Joshua M. Bigley

 

Prophecy

Naval Station Norfolk

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The cabby takes one look at them in their crackerjacks with seabags on their backs, coughs in a shroud of smoke and says, “What ship?”

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Red looks suspiciously at him. “America,” he says. And the cabby shudders.

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He hoists their seabags into the trunk and lists when he walks, bony shoulders like clipped wings. And as the airman recruits get into the taxi, he is pleased to tell them all about America, eyes fizzy and rising like an airborne toxic event.

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“Yea-up, she never missed a show,” the cabby chuckles, “Vietnam from sixty-eight to,” exhaling, “oh, seventy, seventy two.” And doing that scratchy thing in the back of his throat, sputtering, “Lebanon, Libya.” His swollen eyes occasionally darting back to the road. His voice shredded by a lifetime of salt and smoke. He tries to loosen some phlegm. “Somalia,” he says coughing. The car dips into the left lane as he lapses into another hacking fit. And the man finishes with a sequence of hums and haws and finally a greasy snort, ejecting the slippery mucus out the window. He uses his hands when he talks. “Her keel,” eyes foaming, “was laid right here in the Hampton Roads area, over in Newport News. I think it was 1961.” He cups his callused hand over the cigarette when he talks, and when he breathes, there is a fiery glow in between his fingers. “Newport News,” he says, “it’s over the bridge… or,” his hand and the cigarette slice through the smoky interior, “you can take the Merrimack tunnel.” Raising his brow, “Newport News shipbuilding and Dry-dock Company— not to be confused with Portsmouth— the Norfolk Naval shipyard. Much larger scale at the News, fewer slips at Portsmouth, mostly go there for overhauls, repairs… decommissioning.”

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The taxi smells like sun-bleached vinyl, stale nicotine and tar. Old Spice. The ashtray in the door is full of crushed cigarette butts. The name “Newport News” reminds Slater of cigarettes and printing presses. He imagines plank roads and clucking horses drawing Hansom carriages, bells ringing in the doors of shops. He imagines a kid in a tweed jacket, a flat cap, waving a rolled up newspaper in his hand, a menthol cigarette dangling from the mouth, hollering Extra, Extra! Read all’ bout it! His face remarkably like Cyane’s, her flaming red hair tied up under the flat cap in a French pleat— and he chastises himself for doing it, for allowing his mind to drift so easily back to her; and sighing, he gazes out the window, staring into the past, hardly seeing anything. The southern sky is big, so blue… imperial blue…

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“Great Lakes, what’s that like,” the cabby asks.

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Slater watches his cigarette smoldering… 'Mama, mama, can't you see,' boots staggering in his head, 'I used to drive a Cadillac, but now I'm marching with a seabag on my back!’ …he watches the ring of red paper burning over the stuffed tray in the door. The column of smoke obliterated in the wind. “She is every breath,” he says.

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The cabby is fitfully brushing his lap—it seems the hot cinder of his cigarette has fallen off. Slater stops him in the mirror. The rims of the cabby’s watery eyes are blood-cracked and flaring. He has at least three days of grizzled stubble, and thick hair in his ears.

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“A girl,” the cabby clears his throat. He sounds like he can relate. He’s been there. He coughs, hacks up a ball of phlegm, spits out the window. He looks in the mirror again, at Slater, over at Red, and eases a Winston cigarette from a crumpled soft pack above the visor, lighting it with a yellow Bic on the dash. Red turns into the wind. He doesn’t like the smoke.

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“Cold,” Red says. “Basic.”

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“Sure,” the cabby says, turning the wheel wide left.

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“Ain’t Valhalla,” Red says. He has an old voice, an old soul. If you close your eyes, he sounds like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now or Vincent Price when he did that Thriller album. But then you open your eyes and you see Samuel Creel, skin like Vermouth.

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The cabby grunts, muttering, “Windy city.” And ejects a sharp painful cough that lacerates flesh. “Went to San Diego myself,” he says.

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“I used to fall asleep standing up, when we was marching,” Red says.

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“Me too,” Slater says. “All the time.” 

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“Petty Officer Lang was like, Yo, wake the F-up! Wake up you bug!”

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“She called me bug a lot.”

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“Rock.” Red chuckles.

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Slater looks away, out the window, at the empty streets and warehouses, barracks, grass courtyards, and whitewashed anchors. Government cars. White delivery trucks. He wonders where all the people went. Naval bases are cold bleak places, he thinks.

