Read Online The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus - Free Book Online Page A

mid-morning in Alameda, and you are awake, you are in motion. I am on the starboard side, facing east, but I may be looking toward Oregon or Mazatlan. But these stars in their sheet cover you. As I cover you: in the ocean that touches the earth where you sit in the kitchen, and under the sky that is above you and east of you too, I am with you. My spirit, my love, move in the water, and through the air beneath the stars. Perhaps St. Teresa felt this about God during the day, praying, eating, talking to a nun about whether it would rain before noon or the clouds would blow.
    I wrote all that, or got to the last sentence of it, at about ten-fifteen. Now it’s eleven-forty-five. Romantic, spiritual, whatever the mood was, it’s gone now, as distant as last month. I stopped writing because the OOD phoned and told me to watch for a sailor on the liberty boat that left the pier at ten o’clock. A Negro sailor, in a wet uniform. The Shore Patrol had radioed the OOD, told him there had been a fight on the pier, between a white sailor and a Negro sailor, and they had fallen into the water. The Negro had come out and climbed onto the pier and then into the liberty boat. The white sailor was still underwater, and divers were looking for him. The OOD told me to arrest the Negro, get his statement, and have the original delivered to him. He said there was no need to send the Negro to the brig.
    The phone is on the podium with the log. I went to the hatch of the compartment where Gantner sat in one of two chairs: a small place with a gray wall locker, a coffee percolator, white mugs from the mess hall, a desk with strewn memorandums, ashtrays made from coffee cans, a typewriter. Gantner looked up at me standing at the hatch. He is a tall, lean man, probably my age. For moments we looked at each other. Then he stood and swallowed coffee without lowering his eyes from mine. Then I told him and he drained the cup and wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said: “Shit.”
    He put on his cap and followed me to the top of the ladder and we stood at the rail, looking east at the sea, listening for the liberty boat. Soon we heard its engine, distant, to our left, beyond the bow. We lit cigarettes.
    â€œYou know those Goddamn piers,” he said. He was not nervous, or expectant, or, as many men would be, excited. His voice was bitter, and I looked at his face and then back at the sea, wondering where he had been, what he had seen in his life. “A lot of drunk guys. A lot of guys just worked up about being ashore, just a little drunk. Everybody crowded together. Just guys. You ever notice that, how it’s different when it’s just guys?” I looked at him but he was listening to the engine, steady and louder, and staring over the water, perhaps at the horizon. I looked at the sky above it. “Somebody bumps somebody. That’s all. And it flares up like a gasoline fire. Shit.” He drew on his cigarette, then threw it down at the water, threw it with enough force to break something, if it had not been a cigarette, and if the sea could break. “Some poor fucking drunk kid.”
    I leaned over the rail and dropped my cigarette and watched its glow falling, watched it instantly darken, and twice the cigarette washed against the hull, then disintegrated, and I could not see the last inch of paper. I knew from the engine that the boat was making its turn, and there it was, a long boat coming widely around our bow, and I felt Gantner watching it with me as it came out of its port turn and was broadside to us, then turned starboard and came with slowing engine toward us from the stern, and I watched its red and green running lights and listened to the engine slowing, then it was idling with its port side at our ladder, and I stepped away from Gantner and stood at my post. I heard him step behind me, felt his weary sadness, like that of a young man who has been to war, or who as a child lived too much