Passage

“I figured that. I been calling you and the doc all week. I was starting to feel like Norm Pichette. Thought I was going to have to get me a machine gun.”

Joanna looked at him, startled, but he was grinning amiably at her.

“I guess I never told you about how he got accidentally left behind when we abandoned the Yorktown. He was down in sick bay, and when he wakes up, there’s nobody on board but him and George Weise, who’s got a skull fracture and who’s out cold. Well, everybody’s already been transferred to the Hammann and the Hughes.”

He can’t be making it up, Joanna thought all over again. Not with all these details. Part of it has to be true.

“He calls over to us, but we can’t hear him, we’re too far away. Well, he tries everything — he hollers and waves his arms.” Mr. Wojakowski demonstrated, waving his arms over his head like a semaphore. “He even gets a stew pot out of the galley and bangs on it, but we’re too far away and there’s too much going on. So there he is, on a ship that’s going down and no way to get a message to anybody.”

“Mr. Wojakowski — ” she said, but he was off again.

“So what does he do? He takes a machine gun and fires it into the water. We’re too far away to hear it, but Meatball Fratelli sees the splashes in the water and shouts, ‘Sub!’ and everybody looks, but we can’t figure out what it is. It’s not a sub, and it doesn’t act like a depth charge, and then I look up, and there he is, standing on the port catwalk. Pretty smart of him, huh, figuring out a way to get a message to us like that?”

“Mr. Wojakowski, I have a question I need to ask you.”

“Ed.”

Why am I asking this? she thought. It will just remind him of another Yorktown story, and even if he did answer it, Richard would hardly believe someone who was a compulsive liar.

“Go ahead, Doc, shoot,” Mr. Wojakowski said.

“Mr. Wo — Ed,” she said, “during your interviews, you talked a lot about World War II. Was there something in your NDEs that made you think of your war experiences?”

“On the Yorktown, you mean?” He took off his baseball cap and scratched his freckled head. “Not that I can think of.”

The one. time I want him to come up with a story, she thought, and he lets me down.

“Nothing in particular, Doc,” he said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said and gathered up her belongings. “I just wondered.”

He put his baseball cap back on. “You mean besides that I was on a ship, right?”

37

“I must go in, the fog is rising.”

—Emily Dickinson’s last words

“You were on a ship?” Joanna said carefully. “What ship?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Not the Yorktown. I knew every inch of her, and this was an alleyway I’d never seen before. And the door wasn’t like the ones we had. It was more like the door you’d see on the captain’s cabin. Which reminds me of the time I went to ask the captain somethin’, and who do I see coming out of his cabin but Stinkpot Malone. Now, Stinky can’t be up to anything but no good, he’s the biggest stool pigeon in the whole U.S. Navy, and that’s going some. So, anyway, Stinky sees me and he says—”

“What makes you think it was a ship?” Joanna cut in.

“You ever been on board?” he said. “Once you have, you can’t mistake that feeling for anything else. You’d know it even if you was blindfolded and had earplugs on. Which, come to think of it, I guess I was.”

“But you couldn’t tell what ship?”

“Nope,” he said. “It was a navy ship, that’s all I know, ’cause I could see sailors outside the door.”

“You could see sailors?”

“People, anyway. I thought they were sailors. The light was too bright to make out much, but I could see they had their dress whites on, so I figured they must be sailors.”

A ship, and people outside the door, dressed all in white.

“You said it felt like you were at sea. Were the engines going?”

“The engines?” he said, surprised. “No,” and the blue-haired ladies came up, looking determined.

“The van is waiting, Edward,” one of them said, glaring at Joanna.

“Be right with you,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “You gals go on. I gotta say good-bye to my girlfriend here.” He winked at Joanna. The ladies moved off a few steps and then stood there, waiting impatiently. “What other questions you got, Doc?”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Well, I’ll tell ya, I didn’t want to just yammer on like Edgewise Eggleton. Did I ever tell you about him? We called him that ’cause when you were around him you couldn’t ever get a word in edgewise, and—”

“You’d better go,” Joanna said, indicating the ladies, who looked like they were about to have a stroke. “You don’t want the van to go without you.”

“I’d never hear the end of it,” he said and sighed. “You call me as soon as you get that schedule set, Doc. I can come in anytime.” He sauntered over to the women and then came back. “I just got to thinking. It might’ve been the Franklin. I don’t know how she went down, though.”

“Went down?”