“Drag ass, Bud … and make it count!”
His round young head was sweating inside the steel helmet, his freckled breast was heaving. I squeezed her hand — be brave, be brave — but Cassandra was only a silvery blue Madonna in the desert, only a woman dressed in the outlandish ill-fitting pea jacket of an anonymous sailor and in a worn frock belonging to tea tray, flowers and some forgotten summer house covered with vines. And in her hand there was no response, nothing. And yet her green eyes were searching him and waiting.
Then he leaned forward, eyes slowly sinking out of focus, tears bright on his cheeks, moon-face growing rounder and rounder under its rim of steel, and caught her behind the neck with a rough childish hand and drove his round and running and fluted mouth against the pale line of her lips. And sucked once, gulped once, gave her one chubby kiss, backed away step by step until suddenly Pinocchio made a wrenching clawlike gesture and threw him aside.
And Pinocchio’s kiss: foam, foam, foam! On Cassandra’s lips. Down the front of her frock. Snuffling action of the Brooklyn nose. But he couldn’t fool Skipper, couldn’t fool old Papa Cue Ball. So I squeezed again — brave? brave, Cassandra? — and felt what I thought was a tremor of irritation, small sign of impatience in her cold hand.
And then the third and last, the tallest, and the helmet tilting rakishly, the lips pulsing over the front teeth in silent appeal, the bare arm sliding inside the pea jacket and around her waist, and now the cumbersome jacket beginning to fall, to fall away, and now Cassandra’s head beginning to yield, it seemed to me, as I felt her little hand leave mine and saw her returning his kiss-white shoe slightly raised behind her, pale mouth touching, asking some question of the slick black fingernail of hair on his upper lip — and saw my Cassandra raise a finger to his naked underdeveloped chest and heard her, distinctly heard her, whispering into all the shadowed cavities of that thin grisly chest: “Give me your gun, please,” hanging her head, whispering, finger tracing meditative circles through the hair on his chest, “please show me how to work your gun. …”
But he was gone. All three were gone. They had whirled each to his hole, had flung in boots, carbines, helmets and fatigues, and had refilled the holes. Done with their separate burials they had fled from us in the direction of the unsuspecting sailors and the, waiting bus, had run off with their stolen kisses and their crafty plans for travel. At the bus they used judo and guerrilla tactics on the bosun’s mate, the moaning sailor and the noxious driver, and dressed like sailors they lost themselves in a busload of young sailors.
I turned and held out my free arm: “Cassandra, Cassandra!” I beckoned her with my fingers, with my whole curving arm, beckoned and wanted to tell her what a bad brush we had had with them, and that they were gone and we were safe at last. And she must have read my smile and my thoughts, I think, because she drew the pea jacket into place once more, thrust her hands carefully into the pockets, glanced soberly across the waste of the desert. And then she looked at me and slowly, calmly, whispered, “Nobody wants to kiss you, Skipper.”
From that time forward our driver was dead white and licked a little patch of untweezered mustache all the while he drove. And so we recommenced our non-stop journey, rode with a fine strong tail wind until at last we reached our midnight (Eastern War Time) destination, found ourselves at last on the fourteenth floor of another cheap hotel. Here we stayed two days. Here I lived through my final shore patrol. And here I found Fernandez in this wartime capital of the world.
Be brave! Be brave!
The Artificial Inseminator
And now? And now?
And now the wind and the hammock which I so rarely use. For it is time now to recall that sad little prophetic passage from my schoolboy’s copybook with its boyish valor and its antiquity, and to admit that the task of memory has only brightened these few brave words, and to confess that even before my father’s suicide and my mother’s death I always knew myself destined for this particular journey, always knew this speech to be the one I would deliver from an empty promontory or in an empty grove and to no audience, since of course history is a dream already dreamt and destroyed. But now the passage, the speech with its boyish cadences, flavor of morality, its soberness and trust. Here it is, the declaration of faith which I say aloud to myself when I pause and prop my feet on the window sill where the hummingbird is destroying his little body and heart and eye among the bright vines and sticky flowers and leaves: I have soon to journey to a lonely island in a distant part of my kingdom. But I shall return before the winter storms begin. Prince Paris, I leave my wife, Helen, in your care. Guard her well. See that no harm befalls her. My confession? My declaration of heart and faith? “I have soon to journey to a lonely island…guard her well. …” Monstrous small voice. Rhetorical gem. And yet it is the sum of my naked history, this statement by a man of fancy, this impassioned statement of a man of courage. I might have known from the copybook what I was destined for.
Because here, now, the wind is a bundle of invisible snakes and the hammock, when empty, is a tangled net-like affair of white hemp always filled with fresh-cut buds, only the buds, of moist and waxen flowers. Because it is time to say that it is Catalina Kate who keeps the hammock filled with flowers for me, who keeps it a swaying bright bed of petals just for me, and that Catalina Kate is fully aware that there must be no thorns among the flowers in the hammock.
But the wind, this bundle of invisible snakes, roars across our wandering island — it is a wandering island, of course, unlocated in space and quite out of time — and seems to heap the shoulders with an armlike weight, to coil about my naked legs and pulse and cool and caress the flesh with an unpredictable weight and consistency, tension, of its own. These snakes that fly in the wind are as large around as tree trunks; but pliant, as everlastingly pliant, as the serpents that crowd my dreams. So the wind nests itself and bundles itself across this island, buffets the body with wedges of invisible but still sensual configurations. It drives, drives, and even when it drops down, fades, dies, it continues its gentle rubbing against the skin. Here the wind is both hotter and colder than that wind Cassandra and I experienced on our ill-fated trip across the southwestern wartime desert of the United States, hotter and colder and more persistent, more soft or more strong and indecent, in its touch. Cassandra is gone but I am wrapped in wind, walk always — from the hips, from the hips— through the thick entangled currents of this serpentine wind.
Now I have Catalina Kate instead. And this — Sonny and I both agree — this is love. Here I have only to drop my trousers-no shirt, no undershirt, no shorts — to awaken paradise itself, awaken it with the sympathetic sound of Catalina Kate’s soft laughter. And it makes no difference at all. Because I am seven years away from Miranda, seven years from that first island — black, wet, snow-swept in a deep relentless sea — and seven years from Cassandra’s death and, thanks to the wind, the gold, the women and Sonny and my new profession, am more in love than ever. Until now the cemetery has been my battleground. But no more. Perhaps even my father, the dead mortician, would be proud of me.
No shirt, no undershirt, no shorts. And from my uniform only the cap remains, and it is crushed and frayed and the eagle is tarnished and the white cloth of the crown has faded away to yellow like the timeworn silk of a bridal gown. But it is still my naval cap, despite the cracks and mildew in the visor and the cockroaches that I find hiding in the sweatband. Still my cap. And I am still in possession of my tennis shoes, my old white sneakers with the rubber soles worn thin and without laces. Some days I walk very far in them. In the wind and on the business of my new profession.