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It resurrects Cyane Snow. Her name is a mantra. When he thinks of her, the sea swells in his mind, a movement, and a rest. Even now as he gazes out of the window of this cartoon-yellow taxi into a glimmering haze, violet waters wash over him, breathing in his mind, the undertow of dead dreams lifting him up, caressing his face, a salt-rinsed air, curtains undulating, filled with a blue silky breeze, and the chattering of nightingales. He pictures her sleeping, lying cramped and breathing against him in her child-like bed. He holds his breath, the pain of death, of loss, twisting in the core of his being, in the sweaty, sun-tattered vinyl of the cab, on his way to America along this parade of ships. He rolls his aching neck, stiff from the flight, unaccustomed to flying, unable to let go of her lips and the heat of her mouth. Still in thrall. When he hugged her, she held her body away from him, and to the side.

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“You’re about to make history. Yep, America has seen her last days. She gave it a good long run though. Seems they’re puttin’ her out of service,” he looks at Slater in the mirror, his eyes moving away, into the side mirrors, over the wheel. “She’s going to be decommissioned next year I guess.” Talking into the cigarette that is sticking to his lips, sparks swirling. “You couldn’t have come to her at a better time. She’ll make one last voyage,” his body seizing, cough lodged in his chest, eyes spilling over, “should be her finest hour.”

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The cab, the windows, the vinyl, and the man’s pores are incandescent in the sun.

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“The decommissioning crew will get their choice of orders wherever they want to go,” he coughs, “it’s considered a great honor to decommission a ship, especially the America.”

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Slater tugs a few times on the Gold, takes a long drag, and stuffs it out in the door. The cabby clears his throat, takes a sip of water and another pull from his smoke, “She’s done it all son. She comes from a proud history of canvas sail to supercarrier. And she is the only ship with her country’s name. The flagship of America. Me and you—we’re linked—as brothers of the sea. When she launched in sixty-four on her maiden voyage I was there, operating off the Virginia capes, Bermuda, and Guantanamo Bay. I was with her on her first major deployment to the Mediterranean Sea,” he coughs, “you will be with her on her last” — eruptions of coughing and hacking — “in her final hour,” he says with narrowing wet eyes in the mirror. And launches into wheezing sputtering laughter. “The Navy is changing,” says the old master chief. “The world,” he says.

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They drive slowly along the gray haze of ships, past warehouses and asphalt, through plumes and fug of steam in the gutters. Slater turns to look at Red, mesmerized by the march of endless piers, eyes flickering over the sleek black hulls of nuclear attack subs skimming shadowy waters, eyes flickering over nests of great war ships, of destroyers and frigates with names such as USS South Carolina and USS Normandy.

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They move under ten miles an hour past dead sailors, faces sad, lonely, bored, tired, dreadful, wretched, hostile, bemused, and vapid, the drudges flowing by, crossing the street between moored ships and vast parking lots that serve them… bluejackets in dungarees, khakis, working blues, and civvies.

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A wakeful rush of salt air. And he realizes he’s been holding his breath again, a nervous habit. He has thought-apnea. He hasn’t been himself lately, mind lost in an undertow of lies. He breathes, exhaling, yawning, trying to moor onto something. He stares at the unwinding droves of sailors…driftwood, flotsam, jetsam, like plastic gyres floating in iridescent waters, in the shadows under piers, America’s black waters, crackerjacks, listless, loitering, smoking, in the windows of Laundromats, collecting amid blue phone banks— Bell South (pay phones say Bell Atlantic in the North). Bleak sprawling asphalt. Yellow barriers. Elevated steam pipes. He shakes his head whispering Fear of a paved planet. Fingering his eyes, he slips into the past, into another parking lot.

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It was a silver AMC Eagle spotted with rust. It had no heat and the feint undertow of dead fish but it was a good little car. Cyane wept. In the dark, Slater stared at her. Snow collected on the hood.

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The clusters of Destroyers give way to nested supply ships with half a dozen outriggers like legs of overturned insects— hospital and underway replenishment ships. Names like USS Seattle and USS Concord. The slim-lined hulls are massive like the freighters and oil-rigs he sees on the St. Lawrence Seaway, on the Lake, but instead of dark red black hulls these Fast Combat Support Ships are a hard copulating gray of sharp steel curves, vague impressions, lavish protruding bows, sleek pitches and jaded violent angles, long, round and twisting. They look hard, honest, and brutal.

