Firespill (2 page)

“Well, the nuclear boys in the States are sometimes out for six.”

“Oh, lovely,” said Sarah.

“Three months is better than six.”

“Hmm—I suppose. Will you be stopping off anywhere?”

“No. Haven’t seen the written orders yet, but the usual drill for these long training runs is to go right through.”

“Oh. I was hoping you’d be able to write.”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll think of you every day.”

Suddenly Sarah started to cry. Kyle got up, knocking over his cup and spilling the remainder of the coffee on his newly pressed uniform. Sarah reached for a tea cloth and began wiping his trousers. He gently took the cloth away from her and put his arm about her. “Sare—” She buried her head against his chest as his other arm enveloped her. “Sare, honey, I’m not going to war, baby. It’s just a patrol.”

“I know,” she sobbed. “But everybody’s—”

“Everybody’s what?” he asked softly.

“Everybody’s so—so dangerous nowadays. Everybody’s trying to kill one another.”

“Sare, honey, this is just a routine training run. Out towards Japan, up north and back to Vancouver Island. It’s a milk run. No trouble out there—just fish.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, pushing herself away and wiping her eyes. “I know. Good Lord,” she added, admonishing herself gently, “it isn’t as if you’d never gone before. But you’re not as young as you used to be.”

He smiled at her, bent to lift his seabag, and stopped for a moment. “No, I’m not. You’re right, Sare—I am older. But I love you.”

She said nothing, but put her head against his shoulder and walked hand in hand with him to the car as if they were still courting. It had always been their custom for her to drive him to and from the base whenever he had gone to sea. As Sarah drove the VW Rabbit out along the dirt track through the firs to the highway, Kyle gazed proudly over the garden’s brilliant profusion of flowers and shrubs, from the cherry red roses to the deep royal blue of the lobelia borders sloping down towards the bottle green fir woods. But of everything in the garden he liked the dark Nocturne roses best, because he and Sarah had planted them together. As they drove past the old cedar gate, he watched a fat bumblebee taking nectar from the heart of a rose, and momentarily he envied it its freedom. Right now there was nothing he would like better than to putter round the garden all summer with Sarah.

On the way to the base they didn’t talk very much, except for a few words about the roses, which were just as special to Sarah, and about how the tomatoes would probably ripen earlier this year. It was a hazy Vancouver Island day, warm but not too hot, with a gentle breeze coming in from the sea.

From the summit of a high hill they could see a long trail of log booms being dragged by an ant-sized tug across Juan de Fuca Strait. In front of them a huge semitrailer, coughing black clouds of smoke, roared as it topped the peak of the oil-stained grade. Kyle wound up the window to keep out the diesel smell of the truck. He would be breathing enough of that for the next ninety days. Sarah tried to pull out around the truck but dropped back at the last moment, afraid to pass. She hated the monstrous machines; they frightened her in the same way that submarines did.

When they reached Esquimalt Base, Sarah pulled the car over beside the main gate. She had never wanted to see the ships he sailed on, having been brought up to believe that anything that floated was unsafe and that submarines were therefore the un-safest of all. She had never forgotten hearing a junior officer at their home explaining to the children why so many doors were closed on a sub during emergencies. He had described the conventional sub as “not much more than nine hollow steel balls welded together with one or two on top, with a streamlined casing that makes the boat look much stronger than it really is.” Sarah harbored the same idea about machines that many have about the sick—that if you avoid them you’ll be spared their fate. She did not subscribe to the theory that the more you know about them the less frightened you are of them. She believed that if she knew all the things that could go wrong with a car, she’d never drive one. Besides, it was enough strain to wave your husband good-bye; knowing the details, all the terrible possibilities, only made it worse.

As Kyle leaned over to get his seabag from the trunk, Sarah noticed once again how his movements betrayed the fact that he was a man well beyond his prime, a man too old for submarine duty.

Seeing the armed guard at the gate, she was reminded of all the times they had parted during the war. Suddenly she felt the chill of old farewells flooding back. She kissed him gently but quickly on the cheek. He hugged her, and she said in a choking whisper, “Now mind the cold,” fidgeting momentarily with his collar as if it were crooked. He squeezed her hand and walked through the gate.

