Chapter Sixteen
Valletta
I
Now there was a sun-shower over Valletta, and even a rainbow. Howie Surd the drunken yeoman lay on his stomach under mount 52, head propped on arms, staring at a British landing craft that chugged its way through the rainy Harbour. Fat Clyde from Chi, who was 6' 1"/ 142 pounds, came from Winnetka and had been christened Harvey, stood by the lifelines spitting dreamily down into the drydock.
"Fat Clyde," bellowed Howie.
"No," said Fat Clyde. "Whatever it is."
He must have been upset. Nobody ever says things like that to a yeoman. "I'm going over tonight," Howie said gently, "and I need a raincoat because it is raining out, as you may have noticed."
Fat Clyde took a white hat out of his back pocket and tugged it down over his head like a cloche. "I also got liberty," he said.
b*tch box came on. "Now turn in all paint and paint brushes
to the paint locker," it said.
"About that time," said Howie. He crawled out from under the gun mount and squatted on the 01 deck. The rain came down and ran into his ears and down his neck and he watched the sun smearing the sky red over Valletta. "What is wrong, hey, Fat Clyde."
"Oh," said Fat Clyde and spat over the side. His eyes followed the white drop of spit all the way down. Howie gave up after about five minutes of silence. He went around the starboard side and down the ladder to bother Tiger Youngblood the spud coxswain who sat at the bottom of the ladder right outside the galley slicing cuc*mbers.
Fat Clyde yawned. It rained in his mouth, but he didn't seem to notice. He had a problem. Being an ectomorph, he was inclined to brood. He was a gunner's mate third, and normally it would be none of his business except that his rack was directly over Pappy Hod's, and since arrival in Valletta, Malta, Pappy had commenced talking to himself. Not loud; not loud
enough to be heard by anyone but Fat Clyde.
Now scuttlebutt being what it is, and sailors being, under frequently sentimental and swinish exteriors, sentimental swine, Clyde knew well enough what it was about being in Malta that upset Pappy Hod. Pappy hadn't been eating anything. Normally a liberty hound, he hadn't even been over yet. Because it was usually Fat Clyde who Pappy went out and got drunk with, this was lousing up Fat Clyde's liberty.
Lazar the deck ape, who had been trying the radar gang now for two weeks, came out with a broom and started sweeping water into the drain on the port side. "I don't know why I should be doing this," he b*tched conversationally. "I don't have the duty."
"You should of stayed down in first division," Fat Clyde ventured, glum. Lazar began sweeping water at Fat Clyde, who jumped out of the way and continued on down the starboard ladder. To the spud coxswain: "Give me a cuc*mber, hey Tiger."
"You want a cuc*mber,"
said Tiger, who was chopping up onions. "Here. I got a cuc*mber for you." His eyes were watering so bad he looked like a sullen boy, which is what he was.
"Slice it and put it on a plate," said Fat Clyde, "and maybe I will -"
"Here." From the galley porthole. Pappy Hod was hanging out, waving a crescent of watermelon. He spat a seed at Tiger.
That's the old Pappy Hod, thought Clyde. And he is wearing dress blues and a neckerchief.
"Get your ass in gear, Clyde," said Pappy Hod. "Liberty call any minute now."
So of course Clyde was off like a streak for the fo'c's'le and back inside of five minutes, squared away as he ever got for liberty.
"832 days," Tiger Youngblood snarled as Pappy and Clyde headed for the quarterdeck. "And I'll never make it."
The Scaffold, resting on keel blocks, was propped up on each side by a dozen wood beams a foot square which extended from the sides of the ship to the sides
of the drydock. From above, the Scaffold must have looked like a great squid with wood-colored tentacles. Pappy and Clyde crossed the long brow and stood in the rain for a moment, looking at the ship. The sonar dome was shrouded in a secret tarpaulin. At the top of the mast flew the biggest American flag Captain Lych had been able to find. It would not be lowered come Evening Colors; and come true nightfall, portable spotlights would be turned on and focused on it. This was for the benefit of any Egyptian bomber pilots who might be coming in, Scaffold being the only American ship in Valletta at the moment.
On the starboard side rose a school or seminary with a clock tower, growing out of a bastion high as the surface-search radar antenna.
"High and dry," said Clyde.
"They say the Limeys are going to kidnap us," said Pappy. "And leave our ass high and dry till this is over."
"It may take longer than that anyway. Give me a cigarette. There's the generator and
the screw -"
"And the barnacles." Pappy Hod was disgusted. "They will probably want to sandblast, long as she's in the yards. Even though there's a yard period in Philly coming up as soon as we get back. They'll find something for us to do, Fat Clyde."
They made their way through the Dockyard. Around them straggled most of the Scaffold's liberty section in files and bunches. Submarines too were under wraps: perhaps for secrecy, perhaps for the rain. The quitting time whistle blew, and Pappy and Clyde were caught all at once in a torrent of yardbirds: disgorged from earth, vessels and p*ssoirs, all heading for the gate.
"Yardbirds are the same all over," Pappy said. He and Clyde took their time. The dock workers fled by, jostling them: ragged, gray. By the time Pappy and Clyde reached the stone gateway, they'd all gone. Waiting for them were only two old nuns who sat to either side of the gate, holding little straw collection baskets in their laps and black umbrellas
over their heads. Bottoms of the baskets were barely covered with sixpences and a shilling or two. Clyde came up with a crown; Pappy, who hadn't been over to exchange any currency, dropped a dollar in the other basket. The nuns smiled briefly and resumed their vigil.
"What was that," Pappy smiled to nobody. "Admission charge?"
Towered over by ruins, they walked up a hill, around a great curve in the road and through a tunnel. At the other end of the tunnel was a bus stop: threepence into Valletta, as far as the Phoenicia Hotel. When the bus arrived they got on with a few straggling yardbirds and many Scaffold sailors, who sat in the back and sang. "Pappy," Fat Clyde began, "I know it's no business of mine, but -"
"Driver," came a yell from in back. "Hey driver. Stop the bus. I got to take a leak."
Pappy slumped lower in his seat; tilted the white hat down over his eyes. "Teledu," he muttered. "That will be Teledu."
"Driver,"
said Teledu of the A gang. "If you don't stop the bus I will have to p*ss out the window." Despite himself Pappy turned around to watch. A number of snipes were endeavoring to pull Teledu away from the window. The driver drove on grimly. The yardbirds weren't talking, but watched closely. Scaffold sailors were singing:
"Let's all go down and p*ss on the Forrestal
Till the damn thing floats away, …"
which went to the tune of The Old Gray Mare and had started at Gitmo Bay in the winter of '55.
"Once he has got an idea in his head," said Pappy, "he won't let go. So if they don't let him p*ss out the window, he will probably -"
"Look, look," said Fat Clyde. A yellow river of urine was advancing up the center aisle. Teledu was just zipping up.
