Presence: Stories

  Tony Calabrese, Shipfitter First Class, was one of that core of men who did know where to report once he came through the turnstile at four in the afternoon. In “real life,” as the phrase went, he had been a steamfitter in Brooklyn and was not confused by mobs, Marines looking into his sandwiches, or the endless waiting around that was normal in a shipyard. Once through the turnstile, his lunchbox tucked under his arm again, his cap on crooked, he leaned into the wind with his broken nose, notifying oncoming men to clear the way, snug inside his pile zipper jacket and woolen shirt, putting down his feet on the outside edges like a bear, bandy-legged, low-crotched, a graduate of skyscraper construction, brewery repairing, and for eight months the city Department of Water Supply, until it was discovered that he had been sending a substitute on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays while he went to the track and made some money.

  Tony had never until a year and a half ago seen a ship up close and had no interest in ships, any more than he had had in the water supply, breweries, or skyscrapers. Work was a curse, a misfortune that a married man had to bear, like his missing front tooth, knocked out in a misunderstanding with a bookie. There was no mystery to what the good life was, and he never lived a day without thinking about it, and more and more hopelessly now that he was past forty; it was being like Sinatra, or Luciano, or even one of the neighborhood politicians who wore good suits all day and never bent over, kept two apartments, one for the family, the other for the baloney of the moment. He had put his youth into trying for that kind of life and had failed. Driving the bootleggers’ trucks over the Canadian border, even a season as Johnny Peaches’s bravo and two months collecting for a longshoremen’s local, had put him within reach of a spot, a power position from which he might have retired into an office or apartment and worked through telephones and over restaurant tables. But at the last moment something in his makeup had always defeated him, sent him rolling back into the street and a job and a paycheck, where the future was the same never-get-rich routine. He knew he was simply not smart enough. If he were, he wouldn’t be working in the Navy Yard.

  His face was as round as a frying pan with a hole in it, a comical face now that the nose was flattened and his front tooth gone, and no neck. He had risen to First in a year and a half, partly because the supervisor, old Charley Mudd, liked a good phone number, which Tony could slip him, and also because Tony could read blueprints quickly, weld, chip, burn, and bulldoze a job to its finish when, as happened occasionally, Charley Mudd had to get a ship back into the war. As Shipfitter First, he was often given difficult and complicated jobs and could call on any of the various trades to come in and burn or weld at his command. But he was not impressed by his standing, when Sinatra could open his mouth and make a grand. More important was that his alliance with Charley Mudd gave him jobs below decks in cold weather and above decks when the sky was clear. If indisposed, he could give Charley Mudd the sign and disappear for the night into a dark corner and a good sleep. But most of the time he enjoyed being on the job, particularly when he was asked how to perform one operation or another by “shipfitters” who could not compute a right angle or measure in smaller units than halves. His usual way of beginning his instruction was always the same and was expected by anyone who asked his help. He would unroll the blueprint, point to a line or figure, and say, “Pay ’tention, shithead,” in a voice sludged with the bottom of wine bottles and the Italian cigars he inhaled. No one unable to bear this indignity asked him for help, and those who did knew in advance that they would certainly lose whatever pretensions they thought they had.

  But there was another side to Tony, which came out during the waits. Before Pearl Harbor there had been some six thousand men employed in the Yard, and there were now close to sixty thousand. Naturally they would sometimes happen to collect in unmanageable numbers in a single compartment, and the repairs, which had to be done in specific stages, made it impossible for most of them to work and for any to leave. So the waits began; maybe the welder could not begin welding until the chipper finished breaking out the old weld, so he waited, with his helper or partner. The burner could not cut steel until the exhaust hose was brought down by his helper, who could not get hold of one until another burner down the corridor was finished with it, so he waited; a driller could not drill until his point was struck into the steel by the fitter, who was forbidden to strike it until the electricians had removed the electric cables on the other side of the bulkhead through which the hole had to be drilled, so they waited; until the only way out was a crap game, or Tony “enjoying” everybody by doing imitations or picking out somebody to insult and by going into his grin, which, with the open space in his teeth, collapsed the company in hysteria. After these bouts of entertainment Tony always became depressed, reminded again of his real failing, a lack of stern dignity, leadership, force. Luciano would hardly be clowning around in a cruiser compartment, showing how stupid he could look with a tooth missing.

