The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (22 page)

That week I asked around and found out her name and where she lived. It wasn’t easy; she didn’t come from our part of town. I took a bus down to South Philadelphia. I hadn’t been there before. I had lived in the same city my whole life and I had never been there. I remember I was surprised at the quiet and the neat row houses. I had imagined trash in the gutters and shifty niggers on the street corners. Sissy answered the door, and I took off my hat when I saw her. She stood looking at me from the other side of the screen, and I held my hat in my hands and said, “I’m Franklin Shepherd. I’m sorry to disturb you but I saw you at the beach in Atlantic City and I wondered … I wondered if we couldn’t go out walking one evening.” I never talked like that, but standing there in front of her, my head emptied and all I could call up were old-fashioned, country things. She smiled and nodded and told me to come back on Friday evening, so I did. I was nineteen then, and Sissy was twenty-two. We married six months later.

I missed the sunset this evening. Night fell while we were surveying the area on the junk. I was drunk and playing cards with Mills and Pinky. One minute it was day and the next, darkness had fallen. I make a point of seeing the sunset. Even if I am on duty down in the bowels of the ship, I go above deck to watch the sky darken into twilight. It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it.

In the briefing they told us there are enemy hideouts all over this island. If I were to walk deep into the trees near the beach, I would find a village. The people that live there would hear me hacking and stumbling through the jungle and by the time I arrived, they would have disappeared into the bush, babies and all. Protocol says we should burn villages we find in enemy territory. But we don’t have to do that; we’re laying mines instead. The enemy will paddle their sampans to the beach or moor their junks or walk out of the jungle. They will step onto the sand with their load of supplies, and the mines will blow them apart. Their eardrums will shatter; their legs will blow off of their torsos. Some will die. Some will be mangled forever.

“Shit!” someone says behind me. I turn and see some of the guys backing away from a hole in the sand. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” someone says. They triggered a mine, but it’s a dud. I don’t want to die like this—a rotting drunk patrolling a beach so far from home it may as well be the moon. I have a daughter in Philadelphia who doesn’t know she needs me. Lucille is made up of all of these things that are like mine—maybe she has my eyes and chin, or maybe she’ll be good with numbers like me—and she doesn’t even know that I am somewhere in this same world with her. She’s still a baby, but when I think about her, I see an older girl, four or five, in a pale green dress. She calls me Daddy, or maybe Pop, and all the work I have to do to prove myself worthy of her is already behind us.

That dark thing a couple of hundred feet out is bobbing. I don’t think it was moving before. I could ask one of the guys to take a look, but they already think I’m crazy, which is why I’m patrolling instead of laying mines. I shine my flashlight on it, but the beam doesn’t make it that far. Is it closer to the shore than it was before? It’s a little darker than the other islands, maybe. Everything out there is just a silhouette, but it’s blacker, I think, than the rest. I walk out into the water until I’m up to my knees. I wish I could remember if I’d seen it during the daylight, if there was an island right there. I heard the enemy have little black submarines with periscopes no wider than a stovepipe. Command put us out here like sitting ducks. That dark thing is bobbing, I’m sure of it now.

Earlier today, after our recon, Mills and Pinky and I stripped off our clothes and ran into the sea. I expected to feel a firm sandy bottom like at the beaches at home. Instead, I slipped on the slimy muck beneath the surface. The water looks so clean, so transparent and warm. I had been looking forward to a swim all afternoon, but the seawater was syrup on my body. The others whooped and dove. I waded out of the water near tears. I wanted the Atlantic. I wanted Chicken Bone Beach—the water always a little too cold, the waves knocking the wind out of you, the granules of sand scratching against your calves when you swim in the shallows.

