The first sight Lieutenant Commander Robert Selden gets as he arrives is of some thirty guys—pals and gals, different ranks—They didn’t have to come; I really think they like me—standing at ease in a split formation on either side of the walkway up to the flagpole, all of them dogged out in their summer whites, as crisp as typewriter paper. He approaches them from their rear. The flagpole, in its little parklike space, has always seemed to him to stand at the heart of the naval air station, and as he steps toward it now, very likely for the last time, unsure of his feelings, trying to distance himself from anything maudlin, he hears the executive officer, at the podium, call out, “Ten…hut!” and at once the uniformed figures stiffen, feet together. In his honor. There’s nothing he can do to stop the rush of blood to his face.
He goes forward between the halves of the formation to the little low platform on which Captain Peckham and the executive officer and the chaplain are standing, and moving toward the seat that the XO points out to him, he half turns and takes in the gathering of civilian guests in flanking rows of folding chairs at the front of the audience. A few empty seats. He winks at Ginny, in the front row, to the left. She is pale. There is his mom, down from Philly, and next to her the two boys and their girlfriends. He can’t believe some of the other people who have made it down here to see him shot out into the world. His best high school friend, Russ. Dear God, fat cousin Bart, Frogface. The whole Simpson family. He is too excited to check everybody out.
Ginny looks as if she doesn’t want this to be happening. She has been worried. About finality. About having him around the house all day. Most of all, about money. How can a family of four live for a year on twenty-one five these days? His pension will be only half his lieutenant commander’s pay, O-4 grade, twenty-year level. But he tells her the boys are both earning paychecks, good long-range construction work in the Truman Annex, and they’re living at home—that saves money right there. They’ve promised to chip in for now, and he can start in on a civilian job even during his thirty-day terminal leave. Smart to take that option. They can all stay on in the navy house this extra month and look for a place in the Old Town to live. Key West is his piece of pie; he wouldn’t think of moving away. He’ll go on with his night job at Scotty’s that he’s already been doing to earn enough extra money beyond his pay to give the family some leeway, and he’ll also scout around for a permanent full-time day job. He’s told Ginny that lots of retirees take two jobs, on different shifts, and how about that guy Clifton—rakes in his pension, rent on a house he owns, and pay from two jobs: a quadruple dipper! Everything’s going to be fine. Ginny wearily says, “You’re unreal.” He winks at her again, and this time she manages a halfhearted smile.
The XO steps to the podium, and orders the colors to be presented, and says, “Please remain standing afterward while the chaplain gives the blessing.” The color guard, off the edge of the grass to Bob’s right, start marking time. They’ve chosen his clerk, Lizabet, who just made yeoman second, to command the colors detail and carry the American flag. The group is a comedy-club sight, because Lizabet is barely five feet tall and pouts in concentration, holding the flag straight up, this duty heavy on her mind as if this were a funeral, while the two fellows and the other girl in the detail are all six feet tall and mixed ethnic, with shining faces, recruiting-poster material, proud to be American. Lizabet gets the four up to the platform somehow, and when the national anthem comes up on the speakers, sounding far away and tinny, the air station colors dip but not the Stars and Stripes. The chaplain has the mercy to get his part over quickly, and Lizabet marches the detail off again, with just a bit of raggedness in the wheeling process. No matter. To him, on this particular day, these customs—the detail’s order of march, the angle of the flags during the anthem, one saluting, the other saluted, everything straight out of the Big Book—these are the sorts of things that tell him he’s lived for twenty years in a zone of comfort. Where you do what you’re supposed to do, and do it right. You can get good at that. That part’s been easy. Everything’s going to be hunky-dory.
