THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
777
between the hunched, inimical shoulders, the ritual of deception and
assault, Dan could not abide; and his unwillingness to hide his terror
and contempt, to let his beefy shoulders and his stubborn jaw deceive
us seemed a provocation.
He declared himself the natural enemy of our heartiness, and
once on to his ill-kept secret, what could we do but smack the ball
into him, harder, harder; to whatever hands he threw, from whatever
quarter, the moist flushed head would move toward him with an
unpitying jerk, a snap of outward breath, and the sodden leather
bulk would be back before his own breath into his gut. Away-back;
away-back! I could see a nerve beat to the compulsive rhythm in
the hollow back of his right knee, his wrists tremble meaninglessly,
and his eye, shifting with the motion of the ball, his shameless fear.
Back-back!
I had chosen, in a surrender to sweat and childhood, to join
the brutal conspiracy below thought, below the will, at the sweet
muscular level of aggression; to punish the insolence of weakness, the
possibility I had not chosen, seemed enough. But, amphibian at
heart, I had moved before I knew it at his nerve's quivering, back
to empathy, my other element. I let the ball fall from my fingers
with no attempt at conviction, and as I fumbled after it toward
the rail, I could hear Dan escaping. "Guess I'll get a shower and
sack out." And after him, the shouts of the others that confessed
nothing, "Good game! Some workout!" would let him believe only
in the random insights of dreams that he had there known terror.
He knew though what I had done and claimed me as a secret
comrade and ally with a quiet certainty I could not dismay. He would
wait for me, silently reading in my bunk or leaning against a bulk–
head, as Baldy and John and
I f
played cribbage, ignoring our con–
ventional obscenities, and refusing the drinks we occasionally offered
him
with some embarrassment; or when I went into the wardroom
for a cup of coffee toward dawn after a night of poker, I would find
him dozing over a pile of letters stacked up before him with nervous
precision, the edges of stamp and envelope parallel. "Well," he would
say, "well-" and we would be off again.
Over the green tops of the tables through the endless furry noise
of the ventilators, and at the rail, our eyes on the waterline where the
classic, melancholy swell
("Sehnsucht,"
Dan would say, his sole word
