polka dots . . on the. . bazoom of a wave. Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de muff-tash on he face . . They’d all been dunked in the thousands of gallons of fuel oil spewed from the ship’s ruptured tanks — then, yesterday, when the sun came up, as if they weren’t turpentine niggers already, they’d deliberately rubbed more on their faces to protect themselves from the tropical sun. Some had tied strips torn from their clothing around their eyes so that blindfolded they faced the fusillade of radiation. Now all that could be done was to. . throw de tar babies in de coal hole, throw de massa in dere too . . Did Claude really want to embrace the blackened thing that labours towards him, trailing behind it so many more the same, all of them. . turned uppity by disaster? Not. He thinks, I would prefer not to — I’d rather stay away from work for the next few days. . or years. — Fat chance of that! The Old Man does a trick with his hands — taking Claude’s arm in a friendly Bing ’n’ Bob kinduva way, then pinching puppy fat in his pianist’s fingers. . He gets me every time. And every time Martin Evenrude says the same thing: Feel that, kiddo, a span of a twelfth — so sing out, kiddo, sing out after me, Wie sich die Welle, An Welle reiht. . that means, As wave follows wave, so c’mon, sing it! So Claude does sing out — and, as the Old Man had prophesied on all those walks back uptown from Carnegie Hall, he’s never forgotten them: Fließen die Tränen, Mir ewig erneut . . which is also prophetic, because on and on Claude’s tears. . do flow. — In the Recital Hall Pop seethed at the bohunk philistines who destroyed his listening pleasure with their papery rattles and moist coughs. He never seemed to see any connection between his own often quite outrageous public behaviour and anyone else’s, nor did he ever see the need to mute his vulgarities — the drooly ten-cent cigar, his snap-brim hat with the Aztec band — or to harmonise them with his otherwise studious aestheticism. — As they prowl into the Park, Martin Evenrude stabs at the skyline with his cigar, snarling, Tin-can architecture, Claude, for a tin-pot town. . The horses rise and fall on the merry-go-round, curvetting waves of cream and scarlet paint frothing with gilt. Tipping his hat back on his big head, and seemingly choosing to ignore the wild incongruity of the coconut palms springing up along the terrace behind the boating pond, Martin says, We’ll take the long way back, son. We’ve sat in the great man’s hall, so let’s go by his mansion at 91st and Fifth — that way we can stretch our legs, put some of de ol’ jelly-roll in ’em. . — Claude wants to say, I can’t, Pop, I’m only here to echelon in this cargo from Midway — I gotta take these down to Tinian Town and get them mimeoed at 20th Air Force Forward HQ —. But when he reaches in his coat pocket for the way-bills, they aren’t there. Besides, his father is insistent, pinch-pulling him on at a steady clip as he complains about the sheeny swish Lozenge — which is the joke name he’s given the singer of the Schwanengesang: That Lozenge, Claude, why he’s a heldentenor — the Met brung him over to sing Tristan, he’s got the wrong voice entirely for Lieder! — Pop’s two-tones kick up white dust puffs from the crushed coral and quahog roadway, his cigar smoulders in his mottled baloney face. His father, Claude imagines, must’ve once been a handsome fellow, with a strong jaw, a neat dimpled chin, a sharp-shooting nose and clear blue eyes. . but not any more: thick slices of fat are piled on his plate, and he can’t see for the slaw in his eyes — or else he’d notice the Quonsets that’ve grown up among the Park’s stately elms and flowering dogwoods, he’d spot the kinking lizards, and he’d react to the naked men who’re lounging about offering up their jungle-rotted crotches to the healing rays of the sun. Moreover, if he were paying any attention, surely Pop, with his pawshaw for a drop of the ol’ aquavit . . would spy the group gathered round a drum of aviation fuel who’re taking turns at holding an air-compressor hose under its slubbling surface. Good logistics man that Claude is, he’s estimated the cost of this cooling method to be seventy-five bucks a can — on the steep side, certainly, but cheaper than persuading a transport pilot to take a case up to twenty thousand feet in his C47, then back down again, fast, which is what Colonel