unbillable hours: As Big As Your Fist (A Love Story)

- My Grandfather, JQC, and his Seabee Unit, Guadalcanal, 1945.

I dreamt of Charles Bronson the other night. I was standing in a coffee shop in New York by where I used to clerk for an entertainment law firm, and I was speaking with his daughter. She was telling me how she was frustrated with him because he kept sneaking off, in his old age, and buying sweets. I nodded and offered up my commiseration, but secretly sympathized with the old man. I slept with the radio on that night, and must have overheard reports of Bronson’s death in my sleep. It happens sometimes.

The woman continued complaining as we ordered our espressos, and I began to realize I was listening to the old complaints of my mother, frustrated with how her father would disappear in his old age, sometimes leaving in the middle of the night to drive from New Jersey to Florida or Maine. He went where his fancy directed him.

Grandpa was a creature of another time, and had absolutely no place in the post-Vietnam, post-patriotic day and age. He, his older brother, and his older sister, grew up on the shores of Massachusetts and Maine. Theirs was a fishing family, but their father rejected that, and moved inland to farm and operate a small general store. My grandfather was a teenager then, and used that as an opportunity to find his first job.

- TPB, Senior, Bletchley Park, England, 1940.

He was a bootlegger. My father’s father left a respectable life as a professor of mathematics in Kracow in order to fight World War II. He, a polyglot, speaking Russian, Polish, German, and English, worked in Polish Liberation, smuggling information by boat to England and back to Poland. Eventually, he had nothing to go back to, and so he immigrated to the United States, joined the Eighth Army Air Force, and became a bombardier. His body was filled with shrapnel by the end of the war and he died soon after because of it. My mother’s father, on the other hand, left a life of smuggling barrels of whiskey in old deuce-and-a-half trucks from Canada, across Northern Vermont, and into Boston or holds full of gin from Nova Scotia into the old Gloucester harbor. He enlisted with the Navy. Because of his experience with boat and truck engines, along with his less “savory” experience, the Navy placed my mother’s father in the Seabees, a unit of demolition experts, engineers, and construction workers famed for building airbases and sabotaging Japanese shipyards under the most hostile of conditions. Their motto was “Can Do,” which always begged the question “what can they do.” The answer was “anything.” They sent him off to the Pacific, where he ended up on Guadalcanal.

- JQC, Somewhere in the Solomon Islands, 1945.

One of the things clear from the few pictures we have of “Grandpa” (not having known my father’s father, my mother’s took on the singular role of being grandpa) in the South Pacific was that the Navy did little to control my grandpa’s wild streak.

- Going Native, Guadalcanal, 1945.

The Seabees responsible for building the airbase on Guadalcanal were the prime targets for the Japanese that attempted to retake the island by air and amphibious assault. It wasn’t until after my grandpa’s death that I even knew he took photographs there.

All I can imagine is that Grandpa’s wild streak was his salvation. He had channeled his less-than-legal background into something that could keep him alive. Others weren’t so cagey.

- The Burial of JQC's Commanding Officer, Guadalcanal, 1945.

When he came back from the war, Grandpa joined up with the Gloucester fleet. He continued in the tradition of the Seabees, however, and became a specialist in diesel engine repair under less than hospitable conditions. When the trawling rigs or cod boats broke down in the middle of the North Atlantic, my grandfather would pile his gear into a sturdy lobster boat he had purchased from a then-unknown clothier named Leon L. Bean, and sail out to the disabled ship. He would be lifted from his ship along a wire that ran to the other ship, where he would fix their engine, and then would be lifted back for his own arduous sail into port.

A few years after his children left home for college, my grandfather returned to his first profession, this time legitimately. He joined a trucking company, where he fixed the diesel engines of semi rigs and occasionally ran loads of pecans and orange juice up from the south or lumber down from Maine. He loved the road, much like I do now, and often volunteered for the long trips that ran up from the orange farms of Florida to the Canadian Maritimes.

In his later years, my grandfather was fond of sitting down at a table over a deck of cards. The cards were props to him, merely a means to keep someone in place so that he could tell stories. He started with my as soon as he could. His big mechanic’s hands were nimble, despite their scars and calluses, and he began with basic lessons in poker.

“I want you to listen to the cards as I deal them, Johnny,” he would say in his gravelly voice.

“Grandpa, my name’s T, not Johnny.” He often mixed up names, sometimes calling me by his son’s name, sometimes calling my mother by his wife’s name.

“Hush now.” His hands controlled the cards so that they fluidly slipped into place as he shuffled. He began dealing to me, neatly slapping the cards before me on the kitchen table with a sharp double-tick as he dealt. “Hear it?”

I would smile, naively enjoying the game, “Grandpa, that’s the double-tick,” using the words he had taught me. “You’re dealing from the bottom!” I would giggle, and he would gather up the cards and show me how blackjack cheats used mirrors to beat the system.

