The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus Page A

again. But only his voice did: soft, nearly a whisper. “Someday I have to tell my son he’s a nigger.” Again he breathed. Then his right arm pushed backward between us, and I lightened my grip on him so it could move around my waist, and then I tightly held him as his hand holding his drink pressed into my right side, and his arm pulled me to him. “One year old. I have to tell him, Gerry. Soon. Too soon. But before he finds out.”
    Our free arms rose together as we turned to face each other and embraced with both arms and I could not hear the party inside, only our breathing and the faint scraping of our whiskered cheeks. We stood for a minute, perhaps less. Then we stepped back and drank, our glasses lacking at least a swallow spilled, and I drew out my cigarettes, more flattened now, and we shaped them round, and smoked and drank in silence as we walked toward the entrance of the club. Walked slowly, I looking at my watch—the taxis for those who were leaving the party early would arrive at ten-thirty, only eight minutes away—and Willie wiping his face with his gloves.
    We got the first taxi that came and quietly finished our drinks in the back seat, tossed ice and limes out the windows, and left the glasses to roll on the floor. At the pier we waited for the others, the small taxis of officers who wanted the eleven-o’clock launch. We heard it coming, its engine low out on the water. We stood at the edge of the pier, on the opposite side from where the launch would tie up, and looked down at the dark water that always seems fathoms deep at night, and we looked out to sea at the lights of the Ranger . I had one cigarette left, a Pall Mall, and I broke it in half and handed Willie his. Taxis came in a fast column, their headlights shining for an instant on our faces. Willie’s face now was the one I had known until tonight: an expression of repose, though now I saw clearly what I must have seen on the night he first entered our room, though I had not remarked it then, for my life, my past, had taught me to expect it. Now his face reminded me of a painting I saw long ago of an American Indian, a Cheyenne or Sioux, an old chief: he wore his war bonnet, and in the set of his jaw and lips, the years in his eyes, even in the wrinkles on his face, was the dignity of a man, sorrowful yet without self-pity, who has endured a defeat that will be part of him, in his heart, until he dies.
    Officers climbed loudly out of taxis, slammed doors, called to friends standing on the pier or sliding and twisting out of other cabs. The launch’s engine had grown louder, and now it slowed as the coxswain approached the pier. Behind Willie and me the officers clustered. The launch drew alongside, and Willie and I turned together and followed the others into the boat, and took off our caps. Men talked above the wind. For a while I looked at the Ranger ; then I looked away from it, high above the faces across from me, at the stars and the silent sky, and the wind blew on my face and dried the sweat in my hair. Willie and I were last to leave the launch. I walked behind him up the accommodation ladder. On the quarterdeck he saluted aft, then the OOD, and spoke for the first time since we stood outside the club. He requested permission to come aboard.
    We went quietly to our room, abreast in the passageways, Willie going first down the ladders, and the ship itself quiet, its steel having absorbed and separated the others returning from the party. He entered the room first too, and we quietly undressed, as we had on other nights when we came back to the ship so drunk and tired that merely undressing was a bother, and hanging the clothes in our lockers a task. He got into his bunk and I turned off the light and walked from the door in the dark toward the bunks, then saw them, and climbed the ladder near Willie’s feet and crawled onto the mattress and pushed my legs under the blanket and between the crisp