Battleship Gray

I.

The Navy dropped Lieutenant Gerald Fenn in my lap in the spring of ’74, and he came in wearing whites the color of old teeth.

I was a PH1 with eleven years in and a nose that had been broken in three different states. Fenn was a Reserve officer, direct commission, straight out of public relations. A man who had never been shot at, hazed, or hungover on watch. He saluted like he was swatting a fly, when he bothered at all. His hair touched his collar. I called his uniforms dress grays, and he laughed like it was the nicest thing anyone had said to him in years, especially another officer.

That was the trouble with Fenn. You couldn’t hate him. You wanted to take him out back and teach him to stand up straight, then buy him a drink. So I did both. I put a gig line on him and a spine behind it. At night we hit National City and the Dew Drop Inn, where the beer was warm, the jukebox ate quarters, and nobody gave a damn that an officer in civvies was drinking with an enlisted man.

I should have asked why a man that soft was so careful. Why he sat with his back to the wall. Why he never came down to Broadway with the rest of us.

I was a street kid straight out of National City. I figured I knew all about fear.

II.

It was a Friday in June. Fenn had a hamburger halfway to his mouth when the big man came out of the doorway.

Six-four, maybe. A gut on him, a gold chain, a shirt open to the sternum. He said something low, and Fenn’s face went the color of dishwater. The hamburger hit the sidewalk, mustard side down.

“Well, look who’s out of school,” the big man said. “Look who grew up pretty.”

Fenn made a sound. It wasn’t a word.

I put my beer on a mailbox. I wasn’t thinking anything. I’d been hit in the mouth by better men than this one.

The first punch went in under the ribs, and he folded like a lawn chair. The second broke something in his face. When he was down, I put my boot in his crotch, once, twice. He screamed high and wet, and that was the sound I wanted.

A fag is a fag, I thought.

I was twenty-nine years old and had never once thought to be ashamed of it.

There was a garbage can by the alley, galvanized and rusted through at the bottom. I don’t remember picking it up.

When I stopped, Fenn was hanging on my arm with both hands.

“Tommy,” he kept saying. “Tommy. Tommy.”

The big man wasn’t moving much. A bus went by, nobody looking out the windows.

“Who is he?” I said.

“Nobody. Somebody from before.”

III.

It took three weeks and half a bottle of Old Crow to get the rest of the story.

Back in college, Fenn had gone barhopping for atmosphere, a nice boy in a nice sweater, and a certain kind of man had been waiting. Not the kind who wanted what he wanted and left it there. The kind who hunted. They worked in pairs and threes. They bought you drinks, drove you somewhere.

Fenn didn’t say what happened next, and I didn’t ask. He held the glass with both hands.

“That one on Broadway,” I said. “He was one of them.”

Fenn turned the glass a quarter turn on the bar.

“I thought so,” he said. “In the moment, I thought so.”

“It was a long time ago, Tommy. Men get heavy. They get gold chains.”

He tried to smile.

“I never saw his face that night. I saw a big man in a doorway saying something about school, and my whole body went. I don’t know. I’ve never known.”

He took another drink.

“Pruitt was different,” he said. “He was the one who remembered names. Where you worked. Where you lived. Who your father was. He never had to threaten you twice.”

I said that was all right, that a man doesn’t forget a thing like that. I said it the way you talk to a dog that’s been hit by a car.

But later, in the parking lot, I stood beside my car with my hands on the roof and tried to make sense of what I’d done. I’d put a man in Mercy Hospital with a broken face and something ruptured inside him, and I couldn’t swear to God what he’d said that was so wrong.

Look who grew up pretty.

It could have meant anything. It could have meant nothing. It could have been a lonely queer who thought he recognized a face.

I decided it didn’t matter. I’d have known him if I saw him, I told myself. Nobody makes a sound like that for nothing.

IV.

They came for me one at a time, which was worse.

The first was a kid with a straight razor and a smile like a girl’s, waiting in the dark by my car. I took four stitches in the forearm. He took a broken wrist and left a shoe in the street.

The second was a Filipino welterweight who’d boxed out of Stockton. He cracked two of my ribs before I got him on the pavement.

The third I never saw. Somebody sapped me outside the Dew Drop, and I woke up with my wallet gone and a note in my shirt pocket, block letters on a bar napkin:

SAY HI TO YOUR BOYFRIEND.

The fourth was a fat man with a length of pipe. He stood across from my apartment every night for a week, saying nothing, watching my window.

I’d been a Golden Gloves kid. I’d learned some karate from a Marine in Okinawa. I held my own, but only just.

What nobody tells you is the scared part. They tell you about the knuckles. They don’t tell you about lying awake at three in the morning, listening to every car that slows down.

I asked around. Dockside, the tattoo parlors, a bartender I knew. It was all one outfit, they said. The man who ran it was named Lyle Pruitt, and he owned a place on Fifth called the Starboard Light.

V.

Pruitt found me before I found him.

It was Tuesday, noon, at a lunch counter on Market. I was eating eggs when the stool beside me creaked. A man in a tan leisure suit set a pack of Kools on the counter and squared it with one finger.

Fifty, maybe. Thin. Reading glasses on a chain. He looked like a man who sold insurance to widows.

“Thomas,” he said. “May I?”

“It’s a free country.”

“Is it?”

He ordered coffee and thanked the waitress by name.

“You’re a fighter, I’m told. A good one. I admire a man who’s good at something.”

He stirred his coffee slowly.

