Ian Slater - WW III

What stoked the nightmarish obsession and knotted his stomach with anxiety was the thought of the coming inquiry, when he would have to explain to the board why he, the captain, had abandoned the USS Blaine while she was still afloat. Of course, he must tell them the truth — but what was the truth?

He remembered being conscious at the time, but couldn’t remember giving the order to abandon ship, and the worst of it — the worst possible outcome for a captain — was that the Blaine, though badly holed, listing dangerously to port and spewing flame, had her fires doused by monsoon rains that night only to emerge, her fires out, towed in ignominiously by the Des Moines to the shipyards at Nagasaki, where she was now undergoing repairs.

Whatever had happened, Ray Brentwood knew that as captain of one of the United States Navy’s most modern warships, he was the man responsible. And along with the dead skin of his body now blistering and peeling, revealing pink and custardlike mucous below, Ray Brentwood saw the death of his honor as well as his career and all the dreams he had brought with him from Annapolis, which during the fifteen years he had worked so hard to attain. Exonerated or not, in that deadly phrase of the navy’s, his being named a “party to the inquiry” meant he would never command again.

Early one morning he had managed, against hospital orders, to ease himself out of bed. It had taken him fifteen minutes, his legs in poor shape but not broken, to shuffle with the stoop of an old man — to straighten up was to stretch the skin — toward the washroom. He had sat for twenty minutes trying to defecate, but the painkillers had constipated him badly and it was impossible for him to do anything. When, slowly, he got up, he risked a look at himself in the mirror, now that some of the gauze had been removed. The only discernible features were his eyes, the rest of what had been his face an angry red of loose and taut skin, the two orifices of what used to be his nose obscenely turned up, one hole smaller than the other where the cartilage had collapsed, his breathing hoglike because of the melted flesh obstructions inside, his lips peeled back, suture scars on scabrous skin seeping. His speech, they told him, should be all right after much of the internal swelling from the operations had diminished. In any case, he would have to continue being fed through straws, daily astonished at how different food tasted when pureed to slop. In the vortex of pain and loneliness, only death seemed to offer any solution, but he’d been brought up a Catholic, and though no longer a practicing one, those early years had marked him too, teaching that despair was a sin itself. Even so, had it not been for Beth and the children, he doubted whether he could have held on.

He refused to see any of his family, and Robert, the one member who John and Catherine Brentwood thought might have the best chance of getting through next to Beth, because of security considerations covering submarine whereabouts at sea, could not be informed, his Sea Wolf 2-SSN USS Roosevelt being on patrol.

Beth had been allowed to see Ray only once. And he asked her not to bring the children. She didn’t argue with him, and after she had been carefully robed in antiseptic gown, cap, and mask, she was only grateful that he could not see anything other than her eyes. She could not sit on the edge of the bed, because the slightest change in surface tension over the sheet would cause Ray’s whole body to stiffen in pain, which the doctors called “discomfort.”

“Do you good in here,” Beth had said bravely. “Lose a bit of weight before you come—” But she couldn’t say “home.” Home had been another place, had been another time, when the world was another place. Everyone and everything had changed forever.

“I love you,” she said, gripping the bed rail, willing herself again against her heart not to touch him. He mumbled something, his voice nasal and rough like someone with bad flu. Even a cold, they said, would kill him in his present weakened condition.

The very worst thing, she told Ray’s parents and Lana, was that because of the suturing they’d had to do on his face, he was unable to smile for fear of tearing open the now-closed fissures.

It was a thing you took for granted, she told Lana as they sat together in the visitors’ room, waiting for the doctor’s latest report. With Ray unable to smile, Beth told Lana, there was no way of knowing he was all right, no comfort for her or for anyone else around her. Lana wasn’t really Beth’s type, Beth had always thought, too busy… always wanting to do something… not bossy exactly but a doer who made you mad with your own inaction… ate all the right foods, and smart. Not that there was anything bad in being vigorous, healthy, or clever, but sometimes after a day with the kids, she felt such a flop compared to Lana. And a little bit of jealousy — here was Ray, disfigured for life, and there was Lana, wife of Jay La Roche. What could she possibly know about their kind of life, with her big cars, always dressed like a fashion plate? Some said she looked like a brunette Grace Kelly. Not a hair out of place. Never disorganized, and nice on top of it all, especially about Ray. But then, she could afford to be. Next week it would probably be Palm Springs or some charity ball for President Mayne’s war bond drive. She could walk away from the pain.

“… Of course, they might not take me,” Lana was telling Beth. “I used to have asthma as a child. At least, that’s what they told me. Personally I don’t think they were ever sure whether it was more an allergic reaction. Anyway, I had to choose, Daddy said. Asthma or Prince, our dog. I suppose Ray’s told you all about it. I kept the dog. My parents had a dingdong row about that one.”

“Who mightn’t take you?” asked Beth, trying to disentangle the conversation.

“The Waves,” said Lana. “I have a year of premed, and they told me before I left New York that—”

“But what about your husband?”

Lana was nonplussed. “Beth, haven’t you heard a word of what I’ve been—” She paused. “Well, they say I’ll probably be posted to Halifax. They’re so short of nurses that it’ll be sort of learning on the job.”

“Where’s Halifax — that in Canada?”

“Yes, somewhere in Nova—”

Lana and Beth could see some kind of commotion — several patients, including one in a wheelchair, were hurrying toward them to look at the big TV screen in the visitors’ room. News flashes were coming in that the Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan, under U.S. pressure, were backing off from getting too close to Mainland China. There was some generally poor footage of tanks in a rainy field, the scream of an antitank weapon and the tank upside-down for a minute, the reporter’s rapid breathing caught on the sound track as the camera was righted, the reporter explaining that the tank had just been hit by an antitank missile.

“Oooh!” said a petty officer stopping by the door, looking up at the TV. “Really? An antitank missile?” He looked across at Lana and Beth. “Some of these TV guys, I tell ya—” He looked back again at the screen and saw two wide red arrows spreading north and south over a green map of West Germany.

“Where are the French?” the petty officer asked.

“I don’t think,” said Lana, “France is in NATO.”

“They are and they aren’t,” said the petty officer. It was only as the man turned round toward her that Lana noticed he had one arm, the other’s shoulder stump covered by a pajama sleeve rolled and pinned up.

“They’re still in it,” continued the petty officer, “but they wanted their own command structure. Withdrew from the joint command structure in sixty-six. They want the NATO umbrella, so they pay membership, but want to use their forces how they want.” The PO looked at Lana. “Autonomous command,” he said derisively. “You know — like I’m a member of the ball team, but when I don’t want to play, I won’t.”