Dogfight (9 page)

Gerald laughed a little, which got Wishbone started again too. It took a minute for him to get himself back under control. “You leave him?” he said, finally.

“Naw,” Gerald said. “I stuck around a while. Guess I'm dumb as he was.”

“Shit, Gerald,” Wishbone said. “The Nam.”

“It wasn't all bad,” Gerald said. “Saw my first live monkey in Vietnam.”

They stared quietly at the ceiling for a moment. The sun cast a spotlight beam that fell just short of where they lay, and I could see my shadow in the dusty light. I could feel the blood behind my eyes, could smell all those dead fish that had been there before us. I had been thinking about crashing angrily into the hold, doing an impersonation of my uncle, shouting, “Heads are gonna roll around here,” and watching them scramble to their feet in panic, but I decided against it. I was already late with Wishbone's cigarettes. I stood and tiptoed away from the hatch. Then, I approached again, saying, “I'm back, fellas. Sorry it took so long,” unnecessarily loud, making extra noise, the way you clomp around when coming home to a dark, empty house to give the burglars or ghosts or whatever time to clear out.

When I got home, finally, I walked around the side of the house to the pool, stripping as I went. My sister was stretched on a lounge chair in her American flag bikini, one knee up, and a boy her age was lying on his side on a second chair, watching her, two sweating glasses of Coke on the table between them. I must have been a strange sight in my boxer shorts, my body pale from hours below deck, forearms and face smeared with sweat and grime, like an actor in blackface only partly painted. They looked up when I passed, and Virginia started to say something, but I didn't give her a chance. I plunged into the clear water, cutting off the sound of her, and let myself glide, rubbing dirt from my arms and cheeks as I went, leaving a distinct, muddy trail in the water, like a jet stream. I floated to the surface in the deep end and hovered there, belly down like a drowned man, until I had to take a breath. The water was pure, cold energy on my skin.

“Mom's gonna kill you for not washing first,” Virginia said.

“Mom's not gonna find out, is she.” I paddled to the shallow end and stood looking her in the eyes. The pool was chest deep at this end, and my body felt almost weightless in the water.

“She might.”

“She won't,” I said.

I turned from her, convinced my point had been made. From the pool, our backyard sloped over a neatly cut acre to the sixteenth hole of a golf course. Marking the border between the two was a hedgerow of holly, red berries among the leaves like Christmas decorations. When we were kids, Virginia and I would hide beneath the diving board, submerged to the nostrils like alligators, and wait until a golf ball was shanked into our yard, then we'd swoop down on it and retreat to the pool. We didn't use the balls. They collected like fish tank gravel on the bottom of the pool. We just liked the thrilling mischief of the thing. Now, I could see natty golfers in the fading light and just barely, I could hear the sound of their club faces whisking through the grass, like whispered secrets.

“I'm Art.” The boy with my sister was as tan as she was and his hair had been bleached almost white from days in the sun. “You must be the brother.”

“You getting laid, Art?” I said without looking at him.

“There's an idea,” he said. Virginia socked him in the arm and he winced. He was wearing floral print jams and a bulky diver's watch, one of those that's pressure tested to something ridiculous like six thousand feet.

Virginia said, “That's it. I'm getting Mom.”

She stood and padded across the deck toward the sliding doors. I said, “That's a mistake, Virginia,” but she kept walking, skipping a little over the hot pavement. She snapped her bikini bottom into place with two fingers as she went. “Bitch,” I said. “Dyke, cunt, whore.”

“Whoa now,” Art said. “You shouldn't talk to your sister like that.”

I climbed the four concrete steps from the pool. My body
felt huge and slick and dangerous. It would do whatever I wanted. I walked over to Art, and he stood to meet me. We were almost the same height, and our bodies made a stark contrast, his browned and indolently soft, mine white like hard marble. I leaned into him, our faces inches apart, and gave him an evil wink. “Don't fuck with me, Art,” I said. “Just don't.” We looked at each other a moment longer before he sidestepped me and followed Virginia into the house.

My sister had a remarkable propensity for never appearing sleep-worn. I didn't know what went on in that bathroom of hers before the lights went out, but she woke each morning in mint condition, emerging from bed as fresh as she went in, no puffy eyes, no crust around the mouth, not a hair mashed out of place by the pillow. She said it was because she never dreamed. But one night, not long after my meeting with Art, I was startled from sleep by something and jerked awake, heart fluttering, thinking I'm late for work, the house is on fire, whatever, to find my sister standing at the window in my room looking out.

