"Daniel da Cruz - Texas Trilogy 01 - The Ayes of Texas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

playing the trumpet, which he did inexpertly in the school band. But if he didn't play well, he played
loud and fast. It was talent enough, he thought at the age of twelve when he left home in
downstate Illinois to find work in a nightclub band. The closest he got was a succession of cheap
barrooms, which he kept more or less clean, for more or less board and room.
Sometimes he thought about the women at the Liber-ty Towers. In books he read in later years,
whores were always wronged maidens with hearts of gold, but that wasn't the way he
remembered it for the six months he had lived at Liberty Towers, before that police sergeant
conned him into joining the Navy. Of course, by then he had already learned a good deal about
whores, his mother being a part-timer and all that. At Liberty Towers, he learned it wasn't
generosity that prompted them to throw their money around, but stupidity and an indifference
about the morrow. Nor was their line of work-"profession" was hardly the word for a business that
required only a few hours of on-the-gob training to master-picturesque so much as degrading and
mechanical, mere assembly-line produc-tion involving nuts and screws. That they had been
driven into prostitution was only a self-delusive fable: they were mostly lazy, shiftless, dishonest
sluts who would do anything to avoid decent work, and feared only the day when they would be so
old and raddled that there would be no alternative to honest labor. Living in the company of such
females hadn't given him a joyous view of civilian life, and it was almost with relief that he had
walked through the main gate of Recruit Depot in Norfolk, Virginia, to begin what he thought was
going to be a bright new life as a sailor.
Going to sea had been a change, at that, but life was no sweeter than it had been ashore. If he
was big for fourteen, he was small for eighteen, and the target of every bully, bugger, and
boatswain's mate aboard the battleship U.S.S. Texas, to which he had been drafted as a bugler
after finishing Music School in late 1943. For Gwillam Forte, the enemy wasn't the Ger-mans and
Japanese, although during the next eighteen months he would see action against both, but his
own shipmates.
They took advantage of his ignorance by sending him on such fool's errands as fetching five
pounds of beano from the beano locker-an ancient wheeze in-spired by such pronouncements
over the public ad-dress system as "There will be no man-overboard drill today," and the like.
They took advantage of his trust-ing nature by borrowing money they never intended to return, and
cheating him out of the rest of his pay in rigged poker games. They took advantage of his
pre-sumed innocence by trying to bend him on in the spud locker, whereupon he stabbed one of
the two sodomists in the groin with a potato knife and scared the other into retreat. They won
anyway, with perjured testimony before a summary court that got him sixty days in the brig for
unprovoked assault.
Not all of Forte's unpleasant experiences aboard the battleship were the result of his shipmates'
malice or mischief. Most were due to the conflicts inevitable when one hundred officers and
seventeen hundred young men are crammed into a ship making month-long patrols, with little to
do but get on one another's nerves. Watch-standers were constantly on the lookout for enemy
submarines, a morale-sapping and futile precaution, for the Texas possessed no antisubmarine
weapons whatever. The ship was slow, ponderous, and uncomfortable. High seas buried its bow
beneath the waves, flinging icy sheets of water as high and far astern as the pilothouse; in far
northern waters it froze into a frigid mush on one's back and shoulders, and brought on a chill that
the hottest coffee couldn't dispel. The ship's pitch was like riding a gigantic yo-yo in slow motion,
and could turn a veteran sailor green.
Young Gwillam Forte, weary from constantly fight-ing the bucking and plunging ship, often
seasick, and never more than barely tolerated by his older ship-mates, lived a life of lonely misery.
He found it hard to believe that anyone could be happy, as one or two of his shipmates actually
seemed to be, aboard a man-of-war. He found it even more incredible that this floating
concentration camp was once the gem of the ocean. Of course, that was long before his time . . .