V.

But initial sin entails eventual retribution. Later, somewhere between Barcelona and Cannes, evil days fell on Pig. One night, routing the message board, he went to sleep in the doorway of the executive officer's stateroom. The ship chose that moment to roll ten degrees to port. Pig toppled onto the terrified lieutenant commander like a corpse. "Bodine," the X.O. shouted, aghast. "Were you sleeping?" Pig snored away among a litter of special-request chits. He was sent down on mess cooking. The first day he fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed potatoes. So the next meal he was stationed in front of the soup, which was made by Potamos the cook and which nobody ate anyway. Apparently, Pig's knees had developed this odd way of locking, which – if the Scaffold were on an even keel – would enable him to sleep standing up. He was a medical curiosity. When the ship got back to the States he went under observation at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. When he returned to the Scaffold he was put on the deck force of one Pappy Hod, a boatswain's mate. In two days Pappy had driven him, for the first of what were to be many occasions, over the hill.

Now on the radio at the moment was a song about Davy Crockett, which upset Winsome considerably. This was '56, height of the coonskin hat craze. Millions of kids everywhere you looked were running around with these bushy Freudian hermaphrodite symbols on their heads. Nonsensical legends were being propagated about Crockett, all in direct contradiction to what Winsome had heard as a boy, across the mountains from Tennessee. This man, a foul-mouthed louse-ridden boozehound, a corrupt legislator and an indifferent pioneer, was being set up for the nation's youth as a towering and cleanlimbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He had swelled into a hero such as Mafia might have created after waking from a particularly loony and erotic dream. The song invited parody. Winsome had even cast his own autobiography into aaaa rhyme and that simpleminded combination of three - count them - chord changes:

"Born in Durham in '23,

By a pappy who was absentee,

Was took to a lynching at the neighborhood tree,

Whopped him a nigger when he was only three.

[Refrain]: Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.

Pretty soon he started to grow,

Everyone knew he'd be a loving beau,

Cause down by the tracks he would frequently go

To change his luck at a dollar a throw.

Well he hit Winston-Salem with a rebel yell,

Found his self a pretty Southron belle

Was doing fine till her pappy raised hell

When he noticed her belly was beginning to swell.

Luckily the war up and came along,

He joined the army feeling brave and strong,

His patriotism didn't last for long,

They put him in a foxhole where he didn't belong.

He worked him a hustle with his first C.O.,

Got transferred back to a PIO,

Sat out the war in a fancy chateau,

Egging on the troops toward Tokyo.

When the war was over, his fighting done,

He hung up his khakis and his Garand gun

Came along to Noo York to have some fun,

But couldn't find a job till '51.

Started writing copy for MCA

It wasn't any fun but it was steady pay,

Sneaking out of work one lovely day

He met him a dolly called Mafi-yay.

Mafia thought he had a future ahead,

And looked like she knew how to bounce a bed

Old Roony must've been sick in the head

Cause pretty soon, they up and they wed.

Now he's got a record company,

A third of the profits plus salary,

A beautiful wife who wants to be free

So she can practice her Theory.

[Refrain] Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance."

Pig Bodine had fallen asleep. Mafia was in the next room, watching herself undress in the mirror. And Paola, Roony thought, where are you? She'd taken to disappearing, sometimes for two- or three-day stretches, and nobody ever knew where she went.

Maybe Rachel would put in a word for him with Paola. He had, he knew, certain nineteenth-century ideas of what was proper. The girl herself was an enigma. She hardly spoke, she went to the Rusty Spoon now only rarely, when she knew Pig would be somewhere else. Pig coveted her. Concealing himself behind a code which only did officers dirty (and executives? Winsome wondered), Pig he was sure envisioned Paola playing opposite him in each frame of his stag-movie fantasies. It was natural, he supposed; the girl had the passive look of an object of sadism, something to be attired in various inanimate costumes and fetishes, tortured, subjected to the weird indignities of Pig's catalogue, have her smooth and of course virginal-looking limbs twisted into attitudes to inflame a decadent taste. Rachel was right, Pig - and even perhaps Paola - could only be products of a decky-dance. Winsome, self-proclaimed king of it, felt only sorry it should ever have happened. How it had happened, how anybody, himself included, had contributed to it, he didn't know.