“Ricky’s got a plate in his face now. Did you know that? Eats through a straw. He wasn’t what you think, Thomas. He ran my books.”

I put my fork down.

“I’m not going to tell you what to believe,” Pruitt said. “You’ll believe what lets you sleep. But I’ll tell you what I want, and then you can go on being a hero.”

He looked at me over his glasses. Pale eyes, patient.

“I want the lieutenant. Not a scratch on him, not even a bruise. A conversation. Gerald and I have some old business to settle. He leaves the base on a Friday, goes where I tell you to take him, and the boys stop. All of them. Your wallet comes back. Your car stops being a hazard.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you’ll keep fighting my people until one of them gets lucky.”

He drank his coffee.

“That’s all. Think about it.”

He left a five on the counter and walked out into the sun.

I sat there with the eggs going cold. The thing I noticed, the thing I’ve never forgotten, was that I thought about it. Not long. Maybe the time it takes to light a cigarette. But I thought: It would stop. I could sleep.

Then I thought what a man thinks about himself after that, and I went into the men’s room and threw up my breakfast.

VI.

I never told Fenn about the offer. He found out anyway, the way he found out everything: by watching my face over the coffee.

“He came to you,” Fenn said.

“Who?”

“Pruitt. Don’t.”

He set the cup down. His hand was steady. That was the first time I noticed. A man can be afraid for half his life and still hold something straight.

“You’re a terrible liar, Tommy. It’s one of the things I like about you.”

On Friday, he put on his dress whites, the real ones, pressed by a Chinese laundry on Pacific Highway, and every ribbon he’d ever been given for sitting at a desk. His lieutenant’s bars were bright, and his gig line was straight. I’d put it there with my own hands.

“You’re not going to Fifth Street.”

“I’m a Navy officer,” he said. “I can go anywhere I like in the United States of America.”

“You’ll get killed.”

“Probably not. Pruitt’s too careful for that.”

He looked at me. He was white around the mouth, but he wasn’t going to stop.

“I’ve had fourteen years of being afraid of him, Tommy. You’ve had four months. I’d like to see how it ends.”

I drove him. He wouldn’t let me go in.

I sat at the curb in front of the Starboard Light with the engine running and a tire iron across my knees. A fighter, a Golden Gloves kid, and I watched an officer in white walk through a door I couldn’t make my legs go through.

He was inside eleven minutes. I counted. A man came to the door once, looked at me, and closed it again. That was all. But it was enough to tell me Fenn wasn’t in there alone.

When he came out, he was gray and sweating. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t light his cigarette. I lit it for him.

“What did he say?”

“A lot. He’s very persuasive.”

Fenn took a drag.

“I told him I’d written everything down. Names, dates, plates. Mailed it to my father, who sits on the Naval Board of Inspection in Washington and has never once in his life let a thing go. I told him if I disappeared, or if anything happened to you, it all came out.”

He laughed, a thin, awful sound.

“It’s not true. I haven’t written a word. I’m a lousy liar too.”

“He bought it?”

“I don’t know. He smiled at me.”

He closed his eyes.

“He asked about Ricky, you know. If he was in pain.”

I put the car in gear.

“Was he one of them, Gerry? Tell me the truth.”

Fenn looked out the window at the neon.

“You didn’t hit him for what he did,” he said. “I know that. You hit him for what he was. I’ve known it since the garbage can.”

He turned to me.

“I’m not angry. It’s just something we both know now.”

He opened his eyes.

“Take me home, Tommy.”

I took him home.

VII.

It stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe the lie held, or maybe Pruitt did the arithmetic on a Navy lieutenant and an enlisted man who wouldn’t stay down and decided there was nothing in it. I don’t believe the world rewards a thing like Fenn walking through that door. I believe a man with a head for odds looked at what it would cost.

Still, I gave up my flat and moved onto base.

Fenn arranged it through the public affairs office. We were shorthanded on a photographic project, and he put in a request to have me assigned as his assistant. The work meant odd hours, and the temporary quarters near the photo lab made sense on paper. The quarters were normally reserved for officers, but a room was available, and Fenn got permission for me to use it while the project lasted. It wasn’t regulation for an enlisted man to bunk there, but the paperwork was in order, and nobody seemed eager to question a lieutenant who knew how to get things done.

For a while there was a fence and a gate and a Marine sentry between us and Fifth Street, and I slept eight hours at a stretch for the first time since June.

We didn’t talk about it. He’d bring me coffee in the mornings and stand there a minute in his pressed whites, as if he wanted to say something and didn’t have the grammar.

VIII.

They gave me orders in October. Sea duty, the Ranger, two hundred and some days of ocean.

Fenn shook my hand like a man at a funeral. His uniform was pressed. His gig line was straight. I’d done that, and he’d done the rest.

I didn’t know what would happen to him once I was gone. I didn’t know if the base would keep him safe or if it had only been me. I told myself he was a grown man. A lieutenant. An officer of the United States Navy who’d walked through a door I couldn’t.

I stood at the rail the first night out. The water was the same gray as the ship, as the sky, as everything the government ever gave me.

Somewhere off the stern was a city, and a man in it, and a debt I couldn’t name. Somewhere in a bed at Mercy Hospital was another man, eating through a straw. One man had taken something from Fenn, and one had taken something from me, and I didn’t know which wound was mine to carry.

A big brother, I’d called myself. I’d been proud of it.

I kept looking back until there was nothing to look at.