“Jesus Christ, Virginia, you scared me shitless,” I said. I rolled over to look at the clock. Five-thirty. The night crew at the yard would be getting off any minute. “Get the fuck outta here. I've got an hour left to sleep.”

Virginia didn't answer right away. She was wearing her white knee-length nightgown and the light coming through the window made her shape a silhouette beneath the fabric. Her hair was smooth and perfect on her shoulders. My room faced the golf course and I could see morning mist just above the ground.

“What the fuck, Virginia?” I said.

She turned toward me and I knew that she was asleep. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, her fingers curled up a touch. Her eyes were open but as distant as the moon. The world was pulling itself together outside. Sprinklers ticked sleepily on the golf course, the garbage truck ground its way down the street. I pictured Wishbone and Gerald, right then, finishing the first leg of a double shift, coming
up from below deck, oiled with sweat, blinking at the dim morning like coal miners.

“Eighty feet,” Virginia said.

“What?”

“It has to be eighty feet.” Her voice was hushed but firm.

“Okay, Vee, no problem. Eighty feet.” I got out of bed and put my hands on her warm shoulders and piloted her back down the hall to her room. She didn't resist and climbed into her bed, a four-poster with an embroidered canopy, when I showed it to her. I couldn't fall back asleep after that. I wondered what my sister was building in her dreams.

Gerald's monkey was on its way. Wishbone had contacted the Jap and the wheels of black market commerce were turning as we spoke. I didn't know whether or not to believe him. It was true that the repairs on the
Kaga
were nearly finished and her crew was filtering back into town, so he could have been in touch with his connection, but I had trouble seeing how a drug dealer from Japan was going to get his hands on a monkey from Brazil. For Gerald's sake, I remained skeptical.

“Wishbone, where's your guy gonna come by this monkey?” I said.

We had finished welding two new plates into the deck and had one more to burn out and replace. The seams from the new plates ran along the floor like tiny, steel molehills. We were kneeling around three sides of a square, burning along white lines drawn in chalk, the heat between us enough to burn the hair from your arms without protection. I could feel the heat pressing against my clothes, could feel it on my tongue when I took a breath.

“What
is
that sound? It's almost like a woman,” Wishbone said. “You hear something, Gerald?”

Gerald chuckled beneath his mask. Boot steps echoed above us.

“All I'm saying is, according to Gerald's book, spider monkeys live in Central and South America.” The metal beneath the tip of my
flame bent and glowed molten orange. “Your guy's not going anywhere near South America.”

Wishbone shut down his burner and waved at Gerald to do the same. Gerald and I screwed down the nozzles that controlled the gas, reducing the flames to tiny blue pinpoints. Wishbone lifted his mask and breathed in deeply through his nose.

“Listen here, little man, I don't ask questions.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I tell the Jap what I want, and he gets it. Simple as that. Like magic. That's why they call me Wishbone. You trying to discourage Gerald? Make him think his wish won't come true?”

At that, my skin prickled. I glanced at Gerald. His mask was still down, the bar of window over his eyes blurred by the heat, but I could tell he was watching us. We were directly beneath the hatch and I could see a block of clear sky above the ship. “Of course not,” I said. “I just don't want him to get his hopes up unnecessarily.”

“So you think Gerald can't work it out for himself, that it?” Wishbone said. “He's just some dumb nigger got to be looked after.”

“Fuck you, Wishbone.”

Wishbone leaned back on his elbows, his temples and neck tracked with sweat. He smiled, then, all the anger in his face suddenly gone, his features smooth with pure delight. That smile was the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen.

“You hear that, Gerald?” he said. “Nephew's pissed.”

“Leave the boy alone, Wishbone,” Gerald said, snuffing the flame on his torch and raising his mask. He looked tired. “You know he don't mean no harm.”

Wishbone cocked his head and examined me a moment longer, still smiling that amused, unnerving smile. “What Gerald wants, Gerald gets,” he said. He fished in his pocket and brought out his cigarettes. He shook the last three from the pack, snapped two of them at the filter, crumbling the grains of tobacco between his fingers and situated the remaining one between his lips. He said, “What do you think I want?”

For an instant, I thought about saying no, thought about telling
Wishbone to go fuck himself, but I didn't. Something in me resisted the impulse. I don't know whether it was guilt over what Wishbone had said about Gerald or just plain fear or something else entirely, but I dropped my mask and shed my smock and gloves and made my deliberate way up the ladder and into the air.

