Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

The Final Yes

He took the key from his pocket, unlocked the padlock, and then took the shotgun down from the rack.

The shotgun was a Savage automatic, and he thought the name was wryly appropriate because he was about to kill himself and he considered the act essentially savage and at the same time automatic, almost inevitable. Holding the gun in his big hands, he looked down at it with a curiously sad smile. He hadn’t even wanted the damn thing.

The house was very still.

He stood in the center of the wood-paneled den, alone in the house, the ceiling lights glinting on the sleek, polished barrel of the gun. His face in the shining barrel was eerily reflected, distorted by the curve of the metal and shimmer of the overhead fixture. The gun was light in his hands. It had a checkered walnut stock, with a full pistol grip. The barrel was plain and round, but it was made of a special alloy steel so that, even though it was a twelve-gauge gun, it felt as light as any twenty-gauge he’d ever handled. It was really ironic, he thought, that Beth was the one who’d insisted on buying the gun, over his protests. It was really so goddamn ironic that he felt like crying because... because this gun, this gun he held in his hands, was something more than a weapon or a deliverer. Its possession, his ownership of it even though he’d never wanted it, was an admission of a way of life. And his way of living had really left very little choice in determining the way of his dying.

How still the house was, almost as if it expected a sudden noise and were bracing itself for the shock. That’s ridiculous, he thought. The house is empty because Beth and the children are at the beach. No one expected me home this early, not on a Friday afternoon.

He looked at the gun again.

Well, he thought, I might as well get it over with. Shells, he thought. I suppose I’ll need shells.

Aimlessly, he began walking toward the garage. The shotgun felt a little heavier in his hands. He felt no real sense of urgency, and yet he knew the thing had to be done before Beth and the children got home. He supposed that would be around five o’clock, and it was only three now. It seemed much later than that. The idea had come to him at exactly two-thirty, just a half hour ago. He had said his final “Yes” at that time and then had glanced at his desk clock, as if wanting to mark the hour, as if knowing even as the “Yes” left his lips that it was the last time he would ever say that word, the last time he would allow himself to be talked into doing something he did not want to do.

He found the box of shells at the back of one of the drawers in the old chest stored in the garage. He went back into the house and loaded the gun to its full five-shot capacity, even though he knew he’d need only one shot, and then he sat with the gun across his lap for several moments and tried to think if there was anything he wanted to do before he killed himself. He had no idea as yet whether he would put the barrel of the gun in his mouth or simply hold it against his temple. The idea of killing himself did not frighten him. In fact, he accepted it with a sort of depressive calm, as if he had known from the very beginning, from that time so long ago when he had first said “Yes,” that this was the way it would end.

He decided to leave a note for Beth. He didn’t really care whether or not she understood, but he felt nonetheless that he should leave some sort of note. He had given her little enough in her lifetime, and he didn’t want her to think she was totally responsible for what he was going to do. Maybe she was partially responsible, but not entirely, and the least he could do for her was to leave a note to put her mind at ease.

He put the shotgun down on the floor alongside the desk, and he looked around in the desk drawer for a sheet of paper, closed the drawer, opened another one, reopened the first one, and found the pad right under his hand. He sharpened a pencil and then sat down in the desk chair and wondered what he could say to her and then thought, The hell with her, let her figure it out herself, and then relented, sighed, meticulously dated the top of the page, and wrote:

I’m not sure I do understand it, he thought. I’m really not sure I understand it at all. I only know that when Alan came into my office and put the question to me, when Alan asked me to do whatever it was he asked — I can hardly remember what he asked; it is only with a great effort of will that I can remember him asking at all — and I said, “Yes, sure, yes,” I knew that was the end, I knew I had to do this.

