Presence: Stories

  “Tony?”

  He sat up in the darkness, listening.

  “Hey, Tony.”

  Somebody was half whispering, half calling from outside the cable hole. Tony waited, uncomprehending. Margaret’s teardrops were still in his eyes, Grampa was sitting out in the living room. Suddenly he placed the voice. Baldu.

  He crawled out onto the catwalk. His helper was dimly lit by a yellow bulb yards away. “Looey?”

  Baldu, startled, jerked around and hurried back to him on the catwalk, emergency in his eyes. “Charley Mudd’s lookin’ for you.”

  “Wha’ for?”

  “I don’t know. He’s lookin’ high and low. You better come.”

  This was rare. Charley never bothered him once he had given the assignment for the shift. Tony hurried down the circular iron stairway, imagining some invasion of brass, a swarm of braid and overcoated men from the Master’s office. Last summer they had suddenly halted work to ask for volunteers to burn an opening in the bow of a cruiser that had been towed in from the Pacific; her forward compartments had been sealed against the water that a torpedo had poured into her, trapping nine sailors inside. Tony had refused to face those floating corpses or the bloody water that would surely come rushing out.

  In the morning he had seen the blood on the sheets, and Grampa was gone.

  On B Deck, scratching his back under his mackinaw and black sweater, Charley Mudd, alarmingly wide awake and alert, was talking to a Protestant with an overcoat on and no hat, a blond engineer he looked like, from some office. Charley reached out to Tony when he came up and held on to him, and even before Charley began to speak Tony knew there was no way out, because the Protestant was looking at Tony with a certain relief in his eyes.

  “Here he is. Look, Tony, they got some kind of accident on the North River, some destroyer. So grab a gang and take gas and sledges and see what you can do, will you?”

  “Wha’ kinda accident, Charley?”

  “I don’t know. The rails for the depth charges got bent. It ain’t much, but they gotta go by four to meet a convoy. This man’ll take you to the truck. Step on it, get a gang.”

  “How do I heat iron? Must be zero outside.”

  “They got a convoy waiting on the river. Do your best, that’s all. Take a sledge and plenty of gas. Go ahead.”

  Tony saw that Charley was performing for the engineer and he could not spoil his relationship. He found Hindu, sent Baldu for his lunch from under the sailor’s bunk, and, cursing the Navy, Margaret, winter, and his life, emerged onto the main deck and felt the whip of a wind made of ice. Followed by Hindu, who struggled with a cylinder of acetylene gas held up at the rear end by Baldu, Tony stamped down the gangplank to the open pickup truck at its foot. A sailor was behind the wheel, racing the engine to keep the heater going hot. He sent Hindu and Baldu back for two more cylinders just in case and extra tips for the burner and one more sledge and a crowbar and sat inside the cab, holding his hands, which were not yet cold, under the heater’s blast.

  “What happened?” he asked the sailor.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m only driving. I’m stationed right here in the Yard.”

  Forever covering his tracks, Tony asked how long the driver had been waiting, but it had been only fifteen minutes, so Charley could not have been looking for him too long. Hindu got in beside Tony, who ordered Looey Baldu onto the open back, and they drove along the donkey-engine tracks, through the dark streets, and finally out the gate into Brooklyn.

  Baldu huddled with his back against the cab, feeling the wind coming through his knitted skating cap and his skin hardening. He could not bear to sit on the icy truck bed, and his knees were cramping as he sat on his heels. But the pride he felt was enough to break the cold, the realization that now at last he was suffering, striking his blow at Mussolini’s throat, sharing the freezing cold of the Murmansk run, where our ships were pushing supplies to the Russians through swarms of submarines. He had driven a meat truck until the war broke out. His marriage, which had happened to fall the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, continued to ache like a mortal sin even though he kept reminding himself that it had been planned before he knew America would enter the war, and yet it had saved him for a while from the draft, and a punctured eardrum had, on his examination, put him out of action altogether.

  He had gone into the Yard at a slight cut in pay if figured on hourly rates, but with a twelve-hour shift and overtime, he was ahead. This bothered him, but much less than the atmosphere of confusion in the Yard, for when he really thought back over the five months he had been here, he could count on one hand the shifts during which he had exerted himself. Everything was start and stop, go and wait, until he found himself wishing he could dare go to the Yardmaster and tell him that something was terribly wrong. The endless standing around and, worse yet, his having to cover up Tony’s naps had turned his working time into a continuous frustration that seemed to be doing something strange to his mind. He had never had so much time to do nothing, and the shifts seemed endless and finally illicit when he, along with the others, had always to watch out for supervisors coming by. It was a lot different than rushing from store to store unloading meat and barely finishing the schedule by the end of the day.