Off to the far side of the podium from where he is sitting, there is a low table holding a pile of what look like picture frames. The exec, with the CO now standing beside him, asks Ginny to come forward. Although she knew this was going to happen, she looks surprised, taking quick sidelong glances at Bob’s mom and the boys—as if to convey, “I had no idea!”—and she gets up and with one little stumble steps up to the platform. Ginny has put on weight, and she has developed a habit of sadness, which she wears like a uniform; he feels a stirring of uneasiness, watching her come forward. She doesn’t look at him. The XO picks up one of the framed items and reads out the Certificate of Appreciation of the retiree’s wife. A boilerplate job, you can tell, but Ginny’s face reacts to each phrase, as if: Yeah, that’s me. Yes. Okay. I’m glad you realize. Cut it out, Gin; this is getting embarrassing. But he also feels a kind of ache for her, looking so gloomy in her delight. The exec hands the frame to the CO, who hands it to Ginny and kisses her on the cheek. Then Chuck Stone—my guy, the one person in the service I can tell anything to—comes forward from the formation in back and gives Ginny a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath. Ginny’s sadness under the blush of her pleasure really shows at this point in time. She doesn’t seem to have a clue how appropriate her long face is for a retirement ceremony. Bob can see plainly enough, though, that her mood doesn’t really have anything at all to do with the occasion. That deep look isn’t dedicated to him as a gift. Something is going on in her head that is privately hers, something inward, something maybe locking into place in the back of her mind that he’d better hope he’ll never hear about.
Yeah, there’ll be times, he knows. That woman in the three-day course on retirement at the Family Service Center, a j.g., thinking she’s motherly at age about thirty, saying, “You’ll be a different person, sir. You tell me you’ve been close, but one morning pretty soon your wife is going to wake up in bed next to a stranger. Two and a half stripes? The enlisteds’ve been saluting, it’s ‘sir’ to you all the way down the line, and when you say hop, they fly right up off the ground with pointy toes. Then you retire and find yourself out there in a job with some squirt who got out of graduate school about two weeks ago, you know, smart-ass little M.B.A., suddenly your boss, and he tells you you got a lot to learn, mister, do it my way. You’re going to be taking this stuff home to supper, sir. You’ll have a whole new identity. You’ll be a person your wife didn’t necessarily think she was marrying.”
Captain Peckham is at the podium, clearing his throat. His face has a caved-in look; his hat always seems, because of this, to be tilted too far forward. “We are gathered,” he says, “to congratulate our good friend Bob Selden on his retirement from active duty. This is a sad day indeed for me.” Bob accepts this, as he does much that the CO says, at a discount. Peckham wears wings. Bob doesn’t. Bob came up from the ranks. The CO sure didn’t—he graduated from Annapolis. There has been a gaping empty space between them, always a hint on the CO’s face, no matter what Bob has said, of maybe yes and maybe no. But Bob has always done his thing on time, and whenever he has handed papers to Peckham, the CO has glanced at them and then nodded to him, in a very low-key code, if you wanted to take it that way, for “Well done.” But to hear his speech now, you’d think that if this particular paperwork pilot hadn’t flown his desktop in such perfect formation on the CO’s desk’s wing, the whole naval air station would have slid right off the Keys into the Florida Straits. High praise, but a not too subtle reminder that Lieutenant Commander Selden hasn’t ever flown anything but a desk. Never mind. I’ve done my job. One thing that the CO points out is written in stone: A man can’t come all the way up through the ranks from raw seaman to lieutenant commander without having gotten whistle-clean performance ratings every step of the way.
But Bob is grinding. The nerve of that cocky little j.g. lecturing him in the retirement course. Social-worker bulls hit. He knows damn well how not to be an officer. In the job at Scotty’s, working nights—perfectly legal—in jeans and an apron, stock-clerking, putting stuff on shelves, waiting on customers, whatever, he’s been with several guys from the air station from different ranks below him, four or five seamen first and second, a petty officer, couple of chiefs, a warrant—no such thing as “sir” there on the job, they’re all just guys, first names, you’re who you are in your bare bones to the rest of them. Every one of those friends from Scotty’s is standing at attention back there in the formation. Isn’t a single one that didn’t voluntarily show up for the ceremony. No one was ordered to attend.
