Thomas Mcguane: The Cadence of Grass

The next day we were playing catch on the stern. I’d loaned my glove to an officer who never gave it back. John just went up and retrieved it from his quarters so we could play catch, two guys from Montana anchored off a little island covered with abandoned bunkers and a blowed-up ammo dump that looked like a hole right in the middle of the world. He wasn’t particularly afraid of officers, old John.

We almost got used to the kamikazes, they was such a regular feature there toward the end when the emperor knew the score. Every now and then something would happen you couldn’t forget, like the Zero that came from between two little islands near Jolo and Tawi-Tawi about five feet off the water, weaving every which way until he elevated just enough to catch the stern catapult and blow up. Even before the firemen could move, this hand come whistling down the deck and stopped right next to the sick-bay ventilator. Me and John went over to look. That air show was right out of the Olympics, and here was this little brown Jap hand. Remember that, John?

When we started up the boxing matches on the fantail again for the first time since the New Hebrides, I went along with my new friend. This big farm kid from Indiana put on the gloves with a smaller but savvier Mexican from California. The Mexican danced around till some of the guys was booing, but he kept it up till the farm boy run out of gas and then started whaling on his head. It was no good. You’d see his face flatten, with hair all pointed one way and the sweat drops just flying out over the ocean. I remember, John, you saying, “Yes, sir, this makes a lot of sense.”

How that ship stank! The captain didn’t want submarines following our garbage so we kept it all and the ship smelled like a city dump. Red Wolf says, “I’ll take the subs.” It was hot. We slept on deck with sea bags for pillows and swapped theories about the stars that swarmed right into the ocean. Sometimes it got too hot to sleep, like on our way down to Borneo, so we just talked about home. I told you I ranched a little and you told me you was a diesel mechanic and medicine man. I have to admit I didn’t much care for it when you said that your people were the real owners of my ranch. That kind of talk was so much like the talk we had with the southern boys on the ship, about the War Between the States, and I’m glad we dropped it. At first, guys would show off, reciting every state of the union and its capital, but that give out long before the equator. By Subic Bay, the only country we had was that light cruiser.

One of the last things our task force took on was shelling a bunch of islands near New Georgia, if I remember right, where we set off a Jap ammunition dump, better than any fireworks display. That’s when Red Wolf showed once and for all what kind of stuff he was made out of. A five-inch shell hung fire in the gun, and the whole crew waited for it to discharge and blow a hole in the side of our ship, but John worked that shell free and dumped it over the side. Said it wasn’t nothing, that he had extra powers.

Sometimes, when Roosevelt broadcast to all hands over the loudspeakers, John and me would find a quiet spot to visit about things that was so amazing to young fellows from the sagebrush. Like when a torpedo bomber hit us in ’43 and we had to seal off a flooded compartment with seventeen of our buddies still inside. Funny thing was, we shot that plane down after he cut his torpedo loose. The pilot bailed out and we turned him to hamburger with the twenty-millimeter. Later we find out that’s against the rules of war. Tell it to those seventeen boys. Or close calls, like seeing a periscope on a moonlit night and zigzagging all over the ocean to keep from getting sunk. We talked about the guys that couldn’t take the heat and concussion and boredom and finally went Asiatic and had to be shipped home. We looked out there at all the flying death and told each other it was like a movie. Or the big powder magazine that went up on Tarawa, a rolling ball of smoke and flame, jam-packed with dead Japs. You start to get the picture about the human race, that most of it’s dead. Other stuff going up all the time: pill boxes, assembly areas, truck depots. Never a dull moment. How about Magicienne Bay when Jap shore batteries opened up on the California ? We watched those dark hills with little tongues of light from the flamethrowers. That’s how some of them boys went out, at the wrong end of a flamethrower. Bodies always floating past us, Jap and American both, just bobbing meatballs that used to have mothers and hometowns. I’ll bet you’ll never forget the day the ship got caught in the gigantic oceanic whirlpool with Bing Crosby on the air from Radio Tokyo, the ship swinging in smaller circles like it was headed down a giant drain and we’re listening to this crooner. Wasn’t that war something? Like we always said, never a dull moment. But the world has changed, John, and guys like you and me don’t really exist.

The last time was when that suicide plane lost its bombs and the canopy peels away, then a wing, and it comes over the stern bouncing sideways. The motor tore loose and slid across the ship, killing the mount captain on the other forty-millimeter. They found his earphones wrapped around a roll of his scalp about a hundred feet away. Remember him? He’s the one tried to show us how to play chess. By then, we were gettin’ pretty squirrelly every time they called general quarters, having to be good in the clutch whenever the Japs felt like playin’ ball. Lord, it was stormy out there. Like you said, enough wind to blow the monkeys right out of the trees.

It didn’t matter though, did it? The war was over. Truman said so on the radio. You and me heard his voice on the loudspeaker while we stood on the fantail, two nobodies from the boonies, waving good-bye to the dead. Now John, here is how I remember the rest of it: We get discharged at the navy receiving station in San Diego and ride a bus all the way home, but when we crossed the Montana line the only thing you said was, “Looks better with a few hills,” and when I asked if I’d see you again, you said, “Yes.” I got to my ranch and there was nothing there, cows gone, machinery rusted into the ground, saddle horses stolen or eaten. But fifty years comes and goes and you wait for a time like this. The Gazette ran a picture of a battleship graveyard around Mobile, Alabama, and I seen our little cruiser in the pack of wrecked ships but I ain’t seen you .

Well here I am, said Red Wolf, and I followed him into the canyon where the sky was upside down and we could walk straight into the stars.

Thomas McGuane lives in Sweet Grass County, Montana. He is the author of eight previous novels— The Sporting Club, The Bushwacked Piano, Ninety-two in the Shade, Panama, Nobody’s Angel, Something to Be Desired, Keep the Change, and Nothing but Blue Skies —and a collection of stories, To Skin a Cat, as well as two collections of essays, Some Horses and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing.