“Well, it’s nice to have a chance to spend some time with you,” Randy says. His back is still a bit sore from where Amy struck him whilst asserting, the other morning, that expressing one’s feelings was “the name of the game.” So he figures he will express those aspects of his feelings least likely to get him in serious trouble.
“Ah figgered you ‘n’ ah’ud have plenny a tahm to chew the rag,” Amy says, having reverted utterly to the tongue of her ancestors in the last couple of days. “But it has been ages and ages since I saw those two boys, and you’ve never seen ’em at all.”
“Ages and ages? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Well, last time I saw Robin he was just starting kindergarten. And I saw M.A. more recently—he was probably eight or ten.”
“And you are related to them how, one more time?”
“I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.’s relationship to me, but you’d start shifting around and heaving great big sighs before I got more’n halfway through it.”
“So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or twice when they were tiny little boys.”
Amy shrugs. “Yeah.”
“So, like what possessed them to come out here?”
Amy looks blank.
“I mean,” Randy says, “from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their red-hot, bug-encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera, properly owed it.”
“Oh. That’s not really the vibe that I got.”
“Oh, it wasn’t? Really?”
“No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just ’cause we haven’t seen each other for a while doesn’t mean our obligations have lapsed.”
“Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I’m not that crazy about and maybe we should talk about later. But as far as those family obligations go, I do certainly think that one of those obligations is to preserve your notional virginity.”
“Who says it’s notional?”
“It’s got to be notional to them because they haven’t seen you for most of your life. That’s all I mean.”
“I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way out of proportion,” Amy says. “Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I don’t think less of you for it.”
“Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?”
“Math?”
“Counting the trip through Manila traffic to NAIA, the check-in procedure, and formalities at SFO, my entire journey from Manila to San Francisco took me something like eighteen hours. Twenty for you. Another four hours to get down to my house. Then eight hours after we got to my house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now, if we assume that the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in Tennessee, received a news flash that a female Shaftoe was in some kind of guy-related personal distress at about the time you jumped off of Glory IV and hopped in a taxi in Manila.”
“I sent e-mail from Glory,” Amy says.
“To whom?”
“The Shaftoe mailing list.”
“God!” Randy says, slapping himself in the face. “What did this e-mail say?”
“Can’t remember,” Amy says. “That I was headed for California. I might have made some kind of backhanded remark about a young man I wanted to talk to. I was kinda upset at the time and I can’t remember exactly what I have said.”
“I think you said something like ‘I am going to California where Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going to forcibly sodomize me upon arrival.’ ”
“No, it was nothing of the kind.”
“Well, I think that someone read it between the lines. So, anyway, Ma or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her gingham apron—I’m imagining this.”
“I can tell.”
“And she says, ‘Boys, your umpteenth cousin thrice removed America Shaftoe has sent us e-mail from Uncle Doug’s boat in the South China Sea stating that she is having some kind of dispute with a young man and it’s not out of the question that she might need someone around to lend her a hand. In California. Would you swing by and look in on her?’ And they put away their basketball and say, ‘Yes ma’am, what city and address?’ and she says, ‘Never you mind, just get on Interstate 40 and drive west not failing to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,’ and they say, ‘Yes ma’am’ and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway as they pull five gees backing out of the garage and thirty hours subsequently they are in my front yard, shining their twenty-five-D-cell flashlights into my eyes and asking me a lot of pointed questions. Do you have any idea how far the drive is?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, according to M.A.’s Rand McNally Road Atlas, it is an even twenty-one hundred miles.”
“So?”
“So that means that they maintained an average speed of seventy miles an hour for a day and a half.”
“A day and a quarter,” Amy says.
“Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?”
“Randy, you push on the gas pedal and keep it between the lines. How hard is that?”
“I’m not saying it’s an intellectual challenge. I’m saying that this willingness to, e.g., urinate into empty McDonald’s cups rather than stop the car, suggests a kind of urgency. Passion, even. And being a guy, and having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can tell you that one of the few things that gets your blood boiling to that extent is this notion of some female you love being done wrong by a strange male.”
“Well, what if they did?” Amy says. “Now they think you’re okay.”
“They do? Really?”
“Yeah. The financial disaster aspect makes you more human. More approachable. And it excuses a lot.”
“Do I need an excuse for something?”
“Not in my book.”
“But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my image problems.”
A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.
“So tell me about your family, Randy.”
“In the next couple of days, you’re going to learn a great deal more than I would like you to about my family. And so am I. So let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about business.”
“Okay. You go first.”
“We got a German television producer coming out next week to have a look at the U-boat. They might do a documentary about it. We have already hosted several German print journalists.”
“You have?”
“It has caused a sensation in Germany.”
“Why?”
“Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn.”
“We are going to launch our own currency.” By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.
“How do you go about that? Don’t you have to be a government?”