It is 03:00 hours. A washed-up jellyfish glows on the sand. This whole place feels as though the sea spit it up. I’ve been carrying my response to Sissy’s letter in my pocket. I take out the letter and squat in the sand near the lights my squad set up. I smooth the paper open on the butt of my rifle and write: I would like to hold Lucille and to feel her beating heart and see the soul of her looking out through her eyes. My handwriting is scratchy and uneven; the letter doesn’t look like it was written by a man worthy of fatherhood. What I have written is flowery and insufficient. What I want to say is: let’s try to be a family. What I want to say is: I am here and still alive. Give me another chance to become somebody decent. Sissy doesn’t want to hear all of that again, so instead, I write: I will be furloughed in one month. She likes things to be clear, and my furlough is the only fact I can offer her. The paper is damp from being in my pocket, and I have to press hard with my nub of pencil. I put it back into my pocket.

I don’t mention my life here. There isn’t much I could say that Sissy would understand—the warm beer and the waiting and all of the useless chores we do to fill the time, swabbing the deck or polishing the railings even though they’re not dirty. I used to think the discipline was noble, but now I wonder if the brass understands that people are getting killed. It’s ridiculous, disrespectful even, to keep mopping the same patch of deck when men are dying. Mills says it’s better when you go on missions. Better than what, is my question. I’ve been on plenty of missions and I have begun to feel that I am not quite as human as I was when I came here. I don’t know if I can get it back. I try to hold on to that image of Lucille in her pretty green dress, but I have another vision too, in which, a few years from now, I stand across the street from Lucille’s school. Every day I watch her climb the steps holding Sissy’s hand. She hasn’t ever met me, and I know that’s for the best. Nobody ever thinks he’s going to become of those failed men, old bums that normal people won’t make eye contact with, ashy old men with cirrhosis and matted hair and a room in a flophouse. And nobody ever thinks—I never did before I got Sissy’s letter—that those old men probably have wives and children who have had to forget them.

My squad has almost finished seeding the beach. When it’s done, we’ll get on the junk, finish the job, sail out of here.

When Sissy and I lived on Bevere Street, I used to go to a local bar called Fat’s. It was a nasty little place that stank of spilled beer and Lucky Strikes. Sometimes the southern guys came in to play the spoons—cracked-knuckled, rheumy-eyed old guys with raspy voices. All of the songs were work-gang chants or blues about how a bow-legged woman left them in Alabama. But those old guys would sing, and I felt my heart unzip. I mean it; something in my chest unfastened. I have never felt anything as profoundly as I felt those songs, not love or regret or wonder, not even, until I came to this war, fear. I would have been a musician like Floyd if I had known that part of myself sooner. It’s too late now. I’m always saying that; I wonder what I think there’s still time for.

I used to stay out late, playing cards at Fat’s three or four nights a week. I had a good poker face. The more I drank, the better. When I won a decent amount of money, I would give some to Sissy or buy something for the house. One time I bought us an armchair, paid outright from a furniture store on Greene Street. I had them deliver it to the house while Sissy was visiting her sister, so when she came home, she’d find me sitting in that brand-new chair and grinning. She looked at me and at the chair and said, “I appreciate the thought but not the means.” She never would sit in that chair. Later, after it was gone, she said it stank of liquor that had leaked through my pores; she said the smell of it broke her heart.

It got so there weren’t enough games at Fat’s, and I had to travel all over the city. I played men with wads of twenties in their pockets who would break a bottle and cut you if they didn’t like the fact you’d taken their money. I never got stuck up. Most of those guys liked me all right because I clowned them and could drink them under the table. My hands would be numb with whiskey, but I could always drink one more, and nobody ever carried me out of a bar. Those games lasted until five or six in the morning, until there was nothing left to bet.

One time a guy bet his sister. What the fuck kind of world is this, I thought, but I won that game and took my prize. I didn’t go home to Sissy for days after that. I stayed out playing until the wee hours and then crawled into the prize’s bed. I can’t remember her name. I don’t believe she ever knew mine. She was too drunk to do anything but fall asleep. In the mornings I went back out to drink. There are a lot of bars, more than I would have imagined, that open at eight o’clock in the morning. I went to a few and felt like I was stepping into all of the sadness in the world. After a couple of days I ran out of money, so I borrowed some. I ran out of that too, and I went back to work at the Navy Yard. When I showed up, they said I didn’t have a job anymore. I stayed away from home for two more days because I was too ashamed to face Sissy.