He paused, holding the pencil poised over the pad, wondering how he could tell this to Beth. How do you explain to a woman you never loved the things that mean the most to you? How do you tell her about a boy who used to lie in bed beside a frost-rimmed window imagining a universe of ice-crystal stars stretching to eternity? How do you explain a boy who rolled up his trouser cuffs and waded in the river long before winter had released its grip, his toes numb, a foolish grin on his mouth? How do you explain the dreams of youth and the gradual disappearance of the dreams, of any dream, until there was nothing left but a vast compromise with something only vaguely remembered? Where does it go? he wondered. How do you get to be forty-two years old and writing a farewell note to a woman you never wanted?

How can you tell her about a night that happened before she even existed, a night that happened before the beginning of time, when the lights of the ferris wheel traced a round-robin pattern against a starless sky? The calliope music was flooding the vacant lot upon which the carnival had pitched its travel-worn brown tents. There was the noise of barkers, and the simulated, shrieking of young girls, and the mechanical roar of the amusement machines, and the tiny pop of the .22 in his hands, and the echoing sound of the bullets spanging against the gong at the far end of the gallery.

The girl was suddenly there.

He looked up as he reloaded the rifle, and the girl was there, and suddenly his hands were wet. She looked at him somewhat shyly, a tall girl of seventeen, with long blond hair and luminous brown eyes, a faint smile on her mouth. She was wearing a pale-blue cotton frock, and her legs were long and tanned, and she wore white sneakers dulled by the dust of the vacant lot. The night opened. The world dissolved. He looked at her, and everything he had ever wanted in all his long eighteen years was suddenly there, standing not three feet away from him. He put down the rifle. He looked at the girl soundlessly, and his eyes suddenly misted. And then, without expecting to, he held out his hand to her.

The girl looked at him curiously. She studied his face. She shook her head slightly and seemed about to speak, and then her eyes fastened to his, and the night narrowed into a single direct channel, the ferris wheel, the barkers, the terrified shrieks, the laughter, all melting beyond the fringes of focus, their eyes meeting and holding with an intensity so great it excluded all else. Speechless, she took his hand.

The carnival was a part of the dream. They walked through its tinsel and glitter like figures from another time, displaced. There was a glow of unreality to the night. The lights seemed softer now, the music indistinct, the laughter muffled and far away. Only the girl was real, and even the girl was part of the dream. She would not tell him her name. They made a game of it, he trying to guess, and she repeatedly shaking her head, her laughter rising to join the music of the calliope. He bought her a jelly apple, and he watched, bewitched, as her teeth sank into the thick candy crust, and he said, “Your name is Guinevere.”

“No.”

“Elaine then?”

“No.”

Her laughter. Walking with a gentle, delicate step, the dust-covered sneakers carrying her gracefully over the lot and then to the littered sidewalk beyond, and across the town to where the river snaked in unreflecting blackness, overhung with the willows on its bank. He held her hand and guided her to the water’s edge. The grass was wet with dew. He cupped her face in one hand and whispered, “Tell me your name.”

“My name is the wind,” she said, and laughed.

“Tell me.”

“I wish you would kiss me,” she said. “Please kiss me.”

Still holding her face, feeling the hard line of her jaw beneath his fingers, he lowered his mouth, and her lips parted, and he closed his eyes and held her very tight. In that instant all the romantic visions of his youth, all the fantasies he had drawn on the nighttime ceiling of his room, the imagined legends of tall, gallant men and beautiful, delicate maidens, came alive in this girl whose name he did not know. The willows hung like teardrops caught by time.

And with this girl, with this gentle girl who lay softly cradled in his arms by the edge of the river, there came purpose and resolve. He was suddenly brimming with plans; ambition rose within him like a tower. Holding her in his arms, he spun a golden thread of reveries, whispering lest the night be shattered by sound, until at last she sighed and said, “I must go.”

“I’ll take you home,” he said softly. “Where do you live?”

“I live in the air,” she answered, and again she laughed.

“No, seriously.”

“I’ll find my way alone. I want you to stay here.”

“I want to come with you,” he said, puzzled.

“Kiss me again.”

He held her to him and kissed her again, but there was an unfamiliar panic rising within him. He did not want to let her go. Fiercely he clung to her.

“Don’t go yet,” he said. “Please.”

