Sins and Revelations: A Short Story Collection

By Jack Miller

"Sins and Other Revelations," is a book of short stories, that is an interesting mix of genres, that invites you to join two young sailors on a last "Liberty Call" in Cuba, in the 1950's, before Castro closed the country to the American navy. It takes you on a train ride with an unexpected twist, and gives you one possible answer, to the question; what happens inside a Coma? A futuristic Light House Keeper, and a humorous look at, why women are better than men, when it comes to language skills. P.S. It all started with our caveman ancesters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669817192

Jack Miller

John Eduard Miller Jr (Jack Miller) was born on Jan. 29, 1945 in Newark, NJ. He attended public school in University NJ and received a BS degree in biology from Rauleigh Dickinson University. In 1967. He was hired as a staff microbiologist by Merck & Co. Inc. where he worked from 1968 until 1979. He went on to hold various laboratory positions until he retired in 2007. He has lived in NJ. PA, TN, FL & NV and for several months in the Dominican Republic. He has had poems published in the following literary magazines Creo, Impact, The Old Red Kimono & The Scribblers of Brevard. His interests include ancient History, Mythology, Astronomy & Cosmology & Poetry. The current work, Muir’s Montage, is an anthology of poems written over the last 60+ yrs. He has been married & divorced 3 times. He has been with his current partner Donna for 29 yrs.

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Copyright © 2022 by Jack Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/24/2022

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Liberty Call in Cuba

Chapter 2 Jeremiah’s Dying

Chapter 3 Tweeners

Chapter 4 The Wines of Mars

Chapter 5 Remembering Jimmy Beaker

Chapter 6 Keeper

Chapter 7 Memories of a Rocky Hill

Chapter 8 Grandpa Loved Roses

Chapter 9 Urso

Chapter 10 From the Porch

Chapter 11 The Train Ride

Chapter 12 Mary Proud

Chapter 13 The Rally

Chapter 14 Evolution of Man/Woman Language

Chapter 15 Making Nightmares

Chapter 16 Arguing With Hemingway

Chapter 17 The Nude the Pond

Chapter 18 Me and Arlice James

Chapter 1

LIBERTY CALL IN CUBA

Three small, flat bottom boats loaded with pineapples bobbed astern the U.S.S. Hawkins, that was tied to the pier in Santiago Cuba. The highly unstable crafts were filled to the gunnels, with the fruit, and nearly naked Cuban boys who were using long machetes to peel the sticky fruit in swift practiced motions. Several other boys were tight rope walking on the ships’ mooring lines, forming a human chain that delivered the fruit to sailors standing on the fantail, then passing money back down to the wobbly vessels, that seemed ready to capsize at any moment. I had bought one earlier myself, holding it gingerly like an ice cream cone by its’ sharp green stem, as I bit into it carefully, to keep the juices off my starched liberty whites. I was waiting for the Boson to pipe Liberty Call along with about a hundred other sailors, who were milling around the quarter-deck area.

A fourth boat, that had a whore instead of pineapples as cargo, pulled up, and immediately took the attention away from the fruit peddlers, who loudly protested the intrusion on their market place. A crude make-shift cabin covered with large tropical leaves was built on the intruder’s deck, with large gaps conveniently left in the roof, and walls, to allow us to see the young Cuban girl reclining inside. The girl was lying, on a bed of the leaves, with a white blanket spread over them, which made her stand out like a brown hors d’oeuvre on a bed of lettuce. I couldn’t tell you what her face looked like, because she had taken a position that fully displayed her main merchandise. The only thing I could swear to, is the color of her hair, which was raven black, and I can’t even remember if that was on her head. It was early afternoon, and in full view of the Officer of the Deck, so her young pimps had no takers from the hooting crowd of obviously interested sailors; but when it got dark, I knew they would have no trouble tempting some of the duty section, and restricted sailors, to climb down to the floating brothel.

The Boson’s pipe finally blew liberty call, and a stampede of sailors headed ashore. I waited until the main body had left, then saluted and walked down the gangway, with my shipmate Hal, who was a for damn sure real Indian he would say when he got a little drunk.

He had a tribal name that I couldn’t pronounce drunk or sober, so I just stuck with Hal. Hal and me had been talking about our first beer, and first whore since the ship left the naval base at Gitmo, and right now we were ready for both.

