I Pledge Allegiance (5 page)

I
t takes forever for mail to reach us. We, as a ship, have our own ZIP code and everything. But I suppose if you’re nowhere near a post office, and your entire ZIP keeps moving up and down a strange coastline, you can hardly blame the mailman if he’s not exactly popping ’em through the slot in the way you’re used to.

When it does arrive, though, we have a kind of ritual. Like a bunch of squirrels with acorns, we all make our way back to The House, where we lie back and silently read out our mail, waiting for whoever is going to burst first. It never fails. You just can’t help eventually sharing pieces of your mail out loud with the guys.

One of the good things I have learned from Navy life is that despite our backgrounds, there is a lot more in common between us than I had ever really thought about. First among those things is food. Everybody’s mother asks about the food.

“‘Are you getting greens?’” Moses reads to us, though he is doing equal parts laughing and reading so
we have to listen hard. “‘You know, son, that you will never be fed greens the way you were in this house here, so you are going to have to make sure you get your hands on whatever greens you can find. And please, don’t let them tell you that that ol’ iceberg lettuce is any kind of greens because that is pure nonsense. Shouldn’t even call them greens, they should call them whites. And speaking of whites to look out for …’” The rest of the letter is omitted. Not to protect anybody’s sensitive ears, but because Moses is now laughing so far beyond his ability to form words, he may not ever get back. He’s in the rack above me, and when he laughs himself right out of that rack, I snatch the letter out of his hand as he flies by. He lies flat on his back looking up as I hold it, but he just keeps laughing without making any effort to get it back.

I hand it to him, unable to keep from laughing myself, though I haven’t read a word. You don’t read another guy’s mail unless he clearly tells you to.

“‘Scurvy!’” Seven reads out, from his own mom. “‘You do know about scurvy, don’t you? It is a disease that the Navy is famous for because of their inadequate food, so unless you want to come back to me with horrible bandy legs and bendy bones, you make sure you get vitamin C, and A, and D, and all the sunshine you can manage.’”

This time it’s the audience that makes the reading impossible. Everybody roars at the notion of Seven getting sunshine. Then he puts down his letter, picks up his guitar, and starts howling his way through Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”

“‘You’re all the sunshine I need, Ma,’” he sings, really mangling the original lyrics. But hey, it’s his mom.

Rascal has the biggest stack of letters. He claims they are all from heartbroken girls.

“Okay,” Huff says, “read us one. Any one.”

“Cost ya a buck,” Rascal says.

“What?” Huff says. “Don’t be a dope. We’re all reading.”

“You ain’t readin’ what I’m readin’. A buck. Guaranteed satisfaction, or your money back.”

“I could just lie and say I was not satisfied and you’d never know.”

“I sleep two and a half feet away. I’ll know.”

We laugh a lot at letter time.

There are also great fat silences that seem to come over all of us at exactly the same time. I don’t know how that happens.

Right now the place goes silent while the guys read whatever private stuff they’ve got. Me, I’m reading Rudi.

Dear Morris,

How hard is the war going to be if even your own guys scream and shout at you all day long? The sergeant screams so much and so close up to me, it feels like it is always raining on my face.

Sorry, how are you, Morris?

I’m scared all the time though maybe not as much as you might expect. Are you scared? I’ve been hearing a lot about the Navy. The Marines talk about the Navy a real lot. They say yours is the easy war and the safe war. That we do all the dangerous stuff while you sailors mostly go fishing and work on your tans. Then there’s all that other stuff that I can’t even repeat that they say about sailors. Do you think all that is true? About you having an easier war than me? Does it feel like that to you?

