The Last Thing You Surrender, page 4
“Oh,” said George.
“Go back to sleep, Mr. George. Rest that hip.”
George had almost forgotten his hip. The shattered joint had settled into a dull, thudding ache so familiar that it required an effort of will to remember he had not always hurt like this. His hand throbbed like a tooth. It felt heavy and large.
Obediently, George closed his eyes.
“How you guys doing in there?”
Again his eyes came open—he had no idea how much later it was—but this was not the voice of salvation.
“We’re okay,” someone called.
“Where are you?”
“We’re in steering aft. How about you?”
“Lucky bag,” the voice said.
“They’ll be coming for us soon.”
“Any minute now.”
The voices fell silent.
Time stopped moving.
It froze like a lake in winter.
It stood motionless like a statue.
It sat still as midnight.
Time stopped moving and the very idea that it had ever moved came to seem like fiction, a fairy tale, a lie you told children, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, a thing you said to keep them from knowing the true nature of life, the essential cruelty and hardness of it. Time stopped moving. The minute was, the minute was, the minute was. Unending.
George’s stomach gnawed at itself, hunger grinding in his gut like a living thing. And the thirst was even worse. George felt as if he were made of sand. His tongue was a foreign body, a strange thing so swollen he could not close his lips over it. As a result, his mouth hung open, tongue poking through like a turtle peeking out of its shell. He would never be able to drink enough water to quench this. There was not enough water in all the world to make him feel like himself again.
The air was stale and close, smelling of sweat and armpits and piss, of desperation and fear, and it went in and out of you without enriching or renewing. It was just something to breathe, something you took in because you had no choice—you had to breathe something. But this was a useless something, a rank, musty something that made your lungs ache. It was like trying to breathe a blanket.
George closed his eyes. Some amount of frozen time intervened. He opened them. And he wondered where he was and why he was suffering like this.
He remembered after a moment, but his thoughts were slow. They seemed to drop from his mind like water from a leaky faucet. That is, they didn’t flow as thoughts and water usually do. Rather, with a maddening, unconnected individuality, they gathered themselves at the rim of thereness and awareness, swelled heavily, then fell and broke.
I’m still here.
I think I’m still here.
So hungry I could eat … anything.
Thirsty. God.
How long has it been?
Gordy saved my life. A Negro. A Negro saved my life …
Father, I’m sorry. Mother, I’m sorry. Sylvia …
Am I dying?
That one stopped him. It shook him. He went back to contemplate it.
Am I dying?
He thought maybe he was.
And he thought of home. Bienville Square would be girdled with lights now, toy trains circling their tracks in department-store windows, baby dolls with blonde curls watching with unseeing eyes, a Norman Rockwell Santa Claus with cheeks like apples beaming from a sign above as he hoisted a bottle of Coca-Cola to his lips, people below singing “Joy to the World” with a lustiness that made you believe it, made you think it a real and immediate thing, if only for the few moments they were singing the song. Joy to the world. And Heaven and nature sing.
When he was a child, how little George Simon had loved coming down to Bienville Square at Christmas. How he wished he were there right now.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
George opened his eyes (he hadn’t realized he had closed them) upon a different kind of darkness, the waking darkness that had become his world. He wasn’t sure he had heard the voice at first, but then it spoke again. “We’re going to suffocate if we stay in here. We’re running out of air.”
“But where can we go?” Another voice.
“We can get to the tiller room from here. That hatch there.”
The light came on, playing across a hatch on the aft end of the compartment. Now the darkness was alive with the cross talk.
“What if it’s flooded?”
“It’s probably not flooded. No reason to believe it is.”
“But what if it is?”
Silence.
“If it is, we let the water in here. There’s a good chance we drown.”
“But if we stay here, we’re guaranteed to suffocate.”
Silence.
“Hell of a choice.”
“Yeah.”
“Me, I figure if I’m going to die anyway, might as well get it over with.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you guys want to do?”
“Me? I want to wake up between Rita Hayworth’s tits and hear her tell me, ‘Shush, baby. You’re just having a bad dream.’”
There was laughter. Somebody said, “Yeah, you and me both, buddy.”
“Yeah, but really: What do you guys want to do?”
“Let’s put it to a vote.”
They voted to open the hatch. The light beam followed as two of them moved aft on the canted overhead to the hatch. George watched with bleary eyes and morbid fascination, bracing himself to be swept away in a sudden rush of seawater, helpless to save himself, his life given to the surging ocean. He tried again to pray, failed again to pray anything equal to the moment.
God, I don’t want to die.
They got the hatch open. Water did not rush through.
“Air,” someone said.
And the compartment rang with weak and relieved laughter.
Most of the men rushed into the new compartment.
Gordy and another man stayed behind to help George. With the light from the tiller room shining on them, the sailor on the high side of the deck draped George’s left arm around his neck, while Gordy, on the low side, did the same with George’s right arm. Together, they lifted him and began the journey across the compartment.
“I appreciate this, fellas,” said George.
