Free Sweet Reason by Robert Littell Page A

very friendly with Boeth —”
    “What’s suspicious about that?”
    “Boeth is an enlisted man, Captain. The word is he and Boeth actually went to New York together last Christmas. And I know the two of them spend a lot of time down in Main Plot —”

    “Just what is it you think they’re doing down there?” Jones asked, visions of homosexuals dancing in his head.
    “I know what they do, Captain. They sit around and listen to classical music!”
    Jones looked dubious. “Friendship with an enlisted man certainly shows poor judgment, but I don’t see —”
    “There’s one more thing,” Proper said. “When I was checking the typewriters in the after wardroom I had occasion to pass by Ensign Joyce’s bunk. Captain, sir, he has a bulkhead smack full of subversive pictures over his bed!”
    The Poet Stands Corrected
    “Do I understand you correctly, Captain? You want to know about the photographs I have over my bunk?”
    Joyce sat stiffly in the straight-backed wooden chair next to the washbasin. His long, thin face looked longer and thinner because of the shadows in the room.
    He and the Captain had already been through the business about Joyce’s friendship with Boeth. “You know why I don’t allow myself to become friendly with the enlisted men, or with anyone for that matter?” Jones had asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s entirely possible we may come under atomic attack some day. You may remember that when a ship comes under atomic attack, everyone gets off the weather decks to protect against radioactive poisoning. Well, Mister Joyce, let me put it to you — what would happen if everyone was inside and the ship suddenly came under attack from enemy aircraft? What would happen is I’d send some men topside to man the antiaircraft guns aft, that’s what would happen. I’d order these men to expose themselves to deadly doses of radioactivity, and I’d do itwithout batting an eyelash. Now this may sound callous to you, Mister Joyce, but I don’t want to take the risk that I’d hesitate to send a man to certain death merely because he was my friend. So I keep my distance” — the Captain’s eyebrows shot up to underscore the point — “and you’d do well to take your cue from me.”
    But quite obviously, Joyce’s friendship with Boeth didn’t interest the Captain as much as the pictures over the Poet’s bunk.
    “You understand me correctly, Mister Joyce,” Jones was saying. He swung his legs onto the deck so he could face the Poet. “Among other things, I’m responsible for the morale of this ship —”
    “Do you mind if I ask who told you about the photographs, Captain?”
    “That’s neither here or there, Mister Joyce.”
    “It was Proper, wasn’t it?”
    “I said that’s not important, Mister Joyce. What is important is those pictures. Now what about them?”
    “It’s really very simple, Captain. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect paperweights. Some people collect barbed wire. I collect photographs of people being killed. I have one showing a soldier getting shot during the Spanish Civil War. His body is being pushed backward by the force of the bullet passing through him. I have another of a South Vietnamese police chief putting a pistol to the head of a suspect and blowing his brains out in the streets of Saigon. I have a shot of the Nazis stringing up some partisans in Yugoslavia. There’s a photograph of a beaming Cambodian soldier brandishing two severed heads. And another of two small children in a South Vietnamese village called My Lai taken just before they were gunned down by American soldiers. There is another I consider a collector’s item—”
    “I think I get the idea, Mister Joyce.”

    “Do you, Captain?”
    “You’re queer for dead people.”
    “No, sir, that’s not it at all. I’m terrified of dead people. When my father died I didn’t even go to the funeral because I couldn’t stand to see him like that, laid out in a coffin with