"How nice was he?" Hernandez asked.
Margolis could feel his face getting red. He never knew how to answer these guys when they started making fun of him. He took another swig of Coke, desperately hoping to cover his embarrassment.
"Hey, look at Margie's face!" Kirkpatrick said, slapping the table. "I never seen a guy get so red!"
"Matches his hair," Radarman Third Class Reidel observed. Harold Reidel looked like a recruiting poster: surfboard blond, health-club muscular, and as handsome as a teen movie idol. "You must've hit a major nerve, Big-K."
PH2 Margolis was twenty-one years old. He'd joined the Navy the day after he'd graduated from high school; his parents were divorced and life at home with an alcoholic mother was no picnic, The sea had seemed the perfect escape.
But after three and a half years in the Navy, he was ready to call it quits. Six more months, he thought, and I'm out of here, a civilian again and free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I'm free at last!
It wasn't that he disliked the Navy. He'd gotten by okay, on the whole.
Going to photographer's school after boot camp had taught him a trade, and when he got out he wanted to pursue a career as a professional photographer, maybe for a newspaper.
The problem was that Tom Margolis was not exactly the athletic, macho type, not big like Kirkpatrick, not hard-muscled like Reidel. He was intelligent and his speech showed it. He liked to read, he wore glasses, and his pale, freckled skin ― legacy of his hated red hair ― seemed to betray every intense or unpleasant emotion. He stood out in a crowd, especially in a crowd of types like Kirkpatrick and Reidel, and that made his chronic shyness worse.
So he was different from the other sailors of the group he'd fallen in with lately. As for the issue of his being gay, he wasn't… at least as far as he knew. He'd heard that you could be homosexual and not be aware of the fact, but he'd done a lot of pretty heavy petting with Doris in the backseat of her father's car during his senior year in high school, and he was pretty sure he was all right in that department at least.
Gays in the military, especially in the Navy, aboard ship, had remained a controversial issue long after President Clinton had lifted the ban on recruiting them. Margolis had never had much of an opinion one way or the other. He'd heard scuttlebutt that Fire Control Technician Third Class Frank Pellet was gay, but as far as Margolis knew from personal experience, Pellet was just a friendly, bright, and outgoing guy who shared Margolis's love of photography. Pellet had never made a pass at him, never said or done anything to betray his sexual orientation. Margolis had decided early on to ignore the rumors and enjoy the friendship.
And that was when the rumors had started about him.
"I'll tell you, Marge," Hernandez said. "If you are gay and we find out, your ass is grass, you get me?"
"Yeah," Reidel added. "We don't want no fags on this ship."
"Oh, Mama!" Kirkpatrick said, licking his lips. His eyes had strayed across the room to a pair of female enlisted personnel who'd just entered the lounge. One was a rather plain-looking girl who worked in personnel, but the other was a brunette bombshell from Disbursing who filled her too-tight uniform blouse with wondrous, bobbing motion. "You know, guys, it just ain't fuckin' fair. They went and made it legal for queers to join up in this man's Navy. I mean, there they are, right? Sleeping in our compartments. Crowding in with us nuts to butts right there in the shower heads. Well, I'll tell you one thing, and no shit. When they let us shower with the girls on this ship, I'll stop bitching about them letting fags take showers with me! I mean, am I right? It's the same thing, right?"
"Fuckin'-A, Big-K," Hernandez said. "Man, oh, man, lookit that nice ass.
Betcha that looks Grade-A prime in the shower, huh?"
"It'd look better in bed," Jankowski volunteered. "With her legs spread apart like this." He demonstrated, rubbing his crotch suggestively, and the others agreed with moans and laughter.
There had always been gays in the Navy. Always. Until the early nineties, however, they'd kept their presence secret for the most part, for anyone who admitted to being gay was immediately discharged from the service.
Sometimes the discovery ended tragically. In October 1992, a young seaman aboard the U.S.S. Belleau Wood ― a ship with a fleet-wide reputation for being especially rough on gays ― had had his face brutally smashed against a urinal in a restroom in Sasebo, Japan, until he was dead. There had long been dark rumors of other, similar incidents, men reported missing overboard in a storm or AWOL in some foreign port.
Not until the abrupt liberal shift in the government with the Clinton Administration had the official ban on gays finally been lifted. Recruiters were no longer allowed to ask prospective recruits about sexual orientation.
Unfortunately, lifting the ban had not solved the problem. Relatively few gays had come out of the closet, for there was no way to change the embedded prejudice of their shipmates, not overnight. Kirkpatrick's complaint was a common one: If we can't shower with the female sailors, why should gays be allowed to shower with us?
No civilian could imagine the closeness of the quarters, the complete lack of privacy aboard ship. Even aboard a floating city like the Jefferson, with most of her thousand-foot length reserved for her aircraft and the gear and supplies that kept them flying, space was at a premium. When morale was poor, when stress was high, slights, attacks, or harassments, real or imagined, could explode like a magnesium flare in an avgas fuel-storage tank.
More than four years after the ban on gays had been lifted, there were still far too many suspicious "accidents" at sea.
Margolis was scared. As the rumor that he was gay had spread, he'd been getting more and more harassment ― shipmates banging into him in the passageways or the chow line, apparently by accident but hard. Once his sheets had been stolen from his rack. He'd even received a couple of threatening letters telling him to get off the ship or else.
But Margolis had been working on a plan for two weeks now, a way to fight back. He had the necessary equipment. All he needed was some help. And if he managed to pull it off, he'd prove that he was a red-blooded guy just like the rest of them. He'd show them!
"All right, guys," he said. He crushed his Coke can for emphasis, then let the crumpled husk clatter on the tabletop.
"I've got a little scheme going, and you're going to help me. It'll prove to you, once and for all, that I'm no queer."
"Yeah?" Kirkpatrick asked. "How you gonna do that, Marge?"
"Just listen up," Margolis said. He snickered. "You're gonna love this!"
CHAPTER 7
"Come in."
Master Chief Mike Weston, Jefferson's Chief of the Boat, entered Tombstone's small office. "Afternoon, CAG."
"Hi, COB. What can I do for you?"
"Well, this is kind of the way of an informal invitation, if you know what I mean."
"I'm afraid I don't."
"Well, there's gonna be a little, ah, get-together. Fourteen hundred hours, 0–1 deck aft of the hangar bays, across from the paint locker. I know it's kind of unusual, but some of the boys told me they'd be honored if you could come. Unofficial, like."
Tombstone leaned back in his swivel chair, considering Weston's invitation. The big man appeared almost embarrassed, something Tombstone had never seen as long as he'd known him.
He also knew now what this was all about. "My nose is already blue, Master Chief."
"I know, sir. But it'd help morale if you could come. A lot."
"You think so?"