Читать книгу The Rakehells of Heaven - John Boyd - Страница 7

In the Academy yearbook (Adams began), O’Hara’s official nickname is King Con. He was the first man I met at Mandan, and within five minutes of our introduction I became the victim of his first confidence trick. I had tossed my bag on the lower bunk of the room assigned to me when an upperclassman ushered him in. “Midshipman Adams, your roommate, Midshipman O’Hara.”

Right then I should have been wary, for O’Hara was carrying his gear in a carpet bag, but the calluses on his hand were as horny as mine and the smile that cracked his freckles beguiled me. “From your friendly face and honest eyes,” he said, “I gather you’re an American.”

“Right,” I answered.

“And from your accent—I have a fine ear for dialects—that most hospitable of all Americans, a Southerner.”

“Jacksons Gap, Alabama,” I said, astonished because I had spoken only one word.

His accent was neutral English, that hybrid of Midwestern U.S.A. and Oxonian which television actors affect, but all the rest of him was Irish, red hair, freckles, a nose pinched out of his face, protruding cheekbones and a deft in his chin.

“I’m shanty Irish,” he said, “from County Meath. We Irish are so poor and cramped on our little isle that we cannot afford the open-handed generosity of you Americans. . . . Ah, I see you have taken the lower bunk. No matter, the climbing will do me good.”

“O’Hara,” I said, “if you want the lower bunk, you’re welcome to it.”

“Now, doesn’t that bear out all that I’ve said. . . . What is your first name.”

“John. My friends generally call me Jack.”

“Jack! A lovely, no-nonsense name. Kevin’s mine, but I prefer Red. . . . No, Jack. I’ll not take advantage of your generosity. Rather I’ll risk my neck in a fall, for I’ll confess: I imbibe a bit on Saturday nights.”

“She’s all yours, Red,” I said. “I could never bear the death of a drinking man on my conscience.”

Suiting action to words, I hoisted my bag to the top bunk when I noticed a Delta Airlines waybill dangling from the handle, stamped large with the code “Montgom-Mandex,” meaning “Montgomery to Mandan.”

O’Hara was as honest as his talents permitted. He spoke a fractional truth when he said he imbibed a “bit” on Saturday nights. In the following three and a half years, the only sober Saturday night we spent together was on our junior training cruise three parsecs out into the Milky Way, where he demonstrated that his skills as a space jockey were equal to his skills as a tippler. He could turn a starship in the solar system and give you back Pluto and Uranus for change. Ashore and aloft, he was fearless, for he truly believed in the luck of the Irish. He wore green polka-dot drawers at all times and dangled a green leprechaun from the abort throttle of his cockpit. Now, I carried a rabbit’s foot in my pocket, but I didn’t depend on it.

Our Saturday sorties into the wilds of Mandan sometimes resembled forays. Red chose the “off-limit” houses guarded by military police on the theory that such places catered to officers who did not wish to be recognized by midshipmen. He might have been right about Madame Chacaud’s—Dirty Mary’s to the midshipmen. Her girls were refined enough not to stick their gum behind their ears and she kept a bottle of Jamiesons on tap for Red. Each girl had a television set in her room and Red would lounge around on a Sunday morning indulging in another of his passions—soap operas.

Until our senior year, Red and I came and went freely because we kept civilian clothes in the bus-station locker and the military police never questioned civilians.

One February night in our senior year, Red and I were enjoying a few social drinks preliminary to the festivities at Madame Chacaud’s when Red took affront at a Swede who preferred aquavit to Irish whisky. Red argued that his travels in space qualified him as an expert on drinks. His adversary pointed out that space travel did not qualify a man to be a judge of whiskies. Red resented the intrusion of logic into the argument and decided on other methods of persuasion.

Unluckily, Red was too small and too drunk to persuade the man who was about to sum up his case in defense of aquavit when I interposed a few arguments in favor of bourbon and branch water. Bourbon was about to be crowned king of drinks in Mandan when the crash of furniture, the squeal of females and the quivering of the building drew the M.P.s in from outside.

My opponent pointed at O’Hara. “That space cadet started it, and this dehorn jumped in.”

“Space cadet?” The M.P. sergeant turned to O’Hara. “Show me your I.D., mister.”

“I was rolled, Major, so my wallet is missing, but that gentleman,” Red nodded toward me, “is a farmer from Dubuque and I am his hired man. He will vouch for me.”

The sergeant turned to me. “Show me your palms, mister.”