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Each pier has a wide gate with a guard shack and two, sometimes three, enlisted men standing watch in their dress blues. One with dungarees and a flak jacket, carrying a handgun on his hip, or a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Shiny rails cut through the pavement and run under the gates, glinting under an immense turquoise sky slathered over the haze of harsh steel. Tactical, hulking, amphibious assault ships fill the berths— gloomy, stout and terrible looking. There is the USS Guam, the USS Wasp, and the USS Boxer. Something about them darkly arousing.

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The Wasp has its hangar bay doors open at the fantail, allowing him a glimpse into the inner-cavity that in war would conceal powerful artillery and marauding troops charged with unleashing a bloody storm on alien beaches. The black and white pictures in World War II videos come to his mind, sun teetering on the edge of the world, forlorn faces of gray men speculating the shadow of death in swampy jungles, bunkers of sand and barbed-jagged steel in Nazi-squeezed French quarters. He sees their disemboweled flesh, not shown in the old films, but inevitably ripped apart by the flurry of invisible gunfire, chucking it down like cold rain, canals of acrid, dark blood, beautiful blood pooling around spiritless blue-violet eyes and sallow skin. A sudden shiver, vague horror, forces him to look away. The machines have one purpose. Victory. Death to the enemy. America number one. He fingers his eyes, shuts them… In the dark Eagle Slater stared at her. Snow collected on the hood.

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God grant me serenity, he prays, grant me the courage and the strength to grow and to adapt… show me the way.

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High in the crow’s nest of each ship, small brightly colored flags whip in the wind, pennants that signal a specific meaning— tools of the Signalman— all of them obscure to Slater. The flotilla of working-vessels, their blue striped smokestacks, and the imposing blood ships, give way to a sudden hole in the gray range of the sixth fleet, empty berths filled with open air and the shimmering silver water of the bay. A frenzy of screeching seagulls dance around each other, tearing at something in the sky, garbage, or flesh— a dead fish. The birds dip and dive over the empty slips and gather on the naked piers, in the water, and on a black greasy barge moored way out at the end, pitching in the water, clipping the pier.

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The stout, bleak buildings on the right thin out, giving way to sprawling parking lots as far as the eye can see. The long piers are teeming with pedestrians and shiny cars. A Harley-Davidson with gleaming chrome exhaust pipes rumbles by—a flash of shimmering red and black leather tassels. Throngs of sailors, in and out of uniform, in dungarees, skirt the street, going to and from their respective ships, a small ramshackle laundry mat, a McDonald’s heaving with sailors. The line for the drive-thru wraps around the restaurant’s parking lot where idling traffic waits to get in and out under a cloak of yellow sunlit smog— Oil pigs in line for greasy nosh at America’s trough of cholesterol, obesity, pallid-spotty-flesh, and oozing boils on the heart.

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Glancing over all of this, past the shimmering empty spaces and bird invaded piers, Slater’s attention is drawn to the dark ships that rise out of the lands-end and the sea, like gargantuan citadels, fortresses of hard steel filling the windows and blotting out much of the sky, the silver bay gone. These last ships, the aircraft carriers, tower above the avenue, veiled in sun, and shadow. They point to sea like the broadswords of Titans. A Titan’s fury. And they bring titanic death. There are three of them stark against the blue canvas of the sky.

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A seagull circles the crow’s nest of a soaring supercarrier, the number 74 painted huge on the bulk of its island superstructure: USS John C. Stennis tattooed on its fantail. The gull is dark and tiny, appearing as no more than a little tern or swallow at such heights. The shiny brand new ship shares a pier with USS George Washington CVN-73, its stern facing the bay, the bow, its mighty anchors, pointed inland, sheathed in its scabbard. The sign by the gate says pier 11.

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The taxi pulls up in front of the last one, the last pier near a bank of phone booths and a guard shack. Pier 12. The gate is open and a second-class petty officer in his dress-blues waves a sleek black car through, saluting it. Slater can see that the road curves past the pier and around the parking lot, back into the interior of the base, snug against the shoreline. Far to the right, somewhere within the harbor of the base, he can see the white masts of sailboats, pleasure crafts. Gulls screech in the distance.

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“This is it young squids,” the cabby says, “Pier 12, the home of CV-66, USS America. That’ll be ten bucks,” he says, twisting his skinny frame in his seat, leather squelching, a long ash hanging off the tip of the cigarette. He’d left the meter off because they were sailors, he said at the airport. He erupts into a frenzy of sputtering coughs, the long column of ash splashing on Red’s knee and Red fishes through his wallet, the man’s spittle on his hands, and asks the old salt if he has change for a twenty, leaving the ash alone, afraid to stain his uniform. Slater shares a look with Red, knowing he must be thankful it’s not his white jumper pants.