  On this January afternoon, already so dark and the wind biting at his eyes, Tony Calabrese, going down the old streets of the Yard, had decided to work below decks tonight, definitely. Even here in the shelter of the Yard streets the wind was miserable—what would it be like on a main deck open to the bay? Besides, he did not want to tire himself this particular shift, when he had a date at half past four in the morning. He went through his mental checklist: Dora would meet him at Baldy’s for breakfast; by six a.m. he would be home to change his clothes and take a shower; coffee with the kids at seven before they went to school, then maybe a nap till nine or half past, then pick up Dora and make the first show at the Fox at ten; by twelve to Dora’s room, bang-bang, and a good sleep till half past two or three, when he would stop off at home and put on work clothes, and maybe see the kids if they got home early, and into the subway for the Yard. It was a good uncomplicated day in front of him.

  Coming out of the end of the street, he saw the cold stars over the harbor, a vast sky stretching out over the bay and beyond to the sea. Clusters of headlights coursed over Brooklyn Bridge, the thickening traffic of the homebound who did not know they were passing over the Yard or the war-broken ships. He picked his way around stacks of steel plate and tarpaulin-shrouded gear piled everywhere, and for a moment was caught in the blasting white glare of the arc lamp focused downward from the top of a traveling crane; slowly, foot by foot, it rolled along the tracks, tall as a four-story building on two straddling legs, its one arm thrust out against the stars, dangling a dull glinting steel plate the width of a bus, and led by a fitter hardly taller than its wheels, who was walking backward between the tracks ahead of it and pointing off to the right in the incandescent whiteness of its one eye. As though intelligent, the crane obediently swiveled its great arm, lowering the swaying plate to a spot pointed at by the fitter, whose face Tony could not make out, shaded as it was by the peak of the cap against the downpouring light of the high white eye. Tony circled wide around the descending plate, trusting no cable or crane operator, and passed into the darkness again toward the cruiser beyond, raised in the drydock, her bow curving high over the roadway on which he walked with his lips pressed together to keep the wind off his teeth. Turning, he moved along her length, head down against the swift river of cold air, welcoming the oncoming clumps of foot-stamping men mounting her along the gangplank—the new shift boarding, the occasional greeting voice still lively in the earliness of the evening. He rocked up the length of the gangplank onto the main deck, with barely a nod passing the young lieutenant in upturned collar who stood hitting his gloved hands together in the tiny temporary guardhouse at the head of the plank. There was the happy smell of burned steel and coffee, the straightforward acridity of the Navy, and the feeling of the hive as he descended a steep stair clogged down its whole length with black welder’s cables and four-inch exhaust hoses, the temporary intestine that always followed repair gangs into the patient ships.

  His helper, Looey Baldu—where an Italian got a name like Baldu
, Tony could not understand, unless a Yugoslav had got into the woodpile or they shortened it—Looey was already waiting for him in the passageway, twenty-three, dignified and superior with his high-school education, in regulation steel-tipped shoes—which Tony steadfastly refused to wear—and giving his resolute but defensive greeting.

  “Where’s Charley Mudd?”

  “I didn’t see him yet.”

  “You blind? There he is.”

  Tony walked around the surprised Baldu and into a compartment where Charley Mudd, sixty and half asleep, sat on three coils of electric cable, his eyes shut and a clipboard starting to slide out of his opening hands. Tony touched the older man’s back and bent to talk softly and put in the fix. Charley nodded, his eyes rolling. Tony gave him a grateful pat and came out into the passageway, which was filling with men trying to pass one another in opposite directions while dragging endless lengths of hose, cable, ladders, and bulky toolboxes, everybody looking for somebody else, so that Tony had to raise his voice to Baldu. He always spoke carefully to the high-school graduate, who never caught on the first time but was a good boy although his wife, he said, was Jewish. Baldu was against race prejudism, whatever the hell that meant, and frowned like a judge when talked to, as though some kind of veil hung before his face and nothing came through it loud and clear.

