The Last One Left (16 page)

“If it please the court, I would like permission to reconstruct the circumstances which brought Sergeant Walter Corpo to this area. He was a platoon leader in my company in 1944, an infantry combat veteran by then, a young man who had enlisted in December of 1941 after one year and a few months of college. I led a patrol of fifteen men into the small village of Selestat near the Rhine. We were ambushed. Sergeant Corpo took cover by a fountain in the square and gave us covering fire to enable us to withdraw, with little hope of being able to retreat in turn. He was not ordered to cover the retreat. It was his instinctive reaction. We got out with but three casualties and came back with the entire company. Sergeant Corpo was believed dead. It was obvious he had kept firing after being hit several times, gravely.

“A shard of metal, possibly a mortar fragment, had penetrated his skull. A corpsman detected a pulse and had him removed to an aid station, though believing he would soon die. From there he was taken back to a station hospital and then to a general hospital, both installations thinking his chance of survival remote. I believed he
had died. I put him in for a posthumous decoration, and he was awarded the Silver Star. The war ended. I returned to law school. After graduation I entered the practice of law here in the city of Broward Beach. In 1948 the Veterans’ Administration got in touch with me and asked me if I would go over to Bay Pines Veterans Hospital near St. Petersburg on a matter regarding Sergeant Walter Corpo. He had asked for me.

“I discussed the case with his doctors. He was in excellent physical health. The brain injury, however, had left him with certain disabilities. Complicated instruction confused him. His attention span was short. He would say exactly what he meant in every circumstance, a trait our culture does not find palatable. They did not consider him dangerous. But they had noticed an increasing unrest in him, an increasing irritability at being forced to live in such close quarters with so many other men. They doubted he could earn a living. But he was eligible to receive a total disability pension. He had no relatives close enough to take any interest in him. Could I be of any help?

“He knew me. He was glad to see me. He was absolutely certain I could get him out of that place. He had saved my life twice. I brought him back here with me. He lived in my home. I had an outboard boat and motor. He had a taste for being alone. He began to spend longer and longer periods on the water. After he was gone for three days I demanded an explanation. He took me to that small mangrove island in the bay, approximately ten acres in area, nameless at that time and now known as Sergeant’s Island. He had, with what must have been incredible effort, hewed a curving channel back through the mangrove to a small hammock of palmetto and cabbage palm, and he had used the outboard motor to wash the channel deep enough to use. He had constructed a crude shelter out of driftwood, tarpaper, tin cans hammered flat, and some battered
windows scavenged from the city dump. He said it was what he liked and what he wanted, and he wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.

“I will now present for the consideration of the court, two documents. The first is from the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund giving Sergeant Corpo permission to reside upon that state-owned land until such time as title passes into other hands. The second is also dated in November of 1949 and is signed by the Chairman of the County Commission, and grants Sergeant Corpo all the necessary zoning exceptions applicable.

“Once a month Sergeant Corpo comes to the mainland, picks up his disability check at my home, cashes it at my bank, buys provisions and returns to Sergeant’s Island. Over the years he has considerably improved his cottage. Should he not appear for his check, I would go there at once to see what happened to him. He is in splendid physical condition. He wants merely to be left alone.

“There has been talk of violence. There was one such incident. Seven years ago a pack of teen-age boys came to the erroneous conclusion that Sergeant Corpo was a drunk, and that the cottage might well contain a large supply of whisky. There were five of them. They decided to raid the island. They thought Sergeant Corpo some sort of harmless nut. I could have told them that Sergeant Corpo grew up in the swamplands of Georgia, that when he was twelve and thirteen he would go into those swamps hunting and be gone a week without anyone worrying about his safety. I could have told them how silent and deadly the Sergeant was on night patrol duty.