I’ll never be a stranger to my Ginny. She’s got every corpuscle in me tagged and labeled, and if a single one looks like it’s mutating, she’ll let me know.
No question about that. Just two days ago, Saturday morning, there Bob was in his hammock, off duty, slung between a royal palm and an Australian pine, on the water side of his house on Trumbo Point, watching the parade of charter boats and yachts on their morning run out the channel through the overpass from Garrison Bight, his own smart little Mako twenty-footer dancing in their wakes at his private dock at the foot of the lawn, and he was thinking, Oh, brother, what a good-luck guy I turned out to be. It’ll be hammock time whenever I want. Starting Monday, he’d be on the loose. Free from the cluttered office in the admin building at Boca Chica. From all that hassle of the regulation drill for every single move of his little finger. Thirty-eight years old, healthy as a hammer, free as the air. Free as that frigate bird he saw soaring overhead, trailing its sassy long tail feathers, the whole sky its personal backyard. Imagine me, he was thinking, imagine me every day, if I want, in jeans and an unironed work shirt, like right now, flat on my ass out here in my hammock at zero nine hundred hours in the damn morning! Every day a Saturday.
Just about then he heard Ginny call him from the kitchen. He held his breath for a few seconds, then let it all go and rolled out of the hammock and went in.
“I’m going to the commissary,” she called when she heard his footsteps in the hallway. “Be back sometime. I’ll pick up the Herald.”
In the kitchen door, he said, “I’m coming with you.”
She gave him a long straight look. “To the store? What for?”
“Thought I could, you know, help you carry stuff.”
There was a long pause. Her back was turned to him. Then she said, “Let’s go. I’m driving.”
“Suits me.”
Inside the commissary, Ginny backed a shopping cart out of its nest. Bob reached for the handle, but before he could grab it she was already off down the soups-and-condiments aisle. She knew what she wanted. A can of Progresso minestrone. Then around to whole wheat bread. Cornflakes for him. A couple of rolls of toilet paper. Some virgin olive oil. Sardines…
Bob hung back. He began lifting rolls of toilet paper off the shelf, checking the labels. Carrying two of the rolls, he hurried to catch up with Ginny. “Look, hon,” he said. “This kind has fifty more sheets to the roll than them”—pointing to the rolls she’d tossed in her cart. “Eleven cents cheaper the roll too. Don’t you think?” He leaned over to reach into the basket and exchange the rolls he was carrying for the ones Gin had chosen.
“Get your hands out of my cart, Commander,” Ginny sharply said.
“You’re the one who’s been fussing about the money,” he said.
Ginny took a deep breath. “This I do not need, Bob. This is something I can live without. I don’t need this. I appreciated your wanting to carry the bags for me. That was real nice. You were rehearsing, right? You’re planning to be a helpful husband, beginning immediately after the ceremony day after tomorrow, right? Things’ll be different, right? But when you think about it, I’ve been carrying grocery bags for nineteen years. Haven’t I? Was it such a horrible life? Tell me.”
Bob takes a quick look now at Ginny in the front row—she’s sniffing at the bouquet—as Captain Peckham calls him forward and holds up another of the picture frames. The CO explains to the civilians in the audience that this is President Clinton’s reply to Commander Selden’s letter asking the Commander in Chief for permission to be allowed to retire from active duty and be admitted to the Fleet Reserve. “Permission granted,” the CO says. “Reserve for the next ten years,” he adds in a slightly triumphant tone, as if this were a punitive sentence Bob deserved —and then, to make it worse, “Subject to recall. Two hitches possible. Total four years maximum.” He rotates the framed document for everyone in the audience to see, and he says, pointing at a place in the text, “Right here President Clinton sends his personal thanks to Commander Selden for his twenty years of loyal service to his country.”
Now, while the civilians all clap, the CO hands the thing to Bob, and Bob gives it a quick once-over. The President’s signature looks printed to him, but what the hell.
