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Killing (continued from preceding page) you know...”
Oddly, Phil echoed what Hank had heard from his par- ents, which was unsettling.
drink...”
“Okay, then, what would you throw into the drink?”
Hank thought for a moment. “My past,” he said finally. “Parts of it.”
“The nice Jewish boy part?”
Hank was getting tired of Phil’s needling.
“All those times I hurt others, even if I didn’t mean to. Those times I betrayed people. Times when people counted on me and I didn’t come through.”
“Okay...”
“What I wouldn’t throw into the drink is my future. I like to keep options open.”
“Fuck options! Fuck the future! Trouble with you is, you’re still carrying your parents inside of you. All that guilt shit. That’s what keeps you from going all the way. Unless you go all the way...”
Phil held his palms up, head cocked at an angle. The rest of his thought was clear. Unless you go all the way, there’s no personal redemption, no hitting bot- tom, no breaking through to the other side—which is, Hank thought, what optimistic Americans believe happens when you hit bottom.
“There’s a poem,” Hank said, “a poem by Yeats. During World War I in Ireland. Yeats is middle-aged and he’s got a friend, Lady Gregory, she has a son who volun- teers for the British forces and learns to be a pilot. Ireland was still a Brit colony then, so he didn’t have
to fight in that war. It was his choice, right? He’s in his mid-20s—our age—and he goes off and flies a combat plane... and gets killed. And of course Lady Gregory
is devastated and Yeats is heartbroken. So he writes a poem called ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.’”
“You’re not going to recite the whole thing, are you?”
“Just a couple of lines. Yeats is trying to figure out why Robert Gregory, he’s got his whole life ahead of him, why he’d risk death doing something he didn’t have to. Yeats says it wasn’t because of a sense of duty or because political leaders told him to. No...”
“Hey, I’m like you,” Hank said. “A voyeur. This is the outer edge of the known world, right? Where human- ity’s doing itself in? How could I live through this era and not see it for myself?”
“Ah, that’s pre-packaged shit. I got the note you left me in the Press Club. Your name is what, Freedman? Henry Freedman?”
Hank nodded.
“Bizarre. A nice Jewish boy like you,” Phil said in a mock Jewish accent. “Bringing shame on your family! You shoulda been a doctor or a lawyer!”
Hank laughed, but it was a pained laugh; his Jewish origins seemed very distant from the person he was now: a muscular deckhand, high on opium, on the shores of the South China Sea, in a war-zone where artillery illuminated the night sky.
But Hank knew that Phil was dead-on: his family was embarrassed by what Hank was doing. His parents were ashamed by what he’d chosen to do with his life so far.
“I tell you what I’m ashamed of,” Hank said, shifting the ground of the conversation. “When I’m in a U.S. port and I go to my ship, I go past antiwar groups outside the docks. Protesters holding up signs and yelling ‘Stop delivering napalm! Baby-killers!’ They’re looking at me going into the docks with other sea- men, and my shipmates are pointing at the protest- ers, saying shit like ‘Commie scum... We should stick napalm up their asses!’ But the protesters, they’re my people, not the fascist seamen I work with.”
“So... you feel guilty about working on ammo ships. What about taking direct action?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, man. Mutiny... How about mutiny? Or sabotage? Why not organize other seamen and hijack a fuckin’ ammo ship?”
The idea took Hank’s breath away. “Whoa!”
“I know, I know. You’d never go all the way.”
“I’m willing to do a lot of crazy shit, but... ah... no, man, I’m not going to throw my passport into the
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