As we crossed the equator, his shellback initiation consisted of a few daubs of paint and a wetdown with a salt-water hose. Somehow the rough stuff dosed out to the other polliwogs just didn't seem appropriate for him. Once we had crossed the line, the talk on board became more and more centered on Recife and the beer and the women there, with much chatter about the losing of cherries by the new men and about the renewing of old friendships in the houses of prostitution by the more experienced sailors. Somehow, the talk didn't touch him at all. His was an inpenetrable innocence.

But it was destroyed. Two days out of Recife, it was destroyed.

Everybody was always terribly jumpy near the end of a convoy run, and this one had stretched on for an extra week. We had a couple of fights a day among the crew. Cooped up as we were on a hundred-and-eighty-foot deck, personality conflicts could get pretty intense. At a word, you lost your temper, even when you knew you were silly to do so.

By now, the kid was really in my mind much of the time. Lying naked but for skivvie shorts in my sack after evening chow, feeling the steady rolling of the ship and the endless throb of the engines, I could see his bunk from mine, where he lay reading a paperback, or writing a letter. Then he would come over to my sack as usual for a just-before-lights-out chat. The crew's quarters were generally empty. Only the men going on the late watch were taking it easy, planning to get a little sleep before being called at midnight. The rest of the crew was forward, playing cards or listening to a radio in the mess hall which served as recreation headquarters after work hours. He would lean against my bunk, and our talk was quiet and pointless. Buddy talk. I wished it could have been something more, but then if he had known the score he would not have been there in the first place. It all happened so fast and so unnecessarily. Boats, the master-at-arms of the crew's compartment, was passing my bunk just as the ship took a roll, we must have been changing to a new vector and got caught for a second in the trough. Anyway, the lurch caught Boats off balance and he fell against the kid.

"Why don't you get out of the way?" Boats snarled.

"Don't be so goddamned nasty," I yelled. It was a sudden anger, born of the tension of the weeks at sea.

Boats whirled. "Listen, you queen," he roared, "Keep your goddamed lovers from blocking the passage." He looked at the kid.

"Always mooning around over here. You act just like a silly girl in love!" I swung out of my sack and got in one good punch. But the damage was done, and I knew it. Boats had given a name to the buddy-feeling the kid had for me. "Like a silly girl in love!" Love. Love meant sex. And sex was what the kid wouldn't admit existed. Sex was wrong. This feeling which he had was wrong. It was evil, somthing to fight against, to resist, to put out of mind, like other sins of the flesh. Now it had been given a name and was no longer innocent. Adam had eaten the apple, and knew that he was naked!

We docked at Recife and the kid avoided me. On the return trip, he moved his bunk to the other side of the compartment where I could not see him. He stood by my sack never again. A month later, I was transferred to a destroyer heading for the Mediterranean.

I have wondered if he ever made the adjustment, if he ever accepted that warm feeling between two men as a form of love. Or has he remained, frozen, afraid, virgin, puritan, still fighting off the attempts of his heart to thaw and allow him to step out into the green Eden of love.

17