There was a gallery of pecking old faces scrutinizing him from the rail. Some of them were widowers too, and some were leaking away toward the great surrender very fast. Their common denominator was that none of them was honest.
They perhaps had become liars by way of joining the evening pier crowd. One old man spoke of the last manly war, America against Spain. Another gummed away about his thirty pints and fifteen women one night in Mexico. Oliver had lied too. He had told them that he loved his wife and that he had a number of prosperous children.
Well, he had respected his wife, and when the respect wore off, he had twenty years of habit with her. One thing was he was never unfaithful.
And he had one son who was the drum major of the band for Lamar Tech in Beaumont, and who had graduated last year utterly astonished that his beautiful hair and outgoing teeth wouldn’t get him employment.
But now I’m in love, thought Oliver. God help me, it’s unfair to Warneeta in the cold ground, but I’m in love. I’m so warm in love I don’t even care what these old birds got to say.
“Have you ever drove one of them power boats before, son?” This was asked by Sergeant Fish, who had had some education and was a caring sort of fellow with emphysema.
Oliver walked through them and back across the planks of the pier to his car that was parked in the lot at the end. He opened the trunk of his car and lifted out the battery and the gas can. He managed to hold the marine oil under his armpit. He said something into the car, and then all the men at the end of the pier saw the woman get out of Oliver’s Dodge and walk to him and pull the marine oil can from under his arm to relieve the load. She was about thirty-five, lean, and looked like one of those kind of women over at the Rolling Fork Country Club who might play tennis, drink Cokes and sit around spraddle-legged with their nooks humped out aimless.
Jaws were dropped on the end of the pier.
Smokey couldn’t see that far and was agitated by the groans around him.
Sergeant Fish said: “My Gawd. It’s Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one!”
When she and Oliver got near enough the liars, they saw her face and it was cute — pinkish big mouth, a jot pinched, but cute, though maybe a little scarred by acne.
Oliver rigged up the gas line and mixed the oil into the tank. He attached the battery cables. The woman sat two steps above him while he did this alone in the back of the boat. There was one seat in the boat, about a yard wide. Oliver floated off a good bit while he was readying the boat. The woman had a scarf on her hair. She sat there and watched him float off thirty feet away as he was getting everything set. Then he pulled the crank on the motor. It took right up and Oliver was thrown back because the motor was in gear. The boat went out very fast about two hundred yards in the water. Then he got control and circled around and puttered back in.
The woman got in the boat. She sat in Oliver’s lap. He turned the handle, and they scooted away so fast they were almost out of sight by the time one of the liars got his tongue going.
“It was Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one, until you saw her complexion,” said Sergeant Fish.
“I’ll bet they was some women in Hawawyer back then,” said the tall proud man with freckles. He waved his cane.
“Rainbow days,” lied Fish. “The women were so pretty they slept right in the bed with me and the wife. She forgave me everything. It was just like stroking puppies, all of them the color of a goldfish.”
“Can that boat hold the two of ’em?” said Smokey.
“As long as it keeps goin’ it can,” said Ulrich, who featured himself a scientist.
“Oliver got him a babe,” said another liar.
“I guess we’re all old enough to see fools run their course,” said old Dan. Dan was a liar who bored even the pier crowd. He lied about having met great men and what they said. He claimed he had met Winston Churchill. He claimed he was on friendly terms with George Wallace.
“You’d give your right one to have a chance with Oliver’s woman, indifferent of face as she is,” said Sergeant Fish.
“When the motor ever gives out, the whole thing will sink,” said Ulrich.
They watched awhile. Then they all went home and slept.
Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed
It makes me sick when we kill them or ride horses over them. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.
One day I rode up on a fellow in blue and we were both out of ammunition. He was trying to draw his saber and I was so outraged I slapped him right off his horse. The horseman behind me cheered. He said I’d broken the man’s neck. I was horrified. Oh, life, life — you kill what you love. I have seen such handsome faces with their mouths open, their necks open to the Pennsylvania sun. I love stealing for forage and food, but I hate this murdering business that goes along with it.
Some nights I amble in near the fire to take a cup with the boys, but they chase me away. I don’t scold, but in my mind there are the words: All right, have your way in this twinkling mortal world.
Our Jeb Stuart is never tired. You could wake him with a message any time of night and he’s awake on the instant. He’s such a bull. They called him “Beauty” at West Point. We’re fighting and killing all his old classmates and even his father-in-law, General Philip St. George Cooke. Jeb wrote about this man once when he failed to join the Confederacy: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.”
Gee, he can use the word, Jeb can. I was with him through the ostrich feathers in his hat and the early harassments, when we had nothing but shotguns and pretty horses. He was always a fool at running around his enemy. I was with him when we rode down a lane around a confused Yank picket, risking the Miniés. But he’s a good family man too, they say.
I was with him when he first went around McClellan and scouted Porter’s wing. That’s when I fell in love with burning and looting. We threw ourselves on railroad cars and wagons, we collected carbines, uniforms and cow steaks that we roasted on sticks over the embers of the rails. Jeb passed right by when I was chewing my beef and dipping water out of the great tank. He had his banjo man and his dancing nigger with him. Jeb has terrific body odor along with his mud-spattered boots, but it rather draws than repels, like the musk of a woman.
When we were celebrating in Richmond, even I was escorted by a woman out into the shadows and this is why I say this. She surrendered to me, her hoop skirt was around her eyebrows, her white nakedness lying under me if I wanted it, and I suppose I did, because I went laboring at her, head full of smoke and unreason. I left her with her dress over her face like a tent and have no clear notion of what her face was like, though my acquaintance Ruppert Longstreet told me in daylight she was a troll.
That was when young Pelham set fire to the Yank boat in the James with his one Napoleon cannon. We whipped a warship from the shore. Pelham was a genius about artillery. I loved that too.
It’s killing close up that bothers me. Once a blue-suited man on the ground was holding his hands out after his horse fell over. This was at Manassas. He seemed to be unclear about whether this was an actual event; he seemed to be asking for directions back to his place in a stunned friendly way. My horse, Pardon Me, was rearing way high and I couldn’t put the muzzle of my shotgun at him. Then Jeb rode in, plumes shivering. He slashed the man deep in the shoulder with his saber. The man knelt down, closing his eyes as if to pray. Jeb rode next to me. What a body odor he had. On his horse, he said:
“Finish that poor Christian off, soldier.”
My horse settled down and I blew the man over. Pardon Me reared at the shot and tore away in his own race down a vacant meadow — fortunate for me, since I never had to look at the carnage but only thought of holding on.