The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus Page B

sheets a Filipino had tucked with a hospital fold during the day. I shut my eyes and saw and heard Percy, saw Willie’s face as Percy talked, and his face later, outside the club, and I opened my eyes to the gray overhead in the dark.
    â€œGerry.” It was his voice again, the one I had known. “I’m sorry I said that.”
    â€œFuck sorry.”
    â€œThe man got to me.”
    â€œYou don’t need to tell me that.”
    â€œYes I do.”
    â€œOkay. But just once, Jason.”
    I closed my eyes and remembered the wind on my face in the launch coming back, tried to feel it moving over my skin in the closed and air-conditioned room, and I saw the stars again, in the sky larger than the sea. They began to disappear, as though rising from the sea and the earth and my vision, and I saw the black of sleep coming, when below me Willie made a sound like laughter, a humorous grunt, and said: “My people, my people …”
    He shifted, rolled to his side, and I lay on my back and for moments with closed eyes saw the stars again and focused on them until I knew from his breathing that Willie was asleep, then I let go of their tiny silver lights and received the dark.
    11 September 1961
Okinawa, at anchor
    Hello Camille:
    There is not only a mystery in night itself, but it is intensified at sea. I am standing the eight-to-midnight watch, not the OOD on the quarterdeck, but the Duty Officer at the accommodation ladder for enlisted men. I drink coffee and smoke (not allowed on the quarterdeck, or here either, but not seen on this deck, at least not by officers). My assistant is a seaman second class, and he is also quiet. Our duties are simple enough. Every hour the enlisted men’s liberty boat comes alongside from Okinawa, and we stand at the top of the ladder and as each sailor steps aboard he salutes aft, then salutes me and requests permission etc., and I grant it and he goes below. Our only important duty is to make sure a friend or, lacking that, one of the Masters-at-Arms takes below and puts to bed a sailor who is dangerously drunk: helps him down the steep ladders, and lies him in his bunk, on his side, so he won’t drown if he vomits while asleep. Some of them have been drinking ashore since liberty call at noon.
    And there is an interesting instruction left with the log for the oncoming Duty Officer: we are told to watch for sea snakes, which have been seen near the ladder. So Gantner (the seaman second class) and I peer down at the water as the liberty boat approaches. We are unarmed. Instructions like these make me wonder why they are not accompanied by a shotgun. The Navy seems to trust only the ship’s Marines to handle any firearm smaller than a five-inch fifty-four. Ha: they don’t know that tonight’s Duty Officer, shepherd of the young and drunk and recently laid, is a slayer of many cottonmouths and copperheads with his cheap but accurate Hi-Standard .22 revolver. I’m not only at sea and can’t fish, I can’t even shoot a sea-going cottonmouth. A very lethal one at that. So Gantner and I watch the water beneath the ladder that angles out from the ship, so we can yell to some poor bastard stepping from the boat to the ladder that he is about to be struck by a terrible snake, and before he even hears us he will have in his blood a poison that, as far as I know, does not have an antidote. But it adds excitement, or at least alertness, to our hourly stand at the head of the ladder. And at times makes me nostalgic for my snake-infested boyhood: a sure sign that the night and sea are at work on me, for in truth I have little nostalgia for that boyhood, and none at all for the sudden appearance of a poisonous snake in my path or, worse, beside or behind the spot where I have just stepped. What quick— no: startled—draws from the holster, what terrified fusillades with the .22. Remember? How many times did we picnic on a bluff over a bayou, or