“There’s this boy living on a cotton plantation, and he goes off to college, and after a while he writes to his daddy and says everybody in the fraternity has a monkey and will his daddy buy him one too. So the man buys his son a monkey, and the boy brings him home on vacations, and when he’s finished college he asks his daddy if he can leave the monkey at home, because he’s going out into the world. So his daddy says sure, son, that’ll be fine. So the boy leaves and the monkey stays, and one day the man goes outside and sees the monkey out in the cotton field. He’s carrying a gunny sack and going down the rows, picking cotton and putting it in the sack, and the man watches him for a while, going down the rows and filling sacks, and then he says to himself, Now if I had me a hunnerd monkies like that, I wouldn’t have to pay nobody to pick my cotton. So he goes to the pet store and orders a hundred monkies, and the owner of the pet store wants to know what he’s going to do with one hundred monkies. So the man tells him, and the owner says: Nossir, I ain’t goin’ to order you them monkies, and I’ll tell you why. The next fellow down the road’ll see them monkies in your field, and he’ll get to thinking, and he’s goin’ to order him two hunnerd. Then some old boy with a bigger plantation he’s goin’ to order three hunnerd, and pretty soon the South’ll be overrun with monkies, and some damn Yankee lawyer’s goin’ to come down here and turn ’em loose and they’ll go to school with my chilren.”

  Willie laughed. He laughed till his eyes watered, while so many of my white friends, from the Northeast and West and Midwest, had never given it more than a courteous sound resembling laughter, and some had frowned and said: Bad, Gerry, bad. But Willie understood the true butt of the joke.

  “It’s economic,” he said. “So I guess that makes it sociological. Even philosophical. Course it generally is economic.”

  “Sure. It was an agrarian society. An aristocracy even, with—”

  “Not just Negroes and whites. It’s generally economic when somebody’s shitting on somebody else.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Northern mills went South after the Civil War. You think it was for the climate?”

  “Cheap labor.”

  “Cheap white labor. That’s how Shoeless Joe Jackson got started playing ball. Played for a mill. Baseball was good for the morale. Fat cats always have ideas about how to keep poor folks happy without signing a check. You think those mills have unions yet?”

  “Nope. But I have another joke.”

  “From down home?”

  “Again.”

  “Sounds to me like you hung out with some liberals. I thought the good old boys kicked their asses on Saturday nights, till they all went North.”

  “I seem to be in Yokosuka myself.”

  “Indeed you do, my friend, indeed you do. You going to retire down there? If you can stand this Navy bullshit for twenty years?”

  “Never,” I said. Then: “I don’t think so, anyway.”

  Because we haven’t even talked about it, you and I, and until Willie asked me I had not known I had thought about it at all. But something in me had. Or had at least made a decision without telling the rest of me about it, through the process we call thinking. (Maybe all murders are premeditated but the killer never knows it.) Because I said never at once, with firmness and certainty and, in my heart, the awakening of an old dread that had slept, but lightly, on the edge of insomnia. As though Willie had asked me whether I would sleep with a coral snake.

  “Some of my people miss it,” he said. “They go down at Christmas. My grandparents went back to Alabama last year, to stay.”

  “I didn’t know you were from Alabama.”

  “I’m not. My parents were born in Philadelphia.”

  “Why did they go back?”

  His shoulders tightened, and just as quickly his eyes were angry. He said: “Social Security buys more down there.” Then his eyes softened, and his shoulders relaxed—no: slumped toward the table that was so low I could see his belt—and he said: “To see their people. To die at home. They left it to have my father and aunts and uncles in the North. But Alabama was always home. Isn’t it strange? Home? How it can shield you from all the shit out there? The evening meal of the poor—beans and greens and cornbread and rice—and the old bed and the tarpaper roof.”

  “You’ve been down there?”

  “No. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I couldn’t get leave anyway. My father wrote to me, after they went down last Christmas.”

  “Did he say it was bad?”

  “Hell, no. It was a happy letter. He said compared to the sixth floor of a tenement, it was a Goddamn resort. A little house with a little yard with flowers, and they have a vegetable garden, and two oak trees, and a dirt road, and a front porch with a swing where they can sit. And friends. Old people. They gather on the porch at night and drink coffee and talk. No gangs of punks. No junkies. No dealers. Sometimes there’s a fight at the bar.”

  “That’s the best kind.”

  “Of fight?”

  “Of bar.”

  “I forgot. You don’t like the officers’ club. Mean-ass Cajun carries a knife. Holds it at a redneck. Poor guy’s celebrating. Just being happy because they found what the fish and the river left of Emmett Till.”

  “A pocket knife. For fishing and hunting. And in general.”

  “In general.”

  “I’ve always had one. Since Daddy gave me my first one—”

  “When you were two.”

  “Eight. To go with my first long pants.”

  “No button on it? Makes the blade come out smelling blood?”

  “Here.”