On the sixth day, I crawled home like a roach. Sissy was gone. I was too drunk to do anything about it, so I slept for a long time. I kept waking up to varying stages of daylight: dawn, then midafternoon, then dusk, then midafternoon again. The liquor cleared out of my system, and I sat straight up in bed shaking and thinking of Sissy. My liver hurt, that’s not supposed to happen but it did. I had a liver ache, and the only thing keeping my heart pumping was Sissy and the thought that I could get her back. I cleaned myself up and put on a nice suit. I looked like the guys I played cards with. I saw in my own face the slack-jawed, dull-skinned puffiness that old drunks have. There’s a rabid look that goes with that doughiness; if somebody drops a nickel, those guys will run out in the street to pick it up, like a dog does chasing a scrap.

I splashed on a quarter bottle of cologne and went searching for Sissy at her mother’s house and her sister’s apartment. They looked at me like a piece of filth and wouldn’t tell me where she was. I tracked her down at her friend’s place and went over there the next morning. It was cold, but she was sitting out on the stoop in her coat. She saw me before I saw her. She cursed me and all my ways. She cursed my mother for bringing me into this world, and my sisters for doting on me, and every bar in the city for serving me a drink.

“Doesn’t anything matter to you?” she asked.

I got down on my knees. It wasn’t an act to win her back; I would have laid on the ground in front of her if there had been room on the stoop. I told her I loved her and that I’d do better and all of the other things men say when they don’t deserve forgiveness. I meant every word, but she shouldn’t have taken me back. You can’t let somebody like me off so easy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not like I don’t know I’m doing wrong or like I’m powerless to stop myself. I just do what I’m going to do, despite what it’ll cost me. After, I’m truly sorry. I regret almost everything I’ve ever done, but I don’t suppose that makes any difference.

Sissy’s father was a gambler and a drunk. She wasn’t innocent of my faults. I got a job unloading trucks at a department store and I took her my earnings. I told her to put it aside for the house, for when she came home. I didn’t touch a drop or play a single hand. It took two months for her to agree to try again.

The day Sissy came home I bought a broom and mop so I could scour the house with new, clean things. I didn’t want her to have to cook, so I went around to Wayne Street for a batch of fried chicken and some collards. Mother knew Sissy liked gizzards, so she fried some of those too—though she hardly spoke to me. She had saved four thousand toward a house she wanted to buy, four thousand dollars from taking in laundry and working part-time in the high school kitchen. I was to contribute another thousand. I had to badger her into accepting it. She said it was shaming to take money from her children, but she really wanted that house so she finally agreed. Well, she and I both knew what had happened to that money. When I got to Wayne Street, I was too embarrassed to bring it up to her; though evidently, I wasn’t too embarrassed to take her chicken.

I laid the table for Sissy and me. She walked into the apartment tentatively, like you would step onto a sheet of ice if you weren’t sure it would hold your weight. She looked at the food and said, “I guess you’ve been around to your mother’s.” She went into the bedroom and sniffed the sheets. In the living room, she moved an end table and straightened out the doily on the back of the sofa. The food got cold while she walked through the house rearranging things.

“I like to keep the cooking oil in this cabinet next to the stove,” she said.

And, shaking an empty box, “How’d you make out with no sugar? You must have been getting your morning coffee at the diner.”

Then, “I don’t want any liquor in the house.”

She unpacked her suitcase and hung her clothes in the closet. What a relief it was to see her dresses hanging next to my suits. She put a little bar of blue soap in the dish next to the tub and ran her fingers over a dark line of mildew in the tile grouting.

“I can get that out with some lye.”

After she pulled on her slippers, she said, “I guess we ought to eat your mother’s supper.”

We ate in near silence, like a rich couple in a movie. I reached for her hand, and she flinched, so I waited a few minutes, then tried again. A crease in her brow looked as though it had deepened, and I noticed that she had put on rouge and lipstick. I didn’t like that. I wanted us to be husband and wife again with no pretenses between us, nothing for show. She hadn’t worn makeup since we were dating, and it made me feel like a man she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. I wanted her to walk around in her slip like she used to, with her hair in pin curls tied up with a silk scarf.