Here’s what I mean about being not as scared as maybe you’d of thought I might be. The surprise thing is, I think I fit in here. I know, isn’t that crazy? All those years and years of never fitting into anything that didn’t have you and Ivan and Beck making sure I fit and even then never being a really good fit anyway, let’s be honest. Then I get this letter telling me I
now belong to a whole new something and it’s a something that scares me into wetting my pants. Remember that? I am sure that you do. But then comes the funny part and it is that I settle into the Marines real quick. Like from the first day of basic training. I like the way the days are all put together for you so you don’t have to worry about where to be or what to do. I like the idea that we have a big important something that we gotta do. I like the idea that the kind of jobs you get in the Marines mean it is kinda clear whether you get it right or wrong without a lot of talking or thinking about it. I mean you shoot at a guy, you can sorta tell if you got it right, right?

And here is an important something, Morris, that I probably wouldn’t even tell the guys here because I don’t want them to think I am crazy, at least not so soon. I found out I really like to be told what to do. I even like to be screamed what to do if that is what they think they need to do.

The Marines don’t complicate things for me which pretty much everybody else always does. It is like they know me.

I hope your tan is doing well (I am joking there) and that you are not missing home too bad.

Your very good friend,
PFC Rudi

“What’s so funny?” Bruise asks.

I am not even aware of laughing.

“He fits,” I say, and I’m aware of shaking my head in wonder.

“Who fits where?”

“My pal from home, Rudi. Starting to look like he’s a pretty snug fit with the US Marine Corps.”

“Is he mentally defective?” Moses asks, quite seriously, probably reasonably.

“No,” I snap. “He’s just a natural-born Marine.”

“That’s a yes, then.”

Everybody’s laughing. They are laughing because it was a funny line.

I’m not laughing. Stupidest, strangest thing ever, but all of a sudden I’m all choked up. Who could believe it?

Next thing I know, I’m standing, squared up in front of Moses’s rack.

“You gotta take that back, Moses,” I say.

And just like that, nobody’s laughing anymore.

Moses, back lying comfortably in his rack, stops reading his letter, holds it flat to his chest. He looks at me and speaks in an odd-sounding way, a little like a question and a lot like a form of pity. “Sit down, Mo.”

As he is in the rack above me, and we are eye-to-eye, that should be good advice. I would very much like to just lie back down.

“I will be very happy to sit down, after you take back what you said about my friend.”

One by one, each of the guys swings around to a sitting position in his rack. Except Moses.

“You can’t be serious,” he says.

“I think I can.” I’m fighting myself not to tremble too obviously. It’s the only fight I am truly up to here. And I think I’m even losing this one. “You can’t say stuff like that about a guy’s friend when you don’t even know him.”

I sound crazy. Even to me I sound crazy. But there is this great gulf between what I can rationally think and what is flopping around in my gut. And my gut is feeling this overwhelming need to protect and defend Rudi. To make sure that he isn’t taking any more guff off of anybody than he already has, than he already has to.

Especially about his intelligence.

Moses wounded me, is what he did. Because he made me feel like Rudi was unprotected, let down by me, personally. I was failing in my mission already.

Even if it sounds like Rudi needs less protection than I do right now.

“You going to take it back, Moses?”

He gives it just a little bit of thought.

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Then I’m going to have to call you outside.”

Basically, the same sound comes out of every guy in The House, including me, including Moses. A groan.

“Just take it back, Moses” is one popular sentiment.

“Just let it go, Mo” is the other one.

But both perfectly reasonable options lose, and I find myself following Moses out of The House, through the passageway, and up to the next deck. We don’t even get topside, since that’s not where the fighting goes on. It became common knowledge almost as soon as we boarded ship that the private place for sorting out differences of opinion is on the gun deck below topside, right underneath the turret, where munitions are stored and not much else happens with the ample space. I follow Moses through hatches and up ladders as if I were his apprentice.

We reach the empty space and stand opposite each other. I assume the position, arms up, fists curled in, almost like I am ready to punch myself. I have no idea where I learned this stance.

