We take a table by the windows. Below, San Diego glitters like diamonds on black velvet, and the lights of Coronado Island play across the dark harbor in bright dancing lines.  Following a double feature evening of The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal, we are ready for a drink and ready to bring a twentieth century perspective to the black and white flashbacks dancing in our heads.

The room is nearly empty. A sailor and a young woman sit two seats apart at the circular bar, three men in suits are at a corner table and a young couple sit at another window table near ours. We easily pick out our ship among the dark silhouettes in the harbor, and we revel in the condescending detachment provided us by distance and iced gin.

Suddenly, the sailor at the bar pushes off his stool and makes a threatening gesture at the bartender.

“What do you mean, that’s it!  Give me another drink!” he demands.

“I’m sorry,” the bartender replies. “I think you’ve had enough.  Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“I don’t need no cab,” the sailor replies angrily.  “And I don’t need your snooty, fucking bar either.  I’ll get a drink somewhere else,” he says, grabbing his hat. 

In a gesture of salty chivalry, he pauses to apologize to the woman at the bar for his profanity.  Then, “You’re going to regret this, cowboy,” he shouts over his shoulder at the bartender and stomps toward the door.

He is one of ours.  I recognize him when he turns toward us on his way out.  I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him in chow lines aboard ship.   He’s wearing the stripes of a gunner’s mate first class, clearly career Navy. O’Hara and I, low-ranking Navy Reservist draftees, are doing our two years and doing our best to find some sanity away from the shipboard slog. We’re in civvies, and happy for it at a time like this.

The incident sours the evening. Try as we may to get away from the ship, the ship has a way of coming to us. No more Bergman discussion. His shadowy cinematic existentialism pales in comparison to actualities awaiting us across the harbor. We drink up, and floor by floor, as the glass elevator descends we lament the passing of our Sky Room escape.

There he is.   After changing into our uniforms at the harbor locker club, we arrive at the harbor taxi stand, and he is already there waiting for the same taxi we will be taking back to the ship.  He didn’t go anywhere for more drinks.  He is pacing the pier, mumbling to himself and occasionally gesturing wildly.  O’Hara suggests that we keep our distance, and we wait up the pier a bit.

When the taxi comes, we take two dry seats in the front.  The wind is up, and the seats in the middle of the open taxi are soaking wet with spray from the previous crossing.  The gunner’s mate moves to the back and strikes up a conversation with the coxswain.  The coxswain offers him an extra slicker, and the gunner’s mate launches into a non-stop tirade about the incident in the bar.  Over the roar of the engine and the drumming of the breakers on the side of the boat, we can hear bits of it as he gestures toward the shore and the El Cortez Hotel fading into the distance across the water.

When the taxi reaches the ship’s dock the three of us step off together.  Walking backwards with an unsteady duck waddle the gunner’s mate is now in our faces, continuing his rant as we make our way down the pier to the gangplank.

“The son of a bitch said that I had enough…I’ll decide when I’ve had enough!” he bellows.  “Anyway, it wasn’t about drinks at all.  It was about the woman.  Me and her were hitting it off just fine, but he wanted to make his moves on her, so he cuts me off.  The phony son of a bitch.” 

Speaking with a slight stammer, his eyes widen each time he struggles with a word.  He comes across more like a tortured boy, putting on airs, than a genuine tough guy.

We don’t reply.

“Up there!” he swings his arm pointing at the skyline across the harbor. “That bar at the top of the El Cortez, you know?  The son of a bitch.” 

“Yeah, I’ve been up there,” I answer.  “Great view.”

He studies me with a puzzled frown, turns and hurries up the gangplank.

“One disturbed puppy,” O’Hara remarks.

We check aboard, stand for a bit at the hatch leading to O’Hara’s sleeping quarters, have a couple of laughs at the gunner’s mate’s expense, weaving in some lines from The Seventh Seal and decide to call it a night.

I head down the deck toward my sleeping quarters.  As I pass a five-inch gun turret, I notice it begin to rotate.  It’s the middle of the night.  There are no drill alarms going off.  Why is the turret moving?

It stops rotating.  The twin guns, trained across the harbor, begin to elevate. 

My God!  He is that crazy.

I turn to run for the officer of the deck, and just then, he comes running down the deck toward the turret with one of the deck watches.  They crawl inside the turret. There is shouting. A hatch slams. More shouting, “Give me your keys. That’s an order!” Then all is quiet. 

From the shadows, I watch the officer of the deck and the deck watch emerge from the turret, one on each side of our gunner’s mate. Holding him by the arms, they escort him toward the front of the ship. 

My attention shifts to the skyline across the harbor, the red sign at the top of the El Cortez Hotel and the course of tall windows just below it.   

I imagine the three businessmen at the corner table, all schmoozed out, finishing their last drinks with a raucous round of glad-handing.

My fantasy includes the bartender, the target of it all, wiping the bar with his barcloth and sneaking another side glance at the young woman in the royal blue silk top, now the only remaining customer at the bar.

“One for the road,” the bartender says as he pours her a last drink on the house and pours one for himself.

“Oh, aren’t you sweet,” she replies with a fleeting smile. 

“First time in San Diego?” he asks, raising his glass for a clink.  He’s been setting up this moment all evening.  The two of them will have a little nightcap chat, and at closing time he will offer to see her to her room.

I picture two 5-inch rounds crashing through the tall windows, slamming into the backlighted wall of bottles behind the bar and exploding into a booze-laced burst of glass shards slicing through everything and everyone in the bar.  In a fireball that sweeps the length of the floor, windows burst out, the landmark red sign buckles, goes dark and rains down in a deadly shower on the streets below.  The Sky Room is gone in one thunderous moment.  A few small fires, flickering against the night sky, mark where it used to be.  In an eerie memorial silence, a long wisp of smoke, aglow with the lights of the city below, trails out across the skyline and mixes with low hanging clouds.  Then one after another, from here and there across the city the wail of sirens combine into one wavering crescendo echoing across the harbor. 

Emerging from the shadows and from my dark fantasy, I pause by the guns, still trained on the skyline across the water.  I stroke the cold steel of the turret wall with the flat of my hand, and turning, nearly overcome by weariness, I search the shadows for a ladder leading to the darkened deck below, where I hope to sleep.   

# # #

Leon Kortenkamp is a San Francisco Bay Area writer, artist and professor. He holds a MFA degree from the University of Notre Dame. His recent stories have been published in Curbside Splendor, Crux Literary Journal, Pilgrim Literary Journal, Straylight Literary Magazine, 101 Words and Flash Fiction Magazine. His work often features a consideration of constrained emotion lurking in the mundane, reflecting his conviction that ordinary objects and everyday events are deeply charged with spiritual reality.

Art: Leon Kortenkamp