"A fun-loving good will ambassador," somebody remarked, "is all Teledu is." As the river crept forward sailors and yardbirds hurriedly covered it with the leaves of a few morning
newspapers, left lying on the seats. Teledu's comrades applauded.
"Pappy," Fat Clyde said, "you intending to go out and get juiced tonight?"
"I was thinking about it," said Pappy.
"That's what I was afraid of. Look, I know I'm out of line -"
Ho was interrupted by a burst of merriment from the back of the bus. Teledu's friend Lazar, whom Fat Clyde had last seen sweeping water off the 01 deck, had succeeded now in setting fire to the newspapers on the floor of the bus. Smoke billowed up and with a most horrible smell. Yardbirds began to mutter among themselves. "I should of saved some," crowed Teledu, "to put it out with."
"Oh God," said Pappy. A couple-three of Teledu's fellow snipes were stomping around trying to put out the fire. The bus driver was cursing audibly.
They pulled up to the Phoenicia Hotel at last: smoke still leaking from the windows. Night had fallen. Raucous with song, the men of the Scaffold boat
descended on Valletta.
Clyde and Pappy were last to get out. They apologized to the driver. Palm leaves in front of the hotel chattered in the wind. It seemed Pappy was hanging back.
"Why don't we go to a movie," Clyde said, a little desperate. Pappy wasn't listening. They walked under an arch and into Kingsway.
"Tomorrow is Hallowe'en," said Pappy, "and they better put those idiots in a strait jacket."
"They never made one to hold old Lazar. Hot damn, it's crowded in here."
Kingsway seethed. There was this sense of containment, like a sound stage. As an indication of the military buildup in Malta since the beginning of the Suez crisis, there overflowed into the street a choppy sea of green Commando berets, laced with the white and blue of naval uniforms. The Ark Royal was in, and corvettes, and troop carriers to take the Marines to Egypt to occupy and hold.
"Now I was on an AKA during the war," observed Pappy as they elbowed their
way along Kingsway, "and just before D-day it was like this."
"Oh they was getting drunk in Yoko too, back during Korea," said Clyde, defensive.
"Not like that was, or like this either. The Limeys have a way of getting drunk just before they have to go off and fight. Not like we get drunk. All we do is puke, or break furniture. But the Limeys show imagination. Listen."
All it was, was an English ruddy-faced jarhead and his Maltese girl, standing in the entrance to a men's clothing store and looking at silk scarves. But they were singing "People Will Say We're In Love," from Oklahoma.
Overhead, bombers screamed away toward Egypt. On some street corners trinket-stalls were set up, and doing a peak trade in good-luck charms and Maltese lace.
"Lace," said Fat Clyde. "What is it about lace."
"To make you think about a girl. Even if you don't have a girl, it's better somehow if you . . ." He trailed off. Fat Clyde didn't
try to keep the subject alive.
From a Phillips Radio store to their left, news broadcasts were going full blast. Little tense knot of civilians stood around, just listening. Nearby at a newspaper kiosk, red scare headlines proclaimed BRITISH INTEND TO MOVE INTO SUEZ. "Parliament," said the newscaster, "after an emergency session, issued a resolution late this afternoon calling for the engagement of airborne troops in the Suez crisis. The paratroopers, based on Cyprus and Malta, are on one-hour alert."
"Oboy, oboy," said Fat Clyde wearily.
"High and dry," said Pappy Hod, "and the only ship in the Sixth Fleet getting liberty." All the others were off in the Eastern Mediterranean, evacuating American nationals from the Egyptian mainland. Abruptly, Pappy cut round a corner to the left. He'd gone about ten steps down the hill when he noticed Fat Clyde wasn't there.
"Where are you going," Fat Clyde yelled from the corner.
"The Gut,"
said Pappy, "where else."
"Oh." Clyde came stumbling downhill. "I figured maybe we could wander around the main drag a little. "
Pappy grinned: reached out and patted Clyde's beer belly. "Easy there, mother Clyde," he said. "Old Hod is doing all right."
I'm just trying to be helpful, Clyde thought. But: "Yes," he agreed, "I am pregnant with a baby elephant. You want to see its trunk?"
Pappy guffawed and they roistered away down the hill. There is nothing like old jokes. It's a kind of stability about them: familiar ground.
Strait Street - the Gut – was as crowded as Kingsway, but more poorly lit. First familiar face they saw was Leman, the red-headed water-king, who came reeling out the swinging doors of a pub called the Four Aces, minus a white hat. Leman was a bad drunk, so Pappy and Clyde ducked down behind a patted palm in front to watch. Sure enough, Leman started searching in the gutter, bent over at a 90 degree
angle. "Rocks," whispered Clyde. "He always looks for rocks." The water-king found a rock and prepared to heave it through the front window of the Four Aces. The U. S. Cavalry, in the form of one Tourneur, the ship's barber, arrived also by way of the swinging doors and grabbed Leman's arm. The two fell to the street and began wrestling around in the dust. A passing band of British Marines looked at them curiously for a moment, then went by, laughing, a little embarrassed.
"See," said Pappy, getting philosophical. "Richest country in the world, and we never learned how to throw a goodbye drunk like the Limeys."
"But it's not goodbye for us." said Clyde.
"Who knows. There's revolutions in Hungary and Poland, fighting in Egypt." Pause. "And Jayne Mansfield is getting married."
"She can't, she can't. She said she'd wait for me."
They entered the Four Aces. It was early yet, and no one but a few low-tolerance
drunks like Leman were causing any commotion. They sat at a table. "Guinness stout," said Pappy and the words fell on Clyde like a nostalgic sandbag. He wanted to say, Pappy, it is not the old days, and why didn't you stay on board the Scaffold boat, because a boring liberty is better for me than one that hurts, and this hurts more all the time.
The barmaid who brought their drinks was new: at least Clyde didn't remember her from last cruise. But one across the room, jitterbugging with one of Pappy's strikers, she'd been around. And though Paola's bar had been the Metro, further on down the street, this girl - Elisa? - knew through the barmaids' grapevine that Pappy had married one of her own. If only Clyde could keep him away from the Metropole. If only Elisa didn't spot them.
But the music stopped, she saw them, headed over. Clyde concentrated on his beer. Pappy smiled at Elisa.
"How's your wife?" she asked, of course.
"I hope she's well."
Elisa, bless her
heart, dropped it. "You want to dance? Nobody broke your record yet. Twenty-two straight."
Nimble Pappy was on his feet. "Let's set a new one."
Good, thought Clyde: good. After a while, who should come over but LtJG Johnny Contango, the Scaffold's damage-control assistant, in civvies.
"When we going to get the screw fixed, Johnny?"
