The gunner in the back, too, Dolson noticed—his face beneath the mask was covered by the grimace of a lemur. Lunatics everywhere he looked. Release me, husks! Wells cried. Dolson, at the end of his patience, pummeled Wells about the head. The Captain went silent, his face strangely child-like in slumber but for the blood trickling from his nose. On the bridge of the aircraft carrier, General Brant listened tensely to the countdown. Fire, he said. The explosion was more than even the Army engineers had reckoned. Smaller ships were sent tumbling like toys in a bath. The carrier bucked and waves reached over to slap the deck. When the shrapnel and debris and geysers of water finally cleared Brant beheld the sundered remains of the Coast Guard ship. Atop it, blown apart, was the sea monster, its pitiful eye stalks slumped into the churning sea, its limp tentacles spreading like hair across the surface. Success! said the Lieutenant. Quiet, son, said Brant. Don’t you see, General sir? You did it with explosives! Brant said nothing. What he saw was truly a sorry sight, a creature in the thrusts of passion exploded and scattered about in giant leather pieces, its blood frothing ink black into the churning wake. Within Brant was the ring of hollow defeat. And what of the Captain? Did Wells, too, float out there, bits and pieces leaking into the jet stream? A Coast Guard Captain deserved better. They all did. Even the sea monster. The heat of Brant’s crusade had blinded him, made him monstrous. He looked about at the sweating faces of his crew, grimaces smeared with misshapen forms of nightmare animals, and felt the luster of battle, of victory, bleed out. Tow it in, said Brant. Before it goes under. But General! Tow it. Brant retreated to his quarters. There, in his sequined costume and smeared tiger stripes, he understood at last that no worthier adversary would ever present itself. The sea monster had been cut down perhaps approaching a titanic climax. What would it have been to allow the creature to finish? Ten minutes, ten hours. He imagined his own wife spread and moist on the bed, calling his name, before a ferocious explosion tore the roof off the house and blasted the bedroom and all within. He was meat and his lovely wife Brenda even less, hunks of sodden goo. Brant wept for the sea monster. He wept for the fool Wells and the radioman Dolson, and when they were brought to his cabin reeking and deranged, he hugged them to himself. My lost boys, Brant moaned.
70 · Briny Tide