The Big Crowd by Kevin Baker

Author:Kevin Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

22

New York, 1945

He stood at the bow of the ship and watched as the great white City came to him. Most of the other men had gone over to the port side to see the Statue of Liberty, but he stayed where he was, watching the skyscrapers emerge as he used to watch them appear from the Brooklyn docks. Many of them really gray or brown, he knew, or the color of rust or sand. But all of it shimmering whitely now in the afternoon sun as it rose before him.

Just as he had imagined Charlie watching the white cities emerge along the River Plate down in South America.

There was a low buzzing sound coming out of the sky that made him start, as such things did now. Looking up, he saw that it was a navy blimp, and a couple of biplanes circling lazily through the sky around it. There was a great, ragged shout, running up and down the boat, and he looked back down again, blinking at the sight. Ships of every possible description were steaming toward them, as if they were in some kind of mad race. Steel-gray destroyers and battleships, and even two huge, open-decked aircraft carriers maneuvering ponderously about. All of them strung from helm to stern in flags and pennants, ringing their bells and blowing horns—a whole New Year’s Eve, making full steam for them.

A powerful little fireboat sped up alongside and fired a salute from its water cannons, the flumes cascading over even the upper decks of the Queen Mary, soaking the soldiers next to him, who yelled and laughed. A pair of motor yachts hove up, and to the astonishment of everyone on board, they saw that their decks were filled with young women. They were wearing flowers in their hair, like some fantastic cinematic vision—waving and blowing kisses, wiggling and twisting their hips as they called up to them from the rail. Behind them, still more girls were jitterbugging wildly with each other, to an all-WAC band banging away at chorus after chorus of “In the Mood.”

“Oh, baby!” a soldier was shouting next to him, leaping up and down on the rail. “What kind of holy-moly, motherfucking place is this?”

There were crowds waving and shouting to them from all around the harbor, from along the Battery, and the promenade on Brooklyn Heights, and all up and down the docks that jutted out into the water. The captain blew the foghorn, and every other boat in the harbor answered back, a cacophony of sound that was so loud and vibratious that he had to put his hands over his ears, sure that it was the corniest thing he had ever seen in his life, and one that sent a chill down him all the way to his toes.

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