By August Alan was used to the new surroundings, and the new people were used to him and to the fact that every Friday he raced out the door to pick up Rose at the airport. The cost was killing her, she said, and she had thoughts some weekends of driving both ways, but it would have taken too much time. She had time and he didn’t, she had decided; she was a short-timer in her squadron, readying to move on. He, on the other hand, was trying to learn a new job. They spent their waking weekend hours together, slept apart.
Rose had become the center of his life. He couldn’t believe it. He simply wanted to be with her all the time. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. It was not like the times with Kim, not at all; those had been a blaze of sex, little more, as he understood only now. Yet in a way the Kim kind of relationship was much easier.
The new job was a little dull, a little mysterious at first, then slightly more interesting as he caught on. He was nominally an intelligence analyst, more often a kind of talking head who briefed outgoing carrier crews and squadrons; but already, a month into the job, he was impatient with that side of it and eager for more. As a result, his written briefs got longer and more in-depth: they went to a central command, then were filtered and went to other agencies if they were thought useful.
“Welcome aboard,” his new boss, a stringy-looking commander named Reicher, had said to him. “We’re going to make an analyst of you.”
“Good. That sounds good.”
“You’re taking Africa.”
“Does it matter that I don’t know anything about Africa?”
“Not a bit.”
So now he read everything he could lay his hands on about Africa, pored over classified CIA estimates and ONI reports, filled his attaché case with books to read over the weekend, even listened to African music in his room. He tried to learn Swahili from a Berlitz tourist aide. The squadron was a wonderful but fading memory. Africa and Rose were his life.
“Hey, Craik, know anything about diamonds in Sierra Leone?”
“Uh—a little—”
“Take care of this, will you?”
A low-priority message would be dropped on his desk. It would turn out actually to be about the Russian-South African diamond cartel and its effect on Sierra Leone, but he would follow it up, anyway.
“Al, Mombasa’s in Africa, right?”
“Kenya.”
“Handle this, okay?”
“But—” Too late. It was actually about Islamic evangelism in several areas, most of all the old Soviet Union, but there was something in there about Kenya and Uganda; anyway, it became his. So did Iranian terrorist-training camps in Libya, France’s relations with old colonies, UN internal reform (because the new SG was an African, if you thought of Egypt as Africa), the upsurge in high-tech mercenary war as a business (its most spectacular examples in England and South Africa). He devoured everything he could find, took it home with him, got up early to devour more. It was just as well he did.
“Craik!”
“Sir.”
He was passing the boss’s door; he pivoted back, was waved in.
“Siddown.” The commander stared at him. “You pretty well up to speed on Africa?”
“I’m running as fast as I can just to stay in place.”
“Jaeckel tells me you’re doing okay. In fact he said you’re, quote, the smartest goddam kid he’s ever had on Africa, unquote. That’s a compliment.” Jaeckel was a civilian analyst.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Think you can do a half-hour briefing on the Navy’s concerns in Africa and possible US intervention?” Before Alan could answer, he said, “You’re going to, anyway. Next Thursday, 1300, House Office Building. Some goddam subcommittee. Uniform up there is whites for something like this, not chokers, you know. Wear every medal you got. Normally, Jaeckel’d do it himself, but he’s booked. Okay?”
“Who, who—what’s the audience?”
“Couple Congressmen, staffs, probably some other briefers from the community. Nothing classified. The idea is you save them the trouble of looking it up in the encyclopedia, okay? You don’t have to be profound.” He cleared his throat. “You still got that girl?”
“Utica, New York, this weekend. Her parents want to meet me.”
“Good for you! Get married, settle down; you won’t look like something the cat dragged in every Monday around here.” Alan stood up, started out. “Hey!”
“Sir?”
“The word is, you’re going to be up for early lieutenant. Don’t get your hopes up, but, you know—”
“Thanks. Right.”
