A Tidewater Morning Read Online Free

blond White Russian pussy. Then at last these years of war—virtually the rest of his life (except for a brief Stateside assignment)—spent among the sweltering Pacific isles, fighting an enemy he hated with such barely governed rage that he choked when he uttered its name. Wouldn’t you, Stiles said to me, be a little—ahem— peculiar, I mean not quite like the rest of us college kids, if that was the earliest chapter in the story of your life as an American boy?
    The colonel poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into three mess-kit cups and sat down on the edge of the bunk opposite us. It was strictly illegal to drink aboard ship—but, of course, fuck it. Like all Marines who had been in the Pacific for many months, Halloran was scandalously rich through accumulated and unspent back pay. “I gave a Navy supply officer seventy-five bucks for this bottle,” he said, grinning, and held the fifth of amber-hued bourbon up to the light. “Old Forester. Only the best for gents of the Second Battalion. I don’t think I told you this story before, fellows—”
    A beer guzzler, I had tasted whiskey only half a dozen times in my life; I didn’t yet quite know how to handle the awesomely poetic exhilaration I felt when it began nibbling away at my brain cells. I took a hefty sip and experienced instant vertigo: this canceled out any need to try to follow Halloran’s narrative. The only story I wished I could hear—an account from his own lips of the fabulous episode on Tarawa that had won him the Navy Cross (and, of course, our houndlike devotion)—was obviously the only story that he, like any hero with appropriate modesty, could not tell. Instead (oh, Jesus, I thought), here began another tale about Shanghai, the poor guy’s golden time of whoopee amid a totally regimented life. Would it be about Svetlana, the honey-haired White Russian “countess,” suspected agent for the Japanese, who tried her sultry best to squeeze out secrets from Halloran, the junior intelligence officer? (It was a story with brilliant possibilities, and it should have had zip and suspense, like a good Hitchcock movie, in addition to some juicy sex, but Halloran had told it so confusedly that it lacked all of these, especially the sex. “Svetlana was just a slut” was his raciest observation, which reinforced my view that, like most military academy men, he was basically quite prudish, all talk and small action, and had probably gotten less ass than even I had.) Or would it be about Chinese beer? Halloran could do a minimum of forty-five minutes on the brewing of Chinese beer and still be working up to matters of bottle design and the way the head foamed.
    “Shanghai.” I heard the word and I shut Halloran off from my mind as if I had snapped a switch. The eyes of many people, when confronted with a bore, glaze over; one can actually see the glaze as it steals over their vision, a gradual lusterlessness that becomes like that of raw oysters long exposed to air. I, by contrast, have always had the knack of being able to maintain pinpoints of light in my pupils, giving the bore a false impression that I am listening. Thus, as Halloran wound himself up in his reminiscence, and my nostalgia deepened, I sank into a reverie while two interlocking memories flickered in my head like scenes from a home movie. The faraway explosions had made me envision an aircraft carrier in its death convulsion; I had a swift image of oily smoke boiling heavenward, the deck listing, sailors tumbling into the sea like scattered windup toys. This dissolved, gave way to the memory of the launching of the flattop Ranger, America’s first aircraft carrier, which, at the age of seven, I believed to be largely the creation of my father—although he was actually only a medium-level draftsman at the shipyard, where he took me (drugged with sleep at three in the morning) to gawk and marvel.
    And it had been thrilling to watch the mechanics, at once brutish and delicate,