Outside, the sun was lolling above the crooked tops of the cranes. It was a perfect day for sunbathing. I wondered if Virginia remembered her sleepwalking, remembered the dimensions that troubled her dreams. I walked over to the supply wagon, waving occasionally at one man or another who acknowledged my passing. I knew their faces but rarely did I know their names. Everyone knew me, though. The boss's nephew. The guy that ran the supply wagon saw me coming and had a pack of Winston Reds waiting for me when I arrived.

He smiled and shook his head and said, “Wishbone's daily bread.” I forked over the two bucks, thanked him. I turned to retrace my steps across the yard. Right then, the ground rocked and I had to grab the counter for balance. The tremor didn't seem connected to anything, seemed to come from the earth itself, scatter shot and violent, but I saw the source when I turned. For a second, less than a second, I could see the thing, a thick twisting chord of flame, growing up out of the
Kaga
like a vine.

Then it was gone, and I was running hard for the ship, dodging through the wedge of bodies that rushed down the gangplank and away from the explosion. I found Wishbone on deck, four men pinning his arms and legs, telling him, “Lie still, Bone. It's gonna be all right. Don't move.” His eyes were squinched tight against the pain, his mouth wide open, his lips chapped looking, but he wasn't screaming. He was naked, his clothes disintegrated by the fire, and his skin was raw and crinkly all over, like the edges of burned paper. Several men were jetting fire extinguishers into the hold, white vapor billowing back, but the fire was already out. That sort of flame was a supernova, here and gone in a flash.

I caught one of the men by his shirtsleeve. “Where's Gerald?” I
said. “Let me down there. Gerald's down there. Shut that thing off so we can see him.”

He dropped the extinguisher and grabbed my arms.

“You don't wanna see him, son. Believe me.”

I let him lead me away from the crowd and sit me down on a spool of heavy cable. My uncle had arrived on the scene by then, and he came over to where I was sitting. “You're okay, Ford?” he said. “What happened? Jesus Christ, your mother would've slit my throat if you'd been down there.” He leaned close to me with his idea of a kind expression on his face.

“Gerald wants a monkey,” I said.

“Of course he does,” my uncle said. “You bet, pal.”

My uncle drove me home early from work and dropped me at the front steps. I don't think he was ready to face my mother. I didn't tell anyone at home what had happened, just blew right past them, headed down the hall to Virginia's bed. I climbed in, unwashed, and jerked the covers to my chin. I had this crazy idea that my dreams would be safer there. Virginia came in eventually and said, “What the fuck do you think you're doing?” I didn't answer. Without opening my eyes, I slipped one hand free of the covers and gave her the finger and for some reason, that was enough. I could feel her standing there quietly for a minute or two, watching me. After a while, she said, “You look like a little kid,” then she closed the door behind her and left me alone.

To hear Wishbone tell it, Gerald was the smoker. Pack a day at least, must've warned him a hundred times not to smoke around welding lines but he wouldn't listen. Gerald was an old-timer, set in his awful ways. I stood against the wall of my uncle's office a week or so after the accident and waited my turn to speak. My mother was beside me, her hand lightly at my elbow. To my surprise, I felt no anger at Wishbone's lying. The skin on his face was still whitish-pink in places, his sleeves were buttoned to the wrist, covering his scalded
arms, and he wore a newborn's light blue knit cap to protect his tender skull. His hands trembled and his eyes were rheumy, his vision blurred, he said, since the accident. He looked weak, vulnerable, afraid, squinting across the conference table at my uncle and the men from the insurance company. I felt sorry for him. I wanted to know what made him think I wouldn't expose him. All the shit he gave me. Maybe he thought I was afraid because he was black or that I was ashamed of being white when he wasn't. Maybe he thought his cigarette run had saved my life and I ought to be grateful, despite everything. But what I wanted to know more than anything was how he survived and Gerald didn't, because for an instant, the amount of time it took to burn away the flammable air, that hold was pure, white conflagration, molten gas, like the center of the sun. Nothing could have lived in there. But here was Wishbone telling these lies right in front of me, burned but alive, breathing in and out like the rest of us when he should have been dead. After things had settled down on the deck that day, I walked over to the hatch and looked in. Two policemen and some emergency personnel were milling around a lumped sheet of blue tarp covering what must've been Gerald's body. It's funny but the stink of all those rotting fish, that death smell, it was gone.