“No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they’re called banknotes?” Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn’t especially care.
“Okay but still, usually it’s done by government banks, right?”
“Only because people tend to resp
ect the government banks. But government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates.”
“So, how do you do it?”
“Get a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying ‘this certificate can be redeemed for such-and-such an amount of gold.’ That’s all there is to it.”
“What’s wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?”
“The certificates—the banknotes—are printed on paper. We’re going to issue electronic banknotes.”
“No paper at all?”
“No paper at all.”
“So you can only spend it on the Net.”
“Correct.”
“What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?”
“Find a banana merchant on the Net.”
“Seems like paper money’d be just as good.”
“Paper money is traceable and perishable and has other drawbacks. Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous.”
“What’s an electronic banknote look like, Randy?”
“Like any other digital thing: a bunch of bits.”
“Doesn’t that make it kind of easy to counterfeit?”
“Not if you have good crypto,” Randy says. “Which we do.”
“How did you get it?”
“By hanging out with maniacs.”
“What kind of maniacs?”
“Maniacs who think that having good crypto is of near-apocalyptic importance.”
“How’d they get around to thinking any such thing?”
“By reading about people like Yamamoto who died because they had bad crypto, and then projecting that kind of thing into the future.”
“Do you agree with them?” Amy asks. It might be one of those pivotal-moment-in-the-relationship questions.
“At two in the morning, when I’m lying awake in bed, I do,” Randy says. “In the light of day, it all seems like paranoia.” He glances over at Amy, who’s looking at him appraisingly, because he hasn’t actually answered the question yet. He’s got to pick one thing or the other. “Better safe than sorry, I guess. Having good crypto can’t hurt, and it might help.”
“And it might make you a lot of money along the way,” Amy reminds him.
Randy laughs. “At this point, it’s not even about trying to make money,” he says. “I just don’t want to be totally humiliated.”
Amy smiles cryptically.
“What?” Randy demands.
“You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that,” Amy says.
Randy drives the car in silence for about half an hour after that. He was right, he suspects: it was a pivotal moment in the relationship. All he can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.
THE GENERAL
* * *
FOR TWO MONTHS HE SLEEPS ON A BEACH ON NEW Caledonia, stretched out under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.
In Stockholm, someone from the British Embassy got him to a certain cafe. A gentleman he met in the cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a lake where a floatplane just happened to be sitting with its motors running and its lights off. The Special Air Service got him to London. Naval Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to the Marines with a big stamp on his papers saying that he must never again be sent into combat; he Knew Too Much to be taken prisoner. The Marines found that he Knew Too Little to serve as a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, and gave him a choice: a one-way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for the ticket home, then talked a green officer into believing that his family had moved, and home was now San Francisco.
You could practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy ship to the next. The waterfront was lined with the Navy’s piers, depots, hospitals, and prisons. All of them were guarded by Shaftoe’s military brothers. Shaftoe’s tattoos were obscured by civilian clothes and his haircut grown out. But he only had to look a Marine in the eye from a stone’s throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and open any gate for him, break any regulation, probably even lay down his life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast he didn’t even have time to get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on a ship to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj; he smoked, drank and ate for a week without being allowed to spend a dime, and finally his brothers got him on a plane that took him a couple of thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.
They did so with great reluctance. They would willingly have hit a beach with him, but this was different: they were sending him perilously close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General. Even now, a couple of years after The General had sent them into action, poorly armed and poorly supported, on Guadalcanal, Marines still spent approximately fifty percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad guy he was. He secretly owned half of Intramuros. He had become a billionaire from Spanish gold that his father had dug up when he’d been governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named him postwar dictator of the archipelago. The General was running for president, and in order to win he was going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R. look bad, and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn’t work he’d come back to the States and stage a coup d’etat. Which would be beaten back, against enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea’s a neat French city of wide streets and tin-roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines up-island. The place is about one-third Free French (there’s pictures of de Gaulle all over the place), one-third American servicemen, and one-third cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white people in twenty-seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach, feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.
But when he reached Noumea he slammed into a barrier more impervious than any brick wall: the imaginary line between the Pacific theater (Nimitz’s turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General’s headquarters, is just a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there and deliver his line, everything’s going to be fine.
During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he’s stupidly optimistic. Then he’s depressed for about a month, thinking he’ll never get off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display adaptability again. He’s had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes. Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won’t give him the time of day, he can’t get into an Army NCOs’ Club to save his life.
But an NCOs’ Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line of sight, begins to chain-smoke. Before long they’ve come over and started to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.
Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless night, belly-crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B-24 Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to attack from behind. B
ut Tipsy Tootsie’s crew seems to think that they are about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central Missouri.
They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn’t have anything of that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five-hundred-pound bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.
He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once. The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he’s able to move his arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now he’s looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.