Johnny because this officer had been a white hat sent to OCS, and having been then faced with the usual two alternatives - to persecute those of his former estate or to keep fraternizing and to hell with the wardroom - had chosen the latter. He had gone possibly overboard on this, at least running afoul of the Book at every turn: stealing a motorcycle in Barcelona, inciting an impromptu mass midnight swim at Fleet Landing in the Piraeus. Somehow - maybe because of Captain Lych's fondness for incorrigibles - he'd escaped court-martial.
"I am feeling more and more guilty about the screw," said Johnny Contango. "I have
just slipped off from a stuffy do over at the British Officers' Club. You know what the big joke is? 'Let's have another drink, old boy, before we have to go to war with each other.'"
"I don't get it," said Fat Clyde.
"We voted in the Security Council with Russia and against England and France on this Suez business."
"Pappy says the Limeys are going to kidnap us."
"I don't know."
"What about the screw?"
"Drink your beer, Fat Clyde." Johnny Contango felt guilty about the mangled ship's propeller, not so much in a world-political way. It was personal guilt which, Fat Clyde suspected upset him more than he showed. He'd been OOD the midwatch old Scaffold boat had hit whatever it was - submerged wreck, oil drum - going through the Straits of Messina. Radar gang had been too busy keeping tabs on a fleet of night fishing boats who'd chosen the same route, to notice the object - if it had protruded above the surface at all. Set,
and drift, and pure accident had brought them here to get a screw fixed. God knew what the Med had brought into Johnny Contango's path. The report had called it "hostile marine life," and there'd been much raillery since about the mysterious screw-chewing fish, but Johnny still felt it was his fault. The Navy would rather blame something alive - preferably human and with a service number - than pure accident. Fish? Mermaid? Scylla, Charybdis, wha. Who knew how many female monsters this Med harbored?
"Bwaagghh."
"Pinguez, I'll bet," Johnny said without looking around.
"Yup. All over his blues." The owner had materialized and stood now truculent over Pinguez, steward's mate striker, hollering "SP, SP," with no results. Pinguez sat on the floor afflicted with the dry heaves.
"Poor Pinguez," Johnny said. "He's an early one."
Out on the floor Pappy was up to about a dozen, and showed no signs of stopping.
"We ought
to get him into a cab," Fat Clyde said.
"Where is Baby Face." Falange the snipe, and Pinguez's buddy. Pinguez now lay sprawled among the legs of a table, and had begun talking to himself in Filipino. A bartender approached with something dark in a glass that fizzed. Baby Face Falange, wearing as was his wont a babushka, joined the group around Pinguez. A number of British sailors looked on with interest.
"Here, you drink it," the bartender said. Pinguez lifted his head and moved it, mouth open, toward the bartender's hand. Bartender got the message and j*rked his hand away: Pinguez's shiny teeth closed on the air with a loud snap. Johnny Contango knelt by the steward.
"Andale, man," he said gently, raising Pinguez's head. Pinguez bit him on the arm. "Let go," just as quiet. "It's a Hathaway shirt, I don't want no cabron puking on it."
"Falange!" Pinguez screamed, drawing out the a's.
"You hear that," said Baby Face.
"That's all he has to say on the quarterdeck and my ass has had it."
Johnny took Pinguez under the arms; Fat Clyde, more nervous, lifted his feet. They bore him to the street, found a cab, and got him off in it.
"Back to the great gray mother," said Johnny. "Come on. You want to try the Union Jack?"
"I should keep an eye on Poppy. You know."
"I know. But he'll be busy dancing."
"As long as he doesn't get to the Metro," said Fat Clyde. They strolled down half a block to the Union Jack. Inside, Antoine Zippo, captain of the second division head, and Nasty Chobb the baker, who periodically used salt in place of sugar in the early morning's pies to discourage thieves, had taken over not only the bandstand in back, but also a trumpet and guitar respectively; and were now making Route 66, respectfully.
"Sort of quiet," said Johnny Contango. But this was premature, because sly young Sam Mannaro, the corpsman striker, was
even now sneaking alum into Antoine's beer which sat uneyed by Antoine on the piano.
"SP's will be busy tonight," said Johnny. "How come Pappy came over at all?"
"I never had that happen to me, that way," Clyde said, a little brusque.
"Sorry. I was thinking today in the rain how it was I could light a king-sized cigarette without getting it wet."
"Oh I think he should have stayed on board," said Clyde, "but all we can do is keep an eye out that window."
"Right ho," said Johnny Contango, slurping beer.
A scream from the street. "That's tonight's," said Johnny. "Or one of tonight's."
"Bad street."
"Back during the beginning of all this in July the Gut ran one killing a night. Average. God knows what it is now."
In came two Commandos, looking around for somewhere to sit. They picked Clyde and Johnny's table.
David and Maurice their names were, and heading off
for Egypt tomorrow.
"We shall be there," said Maurice, "to wave hello when you people come steaming in."
"If ever," said Johnny.
"World's going to hell," said David. They'd been drinking heavily but held it well.
"Don't expect to hear from us till the election is over," said Johnny.
"Oh, is that it then."
"Why America is sitting on its ass," brooded Johnny, "is the same reason our ship is sitting on its ass. Crosscurrents, seismic movements, unknown things in the night. But you can't help thinking it's somebody's fault."
"The jolly, jolly balloon," said Maurice. "Going up."
"Did you hear a bloke got murdered just as we came in." David leaned forward, melodramatic.
"More blokes than that will get murdered in Egypt," said Maurice, "and don't I wish they would truss up a few M.P.'s now, in those jumping rigs and chutes. Send them out the door. They're
the ones who want it. Not us.
"But my brother is on Cyprus, and I shall never live it down if he gets there first."
The Commandos outdrank them two-for-one. Johnny, never having talked to anyone who might be dead inside a week, was curious in a macabre way. Clyde, who had, only felt unhappy.
The group on the stand had moved from Route 66 to Every Day I Have the Blues. Antoine Zippo, who had wrecked one jugular vein last year with a shore-based Navy band in Norfolk and was now trying for two, took a break, shook the spit out of his horn and reached for the beer on the piano. He looked hot and sweaty, as a suicidal workhorse trumpet should. Alum however being what it is, the predictable occurred.
"Ech," said Antoine Zippo, slamming the beer down on the piano. He looked around, belligerent. His lip had just been attacked. "Sam the werewolf," said Antoine, "is the only sumb*tch here who could get alum." He couldn't talk too well.
"There goes Pappy,"
said Clyde, grabbing for his hat. Antoine Zippo leaped like a puma from the stand, landing feet first on Sam Mannaro's table.
David turned to Maurice. "I wish the Yanks would save their energy for Nasser."
"Still," said Maurice, "it would be good practice."
"I heartily agree," pip-pipped David in a toff's voice: "Shall we, old man?"
"Bung ho." The two Commandos waded into the growing meleé about Sam.