He talked to Rose every night. His telephone bill was enormous. That night, he told her about maybe coming up for lieutenant a year early, and there was the slightest pause before she said something. She was complimentary, happy for him; still, there had been a moment when, he now realized, she had been thinking that she was two years ahead of him in rank and he might catch up. Nothing between people was ever easy, he was learning, even when there was apparently limitless love. Yes, being with Kim had been easier.
“I love you,” he said. It was instinct: when there were obstacles, reaffirm what worked.
“Yeah.” She sounded pleased. They talked about what they were doing, their problems with their superiors. She was coming up for reassignment and had heard of an opening at Pax River. It was too far; he wanted her to come to Norfolk. On and on.
“I love you,” she said.
He laughed, hearing her do what he had done. “We do keep coming back to that,” he said.
“You’re damned right. That’s all there is, finally.”
“That isn’t all there is. Just listen to us.”
“Well—You going to marry me?”
“You bet.”
“When?”
“Isn’t that what I’m meeting your folks for?”
They were silent. She said, “After they meet you, I’m ready. More than ready. I want you.”
For a moment, it frightened him, the imminence of a great change, even danger; it was like something that had happened in Christine, the precise event escaping him; then it came to him—trying to evade the A-5 Fantan’s attack.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
She picked him up on a warm September day at the Syracuse airport and they drove through the early evening traffic with a kind of shared joy. She was a good driver—why not? she was a good pilot—and she looked happy, even excited. They were going to “the lake,” she said, not Utica; the weather was going to be warm, so her father wanted to spend it at their cottage. Her mother was outraged. All the good silver, the good dishes, the good tablecloths, her good clothes were in Utica. Rose thought all this highly entertaining. “You’ll see!” she said. “You’ll see!” That rich chuckle rose and fell.
And he saw: her mother was angry and disliked him on sight. She was short—both parents were short, in fact—big-hipped, gray; if she was an example of how Rose would look one day, he was not unhappy. But she made no secret of her outrage. She made it clear that they had waited up to meet him, and he and Rose should have arrived hours earlier. She had no real bedroom to offer him, only the sun porch, which was cold this time of year; this was her husband’s fault, but, ultimately, Alan’s, no reason given. She put out enough food for eight or a dozen people and disappeared with a headache.
None of this bothered her father. He was a dapper little man, narrow-headed, his hair still mostly black. He chatted with Rose, kept eyeing Alan; like his wife, he spoke with a local accent that Rose had lost and that grated on Alan’s ears—”ditn’t” for didn’t, a nasal A. After half an hour of talk about the neighborhood and baseball and her job, he put on an old vinyl LP and danced with Rose to old swing tunes.
“We always do this,” Rose said. She was flushed and laughing.
“She’s my sweetie,” her father said, looking at Alan.
The next morning Alan and Rose walked along the highway by the little lake. Some kind of hunting season was open (bear, he learned later), and a few cars went by, but mostly they had the quiet of the morning. A kind of town had grown up, scruffy and, along the road, apparently dying. A number of the cottages were boarded up and collapsing in on themselves. The real life was a hundred yards away along the water, invisible from the highway.
“I spent every summer here until I was seventeen,” she said. “I knew everybody. It was like the neighborhood in Utica—blue-collar, I guess. What people could afford. It’s sad, these places falling down. I kissed a guy whose family owned that one over there with the paint gone.”
“Don’t tell me about that part.”
“I was thirteen.”
“That makes it worse.”
She held his arm. “My dad is going to take you out in the boat. That’s when you talk.”
“It’s on the schedule?”
She chuckled. “Don’t mind my mother. You scare her.”
“Well, that makes it mutual; she terrifies me.”
“It’s all she knows to do. You’re upper-class to her—WASP, educated. You know—class.”
He was astonished.
“She thinks she ought to put out all her best because she has to impress you. Just go with it. Finally, she’ll do what my father wants. She’s the queen, he’s the boss.”
“What happens if I kiss you right here on the road?”
“Let’s find out.”
