The Passage (57 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“Forget it; put that back.” Stant tucked the slip into his uniform pocket. “I'll get it to her, if she's here.”
Stant let him out and went back inside the shack. Dan stood irresolute, still not convinced there was no way to find her.
He drifted along the fence and came to a section that paralleled the road. The grass within was foot-worn to bare dirt, and men stood along it smoking. Most ignored him, but one wiry mustached man perked up and gestured him closer. He jittered from one foot to the other, rubbing his hands against his folded arms as if he was cold, though the heat was penetrating.
“Say friend, got a cigarette to spare?”
“No, sorry. I don't smoke.”
“Speak English good, don't I? Used to live in San Antone. You looking for somebody?”
“Yeah.”
“Who? Maybe I can help.”
“Gutiérrez? Graciela Gutiérrez?”
“Oh sure, I know her. Want me to get her for you?”
Dan stared through the fence into the man's eyes, then looked behind him at dozens, scores, hundreds of men dawdling aimlessly along the fence line, talking or just staring out at passing cars. A tattooed teenager urinated against the trunk of a burnt-looking palm tree.
“You know her?”
“Oh sure.” Tobacco-stained fingers probed the mesh. “Pretty girl, I know her, sure. Give me a dollar, I'll get her for you. Or find you another girl—”
“Thanks anyway,” said Dan, and paced on, ignoring the shouting, the transition into no-doubt-obscene Spanish. Past the gate area he could look in to where row on row of tents stretched back across the sandy soil. They were going to have a hell of a mosquito problem this close to the Everglades. He saw smoke rising from cook
fires, people standing in line holding paper bags, children running, men sitting on overturned cans playing cards. Gradually, he realized the camp was far larger than he'd thought. Only then did he accept, reluctantly, that there was no way to find out if she'd made it or not. It was chaos on the far side of the wire.
They'd fled Cuba looking for freedom. And here they were penned up again.
He only hoped Graciela and Miguelito were among them.
 
 
WHEN he got to the restaurant, he found everybody together at a table in the back: Harper and Horseheads; Cephas, the departmental yeoman; Chief Miller, Harper's second in command on the security team. “Had a little errand,” he apologized as they moved their chairs to let him in. “Then I had to go back to the ship and change.”
“That's okay, sir. Glad you could make it. Casey was gonna be here, too, but he's got duty.”
“What's good?”
“Steak, seafood. We already ordered. You'll pay, but it's good.” Dan thought unhappily that after the two taxi rides, he had only four dollars left. Harper looked different, and it wasn't just the thick gold chain around his neck and the shirt unbuttoned to show his chest hair.
“My God. Is that a toupee?”
The chief warrant patted it fondly. “Ain't you ever seen this? My liberty rug. Actual tests prove it doubles my batting average. So, what you ordering?”
“Maybe just a salad.”
“Oh, right, you're the guy owes his fillings to the fucking lawyers. Why don't I pick it up this time? Hey! Slick Hips! Martini's your drink, right?”
“Well, okay. Thanks,” Dan said. “I'll pay you back next week. Straight up, two olives. And a glass of water on the side.”
“Hey, we got mail, didn't we? You hear from your fucking ex, your little girl?”
“No.” The question reminded him that he hadn't heard from them since they got under way from Charleston. “I got to find a card, get her a toy or something. Her birthday's next month.”
“Buy her something nice, something that'll make her remember her daddy. How old's she again?”
“Five.”
“That's a nice age,” said Harper. “I remember when my girls was that age. Cute as shit. They'd run through the house after their bath, their little buns naked, laugh and shriek, Bonnie'd chase them … . But shit, I hardly ever saw them, I was out hustling bombs and beans and bullets. I counted it up once when I was in Westpac. Out of a year, I spent seventy-two days at home. The Navy's not the sweet deal they make out in the recruiting posters.” Harper paused. “Although there are advantages. Japan, the Philippines.”
“I've heard about Olongopo—”
“Shit, not Olongopo. Watching those kids dive off that little bridge into Shit River for pennies. Forget it.” Harper shuddered.
“I liked the double-oh-seven,” said Cephas. “When I was a seaman deuce, we'd all go see Maria. She'd do that with the pickle—”
“Maria, yeah, she'd pick it up from a beer bottle, then lean over and fire it at the audience. Great show. But I hate Olongopo. Guys selling monkey meat on the street, the little kids saying, ‘I love you Joe, no shit. Oh, you cherry boy?' We used to go to Subic City. We had a bowling team. We were always in and out trying to fix the fucking winches. We'd go up there and there was this little twolane alley and we'd just get fucking plastered on San Miguel and bowl. Sometimes when it rained, the fucking alley would flood, but we didn't care; we'd bowl till the ball wouldn't go through the water.” Harper shook his head dreamily, then recalled himself. “But that's long ago and far away. Used to be you could have fun in port. Now it's just grind, grind, grind. You're lucky if you get a night ashore.”
“No shit,” said Horseheads. “It's like being in prison.”
“Only prisoners get color TV and all the sleep they want.”
“You got that right, Ed. It's tough on marriages, tough on families. Bonnie's kind of a slob, but you got to hand it to her, she did all right keeping things going when I was away. But now Emily's starting to act up … .”
Dan sat half-listening, thinking how his own marriage had self-destructed; about Susan's infidelity first, then remembering what the chaplain had said: that infidelity was a symptom, not a cause, that happy wives and happy husbands didn't need to send signals like that. Could it have worked if he'd been around more, like Harper said? Had Susan been right after all—could they have made it if not for the Navy?
“They ought to pay us more, too,” said Cephas.
“Hey! Over here, Sweet Cheeks!” Harper rapped the table for another round. He stared after the waitress. “Shit, I've seen more meat than that on a butcher's apron. Yeah, you can't do it anymore on just your paycheck.”
“You've got a nice house,” said Dan. “A boat and everything.”
“Because I got the bars, a way to make a little extra on the side. Otherwise, I'd be living in some apartment complex, driving a fucking Honda, and Bonnie'd be shopping at K Mart. And I wouldn't have
Blow Job.
Shit, that's what you need,” he told Dan. “Remember
at the beach, we were talking about how you wanted an apartment? If you had the dough? A place to take a girl? You don't want an apartment. You want a boat. Get them a little drunk, get them seasick, and then take 'em down in that V-berth … . All right! Here comes the food.”
 
