Robert Jones - Blood Tide

That was the end of the good life. For the next six years, like it or not, Culdee pulled shore duty. And he hated shore duty. It was the essence of that quarter of the planet called the Beach—stability, salutes, red tape, mortgages, shopping malls, cars, banks, credit cards, telephones, restaurants. It was shore duty, among other things, that had led to and finally disrupted his marriage. Culdee was stationed at Key West then, soon after Korea wound down. The girl worked in a bank on Duval Street. Her name was Vivian, and she was lovely—dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a wide, white-flashing smile that seemed, in those days at least, as fresh as the sea breeze on Mallory Dock.

Weekends he borrowed a boat from the naval base—a heavy carvel-built double-ender—and they sailed out to the Marquesas, sometimes even as far as the Dry Tortugas. She’d grown up in the Keys and knew boats. They fished for permit and mutton snapper over the wreck at the west end of The Quicksands—“Mutton’s better ’n nuttin’,” Viv always said. They trolled over Isaac and Rebecca shoals on their way out to the Tortugas. If there were boats tied up at the wharves on Garden Key, they angled over to Bird Key and dropped the hook there. From a distance, wreathed in terns, Fort Jefferson looked as final as the sunset—solid, fierce, its red brick walls the ultimate meaning of shore duty.

But it was in the fresh wash of sunrise, on the parapets of one of those broken walls, that Culdee asked Viv to marry him. They had climbed the rotting stairways in the dark, bringing a blanket and a thermos of orange juice spiked with Cuban rum, to watch the dawn break.

“Keep your eyes peeled for the flash of red,” Culdee told the girl.

“The what?”

“You’ve heard of the green flash at sundown—hell, you’ve seen it, from Mallory Dock. But there’s a sunrise flash, too.”

“And it’s red?”

“Sure. The green one’s the ocean’s starboard running light. The red one’s on the port side.”

She looked down at the cutter, where it rolled at its moorings beside the wharf.

“That means the sea runs south,” she said. “And the sun at noon is the masthead light.”

“You’ve got it,” he said. They laughed, and he kissed her. Terns circled overhead as they made love, watching curiously with bright black eyes. Viv saw the terns. Culdee, looking down from the parapet, saw a barracuda chasing baitfish in the shallows. Then he proposed to her.

Sadly, for both of them, she accepted.

The joy soon faded. Viv hated being a “dependant”—the official navy designation for wives and children. Still dutiful, though, still loving, she followed him from home port to home port—Norfolk, Boston, Virginia Beach, San Diego, Newport, Long Beach, Treasure Island, even Vallejo, when one of his ships was in the yard at Mare Island. There were no jobs for her in these towns—at least none that counted for anything. No one wanted to hire a navy wife. Her husband might be transferred any minute. She longed to be back at the bank in Key West. Any bank. Any decent job with a chance for advancement, where she was treated as a human being, not a “dependant.”

“Why don’t they just call us appendages and be done with it?” she said.

She took to badgering him, cautiously, obliquely at first, to quit the navy, or least to change his rating to something that would justify more shore duty—he was smart enough to learn electronics, say, or perhaps become an Airdale; he was maybe even smart enough to enter OCS and become a supply designator. That way they could be together more, rather than him being off at sea half the time, three quarters of the time! And if he learned electronics, he could cut loose from the navy and get something that paid real money—maybe his own TV repair business—some day, at least.

So Culdee grew slowly sullen. That’s when the drinking started in earnest, and the bar fighting. He began looking forward to long tours at sea—Operational Readiness Training, offshore work as a target ship for submarines honing their torpedo marksmanship, complex landing and minesweeping exercises, especially the nine-month rotations to WestPac. An old navy tradition had it that all marriage vows were null and void once a man had crossed the international date line. At first he resisted. Then he said, Fuck it. And did.

On one of those tours the baby was born. Miranda—he loved her, a bouncing, brown little thing that ran around naked in the backyard of their cracker-box house in Seal Beach, splashing in and out of the small blue plastic wading pool they’d bought her. A savage, feral little rug rat, quick to talk and fight. He called her his cookie crook, his house ape—while Viv bit her tongue in her own sullen silence. Miranda’s eyes were green like his, specked with motes of brown—sea eyes, he called them, with islands scattered here and there. She was ten the last time he saw her, just before he left for Vietnam, and he loved her more than the sea. But it wasn’t enough.

On another of those WestPac tours Viv went back to school. She studied computers and banking. She was an admirably vital woman, energetic, committed, a ball of fire as they say—a human dynamo. Everyone said so. To housekeeping and child rearing, full-time occupations for most women in those days, she added one activity after another—cooking classes, Planned Parenthood meetings, yoga, modern dance, a history course at a community college, where women gathered at night to drink bitter tea and rewrite the texts that described the nature of their sex. Then she took part in a sit-in. They were back on the East Coast by then—Culdee was in a frigate out of Newport—and Viv went down to the sub base at Groton for an antinuclear demonstration. Culdee’s CO called him on the carpet for that.

“Look, sir,” Culdee told him, “she’s her own woman.”

“It doesn’t look good, Boats,” the skipper said. “I mean, a navy wife—”

“She’s a better navy wife than many, sir,” Culdee said. “She’s no lush, she doesn’t fool around, she runs a taut ship at home. I mean, hell, sir, she keeps a lot of balls in the air.”

The skipper stared at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Yours among them.”

There was a long pause.

“Sir,” Culdee said. He could feel himself shaking.

The skipper looked away and blushed.

“I’m sorry, Boats,” he said. “That was out of line—way out of line. I’m sorry. But please try to talk to her, would you? It was the goddamn FBI blew the whistle on her.”

So Viv got a job, at one of the new electronics companies on Route 128 up in Boston. Within a year she was earning double what Culdee made as an E7. When he was transferred back to California in 1963, she stayed in the East. It was better that way. They both agreed. Oh, sure, when he pulled leave, he’d come back to Boston if he could deadhead on some navy or air force plane going that way, and once they rendezvoused in Pensacola and spent two weeks sailing and fishing in the Gulf. Miranda was with them, and already she was a good man in a boat.

“Just like your mommy,” Culdee told her.

“And my daddy,” she added solemnly.

But it wasn’t the same. The marriage was in limbo. They both knew it.

“Why don’t you put in for retirement?” Viv asked one night as they lay at anchor off Cedar Key. “We’ve got plenty of money in the bank. You could get something in Boston, or even out on Cape Cod. Something to do with boats and the sea.”

A night heron croaked, hunting along the mangroves of the shore.

“I’ve still got four years to go on my twenty,” Culdee said at last. “And now with this thing in the Tonkin Gulf, the navy might really need me.”

“Goddamn the navy,” she said. “At least ask for shore duty.”