The world around was at peace. The waters of Juan de Fuca Strait were only faintly rippled, the sun had brightened, and the sky was empty of clouds. But Sarah did not feel at peace. She felt the same as she had thirty-six years ago, before they were married, when she had seen him off from the other side of the country to the war in the Atlantic.

The guard saluted her and smiled. She said hello, not recognizing the man, and turned to the car before she lost her composure.

Leading Seaman Lambrecker’s farewell in a downtown Victoria apartment had been much shorter. His face, dominated by pale blue, deep-set eyes, was long and thin like the rest of his body, and for a man of barely thirty-five he had a hungry, tired look. He had been awake since five that morning, lying still in the darkness of the bedroom, his creased face illuminated now and then by the glow of a cigarette as he tried endlessly to unravel the tangle of lies and frustrations threatening to strangle what remained of his two-year-old marriage.

Before going to bed he and Frances had been arguing again. They had been shouting louder than usual. “You’re a monk,” she had yelled. “You always want to stay in. Jesus Christ—hanging around that tub of yours all the goddamn time, you’d think when you had a chance you’d want to break out. I’m
twenty-seven
, not fifty-seven! I want some fun. Christ, I don’t know—why can’t you let your hair down like normal people do instead of locking yourself up like a monk?”

“Like Morgan, you mean,” he had replied acidly.

“Yeah, like Morgan,” she answered, her jaw moving up and down on her wad of gum. “At least he knows how to enjoy himself.”

“Son of a bitch is too dumb to do anything else.”

Fran pouted her lips as if addressing a petulant child. “Tch, tch. That a fact? Well, he’s not too dumb to be a lieutenant, is he now?”

It was then that Lambrecker had lost his temper and grabbed her by the arm. For months Morgan—his half brother, a lieutenant in air force stores—had come between them, ever since the day he arrived from back east with that damned imitation French Canadian accent of his that sent Fran into gales of laughter.

A hundred times Lambrecker had wanted to smash Morgan’s face in, but instead he kept hoping that Fran would get tired of him. Besides, he knew that if he ever laid a hand on Morgan, it would be an enlisted man’s word against an officer’s.

Still, whenever he thought of all the times he had come home from Esquimalt Base to find Morgan lounging nonchalantly in the kitchen, his feet up on the window ledge, laughing and drinking with Fran, Lambrecker wanted to kill him. His grip had tightened on Fran’s arm.

She had screamed. “Let go of me, you idiot!”

Lambrecker had pushed her away roughly before he could hurt her.

“Oh dear me,” she taunted, straightening the transparent blouse that looked like a second skin. “Look at his wittle eyes—they all bulging out. Poor wittle him.”

“Jesus Christ!” he had yelled, sweeping the kitchen table clean with his fists, sending a pile of sticky sauce bottles, plastic plates, and spent beer cans crashing to the floor. Fran surveyed the debris scattered about the cheap linoleum. She flushed with anger, but then smiled sweetly. “Oh—wittle man’s gone all crazy again. Poor, poor wittle man.”

They hadn’t spoken since. It was a repetition of what had happened a hundred times before—the unbearably long silence that he knew he would break though he’d vowed not to.

He didn’t know whether Morgan was sleeping with her yet. But underneath it all, beneath the hatred he had for his half brother, he still loved Fran. He couldn’t explain why and he didn’t even try to. He only knew that while he was a loner, a man who did not need friends like others, he did need at least one person who needed him, and that person, he still believed, was Fran. It never occurred to him that she might be staying with him only for simple financial security.

He drew heavily on another cigarette. It wasn’t sex that had been the cause of it all—at least that hadn’t been the trouble at the beginning. Now, of course, they never made love. But he recalled that even when that part of their life had been all right, she had started acting strangely—yelling and screaming at him over trivialities each time he had come home.

It was only then, that morning as he lay silently smoking beside her, that it occurred to him that it was possible she’d been sleeping with someone before Morgan had even arrived on the scene, that she was just using Morgan as an excuse after the fact. Her remark about his half brother’s being a lieutenant came back to Lambrecker as he lay staring out at the pale wash of dawn. The other man must be an officer. It would have to be some son of a bitch impressing her with his rank, he thought. She loved to imagine herself always moving up in society, refused to settle for what she had.

