So Senior Reyes, the new night shift sup. I see him and the new airman walking around the hangar bay. Just talking. Honestly, I thought they were working and I’ve got my binder with me so I come up behind them and go, hey Senior, can you sign off my qual? He whips around and goes NOT NOW. I’m thinking I might get my ass chewed, but then I see the airman, I think it’s Haley, Airman Haley. I look at her and she’s all flushed. Now I’m thinking what did I interrupt? I look back at Senior and he puts together what I’m putting together. Changes his tune. SORRY SHIPMATE, he says. WHAT DID YOU WANT?
Nothing, Senior, I tell him. No worries.
C’MON, he says. C’MON, YOU WANT A SIGNATURE?
Yeah, I go. And he takes my qual book. Signs off a couple sections, looks up at me and signs off a couple more sections. THERE YOU GO, he says. Airman Haley slinks away.
I tell him thanks and Senior just stands in front of me. DON’T MENTION IT, he says. TO ANYONE.
*
Okay, so Senior Reyes. He takes over the maintenance meeting. Guess who he brings to take notes? Fuckin Airman Haley. They go down the list of which bird is up, who’s got budget, whatever. End of the meeting and Senior is walking away and Haley takes the big green logbook and whacks it across his butt. I mean like WHOMP. Senior spins around, sees it’s her—starts laughing. I shit you not. We’re just watching them, the lovebirds. It couldn’t have been more obvious if we walked in on them fucking.
The rest of us don’t know what to do.
CMC clears his throat. Kinda sweet you ask me, he says.
I’m looking around like what the fuck? Everyone breaks out after the meeting and I catch up to the CMC.
Kinda sweet? I say. What the fuck?
And he goes, okay, what’s your problem?
Well, I say, it’s against the regulations.
CMC goes, okay, what should I do?
I go, I don’t know, I’m not the command master chief.
CMC raises his eyebrows and pokes me in the chest.
Okay, let’s say you’re me, he says. And here’s your shipmate, your brother. Married to the Navy. Just about to retire. Now he meets the kind of girl he should’ve met twenty years ago and that’s his fault? Oh, and she likes him too? You’re going to tell him to knock it off?
I guess not, I say.
You guess not, CMC says.
Fuck, I say, shaking my head.
My thoughts exactly, CMC says.
*
Couple months go by and I start dating the corpsman, right? I’m over at her place and I mention Senior Reyes and she goes, OH MAN. She starts to say something before she stops herself. And so now I’m like, you gotta tell me and she says, I’ll get it so much trouble. But I keep on her about it and I can tell that she wants to spill it.
She says Haley was part of the maintenance crew that was doing touch and gos on the Vinson a couple of weeks ago and it was Haley’s first time on the boat and she thought it was just motion sickness but eventually she went to get a pregnancy test and yep you guessed it.
No shit, I say and she says yes shit. What’s gonna happen now, I say.
Well, I think they’re gonna keep it, she says.
It, I say.
Her, she says.
Her, I say.
Well, they’re hoping, she says.
Hoping, I say.
For a girl, she says.
Back at the squadron, they’re not even acting like it’s a secret. Haley waits for Senior by his car at the end of the day and they drive off together.
They’re gonna make it official and everyone thinks good for them. Sure, there’s an age gap but consenting adults and all that. One of them will have to transfer. There are protocols to follow. This has happened before. An old story.
*
On the news they call it a microburst. An isolated weather event. They say it comes out of nowhere. They say it took the little fishing boat that Senior and Airman Haley were on and sucked them out to sea.
The funeral makes the front page of the base paper. They invite the whole squadron.
Day after, I’m sitting in my car outside the flightline before work. Just staring at the dashboard. Someone knocks on my window and it’s the CMC so I roll down the window. He asks me if I wanna tell him I told him so.
Will it make me feel better? I ask him. Would it have mattered?
Probably not, he says.
What’s the lesson here? I ask him.
CMC says oh, you wanna learn something? Go to college.
I get out of the car and we’re walking together to the turnstiles when WHOMP two birds fly into the briefing room window. We watch them drop to the ground. I start going over to where they fell and CMC says what’re you doing but I go over to them anyway. I crouch down and can feel him standing behind me. I’m just trying to figure it out, you know? Tiny crushed beaks and twitchy little feet. I need it to make sense. I’m down there for a while and CMC says, c’mon shipmate so I stand up. We’re looking at these fuckin birds when the base 1MC starts playing colors. So we turn towards the flag and salute the national fucking anthem and when we look down again I shit you not the birds are gone. They’re just gone. And I’m looking at the CMC like what the fuck and he’s just looking at me with this little smile.
Kinda sweet, you ask me, he says.
****
You can watch the author read an illustrated version of this story, below:
Just had a long pro-dev with JOs on fraternization, so I was prepared for this. Reminds me of 18th century seduction tales where the woman who steps out of sex norms Always. Has. To. Die. Poe’s claim that the death of a beautiful woman was the saddest theme in the world wasn’t an absolute. It was cultural critique of a society made sick by pathologizing sexual women. This story is well-executed as a slice of life, male characters are believable, the moralizing bird metaphor works well. But for the absence of Airman Haley from the narrative, I’d like it. Damn. The power of male perspective drowned Airman Haley long before the micro-event did. If that’s the point, then kudos to the author for successfully riling me up with a sea story I’d have ripped to shreds in person and fed the scraps to my hungry dogs. So, yeah, it’s good writing since it got me to believe the male characters and want to eviscerate them.