It was the late fifties, and we didn’t know it yet, but this would be the last liberty call we would have in Cuba; Fidel Castro would be in charge before long, and would close all Cuban ports to the American Navy.

We hugged the dilapidated buildings that lined the pier for shade, to escape the scorching sun, which even after six weeks we were not accustomed to. I believe that Cuba in August is too hot even for Cubans. The wooden pier ended and, as we rounded a corner, a cobblestone street appeared. The city that had been hidden from view by the warehouses, spread out in front of me and Hal, and looked amazingly like a post card I had seen at the enlisted man’s club at Gitmo. Some of the buildings were painted in bright colors, while others were not painted at all, which gave the scene a quilted look.

Hal and I were looking for a bar though, so the simple beauty of the city faded, as we focused on that task. The first bar which presented itself, was literally a hole in the wall, with four stools lining a make shift bar. The hole was actually a doorway that had been closed with plywood, and had shelves hung on it, that were lined with bottles of different kinds of wines and liquors at various levels of emptiness. Five metal patio tables spread over the sidewalk in front of it, two of which were actually sitting in the street. The tables had large faded umbrellas to shade them from the hot sun, and they were already filled to over-flowing by the first group of sailors to reach the bar.

Hal and I stayed behind the crowd that slowly thinned, as groups of sailors dropped off at each bar along the way, until finally it was just the two of us. The next bar was empty, so we sat down at one of the side walk tables, and waited to be served. The place looked pretty much like all the rest we had passed along the way, except this one was built into the boarded-up corner of a building, and its’ bar was made into half a circle, with tables on two sides instead of one, making it bigger than the rest. I mentioned this to Hal, and we both agreed this bar was probably for the elite sailors, like us.

The bartender a short stocky man, with an apron so stained I was glad we weren’t ordering food, rushed out, as soon as we sat down, and began to vigorously wipe off the table with a bar rag that matched his apron. He attacked a large sticky spot of something, that resisted his efforts long enough for him to give up, and go back to the bar with our order for beer.

When he returned with the beer, I picked up the bottle, and removed my white hat, which was limp with perspiration already, and placed the cold bottle against my sweaty forehead, to soak up some of the coolness before the heat of the day could beat me to it; then I took a long slow drink. The brown liquid flowed soothingly down my dry throat, and I could feel tension draining out of me.

There had been a tightness like a rubber band around my chest, all during the strenuous six weeks of the Gitmo cruise, and it was an almost a giddy feeling to know it was finally over, and to feel the band loosen, and slowly fall away. I took a deep breath, and exhaled loudly. Hal looked over at me, and I could tell he felt that loosening too.

The beer was Hatuey a local brew, and probably the only kind the bars served, which was okay by me. I had drank a barrel of Hatuey the last six weeks, at Gitmo. It was cheaper than American beer at the enlisted men’s club, which was a good selling point, especially if it was just before payday. It was however a highly unstable beer with an alcohol content that fluctuated, from one bottle to the next, between twelve, and eighteen proof. It was even more potent when drank too fast. The young sailors experiencing the beer for the first time, usually had to learn the hard way, not to chug-a-lug Hatuey the way they did American beer, and it wasn’t uncommon to see them carried back to the ship after only a very brief hour of liberty. The picture of an Indian in profile on the bottle, gave the beer its’ nickname The One Eyed Indian, and the rule of thumb was, if you have drank enough that he starts winking the one eye..., your already drunk.

Hal put his feet into an empty chair, leaned back with the bottle tipped until it was half empty, then he belched loudly, and slapped his chest hard, nearly knocking himself over backwards.

Damn that first one is good. he said

Remember..., the whore, before we get drunk I reminded him

No problem mate he assured me

I smiled, and shook my head. I had heard that before.

It had been six hard weeks at Gitmo Bay, training for everything from conventional, to nuclear warfare. It was intense training designed to keep ships, and crews battle ready in peace time. The instructors at Gitmo were gung-ho to the max, and did everything they could to make the drills as realistic as possible, and they would come down hard on anyone who didn’t take the drills just as seriously. I had no problem with the late-night surprise general quarters drills, or the hours of monotonous watches, steaming in slow circles, or even the bone jarring gun fire, or depth charge explosions. The jarring explosions that made it look like it was snowing in the engine room, as white paint flaked off the lagging of the overhead pipes. The hardest part of the training, at least for engineering sailors like me and Hal, was the temperature in the engineering spaces during simulated nuclear attacks.

