Jesus Out to Sea

My parents had a fight that night and my father and I did not go to Galveston in the morning. In fact, I didn’t know where my father went. He was gone for two days, then he came home, unpacked his suitcase, read the newspaper on the front porch, and walked down to the icehouse.

I started to have trouble at school that fall. I had thought of myself as a favorite of the nuns, but on my first six-week report card for the term, the gold stars I had previously received for “attitude” and “conduct” were replaced by green and red ones. To combat wartime scarcity of paper, Sister Agnes examined the Big Chief notebooks of everyone in class. Those who wasted any paper at all were classified as “Germans.” Those who wasted egregiously were classified as “Japs.” I was designated a Jap.

Later that same day I pushed the boy from Chicago down on the ground and called him a Yankee and a yellowbelly.

In January, the weather turned cold, streaked with rain and smoke from trash fires. The kids in the neighborhood constructed forts from discarded Christmas trees in the pasture at the end of the block, stacking them in front of pits they had dug to make mud balls that they launched with elaborate slingshots they had fashioned from bicycle inner tubes.

But I took no part in the fun. I read the Hardy Boys series I checked out from the bookmobile and listened to Terry and the Pirates, Captain Midnight, and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy in the afternoons. Then my mother brought home a box of Wheaties that contained a picture of a Flying Fortress, and a coupon, which, when filled out and returned to the cereal company, would entitle the sender to have his name placed on a scroll inside the fuselage of a United States Air Corps bomber.

My father saw me printing my name on the coupon at the dining-room table. “You sending off for another decoder badge?” he asked.

I explained how my name would be inside a plane that was bombing the Nazis and the Japanese off the map.

“Not a good idea, Charlie. Where’d you get that?” he said.

“Mom brought it home.”

“I see,” he said. He cracked open a beer in the kitchen and sat down at the table. His package of Lucky Strike cigarettes had a red dot on it with a green circle around the dot.

“Innocent people are dying under those bombs, Charlie. It’s not a game,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was,” I replied.

He caught the resentment in my tone and looked at me strangely. “Saw the Christmas-tree forts you boys were building,” he said.

“Nick and the others are doing that.”

“What’s going on, son?”

“They don’t like me.”

“I don’t believe that. Tell you what. Does Nick have a flag for his fort?”

“Flag?”

My father rubbed the top of my head and winked.

Saturday morning he and I walked down to the end of the block and cut through the canebrake into the pasture. It was a fine morning, crisp and sunny, the live oaks by Westheimer puffing with wind. Kids were hunkered down behind their barricades of stacked Christmas trees, lobbing mud balls at one another, a star-spangled kite that a kid had tied to one fort popping against a cloudless blue sky.

The exchange of mud balls stopped when the kids saw my father. Nick came out from behind his fort and looked at us, his faded clothes daubed with dirt, his face hot from play.

“Got room for one more?” my father asked.

“Sure, Mr. Rourke,” Nick replied. His eyes didn’t meet my father’s, and for the first time I realized Nick had been injured by Vernon Dunlop in ways I had not understood.

“Do you fellows want to fly this over your fort?” my father asked, unfurling our flag from its staff.

“That’d be great,” Nick said.

“But you’ve got to take care of it. Don’t let it get stained or dirty. Make sure you take it inside when you’re done,” my father said.

While my father walked back home, Nick and I raised the flag on our ramparts, loaded our slingshots with hard-packed mud balls, and opened fire on the enemy. For just a moment, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Vernon Dunlop watching us from the grove of oak trees, his muscular thighs forked across the frame of his bicycle.

Nick’s father was a decent, religious, blue-collar man who built a clubhouse for us in one of the live oak trees on Westheimer and sometimes walked us to the Alabama Theater on Friday nights. The family did not own a car and Nick’s father rode the city bus to his job as a supervisor at a laundry on the north side of downtown. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer as a teenager in Mobile, and he owned a set of sixteen-ounce boxing gloves that he used in teaching Nick and the other kids to box. But he was a strict disciplinarian and admonished his children to never bring home a mark on their bodies that God didn’t put there. When he took out his razor strop, Nick’s scalp would literally recede on his head, as though it had been exposed to a naked flame.

At the end of the first afternoon we had flown the flag at the fort, Nick rolled the flag on its staff and handed it to me.

“My dad wants you to keep it at your house,” I said.