He looks at Ginny again. She has lowered the bouquet into her arms and is holding it like a baby. She is glaring at the framed document in Bob’s hands. On the whole, she has been like a rock during his climb all the years up the ranks, but this kind of rigmarole—request to the Commander in Chief; permission granted; personal thanks—always strikes her as childish, as if it all came out of the Boy Scout manual. “You and your ‘regs,’ ” she said one night not long ago when they were discussing the ins and outs of the retirement pay he’d be getting. “I’m sick of your ‘regs.’ It’s a pretend life you lead. This book that you say it all comes out of…You know what? It’s all like from a make-believe story, like you could buy it in paperback for twenty cents at that secondhand-book store on Truman Avenue. Bet there’s a whole chapter on the salute. I’ve seen you salute that retard Captain Peckham. You don’t have your heart in it, Bobby. Plenty times I’ve seen guys salute you like they were giving you the back of their hand. There’s a thousand and one meanings in that business of the salute—all depends how you make the move, doesn’t it? Every time you salute, you’re playing a dangerous little game in your guts, aren’t you?”
“Come on, Ginny,” he said. “There has to be a right way of doing things. There has to be, when you may be asking people to put their lives on the line.”
Ginny knew how to bring a conversation to an end. “Because they might have to make the supreme sacrifice? Did anyone ever ask you for anything like that? You never had a war, Bob,” she said.
Now Captain Peckham goes over to the little table and picks up the largest framed object of all, a strange contraption in the shape of a triangle fastened atop a rectangle. Bob has looked forward to seeing this, the “shadow box” that they told him he’d be getting, a wonderful memento for him to hang on a wall at home. Under glass in the upper part there is an American flag, folded in the ritual way into a compact small triangle. “This flag,” the CO says with a straight face, “has been flown over the dome of the Capitol in Washington in honor of Commander Selden.” Bob doesn’t dare look Ginny in the eye after this whopper. How many navy men all over the world are retiring on this very day—in other words, how many domes does the Capitol have to fly all those honorary flags to give away? The CO is holding the shadow box upright for the civilian guests to see. “Look,” he says. “You can see here, in these three compartments”—they are in the rectangle beneath the triangle—“first off, here on the left, a flag anchor for every one of the pay grades Commander Selden has gone through…let’s see…mmm”—he laboriously counts—“sixteen of them. And over here on the right, the rows of his ribbons. And here, in the middle, the really important thing, the list of all his duty stations. The story of his life.” The CO puts his glasses on, heavy horn-rims, which help to fill out the weird concavity of his face, and he bends over and reads them off.
Duty stations, God. Yes, Ginny was right, that night. He never had a war. He entered boot camp just when ’Nam was petering out. He was on the beach down here at Boca Chica during the quickie in the gulf. The closest he ever came to a war was that time during one of his hitches at sea, not far offshore at Lebanon. He can see in his memory the sparkling sweep of waves under the Mediterranean sky and, on the beach, clouds of dust and smoke rising from the shelling of the forlorn city. He had no wish for combat. He preferred a distant view of it. That hitch in the Mediterranean was surely his best duty of all, for as a chief warrant officer he had thumbscrew sway over all the enlisted ranks and had, as well, the warrant’s delightful sense of superiority over all the officer grades at least as high as full commander. Could look ’em in the eye and read their minds: This guy, they’re thinking, has come up the hard way, he’s had grease on his hands, knows the men, is one of them but he’s above them too; has the phantom authority, over all of us, of a hard-butt uncle. But now Bob suddenly thinks of Ginny’s letters back then. Reached the ship in bunches. The boys had grown into full-blown hellion territory. Sometimes she wondered whether she had the strength. Worried about him all the time, with those crazies over there, terrorists. Money awful tight. His letters were so happy. How come?
Wait a minute. Was that the best duty of all? It had to be the time right here, right here with Gin. This has been like a two-year vacation under the sun. He remembers a beautiful Sunday with Ginny at Fort Zachary Taylor Beach—she really shouldn’t have been wearing a bikini—she was rubbing sunscreen lotion on his back, and she said, out of the blue, “It’s pretty tough cookies, this life, isn’t it, Bobby?” And then she added, in a quiet voice, “You’re good company.” Then quickly said, doubtless in order not to seem a pushover, “I mean, you’re good company the few times you’re around home and not doing some of your damn sea duty.” By which she meant, of course, going out fishing.
