Westbound

A British soldier and nurse defect from WWII.

They're westbound now, towards the shore, Sloat barely noticing how the wood of the throttle warms his hands, his lass still burrowing in her gray overcoat, darkened glasses glazed with millions of starry droplets catching the gray sunrise. They want instead to warm each other, high to the stove at home, to the cats, to the armchair with all the patchwork chrysanthemums on it, to bed, and instead it's westbound tonight to the cribs of green netting, the soiled men with guns and heavy canteens. Instead it's home behind them and the unexpected warfront ahead, ignorant of the compass rose embossed into the motorboat's handiwork. Sloat pilots a screaming across the sea, watching the bruised tip of the bow crest and plummet with the vast undulations of the water, a dagger come harmonic, reverently to stab at the ocean yet never to pierce her cold.  Westbound now and Sloat wishes for some happy accident, trailing off, that perhaps a horse trotted not after the carrot dangled impossibly near his snout but for a lame chance to about-face, buck-ho and (chomp!) bite away the carrot dangled from the horse behind.

 

The gray intensifies where the sea opens into the sky ahead, as Sloat wishes he barely registers, where the wind will pick up and catch the spray, tricking him during those crashes, the downward stabs of the bow, treating him to the smack of sour needles to his skin, everywhere and yet nowhere just as soon after it crashes. For finding himself encrusted with salt at journey's end rarely endows the exquisite agony the needle-slaps the spray provided. He looks at Mol, the lass, hopes she dreams too excitedly to spy his own smiles from the helm, an awkward chorus of erratic toothwork that she too often adored. Soldiers' teeth, she would say, were she awake, Miss Molly Millions. Sloat appreciates a good lass who cooks and ever alliterates, even as the sea quakes below and the spray stings above, and all with comfort, that was the key in the gray half-morning, mirror-morning somewhere between France and England.

 

A thicker cloud bubbles above, Sloat's face for a moment another dimness, a gray spot among gray in a sea of gray in which things like love or banana breakfast seem absent on stark principle. Handfuls of disinterested sunrays still splash behind them, an ethereal taunt the American sailors were fond of saying, tickling brightly your wake with cries, "Oh won't you please turn back, please make a polite one-eighty and feel the sunshine on journey's home?" The boat breaks a crest, hard. Sloat groans aloud. Turn around, he implores the motions of the wheel and throttle, bite off the carrot of the horse behind, and of the horse behind that, and ever and ever the horse behind. Please just turn around and let's keep going, Molly – was she awake? – I'm begging you, and we eat carrots all the way back home to the armchair, which was probably getting all clawed up by the cats.  Goosing up the throttle before the next crash rolled under the blade, Sloat wondering if the whiskey bottle remained intact inside the modest hold in the stern compartment. Molly wouldn't likely understand its necessity, swathed into a bundle of soiled rags like the baby heir of a half-classed French factorywoman, and hidden as per tradition in a smuggling hold which Sloat guessed was used by American liquor-runners before the war. Whiskey is currency where they are going, westbound still to England. And the rags are still rags.

 

The black cloud passes, and for a moment, the sunbeams glint pink against a sky and sea the color of a dead television. Dull, wood-soled steps come, cautious for the rocking waves, up from where the overcoat lay puddle towards the stern and declaring the presence of a very groggy Nurse Millions, who turns masterfully a yawn into a kiss to Sloat's ear, a feat in itself with compensation for the motions of the boat and Coriolis effect. "In England we'll have to change our names," Molly nurses the words over the splashes, "because your Captain Kimble will have figured us out. And he'll set off with that artilleryman who keeps all those dogs. But wouldn't he rather leave us be, rather than arse himself to go through all the muck to find us?" Yes, Molly, he would, but Sloat feels her hand on his shoulder, a sleepy crutch whose fingernails are still flecked with red paint, the only way the English nurses figured to distinguish themselves inside the French travois.