“I’m going. I must.”

“No. Please...”

“Do you love me?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes, but...”

“Then love me,” she said, “and let me go.”

He was frightened all at once. Suddenly he was afraid that if he insisted he would lose her completely. He nodded bleakly in the darkness. “Yes,” he said. “All right.”

She rose and brushed her skirt, her long, thin fingers moving silently in the darkness.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes, tomorrow,” she said.

“Here?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

She kissed him suddenly and swiftly and then slipped out of his arms and ran up the grassy bank. He could hear her laughter trailing behind her.

“I love you!” he called to the night.

She did not come the next day. He waited until it was dark, and then beyond that, and then he simply sat on the river’s edge, no longer waiting, and stared deep into the black waters.

He looked for her all that summer.

The songs they were playing in 1937 helped to perpetuate the dreamlike quality of that night by the river. Every note he heard echoed of faraway places, any one of which she might have vanished to: “Blue Hawaii” and “The Moon of Manakoora” and “Twilight in Turkey.” Every sad lyric seemed to have been written expressly for him, contrived to remind him of events that somehow never happened: “In the Still of the Night” and “I See Your Face Before Me,” and especially “Where or When,” which was all mystery and magic in the guise of déjà vu. He asked about her everywhere. “Long blond hair,” he would say, “and brown eyes, and she was wearing a pale-blue dress and dust-covered sneakers. She’s the most beautiful girl who ever lived.” And he heard conflicting reports about her. Someone said Yes, he had seen her, she was visiting from California, staying with a cousin on South Twelfth — but he checked the address and the cousin did not exist. And someone else said he thought she worked for the carnival, a sort of shill — but the next time the carnival came to town, she was not with it. Hitler was about to march into Poland; the world was poised for war; but all he could think of was the girl with the long blond hair.

In the early part of 1942 the area of his search was enlarged. He went into the Navy, and the Navy took him to the Great Lakes Training Center and Chicago, and then to radar school in Fort Lauderdale, and the opportunity to search Miami and Miami Beach, and then Norfolk for a training course with the assembled crew of his about-to-be-commissioned ship. He went as far as Richmond looking for her, and then Boston to commission the destroyer, and Guantanamo for a shakedown cruise, and the Panama Canal and a quick, one-night search of Colon, and then San Diego, and Pearl Harbor, searching, always searching — and then the ship went into action, and he stopped looking because then there was nothing to see but death.

His best friend aboard ship was another radarman named Clyde Morrow. He often told him about the girl with no name, and he speculated for the first time about what might have happened if he hadn’t said “Yes” to her request. Would she have vanished so completely if he hadn’t agreed to stay there by the river? The idea was a nagging one. Discussing it with Clyde on the fantail of the Fancher, he recognized his acquiescence as a committed error. But he did not yet know it would become a trend, and then a habit, and * eventually a trap. He was, after all, an enlisted man in the United States Navy, subject to commands, becoming more and more accustomed to saying, “Yes, sir.” As the years passed, as the Fancher miraculously survived battle after battle, the mandatory “Yes, sir” became second nature to him, the ship became his home, his crewmates became the only community he knew. He had never had any brothers, and now Clyde Morrow, mild and unassuming, quietly understanding, became a brother to him. In November of 1948 he said “Yes” to his brother, and lost him, and became frightened.

The Fancher had got under way at dusk, part of a force escorting the four transports and two cargo vessels out of Ironbottom Sound on their way to Espíritu Santo to the southwest. The action itself, the very fact that the transports and cargo ships had been ordered away from Guadalcanal, was an ominous one. Even if there had not been the heavy Japanese air attack that afternoon, the men would have known instantly that something was in the wind. He was not surprised when the chemical alarm shrieked its warning through the ship a little after midnight. Automatically he swung his legs over the side of his bunk, pulled on his trousers, and slipped his feet into his shoes. He was putting on his chambray shirt and running for the ladder when Clyde called to him.