  I twisted in the seat and tried to put my hand in my pocket, but he said: “Shit no, man. Don’t pull that thing in here. This is your kind of place, not mine. I like quiet plastic bars. I don’t need some drunk Marine charging over with a bayonet. Just happens to be taped to his leg. Tell your joke.”

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “About what?”

  “Violence.”

  “Not at all, friend. If it weren’t for the draft, I wouldn’t even be a public relations man in a fucking uniform.”

  “I think—”

  Then I stopped, and looked away, at the reddened darkness and the moving shapes of people.

  “You think what?”

  I looked at him.

  “That if I were a Negro I’d be dead now.”

  “Or you would have learned how to stay alive. The joke, Mr. Fontenot. And I hope it’s not as complex as you are.”

  “I’m not complex.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not.” He finished his beer, looked at my near-empty glass, and raised his hand without looking at the bar, or at the waitress when she somehow and at once noticed him and came and he ordered Asahis. He was looking at me, at my eyes. “My Cajun shipmate,” he said.

  “There’s a monkey walking down the road. In the South, a gravel road, a country road, and he’s walking on the side of it. He hears a pickup coming behind him, and he looks around, and there’s a white man at the wheel, speeding up and aiming at the monkey, and the monkey jumps off the road just in time and lands in a deep ditch. Truck goes on and the monkey climbs out and brushes himself off and shakes his head. Then he starts walking down the road again. After about a mile he sees a car coming toward him, on the other side of the road. There’s a Negro driving, and when he sees the monkey he comes across the road at him, and the monkey jumps in the ditch and the car misses him and goes on by. Monkey climbs out of the ditch again. He brushes off the dust and watches the car driving away, and shakes his head and says: My people, my people …”

  Again Willie laughed, even as the waitress appeared suddenly out of the dark and noise, and he reached back for his wallet, doubling forward with that motion and his laughter too, and gave her some yen and shook his head and held his hand up to refuse the change and she thanked him in Japanese—I can’t spell the word; its sound is arrigato—then he stopped laughing and drew on his cigarette but he laughed again as he inhaled, then he coughed. I was laughing and he waved a hand at me to stop so he could clear his throat and breathe, but I couldn’t stop, for still I was seeing that Darwinian monkey on the dusty gravel road, in the hot afternoon of summer, shaking his head, bewildered and sad. Willie coughed again, breathed clearly a couple of times, swallowed some beer; and then, as though he saw too what I did—that puzzled and doleful monkey—he was laughing.

  There is something about true laughter. Or at least about laughter whose source is not really comic. Like yesterday at sea—I was going to get to this but I can’t stop writing about being ashore with Willie—when we were firing live rounds with VT fuses from the five-inch fifty-four gun mount, and during the firing exercise the magazine jammed and the sailors in my gun crew had to unload it by hand, carrying one shell at a time, cradled in their arms and held against their chests, having to carry the round to the turret’s hatch and hand it to a sailor waiting at the top of the gun mount’s ladder, then that sailor had to back down the short but vertical ladder and carry the round across the small deck, then down and down the series of angled ladders going below decks, where he could at last hand it to someone else to store. The danger of this is dropping it. The VT fuse at the head of the round is a variable time fuse, meaning once the round is fired from the gun the fuse is activated and will explode not on contact but when it approaches something—fifty feet away, thirty feet, whatever, depending on the fuse’s setting. I was of course frightened, as the sailors were, and I stayed with them, so if a sailor dropped a round and set the fuse into action and it exploded he’d at least know his officer’s meat and bones would join his on the bulkheads of the turret, which had always seemed comfortably large, with enough space for men to move about in, but as each sailor removed a round and carried it to the man on the ladder, our place seemed smaller and smaller, just enough to contain all the force of an explosion and what was left of the two men who before the sound and flash had been standing, breathing, speaking.

  Do not think of me as brave. It was simply required. Besides, there was a detachment about my fear. I was watching myself doing my work as it ought to be done, and I concentrated more on that than on images of my body in flung pieces, and never seeing you again, or the sea and the sun, and all else that I love. Then a sailor, a seaman by rank, a lanky and gentle man from Idaho named Mattingly, dropped a round. He had just removed it from the gun’s magazine, had turned toward me to pass me and hand it to the sailor on the ladder. It simply fell, as though his arms decided to uncurl from its weight. It struck the steel deck and slid perhaps a foot between us, then stopped. Its fuse was bent at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. It had hit the deck loudly, and there was the sound of its slide, then Mattingly and I looked at each other in a moment of new and absolute silence, though outside the turret, now that the firing exercise was over, planes were catapulting from the flight deck. Mattingly’s face was pale, like that of a man who without warning is about to vomit. Probably mine was too. I know my mouth had opened, as Mattingly’s had. Then he bent for the round, and I spoke before I knew that I could.

  “Don’t touch it,” I said.

  We watched it. Then I turned to the sailor on the ladder, only his head and shoulders appearing above the hatch. The sun was on his face, but his flesh was pale too, as though he had been in the engine room for months.

