The Last Romantic

One night, when the aircraft carrier Constellation’s air conditioning had been down for five days and most of us were topside, trying to sleep through the black, starless heat vacuuming the last beads of sweat off our sand-dry skin, Engineman Second Class Sneden stepped off the edge of the flight deck and down into the hilly swells of the Arabian Sea.

Nobody saw or heard him go over the side. There was no “man overboard” alarm, no search and rescue helos buzzing around the ship, throwing their light across the sullen night face of the water. Squids sleeping around Sneden on their mattresses, under the wings of a parked F-18 Super Hornet, simply rolled over the next morning and found him gone.

The Old Man ordered an investigation that dragged on for a week. All the while, the crew sat around in the empty heat wondering why Sneden had done it.

“He probably got a Dear John letter.”

“He had to be suicidal.”

“Maybe he was just sick of the AC being busted and steaming around in circles for months, like the rest of us. This shit is making us all crazy.”

The investigation report still hadn’t come out when a rumor flashed through our gloom: Sneden had been snatched off the flight deck by mermaids.

“I’d jump if I saw a mermaid waving at me.”

“Sneden didn’t jump, the ladies grabbed him. Mermaids are crazy for sailors.”

“They must be crazy, to want us.”

“They don’t have any men, just like we don’t have any women.”

“Mermaids. Jesus. You really think they’re out there?”

“That’s why the Old Man won’t release the report on Sneden.”

“How’s that?”

“He doesn’t want us finding out about the mermaids. It’s like the Air Force not telling the public about UFOs. Nobody wants us to know the truth about anything.”

Only after someone had chalked a topless, pink-nippled mermaid with a slash of red electrical tape pulled across her on the door of the Captain’s cabin did copies of the investigation report finally start filtering down to the deck plates.

I got a copy of the report and went up to read it on the catwalk outside my shop, under the Connie’s island. The AC was still down and I was sleeping on the catwalk. It was too hot to even try sleeping inside the ship anymore, and the flight deck was getting crowded, with more squids moving up there. I pulled out a skinny mattress that I’d stowed in a fan room at the end of the catwalk and laid it out overlooking the soda-green sea.

The investigating officer didn’t know why Sneden had stepped off the flight deck. There wasn’t a Dear John letter, he wasn’t suicidal, and no one the IO interviewed ever heard Sneden complain about the AC or steaming in circles for months. What he spent most of his time doing, they all said, was watching porn videos on his laptop, and staring over the side at the dolphin schools that were always springing out of the sea around the ship.

I looked up from the report. Four dolphins were leaping in a tight, level-nosed formation out of the foam kicked up along the Connie’s starboard side. When I’d been watching the dolphins too long, I saw a topless mermaid riding one of them sidesaddle away from the ship. She had dusky skin, chestnut brown hair, and dancing breasts. She mouthed my name, my first name—Tom—tickled me with a shy laugh, then grew thoughtful, as if she were wondering why I hadn’t yet gone over the side to be with her. I leaned against the catwalk’s rail, raised my hand to her, was about to speak her name, it had come to me, when—the dolphins ducked under the water and the mermaid vanished. The sea was empty. I went back and read the last page of the report.

Among the twenty-three porn videos the master-at...