The Intrepid

Intrepid

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

Throughout the long night I sat in the dark bedroom listening to the relentless, staccato pulse of the grandfather clock.

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

On top of the small desk before me is a loaded .22 caliber, Colt revolver. Reaching out, I softly caress the gun feeling its impersonal, cold blue steel.

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

My head feels as though it is being squeezed in a giant vice. Everything is crushing in on me. The past few days have been a whirling blur of agony and confusion - like a festering, tormenting nightmare from which I can neither awaken, nor escape. Was it possible all of this is little more than the worse dream of my life? Or was it equally possible it is all true?

I lean back in the chair and try to clear the bewildering chaos swirling in my head. I need to think.

How did it start?

Where did it begin?

Only a week earlier I was sitting in a classroom along with other college freshmen listening to Professor Joplin ask, “Can the sins of parents be inherited by their children?” It was the same question he posed every year to goad students into a discussion on the consequences of morality and death. I slump lower into the desk seat. The proposition was a silly abstraction. How could sin possibly pass from one generation to the next, or, for that matter, from parents to their children? The idea was absurd. I knew with absolute certainty God would never permit it. But foremost in my mind that bleak December morning was the thought of the forthcoming semester break for Christmas. It was only a week away. All I could think about was finally going to New York.

This was my first Christmas away from home since starting college. Already I missed being with Aunt Kate and the cheery warmth of our small, Midwest home. Aunt Kate raised me as an infant, and she is the only family I have. I loved her as much as any child could love a mother. The holidays will be lonely and empty without her. Still, this was my chance to go to New York and, at last, to see The Intrepid.

Intrepid is an old U.S. Navy, Essex class, aircraft carrier built during WWII. My father, Jessie, was killed on the ship during the savage Battle of Okinawa. A Kamikaze suicide plane crashed onto the wood flight deck igniting a firestorm. Jessie pulled three wounded shipmates from the inferno but when he went back a fourth time a bomb exploded. His body was never found.

Intrepid survived Okinawa and went on to serve for many years thereafter. Still, as with all things, time caught up with the aged career. Too small by modern standards, Intrepid was decommissioned and sold for scrap. Only a last-minute reprieve saved her from the cutting torches by being converted into a floating, naval museum.

As soon as I arrived in New York, I took a taxi to the Hudson River waterfront. There stood Intrepid - a mountainous 35,000 tons of steel. The very sight of the ship sent shivers through me. The old carrier was drawing me to her as surely as a nail is drawn to a magnet. But a foreboding of danger nagged at me.

“Why?” I wonder.

What could be the harm?

What could go wrong?

The haunting answer echoing again and again in my ear was, “Everything.”

I pay the admission fee at the Visitors Center and walk out onto the long wood pier. The massive hull of Intrepid blended perfectly into the gray sunless winter sky. I climb the scaffolded wood stairs and enter the cavernous hanger bay filled with old planes.

Slowly, I wander throughout the ship scanning exhibits and watching old combat films, hoping somehow to catch a glimpse of my father. At last, I found a ship’s ladder, climb up to the flight deck and walk out to the carrier’s bow. I stand there for the longest time letting the cutting, winter wind coming off the Hudson blow on my face. Then I tip back my head, close my eyes, and surrender to my imagination. I try to envision Intrepid as she once must have been - and my father too as he once must have been.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tenseness in my body ebbs away allowing my mind to run free. I feel a strange dreamlike state come over me to where I am floating in an eerie, existential out-of-body experience. At first, all I could see was in the distance was a pulsing, yellowish corona of light moving toward me. Growing larger as it neared, it soon swept over me like a giant tsunami pulling me with it into the dimension of yesteryear.

In the beginning, it was all a dense, fog-like haze where wispy, black-and-white silhouettes appeared, only then to quickly fade away. One after another they came - ghostly, shadowed images of men, ships, and planes, locked in a violent, bloody sea battle fought long ago. Then, as if someone had tripped a switch, it all began going around and around in a giant circle - like a neon-lighted carousel with me standing in the middle. Faster and faster it moved until it was only a blinding, whirling kaleidoscope of color and motion.

Almost as quickly as it had started, it slowed, then stopped. Only now, there is a difference: Intrepid is alive again. The massive engines deep in the ship’s bowels are pushing the mighty carrier through the dangerous waters off Okinawa. I am there. I can see everything.

