I Pledge Allegiance by Chris Lynch

would be possible. “He called me Vera way before you guys did.”
    The way the water kicks up in our wake, it reminds me of films I used to see, of women water-skiing in fancy ridiculous Hollywood musicals. And then I’m thinking of World War II films, with PT boats cutting up the waters and sinking German U-boats and everybody being comrades in arms and knowing which side of everything was the right side and being sure to be on that side. Everybody always had great teeth in all those films. Vera has great teeth, and I’m forcing myself to think these things, because, I realize, I don’t think I want to think about what Vera wants me to think about.
    “I was a great shot,” he says after apparently too much of all that Hollywood. “In basic training. Every type of gun they let me shoot — rifle, the cannons, antiaircraft, whatever they gave me — I could shoot the eyebrows off a fly a mile away. Must be in the blood, the Rivera genes.”
    “That’s great,” I say.
    “Yeah, great. And I swore I was gonna come over here and shoot my father’s eyes out. I was gonna make sure I knew where he was all the time and I was gonna shoot that way. Problem is, I think I said so out loud a few times.”
    “That explains the laundry duty.”
    “I believe my dad was scared of me, so he fixed things.”
    “Is that likely?”
    “Likely? Did you know before you got here that they were actually gonna make us sing ‘Anchors Aweigh’?”
    “No, sir,” I say, shaking my head vigorously and laughing. “I thought it was a joke song, from cartoons or something.”
    “Exactly. Now guess what. I can’t stop. The song, it spins in my head night and day and day and night and I can’t stop it. It plays at the same time with the Marines’ hymn, ‘From the Halls of Montezuma’ — and I mean AT THE SAME TIME, with the words twisting andsnaking in and all over each other. I’m not kidding you, man. It doesn’t ever stop.”
    He turns and locks my eyes with his, right up scary close.
    “My dad used to come in my room and sing that song in my ear while I was sleeping. Night after night. To make me into what he wanted me to be. And not what he didn’t want me to be, you know what I mean? I would wake up, all sweating, that song in my head, but nobody there. I could smell him, though. Just me, there, alone, shaking, with his scent and his song, but no Dad. I
knew,
from his smell, he was there just a minute ago. Scent of Dad, but no Dad.”
    I get more of a chill now than from anything I have seen or heard yet in this war.
    “That’s … ah. Wow, man. No offense, but I don’t think I’d give you a gun, either. I think the Navy’s probably right about that at least.”
    Another first: Vera laughs. That’s a relief. It feels like something is opening, so I step on in. “Why are you talking to me now so much, Vera? After all the not talking you’ve done all this time? “
    His tensed-up features melt some to a real, soft, and hopeful smile. He looks like a kid.
    “‘Cause I been watching you, Mo. You’re a good one. You’re the real thing, aren’t ya? And I need a friend.”
    It seems like a simple enough thing. It seems like the kind of thing that would happen to a person lots of times over the course of a life. But I cannot think of one time, even as a little boy, when somebody came right out and asked me if I would be their friend.
    And here and now, in war and all. In the middle of the night and all. Facing off the stern of a great warship, the wind at our backs, the smell of the sea all around, the roll of the deck beneath our feet. It seems like the easiest answer in the world. Why not?
    I try the easy way first, the
man
way.
    “We’re all your friends, Vera,” I say. “All the guys.”
    He shakes his head. The smile remains.
    “I mean a real friend. I don’t think I have ever, once, had a real, true friend. And everyone should have one real, true friend before he dies, don’t you think?”
    It seems, again,