Fast Attack

A delusional man is guilty of murder.

The cop motioned me to a chair.

“Are you still living on Bank Street?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s still Bank Street.”

“How about Smiley’s Pool Hall? I hear you shoot a mean game of nine-ball.”

“What’s that got to do with why I’m here?”

The cop pushed a pack of cigarettes across the table and leaned forward with a lighter. We studied each other’s eyes across the flame.

“I like to get acquainted, Alex. Things happen for a reason. You picked a hell of a place to kill somebody.”

“You have something against state parks?” I asked, pulling on the cigarette.

“No, I’m curious, is all. Why’d you do it? Better still, why’d you do it in front of a crowd?

“Ok, I did it because I wanted to and because the prick had it coming.”

“Let’s back up to the night before, Alex. What did you do Tuesday night?”

“I hung out and watched the w****s on Bank Street.”

“What else?”

“That was it. Afterward, I went to my flat and crashed.”

“What time did you get up?”

“6:00 a.m.”

“I’m listening,” the cop said.

“I made coffee, then sat in a window. A submarine was steaming up the Thames River. She was a Columbia class, pushing through a steel gray chop, heading for Long Island Sound with sunrays bouncing off her hull.

Claude called around 7:00 a.m. I was out the door a few minutes later. I got to his place on Broad Street after twenty minutes of walking. His windows were lit up with flashes from his welder. Seeing it gave me shivers. It was the same setup he had when his last place caught fire and burned up his girlfriend, Monk.”

“Sounds grim.”

"It was grim, all right. She was the sweetest woman I’ve ever known. Claude was one lucky sonofabitch.”

“Did you ever… “

 "No, f**k no, but I used to dream about her. Anyway, they’d been renting a cottage over in Waterford. Claude worked on his sculptures in the second-story loft, running a three-phase MIG and an acetylene torch up there. 

One night, he went out to hoist a few, and while he was gone, a 50-amp breaker caught fire. The containment box failed, and the cottage burned. They dug Monk out of the ashes She never made it out of bed.”

“That’s tough. Did you feel Claude was responsible for Monk’s death?”

I didn’t answer.

“Ancient history?” asked the cop.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Ok, let's keep going… you got to Claude’s place around 7:20 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Then what?”

“I passed some of his flophouse neighbors coming down the stairs. The hall smelled like a discharged firearm on account of the welder. I let myself in with the key Claude gave me. I told him about the submarine I’d seen churning up the Thames. That’s when he started talking s**t."

“Can you imagine staying submerged for that long? Ho! Not me, brother. It’s dark down there. I wouldn’t care how good the chow was. You know what they say, don’t you?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The diving part is optional; it’s coming up that’s mandatory. Ha-ha-ha!”

He was full of s**t. Chow on subs is good until you run out of fresh food; it takes about a week. After that, you get used to powdered eggs.

“Sometimes submarines don’t come up at all,” I said. “Maybe things go wrong, and you can’t blow to the surface. Down you go. Those are the boats that stay commissioned forever. They’re marked as being on eternal patrol.”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

“What the f**k are you talking about?” he asked as if he didn’t know I’d been commander of a nuclear submarine."

***

“We drove out of New London a few minutes later in search of antique shops, turning north on CT 9, speeding under the forest canopy, then into the sunlight, where granite outcrops stood against the sky.

He held the wheel steady on a long curve as we headed down a declivity and drove through a stretch of gloom. Pond cypress and carpets of moss flew by. The air was fragrant with decay and became corky as we pulled up an incline into a crisper verdancy.

He knew the landmarks and pointed them out to me with a relaxed smile. It wasn’t his usual look, and I felt a tinge of hostility for the unaccountable silliness in his expression. 

He’d always been a prick, but he kept smiling, pointing, and doing his best to deceive me.

He was riding high because his art was finally taking hold. He’d sculpted in obscurity for years, but then he’d put a gamechanger together by spot-welding coat hangers into a metal fabric, then working for another year to shape it into a mermaid, which he unveiled at the Mystic Arts Fair.

