The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (21 page)

Franklin

1969

A sampan appears. Low to the black water and grenade distance from my post on the shore, it sails out of the mist that descended at nightfall.

Yesterday morning I was given my assignment: I am one of a ten-man squad to be deployed to an island at the edge of a large bay. I’ll keep watch on the beach while the others plant mines. We sail out at 04:00. In the briefing I was told to look out for indigenous vessels, junks and sampans. Later that day Pinky and Mills and I were walking to the chow hall when the lieutenant yelled over his shoulder, “Seaman Shepherd! Don’t fuck this up.” Mills and Pinky laughed. Pinky said, “You can’t watch for sampans on the bay at night.” I asked why, and all he said was, “You’ll see.”

Three men ride in the sampan, two at either end and one in the middle; the conical peaks of their paddy hats are pressed close to their heads. They paddle out of an inlet at the far end of the beach. Their arms move in graceful downward arcs. The oars dip; the water ripples. The oars come up; the water ripples again, and the canoe pushes forward. The one sitting in the middle trails his hand along the surface of the bay. Between his legs sits a large sack of something heavy and soft, creased in the middle and slumping over on itself. The sampan is black and wooden, less than two feet high with ends that turn up like a banana’s. The men sit straight as toothpicks, squinting against the beam from my flashlight. The boat does not list.

I fire two warning shots in the air.

“Identify yourselves!”

The men in the boat throw up their hands and in their haste one of their oars falls into the water.

Fishermen in sampans are not to be trusted. In our briefing the lieutenant said it should not always be assumed that they are fishermen. They paddle along in that quiet way they have, then reach under their bundles of fishing net and pull out grenades or MAC-10s. Some even have napalm; brass did not tell me that. Mills and Pinky did, and I believe them.

“Stand up! Stand up with your hands in the air.”

I hear the wet suck of boot falls on the sand behind me. Mills yells, “Drop it! Fucking drop it!” even though none of the men in the boat is carrying anything.

First one stands and then another. The boat trembles and lurches. Two more shots are fired. “I said stand up, motherfucker!”

This, I realize, is my own voice—hoarse and frenzied, shouting at them though I know that they have to rise slowly and one at a time or the sampan will overturn.

“That one in the middle won’t fucking stand up!” I glance at Mills to my left. “He won’t fucking stand up!”

I took my eyes off the target. Never take your eyes off the target. The one in the middle finally stands, and the boat nearly tips over. He squats to steady himself. I almost fire. I almost do. One man turns out to be a woman. She is steadier on her feet than the other two. She turns her head slowly and looks at us like we are a bunch of wilding monkeys.

“What’s in the sack?” I call. They don’t respond.

“They don’t speak English,” Mills says.

“They understand. They’re faking. Dump the sack!” I motion toward the bundle with the butt of my rifle.

I fire a fifth warning shot, this one into the water near the sampan. The man in the middle reaches down and heaves the sack over the side. It sinks silently into the bay.

“Get out of here,” I say. I keep the woman in my sites. She looks sneakier than the others. She’s the one that will fling the grenade if there’s one to be flung. Mills motions for them to keep going. He moves his rifle laterally in two swift motions.

“Move along! Fucking move!”

“Shit, Shep. They leaving!” Mills says. I don’t tell him about the burning at the base of my spine. I used to think the pain was just fear but now I know it’s a premonition. The girl on the sampan set my back on fire.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I shout once more, though one of the fisherman has begun to paddle with the remaining oar, and the sampan is creeping forward.

Mills walks away, shaking his head. I am alone again, pacing my small territory, a narrow strip of sand at the edge of the island. I imagine the fisherman’s sack was filled with specially kitted-out grenades that will wash onto the shore and explode in the sand.

I squint into the darkness. A fist of thick gray cloud drifts back and forth across a high half moon. The bay and beach are moon bright and then dim and moon bright and then dim again. Now, with the moon hidden behind the clouds, I see only the outlines of things: tall blocks of rock rising out of the water, our junk moored a half mile down the beach, the silhouettes of my squad members on their knees in the sand. In the shallows, turtles knock their shells into one another and hiss. I cock my head to the side and listen for human sounds, more paddles in the water, more sampans gliding over the sea.

In a few hours we’ll have completed our mission and then we’ll load up the junk and sail away from here. Behind me my squad is busy digging holes in the beach. I lived near a butcher when I first got married. He was always working when I walked by. He hummed while he worked, which made me think he was a happy man. Listening to the shovels pushing wetly through the sand, I remembered the sound of his knife cutting through flesh.

I am afraid that the mist over the water will creep onto shore and settle over the sand so that I can’t see snakes coming toward me. My neck aches with the strain of scanning the sand for them. I squeeze the trigger of my rifle, softly, slowly until I feel the pressure building under my fingertip, until I am a fraction of a second away from the satisfying pop of the trigger’s release. I light another cigarette. I have written a letter to my wife, my ex-wife, I suppose I should call her—our first communication in almost a year. I think she’s really finished with me this time. I’ll never be finished with her.

Sissy. She’s back in Philadelphia. If she is at her sister’s house, she might be laughing with her mouth wide open, her fingers gesturing as she talks. Or more likely, she is a little blue and staring out of the window with her hands folded in her lap. I know all of her moods and the way they play across her features, but I am still awed at the configuration of lips and eyes and cheeks that make up that face that I love. Out of all of the others I could have loved. My Sissy.