“They raided him on a Saturday night. He heard them coming. He turned his lanterns out. He went outside, circled them, found their boat and cast it adrift. Then, in the night, he took them one at a time, lashed them to the mangroves with pieces of rope, spacing them far enough apart so they could communicate only by shouting to each other. Then he went back to his cottage and cleaned up all
the mess and litter and breakage they had caused. He did a good job. Then he came over here to the city and asked the authorities to come pick up the boys. It was dawn when they gathered them up, cowed and terrified, their faces grotesquely puffed by insect bites, eyes swollen shut. They were of good family, had been in trouble prior to the raid, but to the best of my knowledge, have stayed out of trouble ever since.

“I submit that these petitioners who are making a new attempt to dislodge Sergeant Corpo are expressing not any feeling that he is a public nuisance, but rather a social judgment, and wish to penalize anyone who is unwilling or unable to conform to their particular standards of housing, habit, dress and deportment.

“Your honor, I am reminded of the prim lady who lodged a complaint against the owners of property adjacent to hers on the grounds that it was being put to immoral use as a nudist colony. The officers who investigated were confused by her statement of carryings-on right out in plain sight, having noticed the high wall, the large size of the adjoining grounds, and the remote location of the nudist establishment. When asked what she meant by plain sight, she said, ‘Right from my roof with my husband’s binoculars, you can’t hardly miss it.’

“When the only room left in our society for men such as Sergeant Corpo is inside an institution, it will be time for us to re-examine our goals—and our humanity.”

“Hoooheee, how the Lieutenant does go on,” Corpo said. “And how you this fine morning, Mr. Scallop? Excuse me. Pop you into the sack with all your folks. Get your tribe thinned out some before the mist burns off, and the Sunday damn fools come roaring around here in circles, pulling other damn fools on skis, scaring the fish and stirring up the mud.”

He turned and looked back at his island, a vague darkness in the mist, and turned back to his chore, only to find himself staring at a blue hull inches in front of his eyes. It had appeared so suddenly, with so little warning, his first impression was that he was being run down, and gave a hoarse yell and sloshed backward in the thigh-deep water, stumbling, catching his balance.

“Dumb fool!” he shouted. Then he saw how it was moving, almost stern first, slightly crabwise, a line trailing from the bow. With no wind, and with the tide moving as it was, it had to have come in through the inlet to be moving across this flat. It had drifted right across the waterway and into his bay. Fine boat. New looking. Florida number on the bow.

Corpo reached and caught the bow line and started gathering the loose end in, coiling it as he did so. There was enough weed entangled in the line to convince him the boat had been adrift a long time. He put the coiled line up on the bow. He sloshed around the boat. He could not see into it, it had so much freeboard, but he reached high, slung his sack of scallops over the gunnel, lowered it and let it drop the final few inches.

At the transom he spoke the name and port aloud. “Muñequita. Brownsville, Texas. And that’s for sure one hell of a drift. No, you got a Florida number. And that’s weed from the ocean out there. Got your little propellers tilted up clear of the water. End of all that bow line too unraveled to tell much how it parted. Say you must have been riding an anchor, swinging too much maybe. Get a tide change and slack and you put a loop over a fluke, then when it comes tight again, it could fray. You’re pretty new, aren’t you now? Not a mark on those propellers. Walk you home and tuck you under my front stoop and find out how bad some poor fool wants you back.”

Suddenly Corpo noticed a little folding bronze step plate at the transom corner, just above the waterline. He folded it down on its
hinge, got a foot on it, reached up and caught the grab handle and pulled himself erect on the step and stared into the teak cockpit.

“Motheragod!” he said, launched himself backwards, landed, stumbled and fell, came gasping to his feet in water deeper than he had expected. Wind riffled the water and the boat moved on. He hesitated a moment and then floundered after it, jumped and got the grab handle, knee on the folding step, worked his way up, sat on the broad transom, swung his legs into the boat.

As he took two strides toward her, he wiped his hand on his sodden pants, bent over and laid two fingers on the side of her throat just under the angle of the jaw. There was something there. A faint thing. A flutter. Not the bump-bump-bump you always felt when they weren’t hit bad.

He looked with consternation at the brightness, knowing the mist was burning off. Looking straight up he could see the first blue glaze through mist.