Clyde and Johnny were the only two heading for the door. Everybody else wanted to get in on the fight. It took them five minutes to reach the street. Behind them they heard glass breaking and chairs being knocked over. Pappy Hod was nowhere in sight.
Clyde hung his head. "I suppose we ought to go to the Metro." They took their time, neither savoring the night's work ahead. Pappy was a loud and merciless drunk. He demanded that his keepers sympathize and of course they always did, so much that it was always worse for
them.
They passed an alley. Facing them on the blank wall, in chalk, was a Kilroy, thus:
flanked by two of the most common British sentiments in time of crisis: WOT NO PETROL and END CALL-UP.
"No petroI, indeed," said Johnny Contango. "They're blowing up oil refineries all over the Middle East." Nasser, it seems, having gone on the radio, urging a sort of economic jihad.
Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he'd been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall. Later he showed up everywhere the American armies moved: farmhouses in France, pillboxes in North Africa, bulkheads of troop ships in the Pacific. Somehow he'd acquired the reputation of a schlemiel or sad sack. The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable to all manner of indignities: fist shrapnel, machete. Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable in a latrine-oriented
(as well as Freudian) psychology.
But it was all deception.
Kilroy by 1940 was already bald, middle-aged. His true origins forgotten, he was able to ingratiate himself with a human world, keeping schlemiel-silence about what he'd been as a curly-haired youth. It was a masterful disguise: a metaphor. For Kilroy had sprung into life, in truth, as part of a band-pass filter, thus:
[...]
Inanimate. But Grandmaster of Valletta tonight.
"The Bobbsey Twins," said Clyde. Running around the corner in a jog trot came Dahoud (who'd discouraged little Ploy from taking a Brody) and Leroy Tongue the widget storekeeper, both of them with night sticks and SP armbands. It looked like a vaudeville act, Dahoud being one and a half times as high as Leroy. Clyde had a general idea of their technique for keeping the peace. Leroy would hop up on Dahoud's shoulders piggyback and rain pacification about the heads and shoulders of boisterous bluejackets, while Dahoud exerted his calming influence down below.
"Look," yelled Dahoud approaching. "We can
do it running." Leroy slowed down and cut in behind his running mate. "Hup-hup-hup," said Dahoud. "YO." Sure enough: neither of them breaking stride, up hopped Leroy, clinging to Dahoud's big collar to ride his shoulders like a jockey.
"Giddap there, boss," Leroy screamed, and away they dashed for the Union Jack. A small detachment of Marines, all in step, came marching out of a side street. One farm lad, blond and candid-faced, counted cadence unintelligibly. Passing Clyde and Johnny, he broke off for a moment to ask:
"Wot's all that noise we hear?"
"Fight," said Johnny. "Union Jack."
"Right ho." Back in formation, the boy ordered a column left and his charges set course dutifully for the Union Jack.
"We're missing all the fun," whined Clyde.
"There is Poppy."
They entered the Metro. Poppy sat at a table with a barmaid who looked like Paola but fatter and older. It was pitiful to watch.
He was doing his "Chicago" bit. They waited till it was over. The barmaid, indignant, arose and waddled off. Poppy used the handkerchief to swab off his face which was sweating.
"Twenty-five dances," he said as they approached. "I broke my own record."
"There is a nice fight on at the Union Jack," suggested Clyde. "Wouldn't you like to go to it, Poppy?"
"Or how about that whorehouse the chief off the Hank that we met in Barcelona told us about," said Johnny. "Why don't we try to find it."
Poppy shook his head. "You guys ought to know this was the only place I wanted to come."
So they begin: these vigils. Having put up their token resistance, Clyde and Johnny straddled chairs to either side of Poppy and settled down to drinking as much as Poppy but staying soberer.
The Metro looked like a nobleman's pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes. The dancing floor and bar lay up a wide curving flight of marble steps
lined with statues in niches: statues of Knights, ladies and Turks. Such was a quality of suspended animation about them that you felt – come the owl-hours, the departure of the last sailor and the extinguishment of the last electric light – these statues must unfreeze, step down from their pedestals, and ascend stately to the dance floor bringing with them their own light: the sea's phosphorescence. There to form sets and dance till sunup, utterly silent; no music; their stone feet only just kissing the wood planks.
Along the sides of the room were great stone urns, with palms and poincianas. On the red-carpeted dais sat a small hot-jazz band: violin, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano, drums. It was a plump middle-aged lady, playing the violin. At the moment they were playing C'est Magnifique tailgate fashion, while a Commando six and a half feet tall jitterbugged with two barmaids at once and tree and four friends stood around, clapping hands, cheering them on. It was not so much a matter of di*k
Powell, the American Singing Marine, caroling Sally and Sue, Don't Be Blue: more a taking-on of traditional attitudes which (one suspects) must be latent in all English germ plasm: mother loony chromosome along with afternoon tea and respect for the Crown; where the Yanks saw novelty and an excuse for musical comedy, the English saw history, and Sally and Sue were only incidental.
Early tomorrow deck hands would come out in the bleaching glare of the pier's lights and single up all lines for some of these green berets. The night before, then, was for sentiment, larking in shadows with jolly barmaids, another pint and another smoke in this manufactured farewell-hall; this enlisted men's version of that great ball, the Saturday night before Waterloo. One way you could tell which ones were going tomorrow: they left without looking back.
Pappy got drunk, stinking drunk: and drew his two keepers into a personal past neither wanted to investigate. They endured a step-by-step account of the brief marriage: the
presents he'd given her, the places they'd gone, the cooking, the kindnesses. Toward the end, half of it was noise: maundering. But they didn't ask for clarity. Didn't ask anything, not so much from booze-tangled tongues as from a stuffiness-by-induction in the nasal cavities. So susceptible were Fat Clyde and Johnny Contango.
But it was Cinderella liberty in Malta, and though the drunk's clock slows down, it doesn't stop. "Come on," said Clyde finally, floundering afoot. "It is about that time." Pappy smiled sadly and fell out of his chair.
"We'll go get a taxi," said John. "Carry him home in a taxi."
"Jeez, it's late." They were the last Americans in the Metro. The English were quietly absorbed in saying goodbye to at least this part of Valletta. With the departure of the Scaffold boat's men, all things had grown more matter-of-fact.
Clyde and Johnny draped Pappy around them and got him down the stairs, past the Knights' reproachful eyes and
into the street. "Taxi, hey," Clyde screamed.
"No taxis," said Johnny Contango. "All gone. God how big the stars are."
Clyde wanted to argue. "You just let me take him," he said. "You're an officer, you can stay out all night."
"Who said I was an officer. I'm a white hat. Your brother, Pappy's brother. Brother's keeper."
"Taxi, taxi, taxi."