Eventually my mother or father would catch on.

“What are you teaching him?”

“Gin Rummy,” he would say.

“Marked cards!” I would exclaim.

“Dad,” my mother would say, “you can’t teach him how to cheat.”

“I’m teaching him how others cheat. So he knows. He can’t be a fool in cards!”

“He’s seven, dad.”

My grandfather looked at me through his thick bifocals, rubbed his arms, two hairy, sinewy blocks of muscle made distinctive by the Seabees and U.S. Navy emblems tattooed on the forearms.

“All right, kid, our game’s been busted,” he said, “let’s go get a custard.”

A custard, in his old New England vernacular, was a soft ice cream. He and I would pile into his monstrously big Cadillac and drive out to the beachside ice cream stands near the Sandy Hook lighthouse. “A custard,” really, was an excuse for him. My grandfather was a lifelong smoker. My mother abhorred smoking. Getting out of the house meant that, at some point, he could sneak a Lucky Strike.

We’d sit on the chrome bumper of his Cadillac and look out at the ships leaving the nearby Earle Naval Weapons Station. The Naval Weapons Station was – and is – a giant supply depot, one that refitted all of the destroyers, frigates, and – some said, in hushed tones – ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic Fleet. It began at one side of the county, thirty miles inland, and then traversed Monmouth County by way of a railroad that stretched to the other side of the county, and then proceeded over a concrete dock at least a half mile out into the ocean. When shipments of armament (“always conventional,” claimed the Commandant of the Naval Weapons Station) passed over the rails, the marines would establish heavily fortified perimeters around the railroad track and patrolled the road that ran along it in armored personnel carriers. A few years later, I would nearly get arrested for evacuating during a hurricane along that road.

“When I was with the fleet, this was, ah, up in Gloucester, he said, pointing north with a crooked, cracked finger, “we got this call in the middle of a horrible storm.”

Even by seven, I knew this story by heart. “It was Christmas Eve, right, Grandpa?”

“Ayuh, Christmas Eve. Goddamn blizzard. Cold as a witch’s tit.”

I settled into licking my ice cream cone, listening to his rumbling voice. Our older cousins referred to my grandfather and his older brother, a supermarket magnate, as “the Growler twins,” due to the way their voices rumbled and rolled during their frequent arguments over politics.

- JQC and JCC, Medfield, MA (1981).

“And, so, I said goodnight to your grandmother, God rest her soul, and drove out to my boat in Gloucester. An hour in that storm, and you’d want to die,” he said before sneaking a cigarette out of his pants pocket. “we sail out north, up past Portsmouth and Kennebunk.” Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kennebunk were once great lobster towns, now more or less home to outlet malls and antique shops.

“There were waves…” I began, continuing his story for him.

“That’s right. Waves like houses. Breaking down over the deck. The Kathleen Anne was a good boat, though, and she took them like they were nothing. We get out there and it’s a bunch of goddamn Portuguese yahoos from Fall River.”

We were finished with the ice cream, so my grandfather grabbed me by the hand and we walked along the beach, up to Battery Potter, an old World War One era fort built on Sandy Hook. Other times, when he told me this story, we wandered amongst the fishing boats of Highlands. He missed that life, I think. It kept him scared, and that kept him from gin. It kept him from thinking of how he never wanted to outlive his wife.

“Anyway, my boys winched me up, and I lined across to the Portuguese ship.” He said it like it was nothing, but the idea of riding a quarter-inch wire from one ship to another in the middle of a North Atlantic storm still strikes me as insane.

“I get into their engine, and it’s all busted to hell. So, I ride back to my ship, bundle up the necessary parts to put the cams in order, and line it back.” He laughed. “By then, not only were the boys on the Portuguese boat seasick, even my crew was loosing their Christmas feasts.”

“Why did you go out on Christmas Eve, anyway, Grandpa?”

“Didn’t matter what day it was. If the boats were in trouble, someone had to go. That was the way it was.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to make sense of why he couldn’t refuse to go out during the holidays, “but couldn’t you send out the Coast Guard?”

“The Coasties were nothing more than pussies in white polyester,” he retorted. Pride, as with any fishing story, factored heavily into my grandfather’s tales of the sea. “Not even real navy,” he continued. “So I fix up the diesel and get their screws turning. It’s coming on two o’clock in the morning. Their captain agreed to pay us through the account, but also swore – ‘on his blood!’ He said – to give us something else for making it out there in the storm.”

At the battery’s great iron doors, we would turn around and walk back to my grandfather’s Cadillac. “Did he stiff you, grandpa?” I asked.

“Nope. The little guy shows up at my door on New Years Eve,” he said, amused at the memory. It was there in his eyes, in the way they twinkled at the thought. “with two fifty pound bags of scallops…. Little bastard had kept on harvesting even after I jury-rigged his boat. I put one bag down in the ice box,” the term he used for the deep freezer he kept fish in down in his basement, “and opened up the other one.”

