Bowman was navigation officer and also, he had learned just two days earlier, lookout officer.
“Sir,” he had asked, “what does that entail?”
“Here’s the manual,” the exec said. “Read it.”
He began that night, turning down the corner of certain pages as he read.
“What are you doing?” Kimmel asked.
“Don’t bother me right now.”
“What are you studying?”
“A manual.”
“Jesus, we’re in the middle of enemy waters and you’re sitting there reading a manual? This is no time for that. You’re supposed to already know what to do.”
Bowman ignored him. They had been together from the beginning, since midshipman’s school, where the commandant, a navy captain whose career had collapsed when his destroyer ran aground, had a copy of A Message to Garcia, an inspirational text from the Spanish-American War, placed on every man’s bunk. Captain McCreary had no future but he remained loyal to the standards of the past. He drank himself into a stupor every night but was always crisp and well-shaved in the morning. He knew the book of navy regulations by heart and had bought the copies of A Message to Garcia with money from his own pocket. Bowman had read the Message carefully, years later he could still recite parts of it. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba—no one knew where … The point was simple: Do your duty fully and absolutely without unnecessary questions or excuses. Kimmel had cackled as he read it.
“Aye, aye, sir. Man the guns!”
He was dark-haired and skinny and walked with a loose gait that made him seem long-legged. His uniform always looked somehow slept in. His neck was too thin for his collar. The crew, among themselves, called him the Camel, but he had a playboy’s aplomb and women liked him. In San Diego he had taken up with a lively girl named Vicky whose father owned a car dealership, Palmetto Ford. She had blond hair, pulled back, and a touch of daring. She was drawn to Kimmel immediately, his indolent glamour. In the hotel room that he had gotten with two other officers and where, he explained, they would be away from the noise of the bar, they sat drinking Canadian Club and Coke.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
“How did what happen?”
“My meeting someone like you.”
“You certainly didn’t deserve it,” she said.
He laughed.
“It was fate,” he said.
She sipped her drink.
“Fate. So, am I going to marry you?”
“Jesus, are we there already? I’m not old enough to get married.”
“You’d probably only deceive me about ten times in the first year,” she said.
“I’d never deceive you.”
“Ha ha.”
She knew exactly what he was like, but she would change that. She liked his laugh. He’d have to meet her father first, she commented.
“I’d love to meet your father,” Kimmel answered in seeming earnestness. “Have you told him about us?”
“Do you think I’m crazy? He’d kill me.”
“What do you mean? For what?”
“For getting pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant?” Kimmel said, alarmed.
“Who knows?”
Vicky Hollins in her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she passed. In heels she wasn’t that short. She liked to call herself by her last name. It’s Hollins, she would announce on the phone.
They were shipping out, that was what made it all real or a form of real.
“Who knows if we’ll get back,” he said casually.
Her letters had come in the two sackfuls of mail that Bowman had brought back from Leyte. He’d been sent there by the exec to try and find the ship’s mail at the Fleet Post Office—they’d had none for ten days—and he had flown back with it, triumphant, in a TBM. Kimmel read parts of her letters aloud for the benefit, especially, of Brownell, the third man in the cabin. Brownell was intense and morally pure, with a knotted jaw that had traces of acne. Kimmel liked to bait him. He sniffed at a page of the letter. Yeah, that was her perfume, he said, he’d recognize it anywhere.
“And maybe something else,” he speculated. “I wonder. You think she might have rubbed it aginst her … Here,” he said, offering it to Brownell, “tell me what you think.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Brownell said uneasily. The knots in his jaw showed.
“Oh, sure you would, an old pussy hound like you.”
“Don’t try and involve me in your lechery,” Brownell said.
“It’s not lechery, she’s writing to me because we fell in love. It’s something beautiful and pure.”