amphibi.us

As if I were the pin in the hands of a clock, time has moved around me. I’m
the last one left. I speak to the wives now, maybe a dozen of them in the
whole country, driving for hours at a time just to put them at ease. The
first thing they always say is some remark about how well I’ve stayed put
together, how lucky I am to have mobility at my age. Like me, they were
barely twenty years old when the USS Indianapolis sank and stopped
everything, became the moment that defined what happened before it, the
reason nothing happened after it. I don’t tell the story and they don’t ask
me to, which is good, because I tell it coldly, as pure fact, straight
numbers. There’s twelve: the number of minutes it took the ship to sink.
There’s one thousand, one hundred and ninety-six: the number of men on the
boat. There’s three hundred and sixteen: the number of men who managed to
survive four days attached to a handful of lifeboats, fending off shark
attacks, living without food or water. I mostly just listen. They tell me
about their husbands. None of them have let it go. I get lonesome marriage
proposals from a wife in Lawrence, Kansas, a wife in Ybor City, Florida. The
one in Oklahoma City speaks at me in feverish, rabid French. Two rest home
attendants have to come in and calm her down. One tries to get her to
breathe in a regular pattern while the other holds her hand and rubs gently
between her shoulder blades. One time, as I’m leaving, I’m told that she’s
never happier than after meeting with me, but the excitement puts too much
strain on her heart. I’m not invited back, and I drive on to Cheyenne and
Philipsburg and San Diego. I drive to July 30th, 1945 and everything I drink
along the way smacks of saltwater. Every open mouth has five rows of teeth
and a taste for blood.

© Ryan Werner, 2011