It’s possible I have never felt stupider in my whole life.
I don’t stand a chance, and it would be very difficult for me to put into words what I might hope to achieve. I would bet that nobody on the entire ship would vote for this to happen, other than the utter complete sickos who just love blood for blood’s sake. For his part, Moses’s face shows no hint of any kind of pleasure in this.

And yet. Somewhere deep inside, where common sense cannot reach, I feel noble about this.

Until the punch.

Moses says, “Okay?” like he’s asking permission.

I nod, and his hands are so quick that as I nod I actually nod my nose right into his straight snapper of a right hand.

I go down. My knees buckle and I fall forward, making things even more pathetic by bashing my mouth on Moses’s knee on my way down. My arms don’t feel right, don’t do the job of getting me up off the floor. I can feel the warm blood pooling up behind my wiggly bottom front teeth. I manage eventually to stagger to my feet and find Moses politely waiting for me. I mimic his approach and say, “Okay?”

He nods, then punches me hard enough this time that, though I attempt to fall forward, I find myself sitting on my butt about six feet from where I started, looking up at my puncher. Then there is a gap. There are blackout conditions.

Then I am topside, at the rail, the wonderful, wonderful life-saving sea breeze blowing consciousness into me from the top down.

“You’re a good boy, Mo,” comes the voice right at my ear.

I turn to see Moses’s face right in my face. Because he is holding me up. My arm is around his shoulders, and he is dabbing at my lip with a wet and ruined handkerchief.

“Does that mean I win?” I say, smiling and splitting the lip a little more open.

“You are a good boy, and a great friend to that jarhead, leatherneck, simpleton of a moron Marine idiot pal of yours.”

He lays a big wide smile on me, one that does not have so much as a dent in it.

“Am I going to have to teach you another lesson?” I say. I’m at my most menacing, which is not wildly menacing at the best of times. But the truth is, the words feel fine now.

“Now, now, Mo, you know that violence never solved anything.”

I’m wobbly, but not so bad I can’t handle that one.

“Then what happened to my face? “

“We’ll call that
friendly fire.
Very different thing. It’s
real
violence that never solved anything.”

“You don’t believe that, Moses.”

He laughs. “Nah. That was just a test to see if you had a concussion. Violence solves everything, man. That’s why we’re here.”

I shake my head gently. I see things a lot differently from how Moses sees them. I always have, always will.

But I know I want him right beside me every single day until they send me home.

I
t always shocked me.

No matter how many consecutive Fourth of Julys we’d come here and do exactly the same thing. No matter how many consecutive years we took the green line to Park Street and then made the nervous walk over to the North End to purchase the illegal fireworks. I knew weeks in advance — certainly by, say, June 21 — what was going to happen and what it was going to sound like.

Still, it shocked me. Every time.

Cherry bombs, M-80s, bottle rockets, Roman candles, everything we could scrape up the money for was part of our arsenal. Then we would bring craft to float out on the pond and attack. Ivan, who only cared about the boom-boom element, just brought a copy of the
Globe
and folded boats out of the newspaper. Sometimes he didn’t even bother with the folding, just balling a sheet up and telling us to use our imaginations as we fired away. Rudi usually managed to come up with
something half-shipwrecked already, since he shopped in people’s trash cans. Beck, also working the reasonable/economical side of things since we were going to destroy these things anyway, hand made a couple of boats out of scraps of whatever he found at home. His boats looked better than real boats and sometimes didn’t even sink when we had done our worst.

Me, I always bought a Revell model kit special and slaved over the details, insignia, whatever, until the vapors from the glue made me fall out of the chair. The boats I brought were always as perfect as I could get them.

It was stupid, I know, but it felt right to me. There was always some little-boy part of me that just thought they deserved a certain respect, a fighting chance, if we were going to unleash all our firepower on them.

I never explained that to the guys. I know that Ivan, for one, would have floated me out on a boat and shot bottle rockets at me all day if I tried to explain my
feelings.