  “We gonna watertight hatches C Deck,” Tony said, and he turned, hands still clenched inside his slit pockets, and walked.

  Baldu had had no time to nod and already felt offended, but he followed with peaked eyebrows behind his fitter, keeping close so as not to know the humiliation of being lost again and having to face Tony’s scathing ironies implying incessant masturbation.

  They descended to C Deck, a large, open area filled with tiered bunks in which a few sailors lay, some sleeping, others reading or writing letters. Tony was pleased at the nearness of the coffee smell, what with any more than a pound a week almost impossible for civilians to get except at black-market prices. Without looking again at his helper, he unzipped his jacket, stowed his lunchbox on the deck under an empty bunk, took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose and wiped his teary eyes, removed his cap and scratched his head, and finally sat on his heels and ran his fingers along the slightly raised edge of a hatch opening in the deck, through which could be seen a ladder going down into dimness.

  “Let that there cover come to me, Looey.”

  Baldu, his full brown-paper lunch bag still in his hand, sprang to the heavy hatch cover lying on the deck and with one hand tried to raise it on its hinges. Unwilling to admit that his strength was not enough or that he had made a mistake, he strained with the one hand, and as Tony regarded him with aggravation and lowering lids, he got the hatch cover up on one knee, and only then let his lunch bag down onto the deck and with two hands finally raised the cover toward Tony, whose both hands were poised to stop it from falling shut.

  “Hold it, hold it right there.”

  “Hold it open?”

  “Well, what the fuck, you gonna hold it closed? Of course open. What’s a-matta wichoo?”

  Tony felt with his fingertips along the rubber gasket that ran around the lip of the cover. Then he took hold of it and let it close over the hatch. Bending down until his cheek pressed the cold deck, he squinted to see how closely gasket met steel. Then he got up, and Looey Baldu stood to face him.

  “I’m gonna give you a good job, Looey. Git some chalk, rub it on the gasket, then git your marks on the deck. Where the chalk don’t show, build it up with some weld, then git a grinder and tell him smooth it nice till she’s nice an’ even all around. You understand?”

  “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  “Just don’t get wounded. That’s it for tonight, so take it easy.”

  Baldu’s expression was nearly fierce as he concentrated patriotically on the instructions, and now he nodded sternly and started to step back. Tony grabbed him before he tripped over the hatch cover behind him, then let him go and without further remark fled toward the coffee smell.

  It was going to be a pretty good night. Dora, whom he had gotten from Hindu, was a little shorter than he would have liked, but she had beautiful white skin, especially her breasts, and lived alone in a room with good heat—no sisters, aunts, mother, nothing. And both times she had brought home fresh bread from Macy’s, where she packed nights. Now all he had to do was keep relaxed through the shift so as not to be sleepy when he met her for breakfast at Baldy’s. Picking his way along a passage toward the intensifying coffee smell, he felt joyous, and seeing a drunken sailor trying to come down a ladder, he put his shoulder under the boy’s seat and gently let him down to the deck, then helped him a few yards along the passage until the boy fell into a bunk. Then he lifted his legs onto it, turned him over, opened his pea jacket and shoelaces, and returned to the search for the source of the coffee smell.

  He might have known. There was Hindu, standing over an electric brewer tended by two sailors in T-shirts. Hindu was big, but next to him stood a worker who was a head taller, a giant. Tony sauntered over, and Hindu said to the sailors, “This here’s a buddy, how about it?”

  A dozen lockers stood against the nearby bulkhead, from one of which a sailor took a clean cup and a five-pound bag of sugar. Tony thanked him as he took the full cup and then moved a foot away as Hindu came over.

  “Where you?” Hindu asked.

  “C Deck, watertight hatch cover. Where you?”

  “I disappeared. They’re still settin’ up the windbreak on Main Deck.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware?”

  Then both together, “It’s fuckin’ cold.”

  They drank coffee. Hindu’s skin was so dark he was sometimes taken for an Indian; he made up for it by keeping his thick, wavy hair well combed, his blue beard closely shaved, and his big hands clean.

