It sank quickly to the hub caps, sucked up mud noisily into the wings of its fenders and then hesitated a moment as if undecided whether to submerge completely or not. Grass slapped the fenders, and then the car gave a sudden lurch sidewards, like a prehistoric beast rolling over, and seemed ready by sheer weight and bulk to overwhelm the resisting mud and tangled grass.
It did not sink farther.
It sat where it was in the shallow mud, twisted partially onto its side, the left fender lower than the right and covered with mud, the right fender and indeed the entire upper portion of the car jutting out of the slime, the domed red light on the roof clearly announcing that this was a police car.
Son of a bitch, Rodiz thought, and then began running up the road to where Eugene and the others were waiting for him in the rented car.
6
The United States Coast Guard cutter Mercury was a 165-foot vessel with five officers and fifty enlisted men in her crew. Her single armament was a three-inch, 50-caliber gun on her bow, but she was also equipped with mortar flares, and her gun locker on the after bulkhead of officer’s country carried ten carbines, ten M1s, and eight Colt .45 automatics. She was a small ship and not a particularly fast one, her top speed being thirteen knots. Sometimes when she steamed along with her canvas awning flapping over the fantail, she resembled an old-fashioned gunboat on a Chinese river during the Boxer rebellion.
From the bridge deck of the Mercury, in Key West, Lieutenant Commander Nathaniel Cates could see the Androscoggin, WPG-68, where she lay alongside her dock. For a moment he wished the larger cutter were going out on patrol these next six days instead of his own vessel. His longing had nothing whatever to do with the hurricane warnings that were still pouring from Miami’s Weather Bureau into the Coast Guard’s Rescue Coordination Center on Southwest First, and thence into the radio room of every Coast Guard vessel in the area, all traveling with the speed of light and the frequency of gossip. The advisories bothered Cates not at all, because he had seen hurricanes galore and this did not look to him like any hurricane. They could yell all they wanted to, but the fact remained that the real storm was not moving a hair from its position over the center of Cuba, and the winds and rain up there in Miami this morning were probably nothing more than a good solid nor’easter.
The reason Cates wished it were the Andy’s turn to go out and not his own ship’s was that he had a toothache and there was no dentist aboard the Merc. His own dentist was a man named Feldman who had come down to Miami on vacation in 1949 and had stayed on to open an office on Collins Avenue at the Beach. Cates enjoyed listening to Feldman talk about New York. Not that Cates was a New Yorker. His home town, in fact — before he had joined the Coast Guard in 1936 — was a place called Tantamount, Iowa.
He had joined the Coast Guard because the United States of America in that August of 1936 had just barely stopped selling apples in the street, and the salary of an apprentice seaman was twenty-one dollars a month, plus three squares a day and a bed to sleep in every night. He wouldn’t have cared where they sent him, so long as it was away from Tantamount, Iowa; actually, the choice was between the boot camp at Cape May, New Jersey, or the one in Alameda, California. The Coast Guard, reversing the old military principle that it was best to send a man as far from his home as possible, decided on Cape May. He trained there for ten weeks, and then was sent as a seaman second class to a 327-footer operating out of Boston, Massachusetts.
He loved Boston. He loved the city itself, and the surrounding countryside — this was autumn and wild colors claimed the landscape; there was a sudden cruel bite to the air — and he loved the flat nasal speech of the people, and the feeling that at last he was in America, that at last he had shaken the dust of Crackerbarrel Falls, Iowa, and come to grips with what America was really about.
He had yet to discover New York City.
He made his first liberty into the largest city in the world when he was seventeen years old, falling immediately in love with a girl who worked at a club on 63rd Street, falling in love at first with her long dancer’s legs in black net stockings, and then falling overwhelmingly in love with the rest of her the night they tumbled eagerly into bed in her apartment on West 48th Street.
Her name was Celeste Ryan, and she was twenty years old. She told Cates that she had been born in the Bronx, but that she had been living alone in Manhattan for the past two years. She also told him she was still a virgin, and he believed her. Actually it didn’t matter whether she was or not, because Cates very definitely was, and that was virgin enough for both of them.
She loved him.
He was seventeen years old when he met her, and from November of 1936 to June of 1938 he was possibly loved more than he would ever be loved again in his life. He would jump onto that train whenever he had liberty, and then count the minutes into New York, ticking off the station stops — Providence, New London, New Haven, Stamford — and there she was, waiting at Grand Central Station with those magnificent legs signaling wildly to him. She would rush into his arms and shower his face with kisses, and then pull back from him and look into his eyes with her own green eyes wide and questioning to ask each time, “Do you still love me, Nat?” And each time he would say the same thing, “I love you, Celeste,” and then they would go to her apartment and drink some gin and get into the king-sized bed she owned. He spent almost two years aboard the cutter, learning what it was like to live afloat, being promoted to seaman first class and deciding to become a quartermaster striker, and then studying to take his petty officer test in June of 1938. But in all that time, working as hard as he did, he still managed to spend a good many hours each week in bed with a girl who taught him things they didn’t sing about at prayer meetings in Backwater Gulch, Iowa.
Cates had witnessed the death of prohibition, he had seen the NRA eagles in every shopwindow in Iowa, and then Massachusetts, and then New York, and now he felt the country shaking itself alive again, throwing off the desperate gray coils of its long illness, felt its renewed strength coursing into his own expanding muscle. In June of 1938, two weeks before he was to take the test for quartermaster third, Celeste Ryan discovered she was pregnant and asked him what she should do. Cates told her he would marry her on the spot as soon as she gave the word and as soon as he could obtain permission from his commanding officer. Celeste said that she appreciated the gesture, which she thought was very sweet of him and all that, but she really enjoyed being a dancer and she would.
A showgirl, you mean, he said.
Yes, a showgirl, if that was how he wanted to put it; she really enjoyed dancing though, and it didn’t seem she’d be able to do much dancing in the future if she had a baby and was married to a sailor who might be assigned God knew where.