generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they
With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self- explanatory. The only thing that is missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.
Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta, pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto's ketch. This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In Sweden he has found the calm, grey-green eye of the blood hurricane that is the world.
Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair, they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other, Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut-and-thrust flirtation.
Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably because Julieta is crazy-much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's no reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.
He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one hasn't started yet.
When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is something that he has not done since-well, since he first made it, ten years ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a snapshot of Glory.
'Gimme that!' he says, and snatches it from her.
If she were his lover, she would try to play keep-away with him, there would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.
She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.
'You have a girlfriend-where? In Mexico?'
'Manila,' Bobby Shaftoe says, 'if she's even still alive.'
Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory, nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in the Philippines can't be any worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her uncle's stevedore, young what's-his- name?
Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt and a sweater. 'I'm going into town,' he says. 'Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat.'
Julieta says nothing.
As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol[19] and checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.
He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge south along the beach. The boots are Otto's and are a couple of sizes too big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.
He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other war debris, cast up by the waves, half-buried in sand, stenciled cryptically in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on that Guadalcanal beach.
Moon lifts sea, but not the ones who sleep on the beach Each wave a shovel
A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war-not just stuff that comes in crates and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked out by Annapolis-trained, battle-hardened Marine officers, and based upon tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school year book. Guys are dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.
It was like that with U-691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he suspects) at some point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U-691, were to die.
He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his buddies, and he didn't. Everything between then and U-691 was just sort of an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of like Jesus after the Resurrection.
Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.
He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.
The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an air plane, except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing emits a screaming whine-and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto's cabin, gradually losing altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and claw their way forward up the thing's black body, which resembles the crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.
It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby Shaftoe says, 'One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven' and then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into Norrsbruck, going faster now.
Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE
Randy wants to go down and look at the U-boat in person. Doug says evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and fifty-four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a dive plan.
He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small one) and take off-you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer-grade weather forecasts, to come up with even a
Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks on his back and swim a hundred and fifty-four meters (straight down, admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the bungeed