  “Get off the ladder,” I said. “Take the other men off the deck. Then lock the hatch behind you. Don’t let anyone out here. Wait. Except Ensign Stark. You know him? The EOD officer?” The sailor nodded. “And his chief. He’ll probably bring his chief. But nobody else. Do you understand? Mattingly’s going with you too.”

  “Mr. Fontenot,” Mattingly said.

  “Go on.”

  “I’m the one dropped it.”

  “Go on, Mattingly.”

  “Yes sir.”

  There was not relief in his voice; or fear either; or any tone that implied hurry. He spoke like a man obeying someone at a funeral. Then he was gone, and on the phone at the bulkhead I dialed Stark’s number and told him.

  “You said VT?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s bent? The fuse? Where are you?”

  “Standing here looking at it.”

  “We’re on the way. And you get out of there.”

  “I want to make sure it doesn’t move.”

  “On this big fucking ship? A grocery cart wouldn’t move. I’m there,” and he hung up.

  He and his chief came with a manual. Stark was first up the ladder, the color still in his face (and I hoped mine was restored, if in fact it had left), and in one hand he was holding the book. His starched khakis were crumpled. He stood looking at our companion on the deck, at its bent fuse. He pushed up the visor of his cap, and blond curls showed at his forehead. Everett Stark is twenty-two years old, married just before we sailed, and he is my drinking friend. He is a cheerful drinker and is the ship’s explosive ordinance disposal officer and also our diver, scuba and deep-sea. His chief stood beside him, a dark wiry man nearing forty. He had a tool kit with him; he nodded at me once, and looked at the round. We could have been standing over a corpse, not of a friend, but of a man we had all known. Stark said: “Did you call the OOD?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “To keep him informed.”

  “Should have told him just to keep his ears open. He’d be the first to know.”

  The chief took off his khaki cap, tossed it to the deck, and said: “The fourth.” Then he kneeled beside the round and, with one finger, touched it. “At least it ain’t a fucking misfire,” he said. “Fucker’s cold as my old lady.”

  Stark grinned and kneeled beside him.

  “Good thing it’s not as hot as mine.”

  “Mr. Stark’s a bridegroom,” the chief said, looking at the fuse while Stark read the table of contents of his manual.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You can go,” Stark said. “In case you need to call the OOD.”

  “In case he can’t hear a big bang,” the chief said.

  “So you can write the report.”

  “In triplicate,” the chief said.

  “I’ll stay.”

  Stark shrugged. “What the fuck. It won’t be the first last call we’ve had.”

  “Mr. Stark,” the chief said. “Is that book talking to you yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  I did move toward the hatch, close enough to be blown up, far enough to feel that at least I wasn’t as close as they were, at least I wasn’t touching it.

  “Here it is,” Stark said. “Want to hear it?”

  “I can’t understand that shit. Just read it to yourself and tell me what it says. If you don’t mind.”

  Stark read, then talked to the chief, his voice low until he finished; then he laughed and slapped the chief on the shoulder.

  “I think it says be careful,” he said.

  “Seems to be the message. Maybe Mr. Fontenot could call the OOD, inform him we’re being careful. In accordance with the manual.”

  I wanted to. Because it had become bizarre. Only a few feet outside the hatch was the sea, and I wanted to pick up the round and go down the ladder and to the rail and drop it into the Pacific. But Stark and the chief had to know whether the fuse had been activated and was ready to explode as soon as it looked at something, and for some reason had simply chosen not to yet, but might at any time: as it was carried past a bulkhead, or through a hatch. They worked quietly. They murmured to each other, passed and received screwdrivers and pliers, finally spoke hardly at all: Okay, they said, or That’s that, and once Stark picked up the open manual and looked at a diagram and showed it to the chief who nodded and leaned over again with his screwdriver. There was such concentration in their faces that it seemed their bodies existed only to keep their faces alive. And their hands, their fingers. Then the fuse was off, resting bent in the chief’s hand, looking as lethal still as it had on the round. Then at once Stark and the chief started laughing. I watched them. Then I smiled.

  “Gerry,” Stark said, between his laughter. “Call the OOD.”

  “Tell him,” the chief said, one hand on Stark’s shoulder, the other rubbing the fuse, as a gold prospector might hold and fondle a nugget, “tell him we got him a paperweight.”

  “To put under his cap,” Stark said.

  “Inside his skull,” the chief said. “Give him something to roll around in there.”

  Together they stood, arms about each other’s shoulders, laughing as though indeed they had drunk that lethal and lovely last call that would send them singing into the streets, howling at the moon, ready for fighting, lovemaking, or a bottle to share sitting on a curb. They even moved drunkenly to the hatch, and the chief leaned out of it and, sidearm, threw the fuse over the rail, into the sea. Then he released Stark and went backward down the ladder, smiling, shaking his head, then laughing again as he stopped midway and reached his hands through the hatch.

  “Here you go, Mr. Stark.”

  Stark brought the round to the hatch and lowered it into the chief’s hands. He backed down the ladder, went to the rail, looked at the water, then up at us standing at the hatch.