V.

  'You don't mind,' Teflon was telling him. Paola was hurrying into clothes.   'Out in the snow,' Profane said, 'is where that camera, Teflon, is sending us:'   'Here:' opened the camera, handed Profane the film, 'you're going to be a horse's ass about it.'   Profane took the film but couldn't back down. So he dressed and topped off with the cowboy hat. Paola had put on a Navy greatcoat, too big for her.   'Out,' Profane cried, 'in the snow.' Which in fact there was. They caught a ferry over to Norfolk and sat topside drinking black coffee out of paper cups and watching snow-shrouds flap silent against the big windows. There was nothing else to look at but a bum on a bench facing them, and each other. The engine thumped and labored down below, they could feel it through their buttocks, but neither could think of anything to say.   'Did you want to stay,' he asked.   'No, no,' she shivered, a discreet foot of worn bench between them. He had no impulse to bring her closer. 'Whatever you decide.'   Madonna, he thought, I have a dependent now.   'What are you shivering for. It's warm enough in here.'   She shook her head no (whatever that meant), staring at the toes of her galoshes. After a while Profane got up and went out on deck.   Snow falling lazy on the water made 11 P.M. look like a twilight or an eclipse. Overhead every few seconds a horn sounded off to warn away anything on collision course. But yet as if there were nothing in this roads after all but ships, untenanted, inanimate, making noises at each other which meant nothing more than the turbulence of the screws or the snow-hiss on the water. And Profane all alone in it.   Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and there he'd be, in alien country.   But the door behind him opened again. Soon he felt Paola's gloveless hands slipped under his arms, her cheek against his back. His mental eye withdrew, watching their still-life as a stranger might. But she didn't help the scene be any less alien. They kept like that till the other side, the ferry entered the slip, and chains clanked, car ignitions whined, motors started.   They rode the bus into town, wordless; alit near the Monticello Hotel and set out for East Main to find Pig and Dewey. The Sailor's Grave was dark, the first time Profane could remember. The cops must have closed it up.   They found Pig next door in Chester's Hillbilly Haven. Dewey was sitting in with the band. 'Party, party,' cried Pig.   Some dozen ex-Scaffold sailors wanted a reunion. Pig, appointing himself social chairman, decided on the Susanna Squaducci, an Italian luxury liner now in the last stages of construction in the Newport News yards.   'Back to Newport News?' (Deciding not to tell Pig about the disagreement with Teflon.) So: yo-yoing again.   'This has got to cease,' he said but nobody was listening. Pig was off dancing the dirty boogie with Paola.       III   Profane slept that night at Pig's place down by the old ferry docks, and he slept alone. Paola had run into one of the Beatrices and gone off to stay the night with her, after promising demurely to be Profane's date at the New Year's party.   Around three Profane woke up on the kitchen floor with a headache. Night air, bitter cold, seeped under the door and from somewhere outside he could hear a low, persistent growl. 'Pig,' Profane croaked. 'Where you keep the aspirin.' No answer. Profane stumbled into the other room. Pig wasn't there. The growl outside turned more ominous. Profane went to the window and saw Pig down in the alley, sitting on his motorcycle and racing the engine. Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray. Pig had on a knitted watch cap, pulled down over his face to the neck so that his head showed up as a sphere of dead black. Engine exhaust roiled in clouds around him. Profane shivered. 'What are you doing, Pig,' he called. Pig didn't answer. The enigma or sinister vision of Pig and that Harley-Davidson alone in an alley at three in the morning reminded Profane too suddenly of Rachel, whom he didn't want to think about, not tonight in the bitter cold, with a headache, with snow slipping into the room.   Rachel Owlglass had owned, back in '54, this MG. Her Daddy's gift. After giving it its shakedown cruise in the region around Grand Central (where Daddy's office was), familiarizing it with telephone poles, fire hydrants and occasional pedestrians, she brought the car up to the Catskills for the summer. Here, little, sulky and voluptuous, Rachel would gee and haw this MG around Route 17's bloodthirsty curves and cutbacks, sashaying its arrogant butt past hay wagons, growling semis, old Ford roadsters filled to capacity with crewcut, undergraduate gnomes.   Profane was just out of the Navy and working that summer as assistant salad man at Schlozhauer's Trocadero, nine miles outside Liberty, New York. His chief was one Da Conho, a mad Brazilian who wanted to go fight Arabs in Israel. One night near the opening of the season a drunken Marine had showed up in the Fiesta Lounge or bar of the Trocadero, carrying a .30-caliber machine gun in his AWOL bag. He wasn't too sure how he had come by the weapon exactly: Da Conho preferred to think it had been smuggled out of Parris Island piece by piece, which was how the Haganah would do it. After a deal of arguing with the bartender, who also wanted the gun, Da Conho finally triumphed, swapping for it three artichokes and an eggplant. To the mezuzah nailed up over the vegetable reefer and the Zionist banner hanging in back of the salad table Da Conho added this prize. During the weeks that followed, when the head chef was looking the other way, Da Conho would assemble his machine gun, camouflage it with iceberg lettuce, watercress and Belgian endive, and mock-strafe the guests assembled in the dining room. 'Yibble, yibble, yibble,' he would go, squinting malevolent along the sights, 'got you dead center, Abdul Sayid. Yibble, yibble, Muslim pig.' Da Conho's machine gun was the only one in the world that went yibble, yibble. He would sit up past four in the morning cleaning it, dreaming of lunar-looking deserts, the sizzle of Chang music, Yemenite girls whose delicate heads were covered with white kerchiefs, whose loins ached with love. He wondered how American Jews could sit vainglorious in that dining room meal after meal while only halfway round the world the desert shifted relentless over corpses of their own. How could he tell soulless stomachs? Harangue with oil and vinegar, supplicate with heart of palm. The only nice he had was the machine