very soon when being underwater is the only safe place on the planet.”
“We’re that close?” Henry asked.
“If it happens, a lot of us think there won’t be much point in going home,” Dixon said, letting the implications speak for him. Dixon was offering to save Henry’s life. “Let’s just say some people thought about exploring,” Dixon continued, almost apologetically. “Looking for a safe harbor. They point out we’ve got provisions for a year, considering reductions in the crew. We’ve got chow, warm bunks, plus a full complement of Tomahawks saying ‘Keep your hands to yourself.’ But here’s the thing. We need a doctor on board. I do, anyway.”
“That’s certainly true.”
“People might misunderstand what I’m suggesting,” Dixon said, so softly Henry could scarcely hear him. “They take mutiny pretty seriously in this outfit. If you have to say anything to anybody, it’s all idle chatter. That’s what it is. Idle chatter.”
“I would never say anything to anybody. I swear.”
“We’ll be laid up here for a couple weeks. Supposing you don’t find what you’re after. We could always use a clarinet player.”
* * *
—
MURPHY HAD A BERTH in the base hospital. “They’re shorthanded, and I thought I’d help them out,” she explained, when Henry came to bid farewell. “You’re going back to Atlanta?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“So I won’t see you again?”
“We don’t know what life has in store for us. Didn’t they teach you that in Wisconsin?”
“Minnesooota.”
Murphy stuck out her hand to say goodbye, but Henry held on to it. Her thumb rubbed across his knuckles. “I hope they’re waiting for you when you get there,” she said. “I hope there’s a big welcome home, and everybody’s safe and happy.”
Henry kissed her hand, the most natural thing in the world.
When he returned to the Navy Lodge, he fell into bed, his emotions still all jumbled. He really was finally going home. What would he find there? He dreaded learning the truth, but he couldn’t stand not knowing. He was safe but in danger. Overjoyed but apprehensive. And surprised when there was a knock on the door and it was dawn and he had been deep asleep. There stood Vernon Dixon.
“They got a car to take you to the airfield,” Dixon said, looking a little scandalized that Henry wasn’t dressed and ready at this hour.
“Can I brush my teeth?”
Henry hurried through his ablutions, still in a state of disbelief. That a car was waiting. That he was going to fly to Atlanta. Home.
As Henry was about to get into the car, Dixon handed him a business card. “If the internet ever comes back on or the cell phones work again, you’ll have my contacts.”
In exchange, Henry found a waterlogged card in his wallet. He wrote a number on the back. “This is Jill’s mobile number, just in case.” His own cell phone had drowned in his plunge into the Persian Gulf.
“Oh, here’s something else,” said Dixon. “I saw you had a little trouble getting around last night.”
Dixon handed him a beautifully wrought cane.
Henry was speechless. “Where…?” he sputtered, unable to finish.
“Guys in the shop here can make anything. It’s a Georgia hickory stick. Makes a good billy club if you ever have need of it. Might even work as a putter.”
The handle was a bronze submarine.
49
The Graves
A single-engine propeller-driven Beechcraft, a two-seater, about as powerful as a lawnmower, taxied onto the runway. Henry sat in the rear, in the trainee’s seat, staring at his reflection on the back of the pilot’s helmet. The pilot didn’t say much except to remark, “You must be pretty important.”
“Not at all,” Henry replied.
The little plane slowly gained speed, then hopped into the air. The bubble canopy was clear glass, so the Georgia landscape unfolded below, vast and green. There was no traffic on the roads, and the fields were fallow. Henry thought this is how Georgia must have looked when the Creek Indians lived there.
Was that long-ago past now the future? Henry was flying in a plane, itself a near antique, that was taking him backward in time. He had read enough history to know that civilization moves unevenly through millennia of progress only to undergo cycles of great destruction. He had always been intrigued by the collapse of great civilizations. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Society had uncovered the pathogen thought responsible for killing 80 percent of the native population of Mexico in the mid-sixteenth century—a form of salmonella, probably brought by the conquistadors, that destroyed the Aztec empire. With Jill, Henry had toured