A Tidewater Morning Read Online Free Page B

For God’s sake, keep the ball moving! “I think her name was Ludmilla, or maybe it was the other one, Olga. Fuck! I can’t remember. No, wait a minute—”
    Whenever, I thought—switching Halloran off again—whenever I was overtaken by a spasm of metaphysical creepiness, and the sheer unreality of this endless war enfolded me like a damp, mildewed shroud, I thought of my father. How could he have been so prescient? How could he have known those many years ago that I would someday be in a situation like this? How did he ever imagine that his son would grow up to be a killer, not only willing but eager to kill—to anticipate killing with crude, erotic excitement? He didn’t know the last part. But of course it now seemed inevitable that he—a man who helped build huge war machines but who was a peaceable soul with an exquisite sense of history—should have visualized the trajectory of his son’s life, ending here in these remote and unknown archipelagoes before he was old enough to vote. And I recalled, with a luminous, mnemonic clarity that amazed me, a long-ago day when he virtually predicted my presence on a ship like the USS General Washburn, making its cumbersome passage to the out landish coast of Okinawa …
    The title of the story in The Saturday Evening Post was “The Curse of the Rising Sun,” and I was reading it in the back of the family Oldsmobile, broken down with engine trouble beside a peanut field near the VirginiaCarolina line. At eleven I could read Post fiction with contemptuous ease, but I was not quite old enough to avoid being troubled by the fantasy—a 1930s version of spy thriller spiced up with a touch of futuristic horror. In the front seat my mother, her leg in a steel brace, gazed stolidly forward through the fading light of an October afternoon while my father labored over the steaming engine. I was the classic only child—snotty, self-absorbed—and I offered neither solace nor help, curled up in the back with my chronicle of the nightmare that engulfed America “in the early 1950s.” It was untethered hell. Colossal submarines the size of ocean liners had disgorged their weasel-faced hordes at a dozen landing sites from Seattle to San Diego. Paralysis had ensued as the nation failed to mobilize its defenses. California had become another Manchuria, prostrate, in thrall. San Francisco lay pillaged, the people destroyed like insects. Feeble resistance had allowed Los Angeles to be overrun; the palaces of the movie moguls were occupied by smirking officers, rattling their samurai swords and defiling starlets. (I remember one captioned line drawing: “I saw your film in Tokyo,” said Colonel Oishi sneeringly to the cringing Gloria, “A pretty dance. Now you will perform for me another kind of dance. ”) As Part One began to wind down (I peeked ahead and discovered that “The Curse of the Rising Sun” was a serial in three segments), a certain Major Bradshaw of U.S. Army Intelligence, based with the Defense Command in Denver, spoke on the telephone to his wife back east, imparting the news that the Imperial Fifth Army, a legion of fiends specializing in babies and old people, was advancing across the Arizona desert toward Phoenix, where her parents lived. She sobbed; he counseled courage. Troops from Texas were on the way. Continued next week.
    There was a thick cloud of rage in and around our stalled car. For good reason, we were not a very happy little family. But we generally kept our tempers and were decent with one another, being well-bred and imbued with many of the more gentle Christian prescriptions. Indeed, our love for one another had a special desperation. But I could almost hear the rage humming in the warm autumn air. My father, a patient man, was enraged because he could not fix the engine; he was a graduate of North Carolina State College, an engineering school, and never could reconcile this with his mechanical incompetence. Essentially he was a poet who had