Out in his sweet little Mako. Lots of tarpon in May and June. Never actually caught any bonefish or permit out on the backcountry flats, but what great Saturdays and Sundays with Chuck Stone out there, poling along in the shallows, a beer now and then to neutralize the blazing sun, maybe hard-boiled eggs or a salami sandwich Ginny’s made up, and close-in talk, lot of belly laughs—and, suddenly, there! See over there? Big son of a bitch. Hooo. Spooky fish—ffft—gone. Enough just to try for them. And now, any damn day of the week, think of it, he can go out. Any day. He’ll have to find somebody else to go with on weekdays, but a deal as tempting as that shouldn’t be hard. Chuck’ll still be there on weekends. Bob could wish Ginny didn’t hate going out on the water so much. She makes a face—thanks, she’d rather get her fish at the Waterfront Market. He thinks of her pinched little sigh, as if she didn’t want him to hear it or see it—trying to be decent—when he says he’s going out in the boat. “What time’ll you be back?” You don’t know what’s out there; how could you say exactly what time you’d be back?
There was that time out there when he and Chuck got talking about wives. Chuck’s Esther was a whiner. The worst thing, Chuck said, was in bed. She was a whiz between the sheets, really she came after him like a nympho, but the trouble was that as soon as they finished, when he was thinking how great that had been, she’d start complaining: something he’d forgotten to do around the house, or he never talked to her, or, what really hurt, why had this gone so flat?—wasn’t fun anymore, he was like a cold fish.
Bob said thank God it wasn’t like that for him. Bed with Ginny couldn’t be better; the two of them almost always arrived at their destination at the same moment, and the afterwards with her was very warm, lots of laughing. “She’s such a natural person,” he said. But then he felt a sudden little shiver of a mood change, as he remembered something that had happened a few nights before that, and he added, “I have to admit, Chuck, sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes, when I think about retiring, I feel like she’s going to have me on a leash.” In a sort of advance celebration of his getting out, he and Ginny had gone to a night spot called Two Friends to listen to some music. He was in civvies. The place had a pretty good trio, they seemed to like requests, and Ginny mellowed out a lot. They had a big nostalgia going, all the good years. Remember this? Remember that? They even held hands for a while, like kids. But there were these four guys sitting at the next table and talking at the top of their voices and giggling—high-pitched—very loose at the wrists, that kind of thing, you could tell what they were. Pretty soon he began to get the feeling these characters were laughing at the way Ginny and he were, heads close together, murmuring, so sentimental. So in the middle of one number he turned and said, “Would you cut down on the volume, you guys? We came to listen to the music.” One of them said, “Oooh, sorry!” but then they went right on like before, louder maybe. He was about to get up and punch a nose, but then he saw Ginny’s face, and she had a look he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. “It was like,” he said to Chuck, “ ‘If you do that, I’ll…’ You couldn’t tell exactly what she had in mind, but it was as if I had to be reminded I was about to be sort of a nobody, pretty soon I wasn’t going to have stripes anymore. Other words, I was going to be fresh out of substantial authority. Over anyone. Including her. She’s always been so tender with me. It was a real shock, that look on her face.”
“Ease up, Bob,” Chuck said. “She just didn’t want you to make a damn fool of yourself.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s all it was.”