  It had never seemed possible to him that he would be thinking so much about sex. He respected and almost worshiped his wife, Hilda, and yet now that she was in Florida with her mother for two weeks, he was strangely running into one stimulation after another. Suddenly Mrs. Curry next door, knowing when he ate breakfast, was taking out her garbage pail at six in the morning with an overcoat on and nothing underneath, and even on very cold mornings stood bent over with the coat open for minutes at a time at the end of the driveway, facing his kitchen window; and every day, every single day now, when he left for work she just happened to be coming out the front door, until he was beginning to wonder if . . . But that was impossible; a fine married woman like her was most likely unaware of what she was doing, especially with her husband in the army, fighting Fascism. Blowing on his heavy woolen gloves, he was held by the vision of her bending over and thrust it furiously out of his mind, only to fall still, again remembering a dream he had had in which he was coming into his own bedroom and there on the bed lay his cousin Lucy, all naked, and suddenly he fell on her, tripped on the rug, and woke up. Why should Lucy have gone to bed in his room?

  But now Brooklyn Bridge was unwinding from the tailgate of the truck, and how beautiful it was, how fine to be speeding along like this on a mission for the country, and everybody, even Tony, springing to action for the sake of the war effort. Baldu had to take off his cap and rub the circulation back into his scalp, and finally, feeling shivers trembling in his chest, he looked around and discovered a tarpaulin folded in a corner and covered himself. He sat under it in the darkness, blowing on his gloves.

  Tony ate three spinach sandwiches out of his box, swallowing them a half at a time, like wet green cookies. Hindu had fallen silent, signaled by Tony’s edgy look. The fitter was combative, turtled into his shoulders. As they crossed Chambers Street, the tall office and bank buildings they saw were dark, the people who worked in them at home, warm and smart and snug. Anybody out tonight was either a cop or a jerk; the defroster could not keep up with the cold, and the windshield was glazed over except for a few inches down near the air exhaust. Every curse Tony knew was welling up into his mouth. On deck tonight! And probably no place to hide either, on a ship whose captain and crew were aboard. Margaret! Her name, hated, infuriating, her sneaky face, her tattletale mouth, swirled through the air in front of him, the mouth of his undoing. For she had made Grampa so suspicious of him that he still refused to open the trunk until he had evidence Margaret was pregnant, and even when she got big and bigger and could barely waddle from one corner of the small living room to the other, he refused, until the baby was actually born. Grampa had not earned his reputation for nothing—
stupid men did not get rich in Calabria, or men who felt themselves above revenge.

  As the last days approached and the three-room apartment was prepared for the baby, the old man started acting funny, coming over after dinner ostensibly to sit and talk to Margaret but really to see, as the three of them well knew, that Tony stayed at home. Nights, for a month or so now, he had followed Tony from bar to bar, knocking glasses out of his hand and, in Ox’s, sweeping a dozen bottles to the floor behind the bar to teach Ox never again to serve his grandson, until Tony had to sneak into places where he had never hung before. But even so the old man’s reputation had preceded him, until Tony was a pariah in every saloon between Fourteenth Street and Houston. He gave up at last, deciding to go with the hurricane instead of fighting it, and returned from the piers night after night now, to sit in silence while his wife swelled. With about eight or nine days to go, Grampa, one night, failed to show up. The next night he was missing too, and the next.

  One night Tony stopped by to see if some new disaster had budded, like the old man’s falling ill and dying before he could hand over the money, but Grampa was well enough. It was only his normally hard-faced, suspicious glare that was gone. Now he merely stole glances at Tony and even seemed to have softened toward him, like a man in remorse. Sensing some kind of victory, Tony felt the return of his original filial warmth, for the old man seemed to be huddling against the approach of some kind of holiness, Tony believed, a supernatural and hallowed hour when not only was his first great-grandchild to be born but his life’s accomplishment would be handed down and the first shadow of his own death seen. The new atmosphere drew Tony back night after night, and now when he would rise to leave, the old man would lay a hand on Tony’s arm as though his strength was in the process of passing from him to a difficult but proud descendant. Even Mama and Papa joined in the silence and deep propriety of these partings.

  The pickup truck was turning on the riverfront under the West Side Highway; the sailor bent low to see out of the hand-sized clear space at the bottom of the windshield. Now he slowed and rolled down his window to look at the number on a pier they were passing and quickly shut it again. The cab was instantly refrigerated, a plunge in the temperature that made Hindu groan “Mamma mia” and pull his earflaps even lower. The night of the birth had been like this, in January too, and he had tried to take a walk around the hospital block to waste some time and could only get to the corner for the freezing cold. When he returned and walked back into the lobby, Mama was running to him and gripping him like a little wrestler, gulping out the double news. It was twins, two boys, both healthy and big; no wonder she had looked so enormous, that poor girl. Tony swam out of the hospital not touching the floor, stroked through the icy wind down Seventh Avenue, and floated up the stairs and found Grampa, and with one look he knew, he knew then, he already knew, for the old man’s head seemed to be rolling on a broken neck, so frightened was he, so despondent. But Tony held his hand out for the key anyway and kept asking for it until Grampa threw himself on his knees and grasped him around the legs, hawking and coughing and groaning for forgiveness.

