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fried a couple of pork chops. He had trouble getting the color right; all the faces were yellow. I had a try at it and lost the picture completely, then gave him advice while he labored to get the picture back.
    By the time
Bonanza
came on we were ready. We turned off the lights and settled in front of the screen, which looked like Cinerama after the dinky Magnavox we’d been watching. It was, as always, a story of redemption—man’s innate goodness brought to flower by a strong dose of opportunity, hard work, and majestic landscape. During the scene when the wounded drifter whom Hoss has taken in (over Little Joe’s objections) and nursed back to health nobly refuses, even under threat of death, to help his sociopath brother ambush the good brothers, the Cartwrights, and run off with their cattle, Sergeant Benet rocked in his seat and said, “Amen. Amen.” He said it again during the big turkey-carving scene at the end, when the camera panned the happy faces at the Ponderosa feast table.And I was moved myself, as in some way I had planned to be. Why else would I have put myself on the road that afternoon except for the certain reward of this emotion, unattainable from a 12-inch black-and-white?—this swelling of pride in the beauty of my own land, and the good hearts and high purposes of her people, of whom, after all, I was one.

Command Presence
    W HEN I was eighteen I worked on a ship, a Coast and Geodetic Survey ship out of Norfolk. As I sat on my bunk one night, reading a book, I became aware that one of my shipmates was staring at me. My face burned, the words started swimming on the page, the tranquillity in which I had been imagining the scenes of the novel was broken. For a time I blindly regarded the book and listened to the voices of the other men, the long shuddering surge of the engine. Finally I had no choice but to look back at him.
    He was one of the ship’s mechanics. He had rabbity eyes and red hair cropped so close his scalp showed through. His skin was white. Not fair. White, the pallor of a life spent belowdecks. He hardly ever spoke. I had felt the weight of his scrutiny before, but never like this. I saw that he hated me.
    Why did he hate me? He may have felt—I might have made him feel—that I was a tourist here, that my life would not be defined, as his had been, by years of hard labor at sea relieved now and then by a fewdays of stone drunkenness in the bars of Norfolk and Newport News. I’d been down to the engine room on errands and maybe he’d seen me there and seen the fastidiousness that overcame me in this dim, clanking, fetid basement where half-naked men with greasy faces loomed from the shadows, shouting and brandishing wrenches. He might have noted my distaste and taken it as an affront. Maybe my looks rubbed him wrong, or my manner of speech, or my habitual clowning and wising off, as if we were all out here on a lark. I was cheerful to a fault, no denying that; glib, breezy, heedless of the fact that for most of the men this cramped inglorious raft was the end of the line. It could have been that. Or it could have been the book I was reading, the escape the book represented at that moment and in time to come. Then again there might have been no particular reason for what he felt about me. Hatred sustains itself very well without benefit of cause.
    Not knowing what to think of him, I thought nothing at all. I lived in a dream anyway, in which I featured then as a young Melville, my bleary alcoholic shipmates as bold, vivid characters with interesting histories they would one day lay bare to me. Most of what I looked at I didn’t really see, and this mechanic was part of what I didn’t see.
    I worked on cleanup details in the morning, scraped and painted in the afternoon. One day I was scraping down the hull of a white runabout that was kept on davits for the captain’s pleasure and as a partial, insincere fulfillment of our lifeboat requirement. It was sultry. The sun beat