As I extended my palms, I realized I had been tricked by a soldier with only slightly less brains than brawn. In my three years as a midshipman, my calluses had navigated around my hands from my palms to my knuckles.

“You’re a liar, too,” the sergeant said.

“Are you letting that dogface call a midshipman a liar, Adams?” O’Hara bellowed in anger from between two restraining M.P.s.

Suddenly the honor of the Navy was mine to uphold and defend. When my fist slammed into the sergeant’s belly, his “whoof” drew the attention of his comrades, who dropped O’Hara and turned on me.

Treason and betrayal!

Through a picket fence of billy clubs flailing before my eyes, I glimpsed my comrade slinking out of the door when he should have been attacking the exposed flank and rear. The red rat was deserting me. Anguish slowed my defenses and an M.P. slipped around me and cold-cocked me from the rear.

But justice triumphed. Too drunk to negotiate the icy steps, O’Hara slipped and fell to the sidewalk. When the M.P.s dragged me out, Red was asleep and snoring, in easy tossing distance of the arriving paddywagon.

Before noon Sunday I awakened in the section of the M.P.D. drunk tank reserved for military personnel and I staggered to my feet, hungover, battered and disgusted by the memory of O’Hara’s cheap attempt to sacrifice me and escape. For once he was sleeping in the upper bunk, where his lighter weight had made it easier to toss him, with hardly a bruise showing beneath his freckles. Bending close to his ear, I whistled “The Battle of Boyne’s Waters.”

He snapped awake and swung to the edge of the bunk.

“You shanty Mick,” I said. “You picked a fight between me and the M.P.s so you could save your own skin.”

“Jack, lad, you do me a grave dishonor. I was attempting to escape to get a writ of habeas corpus for you.”

“Habeas corpus? At a military hearing? . . . Come off the bunk. I’m going to habeas a piece of your corpus.”

I’ll say this for O’Hara: knowing right and might were on my side, he came down fighting. Before the turnkeys pulled us apart, our bruises were fairly balanced.

I relate this incident to show that O’Hara learned to respect my fists, and I truly believe that I had the only pair of fists on the continent that he did respect. But I also wished to demonstrate that his mind schemed in such a manner that his most spontaneous plots left him lines of retreat.

After justice was done, we sat on the lower bunk and held the shortest strategy conference in naval history. We were in custody, out of uniform and were lacerated and bruised. We had been arrested in an “off-limits” area for disturbing the peace. We had resisted arrest and I would be charged with assaulting a policeman. By now, a full report of the incident would be on the disciplinary officer’s desk at the Academy.

We decided to tell the truth, but Red seemed strangely optimistic. “Just leave it to me, Jack.”

At noon, the shore patrol hauled us back to the Academy under house arrest. Monday morning, we went before the mast, which was conducted by Commander Omubu, a Ghanaian who used the regional English of Afro-Americans as his status dialect. It took him twenty minutes merely to read the M.P.s’ report aloud, and then he leaned back, looking first at me and then at Red in disbelief, repugnance, awe, or sadness.

“Gentlemen, it seems from this report that you both are unfitted for this service. After you have been expelled, Adams, I suggest you join the Harrier Corps. There your fighting prowess would be welcomed. You, O’Hara, should be a mattress-tester for the Department of Home Appliances. . . . How say you both to these charges? Guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty,” we answered.

“What say you to these charges?”

O’Hara stepped one pace forward. “Commander,” he sang out, “I’m just a dumb Irishman and my only excuse is ignorance, but I would like to say a word in defense of Midshipman Adams.”

“At ease, O’Hara, and tell it like it was.”

“Sir, as midshipmen of the United Space Navy, we are expected to behave as officers and gentlemen. Before an officer can be a gentleman, sir, he must first be a man. An insult offered to one midshipman besmirches the honor of the entire Navy, sir, your Navy and mine, sir, and that honor was at stake when the M.P. called Midshipman Adams a liar, sir.”

“Unless Midshipman Adams lied,” the Commander pointed out.

“That’s precisely the point, sir. Ipso facto, Midshipman Adams could not have lied, sir, since he uttered not one word to the M.P.s.”

“Is that right, Adams?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t open my mouth, sir.”

“Expel us if you must, sir,” Red continued, “but do not expel us with dishonor, and particularly Midshipman Adams, who fought with valor against odds whilst I went to summon reinforcements. . . . With valor and against odds, sir, he fought to defend the honor of the USN, your honor and mine, sir.”

“Midshipman O’Hara,” the Commander said, “will you await the verdict in the anteroom while I recover from your speech?”

