“It’s thirst-making work, defending our land. The noblest calling.”
“You got that, mister!”
It was at this point that Hector would tug on his father’s sleeve, though to no avail.
“But what I wish, my good lads, is that we’d do just that, instead of getting involved in every minor dispute on the far side of the planet.”
“You calling Pearl Harbor a minor dispute?” one of the servicemen replied. “Last I checked, it was a dirty ambush by those rat Japs, where a couple thousand of our guys got it.”
“Rat Japs indeed!” Jackie Brennan would cry. “But what conditions were in fact at play behind that horrid carnage?” his father would intone pedantically. At this point his father was already in the bag, but an audience of newcomers always inspired him, recasting his view of himself as a hardworking factory man into that of thinker, of wise man, someone whose main purpose was to bear light and truth to others, like the revered teacher he’d pictured himself becoming when he was young, before he’d entered the factory like everybody else.
“Precious few of us bother to look at the bigger picture. Did the Japanese intend to conquer us? Do they still? I very much doubt it. Look at our capacity for producing arms, right here in our small town, and then multiply that by thousands. They know they can’t compete with us over the long run. So they attempt a single, stunning blow, to dissuade us from meddling further in their affairs. The scorpion and the lion. Pearl Harbor was about protecting their interests, in their part of the world, in their sphere of influence, and if we had sent them the appropriate signals beforehand, all those sailors-and now scores of thousands of others-would still be alive today.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” one of the men said, slamming down the beer Jackie had paid for on the scarred wooden table. “You’re either one of those pacifists or appeasers, and I can’t stand to listen to you another second.”
“Do what you will,” Jackie answered him, with an almost operatic tone of defiance. “But in fact I’m neither of those, young man. I’m an American, son, with no need for larger aims, which you will someday come to understand.”
“Out of the way, mister.”
“You can do me the respect of at least finishing your beer!”
“Go to hell.”
“Don’t you curse at me!” It was then, as a rule, that pandemonium broke loose, at least in his father’s mind, a fierce, heroic scuffle that usually found Jackie Brennan tightly hugging a soldier around his torso so the fellow couldn’t freely swing and punch. Hector jumped in and he would be beseeching the man to ignore his father’s foul curses, the proprietor and a few regulars holding the other servicemen back until Hector could tug Jackie outside and hustle him quickly down the street and toward home. Nothing too serious ever happened, though after one night when the barkeep took a stray punch in the face, Jackie was ordered to stay away for a while, which he did, without even a private protest at home. Jackie knew he was liked well enough to be tolerated for such troubles, but not much more than that, and if he couldn’t help but be a nuisance when he drank, he took great pains to make up for it, buying drinks for all the fellows on his return and not forgetting a box of candies for the barkeep to give to his wife.
One night, Hector left for home by himself, telling his father he was tired. It was a slow night at the pub, foggy and damp, with no newcomers about for Jackie to sermonize or bet with for drinks.
“I never heard you say you were tired,” his father said to him, suspicion marking his voice. “Not a once in your life.”
“Well, I am,” Hector answered, lying to his father for the first and only time. “I just want to go home.”
“Go on, then,” Jackie said, waving Hector off from his customary place at the far end of the bar, clutching the handle of a mug of ale with his withered, child-sized hand. “And tell your mother not to wait up.”
Hector grumbled in assent, both he and his father knowing of course that his mother would be long asleep, being accustomed to her husband’s Friday-night foolery. Jackie only got sloshed this one night of the week, but never missed it, and his mother was glad that Hector went out with him.
As planned, though, Hector routed himself toward home by Patricia Cahill’s freshly painted bungalow and picket fence (done by his own hand), and seeing the parlor room light illuminated went directly to the back porch door, which she said she would leave unlocked if the twins were asleep. It was the spring of 1945 and the long war was still going and her husband was listed as MIA. She was a stunning raven-haired Black Irishwoman with sky-colored eyes and freckles on her little nose and a curve to her hips that made him think of a skillfully turned balustrade. He’d been fantasizing about her for days, and after school he’d stopped by to be paid but she was having a tea with a friend and told him to come after dark. He had known his father would never depart the pub so early, and that his mother would not be expecting him. The thought of lingering with her in her bed electrified him, the last block or so difficult for him to walk comfortably, his erection already straining his dungarees. He’d been with her once before (voraciously petting, if briefly, in her kitchen) but at that point she was the first mature woman he’d touched, and the give and savor of her body (not as firm as that of his sisters’ friends, nor as blandly scentless) was a revelation; he was drawn to the moist tang of her skin, the scant animal note at the nape of her neck, between her breasts.
It had already begun to rain, and when he entered the darkened screen porch he was suddenly afraid that he’d mistaken what she’d said to him earlier, but then the parlor light went out and she descended and wound about him like a silken cloak. She was warm and naked beneath her thin bathrobe. She knelt and had hardly put him in her mouth when he helplessly came. In embarrassment he crumpled and made to get away but she gripped him and said it’s okay as long as you do the same, and it was then, at her command, that he learned to swim the slant lightless depth, make his way instead by only treading.
Just before dawn he ran home in the steady rain to find a police cruiser parked in front of his house. All the lights were burning. He could see two of his sisters moving about upstairs. He went around back and heard his mother at the kitchen table telling the officers sipping the coffee she’d made that her husband and son had never not come home before. Could some drifters have rolled them and tied them up somewhere? Really, where could they have gone? It was too small a town. She didn’t have to tell the officers that Jackie Brennan had no mistress, for everybody in Ilion well knew he was an uxorious man whose infinite gratitude to his pretty wife for accepting his deformations sometimes also made him crazy when he drank, his imaginings usually centering on her infidelities (which were none), or else he’d be mopey, glum, and self-pitying. One of the policemen caught sight of Hector peering around the hedge and called out, his mother turning to see him. When he went inside, they asked where his father was and where he’d been after he left the pub but he couldn’t tell them about either thing, especially about Patricia Cahill, as one of the cops was her cousin. His mother kept asking him how he could leave his father to drink alone. Hector was silent, but was desperately worried now, too, and begged the officers that he might accompany them as they went to retrace his steps from the pub.
As he rode in the police car he felt a much purer shame than anything he might have felt with Patricia Cahill, and he began to cry; he knew he should have stayed with his father, as any decent son would, most of all if that father was Jackie Brennan. How many men craved such company of their sons, for whatever reason? With him gone missing, Hector suddenly understood what he in fact was for his father, and what he should always be: his ideal figure, a body supreme, his sturdiest hand, and foot, and liver. He would never leave him again. When they got to the pub, the officers and he walked in three directions, looking for any sign of him. Then he spotted his father’s porkpie hat at the head of an alleyway between two warehouses; the alleyway led down to an old dock on the canal. The end of the dock had clearly just collapsed, the splintered edges fresh and jagged. The high water was swirling off muddily, heavy with a current; the locks had been opened upstream.