I remembered a place I'd wandered into where everybody was looking at something I couldn't see. The way they were looking and a smell in the place got me hot and Jimmy looking at me like that, I was getting a hard-on now so I sat down to hide it and lit a cigarette.
Jimmy starts filling me in on the officers. He always knew who was what aboard ship. "The Old Man's a real asshole and you can't smear it on too thick—tell him you want to be buried right in the same coffin with him when you die. Anyhoo, I think we're getting a new C.O. You see, this is a kook project with simulated space conditions and the old C.O. can't adjust. So they have called in someone called Krup von Nordenholz, a Nazi war criminal, I hear, but a space expert. So forget about the old C.O. Never butter a man on the way out or you can slip right out with him. Like to bunk with me? Just one other kid in the room, Jim Lewis. You'll like him and he'll like you, too...."
The investiture of the new C.O. was not unopposed and a period of chaos followed.
Stepping into the hall, I saw three naked boys swabbing the corridor, wriggling their asses and goosing each other. The old C.O., with the master-at-arms, bustles round a corner.
"This is disgraceful! Arrest these men!"
"Are we going to be popped, Commander?"
"Bare-ass in front of all our mates?"
"These men are obviously deranged. Call the medics. Reefer madness most likely. If it's dope they are to be transferred to the prison ward."
The doctor minces in. "Hello there, young guys. Come along for an examination."
"Who's that?"
"That's the new doctor."
"Well, I don't like the look of him."
"He's supposed to be an expert on space medicine."
"So what?"
"So long as I'm C.O. this is Naval Station 123 Communications."
Back in his cabin, the C.O. found a full-length naked effigy of himself dangling with a hard-on from a lantern hook in the ceiling. Then a powder charge went off in its nuts and a roll of paper popped out the cock in a puff of smoke. The paper landed on his desk and unrolled: his resignation just waiting for his signature.
The resignation of the old C.O. after a nervous breakdown did not end the conflict. The old navy was still in occupation. But Krup was winning. Smoothly Krup moved in his Hitler Jungen boys, one looking just like another, all with rosy cheeks and yellow hair. These boys were clean, efficient, exemplary sailors and the old navy could find no fault with them. And Krup removed the off limits on Tamaghis. This made him popular with the men. All the swishes in camouflage openly wore Krup buttons: Billy Budd with a rope around his neck saying, "God Bless Captain Krup."
And the croaker was a Krup man. He served on a Krup metal junk runner when the crew broke into the cargo and got hooked on M.J. Krup found it out and cut them off cold. "This is not a charitable institution," he told the ward full of M.J. addicts shitting, screaming, puking, ejaculating phosphorescent sperm. "I leave you in good hands."
Anyone reporting sick to that croaker walked out a Krup man or he went out feet-first. And the fence sitters, seeing the way the navies were crumbling, began coming over to Krup, and since many of these were the technical sergeants, that just about sewed it up as a Krup shop.
Then one night, the Krup men in every dorm got up before dawn and took down all the pinup girls. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light forty-eight naked boys fucking, sucking, rimming on a red, white, and blue gallows and some awful Nordic shit Krup laps up like a cat, the boy singing his swan song in a mountain lake full of swans who convoy him reverently to the gallows. You don't have to be a space expert, just a tech sergeant, to see the old navy game in operation—how one faction gets another out to slide in their own boys.
Morning sun on morning hard-ons as the tars climb out of their bunks and stare at the walls.
"Where's my sexpot?" a boy moans stolidly.
"I can't stand these kids on my walls."
"They're not your walls any longer."
"Hans, Rudi, Heinrich, Willi—herein!"
Come in with Krup or else. A Krup takeover of the crew and the ship, or so it seemed. He changed his the name of the ship from The Enterprise to The Billy Celeste, after a nineteenth-century English man-of-war. Now all Krup had to worry about were his own men, who had used him to get rid of the old C.O., and the old navy with its loathsome pinups and pro stations.
But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We'd seen this character operate, how smoothly he'd hoaxed us into his hanging universe... Tamaghis ... the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have these deactivated Sirens just give you the sex trill.
The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-know ties.
"Might pop myself a month's pay tonight."
"More likely you'll swing the other way."
The heavy-handed kidding—it's all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise—he's from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror....
"Look at the dong on that kid," says the boy from East Texas.
The kraut kids hardly ever go ashore, because they like to save money. Off duty they loll around in their bunks jacking off and making airplane noises.
The sky is thin as
paper here
Waring's house still stands. Only the hinges have rusted away in the sea air so all the doors are open. In a corner of the studio I find a scroll about five feet wide wrapped in heavy brown paper on which is written "For Noah." There is a wooden rod attached to one end of the scroll and on the wall two brass sockets designed to receive it. Standing on tiptoe I fit the rod into the sockets and a picture unrolls. Click. I remember what Waring told me about the Old Man of the Mountain and the magic garden that awaited his assassins after their missions of death had been carried out. As I study the picture I see an island in the sky, green as the heart of an emerald, glittering with dew as waterfalls whip tattered banners of rainbow around it. The shores are screened with thin poplars and cypress and now I can see other islands stretching away into the distance like the cloud cities of the Odor Eaters, which vanish in rain ... the garden is fading ... rusty barges and derricks and cement mixers ... a blue river ... red brick buildings ... dinner by the river. On the edge of the market, tin ware clattering in a cold spring wind. When I reach the house the roof has fallen in, rubble and sand on the floor, weeds and vines growing through ... it must be centuries.... Only the stairs remain going up into the blue sky. Sharp and clear as if seen through a telescope, a boy in white workpants, black jacket and black cap walking up a cracked street, ruined houses ahead. On the back of his jacket is the word DINK in white thread. He stops, sitting on a stone wall to eat a sandwich from his lunch box and drink some orange liquid from a paper container. He is dangling his legs over a dry streambed. He stands up in the weak sunlight and urinates into the streambed, shaking a few drops off his penis like raindrops on some purple plant. He buttons his pants and walks on.
Dead leaves falling as we drive out to the farmhouse in the buckboard ... loft of the old barn, jagged slashes of blue sky where the boards have curled apart ... tattered banners of rain ... violet twilight yellow-gray around the edges blowing away in the wind.
He is sitting there with me, cloud shadows moving across his face, ghostly smell of flowers and damp earth ... florist shop by the vacant lot ... dim dead boy.... The sky is thin as paper here.