“Well, you know how it is,” said the man on George’s left. “One way or another, Navy’s always got to bail the jarheads out.”
They laughed. “Guess I’m about as useless as tits on a bull,” said George.
“No, sir,” said Gordy, deadpan. “Tits on a bull at least be interesting to look at.”
There was a surprised beat of silence. Then laughter rang again.
No one would ever know what it was that caused Gordy to lose his footing. It might have been a loose barbell. It might have been an abandoned peacoat. It might have been the oily water they were slogging through. It might have been anything.
All they knew was that one instant, they were laughing and the next, Gordy was gone, sliding sideways down the overhead, his arms flailing, his hands gripping only air. He struck the steering shaft headfirst with a sickening crunch, then dropped into the water below. He didn’t even have time to scream.
An open-mouthed moment. A moment when no one breathed.
Then someone said, “Oh, shit!” and two men scrambled from the tiller room. They picked their way carefully down the incline, the light beam playing over the black water under the shaft. George watched, his mouth still open, his breathing stilled, his thoughts blasted, atomized, down to a single word.
No.
No no no no.
It couldn’t be. It wasn’t.
The Negro had saved George’s life. He had done the impossible and made George do it, too. They had overcome everything the ship could throw at them. How could he just slip and fall? How could that be?
The men searched the water for long moments, shoving aside a desk, a mattress, a filing cabinet. Finally, one of them yelled, “Here he is!” And they hauled Gordy’s limp form by his dirty apron up the incline to where the water was shallow. His head hung crookedly from his neck. Blood and oil smeared his face.
“Is he all right?” When nobody answered him, George yelled it. “Is he all right?”
One of the men had his fingers on Gordy’s neck. With a grimace, he put an ear to Gordy’s chest. He lay there a long moment, listening. When he lifted his head, he shook it once, slowly. The sailor was looking directly at George when he spoke.
“He’s dead,” he said.
two
WHEN GEORGE’S EYES CAME OPEN, A LITTLE BOY WAS STARING at him over the back of the train seat in front of him, brown eyes wide, tousled brown forelock falling haphazardly over his forehead. The child—probably not five years old yet—said nothing, just watched George with an unblinking intensity accessible only to the very young.
In the five days of travel that had taken him from Oahu to San Francisco to this railroad bridge on the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans, George had become used to being stared at. In his new service uniform, he supposed it was something he ought to expect. He wished he’d had a chance to buy some civvies—all his clothing, not to mention his other belongings, now resided at the bottom of Pearl Harbor—before they piled him into that transport headed for the mainland. But things had happened too fast.
As a result, here he was in uniform, enduring yet another pair of staring eyes. But being gawked at wasn’t the worst of it. No, the worst of it was that when they saw George coming, hobbling on crutches, his right leg and left hand encased in casts, people stumbled over themselves to hail cabs for him, buy meals for him. Two men even got into an argument over who would carry his bags even though the only bag he had was the small shaving kit he’d managed to pick up before he left Hawaii, and it fit quite easily under his arm.
“Were you at Pearl?” they would ask. And when he couldn’t lie, when he had to admit that he had, indeed, been there, their eyes would soften.
“God bless you, son,” a woman with snowy hair said, touching his forearm.
“We’re going to get those Jap bastards aren’t we?” asked a boy with freckles.
“I bet it was hell out there,” said a man, lifting a cigar from his mouth.
It was as if they needed something from him, something they didn’t even know how to voice. Reassurance, perhaps. The promise of a happy ending. The world had shifted around them, the comforting and familiar certainties of their lives had come crashing down like a chandelier from a high ceiling and then, here he came, a US marine in a crisp new uniform, and whatever it was they needed, they seemed to take just from the sight of him—indeed, the very fact of him.
George tried to be patient with this, but it still made him uncomfortable, like he was some kind of fraud putting one over on those who didn’t know any better. Their admiring eyes trailed him through crowded train stations like he was Sergeant York and Captain America put together, but he wasn’t. He was only a guy who had injured himself falling out of bed and was now traveling in the name of a silly publicity stunt. Of course, he couldn’t explain that to people; he had learned to just ignore it as best he could.
So George tried to buy the little boy off with a smile. When the child’s expression didn’t change, George sighed and escaped by closing his eyes again. He listened to metal singing against metal, giving himself to the gently rocking motion of the train car as it thundered across Louisiana toward the morning sun. Something about it all seemed ludicrous. Two weeks ago, when he was trapped in that drowning ship trying to breathe that unbreathable air, if you had told him he would be here two weeks later, he would have laughed and waved you off like some phantasm of a dying mind.
And yet, here he was.
They had emerged from the tiller room at 1600 Monday afternoon, rescued by a crew of men who literally had cut a path to them through the hull, through an emergency fuel oil tank, through a void space, through steering aft (which had to be pumped out because by then it was full of water), and finally into the tiller room where George and the eight other survivors were huddled.