I giggled as he got to this part in the story. It was my favorite part, just because he grew so excited as he told it.

“In this bag, I pull out scallops,” and he thrust his hand out before me, for demonstration, as he spoke, “as big as my fist!” His hand was huge to me.

“As big as your fist.” It became a mantra in my household. Whenever someone repeated a story, to this day, one family member or another would thrust out a hand and shout “As big as your fist!” in an approximation of my grandfather’s gravelly voice.

One time, after telling the story over dinner, my grandfather finished and sat back, sated with his meal and his opportunity to tell stories. My father suddenly turned to me – I think I might have been fourteen at the time – and asked “What’s the moral here?”

“The moral?” I replied.

“Yes, what’s the meaning to this story?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer. “Moral!” My grandfather exclaimed. “There’s no goddamn moral! It’s a story.”

My father looked at him, “But Quinn,” he asked, in his steady, prosecutor’s voice, “there’s always a moral. There has to be an answer.”

My grandfather scratched at the white stubble on his cheeks, and smiled, “Ayuh? Well, what was the moral of the story I told you about my time in the Philippines, when the boys in the unit went down to the red light district of Manila and….”

“Okay, that’s enough stories,” my mother said, cutting him off.

“No, no,” I argued, “this one sounds good.”

“No,” my grandfather conceded, “that’s enough stories. Next time.” Still, he was chuckling.

That summer, my parents let me go down to visit my grandfather in his new home, just north of the Florida Keys. He had spent sixty years in the snow and ice of New England and the Canadian Maritimes, and he had no interest in spending another winter there. He bought an old Airstream trailer home, a Boston Whaler, and traded his Cadillac in for a cheap, beaten-up station wagon. In truth, the drinking was starting to get to him. His eyes, always watery, were cloudy and he constantly seemed tired.

We sat out on the Boston Whaler most nights, watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. He sat aft, reading a naval history I had brought down for him, and I reclined up on the bowsprit of the aluminum motorboat, reading my summer reading or a beaten-up copy of whatever Steinbeck novel I could find. Traditionally, this lasted for no more than an hour or so before we both dozed off and the boat drifted back to shore.

The naval history I bought for him, The Cruel Sea, was something I had read before giving to him. It told the story of the British Corvettes, the small boats they used to hunt German submarines in the Atlantic. I remember, when I first read it, that it was the first book that made me think of what my grandfather had done during the war. For years I had known the history of my father’s father. He was a hero of that side of the family, the holder of multiple medals of honor of some sort, and a member of a B-14 crew profiled by National Geographic. I knew him better from the National Geographic article than from my father’s stories. He died when my father was so young that, in truth, my father learned more from the National Geographic than from his own childhood. But my grandfather, my mother’s father, had never told the stories of Guadalcanal to me.

“Where were you?” I asked my grandfather, who stood on the shore as I pushed the Boston Whaler off of the beach and into water deep enough for us to motor it back to its moorings.

“What’s that?”

“Where were you? During the war?”

He smiled. “You never asked about that story. Not before, anyway.”

“Well?”

- B-24's on Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, 1945.

“I was in the Pacific. I went from island to island. We built things. Blew up a few things too. Good work.”

“What did you build?”

“Well, there was this one island,” he said, “it was near Japan. We built an airfield there. Henderson Field.”

“Henderson Field,” I repeated. It sounded so bland, like it could have been built in the pastures of Monmouth County. It meant something, I knew, because he named it.

“Ever hear of Curtis LeMay?”

“General, right?”

“Ayuh. Ended up a pally of George Wallace, the shit. Still, he wanted Henderson Field so he could have Tokyo. We gave him Henderson Field,” he paused.

“Took a hell of a lot of boys to give him Henderson Field,” he said, possibly to himself. I had the Whaler back in the water, and my grandfather waded up to it and slowly pulled himself up to the deck. His back had been fused during surgery to repair slipped disks the year before. His years of punishing work were catching up to him.

- Guadalcanal, 1945.

“Anyway, we took that island, and the Japs tried to take it back, but we kept it. I think it’s just Polynesia now,” he said, huffing and puffing from climbing up the gunwale.

“Did you kill any of the Japs?”

“Ayuh, a few.”

“Are you upset about it?”

- Prisoners, Guadalcanal, 1945.

He scratched his head. His fingernails were stubby and dirty from working on the Whaler before we set sail after dinner.

“Not much. Would’ve killed me, I suppose.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute, so I turned the engine over and we puttered back to the moorings.

“I had a reason, you know,” he said.

I thought that he was afraid I was accusing him. “Oh, no, no, no. I understand.”