There was something curiously compelling in his voice. Turning, he looked into Clyde’s eyes and saw something there he had never seen before.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Behind them, the speaker on the bulkhead blared, “General Quarters! All hands, man your battle stations! General Quarters!”

“What is it, Clyde?”

Sailors were rushing past them, scrambling up the single ladder leading out of the aft sleeping compartment, pulling on clothing as they ran.

“What is it, for God’s sake?”

“I can’t go up there again.”

“What?”

“The bridge,” Clyde said. “I can’t.” He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said again.

“What do you mean? Clyde, that’s General Quarters. We’ve got to...”

“Listen.”

“What?”

“Listen. I... I can’t go up there.” Clyde’s fingers tightened on the pale-blue sleeve of his shirt. “I... I could see the pilot’s face. This afternoon. When the... when the plane dove at the bridge, I could see his face. And... and flames were dropping from the fuselage... on... on... some dropped on my helmet.” Clyde paused and swallowed. “I can’t go up there again. I don’t care. I can’t go up.”

“Well... well, what...?” He looked around him in panic. The compartment was almost clear now. They stood together by the ladder, the chemical alarm still shrieking, Clyde’s hand tight on his sleeve.

“Switch with me,” Clyde said abruptly. “Take my place on the bridge.”

“How can I do that?”

“The old man doesn’t know what the hell’s going on, anyway. He doesn’t care who his talker is, so long as he’s got one.”

“Clyde, he’d—”

“I’ll take your place at the Sugar George in the radar shack. You go up and handle the phones. Please.”

“I can’t do that, Clyde.”

“Please.”

“How can I...?”

“I thought we were friends,” Clyde said.

“Yes, but...”

“Then please! Can’t you see I’m about to—”

“All right,” he said softly. “Yes, Clyde. All right, I’ll do it. But for God’s sake, hurry!”

He would remember that night as long as he lived as a night of confusion and terror, Friday the thirteenth, a jinx of a night. There were fourteen American warships and only twelve Japanese, but the Japanese numbered two battlewagons in their force, and the early American advantage of radar was somehow lost in the baffled confusion of a voice radio circuit that was carrying radar reports from the Fancher together with commands on course, speed, and gunfire from the flagship... until suddenly the Japanese fleet loomed out of the darkness not a breath away, and then radar didn’t matter a damn.

They came upon each other with shocking swiftness, meeting in the sound between Cape Esperance and Lunga Point, anticipating the contact and then suddenly surprised to find themselves in the middle of a desperate fight. Japanese searchlights blinked into the night, long fingers of illumination sweeping the water, capturing the surprised and frightened looks on the faces of American sailors as the orders to commence firing and counter-illuminate were roared by the gunnery officer. Standing on the bridge of the Fancher in Clyde’s usual battle position, the sound-powered phones on his head, the mouthpiece an inch away from his lips, he relayed urgent radar reports to the exec and watched the world disintegrate in fire. The roar of the guns was deafening, salvo after salvo pouring from the batteries, sending shudder after shudder through the length of the ship. No one seemed to know exactly what was happening. Each ship that cruised by silently in the darkness could easily be the enemy. Searchlights winked on and off with frightening suddenness; tracer shells threaded the night like blinking neon, red and white; billows of thick black oil smoke belched up from the ships. The sea churned with the geyser-white spray of exploding shells; the night itself was a churning cacophony of fire and smoke and shouts.

Another searchlight pierced the blackness and caught the bridge of the Fancher in brilliant, merciless illumination. He heard the big Japanese guns bellowing in the blackness, heard the shells as they screamed across the open water, and then the Fancher rocked with explosion and he lost his footing as the deck swung downward to port, slanting under his feet. Someone on the open bridge yelled, “The radar shack! They hit Combat!” He tried to scramble to his feet. Crouching against the bulkhead of the pilothouse, the bridge slanting, the whole ship slanting — I’ll fall off, he thought wildly, I’ll drown — he pressed the button on his mouthpiece.

“Combat, this is Bridge,” he said, and got no answer from the radar shack.

