The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin Page B

like a long, bad party in its final hour. A few days before, we had learned that a U.S. patrol had converged with a Soviet unit on the Elbe, and rumors were circulating that Hitler was already dead, or gone mad, or both. All that remained was Berlin itself, though Japan was still a question. Roosevelt had been dead three weeks, and nobody trusted Truman yet, this Missouri haberdasher turned president, but these things seemed not to matter; the war would end of its own accord, whoever made the final decisions.
    As a navigational officer, even the most junior of one, little was required of me during the off-loading; I spent the afternoon on deck, watching the ships come and go from the harbor, beneath a sky of unseasonable blueness and thick, doughy clouds pushed along by a bracing April wind. A new aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea, had just been launched from its locks, and now she lay at anchor, a huge city of floating gray steel almost a thousand feet long, rising twenty stories above the fouled waters of the harbor. I was enough of a patriot to experience an almost visceral stirring at the sight of her, though something else too: that small, unassailable tweak of shame that I had spent the war so far removed from any actual danger. Whenever we were in port, especially the large naval yards at Norfolk and New York, I often found myself among groups of uniformed men, the sailors on shore leave and infantrymen preparing to ship out. They pressed into the waterfront bars and restaurants and movie houses, making every space seem small with their loud voices and the rich haze of their cigarettes. The feeling that passed among them was positively electrical, like some binding, subatomic force. As merchant mariners, we were widely thought of as members of a kind of ancillary navy-technically, we were classified 2B, worker in an essential industry-and never once did anyone confront me directly with an accusation of cowardice. But I knew the truth; I could feel the truth. In those same waterfront bars, a sailor might bump into me by accident, or I might find myself standing at the rail beside a group of freshly minted PFCs on the town for one last night of fun before they shipped out; and though at such moments we might exchange a courteous word or two, always their eyes would slide past me quickly, as if I weren’t completely visible.
    I was watching the Coral Sea from the fantail, feeling these things and despite it all a kind of warm happiness to pass a few empty hours in the spring sun, when I was joined by a shipmate, a man named Mauritz. Mauritz was nobody I knew very well or liked all that much; he was an old mariner, thirty years at sea and brown as the whiskey he drank fiercely, and like all the other lifers, he regarded the hurry-ups as a kind of necessary wartime burden, like gas rationing or bad coffee. The one thing I liked about him was that he played jazz guitar, not just well but expertly-in another life he might have been a professional musician. Sometimes at night he would bring his guitar into the mess or out on deck and play for us, his fingers drawing melodies of such tenderness from his instrument that the very air around him seemed different, lighter. I wondered if he had a family-surely the depth of feeling I heard in his music came from some meaningful human attachment-but I never asked, thinking also that he might be alone. I was wondering about this one night when I asked instead what the names of the songs were.
    He scowled as if my question were the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and did something with his fingers to tune the strings. “No names.” I thought the conversation had ended, but then he winked at me and laughed. “You think of some, you tell me.”
    Mauritz had been dockside all morning, one of a dozen hands supervising the transfer of diesel from our tanks into the holding pens. His face and arms were so dirty with oil that the cigarette tucked behind his ear was as startlingly white as