Some rich b***h from Rhode Island bought it. Not long after, the mermaid was featured in an art magazine. 

After that, Claude couldn’t keep up with the orders. He was the toast of the town. Oh, how they fawned over him! None of his newfound success would bring Monk back, though.

We stopped at several antique stores and then kept pushing through the forest. The rushing trees made me giddy, and I smiled as I watched them disappear in the passenger mirror.

Naturally, Claude took no notice. We pulled into a convenience gas station, and Claude went inside for a pack of cigarettes. At the same time, I pumped a bit of gasoline, remembering the time my special forces unit cornered that bearded terrorist in a Pakistani suburb--not the Hebrew, but the Saudi. He's the one we buried at sea so there'd be less to martyr. 

The Jew was a different story. I decided discretion was the better part of valor in his case. There was something... there messianic about the man, so I sent him on his way with a warning.

We took off from the station. I leaned very close to Claude and waved a hand in front of his face. Nothing more than a kind of peristaltic response. I used the opportunity to debrief myself about my first submarine command.

***

The boat was a fast attack dreadnought, fitted with destruction. Following her sea trials, we tracked the Soviets. The Russian cowards imagined us in every trench, and I grinned wolfishly at the prospect of an encounter with their so-called warships.

After a six-month patrol near the Barents Sea, we were put into port in Groton, CT. There was an incident with a tug that put her in drydock with some hull damage. After repairs, we hit the high seas again, rendezvousing off the coast of Cape Cod with the USS Sea Shark SSN 377 and a small armada of surface vessels. We prepared for sea trials, then brought her to half our maximum hull depth. On our third dive, we went deep and held her steady. I gave the order to take her up slowly. That’s when disaster struck. A pipe joint burst, and the engine room took water. The lights flickered, and the reactor shut down. We went straight to the battery banks, blew the main ballast, and went full rise on the bow planes! We’d sail out of it by God!

But she couldn’t blow. Her bow dipped, and she started down. I didn’t know, but much moisture in the flasks had turned to ice in the valve strainers. So down she went league after league with my men at their posts, awaiting my next order.

The pressure isn’t something you feel in an ear-popping sense. You feel it through vibration so hard that touching a bulkhead burns your fingertips. And you hear the hull groaning and buckling, the sound of your teeth rattling. You know that you’re done when it all feels very still.

Every man has thoughts, and there’s no time to say goodbye. There’s no reason to try because it’s enough that you’re all sharing your last moment together, like you’re sitting at a banquet table and passing a basket of biscuits around. Everybody’s guaranteed an equal share of it, and just for that frozen moment, all the other worries are in the hands of Providence.

When the depth meter showed 4,000 feet, I gave my final order, ‘Dog the hatches!’ And then she imploded.

***

Claude continued to drive, though, I must say, he did so doltishly, nearly passing out from the pungency of my twice-dead farts. He glanced over at me. His eyes watering with sympathy over some physical malady he imagined I must be suffering. He powered open the windows. Self-preservation finally gave me pause. I’d gained the upper hand but resolved not to underestimate his tactical abilities.

His diligence was far too great to ignore. He’d disguised his command center as the simple gauges of an automobile’s instrument clusters.”

“Command center?” asked the cop.

“Yes,” I insisted. “In fact, his entire ship’s bridge looked weird, like the inside of a truck. 

His encryption software he’d cleverly concealed within a cd player. What else might he be capable of? We were bearing 090, and he’d been dialing out ciphers for a while by then. I looked about the bridge for his nautical charts, but he’d hidden them. I'll admit that these were strange latitudes, and some of what I witnessed made little sense. We continued to drive, passing a sign advertising a state park called The Devil’s Hopyard. I suggested we pick up lunch and eat it in the park.

The weather was fine as I followed Claude to one of the park’s picnic tables. Claude looked every bit like the artist that I knew him to be. I reached for a stone.

'This is for Monk!' I shouted. And then I pulverized his skull."