  “I gotta make a phone call,” he said quietly, stooping to Tony. “I left her bawlin’. Jesus, I passed him comin’ up the stairs.”

  “Ta hell you stay so long?”

  “I coun’ help myself.” His eyes softened, his mouth worked in pleasurable agony. “She’s dri’n’ me crazy. We even wen’ faw walk.”

  “You crazy?”

  “I coun’ help it. If you seen her you drop dead. Byoodiful. I mean it. I’m goin’ crazy. I passed him comin’ up the stairs, I swear!”

  “You’ll end up fuckin’ a grave, Hindu.”

  “She touches me, I die. I die. I die, Tony.” Hindu shut his eyes and shook his head, memorializing.

  Activity behind them turned them about. The big worker, his coffee finished, was pulling on a chain that ran through a set of pulleys hooked to a beam overhead, and a gigantic electric motor was rising up off the deck. Tony, Hindu, and the two sailors watched the massive rigger easily raise the slung motor until it reached the pulleys and could be raised no farther, with three inches yet to go before it could be slid onto a platform suspended from the deck overhead. The rigger drew his gauntlets up tighter, set himself underneath the motor with his hands up under it, and, with knees bent, pushed. The motor rose incredibly until its feet were a fraction above the platform; the rigger pushed and got it hung. Then he came out from under, stood behind it, and shoved it fully onto the platform where it belonged. His face was flushed, and, expanded by the effort, he looked bigger than ever. Slipping off his gauntlets, he looked down to the sailors, who were still sitting on the deck.

  “Anybody ever read Oliver Wiswell?”

  “No.”

  “You ought to. Gives you a whole new perspective on the American Revolution. You know, there’s a school that doesn’t think the Revolution was necessary.”

  Tony was already walking, and Hindu followed slightly behind, asking into his ear, “Maybe I could hang wichoo tonight, Tony. Okay? I ask Cholly, okay?”

  “Go ahea
d.”

  Hindu patted Tony’s back thankfully and hurried up a ladder.

  Tony looked at his pocket watch. Five o’clock. He had chopped an hour. It was too early to take a nap. A sense of danger struck him, and he looked ahead up the passage, but there was only a colored worker he did not know fooling with a chipping gun that would not receive its chisel. He turned the other way in time to see a captain and a man in a felt hat and overcoat approaching with blueprints half unrolled in their hands. He caught sight of a chipping-gun air hose, which he followed into a compartment on hands and knees. The two brass went by, and he stood up and walked out of the compartment.

  It was turning into one of the slow nights when the clock never moved. The coffee had sharpened him even more, so a nap was out of the question. He moved along passageways at a purposeful pace, up ladders and down, looking for guys he might know, but the ship was not being worked much tonight; why, he did not know and did not care. Probably there was a hurry-up on the two destroyers that had come in last night. One had a bow blasted off, and the other had floated in from the bay listing hard to one side. The poor bastards on the destroyers, with no room to move and some of those kids seasick in bad weather. The worst was when the British ships came in. Good he wasn’t on one of those bastards, with the cockroaches so bad you couldn’t sit down, let alone stretch out, and their marines a lot of faggos. That was hard to believe the first time he saw it—like last summer with that British cruiser, the captain pacing the deck day and night and the ship in drydock. A real jerked-off Englishman with a monocle and a mustache and a crushed cap, and a little riding crop in his hands clasped behind his back, scowling at everybody and refusing to go off duty even in drydock. And piping whistles blowing every few hours to bring the marines on deck for rifle drill, that bunch of fags screaming through the passageways, goosing each other, and pimples all over their faces. Christ, he hated the English the way they kicked Italy around, sneering. And those stupid officers, in July; walking around in thick blue hairy uniforms, sweating like pigs all over their eyeglasses. You could tell a U.S. ship blindfolded, the smell of coffee and cleanliness, and ice water anywhere you looked. Of course they said the British gunners were better, but who was winning the war, for Christ’s sake? Without us they’d have to pack it in and salute the fuckin’ Germans. The French had a good ship, that captured Richelieu, what paneling in the wardroom, like a fuckin’ palace, but something was wrong with the guns, they said, and couldn’t hit nothin’.