Now Captain Peckham turns and nods to Bob. It’s the cue for his farewell speech. He is bothered by how nervous he is as he steps up to the podium. He has written it all out, but when he starts talking he doesn’t even glance at the paper. To begin with, a few little white lies are strictly required. “I want to thank you, Captain, for the kind words you said about me a few minutes ago. I feel real lucky to have been working with you these last couple of years. You always made my duty seem…I won’t say”—Bob grins—“I won’t say exactly a pleasure, but anyway real easy.” He sees his friends in the formation chuckle at his dig. He is surprised himself at his nerve. He sees rhythmic bulges begin to work in the CO’s jaw. You never can tell, when Peckham grinds his teeth, whether he’s mad, or in a hurry to get things over with, or maybe nothing, maybe just digesting his breakfast. “I also specially want to thank two people who’ve helped keep my desk from looking like Mount Trashmore”—Key West’s huge hill of half a century of garbage disposal over by the hospital—“and who’ve done plenty to help keep the whole station on an even keel: I mean Chief Wilkins and Yeoman Second Allend. Thank you, Tom and Lizabet.”
So far so good. It seems to be going over okay.
But now he comes to another obligatory part of his speech—the retiree’s passage of thanks to his wife—and he suddenly feels as if he is in free-fall. His mind has gone blank. He has entirely forgotten what he wrote down to say about Ginny. He swallows twice. After a long silence, he manages to say, “Quite a few of you know my wife, Virginia.” And now, all at once, some of what he wrote comes back to him. “I couldn’t’ve got here without her,” he says. “Not in a million years. She is the most considerate person I know, the kindest, the most loyal.” Every word of what he is saying is honest and true, and his heart was full when he put it down on paper, but the terrible thing now is, it sounds hollow, it has no feeling in it at all. He doesn’t feel a thing. He can’t look at Ginny; he talks straight at his friends back there in the formation. “However,” he says—but now he has forgotten his lines again, and there is a long, excruciating pause, until his intention suddenly comes back to him. “However, the main thing is,” he says, “she has a mind of her own. She never lets me blame anybody but myself. I’ll tell you a little story. It was when we were stationed one time at Norfolk. I had just made j.g.; I was a bit older than most of the greenhorns that had come half baked out of OT school. One of these was this lieutenant, one rank up from me in the same section, who I couldn’t stand. We were in base ops. He’d graduated UCLA, and he was always pulling this stuff of ‘If you had a bit more education’ on me, not necessarily in those words, but he made it clear—he had a long nose to look down—and one day he says…I’d made some mistake, it was minor, a nothing, and he says, ‘You’re going to have to learn,’ he says, ‘to think a little faster on your feet.’ I wanted to say, excuse the expression, ladies and gentlemen, ‘Up yours with a twist of lemon peel,’ or something, but you couldn’t. So that night I was telling Ginny about the guy, how rough it was to be stalled in a slot lower than him, with him on my back, and she said something that has stayed with me ever since, it’s come to me anytime I thought I was going to lose it for keeps. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘you chose the navy. You signed up of your own free will. It was your choice,’ she said. ‘You looked into it, you knew the risks, you made the choice.’ ”
Now comes the queerest part, when he tries to say what it means to him to be leaving what he chose. Because just the opposite happens. His voice breaks. When he wrote this down, last night, he felt absolutely nothing and kept thinking, This is what I’m supposed to say, this is royal b.s., this is out of Ginny’s Big Book of Make-Believe. In the act of writing about what wonderful years the navy time had been, he caught himself thinking, as if it were the marrow of truth, that he couldn’t be gladder that those years were finally going to be over. But now as he speaks his voice begins to quaver. He looks to Gin for help, and looking in her eyes, he gets a surprise. He sees that she sees that he’s scared. He realizes that he was miles off base last night. That the real truth is he’s spooked out of his mind by what may be waiting for him outside the zone of comfort. That squirt of an M.B.A.—“Do it my way.” He is suddenly furious with himself for having wasted a thought on that snippy little bitch of a j.g….“The great thing about our regulations,” he is saying in his speech, “is how they pave the way, how they make the tough decisions so much easier, because, you know, when you come down to it, there’s only one right way….” But what he hears in his memory’s ear is Ginny’s voice on that subject. And he almost loses his place in the speech again as, with a little mental lurch, he wonders: How far will twenty-one five go?