Her father took him out in the boat, just as she’d said—an ancient sixteen-footer with an outboard that looked big enough to power the QE2. Alan had expected a rowboat and was ready to offer to man the oars; instead, he slumped down out of the wind while they put up big rooster-tails and went right across the little lake in about four minutes. Her father kept up a chatter about the great weather, the World Series, big fish he’d caught right here. He stopped the boat without warning, and, as they bobbed on their own wake, handed Alan a fishing rod and a coffee can that proved to be full of night-crawlers.
“I don’t have a license,” Alan said.
“Well … I don’t see no game wardens.” He pretended to search the sky. “Unless they’re gonna do one of those surprise air drops. Anyway, the fine is about two-fifty, which is cheap to find out are you gonna marry my daughter.”
Alan laughed and opened the bail; the sinker splupped into the water and line ran out. “What are we fishing for?”
“Privacy.”
They sat there. The September sun was thin but warm, yet a breeze from the west was now and then surprisingly cold.
“That’s an osprey,” her father said. “See? The white, top of the spruce tree on the point? They’re a beautiful bird, like a white eagle, and they fold their wings and drop right into the water, bam, and come up with a fish. We got everything here. Deer, bear. Rosie’s crazy about you.”
The change of subject caught him off-guard. He was nervous, he realized. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And I’m crazy about her.”
“Call me Bobby.” He jerked his rod-tip up and down and looked over the side as if he could see what the fish were up to. “When I went to work at the metal-processing plant, they said, ‘What’s your name?’ So I told them. They say, ‘We already got a Angelo Siciliano.’ I thought they meant I had to go home. I was sixteen. I didn’t know no better. They said, ‘Call yourself something else.’ So I said, ‘Bobby,’ after a ballplayer was very big then. So I been Bobby ever since.” He looked at Alan appraisingly, the way he had looked at him last night. “You and me are different. You come from people who go to college, am I right? What they call white-collar. Me, I’m blue-collar. Rosie says that makes no difference and I think she’s right. You got any thoughts about that?”
“I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“Between you and me, it’s a problem for Rosie’s mother, but she’ll get over it. She thinks she’s entertaining Prince Charles, it makes her jumpy. Pretend not to notice.”
He jerked his rod again. Alan jerked his rod, supposing it might tip the balance for some undecided fish down there. Nothing happened.
“Where I worked,” Bobby said, this time in a lower, contemplative voice, “it was all Italians and some Pollocks then. I’m talking the end of World War II—one more year and I’d’ve gone in. I went in anyway in Korea, drafted; a whole lot of nothing. Rosie says you been in combat and got medals. More power to you. I spent two years counting GI underwear. Then I come back, right back into the metal-works. Good jobs then. Everybody doing the same thing, year in year out, fathers and sons, whole families, you know? There goes a pine siskin, what the hell is he doing out over the lake? We had a union, a good contract—Life was good. Now—I’ll take you down along the tracks in Utica. Gone. Everything gone. Where I worked thirty-two years, a lot of weeds. I picked up a brick, I put it on my shelf, it was from the factory where I worked. Maybe I looked at that brick for thirty-two years. Now, nothing. There was a brewery down there—a shell. A leatherworks. Everything gone. All of a sudden, it seemed, this city where I’d spent my whole life fell apart. People out of a job, people leaving. Then kids like Rosie going away. Everybody’s kids going away! I tell you!” He shook his head. “Thirty-two years, one day they come around and go, ‘We’re sorry as hell, boys, we can’t do it no more,’ and they close it down. They opened up in Alabama, what the hell. I wasn’t going to move to Alabama, no sir.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you do? You pull up your socks and find something else. I and a buddy, we opened a kind of machine shop. It pays the bills. What the hell. I get by. But it isn’t like it was. The old days, a kid like Rosie wouldn’t’ve gone away, she wouldn’t’ve come back with a guy like you. No offense.” He studied the end of his rod. “Rosie’s my favorite.” He started to sing, in a husky, surprisingly well-pitched voice. “Rosie, She is my posy; Rosie, She is my joy—You hear that one? Jolson sang that. She is my posy. You want to marry her?”
“I sure do.”
