about his parents, Lee just stared for a long moment at Colonel Wade, glowering more than usual. Then he shook his head, blew out a high, sharp laugh, and set his fork down next to his plate. The ocean was rough that night, and the fork rattled against the plate as Lee began to speak.
“My father’s dead,” he said. “I’ve never seen him. My mother has to work at a drugstore to support herself. She’s old and sick and frail and has to work at a drugstore. There’s America for you. They’ll put her out on the street if she doesn’t keep the rent coming in. Put her in jail if she doesn’t pay her taxes. She’s never gotten anything for it, either. Just a sore back and wrinkled, calloused hands and off to work again at the drugstore. There’s America.”
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wade said, surprised. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just—”
“Home of the free,” Lee said now, slapping the table and sending his fork to the floor, where it slid against the bulkhead and rattled there even louder. “Land of plenty. Hah! Land of a sickness and a cancer. A cancer called money. It eats you and eats you. And when it’s gone you’re dead. Or wish you were.”
“See here,” the colonel said.
“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Wade said.
Joe Bill said nothing. The officers at their table had stopped eating to stare at the scene. The steward had entered the room at the sound of shouting and stood at the corner of the passengers’ table saying, “Please, monsieur,” and Lee was still going on, and now he stood and the colonel stood and said, “Calm down,” but Lee was waving his hands and shouting about America and how it robbed people of their lives and their blood in order to keep the rich in fine clothes and fancy cars, and then he said, “And men like you, Colonel, your job is to keep the poor people in line. The state only gains its power through fear. Except in America, you can even convince people it’s not fear at all, but duty and honor and country and national pride that keeps them going off to the factory and the plant and the drugstore.”
“Sit down, please,” Mrs. Wade said now, and the steward said again, “Please, monsieur. Sit, please,” and Joe Bill watched as Lee said, “Colonel, I know. I was a soldier, too, you understand.”
“You’re some kind of damned communist,” the colonel said now, pushing his wife’s hand away as she reached for his.
“No, I’m not,” Lee said. “Communism’s just another tool of the state. Just another illusion. I’m a Marxist-Leninist-collectivist.”
“I knew it,” Colonel Wade said, ruddy and livid, pointing at Lee. “Why don’t you just keep going? Don’t stop in Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or wherever it is you’re going. Just keep on. You’d be happier in Russia.”
“My mother would be better off there, that’s for sure,” Lee shouted, then pushed his way past the steward and out the door.
“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” the steward said. “Very sorry, madame. It is the ship, certainement. It is not a luxury liner, no? Some people get upset . . . how you . . . cramped? It makes some people . . . irritable. I will try to have a talk with monsieur Lee. If necessary, we will make other dining arrangements.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Wade said as Colonel Wade returned to his seat with a snort. “Of course, it was my fault, really,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pried. I could tell he was sensitive.”
“He’s nuts,” said the colonel now, picking his glass of tomato juice from the holster and bringing it to his face.
“Again, please accept the apologies of the captain and crew of the Marion Lykes.” With that the steward spun quickly away. Colonel Wade turned to Joe Bill.
“Is he like that all the time?”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” Joe Bill said, “he really never speaks to me. We talked some the first day, but since then he’s hardly said a word. I don’t really see him that much, actually. I have no idea where he goes. Just wanders around on the deck, I guess. He’s gone when I get up in the morning and still gone when I go to bed at night.”
“The poor thing,” Mrs. Wade said. “I should have just let him be. I have a problem with talking too much, don’t I, Richard? I always have. I just had to pry.”
“It’s really quite amazing,” Joe Bill said. “It’s like he vanishes or something.”
“This is 1959,” Colonel Wade said now. “No one can still be that naive about communism. Not after Korea.”
“A mother would have known better. I was never a mother. Female troubles.”
“It’s not that big a ship. There are only so many places he could go.”
“Not after Stalin.”
And the three of them went on like that for the rest of the meal, each in their own conversations, their own attitudes of sympathy, mystery, and disbelief, until the steward came again to clear the table, and Joe Bill and the Wades said goodnight.
And now another week, or four days, or ten days, had passed. The sky in the daytime was the color of smooth lead, and at night no stars came out and the dark was low and cloying, like the sky had dropped down to meet the water and seal the Marion Lykes inside, holding it in place somewhere far away from the port of New Orleans or the port of Le Havre, and there it would stay until the waters dried up and the sky squeezed the earth into nothingness, until all that was left was matter, and then not even that.
If only he’d spoken his French earlier, he would have someone to talk to, the deckhands or the officers. Joe Bill imagined them up late with a drink in the mess discussing Baudelaire or de Gaulle as the mooring chains clanged against the bulwarks and the ship gently pitched through the night toward France.
His spy game had been a bad idea. That was clear. But it was also clear that to suddenly start speaking French now would seem rude at best, make him look like he really had been spying on them, and they would certainly distance themselves from him even more. By keeping his secret, at least he could still listen.
On one of these starless, heavy nights, Joe Bill went out on the deck for a smoke, hoping to eavesdrop on the deckhands while they worked. It was starting already, his mother would say if she saw him flicking four, five, six matches before he could get one to light, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the ocean chill and scratching against the stubble he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Hasn’t even got to France yet and already he’s smoking. And the truth was, he didn’t even like it, didn’t even know how to smoke, but he was so lonely and bored that so many times smoking a cigarette was the only thing to do. He’d bought his first pack of Chesterfields—the only American brand on sale in the ship’s mess—sometime shortly after the blowup between Lee and Colonel Wade at dinner, the last meal Lee had shared with them. And now Joe Bill was already up to a pack a day because he didn’t feel like he could just go stand outside and not smoke, and he was going outside all the time. It was a shame, Joe Bill thought, puffing his Chesterfield, that he and Lee hadn’t hit it off. They could have been pals—nothing like the hothouse of a freighter cabin to form fast friendships. They could have visited each other this fall—Lee could have come to Tours and Joe Bill could have gone to Switzerland (or Sweden or Finland). It was a shame, but it was unlikely to change now.
It