This is a fascinating take because I loved this story and teared up at the end. I really appreciate your readership and commentary, Liam — you’re right that Airman Haley doesn’t get a voice here. And I truly appreciate your attention to womens’ voices and representation, which matters a lot to me.
But she does get the WHOMP, which is pretty big. 🙂 It’s the WHOMP heard round the world. I like her physicality, her presence. The emphasis on consent. Her decision (to keep the baby). And she’s not the only one who perishes in the accident. (As part of a navy family it’s been interesting to me that the vast majority of deaths in my husband’s line of work are accidents — an interesting contrast to friends of mine in, say, the Army and Marines. Motorcycle accidents, bike accidents, accidental overdoses.)
What I love about this story is the bittersweet sense of something waited for, then found. It matters that it’s soon lost, it matters a lot — but it also doesn’t, in a way. It reminds me of Peter Molin’s short story “Cy and Ali,” based on Ovid’s myth of Ceyx and Alceone — this love that is larger than what tries to inhibit it or crush it, something that can live in an ethereal place that for all we know may be corporeal in some way too. Maybe that’s sappy, but I like the idea.
Thanks, Liam, for reading and for starting this discussion. We are always grateful for you here at Wrath-Bearing Tree.
Uh, thanks?
Absolutely, the WHOMP, Andria 🙂 Yet POV is carefully controlled in the story–very carefully. Note that the perspective towards the baby is hearsay, part of an illicit gossip network. And the ending–the official explanation is sufficiently undercut by calling it an official explanation. Could just as easily have been a murder-suicide. Ft Hood and Specialist Guillen haunt my reading of this story. And your comments about consent are precisely the murky waters that fraternization policy (which is very different in the Air Force than in the Navy) is designed to help sailors navigate. Disparities in rank immensely complicate the ways we interpret consent. Too often, we create narratives around rumor and external behavior. The more time I spend with this story, the more I admire the artful way the author refuses to validate the various interpretations of consent in the story. Kudos to the author and WBT for bringing forward a piece that inspires such divergent reading. The artful control of POV, the studied ambiguity of the ending, the backdrop of an old-boys network that controls the official narrative–these are excellent depictions of the complex landscape of fraternization.
Humbled and honored by the thought and sophistication of the discourse around this story. I’m (very) new to writing and publishing fiction and to see someone engage with the themes I built the story around is surreal.
Very interesting to hear your thoughts on AN Haley’s POV and her death as being some kind of cosmic retribution. Love Andria’s take on her WHOMP representing her lifeforce.
One of the things I wanted to do was to have the story feel like it’s being told from sailor to sailor, even if you only see it from one perspective (fun fact: an early version was titled “Scuttlebutt”). It’s true you don’t get much of AN Haley and SCPO but I think that distance is intentional. Big squadron, something tragic happens and you look back at what you knew of them and it always seems mundane or distorted. Good commands feel like a big family. When you lose someone, it’s a shockwave. And then, you have to move on because the job is bigger than one person, or in this case, two people. But it doesn’t make it any less jarring.
All that to say, thank you for reading so closely, Liam. Truly.
Kyle, the story is a great accomplishment. You really nailed the voice, which is what makes it so compelling. “Scuttlebutt” is a great evocation of theme. I can really see that as its origin. Successful art is always larger than the artist. It proves that what you’ve channeled in your work is truly alive. Looking forward to more stories from you in the future!
I have to say that I love the idea of a microburst. In affection, in love. “It came out of nowhere.” Who can explain it?
You have a very fine touch for capturing details that suggest more than is said (or written), and resisting the temptation to say too much, leaving enough ambiguity for readers to find their own meaning. And that tying-up bow of an ending. Genius.
I’m stunned by the economy of this story, how it covers so much ground with so few words, and yet it didn’t leave me feeling cheated of nuance or depth. And it has a colorful voice, much like the author’s other work, “Dirty Lincoln”, another economical story, which is what led me here. It could be I’m just a Neanderthal male but it didn’t bother me that Airman Haley didn’t get a voice because life is often like that…in your day-to-day you encounter people whose stories you might grasp the general contours of, but no more than that, and you may barely even exchange words with them. They’re a peripheral character in their story, and you in theirs. And what you know about each other is frequently based in part on gossip, like Airman Haley’s story here. Anyway, if you want a female voice, there is the corpsman…she doesn’t get a name but she does have a scrap of agency at least, in that she chose to tell the narrator what she knows. I’ve read that good short stories find their characters somehow changed by the end. If I had to guess, I’d say the change here is the narrator’s in learning things don’t always go the way they’re supposed to. Even before the end you realize he’s the kind of person who expects that because he expects the rules on fraternization to be followed. He’s a bit rigid in that regard, but by the end he’s less so. I love this piece, and “Dirty Lincoln” too.