 

"Kimble will find out what happened, I'm sure," is what comes out. They're both of them peevish tonight, involuntary ambassadors between a rough sky and a rougher sea, two strings on God's guitar, tightened up sharp and out of key. "And you know what? Nothing will happen. Not while you're sick." The hand stays, adamant, on Sloat's shoulder, and the other rummages through a pocket, wanting to look pugnacious and busy, searching perhaps for a ribbon for her hair, one of the few that haven't escaped overboard, or perhaps just searching for that one thing pockets never seem to contain. Sloat levels his eyes at Molly's, the first time since her waking, and for a moment wonders if everybody's pockets were connected somehow, symbolically, if maybe metaphysics can accomplish it someday. He looks back, resettling his eyes on the pulsing sea ahead in the distance where the whitecaps seemed to be the worst, and shrugs his malcontent – actually shrugs – until it gruffs her hand away, tumbling off his back as boulders would from a mountainside. Sloat speaks, "Take the helm, please, love, for a moment. I need to check the petrol." Meaning the whiskey. Should have done this while she slept, stinging his thoughts, shuffling from his stool by the wheel and deciding a set of precarious steps necessary to reach the aft smuggling hold.

 

"The waves are so huge, Henry!" she calls from the wheel, exuberant.

 

She's awake, but perhaps still dreaming, Sloat concludes. Yes, comes his rejoinder, a wonderful morning to be a U-boat. Checking his watch now, envisioning the events of his discovery (or better lack thereof) back on mainland, thoughts meshing together in impromptu set pieces behind his countenance, an impassive curtain facing a beguiled audience. Sloat's not at his creaky oak table with the radio set, nor at his bunk between the communications unit's recreational trampoline and the remnants of one of Kimble's banana breakfasts, nor is he even to be found around the Captain at all. The throttle whines at Sloat's desertion, voicing its dismay in unlubricated cylinders and the turning garbles of the screw behind. Miss Million's disappearance will be harder to catch. Dozens of perky uniformed nurses cloud the troughs of the wounded, the arc of bandaged bedmen that curves the barely liberated French landscape, and among them the absence of one of their own likely does not raise a clever eyebrow before supper.

 

Sloat reaches the aft closet, epiphany stabbing him as the craft into unrelenting saltwater, advising him through Athena's well-flossed teeth of the terrific liability latent in Miss Millions' beauty. If she is missing, they will know it before anything else, and the gossip, bitter and tinged with rudimentary French, screams across the land faster than any telegram, slams into Captain Kimble's ire as Sloat's destroyers do into the land he once held dearer than the lass who steers, virulent, away from that place. The Captain knows, the rockets sing over Normandy, they are caught, they are already looking for them, those men with the Garands and the canteens.They will arrest Molly at landfall, the Englishmen who remember Kimble, regard him as dear as the benevolent scars born from the beaches only weeks ago, spite the nurse so curiously far from the front lines. They will take her from him, refuse in the grim punchline of a cosmic joke his whiskey, his currency made counterfeit for the culling of his nurse, his Molly Millions.

 

His grip around the bottle, auburn glasswork and wax-sealed like wine, treats the churning waves to an incongruous shake of its own, a sea of whisky far more invidious than any water navigated in conventional geography. Oh, to Sloat's God, he has killed them both, murder at sea, shots piercing the neck from the end of the hallway, death certain after, only so, that instant of tearing, the prick of metallic death necessarily felt as the bullet strikes yet before sweet death relieves. The rain returns, cracks above as laughter from an old foe, raspy and auspicious for not speaking in such time, and it does not, coldly, purify. "The rain is back," Molly repeats, bashful in her duplicity, and trails off hotly. Sloat endures one last thought, rockets out of fuel and reaching the apex, the balance of action capsizing beneath his feet, and rides the punctuation of his terror, the sea's reply to the manslaughter with a stab of its own. The foamy broadside, opaque but for a lightning bolt encased within as it rises to eclipse the stromfront, rears above for a suicide plunge.

 

Forget the blasted whiskey. Sloat exists as a sprint, the helm and crumpling Molly the target of the sacrifice he serenely disdains to perform, and the monster strikes down. She cannot look away, but into the gray maw, and hears before the end a pair of primeval roars, guttural and bloodied with the rage reserved to end the entire war on the stolen deck of Sloat's grand getaway. Dissonance resounds, and for that terrible instant, the bullet piercing the mind, the runaway operator Henry Sloat encompasses the beautiful Miss Molly Millions in arms that know no surrender. The wave collides, and information itself is lost in the grey, Sloat and his mistake pulverized into vanity and a flat sea.

 

Westbound, where the war behind meets the war ahead is the resting place of love, canonized in resolute defiance of aloneness, sloshing about its pinnacle where no war exists. They sink now, entwined and heavy under the mercy of the waves, where descent for love at sea pardons a sacrifice for war at land.