I just never enjoyed the explosions much. I would spend 364 days every year convincing myself that that wasn’t so, and then one day jumping out of my skin with shock and the wrong kind of surprise all over again. I always wanted to be there, because I never liked the guys doing things without me. Especially
things that had become part of our traditions. But it got to be hard.

And then there were those nightmares.

They started coming pretty regularly the summer between junior and senior years. The news from the war was unavoidable, and in the daytime it would bleed into my head. At night, it would all start churning and bubbling in there, and the explosions would start, and all of us would die. Again. Again.

“I was thinking, maybe we don’t need to bomb the boats on the pond this year,” Beck said when it was nearing time for our North End rearmament.

We were walking around the pond, just walking around the footpath that circles it, walking to nowhere, which we did a lot of on good summer days.

I was surprised by this but made an effort not to seem like it.

“Huh?” I said casually. “What? Why?”

Beck is not the type to laugh outright in a guy’s face, no matter how dumb the guy’s being. Instead, he does this kind of relaxed semi-smile where one side of his top lip curls up and he lets his mouth hang open. You’d almost wish he would just laugh at you.

“Come on, Morris. It was pretty obvious by last year that you weren’t getting much fun out of it. Now I figure the fact that you tell us about your explosive and
tragic nightmares
every single day
probably has some meaning.”

Every single day?

“Every single day?”

“Every single day.”

“I didn’t think I was telling it every single day.”

“What did you think, that you were putting on a brave face or something?”

I had to consider.

“Yes. Actually, I did think that.”

“Sorry, man. No brave face. Do you even have one of those?”

As we approached the boathouse, we ran into Rudi and Ivan, who were hiring out a rowboat for an hour. Rudi never seems to work out that this always winds up with him mysteriously falling into the water at some point, followed by Ivan laughing so helplessly, he only manages to save Rudi — who can only stay afloat so long — at just about the moment of drowning death.

“I think we’re going to skip the bombing of the fleet on the Fourth this year,” Beck said to them.

“What?” Rudi said. He got quite flustered at this tipping of the annual rhythm of the calendar, as if someone had suddenly canceled, say, August. He looked nervously back and forth between Beck and Ivan.

“It’s just, with everything going on, and the nightmares and everything … Morris doesn’t have any fun. So I thought we’d just skip it this time around. Maybe things’ll be better next year.”

Then it was Ivan’s turn to look perplexed. He stared at Beck, head tilted, trying to make it make sense. He never quite achieved that.

“No,” Ivan said firmly. “Request denied. Stuff needs to be blown up.”

“Right,” said Rudi, finally exhaling.

“Rudi?” Beck said, gesturing toward me.

I must have had my famously un-brave face on, because at the sight of me, Rudi looked like his dog had just died.

“Ah, I suppose,” he said.

“Maybe we’ll go to the Sox game this year for a change. They’re about a million games out, there will be about a million tickets available. We can probably sneak in for nothing anyway.”

Rudi brightened.

Ivan did not.

“Request denied,” he said, more emphatically. “I told you, stuff needs to be blown up.
Somebody’s
got to do it.”

“Then I guess you’ll need to do it alone,” Beck said.

He had to know this would cut very little ice with Ivan.

“Then I’ll do it alone,” he said. He turned, tugging Rudi by the shirt down the dock toward the rowboats. Halfway down, he spun around again in our direction. “You guys are still making me boats, though, right? I can’t do everything for you.”

For
us.

I laughed at him, because he was just being so totally Ivan about it all.

“I’ll make you a boat,” I said.

Beck, less amused by Ivan, didn’t answer.

Just as they were getting into the boat, Beck shouted down, “Rudi? You do know he’s going to dump you into the water, right?”

Rudi was actually offended by this suggestion.

“No,” he shouted back. “I don’t know that. Why would I know that? Why would he do that?”

Stepping into the boat, Ivan broke already into the laugh, so loud and hard he very well might not be able to rescue Rudi when the time came.