Read Finding a Girl in America for Free Online Page B

before the Captain said: ‘They’re from ONI, Joe, and it’s about you.’
    Joe turned in his chair and gazed off toward the bar and shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead and murmured something he couldn’t hear and didn’t want to, and then it was over, the long bantering friendship between them, he felt it go out of him like dry tears through his ribs and for an instant, watching Joe’s profiled face that could never look at him again, he raged at the other face he had never seen, impassioned and vulnerable in the night, then the rage was gone too and he sat watching Joe rubbing his forehead, watched Joe profiled in that place of pain and humiliation where he had fallen and where the Captain could never go. Yet still he kept talking, threw words into the space, bounced them off the silent jaw and shoulder: ‘Listen, I hate the bastards. I don’t want you to see them. They’re going to tell you general court or resign, but I’m going to tell them to get the hell off my ship, and I’ll handle it. No one will know anything. Not for a while anyway. Not till you’ve written your letter and gone. And still they won’t know why. I don’t care about what they told me, I want you to know that. They brought paperwork and it was sealed and it still is and it’ll stay that way. I don’t give a good Goddamn and I never did . You hear me, Joe?’
    He waited. Joe nodded, looking at the bar.
    â€˜I hear you, Captain.’
    For perhaps a minute they sat that way. Then Captain Devereaux got up and touched Joe’s shoulder and walked out.
    Corporal Swanson was sleeping in the sun, his cap over his eyes, and he did not wake when the Captain and the coxswain and crew descended into the gently rocking boat, did not wake until Captain Deveraux softly spoke his name. Then he stood quickly and saluted and the Captain smiled and asked if he’d had a good nap. All the way back to the ship he talked to Swanson; or, rather, asked him questions and watched him closely and tried to listen. Swanson was not staying in the Marines; in another year he’d get out and go to college in South Dakota. He wasn’t sure yet what he wanted to be. He had a girl in South Dakota and he meant to marry her. The Captain sat smiling and nodding and asking, and sometimes he leaned forward to listen over the sound of the engine, and it wasn’t until the launch drew within a hundred yards of the ship that he knew Joe wasn’t coming back, and then at once he knew he had already known that too, had known in the Club that Joe’s isolation was determined and forever, and now he twisted around and looked back over his shoulder, into the sky above the air base, then looked forward again at the huge ship, at its high grey hull which now rose straight above him, casting a shadow across the launch.
    At six-thirty Foster and Todd found him on the flight deck. He had been there for an hour, walking the thousand feet from fore to aft, looking into the sky and out at the sea. When they emerged from the island and moved toward him, walking abreast and leaning into the wind, he was standing at the end of the flight deck. He saw them coming and looked away. The sun was going down. Out there, toward the open sea, a swath of gold lay on the water. When they stopped behind him he did not turn around. He was thinking that, from a distance, a plane flying in the sunset looks like a moving star. Then shutting his eyes he saw the diving silver plane in the sunset, and then he was in it, his heart pounding with the dive, the engine roaring in his blood, and he saw the low red sun out the cockpit and, waiting, the hard and yielding sea.
    â€˜Commander Saldi is not here,’ he said.
    â€˜Not here?’ It was Foster. ‘Where is he?’
    â€˜He’s out there.’
    Foster stepped around and stood in front of him, and then Todd did, and they stood side by side, facing him, but he