It... it never occurred to me. No. No, it never did. And Lois means nothing. You know that. You know I’d never...
I know. I know you damn well better never.
I don’t need threats. I know what’s right and wrong.
Then start thinking about Miller, and start thinking about how you’ve wronged him.
But I haven’t...
Unless he thinks you have, and then you have. And I’m going to forget all about what you almost said, did in fact say, I’ll forget all about that and pretend it never happened, but you’d better start thinking about it, you’d better start thinking about it damned hard.
He started thinking about it.
It had never occurred to him that Miller might feel that way, and he cursed himself for his own blind stupidity. That would be ironic, he thought, that would be really ironic. If Miller thought that about me. If that were the nub of all the trouble. It would be something like the story he’d heard about the white man married to a Negress, the white man who’d been going home to his Negress wife when the race riots broke out in Harlem, the white man who’d had his throat slit for being a white man in black territory on that night when color was the all-important factor in deciding the behavior of human beings. Color or the lack of color.
It would be something like that because Rick had never consciously thought of Miller as a Negro. Miller was another boy in his classes, and Miller happened to be a troublemaker, but Miller was never a Negro. Rick knew he was colored, of course. He knew that, but he knew it the way he knew that Carter had red hair. He had no grudge against red hair, and he certainly had no grudge against Miller’s pigmentation. That had never once entered into his thoughts about the boy.
But if Miller thought that...
Rick had been in a similar situation once before. It had caused him an uncomfortable two weeks, but he’d finally straightened it out. It had happened while he was in the Navy, and it had nothing whatever to do with color, or the lack of color, but it had a lot to do with misunderstanding. If Miller believed this about him now, it was clearly a case of misunderstanding, and the only way to combat that was with understanding. If anything, the time in the Navy had been more difficult because Rick had been on a destroyer, and a destroyer is a small ship, and you’ve got to live with a lot of different guys, and the living is cramped. You can’t step on anyone’s toes without getting your own toes crushed.
They’d been coming back from liberty in the town of Kagoshima, with the twin volcanos steaming in the distance, with the ash-covered slopes leading down to the beach and the LCVP that would take them back to the ship. He’d been sitting on the metal deck aft of the ramp, chatting in a group of guys from the radar gang, when Mr. Goldin walked over to the circle, leaned down into it like a man ready to roll in a floating crap game.
“This gunner’s mate,” Mr. Goldin had said. “A blond guy, thin, with a sort of hooked nose. What’s his name again?”
The guys had been talking about the town, and the women in the town, and they looked up uninterestedly when Mr. Goldin asked his question. They all knew the gunner’s mate’s name, and any one of them could have supplied it and probably would have because Mr. Goldin’s question had been innocent enough. Rick just happened to be the first one to speak.
“Bowden,” he said. “Is that the one you mean?”
“Yes,” Mr. Goldin said, smiling. “That’s him.”
“What about him?” Rick asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Mr. Goldin said, and then he strolled away from the group. The guys went back to talking about the town and the women in the town, and suddenly the LCVP’s squawk box burst into static, and a gravelly voice said, “Now hear this, now hear this. Bowden, Gunner’s Mate Third Class, report to the bridge on the double. Bowden, Gunner’s Mate Third Class, report to the bridge on the double.”
The radarmen in the circle stopped talking and looked at Rick, and then looked over to the port side of the landing craft where the gunner’s mate, Bowden, pushed himself to his feet with a curious smile on his face. He walked forward and mounted the ladder to the bridge, and Mr. Goldin went up that ladder a few seconds afterward.
The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than five minutes. Goldin came down from the bridge first, and then Bowden followed after him, that same curious smile on his face. He walked back to where he’d been sitting on the port side of the landing craft, and then he looked across to where Rick was sitting on the starboard side. His eyes met Rick’s, and the smile dropped from his face, and that was the beginning of it.
At first. Rick wasn’t even aware of what was happening. It started with all the gunner’s mates, of course, but it spread rapidly to people on the ship he didn’t even know, and people he was sure did not know him. The first indication came that time in the head when he’d been waiting for a sink. Arbuster, a gunner’s mate first whom he’d always exchanged a friendly word with, was shaving, and Rick slouched near the sink, watching him, waiting for his turn.
“You make me nervous,” Arbuster had said suddenly, irritably.
Rick looked into the mirror and at Arbuster’s reflection there. He smiled and said, “That’s okay, take your time. I’m in no hurry.”
“Then why the hell don’t you take a walk someplace, ’stead of watching me like an eagle?”
Rick was surprised by Arbuster’s outburst, but he attributed it to a hair across the ass, something that happened to everyone sooner or later. He’d shrugged, and been saved any further conversation by the appearance of a suddenly vacated sink. He hadn’t thought further about the incident until he’d noticed that none of the gunner’s mates returned his greetings when he passed them on the ship. That struck him as being peculiar, and then the sickness spread to the radar gang, and everyone began treating him like some sort of leper. He finally cornered Frank Port, a radarman and his closest buddy aboard ship.
“What’s the scoop, Frank?” he’d asked. “Did I do something?”
“You know,” Frank said, avoiding Rick’s eyes.
“No, I don’t know. What is it?”
Frank lifted his eyes like a man with four aces about to call a pair-of-deuces bluff. “You ratted on Bowden,” he said.
“I what?” Rick asked, astonished.
“You told Goldin he swiped that bottle of Coke,” Frank said.
“What bottle of Coke? What the hell is this?”
“On the LCVP,” Frank said patiently. “Come on, Rick, you don’t have to snow me.” He’d turned to go, but Rick caught at his sleeve and forced Frank to face him again.
“No, wait a minute, Frank. I don’t know what it’s all about, I mean it.”
Frank had hesitated a moment, and then given Rick the whole story. There’d been a Coca-Cola case aboard the LCVP, one of these red metal jobs with the doors on top. The crew apparently chipped in each month for the Coke and they were allowed the privilege of dipping into the ice-filled case whenever they were thirsty. This privilege, however, did not extend to include the crews of every ship in the Pacific Fleet. Bowden, probably thirsty after his bout with the dust-filled streets of Kagoshima, had dipped into the metal case, swiped a bottle of Coke, and drunk it hastily and apparently unseen.
Except that someone had seen him, and someone had supplied Goldin with the information, and that someone had been Rick Dadier.
“Me?” Rick asked. “Hell, I only answered Goldin’s question. I didn’t know Bowden swiped anything.”
“Yeah,” Frank had said, and then dismissed the subject.
It was really an amazing thing. He’d been accused and tried and convicted without ever once opening his mouth in defense. The funniest part was that everyone believed it, even the guys who’d been sitting in the circle when Goldin had come over, the guys who knew damn well what was asked and damn well what was answered, the guys who probably would have supplied the same information had not Rick spoken first.