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When the cab driver recovers, he wipes his mouth with the heel of his hand and turns round to rummage through a zipped bank envelope he has tucked in the door, handing him two fives and muttering something through the cigarette in his teeth.

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They slide out, rising, and the cabby pops the trunk, trembling under the weight of their seabags. A gust of wind hits Red in the back, billowing in his bell-bottomed trousers and neckerchief, the flap on his jumper smacking him in the head.

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A brown and red McDonald’s bag skips past him into the street. A steel barrel by a bank of Bell South’s phone booths overflows with debris, mostly white paper cups and brown yellow and red bags from America’s favorite processed burger joint, processed diet, and processed life— the same trash littering the spangled roads, turnpikes, and highways that stitch the red, white, and blue together. And now, apparently, the same arches are feeding the fleet, nesting in our maritime tradition. America’s Navy, America’s military, in bed with a hamburger franchise. The smell of lard soaked French fries, homogenized beef-lips and assholes bakes in the air beside the fishy oil-rinsed harbor— embroidered with the crisp salt of the sea. It is both a delightful and repulsive smell, like that of a summer carnival that makes him sick— dumpster offal, fried dough, and salt-water taffy. Slater breathes deeply, and it stirs in his stomach. Isn’t this convenient, he thinks, the ship moors, step off the brow and up to Mickey D’s.

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The cabby stands beside him, putting the cigarette to his mouth, thin and bent, like his crusty sun-drenched body, shoulder blades prominent under the canary-yellow polyester tank top that he wears. A gold chain and anchor juxtaposed with a crucifix glints in the tuft of grizzled hair on his chest.

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“You see that,” close enough for Slater to smell his Old Spice and feel his wet tarred breath; he points at the towering superstructure, at the island stacked somewhere in the middle, with the number 66 blazoned on it, “CV-66… of the sixth fleet.”

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Slater nods his head, “yeah,” he says, looking at the flight tower and bridge, the pilothouse, “And,” he says, waiting for the old Master Chief to pass on some lost heritage of the nation’s icon. The America has a distinct, patched and serrated look unlike the other carriers, the newer nuclear Nimitz-class carriers beside her; and unlike them, her mainmast and superstructure are black, not gray, with yellow aviation wings stenciled over a large Battle ‘E’ on the front of the tower. She was born of a different time, in an older generation of diesel, and steam turbines, in the first class of supercarrier, the Kitty-hawk class. She has a red and white candy-striped spar with a blue crown, an aerial-like mast on the forward flank of her flightdeck. The spangled mast, Slater recalls from airman training at basic, is a navigational instrument called a Belknap pole— named after the USS Belknap, a destroyer that collided with the carrier USS John F. Kennedy. Dripping stains of rust spot the gray hull of America like bloody lacerations and welting liver spots. The skin looks thin and rotted with stained brown edges, the starving flesh clinging to the ribs of her spine. Brown water trickles and spits out of scuppers along the hull. She looks battle-hardened.

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“That’s the sign of the beast!” The old Master Chief says, coughing.

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“Yep.” Red glowers at her rusty watering armor, and shining black mast. “That makes sense. Beast is probably a good name for her.”

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The cabby leers at him, “they call her the Big Dawg… and she’s cursed.” He turns his cheek, “6-6-6,” he breathes, one gnarled eye squinting at Slater. “You heard of Nostradamus, ain’t ya?”

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Slater shivers. The man stammers at first, but then for the first time since they got in his cab, he speaks with a clear voice, eyes darkly animated. “Michel de Nostrame,” he clears his throat, “Nos- Nos- Nostradamus prophesied that an enormous ship of the line, spawning giant wasps of terrible power, a man-o’-war unlike anything the world has ever seen, bearing the name of the New World and the Sign of the Beast,” he spits, “will never… never return on its last voyage— sunk, with no survivors!” He holds up a finger, seized by a fit of coughing, and hocks up a ball of phlegm that he spits at their feet. “Now this… the wizard claimed… over five-hundred years ago.”

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The old salt squeezes Red’s shoulder and gets back into the taxi. He winks, “Don’t underestimate her son, she might look a little ragged and rough-edged, but she’s a tough old girl and no stranger to danger. She’s a survivor.” And giving Red and Slater a casual salute, he pulls away, vanishing round the corner.