"Limey's brother, everybody's brother. Who says I'm an officer. Congress. Officer and gentlemen by act of Congress. Congress won't even go into the Suez to help the Limeys. They're wrong about that, they're wrong about me."
"Paola," Pappy moaned and pitched forward. They grabbed him. His white hat was long gone. His head hung and hair had fallen over his eyes.
"Pappy is going bald," said Clyde. "I never noticed."
"You never do till you're drunk."
They made their way slow and unsteady down the Gut, yelling occasionally
for a taxi. None came. The street had a silent look but was not so; not so far away, on the hill ascending to Kingsway, they heard sharp little explosions. And the voice of a great crowd around the next corner.
"What is it," said Johnny, "revolution?"
Better than that: it was a free-for-all among 200 Royal Commandos and maybe 30 Scaffold sailors.
Clyde and Johnny dragged Pappy round the corner and into the fringes of it.
"Oh-oh," said Johnny. The noise woke Pappy, who called for his wife. A few dangling belts were in evidence, but no broken beer bottles or boatswain's knives. Or none anybody could see. Or not yet. Dahoud stood against a wall, facing 20 Commandos. By his left bicep another Kilroy looked on, with nothing to say but WOT NO AMERICANS. Leroy Tongue must have been off underfoot somewhere, clubbing at shins with his night stick. Something red and sputtering came arcing through the air, landed by Johnny Contango's foot and blew up. "Firecrackers,"
said Johnny, landing three feet away. Clyde had also fled, and Pappy, unsupported, fell to the street. "Let's get him out of here," said Johnny.
But they found their way blocked by Marines, who'd come up from behind.
"Hey Billy Eckstine," yelled the Commandos in front of Dahoud. "Billy Eckstine! sing us a song!" A volley of firecrackers went off somewhere to the right. Most of the fist-fighting was still concentrated in the center of the mob. Only shoving, elbowing and curiosity at the edges. Dahoud removed his hat, drew himself up and began to sang I Only Have Eyes for You. Commandos were struck dumb. Somewhere down the street a police whistle blew. Glass broke in the middle of the crowd. It sent human waves back, concentric. A couple-three Marines staggered back and fell over Pappy, who was still on the ground. Johnny and Clyde moved in to rescue him. A few sailors moved in to help the fallen Marines. Unobtrusive as possible, Clyde and Johnny lifted their charge by an arm
each and sneaky-Peted away. Behind them, the Marines and sailors began scuffling with one another.
"Cops," somebody yelled. Half a dozen cherry bombs went off. Dahoud finished his song. A number of Commandos applauded. "Now sing I Apologize."
"You mean that," Dahoud scratched his head, "that if I told a lie, if I made you cry, forgive me?"
"Hoorah Billy Eckstine!" they cried.
"O no man," Dahoud said. "I don't apologize to nobody." Commandos squared off. Dahoud surveyed the situation, then abruptly lifted a gigantic arm, straight up. "All right there troopers, get in ranks now. Square away."
For some reason they shuffled into a kind of formation.
"Yeah," Dahoud grinned. "Right, FACE." So they did.
"Awright men. Let's goooo!" Down came the arm, and away they marched. In step. Kilroy looked on deadpan. From nowhere Leroy Tongue emerged to bring up the rear.
Clyde, Johnny
and Poppy Hod struggled free of the brawl, dodged round a corner and began the struggle up the hill to Kingsway. Halfway along, Dahoud's detachment passed them, Dahoud counting cadence singing it like a blues. For all anyone knew he was marching them back to the troop carriers.
A taxi pulled up next to the three. "Follow that platoon," Johnny said and they piled in. The cab had a skylight, so of course before it reached Kingsway three heads had appeared through the roof. As they crawled behind the Commandos, they sang:
"Who's the little rodent
That's getting more than me?
F-U-C-K-E-Y Y-O-U-S-E."
A legacy from Pig Bodine, who'd watched this particular kid's program religiously on the mess hall TV every night in port; had furnished black clip-on ears to all the mess cooks at his own expense, and composed on the show's theme song an obscene parody of which this variation in spelling was the most palatable part. Commandos in the rear ranks asked Johnny to teach them the
words. He did, receiving in exchange a fifth of Irish whisky when its owner insisted he could not possibly finish it before they got under way next morning. (To this day the bottle has remained in Johnny Contango's possession, unopened. No one knows what he's keeping it for.)
This weird procession crept along Kingsway until intercepted by a British cattle car or lorry. The Commandos climbed on, thanked everyone for a jolly evening and snarled away forever. Dahoud and Leroy climbed wearily into the cab.
"Billy Eckstine," Dahoud grinned. "Jeez."
"We got to go back," Leroy said. The driver made a U-turn and they circled back to the scene of the free-for-all. No more than fifteen minutes had passed; but the street was deserted. Quiet: no more firecrackers, shouts; nothing.
"I'll be damned," said Dahoud.
"You'd think it never happened," said Leroy.
"Dockyard," Clyde instructed the driver, yawning. "Dry dock two. American tin
can with the teeth marks of a screw-chewing fish."
All the way out to the Dockyard Pappy snored.
Liberty had been expired an hour when they arrived. The two SP's bounded past the rows of latrines and across the gangplank. Clyde and Johnny, with Pappy in the middle, lagged.
"Now none of that was worth it," Johnny said bitterly. Two figures, fat and slim, stood by the latrine wall.
"Come on," Clyde urged Pappy. "Few more steps."
Nasty Chobb came running by, wearing an English sailor hat with H.M.S. Ceylon printed on the hand. The shadow-figures detached themselves from the latrine wall and approached. Pappy tripped.
"Robert," she said. Not a question.
"Hello Pappy," said the other.
"Who zat," said Clyde.
Johnny stopped dead and Clyde's momentum carried Pappy round to face her directly. "I'll be dipped in messhall coffee," said Johnny.
"Poor Robert." But she said it gently, and was
smiling, and had either Johnny or Clyde been less drunk, they would have bawled like children.
Pappy waggled his arms. "Go ahead," he told them, "I can stand. I'll be along." From over on the quarterdeck Nasty Chobb was heard arguing with the OOD. "What you mean go away," yelled Nasty.
"Your hat says H.M.S. Ceylon, Chobb."
"So."
"So what can I say? You're on the wrong ship."
"Profane," said Pappy. "You came back. I thought you would."
"I didn't," Profane said. "But she did." He went off to wait. Leaned against a latrine wall out of earshot, looking at the Scaffold.
"Hello Paola," said Pappy. "Sahha." It means both.
"You -"
"You -" at the same time. He motioned her to talk.
"Tomorrow," she said, "you'll he hung over and probably will think this didn't happen. That the Metro's booze sends visions as well as a big
head. But I'm real, and here, and if they restrict you -"
"I can put in a chit."