After Red left, Commander Omubu sadly shuffled the pages of the report into order and looked up. “At ease, Adams. Well, I can’t give you a medal. There are five charges against you and four against O’Hara. On the other hand, I can’t expel you. The transcript of the hearing is read by Admiral Bradshaw. If I expelled you after that speech, I’d be the worst mother in Academy history. But there’s one bit of advice I’d like to give to you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Man, there’s only one thing dumber than a dumb Irishman, and that’s a smart Alabaman.”

We were restricted to quarters for a month on half-pay and put on permanent probation for the remainder of our senior year, which meant that one demerit would expel us. But our confinement sent our grades soaring and my own soared somewhat higher than O’Hara’s since he played solitaire. When our confinement was lifted, we were in the best shape of our career to celebrate and the M.P.s were gone from in front of Madame Chacaud’s.

We arrived on Friday night at Madame Chacaud’s and left Sunday morning so broke we had to hitchhike back to the Academy in zero weather. We were walking through an area of cheap stores and pawnshops when the aroma of boiling coffee drifted through the March air. I sniffed again. It was coffee boiled with chicory, and nostalgia pierced me more deeply than the cold. Someone was making Alabama coffee.

We were passing an abandoned store building and I noticed a sign, crudely lettered, posted in the window:

SAILOR BEN’S HOLINESS MISSION

Come In and Pray . . . . . Free Coffee and Doughnuts

Inside, a service was in progress. I slowed O’Hara. “Red, could I treat you to some good old hellfire religion, Southern-style, plus a cup of coffee?”

“I could use a little of both.”

We entered and took a bench at the rear, not wishing to tempt the wine-soaked derelicts crowded near the pulpit with the odor of fine whisky on our breaths.

From the pulpit, Sailor Ben was preaching on the evils of drink, in the accents of my home. “Boys, I was soaking in booze till Jesus wrung me dry. I stunk so loud of moonshine it was a pure wonder the revenuers didn’t raid me for a still. I tell you, if I’da died and gone to hell, I wouldn’t have burned, I would have boiled.”

His voice dropped from a tone of braggadocio to one of reverent thankfulness. “But then I met the best woman God ever gave a sinner, boys. She was a dilly. She set me on course to Jesus, afore she died, leaving me with that little bundle of joy you know as Sister Thelma, and I been sailing a straight course, ever since. . . . Play, Sister Thelma.”

Brother Ben switched on a light which was beamed on a girl at an upright piano who had been lost in the shadows. She was dressed in a simple gray skirt with a white blouse and the light threw an aura around her ash-blond hair. Then I knew why the winos were crowding near the pulpit as she began to play “Shall We Gather at the River.”

The hymn is ordinarily a funeral song, but I felt it was appropriate for Brother Ben’s sermon and I rose to sing, in a quavering tremolo that raised the hackles on my own nape.

After a prayer, Sister Thelma took up collection. She was not more than eighteen, and she floated down the aisle with a sidewise sway to her hips that was both ethereal and feminine. She moved in serenity, her blue eyes glowing with spirituality, and when she came back to us and smiled at me, I felt an angel’s wing brush my cheek.

But I was embarrassed, both for myself and for Red, for we had nothing for the offering. When I glanced down at the plate that I handed over to Red, I was embarrassed for the girl. There was nothing in it but pennies, a few nickels and a rare dime.

Red seemed to hold the plate a long time, so long, in fact, I feared he might be following some obscure Irish-Catholic ritual and counting the take. When he nudged me with the plate, I handed it back to the girl without looking. I was astonished to hear her say, “Why, I thank you, Brother O’Hara.”

Brother Ben led us in a final prayer and invited us all back to the pantry for coffee and doughnuts. “Were you holding out money on me, you bastard?” I whispered to Red.

“Not at all, my boy. I wrote the girl an I.O.U. for twenty dollars, payable next Sunday.”

Coffee and doughnuts in the church kitchen was like a homecoming for me. Once Brother Ben found I was from Alabama, he cornered me in conversation while Red cornered Sister Thelma. Brother Ben, I found, had been a loom-fixer in a Jackson, Mississippi, cottonmill and had worked for a season on a shrimp boat out of Pass Christian. He had gotten the Call while at sea, and hence the name “Sailor Ben.”

Once in a lull in Brother Ben’s conversation, I heard O’Hara say to Sister Thelma, “Lassie, I’ll pluck a feather from an angel’s wing to grace your bonny hair,” and I knew he was zeroing in on Thelma. Glancing their way, I noticed Thelma was slinging her pelvis toward Red as he talked, and again nostalgia assailed me. I had forgotten how the girls hunched down South and I had not seen such hunching since my last Baptist Young People’s meeting at Jacksons Gap.