Intrepid’s flight deck is crowded with fully armed Hellcat fighters and bomb-laden, Dauntless dive bombers. I can hear the howling roar of their engines as they launch, one-after-another, into the ominous, red morning sky. From somewhere back on the carrier’s stern comes the agonizing groan of arresting cables stretched by the tail-hooks of returning planes slamming back down onto the flight deck.

But what stunned me was the sight of Kamikaze suicide planes crashing into Intrepid’s side igniting thunderous fireball explosions and blistering, searing heat. I hear the pleading, agonizing cries of blood-soaked, dying sailors. My nostrils sting with the sweet, acrid stench of burning flesh. I scream in horror at the carnage.

I scream, and scream, and scream. Suddenly, someone is shaking me by the shoulders and asking if I am okay. I open my eyes and, half stunned, look around only to realize it had been just a wild, imaginative dream. Or was it?

Trembling, I stagger to a nearby catwalk and find a ship’s ladder leading below decks. Half-running though the stale, dank passageways an icy chill grips me.

Am I being watched?

Am I being followed?

Twice I turn to look. No one is there. Then I heard it - a haunting, beckoning voice echoing through Intrepid’s steel corridors.

"Cort"

"Cort"

"Cort

Startled, I whirled around to see who was calling me. Again, there was no one. In a near panic, I ran through the ship, down the scaffolded steps, and out the main gate. I crossed the street only to turn and stare at the carrier’s looming, grey silhouette as an ominous fog wrapped its arms around her. Intrepid was trying to tell me something - but what?

It started to rain.

I stood on the sidewalk for hours just watching - for what I didn't know. I was hoping for some kind of a sign, or signal - just anything. But there was nothing.

Night came. By then I was wet and cold. A policeman came by and asked if I was all right. I told him that I was fine. The officer studied me for a moment, then gently suggested it was probably time to go home. Walking away I turned once again to look at Intrepid. I’ll be back.

A week passed. I waited.

At last, a winter storm arrived, and with it a blanket of melancholic fog descended across New York. At night the fog took on a special, sinister quality. Normally bright streetlights became little more than glowing lamps impotent to penetrate the cheerless, grey gloom. Every doorway, every alcove, every alley became a shadowed refuge capable of concealing a figure moving stealthily through the night.

From my hotel window I watch the fog magically transform the city into murky darkness. My thoughts wander, but mostly they are of Aunt Kate. She never talked about my father. I never quite understood why. After all, she and Jessie were brother and sister. But Aunt Kate was strangely quiet whenever I tried to talk about my father. I simply assumed his death was too painful for her. And yet, I recall Aunt Kate’s odd reaction upon learning I was going to visit Intrepid. She paled. She never said a word. She simply walked away.

I told the cab driver to drop me off three blocks from the waterfront. I wanted to walk the rest of the way. Near Intrepid I found a recessed entrance of an old warehouse. Quickly, I unscrew the single light bulb over the door and step back into the shadows.

At midnight I watch the guards at Intrepid’s Visitor’s Center change shifts. The new guard made a hurried check of the dock, then quickly returned to the warmth of the office.

My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid it could be heard for miles. I took a deep breath. It was time. Darting across the street I quickly scale the perimeter cyclone fence. Noiselessly, I run along inside the fence hiding in what shadows I can find.

At the Visitor Center I crouch beneath a window and listen for any sign of being detected. Peeking inside, I see the guard sitting at a desk, reading a newspaper. Bent over, I ran across the wet dock and scamper up the scaffold stares to Intrepid. I opened a hatch door, stepped through it, and pulled it shut.

“Great!” I thought, “Now what is I supposed to do?” Yet, instinctively, I cross the hanger bay to the far side, climb a ship’s ladder up two decks, open a hatch, and step outside. Intrepid’s flight deck is a wet blanket of dense fog. For a time I just stand there - shivering and trying to adjust to the cold. Then, coming out of the fog, I hear a faint, whispered voice.

“Cort”

“Cort”

“Cort”

Suddenly unsure of myself, I hiss, “Who’s there?”

The fog thinned. Slowly, a strange, ethereal shape emerged. I am afraid. I want to run - and yet, I want to stay. Frozen with indecision, I watch the delicate apparition take form. A macabre semblance of a face appears. It was an old man’s face - haggard and narrow, weathered by time, with long, unkempt gray hair. But the most striking feature about the face was that it did not have any eyes. In their place were two empty, lifeless sockets as black as coal. And yet, the face stared directly at me.