"Or send you off to Egypt or anywhere else, it should make no difference. Because I will be back in Norfolk before you, and be there on the pier. Like any other wife. But wait till then to kiss or even touch you."
"If I can get off?"
"I'll be gone. Let it be this way, Robert." How tired her face looked, in the white scatter from the brow lights. "It will be better, and more the way it should have been. You sailed a week after I left you. So a week is all we've lost. All that's gone on since then is only a sea-story. I will sit home in Norfolk, faithful, and spin. Spin a yarn for your coming-home present."
"I love you," was all he could find to say. He'd been saying it every night to a steel bulkhead and the earthwide sea on the other side.
White hands flickered up, behind her face. "Here. In case you think tomorrow it was a dream."
Her hair fell loose. She handed him an ivory comb. Five crucified Limeys - five Kilroys - stared briefly at Valletta's sky till he pocketed it. "Don't lose it in a poker game. I've had it a long time."
He nodded. "We ought to be back early December."
"You'll get your good-night kiss then." She smiled, withdrew, turned, was gone.
Pappy ambled on past the latrine without looking back. The American flag, skewered by spotlights, fluttered limp, high over them all. Pappy began his walk to the quarterdeck, across the long brow, hoping he'd be soberer when he reached the other end.
II
Of their dash across the Continent in a stolen Renault; Profane's one-night sojourn in a jail near Genoa, when the police mistook him for an American gangster; the drunk they all threw which began in Liguria and lasted well past Naples; the dropped transmission at the outskirts of that city and the week they spent waiting its repair in a ruined villa on Ischia, inhabited
by friends of Stencil - a monk long defrocked named Fenice who spent his time breeding giant scorpions in marble cages once used by the Roman blood to punish their young boy and girl concubines, and the poet Cinoglossa who had the misfortune to be both homosexual and epileptic - wandering listlessly in an unseasonable heat among vistas of marble fractured by earthquake, pines blasted by lightning, sea wrinkled by a dying mistral; of their arrival in Sicily and the difficulty with local bandits on a mountain road (from which Stencil extricated them by telling foul Sicilian jokes and giving them whisky); of the day-long trip from Syracuse to Valletta on the Laferla steamer Star of Malta, during which Stencil lost $100 and a pair of cufflinks at stud poker to a mild-faced clergyman who called himself Robin Petitpoint; and of Paola's steadfast silence through it all, there was little for any of them to remember. Malta alone drew them, a clenched fist around a yo-yo string.
They came in to Valletta, cold, yawning,
in the rain. They rode to Maijstral's room neither anticipating nor remembering – outwardly, at least, apathetic and low-keyed as the rain. Maijstral greeted them calmly. Paola would stay with him. Stencil and Profane had planned to doss at the Phoenicia Hotel, but at 2/8 per day the agile Robin Petitpoint had had his effect. They settled for a lodginghouse near the Harbour. "What now," said Profane, tossing his ditty bag in a corner.
Stencil thought a long time.
"I like," Profane continued, "living off of your money. But you and Paola conned me into coming here."
"First things first," said Stencil. The rain had stopped; he was nervous. "See Maijstral. See Maijstral."
See Maijstral he did: but only next day, and after a morning-long argument with the whisky bottle which the bottle lost. He walked to the room in the ruined building through a brilliant gray afternoon. Light seemed to cling to his shoulders like fine rain. His knees shook.
But
it wasn't hard to talk to Maijstral.
"Stencil has seen your confession to Paola."
"Then you know," Maijstral said, "I only made it into this world through the good offices of one Stencil."
Stencil hung his head. "It may have been his father."
"Making us brothers."
There was wine, which helped. Stencil yarned far into the night but with a voice always threatening to break, as if now at last he were pleading for his life. Maijstral kept a decorous silence, waiting patiently whenever Stencil faltered.
Stencil sketched the entire history of V. that night and strengthened a long suspicion. That it did add up only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects. At one point in Mondaugen's story:
"Ah," Maijstral said. "The glass eye."
"And you." Stencil mopped his forehead. "You listen like a priest."
"I have wondered." Smiling.
At the end of it:
"But Paola
showed you my apologia. Who is the priest? We have heard one another's confessions."
"Not Stencil's," Stencil insisted. "Hers."
Maijstral shrugged. "Why have you come? She is dead."
"He must know."
"I could never find that cellar again. If I could: it must be rebuilt now. Your confirmation would lie deep."
"Too deep already," Stencil whispered. "Stencil's long over his head, you know."
"I was lost."
"But not apt to have visions."
"Oh, real enough. You always look inside first, don't you, to find what's missing. What gap a vision could possibly fill. I was all gap then, and there was too wide a field to choose from."
"Yet you'd just come from -"
"I did think of Elena. Yes. Latins warp everything to the sexual anyway. Death becomes an adulterer or rival, need arises to see one rival at least done in . . . But I was bast*rdized enough, you see, before
that. Too much so to feel hatred or triumph, watching."
"Only pity. Is that what you mean? At least in what Stencil read. Read into. How can he -"
"More a passiveness. The characteristic stillness, perhaps, of the rock. Inertia. I'd come back - no, in - come in to the rock as far as I would."
Stencil brightened after a while and changed course. "A token. Comb, shoe, glass eye. The children."
"I wasn't watching the children. I was watching your V. What I did see of the children - I recognized none of the faces. No. They may have died before the war ended or emigrated after it. Try Australia. Try the pawnbrokers and curio shops. But as for placing a notice in the agony column: 'Anyone participating in the disassembly of a priest -'"
"Please."
Next day, and for days after, he investigated the inventories of curio merchants, pawnbrokers, ragmen. He returned one morning to find Paola brewing tea on the ring for Profane, who lay bundled
up in bed.
"Fever," she said. "Too much booze, too much everything back in New York. He hasn't been eating much since we arrived. God knows where he does eat. What the water there is like."
"I'll recover," Profane croaked. "Tough sh*t, Stencil."
"He says you're down on him. "
"O God," said Stencil.
The next day brought momentary encouragement to Stencil. A shopowner named Cassar did know of an eye such as Stencil described. The girl lived in Valletta, her husband was an auto mechanic at the garage which cared for Cassar's Morris. He had tried every device he knew to purchase the eye, but the foolish girl would not part with it. A keepsake, she said.
She lived in a tenement. Stucco walls, a row of balconies on the top floor. Light that afternoon produced a "burn" between whites and blacks: fuzzy edges, blurrings. White was too white, black too black. Stencil's eyes hurt. Colors were nearly absent, leaning either to
white or black.
"I threw it into the sea." Hands on hips, defiant. He smiled uncertainly. Where had Sidney's charm fled? Under the same sea, back to its owner. Light angling through the window fell across a bowl of fruit - oranges, limes - bleaching them and throwing the bowl's interior to black shadow. Something was wrong with the light. Stencil felt tired, unable to pursue it further - not just now - wanting only to leave. He left.