When I finally squeezed in a few words with Thelma, I apologized for Red’s I.O.U. “That’s the way they pledge contributions in Ireland,” I told her, “and I’m pledging twenty dollars myself.”

“I’ll declare,” she said (but she did not hunch for me), “that’s the most generous thing, Brother John. Why don’t y’all come back Saturday for a chicken supper.”

I promptly accepted. Forty dollars is a lot of money for a chicken supper, but I was determined Red should honor the I.O.U., and if Brother Ben’s mission did not get the money by Saturday night, there’d be nothing left from Madame Chacaud’s to put into the plate Sunday morning.

Once on our way again, I said, “Red, you’re honoring that I.O.U.”

“Certainly, Jack. Thelma’s a lovelier lass than any at Madame Chacaud’s.”

“Whoa there, boy,” I said. “If you’ve got any ideas about Thelma, drop them. To circumnavigate that little behind, you’ve got to get a shotgun away from her pa, assistance from a preacher and learn to speak in unknown tongues to show you got religion.”

Thereafter, Brother Ben’s Mission became our favorite charity, and Brother Ben’s sermons spurred me to reread the New Testament. It surprised me how appropriately the Scriptures could be interpreted in the light of the New Relativity. Once when discussing the parables from the Sermon on the Mount with Red, showing him how they could apply to the Space Age, Red agreed.

“Yes, Jack. The meek shall inherit the earth because it takes guts to blast off from this planet.”

Red quit cheating at solitaire during those days and after a month’s attendance at the mission, he dropped cards entirely and took to reading love poetry. I approved. Any man who read poetry couldn’t criticize a man for reading the Bible.

O’Hara pulled no stops to get to Thelma Pruitt’s heart, if that was truly his direction. He wore his green polka-dotted drawers on their first date, but his space charm did not work on Earth. In May, he “got the spirit.”

It’s hard to fake the unknown tongue. When Red rose to his feet and began to shout in the midst of a sermon, he fooled me completely. His language had the accents and rhythms and nonrepetitive phrases of a genuine Pentecostal experience, and I was so convinced that he had been touched by the Holy Ghost that I was even adding “Amen” behind the logical pauses in his shouting.

Blasphemy and sacrilege!

With unfocused eyes and waving arms, he stood before that congregation, and all were clapping their hands and shouting encouragement to this new member of the church. Brother Ben was thanking Jesus, and Sister Thelma, her face glowing with pride, was moving to the piano to begin softly playing “Come to Jesus.” Then Red, in his final fervor, shouted out a phrase I recognized: “Erin go bragh.”

Red O’Hara’s unknown tongue was unknown to Mandan but familiar to Dublin. He was shouting in Gaelic.

So lie entered into the brotherhood of the Holiness Church, with a false passport. Thelma wept for his salvation but she would not yield. He got her, finally, but not the way he intended.

Late June at Mandan is a season of sentiment. From the needled spires of the Academy, the prairies lay green to horizons purpled by heat haze. Alfalfa blossoms sweeten the air. The axial tilt of the earth seems to toss the Dakotas toward the sun in apology for the winter. Rivers are flowing once more, birds are returning and the senior class is going.

But life orbits. Circles of farewell merge into circles of greetings and circles are wedding bands. Graduating midshipmen, freed of matrimonial bans, marry and start other circles of honeymoons and sowings to forget, for a spell, the approach of another farewell, their first cruise into outer space.

O’Hara and I got orders to lift-off in early January, to scout a sector near Lynx. Buoyed by my growing faith, I felt no trepidation about our coming probe, but O’Hara resorted to conventional methods of allaying apprehensions. Red married Thelma Pruitt and left on a six-month honeymoon of sun and fun in Jackson, Mississippi.

When Red broke the news of his honeymoon site, I broke for the clothes closet and prayed that his bride be given the strength and the nuptial talents to divert Red’s mind from both our coming probe and a real and present Jackson. Once I had spent five hours in Jackson, Mississippi.

For me it was a pleasant summer spent in fishing up and down the Tallapoosa, meditation, prayer and quail-hunting in the fall. Fishing was good, I got the Call and the birds were numerous.

By meditating, I learned that the Lord’s Will was for me to carry His Word to other galaxies, but there was a law against missionaries in space. Before the union of nations, the law had been put through by former colonial nations. After the union, the law was retained by the Interplanetary Colonial Administration, with full agreement of once underprivileged countries, to permit Earth colonization of planets inhabited by nonbelievers.