“Combat, Bridge!” he shouted urgently. “Was that a hit?” Silence, “Hey! Can anybody hear me? Clyde, are you on this line? Clyde? Clyde?” Silence. “Will you for Christ’s sake answer?”

The action ended at about 0230, when the remaining Japanese warships began limping northward. The Americans had lost four destroyers and two light cruisers. Almost every ship in the force was badly damaged, but the planes on Henderson Field — the Japanese objective — had been saved. The Fancher, floating on an oil-slicked sea adrift with white hats and the bodies of sailors hanging lifelessly inside their life jackets, extinguished her fires by 1930 and once more considered it a miracle that she was afloat. The tropical sun was brilliant on the warm Pacific waters. The sailors took off their shirts as they worked to clean up the mess.

The explosion in the radar shack had wounded the senior communications officer, destroyed the Sugar George gear, and killed a Radarman Second/Class named Clyde Morrow.

It was not his fault, and logically he knew it was not his fault. But logic and reason seemed to have no place in his reconstruction of what had happened. Piece by painful piece he put the incident together, and the resulting revelation was frightening. He hadn’t wanted to go up to the bridge any more than Clyde had, but neither had he wanted to lose Clyde’s friendship. And so he had taken the easy way out; he had chosen not to argue. He had said “Yes” and sent Clyde to his death. As frightening as the knowledge was, he persisted in exploring it and finally coupled it with what had happened by the river on the night of the carnival. He had said “Yes” there, too, and sent the girl into oblivion.

“Yes,” then, was a dangerous word. Here in a world of snapping hand salutes and of mechanical responses to idiotic orders he began to dread the word and what it meant in terms of his own weakness. He resolved to be extremely careful with its use. He knew now that he was inclined to avoid friction, to present the agreeable smile and the accepting nod rather than to risk displeasure. But on at least two occasions he had gambled on a nod — and lost. He decided he would never allow that to happen again.

He was twenty-seven years old when he was released from active duty in 1946 and returned to his home town. He felt a lot older. The town had changed very little during the war, but it seemed alien and strange to him. He avoided making new friendships because friendship involved a responsibility he had decided against. He took a series of meaningless jobs, leaving one after another whenever he got bored or whenever he felt too much was being demanded of him. Without fully realizing it, he was becoming aimless and rootless, bound by a futile decision that really rendered him decisionless. He had, in effect, committed himself to a policy of non-commitment, and perhaps he realized it would not work even before he met Beth.

He supposed he would never love anyone as deeply as he had loved the girl with the blond hair. Beth had blond hair, too, but she wasn’t that enchanting girl of his youthful dreams, not by any wild imagining. Beth’s hair was clipped short, and her eyes were blue, and there was a somewhat horsy look to her face, a sophisticated twang to her speech. She walked over to him one night at a club dance and said, “My name is Beth McCauley. Don’t you ever talk to anyone?”

“Sure I do,” he said. “What do you want me to say?”

“I’d like you to ask me to dance.”

“Do you want to dance?” he said.

“I’d love to,” Beth answered, and she flashed a quick, conspiratorial grin.

She danced well. She was a small girl who seemed too compactly built, but she moved with surprising grace, and she followed every innuendo of pressure on the small of her back. He walked down to the river with her later. The waters were black; the willows overhung the bank. He thought he could hear a trace of laughter floating on the air.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” he told her.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Mmmm.” He nodded and looked at the water. He guessed he should kiss her.

“You haven’t told me your name,” she said suddenly.

The words startled him. He looked at her curiously and then very softly and slowly said, “My name is the wind.”

“What?” Beth said, and then laughed. “It isn’t at all. It’s Matt. I knew before I asked you to dance.” She paused. “What’s your last name?”

“Blaney. Why?”

“Blaney,” she repeated, and then suddenly added, “Beth Blaney,” as if testing the words.

He made no comment. He shrugged in the darkness, and then he kissed her without any real desire and thought, You can feel her teeth when you kiss her.