Thirty-two hours they had been trapped in the ship. Almost a day and a half. When they lifted George up onto the upturned hull through the rectangular hole with blankets draped over its rough edges, he could not help gasping at what he saw. The water was still burning. Dirty, oil-smudged men wandered about the dock. The great ships canted at obscene angles, towers of black smoke rising from mangled superstructures. The air reeked of burning oil and rubber, of blood and death.
“My God,” he whispered. He looked to the sailor who was bracing him. “How bad did we get hit?” he asked.
The man told him Nevada was beached.
And California was sinking.
And West Virginia was sunk.
And Utah was sunk.
And Arizona was gone.
Each name was like a nail pounded into his chest. “How many men?” asked George.
The sailor shrugged. “Hundreds, maybe. Maybe thousands.”
“My God,” George said again.
“Yeah,” said the sailor. “Agree with you there.” And he handed George off to two other men, who helped lower him into the waiting barge.
It was six days later that George abruptly awoke staring up at the netless orange rim of a basketball hoop. This had been his waking view ever since he got out of surgery. Overrun with casualties, the hospital at Hospital Point had sent him and dozens of other wounded here to this row of beds set up in a high school gym to recover.
At first, he didn’t know what had sundered his nap. He hoped it wasn’t the nurse—“the USS Hortense,” they called her behind her back, because she had the build and all the warmth of a battleship. Barely 24 hours after surgery, that evil woman had forced him to get out of bed and start walking on crutches. He couldn’t even hold the left crutch; he’d had to figure out a way to brace it with his bad hand. But the USS Hortense had been about as moved by his difficulties as a real battleship might have been, and he had shuffled gamely down the row of beds and back. They had done this every day since. His body ached from the ordeal.
“Glad to see you’re awake, marine.”
The voice brought George’s head up sharply from the pillow. What he saw jolted him. Sitting in a chair at his bedside, the silver oak leaf insignias winking on his shoulders, was a lieutenant colonel he didn’t know. Standing behind him, hands crossed behind his back, was a man wearing the stripes of a sergeant major. George could not begin to guess what had brought so much rank to his bedside. He could not decide whether to be alarmed or terrified.
“Sir,” he said. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Reeves,” said the seated man. He jabbed a thumb toward the other man. “This here is Sergeant Major Stevens.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“They treating you okay?” Reeves’s hair was a bristly wedge the color of rain clouds. “You getting enough chow?”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“I understand you’re going to be all right?”
“Yes, sir. They say I can expect a full recovery.”
“Kind of an odd thing, isn’t it, for a boy your age to break his hip? That’s usually something that happens to folks a little older, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Doctor said it was a freak thing. He called it a pathological fracture, said I had a cyst on the bone. Apparently, it had been there a long time. I guess the bone was already weak.”
“So how long do they figure before you’re back at full strength?”
“Four to six months, sir.”
Reeves glanced meaningfully at Stevens. Then Reeves said, “Tell us about your escape from the ship.”
“Sir?”
“I hear there was a Negro boy, carried you out of a flooded deck on his back? Didn’t make it out himself?”
“Yes, sir. I only knew his last name. Gordy.”
“Eric Gordy,” said Reeves. “Messman 3rd Class Eric Lamont Gordy, to be exact. I hear you think he’s some kind of hero.”
“Yes, sir, I guess I do.” George had told the story of Gordy’s heroism to a number of men on the ward. He’d kept a colored orderly from his rounds for almost an hour talking about what Gordy had done.
“Why?” asked Reeves.
So George told it all again, how Gordy wouldn’t let him give up, how the Negro rescued him from the flooded compartment when George fell in and climbed the vertical deck with George on his back. The two men let him talk without interruption, their eyes never leaving his. When George was finished, Reeves leaned back. “That’s a hell of a story, marine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re grateful to this man, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So here’s the thing,” said Reeves. He was lighting up a Lucky Strike. “You’re not going to be able to do any fighting anytime soon, but what if there were a way you could still serve your country? Would you be interested in hearing about that?”
“Sir, I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
Reeves squinted through cigarette smoke, appraising George. Finally he said, “Morale is a weapon in war, marine. Especially in a free society. Keeping the public’s spirits up is just as important as making sure our fighting men have enough bullets and planes. Do you believe that?”
“I suppose so, sir.”
George wasn’t sure he believed it at all. He wasn’t even sure he understood it.
“You suppose so.” Reeves smirked behind the mask of blue smoke. Apparently, this was not the answer he had been looking for. “Tell you what,” he said, “how about you take my word for it, son? How about that?”
“Sir, yes sir.”
Reeves nodded. “Now, given that morale is so important, I’m sure you would be eager to do your part to protect it.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“So here’s what we want you to do, private. We want you to pay a courtesy call on Gordy’s wife—his widow now, I suppose. And afterward, we want you to do an interview together with her for the local paper. If that works the way we think it might, the next step will be to send the two of you on a tour around the country to a few key cities to do interviews with other papers, maybe a few radio stations, maybe give talks at some colored churches. We want you to tell your story to every colored face you can. And when you do it, really play up the part about this boy saving your life.”
