as a in more than placing them in this classic double-bind. The fisherman is, Busner diagnoses, undoubtedly the victim of some traumatic experience — a physical one, probably connected to sharks, such being the simplicity of the fabulated. His resemblance to Claude Evenrude is. . really rather superficial. Yes they have the same high forehead and widow’s peak of grey hair. The face, seemingly unshaven, ’though it’s not. . this too they share. But Quint is a big, deep-chested man, while Claude — who Busner remembers as he last saw him, five years previously, being led handcuff ed from the psychic wreckage of 117 Chapter Road, Willesden — was. . and presumably still is . . a broken man: skinny and knock-kneed, his emphatically narrow chest drummed upon from within by his ragtime demons. . I wanna go down to Tom Anderson’s ca-fé, I wanna hear that Creole jazz band play! The Cadillac, the Red Onion too, the Boogie-Woogie an’ the Parc Sans Sou’. . Around the Creep’s battered brow Busner now casts a rosy nimbus of reminiscence: Not for Claude this portentous accompaniment, the string section sawing toothily away, the horns honking, the timpani tinkling as the entire orchestra galumphs through the waves. . But when Quint pulls open his denim shirt, exposing the bluish blodge, and says, Had a tattoo there, it said USS Indianapolis. . a stretched tether inside of Zack snaps! and he plunges down the steep beach of his recent past, and even as his voracious understanding dramatically widens its aperture, so events that had been firmly relegated to the historic background zoom into the present, while what’s currently transpiring — the miserable wreckage of his broken marriage, the subaquattering of his strange son, the very stickiness of his Maltesered fingers — remains defiantly. . THE SAME SIZE! — If Quint is the Creep and I’m Hooper, then, Busner thinks, Chief Brody must be Michael Lincoln — Christopher’s guardian, who followed Claude into the Black Maria that May day, calmly assuming a responsibility that was undoubtedly mine, but I was pathetically unable to cope with. — The maimed fishing boat creaks, the three men. . now and forever more . . confront each other across the tabletop. Hooper says, You were on her, June ’45? and Busner testily corrects him: It was the tail-end of July! although why such minor recall should rectify my oceanic amnesia, he’s no idea. Quint says, On her and torpedoed right off her into the drink with nine hundred other clowns. . Started with nine hundred anyway. . floating in the big warm Pacific. Must’ve been like a dinner bell in there. . Explosions, and half the guys bleeding. Soon as the sharks came homing in on us, we went by the Manual, of course. . Keep trying to float in groups. . doin’ what it said — splash at ’em, yell at ’em, hit ’em on the — NOSE! I’VE GOT NO NOSE! It’s a soundless scream because. . I’VE GOT NO MOUTH EITHER! He gawps at the watery expanse of his face and thinks, I better do something quick or my eyes’ll go under. . Thinking for themselves, his hands wrench open the cabinet and sort through the spongebag. These pills, he prays, will surely help. — And they do, right away, for as he lifts his palm his mouth is re-created to receive them. Back downstairs he wonders: Have I been gone for seconds — or years? The five men are in the same positions as when he left: the Kid supine on the mattress, Claude and Michael Lincoln on the floor facing Rodge and Lesley on the sofa. Only the last must have moved — how else to explain the half-smoked joint in his hand, and the smoke leaking from his mouth and nostrils? Zack kneels down beside the Kid and lays a hand on his quaking shoulder. There-there, he says, there-there. Lesley drawls, Oh, ma-an, what’s happened to the sounds — we gotta have some music. He stands, and Zack thinks: We do need music, for without that all there is are these. . sounds: the Kid’s hiccupping negation, the dull rasp of Roger’s breathing and the whispered words flitting between Claude and his. . co-conspirator — what’re they up to? A line from Ronnie’s Politics of Experience comes to Zack: These arabesques that mysteriously embody mathematical truths only glimpsed by a very few . . how beautiful, how exquisite, no matter that they were the threshing and thrashing of a drowning man . . Claude trills, Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de muff-tash on he face, then says: It was a cracker regime down there in Florida — the sergeants treated us like Negroes, had us doing six formations a day, which meant six shaves a day. My face got raw then rawer — but if you missed one of those shaves the whole bunch of ’em would surround you, slam you up against the wall and shout in your face, Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, WID DE MUFF-TASH ON HE FACE! Lincoln says, There was a certain amount of barracking — if you made a frivolous complaint you’d be put on a charge and have to do jankers, but, apart from a few goons, the sergeants weren’t that abusive. Claude says, I’d done monkey-drill in basic — hell, everything in basic was monkey-drill. Soon as we’d got the creases outta our fatigues they had us standing in chow lines, lining up for mail calls, lining up for the goddamn latrine. . Lincoln muses, Actually, I never got that much mail, and because I’d been up before the tribunal I rather kept myself to myself — there was another chap on the establishment in the same situation, entirely by coincidence I knew him from PPU meetings in Lewisham. However, we were pretty bashful to begin with, then, after he’d been made up to lance-jack, we didn’t speak at all — in spite of Hore-Belisha the War House took a pretty dim view of fraternisation between ranks. Claude says, Everywhere you went in Texas you saw these boards set up — in vacant lots, in motor courts, wherever: big wooden cut-out shapes of hands, and painted on ’em, Prepare to Meet Your God. First time we were introduced to the corporal, he said, I hope you are prepared, because from now on I AM YOUR GOD. He was a Missouri mule-skinner that man, loved his bully-pulpit and he could shout the paint off a picket fence. Got us doing standard formations and close-order drills — Hup! Twoop! Threep! Four! Thing was I didn’t much mind it — liked it almost. There was a sorta joy in losing yourself in this many-headed marching beast. . Besides, what’d been happening anyway, not much besides a hell of a lot of drinking — I’d already been in the tank a few times, hocked my pants for a pint on more than one occasion. . and I’d seen the fuckin’ aery mouse gobbled up by the rat in the wall, oh yes indeedy. . When Pop was in funds he still treated me with a degree of liberality — then I’d hand it off to the other bohemian types who hung round the Village. We used to meet up at this apartment a fellow had on 12th and Fourth and play interminable games of Go while we smoked reefer and called down to the liquor store to send up pints — but I knew it was bunk and I weren’t going nowhere. . — Lincoln, drawing on his re-lit pipe, watching its dense greige smoke attack the thin blue lines advancing from Lesley’s joint, says, Funnily enough, thing I remember most from that time are the American cigarettes we were issued with — came in round tins of fifty. Once you’d turned your coin in the groove and levered off the lid, there was this most wonderful aroma of fresh Virginia tobacco. Inside there’d be a scrap of paper that said, Manufactured and packaged by the Proprietors of State Express Cigarettes. Silly, really, but every time I read that I pictured these very portly American gentlemen wearing broad-brimmed hats and white linen suits, and perspiring rather heavily as they sorted big piles of cigarettes into bundles of fifty. D’you see? Those were the Proprietors. . Claude says, We’d count off into squads of fifty, TENNN-SHUNNN! then compete. Thing was to figure out how to move without your head bobbing — I was good at it. Good at voice and command too. Squaaad, right! Squaaad, left! Round annaround we went — and this being the Air Force I used to wonder what we looked like from the sky: all those big simple profane prairie boys and me, circling and circling, so tight together we musta seemed like one big tan fish trying to swallow its own tail. Michael says, I miss touching the clouds — I haven’t flown again since the war, couldn’t imagine doing it. . When I was a boy, in the Corps, I thought of the clouds as my friends, well —. He laughs abruptly. More like my mother, I s’pose, big soft presences that asked nothing of me but to allow them to enfold me in their ample bosom. I dare-say if these chaps here — he pokes his pipe-stem at Busner and Gourevitch — weren’t high as bloody kites they’d put some Freudian interpretation on that, but let’s spare them the trouble, shall we — because of course it was sexual, as well, and it went on being sexual as hell when I was on active service. A fully loaded Lanc’ with ten thousand pounds of HE and God knows how many of fuel on board was a bugger to get airborne — bloody terrifying. At the point when the stick was shuddering one’s hand, and the Lanc’ was bumping off the runway, one felt gravity squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing — then we were up, and the grip gave way to the caresses. . of the clouds. Claude says, Me, I was surviving on a diet of five-cent novels from the Negro Library — classics, mostly — that way I’d enough green for a bottle-or-nine of Greasy