“Then do it. Just understand, if you hurt her, if you let her down, I’ll come after you myself. Okay? We got a deal? Just remember, I mean what I say. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, and about that damn priest and the church and all that, you do what you want. Rosie’s mother goes on, ‘Oh, what about Father Joe?’ ‘Oh, what about his catechism, oh, the children—!’ I tell you, boy, women in black and old men in skirts, what a way to run a religion! I believe in God, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe I need that no-balls jackass, you should pardon the expression, to tell me how to act. You agree?”
Alan was saved from having to commit himself by a tremendous tug on his line; he reeled in, and Bobby started shouting, almost tipping the boat while he got the net, and in time a big jackperch came over the gunwale.
“Nice! Nice! Get your hook back in the water, for Christ’s sake! Come on, you’re gonna break the law, you might as well do it right.” Alan caught two more and Bobby caught one; then the fish stopped biting, and Bobby pointed out a great blue heron going slowly across the sky. “They fish down there where it’s shallow; they nest up there someplace, where he’s going.” He stood up to watch the bird. “God, I love this place! I just love it. I dunno what you see when you look at it—lot of cottages, I suppose, nothing really wild. Not like it’s some private fancy lake. But I just love it. You know, you work all week, busting your ass, pardon me, you come up here—have a beer, sit in the boat, listen to people’s radios a mile away, or they’re singing or just talking—And you know what it all comes down to? I’ll tell you: a job. That’s what it’s all about. A man’s got to have a job.” He reeled up his line. “I like you. You’re a good listener.”
They turned in the rental car at the Syracuse airport and she waited with him, because his plane was leaving first. After the tension of the weekend, they were both quiet, both saddened. As his plane taxied in toward the boarding walkway, he said, “Let’s do it.”
She hugged him.
The Thursday briefing brought out a so-far hidden talent for making trouble. On the Monday, he reviewed the Agency’s estimates for selected African countries and began to suspect that they represented a blend of wishful thinking and false assumption. It was, he thought, part of the numbness of the Cold War’s slow death that caused informed people not to think that their withdrawal of attention and money would itself become a factor; and so far as he could see, the same informed people seemed not to have noticed that their client in central Africa had got old and their clients in the Horn had never really liked them—or anybody else, for that matter.
He tried to tell Rose all this and more over the phone; she told him to shut up and save it for the Congressmen. So he blundered on, stayed up long after he had said good night to her. It was already morning in Africa; there were people there quite ready to talk to him. By Wednesday, he was asking classified questions over a scrambler phone of people in Washington, one of whom finally told him he was an arrogant shithead and banged down the phone. A couple of others, less tied to the past, said pleasantly that his surmises were absolutely right but would not be well received, especially with an election coming. And anyway, Americans didn’t care about Africa and we had no interest there.
“Americans care about starving kids.”
“Not if they don’t know about them.”
“But they do know about them. They’re on the tube.”
“Bubba doesn’t make policy.”
On Thursday, he walked into the Congressional hearing room feeling as if his skin had been split and stitched up after a piece had been cut out, so that it all fit too tight. He even had a slight tremor in his fingers, from tension and fatigue; yet he felt entirely ready. He had his hat (white cover) tucked under his left arm, his wings and his ribbons marching down his chest over his heart, his black briefcase in his right hand. A woman stopped him just inside the door. “Yes?” she challenged.
“Lieutenant Craik. Fleet Analysis?” He grinned. “They cleared the bench.”
She wasn’t amused. “Sit there. When the Chairman calls you, sit at the center by the microphone and start right in; we’re running behind, so don’t try to charm us, okay?” She shouted something at a man with a pile of papers and he scooted, red-faced, to the other end of a long table.
It was not Alan’s idea of a Congressional hearing—no lights, no television cameras. Not even C-Span. This is it? he thought. Relief and disappointment mixed. What was all that worry for?
Only three actual Congresspersons appeared. Only one of them looked at him, a red-eyed septuagenarian with the distrustful look of a prison guard. The woman who had challenged him at the door whispered in the old geezer’s ear and kept glancing at Alan. What’s she got, a file on me?