He went around her to the controls, pulled the nylon cover off, wiped his hands on his thighs as he studied them. Both keys in place, brass-bright. Quarter turn right for on. These little toggles should drop the props into the water. Hiss and chunk. Okay so far. Throttles in neutral? Starter buttons. Try it, Corpo.

One caught very quickly. The other ground for several long seconds and caught. He revved them with several quick hard bursts on each one, then at slow speed slipped them into gear. The boat moved. Exhaust bubbled astern. Water whispered along the bow. He turned the boat, tried more throttle, startled himself with the way it jumped. He pulled it back down. Just as he eased it slowly into his channel he looked west and saw the candy houses beginning to show through the mist, looked east and saw a motor sailer moving south down the Waterway toward Fort Lauderdale.

He had trouble in his narrow channel. At the turns the stern would swing too far, brush the roots. The channel widened at the
cabin, where for so long he had used the very lowest tides at the time to chop out the dead roots, grub out the muck, sand and dead shell and use it to build up the land around the cabin. With engines off, he glided slowly under the platform porch, nudging his skiff rudely aside as he scrambled forward, fended the boat off the house pilings, then made it fast at bow and stern.

He picked up the damp sack of scallops and went up the stairs, pushed the trapdoor open from below, climbed into his living quarters. He dumped the scallops into a shallow washtub, went out onto his front porch, dropped a bucket on a line, pulled up enough water to cover them. They began to move around in the washtub.

“Taste the best that time I fried you with the butter and onions, didn’t you now?”

He wondered when would be the best time to eat them. They’d keep fine. Maybe late in the day.

“Got me a good mess of you scallop folks that time I found that girl in that boat, too.”

Now when was that? Last year, or yesterday, or was it something going to happen, or by God, was it now!

He went to his think place, put his hands around the poles he had cut for supports, rested his forehead against the wall timber. He closed his hands as hard as he could, hard enough to make his shoulder muscles creak and pop. The poles were shiny where he had grabbed them a thousand times, the timber stained where he had rocked his head back and forth on it.

Everything would open up for you and turn loose, so you didn’t know where you were. You had to pull it back and lace it down. You had to shut your eyes and think of a row of poles closing you in like a fence on each side of you, so that tomorrow was ahead, and yesterday was right behind you, and last month and last year were way back. Then you could get the shape of yesterday and the day before, and from that you could make it into now.

Yes, she was down there right now.

Clucking with exasperation at himself, he stripped his bed, flipped the mattress over, got the other sheets out of the box and made it up fresh.

He took a clean cotton blanket down to the boat, spread it on the deck beside the girl, and gently rolled her over onto it, trying not to look directly at her. He wrapped it around her, slid his hands under the blanket and stood up with her, astonished at how light she was. It was easier to carry her out and around and up the front way. He put her on the narrow bed and went back and closed his screened door, noticing the last of the mist was burned away.

He opened the petcock and ran some rainwater from his roof cistern into a basin, washed his hands with the sliver of yellow soap, dried them on sacking. He ran rainwater into the pot, pumped the little gasoline stove, lit the burner, put the pot on. Then he went over and sat on his heels and looked at her. Pretty enough little face, but the bones behind it looked sharp enough to come right through the skin. Skin worn off her cheek, mound of her forehead, edge of her jaw. He puzzled it out and decided it could have been rubbed against the teak deck just that way if the boat moved around much. Scrawny little arm about as big around as a turkey leg. He felt her forehead and clucked again, and said, “Just like a fire inside there, missy. You’ve got a fire that’s burning the meat right off your little bones.”

When he turned her head gently, he found the worst place. Where the fair hair was matted and tangled dark, above her ear. He fingered the hair pad away, separating it, and found the wound, perhaps two inches long, gaping almost an inch wide in the middle. It had been rain-washed, and had a skin of healing over it, but the lips of the wound were swollen and granular. He sucked his mouth in and held his breath and prodded at it with a gentle finger, but he
could feel no give or shift of the bone under the wound, no fatal sponginess.