The three of them ran broken-field through a roomful of teeming bodies. On the way they picked up Dewey Gland. By the time the Shore Patrol had crashed into the Sailor's Grave, night sticks flailing, the four found themselves running down an alley parallel to East Main. 'Where we going,' Profane said. 'The way we're heading,' said Pig. 'Move your ass.' II Where they ended up finally was an apartment in Newport News, inhabited by four WAVE lieutenants and a switchman at the coal piers (friend of Pig's) named Morris Teflon, who was a sort of house father. The week between Christmas and New Year's Day was spent drunk enough to know that's what they were. Nobody in the house seemed to object hen they all moved in. An unfortunate habit of Teflon's drew Profane and Paola together, though neither wanted that. Teflon had a camera: Leica, procured half-legally overseas by a Navy friend. On weekends when business was good and guinea red wine lashing around like the wave from a heavy merchantman, Teflon would sling the camera round his neck and go a-roving from bed to bed, taking pictures. These he sold to avid sailors at the lower end of East Main. It happened that Paola Hod, nee Maijstral, cast loose at her own whim early from the security of Pappy Hod's bed and late from the half-home of the Sailor's Grave, was now in a state of shock which endowed Profane with all manner of healing and sympathetic talents he didn't really possess. 'You're all I have,' she warned him. 'Be good to me.' They would sit around a table in Teflon's kitchen: Pig Bodine and Dewey Gland facing them one each like partners at bridge, a vodka bottle in the middle. Nobody would talk except to argue about what they would mix the vodka with next when what they had ran out. That week they tried milk, canned vegetable soup, finally the juice from a dried-up piece of watermelon which was all Teflon had left in the refrigerator. Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible. Picking the seeds out of the vodka proved also to be a problem, and resulted in a growing, mutual ill-will. Part of the trouble was that Pig and Dewey both had eyes for Paola. Every night they would approach Profane as a committee and ask for seconds. 'She's trying to recover from men,' Profane tried to say. Pig would either reject this or take it as an insult to Pappy Hod his old superior. Truth of it was Profane wasn't getting any. Though it became hard to tell what Paola wanted. 'What do you mean,' Profane said. 'Be good to you.' 'What Pappy Hod wasn't,' she said. He soon gave up trying to decode her several hankerings. She would on occasion come up with all sorts of weird tales of infidelity, punchings-in-the-mouth, drunken abuse. Having clamped down, chipped, wire-brushed, painted and chipped again under Pappy Hod for four years Profane would believe about half. Half because a woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to. She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria: Demain le noir matin, Je fermerai la porte Au nez des annees mortes; J'irai par les chemins. Je mendierai ma vie Sur la terre et sur l'onde, Du vieux au nouveau monde . . . He had been short and built like the island of Malta itself: an inscrutable heart. She'd had only one night with him. Then he was off to the Piraeus. Tomorrow, the black morning, I close the door in the face of the dead years. I will go on the road, bum my way over and sea, from the old to the new world . . . . She taught Dewey Gland the chord changes and so they all round the table of Teflon's wintry kitchen, while four gas flames on the stove ate up their oxygen; and sang, and sang. When Profane watched her eyes he thought she dreamed of the para - probably a man-of-no-politics as brave as anyone ever is in combat: but tired, was all, tired of relocating native villages and devising barbarities in the morning as brutal as'd come from the F.L.N. the night before. She wore a Miraculous Medal round her neck (given to her, maybe, by some random sailor she reminded of a good Catholic girl back in the States where sex is for free - or for marriage?). What sort of Catholic was she? Profane, who was only half Catholic (mother Jewish), whose morality was fragmentary (being derived from experience and not much of it), wondered what quaint Jesuit arguments had led her to come away with him, refuse to share a bed but still ask him to 'be good.' The night before New Year's Eve they wandered away from the kitchen and out to a kosher delicatessen a few blocks away. On returning to Teflon's they found Pig and Dewey gone: 'Gone out to get drunk,' said the note. The place was lit up all Xmasy, a radio turned to WAVY and Pat Boone in one bedroom, sounds of objects being thrown in another. Somehow the young couple had wandered into a darkened room with this bed. 'No,' she said. 'Meaning yes.' Groan, went the bed. Before either of them knew it: 'Click,' went Teflon's Leica. Profane did what was expected of him: came roaring off the bed, arm terminating in a fist. Teflon dodged it easily. 'Now, now,' he chuckled. Outraged privacy was not so important; but the interruption had come just before the Big Moment.
Вы читаете V.