The drill called for something called a gas tight envelope, which meant with the temperature of a hundred plus degrees outside, all ventilation was stopped, and the ship was sealed like a sardine can. This was supposed to keep the contaminated air from the make-believe nuclear bomb from getting inside the ship. The engineering spaces during those drills reached temperatures well over one-hundred-twenty degrees, and would become almost intolerable before the instructors restored ventilation.

I never thought hundred-degree air could feel good, but when those blowers came on, and pumped the outside hot air, into the engine room, it was like a refreshing arctic blast against a man’s perspiration-soaked clothes.

The other problem with Gitmo, (the shortened name everyone used for the base at Guantanamo Bay) was, that it was a men’s’ only club in the fifties, and the few female dependents, and Cuban domestics on the base, were kept far away from us Fleet Sailors for obvious reasons, and I’m sure forced celibacy created some of the intensity of that Gitmo experience. While the US Navy played war games in Cuba, there was a very real war going on between Castro’s guerrillas and Batista’s government troops, and sometimes we could hear them fighting in the hills around the base. We didn’t worry about that very much though, because there was enough fire power at Gitmo to wipe out both sides of that conflict, or at least that’s what we thought at the time.

Hal and I drained our first beers, just as a couple of whores arrived at our table, and sat down.

Buy us a drink Joe? The one who sat next to me asked.

I shook my head yes, and played village idiot, as I paid for the tea the bartender had rushed out pretending it was whiskey.

Hal got the pretty one as usual, but after six weeks mine looked good too.

She tossed her drink down like the tea it was, and the bartender promptly rushed out with another, so I leaned over and whispered in my best tenth grade Spanish that she better linger over this one. She smiled sweetly, and slid her hand up my leg, and I felt six weeks of abstinence come to life, so I smiled too.

She was a sturdy woman, not fat, but with a plumpness that over filled the peasant dress she wore, and pushed two brown mounds of breast above the elastic semi-circle of the top. The grip she had on me, and the movement of her hand, told me she might milk goats, as a sideline.

Hal and his whore got up to leave.

Meet you back here in a little while. He said, his voice an octave or two higher than usual.

I knew from a lot of Liberty Calls in a lot of ports that I had been in with Hal over the last two-years, that he loved two things, as much as I did, and they were beer and women in no particular order, as long as they were available, and plentiful. We were both nineteen, with two-years aboard the Radar Picket Destroyer the USS Hawkins out of Newport Rhode Island, and at the moment we were doing all the things the recruiting posters said we should be doing. We were making friends in foreign ports.

We go too Joe? The whore asked squeezing harder.

I asked the price, not that it mattered much, at that point. We were definitely going, but it gave me time to take another sip of Hatuey.

Five Dollars Joe. she said

I had a theory about why whores called soldiers and sailors Joe I think it’s their secret way of calling us bastards without losing a customer.

It was a short walk to her business room, which was located in the back of a bakery, not far from the bar. We had to walk past bakery customers, and a very old lady that must have been the whore’s mother, or grandmother, because she looked at me as if she wanted to spit on my shoes. The whore said something in a loud voice that I knew wasn’t Hi Grandma, and the old woman looked away muttering to herself.

The captain had warned us before liberty call there were Anti-American feelings, among some Cubans, and I assumed that Grandma was one of them.

I was glad when the door that covered the room was finally closed behind us even though it was only a sliding curtain, and wouldn’t keep in much noise, but then as if on cue a radio in the shop was turned up loud to cover any sounds we might make. The smells of fresh baked bread floated into the room to mingle, with my thoughts of sex, and it has screwed me up for years, as I find myself aroused whenever I walk by a bakery.

Clothes Joe She ordered, pulling the dress over her head, revealing she had nothing under it. I remember thinking how much time that must have saved between Joe’s.

She helped me pull the sweaty jumper over my head then, and hung it on a chair that held a metal wash-bowl, that was half full of water. The chair was the only furniture in the room, except for the well-worn half bed, with a cover that looked as if it could have been a horse blanket in a prior life. I hung my pants and