Carolinas to the Mississippi, from the Mason-Dixon Line to the Gulf Coast. There was MacIntire, Hamilton III, Lukas from the hills of Georgia—good boys all.
There was one more fellow, a small, wiry man from the outskirts of New Orleans named Chenier. He was a little bit older than the other men, and he looked older than that, because his skin was rough and dark from standing in the sun, and his nose had been flattened in an adolescent fistfight. He was a Cajun; most of the men on board could hardly understand him through the meal of his accent, and this, too, separated him a little bit from the others. He smiled crookedly, smiled slightly madly, and spoke in a crazy dirty French mumble. During his days in stateside camp a sergeant from Louisiana had dubbed him Coonass, and he carried the name with him, all through his deployments.
Some of the men took in his dark skin, his mumble, and his nickname, and decided he was a Negro, if not in whole then in substantial enough part. Warren from New Hampshire may have been the first to suggest it, one evening while he stood at the base of his bed, peeling wide papery flakes of sunburnt skin from his shoulder. I don’t know about all this work outside, he said. A civilized man doesn’t stand in the sun. The invention of culture was simultaneous with the invention of indoors: palaces, cathedrals, libraries, legislatures.—He made a gesture like a man sprinkling a pinch of salt, and the skin fell from his fingers to the floor.—Where does an evolved man eat? In a dining hall. Where does a wise man lay his lovely wife? In the darkened privacy of his chambers. Oh, the sun is a fearsome thing: the Greeks called him Apollo, the son of Zeus himself. The Egyptians called him … What did the Egyptians call the sun god, Brammer?
Fuck if I know, said Brammer.
Warren peeled at his skin some more. Everything the sun sees, it destroys, starting with a man’s own flesh. Myself, my father, his father, and his father before him, all treated the sun with a healthy respect, and the Warrens have always been the paler for it. Now the Corps asks me to stand in the sun all day, just so my rifle won’t get lonely. Hence, I burn. It is the mark, I say, of a civilized man.—He gazed imperiously around the room. Now, Chenier, for example, doesn’t burn. In fact, Chenier is getting mighty dark. Where you been, Chenier? On your own little Africa campaign?—Laughter all around, and the conversation turned.
Then a unit had been finishing maintenance on a cannon when one of the men spotted a slick of oil beneath it. It was evening; the sun was red on the horizon. Sergeant isn’t going to like that, said a Voice of Fearful Mourning. Somebody’s going to have to stay behind and get it cleaned up.
Let the nigger do it, said a Voice of Young-Old Dudgeon.
He meant Chenier, and Chenier, who was on the other side of a crate of shells and didn’t hear him, accepted the assignment without knowing why it had been left to him, spent an hour on the job, and then ran to the mess, where he sat at a table with two of his battalion mates, who rose pointedly from his presence and took themselves across the room.
Well, an argument went, over boilermakers and under a bitter yellow moon. Coonass was a black man, snuck in by the Department of the Navy under the guise of being white, because Roosevelt wanted to prove his principles. No time better than a war, when great masses of men shifted around the world, and all societies were transformed. Somebody had to be planning it: somebody had to be keeping track, from start to finish. One Negro man in the Marine Corps.
Chenier paid no mind. He’d heard worse, he’d done worse. He was thirty years old, his teeth were still strong enough to bite the head off a penny-a-pound nail, and his hair was still thick; he didn’t care what young men thought. It was just as well they left him more and more alone, to fall back on his tangled inner tongue. He wrote to his wife in Slidell, telling her it wouldn’t be long until the day he climbed back into bed with her, and banged her until the walls shook.
Then there came a Wednesday night when leave appeared, like an alignment of the planets, for Lukas, Hamilton III, and Walter Selby. It was a fine night, a fine fortune, the palms were rustling, the wind was up, and the three men strolled the walks with careless ease. At the motor pool stood Chenier alone, dressed in his immaculate uniform and a sour-smelling aftershave. He nodded hello to the boys and turned back to his obscure thoughts. Hamilton III took the others aside in a spirit of gallantry born out of the tedium of waiting, as surely as his ancestors’ had been born out of the tedium of the fields. Listen here, he said. I don’t care what those boys say. Coonass is a man of honor. Coonass is an upstanding representative of the values and tradition of the United States Marine Corps. And Coonass is going to accompany us on a goddamn drunk.
Walter Selby went to Chenier and made the invitation, and Chenier accepted with a shrug, neither ungrateful nor quite glad.
Where were you going, anyway? Lukas asked him as they started into town.
Don’t know, said Chenier. Just going into town to get a drink, maybe look at the femmes go by.
The femmes, said Hamilton III. That’s good. What kind of femmes do you like?
Chenier said nothing, but he smiled broadly in response, his wide lips curling back immodestly.
We’ll see what we can do, said Hamilton III.
They began at sundown in a bar on a hillside and progressed down toward the water, as if in a dream of drowning. In one dark beery place they became bogged down—Lukas wanted one of the waitresses and insisted on staying until he could proposition her—but in time they moved on. Their faces grew red and their eyes grew wet, ten o’clock came at Lonesome Bob’s, the Best of Honolulu, where they ordered rum and coconut milk and stared at the center of the scarred round wooden table.
I left a girl in Abilene
I left a girl in Abilene
Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen
Waits for me in Abilene.
I want to go dancing, said Lukas. Let’s go find us a dance somewhere. You a dancer, Coonass?
Chenier nodded, his face serious and proud. King of St. Tammany Parish, he said. Ain’t nobody better.
There’s a big band down at the Regis Hotel, said Walter. Let’s go, then. Let them swing.
Let them swing, said Lukas, and they rose a little unsteadily and started back into the night.
The hotel ballroom was dark but the bandstand was bright, the music was hot and loud, and Chenier could dance just as he said, jitterbugging furiously, with his hat clenched in one hand and a local girl grasped by the other, his lined face shining and a smile fixed upon his features. Walter watched him with a combination of curiosity and admiration, as if the other man were an exhibit of some sort, a demonstration of human physical skill taken beyond the practical and into festive excess; and he danced one song himself, with a tall, heavily made-up woman with straight black hair and ocher skin, and then retired to the bar, where Lukas and Hamilton III were waiting.
Look at that man go, said Lukas. Chenier had loosened a button on his dress shirt and his legs and arms were flying this way and that.—He looks like a goddamned rooster trying to fly. Can’t compete with that: let’s get drunk. Bartender! You got any bourbon in behind that fancy bar of yours?
Then it was midnight and the band members were taking their bows, there was applause all around, and the three of them were as blind as worms, as bent as worms and with as little left to lose. Last hours on earth. Outside, the palm trees were being whipped around by a dark Pacific wind; inside, Hamilton III was lecturing to no one. My mother … he started, and then he stopped again, as if mentioning her was all he had intended. Coonass had come off the dance floor soaked in sweat, his hair as wet as if he’d just stepped out of the ocean. A big round-faced sandy-haired boy was waiting for him at the bar, watching him as he came across the polished floor, finally laying hands on the bar top and huffing for air as he gazed down to the far end, where the bartender was wiping up a spill.
Tell me something, nigger, said the sandy-haired boy. He wiped his small bent nose with the back of his hand and sucked back the water from his lips.
Chenier shook his head. Not so, he said,