When we crossed the threshold into our apartment on the day we got married, a maple leaf blew into the living room. It had turned a deep crimson that darkened to burgundy around the edges. Sissy said that fall was all blood and gold, and I held the leaf and said, “Well, here we got the blood.” We went back outside to look for the gold. I found a yellow leaf on the sidewalk across the street, not a speck of brown on it. I can’t imagine doing that with anyone else—something as silly as looking for fallen leaves in the street, but with her it wasn’t silly at all. I gave her that gold leaf, and she put it on top of the red one and wrapped both in a handkerchief that she pressed into a flat neat square with the iron. We didn’t have any ribbon, so she cut a scrap from the lining of the dress she got married in and she tied up that handkerchief and put it in a pull-out drawer under the bed. That was only two years ago.

The clouds roll back, and the moonlight throws the area into high relief. There are hundreds of small islands in this bay. In some places they are so close to one another that if I floated between them on my back, my toes would touch one and the crown of my head would touch its neighbor. The smallest are just hunks of dirt no bigger than city block squares of cement, but they have crazy colored flowers growing all over them. I don’t even know if you’d call them flowers, they’re waxy and spiky and bright as neon signs. Mills told me this bay is one of the Seven Wonders, but I’ve never heard of it. I patrol the biggest island; there’s a whole jungle growing in the middle of it. I wish I could have seen all of this in some other way, without a rifle and the junk full of bombs.

I don’t know where Mills gets all of this beer. We’ve been drinking since reveille. There’s a glimmer of something bright in the sky—can’t be a star because it blinks too much, or a flare because it didn’t sail upward and then fade, or a plane because it’s stationary. I’ve never seen so many unidentifiable lights in the sky as I have since I’ve been here. Pinky said the sky over the bay is haunted. “Sky can’t be haunted.” I said. “You’ll see,” he answered. Then he laughed, and I knew he was making fun of me.

A few feet out from the shoreline something splashes. I get my rifle up quick. Something’s coming for me right out of the water. I’ll shoot it to tatters; I’ll make it Swiss cheese. It breaks through the surface. A fish, a goddamn flying fish. It glides for a hundred feet or so and dives. I lower my rifle. Something black and convex floats right next to the place where it disappeared under the water. It doesn’t move, so it must be one of the islands. The small ones are no bigger than a coffee table. Must be one of those, must be.

I smell like stale cigarette smoke and rancid meat. I taste the smell in my mouth. My tongue and teeth are mossy. I can’t imagine what my breath must be like. I ate a can of tuna earlier and some crackers; my other meals were beer and coffee. I am always nauseous. I can’t remember the last time I went an entire day without feeling like vomiting. My beard has grown in irregular patches. Beneath the hairs, red bumps flare in clusters.

I’d like to think Sissy wouldn’t recognize me, but that’s a lie. She’s seen me this ugly. When I get back to the ship, I’ll start a new regimen: I’ll limit my beers to the evening, after chow. I’ll stay out of fights and the brig. I think that I can do that, get myself together. I’ve done it before, though sometimes I think I am just a bleary drunk, and the periods when I am clean and shaved and useful, I am only hiding from myself.

I got a letter from Sissy last week. She wrote: You have a baby girl, born September 13th. I wasn’t going to tell you, but she looks just like you, down to the flecks of hazel in her eyes. I don’t know what you’re going to do now that I’ve told you. I don’t know if I want you to do anything. I was going to keep the secret but I know enough to understand that the things you try to hide come out when you least expect them to. I don’t want my baby to have a liar for a mother. She is five months old. Her name is Lucille.

I met Sissy on Chicken Bone Beach. White folks started calling it that because they said we dropped chicken bones everywhere; it’s the only Negro beach in Atlantic City. We started calling it that too. Ain’t that a shame? There were a few bones scattered in the sand. Mother went with us once and she spent the afternoon shaking her head and clucking her tongue. “Negroes don’t know how to keep anything nice,” she said. The beach wasn’t really as bad as she made it out to be, and it wasn’t so much that we were dirty as it was that the county didn’t clean it up like they did the white beaches. Seagulls swooped down to peck at the chicken bones. They cracked them with their beaks, ate out the marrow, and left the hollow bones to bleach in the sun. You had to be careful, I remember, or you’d get little bone splinters in your feet. That summer Uncle Lewis bought a brand new Buick but he’d only take four of us at a time. He said it was unseemly to drive around with a car full of Negroes piled up on top of each other.

I saw Sissy standing in line to buy a pop from the man that walked up and down the beach dragging his portable icebox along the sand. She had a brown mole on her cheek, and the first thing I thought was how pretty she was despite that blemish. I was barely out of high school but I’d had my share of girls, perfect butter-colored women with thick thighs and small waists. Sissy had that mole, but there was something in the way she held her pop bottle, as delicately as if it were a china cup. I didn’t talk to her that day, but I spent the week scheming about how I could get her. I knew enough to realize that I’d have to say just the right things and mind my manners, maybe make some promises. I’d let her know I had a good job as an electrician’s assistant down at the Navy Yard. I’d borrow Uncle Lewis’s Buick and drive her downtown to a concert at the Latin Casino. I’d pull her chair out for her, buy her a cocktail, and look her in the eye with this Romeo stare I’d been perfecting. She’d let me kiss her when I dropped her off, and then it would only be a matter of weeks. I knew just how to play it. I would start the next week.

The following Saturday came, and she wasn’t there. I drank my pop and laughed with my friends but I never stopped looking for her out of the corner of my eye, and the more I didn’t see her, the more the beach looked squalid. The sun felt too bright; the bathing-suit-clad bodies around me were oily and speckled with birthmarks and bumps and hair. I walked from one end of the colored beach to the other. It wasn’t very long, but it was far enough for the soles of my feet to scorch in the sand and the skin on my nose and shoulders to redden. The gulls annoyed me. I was so out of sorts that I didn’t go out that night. I spent the following week trying to convince myself that what I felt was merely disappointment at not having the chance to mess around in the backseat with a nice girl. When she didn’t come the next Saturday, I felt a buzzing in my temples.