Profane sat in a worn flowered robe of Fausto Maijstral's, looking ghastly, chewing on the stump of an old cigar. He glared at Stencil. Stencil ignored him: threw himself on the bed and slept soundly for twelve hours.
He awoke at four in the morning and walked through a sea-phosphorescence to Maijstral's. Dawn leaked in, turning the illumination conventional. Along a mudway and up twenty steps. A light burned.
Maijstral was asleep at his table. "Don't haunt me, Stencil," he mumbled, still dreamy and belligerent.
"Stencil is passing
on the discomfort of being haunted," Stencil shivered.
They huddled over tea in chipped cups.
"She cannot be dead," Stencil said.
"One feels her in the city," he cried.
"In the city."
"In the light. It has to do with the light."
"If the soul," Maijstral ventured, "is light. Is it a presence?"
"Damn the word. Stencil's father, had he possessed imagination, might have used it." Stencil's eyebrows puckered, as if he would cry. He weaved irritably in his seat, blinked, fumbled for his pipe. He'd left it at the lodginghouse. Maijstral tapped across a pack of Players.
Lighting up: "Maijstral. Stencil expresses himself like an idiot."
"But your search fascinates me."
"Did you know, he's devised a prayer. Walking about this city, to be said in rhythm to his footsteps. Fortune, may Stencil be steady enough not to fasten on one of these poor ruins at his own random or at any
least hint from Maijstral. Let him not roam out all Gothic some night with lantern and shovel to exhume an hallucination, and be found by the authorities mud-streaked and mad, and tossing meaningless clay about."
"Come, come," muttered Maijstral. "I feel uncomfortable enough, being in this position."
Stencil drew in his breath too loudly.
"No, I am not beginning to requestion. That is long done."
Beginning then Maijstral took up the study of Stencil more closely. Though suspending judgment. He'd aged enough to know the written apologia would only be a first step in exorcising the sense of sin that had hung with him since '43. But this V. was surely more than a sense of sin?
Mounting crisis in the Suez, Hungary and Poland hardly touched them. Maijstral, leery like any Maltese of the Balloon's least bobbing, was grateful for something else - Stencil - to take his mind off the headlines. But Stencil himself, who seemed more unaware each day (under questioning)
of what was happening in the rest of the world, reinforced Maijstral's growing theory that V. was an obsession after all, and that such an obsession is a hothouse: constant temperature, windless, too crowded with particolored spots, unnatural blooms.
Stencil, returning to the lodginghouse, walked into a loud argument between Paola and Profane.
"So go," he was yelling. Something crashed against the door.
"Don't try to make up my mind for me," she yelled back. Stencil opened the door warily, peered around and was hit in the face with a pillow. Shades were drawn and Stencil saw only blurred figures: Profane still ducking out of the way, Paola's arm in follow-through.
"What the hell."
Profane, crouching like a toad, flapped a newspaper at him. "My old ship is in." All Stencil could see were the whites of his eyes. Paola was crying.
"Ah." Stencil dived for the bed. Profane had been sleeping on the floor. Let them use that, thought spiteful
Stencil; snuffled, and drifted off to sleep.
At length it occurred to him to talk with the old priest, Father Avalanche, who according to Maijstral had been here since 1919.
The moment he entered the church he knew he'd lost again. The old priest knelt at the communion rail: white hair above a black cassock. Too old.
Later, in the priest's house:
"God lets some of us wait, in queer backwaters," said Father Avalanche. "Do you know how long it's been since I have shriven a murderer? At the time of the Ghallis Tower murder last year I had hopes . . ." He maundered thus, taking Stencil by an unwilling hand, and began to charge aimless about thickets of memory. Stencil tried to point them toward the June Disturbances.
"Oh, I was only a young lad then, full of myth. The Knights, you know. One cannot come to Valletta without knowing about the Knights. I still believe" – chuckling - "as I believed then, that they roam the streets after sunset. Somewhere. And I
had only served as padre - in the actual fighting - long enough to have illusions left about Avalanche as crusading Knight. But then to compare the Malta that was, in 1919, to their Malta . . . You'd have to talk, I suppose, to my predecessor here, Father Fairing. He went to America. Though the poor old man, wherever he is, must be dead by now."
Politely as he could Stencil took leave of the old priest, plunged into the sunlight and began to walk. There was too much adrenalin, contracting the smooth muscle, deepening his breathing, quickening his pulse. "Stencil must walk," he said to the street: "walk. "
Foolish Stencil: he was out of condition. He returned to his pied-a-terre long after midnight, hardly able to stand. The room was empty.
"Clinches it," he muttered. If it were the same Fairing.
Even if it were not, could it matter? A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip
and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words - "events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic" - pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces. Profane lurched in on him thus.
"Paola's back with her husband," said Profane and collapsed on the bed. "She'll go back to the States."
"Someone," Stencil muttered, "is out of it, then." Profane groaned and pulled blankets around him. "Look here," said Stencil. "Now, you're sick." He crossed to Profane, felt his forehead. "High fever. Stencil must get a doctor. What the hell were you doing out at this hour anyway."
"No."
Profane flopped over, fished under the bed in his ditty bag. "APC's. I'll sweat it out."
Neither spoke for a while but Stencil was too distraught to hold anything in. "Profane," he said.
"Tell Paola's father. I'm only along for the ride."
Stencil began to pace. Laughed: "Stencil doesn't think he believes him any longer." Profane rolled over laboriously and blinked at him.
"V.'s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century's streets. Porcépic, Mondaugen, Stencil pere, this Maijstral, Stencil fils. Could any of them create a coincidence? Only Providence creates. If the coincidences are real then Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling.
"Stencil came on Father Fairing's name once, apparently by accident. Today he came on it again, by what only could have been design."
"I wonder," said Profane, "if that was the same Father Fairing
. . ."
Stencil froze, the booze jittering in his glass. While Profane, dreamy, went on to tell of his nights with the Alligator Patrol, and how he'd hunted one pinto beast through Fairing's Parish; cornered and killed it in a chamber lit by some frightening radiance.
Carefully Stencil finished the whisky, cleaned out the glass with a handkerchief, set the glass on the table. He put on his overcoat.
"You going out for a doctor," Profane said into the pillow.
"Of sorts," Stencil said.
An hour later he was at Maijstral's.
"Don't wake her," Maijstral said. "Poor child. I'd never seen her cry."
"Nor have you seen Stencil cry," said Stencil, "but you may. Ex-priest. He has a soul possessed by the devil sleeping in his bed."
"Profane?" In an attempt at good humor: "We must get to Father A., he's a frustrated exorcist, always complaining about the lack of excitement."
"Aren't you a frustrated
exorcist?"