Dick. The prairie boys called me a nigger-lover — and I was too: Marian Anderson came to sing at the camp, and the only folks who showed up were me and a coloured contingent. Then I discovered there were booklets you could get told you how to do the aptitude tests and the IQ tests. So I splashed out and mugged up — I was always good at cramming so long as there wasn’t a bottle to hand. Next thing I know I’m riding the Fargo Express down to Miami Beach with a couple of other officer-candidate jerk-off s — one was a master sergeant, porky fellow, boy! didn’t he think he was just the big I-am. Other one was a Jew outta Chicago, and he gave himself plenty of airs too. Funny thing was they were both flat-busted inside of three days — couldn’t handle the shaving, or the shouting. Air down there was like soup, and they had us all shacked up in these big hotels, four and five to a double room. Naturally the owners — who were either Jews or connected, or both — were rubbing their hands: what occupancy rates! And not just for the season — for the whole fuckin’ duration! We weren’t allowed to use the elevators, we’d to march up and down Hup! Twoop! Threep! flights at the Eden Roc. Poolside there were still polo-playboys in terrycloth robes and Waikiki shorts. . Man! at the time I thought those big hotels, with their metal shutters and cream paint-jobs, were some kinda surrealistic joke — but when I was shipped out to the Pacific I began to think it might all’ve been a calculated part of our induction, ’cause if you took away the tanning debs, the white caps in golf shoes and the whoring showgirls sucking up their contract highballs, the basic surroundings were the same. Michael says, Rotblat’s remarked to me on more than one occasion that flying isn’t simply like making love — it’s the most sexual thing we’ve ever done. For many of the boys I flew with in the war this was quite literally the case — not that all of them were blushing virgins, but in those days. . well, most of ’em would have to go on an awful blind before they plucked up the courage to even get off with a girl. I never flew again, and sometimes I think I never properly made love again. . either. . He falls silent for a few moments, shudders heavily, then resumes: Well! the atmosphere in the mess before a raid was thick — thick with lustful expectancy — all those inexperienced boys, absolutely riddled with nerves and staring — if you’ll forgive the poetry — straight into the naked face of death while they tried awfully hard to swank it: Toast, Jimp? I say, Barrel, ol’ man, roll out the jam, will you. . In the briefing, I’d look around at all those pinched faces and think, how is it you’re all so alive? By a year in quite a few of us had completed a tour, had a leave and were starting a second — we knew the odds, we looked with pity on the sprog crews, thinking, You chaps are like us. . already dead wood — faggots, who’re about to take a great bundle of kindling and drop it on a fire that’s already been fed with petrol — faggots who’re going to be added to that fire. . Faggots who’re going to. . burn. Claude says, They’d back us up against those faux-adobe walls, five or six of those crackers, bawling in our faces ’til their spittle filled our eyes: HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOOD CHUCK CHUCK IF A WOODCHUCK COULD CHUCK WOOD! To which the instantaneous answer was: A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood, SIR, YES, SIR! And if one single item of your kit was wrinkled or grubby when those bastards came to inspect it, they’d get ahold of your sad little can of Army-issue polish and rub it all over your raw, six-times-shaved face with a goddamn scrubbing brush — then they’d pitch you in the closet, singin’ out, Throw de tar baby in de coal hole wid de muff-tash on he face! You’d be in there for a while — they’d nail the door shut. Plenty of time to get sick from naphthalene and the schlockenspiel of the coat hangers — then they’d let you out when you didn’t have enough time to shave and clean up before the next inspection. I tellya, the only way to survive was to learn to do without sleep, and to learn to do without any belief in the goodness of your fellow men. Michael says, At the same time — and this was the most peculiar thing — the more I flew, the more oddly invulnerable I felt. The flying-control officer would drone on about icing levels, cold fronts and the shortest possible route from Hamburg to Bremen — I’d look around me at another fresh crop of faggots, and I’d think, oh well, what the hell, because after all, it was always the others that died. . Michael stops. The greasy-haired one they call John has been gone for a while, but there’s no evidence of his stated intention to