Read Me and My Manny for Free Online Page B

concerned, that’s all.”
    I punched my pillow and sat upright against it. “Concerned about what?”
    “You and the way you’ll take on, if I’m deployed.”
    “You’re being deployed? When? And to where?”
    “I’m not. It’s only the usual scuttlebutt. You’ll just have to hack it if so.”
    “I can…I do. I’ve learned to cope.”
    He lowered his head, turning it once in silent disagreement. “Remember the night I headed back for my last tour of duty?”
    “The night I took you down to the Sound?” Having forgotten much about that night, I kept my mouth shut and let him fill me in.
    “I was supposed to spend those hours aboard ship,” he began. “Instead we did the town. Hopping from one waterfront bar after the other. You met a lot of old salts who told you a lot of tall tales. Boy did they ever shiver your timbers.”
    “Shiver I did. Especially after that contest to see who could eat the most steamed clams.”
    “That’s probably what made you sick. That and the half a dozen navy grogs you ordered to wash them down.”
    I looked at Harry silhouetted against the stars. “I liked the little paper umbrellas.”
    “Grogs don’t come with umbrellas. You got those from a pair of Molotov cocktails disguised as valley virgins.”
    “No wonder I was too drunk to drive back home.”
    “That’s why we stayed in a motel,” he said. “After you threw up and passed out, I checked to see if you were still breathing. By then it was dawn.”
    I had the faint impression of him on the bedside phone, calling a cab and leaving with a duffle bag slung over his back.
    “I didn’t mean to ditch you like that,” he went on.
    “Ditch me? If you hadn’t shoved off, you’d be facing a court-martial for jumping ship.”
    “I ditched you and split. Ever since, you’ve been clinging to that manny like a life raft.” He gestured toward Wolf on the bedroom chair with the mandatory sheet over his head. “It’s like my leaving triggered something. Like you thought I was never coming back.”
    “So I woke up with another sailor… make that a wooden sailor.” Embarrassed that he still focused on my attachment to the manny, I tried to make light of his comment. “Full-scale warfare tends to freak me out.”
    “All the more so after those old salts started telling you hair-raising stories. Those things can’t happen, Judy. No mutinous crews, no pirate invasions, none of it, no how on your modern high-tech destroyers.”
    As he spoke, I recalled a shabby waterfront bar where rumpled old men in pea coats and watch caps sat in the shadows, regaling me with legends about ships under the spell of evil forces, something they described in terms of possession.
    “I doubt the supernatural gives a damn about state-of-the-art equipment.”
    “C’mon, Judy. There’s no such thing as a bad luck ship.”
    Harry’s sudden denial of nautical superstitions gave me pause. He often outshined the best of the old salts in relating tales about spectral ships, creaking and groaning from a veil of thick fog. His negation on the heels of rumors about deployment made me wonder if he was hedging.
    “Tell that to the captain of the Titanic , the so-called unsinkable that sank.”
    Harry raised his hand. “Don’t start.”
    “The Titanic was on her maiden voyage. Tradition holds that you got a bad luck ship if it encounters a mishap at its outset—its launching or its maiden voyage. The Titanic never had a chance. If it hadn’t hit an iceberg, it would have met with some other disaster. Just like the other tragedies that happened involving jinxed ships.”
    “It’s not that bad things haven’t happened on the high seas,” Harry said. “Sailors go berserk and jump overboard for no apparent reason. However—”
    “Captains, too,” I interrupted. “Captains also have been known to go mad and commit murder.”
    “However,” he continued, “most of it can be blamed on the anxiety guys experience when cooped up for long