Philco Read online

  “Weeks passed until one day Jacob’s mom made a special lunch for the two of them and handed it to Jacob as he set out for the half-mile walk to the school bus stop. She said, ‘Here, I made Joshua’s favorite today; don’t leave it on the bus.’ At lunchtime Jacob brought it to the place under a tree off to the side of the playground where they used to eat together and Joshua was there. They ate in silence, never looking away or taking their eyes from each other. Then Joshua asked Jacob about his family and told Jacob about his. After a while he stopped talking and got up to leave. Jacob stood up with him and, facing each other, they put their hands, one over the other, on their hearts. Before turning away to the fields, Joshua said, ‘The winds are soft and warm—the time for speaking has come for us.’”

  Jacob knew then that they would be friends forever because Joshua gave him some of his words that day and when he ran off Jacob knew deep in his heart that Joshua was chasing the winds, talking to God, and looking for man words…so they could talk some more.

  THE PALACE HOTEL

  [PHILCO]

  I DRIFT BACK FROM the schoolyard and the image of Joshua and Jacob disappears. Once again I can feel the hard bench against my back and the old man next to me is still talking. His voice drifts back into my awareness, almost as if it is being faded up out of the storied distance. Then he stops speaking to me as suddenly and naturally as he had begun, leaving me mesmerized and sweating. He stands up. “Nice meetin’ ya, fellar.”

  He pulls his craggy hat farther down on his forehead, disappears into the hotel, or down the street, or into the morning air. I really don’t know.

  “Hey…yeah,” I replied, but once again it is just me. It seems I have now lost my echo, though I am getting more accustomed to the sound of my voice. All I know is he is gone and the touch of his story is here beside me in this place. The wind kicks up a round patch of dust in the center of the empty street and leaves it hanging in the still air before me. Its veiled company makes me realize just how alone I am in this strange place.

  Needing deliverance from the silence, I decide it is time to find a place to stay. Since there is no one to ask for recommendations on accommodations, I begin with the Palace Hotel behind me. I stand up, turn toward its timeless facade, walk through its open doorway, and head straight to the check-in desk. It appears I am the only person in the small lobby. Once my eyes adjust I am able to see in the dim light that there is a person standing motionless behind the desk. At first I think it might be an apparition; but it’s a discernible female, and it’s as if she is waiting just for me. As I draw near, I notice a little bell on the counter. She appears to be frozen in space so I have this strange urge to ding it right in front of her just to shake things up and bring a little life to this otherworldly scenario.

  As I look into the face of this very unusual lady, I am caught off guard by features that defy age categorization or cultural identity. Her expression presents even less insight. How could someone look so young and seem so old, so mid-western, so southern, so big city, and so pilgrim-like at the same time? Her smile is automatic—appearing almost programmed with an appropriate expression, as if dictated by her job description.

  “Excuse me, are any rooms available?” I ask.

  I look down at the counter. She lifts her right hand away from covering her left and pushes a key and registration card toward me that was already situated beneath her palm. The card has two lines—the first line for the guest name (last name optional) and the second has a small space for her to add the room number. When she speaks, her words are measured and have only to do with the amenities offered at the facility.

  “It is six bits for the room, fifteen cents for towels and soap, plus a nickel extra if you want the room at the end of the hall right next to the only bathroom on the second floor.”

  Although her eyes and body remain motionless, I know the words are coming from her because I can see her lips moving ever so slightly. She continues…

  “The restaurant opens at 6:00 p.m. and serves hot food straight through until 9:00 p.m.” Just her lips are moving and it is kind of creepy.

  “Would you like a reservation?” she inquires.

  It’s 5:30 p.m., and I am hungry, so I ask if there is availability at 6:00 when they open. It takes her a while to peruse the evening’s reservation list. After a long pause, she says mechanically, “That will be just fine,” and then asks if I will be dining alone. I look around and behind me, moving with a hint of sarcasm. After a brief pause I answer courteously, “Yes, that will be the case.”

  “Dinner for one,” she notes in precise confirmation of this decisive moment. She then hands me my basket of bathroom notions and points to the stairs over my shoulder. Her automated nod toward them suggests I should leave her area and go to my room.

  I take my a la carte accessories up to my room at the end of the hall and place the jumbo-sized room key in a keyhole the size of a mailbox slot. The door opens into a nearly barren interior—supplied with only a bed, chair, lamp, and small Quaker-style armoire. It’s not actually an armoire, but more of a tall, empty cupboard. I pull back the window curtain to let in some air and discover a window frame attached to a wall with a blue sky and faux puffy white clouds painted within its borders. It takes a small moment to realize that the fake window makes sense considering I have an inside room at the end of the hall. Reflecting on my vantage point from the bench in front of the hotel, I remember that all the buildings are joined together, and that the whole town appears to begin and end this way, with the structures at each end being the only ones having side-facing windows.

  I knock on the bathroom door before entering and, responding to the lack of an answer, I enter. There is only one faucet so I assume the water temperature selection is cold or cold. With this simple act of splashing water on my face being my total “getting ready for dinner” routine, I head back down the hall, walk down the stairs, and enter the dining room promptly at 6:00 p.m. for dinner. I am the only customer. Good thing she was able to squeeze me in. A male version of the lady at the counter is standing by my table waiting to hand me my menu. I order the special.