“Who are you?” I hiss.

“I am your father’s spirit.”

I gawk at the face. “What happened to you?”

“Death ends man’s short life and by so doing separates the soul from the flesh. We pray that in death we may find sweet rest. Yet, death may bring only endless torment.”

Jessie paused, “I am forever dammed, as you too are dammed, for the unpardonable sins I have committed. And for those sins, I am imprisoned in this steel tomb until such day it may find a watered grave. Thereafter, I will be sent to wander alone across the storm-tossed seas of eternity.”

“But, why?” I cry. “You were a hero.”

The face began to fade.

“Don’t go,” I plead. “Please stay.”

The ghoulish shadow pulsed - hesitating between the urge to leave, and the need to stay. At last, I heard my father say, “The impulsive acts of desperate men in war cannot atone for the unnatural trespasses committed within their life.”

“I don’t understand,” I cry.

Jessie’s cold, dead eyes stared directly at me.

“As I am your father, so too am I your uncle. As Kate is your aunt, so too is she your mother.” Then the ghost melted into the night.

“Come back,” I plead. But my father was gone.

I stood on the cold flight deck straining to peer into the night. I was stunned. How could it be true?

The bus trip home took two days. I did not talk with any of the passengers, preferring to stare out the window and brood in my tortured thoughts of Jessie’s message from the other side of life.

It was early afternoon when I arrived home. Kate was sitting at the kitchen table waiting, knowing I would come. She’d lost weight. Her face was thin and pale. She looked tired.

“Is it true?” I demanded. The tone of my voice was hard and sharp. “I want to know.”

Kate turned her head away. A tear ran down her cheek.

“Yes.”

I ran to my bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it. Laying on the bed, I thought of Aunt Kate and my father. I am their son. But it was more than just that. I am the bastard son of an incestuous brother and sister - a corrupted mixture of flesh and blood. At first, I tremble with rage, only to succumb to overwhelming self-pity, despair, and shame. How could it have happened? Did my father force himself on her? Or did they willingly lie in each other’s arms?

What choices do I have?

What should I do?

What can I do?

I feel as though I am sitting in a wagon pulled by a team of stampeding horses not knowing where they were going, nor with any idea of how to stop them.

Is it possible to cleanse myself of this evil?

Is redemption possible for any of us?

How could God have so abandoned me?

I think of the stone cast onto a pond and the expanding circle of ripples it creates before disappearing into the black, nothingness of the murky mud. And, like the sinking stone and the disappearing ripples, I too am doomed to hopeless, darkness - irreversibly scarred by the ugly, unforgivable acts of a father, whose memory I’d worshiped, and of a woman, who I’d loved as an aunt, never realizing that she was also my mother.

From a desk drawer I took out the Colt revolver and a box of ammunition. Opening the cylinder, I loaded the weapon with six cartridges and snapped it shut. Gingerly, I put it down on the desktop before me. It is the same gun I’ve used so many times before to hunt rabbits.

The afternoon wore on grudgingly fading into night. Outside, I hear Aunt Kate sobbing. I do not care. How could I? Throughout the long, long night the endless rhythm of the grandfather clock, once so soothing to me, was now a torturous pounding in my ears.

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

Tick-Tock

I cry and cry. But there is no relief. At last, dawn arrived. It had snowed during the night covering everything with a virginal, white coat. The scattered rays of the morning sun filter through the lace curtained windows filling the bedroom with light - and with it suggesting a false measure of hope. I pick up the gun, pull back the hammer, and put the barrel in my mouth.

A year passed. Kate grieved alone. Then one day, and without telling anyone, she quietly packed her few possessions and moved away. According to the police report, the thin, grey-haired woman came every day with her folding chair and sat on the high, precipitous cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She was always alone. She sat for hours, with the sun and wind on her face, listening to the surf crash on the rocks far below and watching the sun slowly set into the distant, blue horizon. Then one afternoon, she stood, walked to the edge of the cliff, and jumped. Her body was never recovered.

The class of new college freshman stirred in their seats. Professor Joplin began, “Can the sins of parents be inherited by their children? But before you answer, let me tell you a story."