No, there’s something much scarier than any of that. It’s the truly basic thing: After all these years, he doesn’t know where he really stands with Ginny. He has always counted on her to be his gyroscope in rough waters, but he gets no steadying help now from her eyes. He hears in his mind the raw edginess of her voice, in the aisle at the commissary, the day before yesterday, gripping the handle of the shopping cart with white knuckles: “You’re planning to be a helpful husband, right?” Suddenly self-conscious, afraid of getting even more choked up, he looks away from her. And he can see that his friends back there in the formation really like it that he’s so deeply moved—as they must think from hearing his words and his shaky voice—at leaving their ranks.
When he turns away to go back to his seat, he gets a big, big hand from all present, in uniform and out.
The CO is up, telling the civilians that what is to come next is a venerable and precious custom of the United States Navy. “It symbolizes Lieutenant Commander Robert Selden’s leaving the ship,” he says. “This little ritual of ours is called Piping Him Over the Side. He will have an honor guard, as he leaves, of eight of his closest friends, and he will have the gratitude and respect of all who have worked with him over the years.”
The CO raises his head—the peak of his hat is still slanted forward in that goofy way—and he calls out, “Post the Side Boys!”
Eight of them. Chuck Stone, of course. Treadwell, Banton, Furr, Pollowicz…yeah, they really are friends. He had to pad out the other three, to make it eight. Eight is a heck of a lot of best friends to have. Who has that many? Codder, he’s more or less all right. Lawson. But why in hell I picked Franklin, I’ll never know. I’ve never really trusted the guy.
There they are, the eight of them, forming up on either side of the red carpet that is laid out at the end of the path to the curb, to where the navy car is waiting. He’s made sure that Chuck would have the first spot on the right. The eight stand there on either hand of the red carpet, his Side Boys. They snap to attention when the CO barks the order. Then the CO shouts, “Prehent harms!” and eight swords flash in the sun and swoop up to form inverted vees high over the red carpet, a glistening arch of esteem to guard a valued person as he leaves the ship for good. Now some more tinny music comes on. The retiree can choose what music they’ll play, and he’s picked “Anchors Aweigh,” as if: This is a celebration, it’s a game, we’re going to win, cheer up.
The CO nods toward him, and he steps down off the podium and goes over to the civilian chairs and takes Ginny on his left arm, and they start down the path and get to the red carpet and involuntarily duck both their heads on account of the sharpness of the swords. As they go along, Ginny is trying hard, without much success, to be military and keep in step with him. They’re about halfway down the red carpet—the thin music back there in the speakers is still going—when a bosun’s whistle splits the air. Over the Side. This is when it begins, at last, to be real, but it’s hard to say whether he’s thrilled or alarmed by the familiar sound. Goose bumps start on his behind and travel up his back and all down his arms. And then, on top of that, when he and Gin are just two steps away from the curb and the car, the door of which the driver is holding open, dang!—a single stroke from behind them of a ship’s bell. How many times has he heard that sound in the past twenty years? It hits him like a blow. That’s it. That is the end. He is out.
He almost stumbles. He feels numb.
He more or less shoves Ginny into the car, and he scrambles in after her and says to the driver, “Peel outta here.”
The driver doesn’t say, “Yes, sir.” “Sir” is for officers. He says, “Trumbo Point?” Like a goddam taxi driver.
Ginny quietly says, “That’s right, driver. We’re on the bight side, near the upper end,” and then she takes her civilian husband’s hand and presses it hard, and it’s as if what she means by the squeeze is just Cool it, but what she says is something entirely different. “It’s all right, Commander,” she gently says. “It’s over now. It’s all over.” For a long time she has always, always seemed to aim the word Commander at him with a barb on it: “So you think you’re the wheel around here, do you?” But not this time. This is different. She sounds as if she were far away, in an unfamiliar countryside, on some surprising, unexpected terrain of regret and dim hope. He is certain that she will never use that word in connection with him again. But this time, for once, she has given it every bit of its full value. She lets go his hand.