There was passion in this girl, and beauty of a sort, and a knife-edge intelligence that sometimes made him feel awkward and clumsy. But most of the time she was pleasant and easy to be with, and he continued seeing her until eventually she seemed to have been there always.

He had no intention of marrying her, not really. Even facing the realization that he could not go through life refusing to form any real attachments, he did not once seriously think of forming an attachment with Beth McCauley. He continued seeing her because she demanded nothing of him. Until one night, by the river, suddenly and without preamble, she said, “Matt, I want to get married.”

At first, idiotically, he thought she was talking about someone else. And then immediately he knew she meant she wanted to marry him, and the idea was so preposterous that he almost laughed aloud. Well, I don’t want to marry you, he thought and said nothing, staring at the river.

“Well?” she said.

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“Say yes or no, Matt.”

Yes or no, he thought, and he smiled a bit wryly. Yes or no, and what happens if I say “Yes”? Who vanishes this time, Beth? Who gets blasted into oblivion?

“I haven’t given much thought to marriage,” he said cautiously.

“Think about it now, Matt.”

I don’t have to think about a damn thing, he thought. I know I don’t want to marry you. I don’t love you. What’s there to think about?

“I can’t afford to get married right now,” he said. “I’m going to leave my job. I’m fed up with my job.”

“My father will give you a job, Matt.”

I don’t want a job with your father, he thought. I don’t even like your father.

“I don’t know anything about grain,” he said.

“You don’t have to know a goddamn thing,” she answered angrily, “and he’ll still pay you twenty thousand a year.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yes.”

“I’d hate to think I was being...”

“Bribed?” Beth supplied.

“Well...”

“You are,” she said. “I’m twenty-eight years old, Matt, and I’m tired of necking by the river. Yes or no?”

“If I say no?”

“Is that your answer?” She rose and brushed off her skirt.

“Wait!”

“Yes or no, Matt?”

“How do you know I love you?” he said.

“I didn’t ask,” Beth answered.

He hesitated for a long while. Then, committing himself for the first time since Clyde’s death, he said, “Yes, all right,” and knew instantly who would vanish this time, knew instantly who would be blasted into oblivion.

They were married in the First Episcopal Church on top of the hill. Her family made all the arrangements, and he always looked back on it later as Beth’s wedding, not his own. The house they moved into was chosen by Beth, a high-gabled house in the middle of a dense woods. Later, because the house was in the middle of the woods, Beth insisted that they buy a gun. Apparently she had already forgotten that she herself had chosen the house and its location. That didn’t matter. She was afraid of being alone in the woods, she said, now that they had children to care for. By that time he was so used to saying “Yes” that he’d protested only weakly before agreeing and then went downtown with her to pick out the Savage. He hadn’t liked the gun from the start. The gun reminded him of the .22 he’d been firing that night at the carnival when the enchanted girl — he always thought of her as enchanted, magical — had walked soundlessly into his life on silent, sneakered feet. The gun reminded him of the five-inch cannons on the Fancher and the answering fire of the Japanese ships, and the death of Clyde Morrow.

But more than that, the gun — securely locked in a rack, out of reach of the children — was a constant and visible reminder of what he had become, or perhaps what he had always been. Yes, yes, yes, I will marry you, yes I like the house with the gables in the middle of the woods, yes we should have children, yes we need a gun, yes, yes!

This afternoon he had said “Yes” for the last time.

He picked up the shotgun he had not wanted and thought, You goddamn gun, I didn’t want you!

I didn’t want Beth, or this endless silent house, or the children, or the job with her father where Alan can come in to ask me to do something meaningless and I can say, “Yes, sure, fine, yes, yes!”

I would like to say “No” sometime, he thought. I would like to stand with my head and shoulders back. I would like to take a deep breath and then yell with all my strength, “No! I don’t want to, you bastards!”

He looked at the shotgun. He sighed gently and then put the barrel into his mouth and hooked his thumb around the trigger.

I don’t want to do this, he thought.

And fired.