“No. No, you don’t. You’re too young,” he said as he fished out a Lucky Strike. “Thank God for that. But I had a reason. It’s like your father said, up at the restaurant, what was that place…”

“The Hofbrauhaus, Grandpa?”

“Ayuh. That’s the one. Good sausage, there. But, he said there had to be a moral. There’s no moral, but there’s a reason.”

“What was that?”

“A reason.”

“No,” I said, “I heard you. What was the reason?”

“It was war, boy. War. You don’t need a motive. It’s not one of your father’s cases, but you still needed a reason. We let a few go, too, you know.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Let ‘em sail back to their islands. Let ‘em pretend that the war was still going on, thirty years later. We had some boys, they would kill anything they saw. Jap. Native. Hell, I think they would have shot me if they didn’t know better. But they didn’t make sense. There was no reason.”

We were at the mooring, and I idled the engine and hopped up to the rotting wooden planks. I tied off the bow of the boat with a clove hitch on one of the pilings, then hopped back in the boat. I needed to drop down one of the inflatable bumpers before tying off the stern.

“You know, pretty place like this looks a lot like that island,” my grandfather said.

I stopped and looked at the beach, the palm trees, and my grandfather’s Airstream trailer hidden beneath a few of them.

“I wonder,” he said, “I wonder if a few of our boys stayed on those islands too, some of those that shot at anything. Still fighting the war, still killing anything that moves.”

I listened as I walked to the aft compartments and retrieved the bumper.

“Damn shame. Missed out on a lot of the fun on the island.” He was finished with his story. I watched as he flicked his cigarette into the water, winked at me, and then walked to the bow of the boat.

“Now let’s see what shit knot you tied here, boy scout.”

“Clove hitch, old man,” I said. We liked teasing each other.

“Tomorrow, you want to do a poker tournament up in Pinellas, or do you want to go to Epcot?”

“How’s your back?”

“Fine, Jimmy,”

“My name’s T, grandpa.”

“Whatever. It’s good enough. You want to go to Epcot again, don’t you?”

“I like the future stuff.”

“Don’t mind the pretty girls at the Sweden exhibit either, eh?”

“Whatever,” I shrugged, embarrassed. “Sure.”

“Whatever,” he said, mimicking me.

“It’s Norway, though,” I said.

“Oh, Norway, is it? Fine, fine. So, you want to go?”

“Sure.”

I tied off the stern of the boat, hopped off into the warm water, and helped him down. His arms, even then, were still the knotty, muscular beasts that I remembered as a child. I turned to walk toward the trailer, and he gave me a playful smack on the head.

“Get in, Gunga Din.”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“You’re not going to tell your mother about the poker tournament, are you?”

“I never told her you taught me how to count cards, did I?”

“No, I guess you didn’t.”

“Won eighty bucks off of the kids at lunch last year,” I said. I was exaggerating.

“Not bad. You ever learn how to double deal?”

“Not yet. I can’t get the pinky to flip quickly enough.”

“Maybe next summer,” he said, wheezing, “you come down and I’ll teach you.”

I never made it down next summer. Grandpa's drinking had caught up with him. My mother didn't want me to get into his car again. He disappeared on Thanksgiving Day, 1992. The Florida Highway Patrol called us in early December of that year. He had been drinking, and hit a bridge embankment. The accident put him in a coma that lasted until just before his death, in 1993.

My father and I went down to Florida to dispose of his possessions. We cleaned up his trailer, throwing out the old bottles of Beefeater and Jamesons. While he tried to figure out a way to deal with the old Airstream, I went down to the moorings. There was the old Boston Whaler. Although I didn't, I was very tempted to undo the hitches on the motorboat and just let her drift off into the current. Still, a man has to have a reason to do something.

Comments

I miss my grandfather. Great story.

Posted by: Bubba | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 01:56 PM

Yes, good post.

James

Posted by: James R. Rummel | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 03:36 PM

Bravo. And thank you.

Posted by: Dan | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 04:38 PM

Uh-oh. Bald maternal grandfather. ;-)

Posted by: sugarmama | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 05:57 PM

Dan, James, and Bubba/James, I do appreciate that.

Yeah, I had a bald maternal grandfather. I'd like to add, though, that he was actually a badass bald maternal grandfather. So, I'll gladly take those genes.

Posted by: TPB, Esq. | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 06:59 PM

wow.

Posted by: Kathleen | Friday, September 05, 2003 at 10:18 PM

Both of them were handsome, btw.

Posted by: sugarmama | Saturday, September 06, 2003 at 12:30 PM

Makes me wish I'd known my grandfathers. Thanks for that.

Posted by: Swerdloff | Tuesday, September 09, 2003 at 11:18 AM

What are you doing blogging? That story needs to be *published* - this is way, way too good to be just giving away on your site. But I'm glad it's here - just beautiful writing.

Posted by: Tom Johnson | Friday, September 12, 2003 at 01:28 PM