John Hawkes - Second Skin

The floating paradise, the brutal act, a few memories on a distant shore….

…dropped to my knees beside her and took her cold hand — no rings — and confessed to her at long last that Fernandez was dead. That I had found him dead at the end of my final shore patrol on Second Avenue. That I thought she should know.

Yes, I thought she should know. And yes, I told her the truth, made my confession, got it off my chest that night the snow fell into the trembling arms of the larch trees on our black and ragged island rooted fast in the cold and choppy waters of the Atlantic. Yes, I told her, my own daughter. For her own good. For her own good and mine, for our mutual relief. And yes, yes, I thought she might spare herself if she knew the truth, might spare her own life somehow. But I was wrong, of course.

The truth. Yet wasn’t I deceiving her even then? Wasn’t I sparing her certain details, withholding others, failing somehow to convey the true tonality of the thing? Well, I should hope to God! Because how could I or anyone else convey the true tonality of Second Avenue, kneeling as I was by Cassandra’s little lumpy four-poster — little nightcaps secreted for years under that embroidered pillow — in the cold dark room in that prim rotting house with fresh white snow on the sagging eaves and those dark trenches — Puritan graves — awake and listening in the cellar? No. Second Avenue could not survive that moment in a winter’s night. Then why did I wait, why bother to talk to her at all? Because I should have acted then and there, should have done something on the spot, so to speak, in the middle of the flickering darkness of Second Avenue. Yes, I should have left the body, bodies to be true to fact, exactly where I found them in the flickering chaos of the cheap room in that Second Avenue hotel, flophouse, whatever it was, and posted a guard and driven the gray Navy pickup truck back to that other cheap hotel myself, and waked her and bundled her into a blanket and driven her, still half-asleep, back down those twenty or so wet blocks and carried her up the broken tiles of those stairs and into the room of blood where she could have taken a good look at him with her own eyes. Yes. That’s what I should have done. I know it now. But I waited.

Yes, I waited those two or three months, and they made all the difference, they tipped the scale, shadings of the true tonality were lost, and certain details were kept to myself. Cassandra never knew, for instance, that I took care that she should not be alone that night. Small matter, yet it might have helped. And I never told her how my stomach felt as if it were going to boil over like a car radiator. These and a few other small points omitted, gone. And I shall never forgive myself the loss. A hair’s breadth might have kept Cassandra from killing herself, merely a hair’s breadth. Now I shall never really forgive myself the loss.

But if I missed those many years ago I won’t miss again. So now for everything, for what I told her as well as what I didn’t tell her in the upstairs bedroom of the cold island house, everything I can think of now to restore a little of the tonality, to set to rights my passion. A small recognition, a brief scene of blood, some light on our lost affections.

There was the regulation.45 caliber Navy automatic, for instance, stuck like a four-pound T-bone steak point down on my hip. And a web belt — too small, they were always too small for me — buckled around the girth of my white tunic and squeezing me, puckering the skirt of the tunic with deep awkward pleats. And the dark bright blue brassard on my arm — white letters SP a mile high — and then the gaiters. Little canvas things with laces and hooks and eyes and canvas straps to go under the instep, little canvas sleeves to bind the ends of the white trousers to the fat ankles, and it must have been two o’clock in the morning, Eastern War Time, when I sat on the floor in our shabby room in the cheap hotel trying to fasten on the gaiters, puffing, struggling, moving my lips in silence because Cassandra and Pixie too were both sleeping in the single bed. And finally the cap, my old white garrison cap — eagle going to seed on the front, golden threads of the eagle turning black — the old cap pulled square on my head to simulate, if possible, the policeman’s style, the policeman’s look of authority. My rig, my poor rig. Thank God she never saw me in that rig.

It was raining. Once more we were across the street from a Greyhound terminal, though it was an eastern rather than a Pacific terminal and though we were in a hotel instead of a Chinese restaurant, and it was raining. A vaguely familiar terminal, the return to a hardly altered darkness, the city-wide relentless song of the rain, and in a wet envelope in my pocket, my orders. A final shore patrol for Skipper. More shore patrol, more drunks in a dream, more faces inside the cage. Didn’t they know I had had enough, that I was done with the sea? At least I with held this information from Cassandra, kept her from knowing that she would be alone that night while I, her father, was off exposing himself to God knows what harm. So we crossed the street in the rain at half-past one in the morning — no more 0130 hours for me, no more — and ran for the nearest doorway and in the red-eyed pain of interrupted uneasy slumber we shook ourselves like dogs in front of the desk clerk and piled into the dingy, self-service elevator.

Even from across the street and through the rain I spotted that hotel for what it was: a place for suicide.

“Where are we, Skipper?” she asked once, but I shook my head. I needed time, I needed silence, I had to think. The elevator had a tic in its ratchets and one of the push buttons had fallen out, it banged from side to side in its dismal shaft and smelled like the flooded lavatory of the bus we had just escaped from. There was a crumpled six-inch black headline in the corner. We groaned and banged our way up the shaft.

A place for suicide obviously, and my orders were in my pocket and Sonny was three or four thousand miles away that moment in Southern Cal. Surely I couldn’t seek help from the clerk who had sent us up with malice, oh, with what obvious malice to the fourteenth floor which was really the thirteenth floor, I knew. Never have I been taken in by the number fourteen in a cheap water front hotel but have always known beforehand that other number it concealed. The light went out when we reached the fourteenth — thirteenth — floor and, knowing I could not trust Cassandra alone, I gasped, fumbled for the door lever in the darkness, caught my fingers in a joint that was packed with grease.

So we disembarked quickly into the bare corridor, and as I was turning the key in the lock I saw the figure down on its knees with scrubbing brush and pail at the far end of the corridor and I knew that for the moment at least Cassandra was safe. A lucky break on our unlucky floor.

The single bed, the broken radio, the cigarette burns on the chiffonier, the stains on the toilet seat, the broken window shade which came down in my arms. A room in the wartime metropolis of the world for Cassandra, a cut above a flophouse for Cassandra, just the place for her, with its hairs on the pillows and old disreputable impressions on the gray sheets. How little I knew.

“Are you trying to look like Mussolini, Skipper? You look like Mussolini, Skipper, you really do when you hold your chin out that way.”

I smiled. “You’re tired, Cassandra,” I said, “you better hop right on in. Big day coming up, Cassandra.”

So it was 2 A.M. and mother and infant were sleeping together in the narrow bed with the loose springs which on many another night gave quick unconcealed clamor to the hidden desires of young servicemen, and I was lacing my gaiters in the middle of the floor and staring at the rain-refracted puddle of neon light that my feet were in. It always rained hardest between midnight and early dawn, I thought.