The Coldest Night (9 page)

“Oh,” the man had said, “she seems to be a real good swimmer.”

“Where is she swimming to?” he’d asked.

“One time she made it to the other side, but the current took her several blocks downstream.”

“But she has disappeared,” Henry said.

“Maybe you should tell someone, but I’ve seen her do it before. She’s a real good swimmer. I can’t say, but it seemed like her own idea and you’ve got to ’spect that.”

As they approached the place there was a gathering of people where the woman had entered the water and farther out a trolling boat.

“She’s drowned,” Mercy said.

“I am afraid of that,” he said.

“We can’t do anything about it,” she said. “We should but we can’t.” Her words were her thoughts tumbling from her mind.

Henry took her in his arms, but she pulled free and stood alone. He took her again and held her tightly and when she softened and breathed into his chest he guided her away from the river.

Their days remained as such, released into the hush of indeterminate time, the world poised at the strange edge. There was no clock, no calendar that moored them in the stream of nights that begot days and days that drifted into darkness. It was as if they’d broken time itself and there was only waiting. Waiting for light and darkness, waiting for sunrise and sunset.

Then came the day he convinced her to let him work and send money to Clemmie, because he’d always contributed a share to their existence. Mercy had of late been restless and changeable, plunging into long meditative silences and then for no perceptible reason engaging him again.

“I understand,” she said. “If you must.”

So he took work cleaning an office building just completed and being readied for the occupants. His partner was a Haitian named Paul, a black-skinned man, not tall, but ebullient and, as he did not speak English, made for good company.

When Henry came back after work that first day, Mercy was in bed, crying. She told him that she was having bad thoughts and had decided against any future absence on his part.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Of what?” he asked, taking her feet in his hands and holding them to his chest.

“That one day you won’t come back.” She curled her toes to clutch at his fingers and then released her hold.

“But you know I will,” he said.

“I am afraid they will steal me while you are gone. Don’t you see? He will steal me and lock me up.”

“No,” he said, moving to take her in his arms. “Nobody steals anybody. I will protect you.”

“It’s what he did to my mother.”

He held her tightly in his arms and she let herself be comforted. He told her how much he loved her back and she told him how very much her back was in love with him.

“I have never been loved by a woman’s back,” he said.

“My back has changed since we have been together,” she told him into his chest, and after a time they fell to sleep.

As each of the next few days went by she seemed less and less afraid at his morning departures. At work, he could not convince Paul it was okay to break at midmorning and take another break at noon for lunch, so he’d go down the stairs alone to the park across the street and wouldn’t even be hungry but would sit in the sunlight and watch Paul in the empty windows across the street.

Paul’s whole body would be framed in the big windows as he wetted the glass and stretched out his arms with rags in both hands and washed the windows and it would be as if he were washing the air itself as his hands swam before him. Henry would think of Mercy and wonder what he’d find when he climbed the stairs. She could rock back and forth for hours staring off to nowhere for long periods of time. He wondered sometimes if she’d even be there, or maybe she would be stolen away as she feared. And he missed Clemmie and felt a growing shame for leaving her.

One day at lunchtime, as Henry was occupying his bench, he could see where Paul had moved up a floor. Paul waved down to him and he waved back. Paul wetted the window with cleaning solution, and as if blessing the sky he began his white-handed circling, and then in the easiest way imaginable the window was coming out of the wall and he was coming with it. Four stories down, a tree fractured the diving sheet of glass and his fall broke through the branches and he lay there on the sidewalk like an upturned turtle, feebly waving his arms in the air as more glass rained down on him. His body was broken and blood was oozing from his mouth and the concrete around him sparkled with shards of shattered glass and shreds of green leaves.

For some reason Henry did not cross the street and he did not wait around. It wasn’t such a hard thing to tell when someone is dead or about to be dead. He hurried away and back to the Quarter and climbed the stairs. The stairwell was dark and the lights would not work. He groped blindly through the upper hall and found their door. He dug up the key, let himself in, and locked the door behind him before he struck a match to find a candle.

Henry called out to Mercy, but she did not answer. She was gone and in her place he felt there to be another presence in the dark room, and at first he could not tell who it was and then he could. It was Randall standing in the shadows. He looked at Henry and then hit him over the head with a flat iron. Henry’s vision exploded and blackened and he realized he may have gotten himself killed.

“It is over and you are not forgiven. Not now. Not ever.”

The man’s words seemed to be crossing a great distance on their way to Henry and were thick and slow.

“Jesus God, just don’t hit me again,” he cried. He could feel the cool wet of his own blood beginning to soak his hair.

“I don’t want any of your back sass,” Randall said, and he hit Henry again. Henry’s vision blackened and then a noose dropped over his neck and a hand cinched it tight at his throat and from behind he was dragged onto his knees.

“It pays to be afraid,” another voice said. The man’s breath was hot and sour with tobacco. A stick match flared to light a cigar and then dropped to the floor where it slowly burned out.

“Go away,” the voice said. “Don’t ever come back.”

Then he was alone. He lay on the floor, paralyzed in the shadowed light. His head was burning up with a pain it could not fully embrace and so it vined into his neck and shoulders and down into his chest. So great was the pain, he could not move to the bed. He touched at his head to feel wetness and came away with a slick of blood in his palm and leaking down his wrist.

Inside was a deep song he could not quite hear. Then there was the swashing of the blood in his heart and the hiss of air in his lungs and he knew that he was not dead. He held to the frayed end of the rope draped over his shoulder until he realized he was choking himself. He began to gasp and struggled to loosen the rope and let it drop to the floor.

She was gone and every trace of her. Gone was her black book. He could not peel back the fat rubber bands to open it, to reveal the pages for their codes and drawings, their faint letters, scribblings, and strange words. He could not go inside its pages to find her.

Left to him was the knife and the pistol, his inheritance passed onto him by his mother’s hand. She’d told him they were his and he was to take them with him where he was going.

It was as if a door had opened on hellfire and he had entered. He had the recurring sensation that a belt was ever tightening and loosening about his chest. He could not escape the feeling of entombment and no wish, no words, could change what had happened.

Part II

There on the perilous open

ground of war, in brave

expectancy they lay all night

while many campfires burned. As

when in heaven principle

stars shine out around the moon.

Iliad
8.626–31

Chapter 13

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER 26,
1950, and harbored off the coast of North Korea were seventy-one transports packed with twenty-eight thousand marines waiting for the word to go.

In the early morning when the tide was right, they would climb down the nets into the landing craft, the flat-sided steel boats bucketing in the gray chop. A dirty rain had begun to fall on their shoulders. The air was rank with the smells of salt, paint, grease, tobacco, and sweat. Sky-bound soot and ash and brick dust were being dragged back to the earth and water from hazy suspension.

Some men took chaws out of their mouths and placed them in their caps while others retrieved the chaw they’d been saving and tucked it inside their cheek. Other men were sick and puked on their boots. Men squared their gear again. Men looked inside themselves for reason or meaning, but there was little there to be found. In their minds they dismantled and assembled their weapons again and again. They mouthed the words to prayers, and rosaries came out, the ticking beads entwining fingers grimed with Cosmoline. They cradled the little Jesus in the palm of a hand, whispered cadences, and for a moment Henry envied them their belief and passion. He envied them their pastoral moment for how unplaceable he felt himself to be. He was just seventeen.

Marine Corsairs heaved into view. They came as if phantoms from beyond the orbit of the moon, their inexorable motion of speed, their trailings of sublunar vapors, resizing every second, and suddenly there were vast and terrifying and devouring sound explosions tearing the sky and they disappeared.

Lew Devine took out his spearmint chewing gum, rolled it between his fingers, and stuck it behind his ear. He sucked the phlegm from his nose and spit it out. He patted his stomach and gave Henry a thumbs-up and a skeletal grin, a gold tooth perched in his jaw. His mouth moved:
Won’t be long now
.

Gunny moved among them in an eccentric amble, touching them, addressing them as if they were schoolboys headed off to their first recital. Usually fearsome, in the chaos of the landing he was suddenly patient and caring.

“When you hit the beach do not stop,” he said. “Do not crawl; roll. Do not fire over; fire around. Fire from different positions behind your cover. Move those ammo pouches so you can get closer to the ground if you need to. You defend yourself by attacking.” He paused. “Try not to shoot yourself and do not shoot each other.”

Henry was a hunter and Lew Devine was a hunter. This they shared as marines, but that was all Henry knew of him. Lew Devine was older and did not make friends. He’d fought in the Pacific, bloody Tarawa, Okinawa, the Solomons, where they stood back to back with one imperative: to hold the god damn position or die.

Lew Devine could sit still and quiet longer than any of them. He could slow his breathing and his pulse, and the exhalations of his breath and his heartbeat became almost imperceptible. He chewed gum constantly and there was a roll of white scar tissue where his right eyebrow should have been. Lew had been sick for most of the three weeks at sea as they waited offshore for the minesweepers and the frogmen to do their work. He’d lost fifteen pounds and wore his dungarees gathered at his skinny waist.

Lew uncapped his canteen. He leaned forward, bowed his head, and tipped the drink into his mouth.

“That’s a good drink,” he said to no one in particular.

“Water?” Henry said.

“Yes. Water.”

The stiffness in Henry’s legs began to melt away. Beneath his feet he could feel the vibrations of the mysterious and he felt to have traveled the eternal, circling half the world to reach the point that was this place in his life. For some seconds he thought of his mother, her beauty and grace, and his heart ached for her and he wished he’d been a better son.

When it was their turn to go, one man fell from the nets and went into the water and disappeared under the weight of his gear. He could not be saved. Another man’s leg was crushed when he stepped between the scraping hulls. No sound could be heard coming from him, just the yaw of his open mouth as he screamed in agony, his boot torn away, and the crushed leg of his dungarees ragged and soaked with his blood.

They crossed the treacherous harbor through a luminous mist and behind them was the apex of their widely spreading wake, the beacon lights reflecting on the swimming motes that densed in the wet sky. The lights bore through the thick air so powerfully they crackled in the ruptured atmosphere. Henry half closed his eyes to see better. What wandering current had he entered?

The coxswain’s neck was stiff and bent back on his folded shoulders as he sought their designation for making land. There was a deafening explosion off the starboard and then they were drenched with seawater and debris, human and otherwise. The work of the frogmen and the minesweepers had not been perfect.

The coxswain laid off but then, finding their smoke, veered to starboard and then port. They bucked the white breakers and the dodging tide and then he caught the breakwater and gunned the engine, leaving behind them a muddy guttering wake slick with fuel and the air filled with gouts of black exhaust. At the last instant the coxswain backed off, reversing the engine, and it gnashed as the gears reknit.