  The trunk lid opened, Tony saw the brown paper bundle tied with rope, a package the size of half a mattress and deep as the trunk itself. The rope flew off, the brown paper crackled like splintering wood, and he saw the tied packets—Italian lire, of course, the bills covered with wings, paintings of Mussolini, airplanes, and zeros, fives, tens, colorful and tumbling under his searching hands. He knew, he already knew, he had known since the day he was born, but he ran back into the living room and asked. It had been an honest mistake. In Calabria, ask anybody there, you could buy or could have bought, once, once you could have bought, that is, a few years ago, until this thing happened with money all over the world, even here in America, ask Roosevelt why he is talking about closing the banks. There is some kind of sickness in the money and why should Italy be an exception, a poor country once you leave Rome. Hold on to it, maybe it will go up again. I myself did not know until two weeks ago I went to the bank to change it, ask your mother. I took the whole bundle to the National City in good faith, with joy in my heart, realizing that all your sins were the sins of youth, the exuberance of the young man who grows into a blessing for his parents and grandparents, making all his ancestors famous with his courage and manliness. It comes to seventeen hundred and thirty-nine dollars. In dollars that is what it comes to.

  I used to make three hundred driving a truck from Toronto to New York, four days’ work, Grampa. Seventeen hundred—you know what seventeen hundred is? Seventeen hundred is like if I bought one good suit and a Buick and I wouldn’t have what to buy gas, that’s seventeen hundred. Seventeen hundred is like if I buy a grocery store I be out on my ass the first bad week. Seventeen hundred is not like you got a right to come to a man and say go tie that girl around your neck and jump in the river you gonna come up rich. That’s not nowhere near that kinda money, and twins you gave me in the bargain. I got two twins, Grampa!

  The red blood washed down off his vision as the truck turned left and into the pier, past the lone light bulb and the night watchman under it listlessly waving a hand and returning to his stove in the shack. Midway down the length of the pier shed, one big door was open, and the sailor coasted the truck up to it and braked to a halt, the springs squeaking in the cold as the nose dipped.

  Tony followed Hindu out and walked past him to the gangplank, which extended into the pier from the destroyer’s deck, and walked up, glancing right and left at the full length of the ship. Warm lights burned in her midship compartments, and as he stepped onto the steel deck he concluded that they might be stupid enough to be in the Navy but not that stupid—they were all snuggled away inside and nobody was standing watch on deck. But now he saw his mistake; a sailor with a rifle at his shoulder, knitted blue cap pulled down over his ears and a face shield covering his mouth and chin, the high collar of a storm coat standing up behind his head, was pacing back and forth from rail to rail, on guard.

  Tony walked toward him, but the sailor, who looked straight at him on his starboard turn, continued across the deck toward port as though in an automatic trance. Tony waited for the sailor to turn again and come toward him and then stood directly in his path until the sailor bumped into his zipper and leaped in fright.

  “I’m from the Yard. Where’s the duty officer?”

  The sailor’s rifle started tilting off his shoulder, and Tony reached out and pushed it back.

  “Is it about me?”

  “Hah?”

  The sailor lowered his woolen mask. His face was young, and wan, with staring pop eyes. “I’m supposed to go off sea duty. I get seasick. This ship is terrible, I can’t hold any food. But now they’re telling me I can’t get off until we come back again. Are you connected with—”

  “I’m from the Navy Yard. There was an accident, right?”

  The sailor glanced at Hindu, standing a little behind Tony, and then at both their costumes and seemed ashamed and worried as he turned away, telling them to wait a minute, and disappeared through a door.

  “Wanna look at the rails?” Hindu joked, with a carefully shaped mockery of their order, shifting from one foot to the other and leaning down from his height to Tony’s ear.

  “Fuck the rails. You can’t do nuttn in this weather. They crazy? Feel that wind. Chrissake, it’ll go right up your asshole an’ put ice on your throat. But keep your mouth shut, I talk to this monkey. What a fuckin’ nerve!”

  Looey Baldu appeared out of the darkness of the pier, carrying the two sledges. “Where do you want these, Tony?”

  “Up your ass, Looey. Put ’em back on the truck.”

  Baldu, astounded, stood there.

  “You want a taxi? Move!”

  Baldu, uncomprehending, turned and stomped down the gangplank with the sledges.

  The door into which the sailor had vanished opened, spilling the temptation of warm y
ellow light across the deck to Tony’s feet, and a tall man emerged, ducking, and buttoning up his long overcoat. The chief petty officer, most likely, or maybe even one of the senior lieutenants, although his gangling walk, like a college boy’s, and his pants whipping high on his ankles lowered the estimate to ensign. Approaching, he put up his high collar and pulled down his cap and bent over to greet Tony.

  “Oh, fine. I’m very much obliged. I’ll show you where it is.”

  “Wait, wait, just a minute, mister.”

  The officer came back the two steps he had taken toward the fantail, an expression of polite curiosity on his pink face. A new gust sent his hand to his visor, and he tilted his head toward New Jersey, from where the wind was pounding at them across the black river.

  “You know the temperature on this here deck?”

  “What? Oh. I haven’t been out for a while. It has gotten very cold. Yes.”

  Hindu had stepped back a deferential foot or so, instinctively according Tony the air of rank that a cleared space gives, and now Baldu returned from the truck and halted beside Hindu.

  “Could I ask you a little favor?” Tony said, his fists clenched inside his slit pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes squinting against the wind. “Would you please go inside and tell the captain what kinda temperature you got out here?”