Lambrecker turned towards his wife. His eyes followed the contour of her body from her hip to her neck. He could see nothing else. She took care nowadays to wrap her shapely figure in uninviting nightdresses obviously designed to dissuade him from making any advance. He put his cigarette out, pushed it so hard that the still burning butt scorched his finger. He turned back to look at her. Who was it? For a moment he had the impulse to slap her awake and beat her until she told him, put his hands around her neck and choke the life out of her. Instead, he quickly got up and dressed, then gulped some cereal and shaved.

After a while he returned to the bedroom and stood motionless in the doorway, watching. She moved a little in her sleep and the blanket slid off her shoulders, revealing the gentle rise and fall of her breasts beneath the pink nylon as she breathed.

He thought her more beautiful than when he had married her. He knew women were supposed to become less attractive more rapidly than men, but to him she had improved with age. There was now a fullness about her figure that made her seem even more sensuous. He remembered when he had first seen her; she had reminded him of Lauren Bacall. She still did. Gradually, after the realization that he would not see her for three months had struck him full force, his anger started to ebb. He bent down to kiss her forehead. Suddenly her hands shot out from beneath the covers and pulled the blankets over her head. Aware now that she had known he’d been watching her—desiring her—Lambrecker felt humiliated. He grabbed viciously at his seabag, stamped into the kitchen, and rang for a cab. The dispatcher, bothered by static, asked him to repeat the address. He shouted it this time and slammed down the receiver. Taking care to bang the door, he walked out into the gray, crushed-stone parking lot where the sun never came, and waited in the early morning chill.

He was beginning to hate the coming patrol—more than he had any other. It would take him, not for a rest, but away from the chance to fix what was wrong. For some men such a cruise would have meant an escape. For Lambrecker it would be torture. The only possible explanation for Fran’s behavior was that she had taken a lover even before Morgan. He tried not to think who the other man might be. He wanted to lock out the thought until he returned from sea, until he could do something about it. But the more he tried not to think about it, the more it filled his mind, until it was the only thought he had. For a moment he contemplated going AWOL; then he dismissed the idea, not because he thought it was wrong, but because it would not help him solve anything if the MPs were hunting him.

His wife’s comment about Morgan’s being a lieutenant kept haunting him, and the more he thought of the other man, the more certain he became that it was an officer. “And what,” he thought as the cab drove down towards the taverns on Esquimalt Road, “can you do against an officer?”

The executive officer of H.M.C.S.
Swordfish
gave Kyle a brisk salute. “Welcome aboard, sir.”

“Thank you. Bud O’Brien, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pleased to meet you.” They shook hands. O’Brien, a tall, deeply tanned man in his early thirties, nodded appreciatively.

“Same here, sir,” he said, his heavy eyebrows not moving as he took care not to register surprise at Kyle’s age. Kyle didn’t notice; he was too busy looking at the boat. From the moment he had stepped aboard the long, black sub, resting in the water like a harbor seal, he had felt the old sense of security afforded by the various symbols and the familiar routine, from the Canadian flag at the stern to the officer on watch. Doubtless first impressions were often wrong, but O’Brien immediately added to Kyle’s general sense of well-being. The sub’s black, slatted decking was spotless, the flag lanyard taut, and though the bridge surface had been recently painted, the small night-running light set aft of it at the base of the metal sail was clear of even a speck of paint. They were small things, but they told Kyle a lot about the first officer. O’Brien might be much younger, but he obviously wasn’t a paid-up member of the “new breed.” He did things right.

Of course the sub’s performance and endurance had been updated. She had been fitted out with large Exide-Tarpon batteries that greatly reduced recharging time, and a streamlined hull that now gave her a submerged speed of eighteen knots. Even so, for a moment Kyle felt as if he had just stepped back in time and said good-bye to Sarah before going on yet another Arctic convoy run. Some things would be unfamiliar, but from the refresher courses he knew that things had not changed so much that all the old ways had been abandoned. Before he unpacked his seabag he asked to see his engineering, electrical, navigating, and weapons officers in the control room, immediately below the conning tower. With such a short time remaining before sailing, he had no time for a more informal gathering with his officers. His first job was to ascertain the state of the sub’s readiness.