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It would take the salvage ship Warbler half a day to reach the site where the Regatta lay wounded, bleeding its black cargo into the ocean. By then, the tanker’s stern had sunk all the way to the bottom, a scant forty feet below, pushing the bow up to the sky. The fuel tank had caught fire and now the bow was burning fiercely, like a torch half-buried in the sea. It would be impossible to tell how much of the cargo was salvageable until they put out the fire and inspected the lower decks.
The US Coast Guard had answered the distress call and issued both a rescue request to all ships in the area, civilian ones included, and an immediate salvage request to Warbler’s port at Key West. By coincidence, Warbler was already in the vicinity, having set course to salvage a freighter sunk by a U-Boat in the same area. It seemed that the Krauts had lucked out that day.
Dick’s heart skipped a beat when D’Angiolo, the radio operator, came to smoke him out during his night break and handed him the jotted down coordinates and details of the new salvage.
“Regatta,” D’Angiolo said, in a somber voice. “Isn’t that your friend’s ship?”
Torpedo attack, said the note. Engine exploded. Fuel tank afire.
“Is he—Are there—”
D’Angiolo scratched the back of his neck. “Coast Guard said one casualty, eighteen presumed. No names.”
Dick nodded, crumpling the paper in his fist reflexively. When he realized what he’d done, he opened his hand and smoothed it out, embarrassed.
“Goddamn Krauts had a field day,” D’Angiolo muttered grimly.
“Did we adjust course?” Dick asked, defaulting by habit to his more formal voice.
“Yes, sir. Captain gave the order ten minutes ago.”
“ETA?”
D’Angiolo checked his watch. “It’s gonna be another three hours to the site. Less till we meet the lifeboats. Three of ’em, they said.”
“All right,” Dick sighed, pushing aside the bedsheets. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I can send Beaver to wake you up.”
“No,” Dick said curtly, then regretted his tone. “Thank you, Bill. I’ll just come over and make myself useful.”
Once alone, he got up, shaved, and changed into clean clothes. While shaving, hunched in front of his tiny mirror, he could hear his friend’s good-natured ribbing as if the man were there, leaning on the porthole with his arms crossed on his chest: “You dolling yourself up for me? Cute.”
It was about five in the morning when they sighted the lifeboats, three just like the Coast Guard had said, with five men aboard each. It took an hour to get all of them on the Warbler. After the tenth unshaven, soot-spattered, exhausted face climbed on deck and none of them was the right one, Dick started to feel a soft, high-pitched ringing to his ears. In the pitch darkness by the starboard, it was impossible to tell the men apart.
Dick would never know if it was by chance or rather a touch of chivalry on his friend’s part, but he finally climbed up last. Dick released an audible sigh of relief when the familiar patch of black hair peaked up the ladder.
“Master Nixon,” Barbetti said, shaking the man’s hand with a degree of genuine emotion. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Nixon said, returning the handshake with a firm one of his own. His eyes swiped through the small Warbler crew on deck, searching, and rested on Dick’s face. He nodded minutely, and Dick answered in the same way. There were dark circles under those eyes to match an equally dark full beard.
“Let’s patch up those wounds and get you all cleaned up,” Barbetti said. “Mr. Winters?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Please set course to Brunswick. We are giving the gentlemen a ride.”
“That’s very kind of you, Captain,” Nixon sighed.
“Least we can do.”
“Right away, sir,” Dick confirmed, and headed off to the bridge.
He didn’t see Nixon until later. He relieved Mizner at the wheel and made himself busy with all sorts of inconsequential stuff, double and triple checking every small thing and positively annoying the hell out of the bridge staff. He chalked his mood up to a spot of submarine paranoia, the extra adrenaline rush they all got when they entered U-Boat hunting grounds, but really it was more than just that: now that he knew that Nixon was all right, he dreaded talking to him almost as much as he’d longed for it, an unpleasant feeling not unlike an itch he couldn’t reach far enough to scratch.
It was well into the morning when he finally relinquished his post and headed to the officers’ quarters. In a strike of inspiration, he’d given his room key to Beaver and instructed him to deliver it to Master Nixon and tell him that he could rest there. Beaver had come back ten minutes later without the key.
He smoothed his hair back, silencing the Nixon-sounding ghost in his mind who only existed to remind him of his weaknesses, and knocked at the door.
After a moment a gruff, sleepy groan came from inside: “Come in.”
Nixon was lying on Dick’s berth. He looked clean, or at least cleaner, having divested of his dirty jacket and trousers and boots. The clothes had been hung in the open porthole to air out, but a faint, lingering fire smell permeated the room nonetheless. On the berth, Nixon lay in his shirtsleeves and underpants. His face, washed of the dirt and soot, looked less exhausted than it had upon climbing aboard, his beard softer and somehow looking less like a dark smudge on his face.
I think it’d suit me, he’d said once, rubbing his stubbly chin like a philosopher. Make me look the part.
“Hi,” Nixon said now, pushing himself up on his elbows.
“Hi.”
Dick closed the door behind him. For a moment they just looked at each other in silence. Dick felt at a loss for words, almost as if tragedy had struck instead of this merciful miss; Nixon looked too tired or too stricken to articulate past his monosyllabic greeting.
“Still drinking nothing but the Vat 69?” Dick asked, tipping his chin at the hip flask sitting on the nightstand, cap unscrewed.
Nixon studied him for a moment, then bowed his head as if in surrender to some internal struggle.
“Dick, quit looking at me like that.” Nixon extended his right hand, fingers curling up in a beckoning gesture. “C’mere.”
Once Dick touched his hand, it was the easiest thing to let Nixon pull him over to the edge of the cot. Nixon’s free hand rose to wrap around Dick’s arm, locking him in a vague resemblance of a hug.
