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Fiction from Web del SolThe Teak Wood Deck of the USS Indiana
Michael Martone
I stabbed a man in Zulu. It had to do with a woman. I
remember it was a pearled pen knife I'd got from a garage.
I'd used it for whittling and the letters were wearing
off. It broke off in his thigh and nicked the bone. It
must have hurt like hell.
I did the time in Michigan City in the metal shop where
I would brush on flux and other men would solder. Smoke
would be going up all over the room. They made the denim
clothes right there in the prison. The pants were as
sharp as the sheet metal we were folding into dustpans and
flour scoops. It was like I was a paper doll and they'd
folded the jacket on me with the tabs creased over my
shoulders. And the stuff never seemed to soften up but
come back from the laundry shrunk and rumbled, just as
stiff until the one time when all the starch would be gone
and your clothes were rags and you got some new.
There was a man in there who was building a ship. When
I first saw it, he had just laid down the keel and the
hull looked like a shiny new coffin. This guy was in for
life and he kept busy building a model of a battleship,
the USS Indiana. He had hammered rejected license plates,
flattened the numbers out. He'd fold and hammer. In the
corner of the shop he'd pinned up the plans, a blue ship
floated on the white paper. He had models made from
balsa, the ribs showing through in parts. He had these
molds of parts he would use to cast, jigs and dies. His
tools were blades and snips. The needles he used to sew
the tiny flags, he used in the model as antennae. The
ship was 1/48th size of the real thing, as big as a canoe.
The men who walked the deck had heads the size of peas.
He painted each face differently, the ratings on their
blue sleeves. He told me stories about each man frozen
there on the bridge, here tucking into a turret, here
popping out of a hatch way. He showed me letters from the
same men. He had written to them sending samples of the
paint he had mixed asking the men who had actually scraped
and painted the real ship if this was anywhere near. He
knew the hour, the minute, of the day his ship was
sailing, the moment he was modeling.
But this was years later. At first I saw the hull. I
saw the pile of rivets he collected from the temples of
old eyeglasses. He collected spools for depth charges,
straws for gun barrels, window screen for the radar. He
collected scraps from the floor of the shop and stockpiled
them near the ship. Toothpicks, thimbles, bars of soap,
gum wrappers. Lifesavers that were lifesavers, caps from
tubes for valves and knobs, pins for shell casings.
Everything was something else.
At first he started building only the ship but knew
soon enough he'd finish. So he went back and made each
part more detailed, the guns and funnels, then stopped
again and made even the parts of parts. The pistons in
the engines, light bulbs in the sockets.
Some men do this kind of thing. I whittled but I took
a stick down to nothing. I watched the black knots of the
branches under the bark grow smaller with each smooth
strip until they finally disappeared. Maybe I'd sharpen
the stick but that got old. Finally it is the shavings
thin like the evening paper at my feet. That was what I
was after. Strip things so fine that suddenly there is
nothing there but the edge of the knife and the first
layer of skin over my knuckle.
One of the anchors of the real battleship is on the
lawn of the Memorial Colisuem in Fort Wayne. The anchor
is gray and as big as a house. I took my then wife to see
it. We looked around that state for the other one. But
only found deck guns on lawns of the VFW, a whole battery
at the football stadium near the university. In other
towns, scrap had been melted and turned into statues of
sailors looking up and tiny ships plowing through lead
waves.
The deck of the model was the only real thing. He said
the wood was salvaged from the deck. A guard brought him
a plank of it. He let me plane it, strip the varnish and
splinter it into boards. A smell still rose from it of
pitch, maybe the sea. And I didn't want to stop. I've
seen other pieces of the deck since then in junior high
schools made into plaques for good citizens. It is
beautiful wood. The metal plates engraved with names and
dates are bolted on and near the bottom there is another
smaller one that says this wood is from the deck of the
battleship. It is like a piece of the true cross. And
that is why I came to the capitol in Indianapolis to see
the governor's desk. I heard it was made from the
teakwood deck of the USS Indiana.
So imagine my surprise when in the rotunda of the
building I find the finished model of the ship in a glass
case with a little legend about the prisoner in Michigan
City. He'd finished it before he'd died. The porthole
windows were cellophane cut from cigarette packs. The
signal flags spelled out his name. It was painted that
spooky gray, the color between the sea and sky, and the
stern a blue airplane was actually taking off and had
already climbed above the gleaming deck where a few seamen
waved.
I felt sad for that con. He spent his life building
this. He never got it right. It wasn't big enough or
something.
I walked right into the governor's office. I'm a
taxpayer. And the lady told me he wasn't there, but I
told her I was more interested in the desk. So she let me
in. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said opening the
curtains for the light that skidded across the top cut to
the shape of the state. One edge was pretty straight and
the other, where the river ran, looked as if that end had
melted like a piece of butter into toast. I ran my hand
along the length of it, felt how smooth it was -- the
grain runs north and south -- when the governor walked in
with his state trooper.
"It's something," he said. He's a Republican. The
trooper followed and stood behind him. "It has its own
light."
The trooper wore a sea blue uniform with sky blue
patches at the shoulders and the cuff. Belts hung all
over him. Stripes and creases ran down his legs. Braids
and chains. The pants were wool. He watched me. And I
looked at him.
Jesus, you've got to love a man in uniform.
I stepped up to the desk and saw my face and the shadow
of my body deep inside the swirling wood. I took my
finger and pointed to the spot not far from Zulu where I
knifed a man and said, "Right there." I pushed hard with
my nail. "That's where I was born."