. The Negro turned toward George, his face a blue half-moon, bathed in the emergency lights. “I’m gon’ have to carry you,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said George, knowing it was a stupid thing to say, unable to help himself.
Gordy shrugged. “What else we gon’ do?”
He released George’s waist and reached to lift him. Right at that instant, with a sudden heaving motion, the ship turned fully on its side. Unbraced, unbalanced, unable to stop themselves, both men went sliding helplessly down the suddenly vertical corridor, dropping back through the passageway, dropping through where it widened into an open area, dropping along with tables, chairs, desks, and all manner of smaller detritus, toward the port side of the ship. George’s head smacked into a bulkhead as he fell, and he splashed into a pool of water that had been a compartment just minutes before. It was not unlike a basketball hitting the rim and dropping neatly through the hoop. The world went away.
He awoke some unknown fragment of time later in a darkness studded with flashing stars. A foulness of oil and hydraulic fluid filled his mouth, and he heard a bowling ball grumbling down the middle of his skull. George felt himself turning without direction in that liquid abyss, too injured and spent to command what was left of his own body. But that didn’t bother him. Nothing did anymore. In spite of the pain, in spite of the helplessness, he felt a warmth. He was almost content.
Then, from the darkness above, a hand grabbed his arm. Or at least, it tried. George was so slimy with engine fluids his arm just slipped out of the hand’s grip. But the hand in the darkness was insistent. It tried again, this time grabbing the neck of his t-shirt and pulling until George’s head was clear of the water.
“Come on, goddamn it!” Gordy’s voice snarled out of the darkness. “You got one good leg and one good hand, ain’t you? You gon’ make me do all the fuckin’ work? Help me here!”
The venom of the tirade brought George’s eyes open. In the gloom, he saw a figure perched on the bulkhead above the water. “That’s better,” said Gordy. “Now come on, I can’t hold you all day!”
George didn’t want to. He wanted to lie there in the warmth and contentment of the abyss. He would have been perfectly happy to do so. But he knew that would disappoint Gordy. And somehow, after all they had gone through in the few short minutes of their acquaintance, it was important to him not to let the Negro down.
So George made himself move. As Gordy pulled at him, he reached with his good hand, grabbed the bulkhead, and hauled himself up out of the water. The metal was slippery in his grip and he felt his hand sliding free, but he caught something protruding from the wall—a mailbox, a pipe, a faucet, he would never know—and crooked his arm around it, drawing himself further up. His good leg scrabbled for purchase in the murk below. It found something solid—he would never know what this was, either—and he pushed against it. The water was rising almost as fast as he was. Within moments, it would engulf their position. Then he was up, and Gordy was hauling him out of the water, and he was lying on a floor that had been a bulkhead not even 10 minutes ago, gagging up foul seawater.
“We got to hurry,” said Gordy, drawing George upright. “She ain’t done with us yet. She gon’ turn turtle, I think.”
With a dawning horror, George realized the messboy was right. He could feel the ship still moving, turning beneath him as she sought her final resting place at the bottom of the harbor. She would not stop until she was completely upside down. Worse, the deck they’d had to struggle to walk across was now a sheer, featureless cliff towering over them. It would have been impossible for two uninjured men to climb.
“What are we going to do?” George asked. “How are we going to get up there?”
The Negro was silent for a very long moment. George waited for him to admit their helplessness, to concede the fact of their defeat. For some perverse reason he couldn’t name, he was looking forward to hearing the other man say there was nothing they could do but await the inevitable.
Gordy said, “Can’t climb the deck.”
George said, “Nope.”
“But I could probably climb the overhead.”
And this, George realized, was right. What had been the ceiling was a tangle of pipes, girders, and braces. It offered plenty of handholds.
“What about me?” said George. “I c-can’t c-climb.”
“I can carry you.”
“That’s c-c-crazy. You n-n-need to just go on without me.”
Gordy sighed in frustration. “Okay, I will,” he said.
George knew the colored man was challenging him again, daring him again to give up. And Lord, he wanted to. He was exhausted, he was nauseous, and he felt tectonic plates grinding together in his skull. Worse, his injured body felt as if it would never be right again. He began to hate the Negro for not understanding this and leaving him be. But George knew he could not honorably give up hope while another man was fighting to save both their lives. And he knew Gordy knew it, too.
George sighed. “So, we’re going to climb the overhead.”
“Yeah. We can climb back to the ladder, take that up to the top deck.”
“No,” said George. “The ship is on its s-side, remember? That deck you’re talking about is underwater now. We’ve g-got to go down a level. Harbor ain’t that deep. Bottom of the ship might still have air. In any case, it’s going to be the last part to flood. Maybe a rescue crew will cut through the hull. We get down there, maybe we can signal them, let them know we’re there.”
“Then that’s what we do,” said Gordy.
“Yes,” said George. “That’s what we do.” He forced himself upright. The water was to his shins.
Gordy knelt and George lifted his bad leg until he was straddling Gordy’s broad, powerful back. He wrapped his arms around Gordy’s neck, piggyback style, locking one slippery, oil-slicked hand as best he could around one slippery, oil-slicked wrist. The Negro braced his hands under George’s thighs, and George almost screamed from the pain in his hip.
“You okay?” asked Gordy.
“Yeah,” said George, lying. Then, to change the subject, he said, “A-a-are you sure you c-c-can handle my weight?”
Gordy said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you climb on and we find out?”
George said, “But I’m already—” Then he got it. “Oh,” he said.
Laughing, Gordy straightened up. “How much you figure you weigh, Mr. George? Hundred fifty, maybe?”
“A little more,” said George.
“No problem,” said Gordy. He found a foothold, a beam that had stretched across the overhead. He found a handhold, a bracket holding a sheaf of pipes. He put a foot on the one, gripped the other, and pushed and pulled the weight of two men up the overhead of the passageway. He reached behind, braced his burden, searched out another handhold, pushed and pulled again. Gordy snarled with each exertion, as if locked in some private battle with the wall that had been a ceiling, as if one or the other would be defeated here and Gordy had determined it would not be him. George concentrated on the task of keeping his hand from sliding off his wrist while also not choking his benefactor. He didn’t speak to the other man. All the breath Gordy had, he needed for climbing. But George found himself wondering how much of the Negro’s bravado had been for his, George’s, benefit. This was useless, wasn’t it? Surely, he didn’t really think he could climb, with George on his back, all the way up to the starboard side of the ship.