He laid it out for them as if he were briefing a roomful of enlisted personnel—no bullshit, no big words, no pandering. He came out within twenty seconds of the assigned time, ending with a summary that was not a warning but that put his serious reservations in one little package: ethnicity and the African center, meaning Rwanda-Burundi and Zaire; the Horn, meaning Somalia; the long-term problem of poverty in South Africa. Then he said thank you, and he sat back.
The old man fixed him with his prison-guard stare. “Are you aware of this body’s position on interference in sub-Saharan Africa?”
“That was not my subject, sir.”
“Are you aware of our position?”
“If you mean HR 3901, yes, sir.” He had got that from the Congressional Research Service.
“That’s what I mean, that’s exactly what I mean. You are aware of it. Well, you surprise me. Do you mean to sit there and tell us that the United States Navy ought to be moving into Somalia? Is that what I understood you to say?”
“No, sir, that’s not what I said. I said that if—”
“I don’t want to hear ‘if’! Are you trying to tell us the Navy has a place, a role, an—involvement—in Africa?”
“Under certain conditions, it might have.”
He got a lecture on quagmires and no-win situations, and he felt for the first time the sting of that old saying about the messenger and the message. The Congressman then moved into an area that Alan knew was classified, and the woman had all but put her hand over his mouth. He listened for some seconds and stared at Alan with what seemed to be hatred. “No more questions,” he said sullenly. Alan looked at the woman, and to his astonishment she winked.
He slipped away during a recess, but got only to the corridor when she came after him. “That was swell,” she said. “You really surprised me! Your first time?”
“Afraid so.”
“You’re going to do okay here. You touched a nerve, you know that, don’t you? It’s okay, but next time, check out the politics and save yourself some grief.”
“I didn’t think what I said was political.”
She smiled wanly. “You’ll know better next time.”
Another woman came out of the hearing room and walked toward them, her heels striking the marble floor like small hammers. She looked rather elegant, hard, practiced—a lawyer, he would have said. Thirties, not pretty but well put together, always prepared. The Congressional aide seemed to know her, and they exchanged a kind of greeting, subtle in its shadings, like two animals who didn’t want to fight but would if they had to. After a few seconds, Alan was alone with the newcomer. “I’m Sally Baranowski,” she said.
“Alan Craik.”
“That was impressive.” She was amused by something but wasn’t sharing it with him. Finally, she decided to take pity on him, and she said, “I work with George Shreed.”
“Ah.” Aha! “That must have sounded really simple-minded to you.”
“Not at all. You handled the congressman well, thank God. He’s one of our supporters.” She laughed. “He doesn’t like to hear people disagree with us.”
“I didn’t disagree with you.”
She smiled. “Don’t be cute.”
“Hey—hey! Wait a minute—”
“Is this a message from ONI or something? I’m on a committee where we try to head these things off. I wish I’d known.” She said it with that tone of regret that parents use for the follies of their older children. “We could have dealt with it.”
“Look, I’m an analyst. There was no message. I didn’t say anything here that I haven’t sent out in daily briefs. There was no policy, for God’s sake. I simply tried to show where the present situation might lead.”
“We have estimates on all that. We expect you people to profit from them.”
“Not if they don’t follow from the facts. I was told to come here and do a job, and I did it. If I stepped on your toes, sue me.” He leaned back. “I’m sorry; I was wound up. I want to get in touch with Mr Shreed; how do I do that?”
“You can’t just now; he’ll be back in a week.” She started to burrow in a shoulder-bag.
“It’s something personal—not what happened in there.”
“I know.” She was writing in tiny letters on a business card. She handed it to him, smiling. “About the job you didn’t take.”
“Oh, you know about that. Was he mad?”
“Oh, sure. But he got over it. Still, you should apologize.”
“I know he meant well.”
“Yes, he did.” She was still smiling; it was not a smile that was for him, but rather was about him. Or at him. “You’re so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” she said. She turned away and laughed. “You’ll learn!”
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Friday afternoon, a strong memo of protest from the CIA reached his boss’s desk.
Saturday, he married Rose.