Midgely’s staff on Guam do —. Woe to the fugitive! Martin Evenrude breaks in, and his son obediently translates: Wehe dem Fliehenden . . Who sets out into the world. . Welt hinaus ziehenden! Who roams foreign parts. . But are these foreign parts? Claude wonders, looking over to where the grand mansions and apartment houses should face out from Fifth on to the Park, and seeing instead the shaggy grey-green shrubbery covering Mount Lasso, which undulates in the late-afternoon onshore breeze. — Since Claude flew in to Tinian from Guam a week ago, he’s been troubled by these slippages: the past overlaying the present, so that the grid-pattern of roadways laid out by the Seabees suddenly slips down over the familiar shapes of Midtown and Uptown. — It’s no help that some smartass also had the neat idea of giving these baking roads — which are steadily being pulverised by the jeeps, trucks and fuel tankers that pound the length and breadth of the island — Manhattan names: Wall Street, Canal Street, 42nd Street, Broadway and. . Riverside Drive. Claude would also be forced to concede — were he belayed on it — that the torpedo juice hasn’t been helping. Since he’d scored a couple of pints off some swabs who’d a gilly-still hidden behind the 212th’s tech’ area. . I can scarcely fuckin’ see any more . . although they’d sworn to him that they’d double-filtered the hooch. — Who roams foreign parts, his father chants. Fremde durchmessenden. . Claude dutifully recites. Who forgets his fatherland, his father needles, and Claude can’t take any more so pulls up short. — Their afternoon stroll has brought them looping over a spur of Mount Lasso, past the Army Hospital on 109th Street, up a perimeter road that runs beside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Central Bomb Dump. Now they’re almost home — home at the six-storey building on Riverside Drive where the Evenrude Family have been the tenants of a cavernous top-floor apartment since they took advantage of the Crash — and Pop’s silver-plated trust fund — to move back from Norwalk. Excepting this: there’s no apartment block here, its tiled mansard roof nipped by copper-tipped finials, its grey stone façade staring down on to the scary Hooverville on the far side of the streetcar tracks — there’re only still more Quonsets that’ve been pitched so hard into the heavy earth that their footings are buried, more raggedy palms — and a curved signboard mounted on two thick posts. . a scythe — or a samurai sword. Claude shades his eyes from the vicious sun and reads aloud: HEADQUARTERS 509TH COMPOSITE GROUP. Behind the sign there’s a barred gate with two MPs lazing guard, beyond them the fence bellies out around a large compound. . which is itself within Tinian’s compound, sailing on through Pacific waves . . Heimat vergessenden . . Mutterhaus hassenden . . Claude laughs — and Martin says, You may’ve enlisted but you don’t give a damn about your country any more than you do about the home Mother and I made for you. No! Claude protests. It’s not that — it’s this sign: this is the outfit I’ve been palletising cargo for — scads of it, Pop. They’ve got a big armaments squadron, a troop-carrier squadron and a whole goddamn slew of MPs too. Only yesterday I was down at the harbour offloading this super-heavy bomb hoist we found for ’em over on Midway and had shipped here. This is the hush-hush outfit they’re razzing with this poem — he recites: Don’t ask about results or such, Unless you wanna get in Dutch, But take it from one who is sure of the score, The 509th is winning the war! Claude, his father says quietly. Yes, Pop? You know I’m dead, don’t you, son? Well. . yeah, I guess so, Pop, I guess so. . Martin Evenrude takes his time relighting his cigar — he totters on one leg, striking the match on the sole of his two-tone, and Claude is sickened by his father’s scrawny shank, its bald shine cinched by a flesh-coloured sock-suspender. He thinks of the garter belt some joker had tied round the toilet bowl in the can of the Liberator he hitched a ride on from Hickam Field to Guam. Lying on a lumped-up cargo of mail sacks and flamethrowers, as the ship gained altitude and the scent of frangipani blossom was replaced by the stench of greasy hessian and aviation fuel, he’d marvelled: So this is what we’ve become, a fighting force of underwear thieves commanded by panty-waists and policed by snitches. .