“You lost weight,” Nixon assessed, casting him a critical look.
“I didn’t.”
“Liar.” Nixon moved a hand to Dick’s hip, testing the taut plane of his belly. “Do they feed you on this garbage scow?”
“This garbage scow saved your ass,” Dick replied, piqued on behalf of the old girl.
“And unless you plan on eating it, I don’t see how that helps,” Nixon replied.
Dick blinked and felt his cheeks turn warm at the innuendo, but he had thought about the man too much over the course of the past months—not to mention the hours he’d spent fearing him dead—to let a little dirty joke deter him.
“Maybe I do,” he replied.
That won him a smirk, at least. “That a promise?”
Dick shrugged.
“My oh my. Sea life taught you some bad habits, sailor.”
“This one I already had, though, didn’t I?”
This particular bad habit was, after all, what had landed him on the Warbler, toiling day after day to salvage crippled ships instead of fighting the Krauts on the battlefield. On a bad day, Dick had to remind himself that despite all, this was still doing his part.
Nixon’s mouth curled into a full, short-lived smile. His right hand rubbed Dick’s arm up and down, but his eyes moved away, stalling.
“Nix—”
Nixon produced an amused scoff. “No one else calls me that.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
Nixon heaved a sigh. “You’re not letting me off the hook on this one, are you?”
Dick recoiled. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“No, it’s all right. It was—great. Fantastic. Took a direct hit to the fuel tank. Simmons—Our pilot bled to death on the bridge. Piece of shrapnel to his neck. I got out, fourteen more got out. We thought we heard screams from below deck, so me and two others went back, but—” He paused.
“The rest of them?”
“Trapped. Blown up, burnt, or drowned. Goddamn nightmare.”
“I’m sorry,” Dick murmured, covering Nixon’s hand with his own.
“Yeah. Thanks. I just—” Nixon looked up, brow suddenly furrowed in a soft, pained expression. “Look, I’m just gonna tell you, all right?”
“Sure.”
“When the first round hit us, I thought, This is it. This is the way I go. But I didn’t give a damn about any of it. The boys, the ship. Kathy. The kid. I just didn’t.”
“Lew, it’s okay.”
“One thing, though,” Nixon continued. “One thing I was pissed as hell about. I thought, Goddamnit. Best sex of my life and I’m never gonna see him again.”
Dick exhaled slowly through his nose, feeling his chest constricted by a rush of emotion. “I wasn’t sure,” he confessed.
“I figured.” Nixon flashed a tiny smile and hinted at the door with a tip of his chin. “Standing there like I was gonna boot you out of your own room.”
Dick felt a flush of shame at how easily Nixon could read him, but at the same time, relief soothed his boiling anxiety like salve on a burn.
“Well, it’s been months. You didn’t answer my letter.” Nixon’s eyebrows did a number on his face. “No, it’s fine. I just figured you weren’t interested.”
“I never got a letter. Course I’d’ve answered. I wanted to look you up, but you said you’d write, and—” He trailed off. His hand climbed up to cup Dick’s cheek in its palm, his eyes looking big and liquid and darker than ever. “It’s good to see you,” he murmured.
In the end it was Dick who initiated the kiss. Nixon’s beard, now long and soft, felt better against Dick’s chin than the rough stubble that had burned his face months ago. Nixon’s mouth felt and tasted just the same, hot and sweet and sour from the scotch. Nixon, he was reminded, kissed like he did anything else: like he was the master of all he surveyed, possessive and lazy at the same time, an attitude Dick found infuriating in anyone else but—try as he may—couldn’t seem to begrudge this man.
“We’ll be docking soon,” Dick said when the kiss ended, his mouth still close to Nixon’s.
Nixon sighed. “Way to spoil the moment, Dick.”
“I’m sorry, but I need to say this.” Dick pulled his head back and touched Nixon’s hand resting in the man’s lap. “I don’t know how long this job’s gonna take. We’ve got another one lined up, and if all goes well it might be a couple weeks, maybe more. That is, if nothing comes up in the meantime. And you’ll have your hands full with—Well.”
Nixon looked down at their fingers joined together, then rubbed his face with his free hand—an utterly dejected, impotent gesture. “Those letters to the boys’ mothers aren’t gonna write themselves, that’s for sure.” He tipped his face up. “That’s your way to lay me off gently, I suppose.”
“No, nothing like that,” Dick replied quickly. “I’m just saying, it might be a while, but when I’m ashore next, I’ll look you up. If you want.”
Nixon looked relieved. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. But perhaps,” he suggested, fingers idly rubbing Dick’s palm, “I should come over.”
“Yeah,” Dick agreed, ignoring the—admittedly faint—pang of guilt at the thought of Nixon’s wife and child in New Jersey. “I’ll give you my address, okay? And then—”
Somebody knocked at the door, and Dick sprung to his feet like a wind-up toy.
“What?” Nixon barked.
Perhaps it was the tone, but the man on the other side didn’t dare open the door to deliver his message. “Docking in twenty minutes, sir,” he announced.
“I’ve gotta go back to the bridge,” Dick said after Nixon dismissed the messenger. He walked over to his small writing table, wrote down his address, and handed the piece of paper to the man in his bed. “Soon. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Nixon promised, looking at the offering for one long moment before lifting his hand. Instead of stealing the note, he closed his fingers around Dick’s and pulled the other’s hand to his mouth, the paper slip crushed in their joint grip. He placed a dry, soft kiss on the back of Dick’s hand, causing a warm flush to rush all the way up to Dick’s face.
Nixon smiled, unmistakably pleased with himself. “Soon.”