  I eat in silence. The food is good.

  I go to my room. I go to bed. I dream.

  PIER PRESSURE

  [PHILCO]

  THE MOURNFUL CRY of a distant foghorn brings me out of sleep and back into this place. The Palace Hotel bed is lumpy and creaky, but oddly comforting in the way it sags and swallows up my body. It gives the sensation of security—of being held in loving arms. Curiosity compels me to investigate the incongruous sound I hear in the distance. My feet hit the cold, hard floor and I go to the window to throw open the curtains and look outside. Forgetting my earlier discovery, I bump my head against a faux blue sky and puffy clouds. Too dazed to be confused, I downgrade the importance of discovery and retreat to the warm embrace of the wrought iron man-crib from whence I came and try to go back to sleep. I will wake up later and take another stab at reality.

  I doze but can’t sleep. It is more than the foghorn making me restless. The room is damp and cold, and the hotel is rocking back and forth slightly. The smell of dead fish and salt air is the last straw and I abandon my attempts at further sleep. I refuse to fall for the faux window bit, so I throw on last night’s clothes, head out into the hall, and run down the stairs to the lobby. As I clear the bottom step, I glance toward the hotel’s reception desk. Yes, she is still there in the same position as she was when I checked in yesterday afternoon. In fact, she not only has the same smile, she is wearing the same blouse. I might not have taken such notice of her wardrobe, but orange and white calico with a blue ruffled collar and matching cuffs is hard to forget.

  As I make my way to the front of the building I notice the interior is narrower than I remembered, and it is lavishly covered with polished mahogany. Small, round windows run along the full length of the lobby, front-to-back and on both sides. I push
open the oak-framed, cut-glass door anchored more like a hatch instead of resting on antique hinges, and I walk outside where a damp wind hits me straight in the face.

  This must be the ocean.

  I find myself standing on a boardwalk at the land’s end of a long pier with a couple of docked fishing boats and a small Navy vessel anchored off to the side. Sitting down at the end of a long pier, a sailor looks out to sea. No one else is visible along the length of the pier, and the boats and the gray ship look vacant. I am drawn. I walk along the railing until I find myself standing in front of him.

  “Welcome mate.” His tone is warm.

  He barely looks up, and then with the slightest motion he invites me to sit down beside him. I do so without hesitation. He maintains a distant stare as he talks to himself. It doesn’t take long to discover he is reflecting on his days of sea duty and time as a hospital corpsman in the old Navy.

  It seems I have joined him between stories, and I am just in time for the next episode. I feel like a child running late to the cinema, having just made it when the “coming attractions” trailers are over, settling down in my seat as the opening movie credits are rolling. He draws me deep into stories of the sea, medical adventures, naval hospital facilities, and the antics of fellow mates. He looks like someone familiar with the sea—turned up collar on his dark blue pea coat, a crop of wind-tousled hair cascading down to a furrowed brow and gray whiskers. Sunburned hands rest, one folded over the other, on his left knee. His voice and deep blue-green eyes seem to be searching the horizon and are unified in intent as they fit perfectly into the cadence of the lapping waves and the foghorn that called me here. The longing tone of his voice and wistful look in his eyes tell me he is revisiting a time long ago when he was a young man. I lean back against the railing as his story unfolds. Even though we are sitting together, his distant stare separates us, mirroring the time elapsed between now and his story. He reminds me a bit of Robbert— something about the hands.

  The dock dissolves; the setting fills with a lot of blue and gray and I see sailors wearing white hats and clean white T-shirts under their starched white uniforms. I study their movements for a moment, then gaze out toward the horizon where ships drift, backed by a sky filled with white clouds and crying seagulls. In the distant background a large Naval hospital looms on top of a hill overlooking the scene.

  It’s early autumn in Bremerton, Washington. He reaches over and takes the white, regulation sailor’s hat lying by his side and stares for a moment at the name stenciled inside the carefully curled brim—Graton, Paulson USN. He stares at his name for a moment, turns the hat full circle in his hands and then lays it back down. He reaches down, his motions in the same fluid rhythm of the lapping water beneath us, and picks up a small bronze telescope; and, with a distinctly familiar motion and stroke, begins polishing it with a small rag in time with the waves, the words, and the wonder of his recollection. He begins his story…

  He tells me about a shipmate he once knew named Midge.