Maijstral frowned. "That's another Maijstral."
"She possesses him," Stencil whispered. "V."
"You are as sick."
"Please."
Maijstral opened the window and stepped out on the balcony. Valletta by nightlight looked totally uninhabited. "No," Maijstral said, "you wouldn't get what you wanted. What - if it were your world - would be necessary. One would have to exorcise the city, the island, every ship's crew on that Mediterranean. The continents, the world. Or the western part," as an afterthought. "We are western men."
Stencil shrank at the cold air moving in through the window.
"I'm not a priest. Don't try appealing to someone you've only known in a written confession. We do not walk ganged, Stencil, all our separate selves, like Siamese quintuplets or more. God knows how many Stencils have chased V. about the world."
"Fairing," Stencil croaked, "in whose
Parish Stencil was shot, preceded your Father Avalanche."
"I could have told you. Told you the name."
"But."
"Saw no advantage in making things worse."
Stencil's eyes narrowed. Maijstral turned, caught him looking cagy.
"Yes, yes. Thirteen of us rule the world in secret."
"Stencil went out of his way to bring Profane here. He should have been more careful; he wasn't. Is it really his own extermination he's after?"
Maijstral turned smiling to him. Gestured behind his back at the ramparts of Valletta. "Ask her," he whispered. "Ask the rock."
III
Two days later Maijstral arrived at the lodginghouse to find Profane lying dead drunk and slaunchwise on the bed. Afternoon sun illuminated a swathe of face in which every hair of a week's growth showed up separate and distinct. Profane's mouth was open, he was snoring and drooling and apparently enjoying himself.
Maijstral gave Profane's
forehead the back of his hand: fine. The fever had broken. But where was Stencil? No sooner asked than Maijstral saw the note. A cubist moth, alit forever on the gross heap of Profane's beer belly.
'A shipfitter named Aquilina has intelligence of one Mme. Viola, oneiromancer and hypnotist, who passed through Valletta in 1944. The glass eye went with her. Cassar's girl lied. V. used it for an hypnotic aid. Her destination, Stockholm. As is Stencil's. It will do for the frayed end of another clue. Dispose as you will of Profane. Stencil has no further need for any of you. Sahha.'
Maijstral looked around for booze. Profane had finished everything in the house.
"Swine."
Profane woke. "Wha."
Maijstral read him the note, Profane rolled out of bed and crawled to the window.
"What day is it." After a while: "Paola's gone too?"
"Last night."
"Leaving me. Well. How do you dispose of me."
"Lend you a fiver, to begin
with."
"Lend," roared Profane. "You ought to know better."
"I'll be back," said Maijstral.
That night Profane shaved, bathed, donned suede jacket, levis and big cowboy hat and went a-roving down Kingsway, looking for amusement. He found it in the form of one Brenda Wigglesworth, an American WASP who attended Beaver College and owned she said, 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts, half of which she had brought over to Europe back around June, at the beginning of a Grand Tour which bad then held high promise. High she had remained all the way across the Atlantic; high as the boat deck and mostly on sloe gin fizzes. The various lifeboats of this most underelict passage east were shared by a purser (summer job) from the academic flatlands of Jersey, who gave her an orange and black toy tiger, a pregnancy scare (hers only) and a promise to meet her in Amsterdam, somewhere behind the Five Flies. He'd not come: she came to herself - or at least to the inviolable Puritan she'd show
up as come marriage and the Good Life, someday soon now - in a bar's parking lot near a canal, filled with a hundred black bicycles: her junkyard, her own locust season. Skeletons, carapaces, no matter: her inside too was her outside and on she went, streak-blond, far-from-frail Brenda, along the Rhine, up and down the soft slopes of the wine districts, into the Tyrol and out into Tuscany, all in a rented Morris whose fuel pump clicked random and loud in times of stress; as did her camera, as did her heart.
Valletta was the end of another season and all her friends were long sailed back to the States. She was nearly out of money. Profane couldn't help her. She found him fascinating.
So over sloe gin fizzes for her which took tiny sweet bites out of Maijstral's five-pound note, and beer for Benny, they talked of how it was they had come this far and where they would go after Valletta, and it seemed there were Beaver and the Street for them separately to return to; and both agreed this was nowhere, but
some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere: it is a kind of Talent, and objections to it are rare, but even at that captious.
That night between them they established at least that the world was screwed up. English Marines, Commandos and sailors who came by - going nowhere also - helped them believe it. Profane saw no Scaffold sailors and decided that since some of them must be clean-living enough to stay away from the Gut, the Scaffold too had left. It made him sadder: as if all his homes were temporary and even they, inanimate, still wandering as he: for motion is relative, and hadn't he, now, really stood there still on the sea like a schlemiel Redeemer, while that enormous malingering city and its one livable inner space and one unconnable (therefore hi-value) girl had all slid away from him over a great horizon's curve comprising, from this vantage, at once, at least one century's worth of wavelets?
"Don't be sad."
"Brenda, we're all sad."
"Benny,
we are." She laughed, raucous, having a low tolerance for sloe gin.
They went back to his place and she must have left him sometime during the night, in the dark. Profane was a heavy sleeper. He awoke alone in bed to the sound of forenoon traffic. Maijstral sat on the table, observing a plaid knee sock, the kind worn with Bermuda shorts, which was draped over the electric lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling.
"I have brought wine," said Maijstral.
"Good enough."
They went out to a café for breakfast, about two. "I have no intention of supporting you indefinitely," Maijstral said.
"I should get a job. Any road work in Malta?"
"They are building a grade intersection - an underground tunnel - at Portedes-Bombes. They also need men to plant trees along the roads."
"Road work and sewer work is all I know."
"Sewers? There's a new pumping station going up at Marsa."
"They hire aliens?"
"Possibly."
"Possibly,
then."
That evening Brenda wore paisley shorts and black socks. "I write poetry," she announced. They were at her place, a modest hotel near the great lift.
"Oh," said Profane.
"I am the twentieth century," she read. Profane rolled away and stared at the pattern in the rug.
"I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government; the café-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone; the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the traveling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night."
"That sounds about right," said Profane.
"I don't know." She
made a paper airplane out of the poem and sailed it across the room on strata of her own exhaled smoke. "It's a phony college-girl poem. Things I've read for courses. Does it sound right?"
"Yes."
"You've done so much more. Boys do."
"What?"
"You've had all these fabulous experiences. I wish mine would show me something."
"Why."
"The experience, the experience. Haven't you learned?"
Profane didn't have to think long. "No," he said, "offhand, I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing."
They were quiet for a while. She said: "Let's take a walk."
Later, out in the street, near the sea steps she inexplicably took his hand and began to run. The buildings in this part of Valletta, eleven years after war's end, had not been rebuilt. The street, however, was level and clear. Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in
silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.