 
AFTER dinner, they went out, to find a parking ticket on Miller's rented Dodge. Horseheads crumpled it up and stuffed it in the glove compartment as Harper started the car. “Where to?” said Dan, still not sure he was in the mood. The faces at Krome haunted him.
“Coconut Grove. Skids looked in the paper; there's a hot group at The Yellow Man.”
“Skids” must be Cephas, though he'd never heard the yeoman's nickname. “I didn't know you liked Jamaican music, Jay.”
“I like anything that attracts young fresh pussy.”
“Good point.”
The club was at Mayfair-in-the-Grove, a high-rise Spanish-style shopping complex. They took an elevator up from the basement garage. Hammered copper and brass doors opened on tiers of expensive-looking shops. The terraces were paved with brick and cooled by tiled fountains and tropical foliage so lush it looked unreal. Dan glanced around, then up at twinkling lights he only belatedly recognized as stars. The plaza was open to the sky.
The Yellow Man wasn't just packed; the line snaked out the door and past Lord & Taylor. Harper was right; there were scads of women. Some young, some older, though well cared-for, all expensively dressed in silks, leathers, metallic bustiers, velvet jeans. Gold jewelry hung from every possible point of attachment. There was a lot of joking and laughing, a lot of Cuban accents. Dan felt out of place, uncomfortable, but Miller struck up a conversation with a woman behind them. She giggled when he introduced himself, and said, “Do you boys reggae here often?” She told them “Yellow Man” meant mulatto, that the old song “Yellow Bird” was actually about a mulatto woman. Dan wondered if this was so, why there were no blacks in the line, or anywhere here, for that matter. Except for Cephas, of course.
Harper slipped the girl who seated them a bill and they got a table far enough from the band to hear one another, but still close to the action. A harried waitress appeared, and they ordered margaritas and rumrunners and Barbancourt rum with lime and tonic.
Dan sat listening to the music. It was hot, fast, but he couldn't seem to get into it … as if he wasn't really here, ashore, in a place designed for people to spend money and have fun. He was someplace
else. But it was hard to say where … as if he'd been jerked too swiftly through too many different places in the last month. Charleston, Gitmo, the Passage, adrift in a tiny boat;
Razytelny, Barrett,
and now Coconut Grove, listening to the Buffalo Soldiers singing an a cappella version of “Ninety-Six Degrees in the Shade,” the lead singer in a metallic crocheted hat with dreadlocks down to his waist like Bob Marley. And as each scene flashed by, unanswered questions popped up like “no sale” tabs in an old-fashioned cash register: Strishauser and Billy; Sanderling's death; the captain's truthfulness; whether they'd have to return to refresher training; Graciela's fate … none of it settled, as if nothing ever was settled, only left behind … . No wonder he was fucking disoriented … .
Harper was shouting something and he leaned, cupping his ear. “What?”
“I said, it's bullshit. All this talk about us and the Soviets getting ready to go to war any minute, it's bullshit, that's what it is. You know?”
The chief warrant was back on another of his ultraconservative hobbyhorses, apparently. Dan nodded noncommittally and Harper yelled, “What we'll probably do, next war, it'll probably be both of us against China or something. Want me to prove it?”
“Sure,” said Dan, curious as to how he was going to do that.
“I'll tell you. Remember when they captured the
Pueblo?
They got operating cryptographic machines. Okay, you say, so we stop using the KW-seven, right? We go to a new machine? Wrong. We kept right on using it. So, you think anybody really cares?”
“Well, they must,” said Dan. “Why else are we out steaming all the time, they're building a six-hundred-ship Navy—”
Horseheads snickered, and Harper said sharply, “Get real, shipmate. Even you ain't
that
innocent. Who makes bucks off that? The goddamned shipbuilders, the politicians, the labor guys. Remember I told you, the only thing the government can do is redistribute money? That's how they scare us, so we let them reach in and pick our fucking pockets: the fucking Russkies are planning to sucker punch us. Well, I flat just don't believe it. They bogeyman us, so we tax the shit out of our people, and we bogeyman them, so their generals can keep churning out tanks and shit. 'Scuse me, but it's all so fucking obvious, it makes me want to laugh.”
“Wait a minute,” said Dan. “You were telling me—remember when we were out on the rifle range, and you were telling me how feminists are actually Communists, trying to wreck the family and—”
“And that's all absolutely right. But you tell me. You were aboard that Russki tin can, right? Did those guys hate your guts, want to hang you from the yardarm?”
“No.”
“What were they like?”
“Just people. People like us, I guess.”
“There you go. It's the assholes in charge. They'll use the NAACP and the fucking bra-burners to bore from within. But are they going to screw themselves, start a war, make us nuke 'em? I don't think so.” Harper drank moodily. “It's a shell game. Only problem I got with it is Ronnie talks trickle-down, how come none of it trickles down to us?”
“No shit.”
“You remember we were talking about that in Gitmo. About the movie, the guys that found the treasure—”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“You still think the same? That you'd go for it, you could take home a big piece of loot and nobody'd know? Then you could get that boat, help your brother through school … .”

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