  JUST DESSERTS

  [PAUL]

  “I NEVER LIKED BEING called Paulson—Paulson Patrick Graton. What I really hated growing up was when the other kids would tease me and call me by my initials: PP. I did like the simplicity of Paul though. I also did not want to be in the Navy. Actually, I didn’t want to be in the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, Sea Scouts, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, or anything else that had to march, guard, encounter, fight, or protect things. I especially did not want to be around guns and loud exploding noises. I simply wanted to graduate from high school, attend the local junior college downtown, sing in the choir at the local church, and marry my high school sweetheart someday. All my aspirations had to do with a life that could take place without ever leaving the county.” Paul moves his hat a few inches away on the bench, stares down at it some more, and it appears he is talking to it…

  “The problem was that in those days we all had to ‘go in’ and go away. You either enlisted in the branch of service of your choice for four years or you waited until you were drafted for a two-year hitch. Being drafted almost guaranteed you were going to end up in the Infantry which was the main reason a lot of guys joined the Navy or Air Force right out of high school. (Something about eating rations out of a can coupled with sleeping on the ground next to your rifle was not a siren’s call to most teenagers.) The ruling criterion for my eventual decision was based on percentages and years. The way I looked at it, the extra two years I’d serve by enlisting would be equal to over ten percent of my life to that point. I decided it was too big a price to pay in lost freedom, so I decided to ‘bite-the-bullet’ and went downtown to the draft board office in my hometown and had my name moved to the head of the list so I could get the ‘service’ thing out of the way. Volunteering for the local draft made me popular with the other men waiting for the dreaded military axe to fall. Each of them thought if enough of people did what I did they may never have to ‘go in.’

  “Well, I lucked out. The Navy had lost a large number of sailors whose enlistments ran out after they served their hitch during WWII, and for the first time in its history, the Navy turned to the draft to boost their ranks. That meant I got to nail down the shorter time commitment and would never have to sleep on the ground. I had been told that sailors always slept in a bed of some kind. (Someone forgot to mention that, in many cases, their version of a bed was a hammock.) So, anyway, there I was in the Navy. I admit I did have a bad attitude about being there; but, fortunately, I had enough smarts to know it was useless to fight the system, so I did what I was told and got by with minimal effort. One thing that was really strange, though, was this odd guy I was stationed with who acted like this place was his home. I could not quite figure him out. How could anyone feel at home in the Navy?”

  This whole time he has been talking to that white hat, moving it around at certain points, almost as if to emphasize what he is saying. Then, he looks up from the hat and at me for the first time. “I’m Paul; what’s your name, sir?”

  Wow, that catches me off guard—finally, I am about to be included in a real conversation. I squeeze my hand really hard against the bench to make sure I am real. “They call me Philco,” I reply feeling even more comfortable with hearing my voice. He nods his head letting me know he heard my name and immediately asks, “What branch of the military did you serve in?”

  I answer, “None,” hoping this won’t become a topic for discussion because that’s all I have to offer. He immediately looks back out to sea and begins talking again; but his tone has changed, and this time the story is no longer about him. I can tell he wants to talk about this odd guy in a way of remembrance—to relive something that touched his life.

  “His roll call name was Ward, M.G., but everyone called him Midge based on his initials. He was slight and quiet and never really looked all that well. His build suggested he had been sickly as a child or had grown up malnourished. He wore his Navy fatigues so loose you never really could tell how frail he was beneath the folds.

  “Although typically shrinking back from any sector of confrontation or personal involvement, he did make it a point to be first in line at the mess hall. His M.O. was to make a beeline to the dessert section, pick one out, step aside, gobble it down and then work his way back to the front of the line. Once his food tray was filled, he would immediately go to a far corner table and eat the rest of his meal alone. It seemed so odd to see someone eat chocolate cake and chase it down with corned beef hash.”

  “Wow, that’s very interest…,” I attempt to interject in his brief pause, thinking I would be able to react with a comment on how unusual that was, but he keeps on talking out toward the horizon as if I’m not there. Paul continues…

  “The time was the late forties during the welcomed peace after WWII. Midge worked in Administration at the 13th Naval District hospital in Bremerton, Washington—an hour-long ferry r
ide across the Puget Sound from Seattle. The rest of the enlisted hospital corpsmen interacted with doctors, nurses, and patients on a regular basis and established many personal relationships.

  The day-to-day emergencies and doctoral doings had a way of drawing them into friendships and a sense of interdependence. His workday was spent toiling alone at a cluttered gray metal desk behind giant rows of filing cabinets. Being buried under mountains of paperwork provided minimal human interaction, and that was exactly how he wanted it. Because he had attained the rank of 1st Class Petty Officer, he was afforded his own room in the barracks. There he would close himself off after dinner for the evening, except for Thursdays when he would leave at exactly 6:45 p.m. and return at precisely 9:45 p.m. He did this every Thursday, always in full dress uniform. One of the facility electrical technicians, who had to do some rewiring in the petty officer barracks building, said that he noticed there were no civilian clothes in Midge’s locker.”

  “He was different, and I felt sorry for him because he always seemed so alone; so, one day at dinnertime, I walked over to his table and sat my food tray down next to his. He immediately took a position similar to that of a dog guarding his food bowl. He carefully finished chewing the food in his mouth before he looked at me from his hunkered position over the chrome galley tray. I introduced myself and he acknowledged my introduction without offering his name in return. Of course, we all knew each other’s last names because of roll calls, duty lists, etc. However, I did not know what the M.G. actually stood for. I invited him to chapel the following Sunday in a second attempt to break the ice and out of the desire to deliver him from his apparent loneliness. His response was a blank stare.”