Joseph

Six

The Submarine

Late afternoon, clouds dried up for a moment, mist rising from the rain-drenched ground. He has come out of the city proper, into neighborhoods and groves of orange and magnolia, past tiny garden beds where ladies looked up from their hyacinths and asked where he was going, to this waterway that has no bank but wooden floodwalls hemming placid murk. Blown and stumbling, he has wandered from the Carondelet Canal into the grassy fields about Bayou St. Jean and what appears to be a gang of men in throes of worship at a massive black and ovoid idol. Propped on trestles of enormous size, bolstered by sacks of shell, the idol towers over the reverent.

And this might be a ceremony of voudou, though he counts no blacks among the worshippers. Still, who knows how things are done so far from home. Farther than he’s ever been on his own feet. He wants a sunny place to let his clothes dry; he wants water to drink and to sit. He wants, more than anything, to hear a grown voice say that it will be all right.

Closer, he finds the idol is built of iron, riveted from back to belly in the shape of a great black eye bearing down on him and on the men hereabouts. He sees now they have their hands in its side, prying away parts and loosening mechanical organs while other fellows lean on mauls, their backs to him, waiting.

Settled in the moist ground, Joseph thinks his mother will be angry that he’s muddied his pants.

Apart from the workmen stand a pair of gentlemen. One, spade bearded, coat unbuttoned, cups his hands upon his hips and surveys the work while his companion cuffs his eyes and sobs. The latter’s hair is wild, his beard grown to his chest. And he actually sobs, as Joseph has never seen a man do.

“God,” says the wild-haired man. “That she’d never see the sea!”

“Easy, Burton,” says the other, then to the workers: “All right, boys, when you’ve got the engine out we’ll have her in one go.”

The sobber, Burton: “This damned world. Another week and she’d have been ready—”

“Mind where you strike. We don’t want her falling backward.”

“—and she’d slip under the water and then we’d have the bastards smashed!”

So it’s a ship, this iron eye. Now he sees how it favors a fish in fin and tapered tail. Joseph listens: the crying man talks of broken blockades and his great invention powering beneath the waves even as the spade-beard directs its dismemberment.

The pistol jabs at his lap and so he shifts, imagining what kind of men would go into the dark belly of this ship, like riding in a roving coalbin, the press of the pistol recalling his father’s anger, the stories he tells of the punishments of his youth. How, when he raised the ire of his own father, he’d been made to eat coals burning hot. Joseph knows the story rote, and he would rather eat coals than do what his father asked today. Better to be beaten, better to burn. Better yet to run.

Egrets light ahead in the bug-humming grass, and clouds have regrouped to overtake the sky. The maul-bearing men approach the ship, strike the braces at the end nearest the water as others pitch engine guts over the side. A propeller goes windmilling, followed by handles and crankshafts, each mourned aloud by the weeping man. Joseph thinks of himself and Marina, far below a surface battle, hearing the muted sounds of cannon fire as errant shots sink harmlessly like marbles in a bath, stealthily threading their bulky enemies in this sleek wonder on their way to her island home. Alone with her in the dark.

But the time for wonders is past: the pegs and braces break; the workmen stagger back, as with a ferrous groan the ship slips its mooring and slides forward, splintering the floodwall as it topples end over end into the bayou, sending up a spray that doesn’t cease. He looks up; the clouds have broken and the rain begun again.

He is at the floodwall, unable to resist the sight of this doomed christening. The submarine rights itself, bobs, throwing wake above the boards. A churning gurgle as water fills its bowels; froth builds to a boil and the wonder sinks lower, until the last patch of iron is subsumed and the wonder gives no hint of its existence save bubbles. He fights down a hitching at his chest. This sight is somehow sadder than the city’s fall, or his own fate, whatever that might be. He wants to weep as the inventor, Burton, weeps. He has wandered from a nightmare into something worse—the dismantling of a dream.

He is lifted up to a face wet with tears, eyes red-rimmed. The inventor rasps, “What do you think you’re doing here, boy?”

He has no answer.

The spade-beard calmly approaches, easing Joseph from the grip of his quivering friend.

“Don’t you know what’s happening today?”

“We’ve lost the war,” says Joseph.

The calm man seems for a moment to agree but, seeing Burton wander off a ways, shakes his head. “We haven’t lost,” the man says, as much to himself as Joseph.

“Lost!” cries Burton.

The calm man’s face is a soggy mask of reassurance. “Only one city,” he says, bending to eye-level. “One city and one weapon.”

“Lost everything! I should’ve gone down with her!”

The workmen pitch their tools away and go for shelter. The spade-beard stands, looks to his friend: “Come now, man. It’s time we went.” Then crouching back to child-height, and with a voice meant for advice of great importance, he says, “And you should get home and out of the rain.” With this wisdom imparted, he starts off in pursuit of his friend, who goes writhing and stomping through the field.

One last look to the bayou. From the scuttled marvel rise bubbles, now almost indistinguishable from the rainfall on the water’s surface. He sends fingers to the pistol at his waist, as though it might spring out on its own and seek a place down there in the dark, among the failures of this world. He will not throw the gun away, just as he will not give himself to the roads but heads through rain and sucking mud for home.

When he regains the streets, he finds New Orleans speaks in hastily scrawled signage affixed to shopwindow and storefront. A clapboard adumbration of municipal outrage, bluster, and confusion. Joseph reads them as running conversation between the mute buildings.

THEFES WILL BE SHOT!

ETATS-UNIS—MERDE

LOOT AND DIE

OWNER ARMED—II CLUBS, I SHOTGUN, III MAD DOGS

DEATH AWAITS WITHIN