Chili Williams life-vest presses into Claude’s burnt back, his paddling feet kick at Claude’s calves, tearing the saturated skin. I did that — Claude is thucthinct through cracked lips — becauth he wath dead. — He-weren’t-dead. Gripping Claude’s scruff, Gorecki shakes out his own words: I-heared-him-talkin’-when-you-was-untyin’-him! Aww, Claude croaks, giveth a fuckin’ retht willya, Gorecki. The kid wath praying — thaying hith latht prayerth. He wath a Catholic thame ath you, and he thought I wath the Chaplain — the Chaplain been by a while back, the kid begun to give up, and the Chaplain went way over there, the kid thaid he couldn’t hold out and he wanted to go out praying. What am I gonna do, Gorecki, refuthe a man hith dying whith? It’s the most Claude has said to Gorecki in the long hours they’ve been spooning . . In your arms I find love so de-lec-ta-ble, dear, I’m afraid it isn’t quite re-spec-ta-ble . . dear . . and he thinks it may be this talkativeness as much as his explanation that pacifies the Polack, who lets go of his hair. Claude’s gaze sweeps over the beaver heads of their companions as his hands smuggle the tapes of the kid’s vest behind his back, fumbling them into a knot that’ll do for now . . — Whatever his other little foibles . . Claude comprehends this crucial fact perfectly welclass="underline" survival is all about everything having to do for now. Survival is a jerry-rigged little raft of flotsam on the ocean wave — and if Gorecki had ridden him harder, Claude could’ve euchred him any number of other ways. He might’ve pulled rank — although he doubts this would’ve worked, given their current communistic situation: officers and enlisted men, swabs and marines, all in it together . . and me the only fly-boy. Or, Claude could’ve fanned out for Gorecki some of the choicer cards he’d picked up censoring the dumb Polack’s mail. — It’d been a strange realisation, this, that seeped into him during the darkest hours of their first night together, when, in fear and trembling, Gorecki spilt the beans on his activities as a cocksman back home in his jerkwater Pennsylvania steel town: double-and triple-timings he felt the need to unburden himself of now, hoping, Claude presumed, that a buoyant conscience might help him stay afloat. Claude didn’t let on he knew all about these peccadilloes already — to say sins would be to. . dignify them — because he’d read Gorecki’s letters to these broads, and, purely for the hell of it, he’d blanked out all the ham-fisted endearments, while scrawling on the one destined for Missus Gorecki, You’re not the only one, you know, before sealing and stamping it kerrr-chunk! you asshole lunk! PASSED BY NAVAL CENSOR. Claude knew that for many another man — in particular a mackerel-snapper such as Gorecki — this crazy coincidence would be further confirmation of God’s existence — the selfsame God who’d perpetrated this ALMIGHTY FUCK-UP on them all. Not Claude — not me. To Claude, Gorecki’s secrets were only more of the flotsam folks left lying round for anybody to make use of who was good with his hands — flotsam such as the Very pistol tucked in Claude’s belt, the malted-milk tablets and the morphine syrettes in his shirt pockets, and the drowned kid’s life-vest he keeps stuck between his thighs — waiting for when Gorecki isn’t looking to make the swap. What Claude can do is sneak out the fourth of the syrettes, nip off the cap with his teeth and stab it into his thigh through his pants leg — not because he’s in pain — how could he be, when he’d only had the third an hour or so ago — but because I can . . and because he can lie painlessly back on Gorecki’s bazoom while. . pain is all around. — A superfluity of pain, seared in the skin, burnt in the flesh and charred in the bones of these sailor-boys. Pain is in the saltwater eating into these wounds, and the sun hammering down on them — most of all, pain is in the vitals of those boys foolish enough to slake their terrible thirst with seawater, who soon enough begin crazily ranting, then puke their guts out, some so violently they turn full somersaults. Pain is in the fists that fly when one of the boys dies and ten others gather round to fight over who should get his life-vest — not that these crummy pieces of shit are worth having once the penetrating seawater has been sopped up by their kapok stuffing. — You might ath well tie a goddamn thponge on. . Gorecki’s arms tighten round his chest, and the Polack grunts, Wozzat? And it’s only then that Claude realises he’s croaked aloud, because pain is in those arms around his chest as well — pain is in the legs that grip his hips too. Pain, Claude concludes, is in all human touch, no matter how gently murmurous, Wiege das Liebchen, In Schlummer ein . . — A lover’s sleepy breath in the hollow of your neck is a raging flamethrower, a mother’s tender caress is the flail of tank tracks, a brother’s helping hand is a bayonet twisted in your guts . . With pain so all-encompassing, surely it’s better to feel this: the warm numbness spreading out from his leg, and repelling not simply current pain but pain. . as yet unborn . . In tiefer Ruh liegt um mich her, Der Waff enbrüder Kreis. The Chaplain, who’d bullied, slapped and punched the shipwrecked men into tying their vests together, had indeed been hearing the kid’s mumbled confession when a sailor on the far side of the circle flipped his wig, firing a service revolver he’d miraculously managed to keep dry. The padre paddled off to deal with this — and Claude let the boy die. It might be kinda funny to tell Gorecki that, yeah, if he wanted to get a fix on it — to read the bottom line — then he might as well know: Claude had killed the dying boy with courtesy. Death had been a sales clerk at Brooks Brothers who helped him out of his life-vest and handed him down into the deep. — Claude had once read an article in the Scientific American about the psychopathic personality. It said the psychopathic killer depersonalises his victim by turning a he or a she into an expendable it about which it’s unnecessary to have any human feeling. Yet Claude knew all there was to about the kid: his name and his mom’s and pop’s names, and his sisters’ and brothers’ names, and where he went to high school, and the names of the boys he’d snuck into vacant houses with to poke through the lumber in their attics. . Picking up an ancient ukulele. . plink-a-plunking a few sad notes. . Hullabaloo-loo, Don’t . . bring . . Lulu! — Or was this all a lie — had it been Claude himself who hung the garbage on Old Man Olsen’s gate, caught frogs in the brook at the back of the overgrown yard, and cried hot tears when he found out that one of the kids he’d played pick-up baseball with. . since we were knee-high had finger-fucked Betty Spiegelman in the back of her brother Ted’s rattletrap Ford. . The winds blowing . . the savage old bitch incessantly crying . . And the strange tears down the cheeks coursing — some drowned fuckin’ secret hissing . . Anyhoo, the point being that if he’d had his druthers he would’ve killed the kid hours before, when it became obvious what a righteous pain in the ass he was . . — Close it up there, man! Willya close it up! The Chaplain’s cry comes to Claude from a long way off, stirring the thick sludge of painlessness he’s lying in. Close it up, man! the Chaplain yells again, and Claude lifts his head from Chili Williams’s chest to see the blackened faces of the shipwrecked sailors