Peter Orner - Esther Stories

“You want to walk around the block? Huh? My cauliflower? My eggplant, my Sallygirl? Wake up a little more?”

She doesn’t answer, only jerks from his grip and marches toward the looming steps. Walt, without hesitation, hustles into line behind her, smoothing his suit with trembling hands. She’s a plump, high-heeled Black Jack Pershing in a blue hat with white frills, and he’s a grinning doughboy who’d follow her into any slaughter without a second thought, mortar fire bursting, come what may.

A WHITE-BORDERED black-and-white photograph of my grandfather and my father looking out at Lake Michigan. The picture was taken in Michigan City, Indiana, in the late 1940s. My grandfather and my father are visible from behind. There is no mistaking the shape of my grandfather. He is 5'7'', bold, forward, and squat. The muscles in his shoulders are bunched up so that his neck and his shoulders meet as one, like the gentle slope at the bottom of a mountain. He is pointing at the lake. With his other hand he is holding my father’s hand. My father is wearing a fedora that is too big for his head.

My grandfather is telling my father about the lake, about how many miles it is from north to south, east to west, about how ferocious it can be, about the ships it has swallowed. He is telling my father about the towns with Indian names along the Michigan and Wisconsin coasts. Muskegon, Manistee, Sheboygan, Mantiwoc. A place called Fort Michilimackinac, where the British vanquished the French in 1761. My father says nothing. When my grandfather was gone in the war, my father used to draw pictures of him riding on his ship. Pictures with crayon captions like YOU KILLER JAPS BEWARE MY DAD!!! But now that my grandfather has returned, my father is afraid of him, of his shouting confidence, of the attacking way he handles his fork at the dinner table. And my father knows that the war didn’t make my grandfather this way. He remembers it was this way before, too. He’d hoped with all his pictures and all his praying that the war would either change his father or kill him. Neither has happened. And he is ten years old and looking out into the glare of the summer lake, and although my grandfather’s voice is soft and playful, the hand that holds my father’s is a wrench that slowly tightens around his aching fingers. The boy stares out at the vast and tries to see what his father sees.

MY GRANDFATHER, who lost his short-term memory sometime during the first Eisenhower administration, calls me into his study because he wants to tell me the story he’s never told anybody before, again. My grandmother, from her perch at her dressing table, with the oval mirror circled by little bulbs I used to love to unscrew, shouts, “Oh, for God’s sake, Seymour. We’re meeting the Dewoskins at Twin Orchard at seven-thirty. Must you go back to the South Pacific?”

My grandfather slams the door and motions me to the chair in front of his desk. I’ll be thirteen in two weeks. “There’s something I want to tell you, son,” he says. “Something I’ve never told anybody. You think you’re ready? You think you’ve got the gumption?”

“I think so.”

“Think so?”

“I know so, sir. I know I’ve got the gumption.”

He sits down at his desk and stabs open an envelope with a gleaming letter opener in the shape of a miniature gold sword. “So you want to know?”

“Very much.”

“Well then, stand up, sailor.” My grandfather’s study is carpeted with white shag. It feels woolly against my bare feet. I twist my toes in it. In the room there are also many cactuses. My grandfather often encourages me to touch their prickers to demonstrate how tough an old bird a plant can be. My grandfather captained a destroyer during World War II.

“It was late,” he says. “There was a knock on my stateroom door. I leaped up. In those days I slept in uniform — shoes, too.” My grandfather smiles. His face is so perfectly round that his smile looks like a gash in a basketball. I smile back.

“Don’t smile,” he says. “Just because I’m smiling, don’t assume I couldn’t kill you right now. Know that about a man.”

“Oh, Seymour, my God, ” my grandmother says through the door. “Anyway, isn’t he supposed to be at camp? Call his mother.”

He looks at me and roars at the door, “Another word out of you, ensign, and I’ll have you thrown in the brig, and you won’t see Beanie Dewoskin till V-J Day.”

“I’ll make coffee,” my grandmother says.

“It was late,” I say. “There was a knock.”

“Two knocks,” he says. “And by the time he raised his knuckle for the third, I’d opened the door. ‘A message from the watch, sir. A boat, sir, three miles due north. Very small, sir. Could be an enemy boat, sir; then again, it might not be. Hard to tell, sir.’ I told the boy to can it. Some messengers don’t know when to take a breath and let you think. They think if you aren’t saying anything, you want to hear more, which is never true. Remember that. I went up to the bridge. ‘Wait,’ I told them. ‘Wait till we can see it. And ready the torpedoes,’ I told them, or something like that, I forget the lingo.”

“The torpedoes?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “The torpedoes. I couldn’t make it out, but the chance that it wasn’t a hostile boat was slim. You see what I’m driving at?”

“I do, sir.”

“No, you don’t, sailor.”

“No, I don’t,” I say. “Don’t at all.”

“We’d been warned in a communiqué from the admiral to be on high alert for kamikaze flotillas. Do you have any idea what a kamikaze flotilla is?”

“Basically,” I say, “it hits the side of your boat, and whango.”

“You being smart with me? You think this isn’t life and death we’re talking about here?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“So I waited. It took about a half hour on auxiliary power for us to get within a quarter mile of the thing — then I could see it with the search.”

My grandfather pauses, opens his right-hand desk drawer, where he keeps a safety-locked pistol and a stack of pornographic comic books. They are strange books. In the cartoons men with long penises with hats on the ends of them and hair growing up the sides, so that to me they look like pickles, chase women with their skirts raised over their heads and tattoos on their asses that say things like Uncle Sam’s my daddy and I never kissed a Kaiser. He whacks the drawer shut and brings his hands together in front of his face, moves his thumbs around as if he’s getting ready either to pray or to thumb-wrestle. “Japs,” he says. “Naked Japs on a raft. A raftload of naked Jap sailors. Today the bleedyhearts would probably call them refugees, but back then we didn’t call them anything but Japs. Looked like they’d been floating for days. They turned their backs to the light, so all we could see were their backsides, skin and bone fighting it out and the bone winning hands down.”

I step back. I want to sit down, but I don’t. He stands and leans over his desk, examines my face. Then he points at the door, murmurs, “Bernice doesn’t know.” On a phone-message pad he scrawls, BLEW IT UP in capital letters. Whispers, “ I gave the order. ” He comes around the desk and motions to his closet. “We can talk in there,” he says, and I follow him into his warren of suits. My grandfather long ago moved all his clothes out of my grandmother’s packed-to-the-gills closets. He leaves the light off. In the crack of sun beneath the door I can see my grandfather’s shoes and white socks. He’s wearing shorts. He’d been practicing his putting in the driveway.