I had the Call to preach to beings of alien species, and the Call was in violation of Navy Regulations.

Red O’Hara was having his troubles, too, over in Mississippi. Four days before I was scheduled to leave for Mandan, a rented auto pulled up at the farm and Red got out. After the introductions and after Papa had taken him out to the barn for a drink (Papa still sinned), I showed Red over the farm.

“Thelma and I were staying at her Aunt Ethel Bertha’s, the one that raised her after her ma died,” Red explained. “Thelma didn’t want me to fly back. She got a little nervous on the flight down and swore off flying, for both of us. She thinks I’m driving back, with fourteen feet of snow on the ground. So I thought I’d drive over here and fly back with you, without letting Thelma know. Thelma says if God intended man to fly, He would have given him wings.”

“How was the honeymoon?” I asked.

“Tell you the truth, Jack, that was about the best honeymoon I ever had.”

“Were you married before?”

“No. Never had to before.”

Red had never been one to burden others with his problems and Jackson had added to his maturity, but inadvertencies occurred.

When he returned the car to the rental agency, I trailed him in Papa’s car to drive him back. Not once did he suggest that we stop at a bar, nor did he inquire about the pleasure parlors available at Jacksons Gap. I commended him on his righteousness.

“Thelma’s Aunt Ethel Bertha was pretty strict about those things. She was dead set against drinking and smoking. She caught me in the woodlot one evening smoking a cigar and she blessed me out. You know, Jack, I’m tolerant with you reformers. But it doesn’t set well with me to get blessed out for smoking by a woman with a dip of snuff.”

“Didn’t Thelma defend your right to smoke?”

“Well, Thelma was the reason I was smoking in the woodlot. My little angel didn’t want me to defile our bedroom with tobacco smoke.”

Red was taciturn for the few days he spent with us, but Mother loved him. He begged off quail-hunting and spent his mornings with Mama watching “The Pitfalls of Love,” “Life Can Be Golden” and “The Sadness and the Glory.” Aunt Ethel Bertha and Thelma disapproved of television, it seemed, because it showed girls dancing with bare legs. Red had not seen a soap opera for over five months.

When Papa drove us to Montgomery to board the plane for Mandan, Red, gazing out of the car window, commented idly, “Jack, I can see why there are so many mulattoes around these parts.”

On the plane to Mandan, I faced our coming lift-off with the calmness of one whose fate was in other hands, but Red was raring to go. After marriage and Jackson, the void offered no perils for O’Hara.

We lifted off from the Mandan pad near midnight, January 3. He tied his green leprechaun above the instrument panel and said a few words aloud to Mary while I spoke silently to Jesus. Since I was flight commander because of my higher academic rating, I ordered Red to take the con.

The night was moonless. The air seemed crystallized by the cold. Beneath a vault of stars the prairies stretched white around us to the rims of the world. Above us, Cassiopeia beckoned as the window onto Lynx slowly opened and we completed the chant of spacemen.

“Power on?”

“Power on.”

“Struts clear?”

“Struts clear.”

“Ports closed?”

“Ports closed.”

“Ignite pods!”

“Pods ignited.”

“Countdown commencing!”

Red’s face in the glow from the panel reflected only joy as he repeated aloud the readings on the panel: “Four, three, two, one . . . zero. Here goes nothing!”

Glare from our pods on the snow dimmed the stars as the ship creaked from the stress of the launch and Gs forced us back into our rests. We were rising, and inside me a sense of purpose was rising.

“Pods away!”

Our ship lurched and surged as the assist pods dropped and the lasers cut in, and the sough-sough of their pulsing chimed oratorios through my being.

“Cepheus three points off the port bow, Captain,” Red sang out. “On course for Lynx.”

As I watched Uranus drift astern, I knew that my own course was not plotted on the ship’s flight-recorder, but it lay as clear in my mind as that triangulated on the star chart before me.

As the gold of the stars shifted to violet and the blackness before us grayed, as our weight stabilized to the constant acceleration of one gravity, Red turned and asked, “Well, Jack, my lad, how about going below for a cup of java?”

“Sounds good,” I said.

So vast are the meadows of the void that the bleat of one lamb can be lost. It was not given me to know that my voice would be amplified and reinforced by the most unlikeliest of channels. In my exaltation and pride, I could not foresee—and no one could have guessed—that the boy who unlocked himself from the seat beside me would become, in the fullness of time, the god of a far galaxy.