by Ivan Doig
"I have a bit of news of my own," Danzer delivered it with relish on the side. He looked off around the room as if gathering his statement. "I know where our buddy Dex is and the reason why."
Ben felt a lurch the ship was not responsible for. He shifted in the chair as he eyed his now truly unwelcome caller.
"Is that so. You're busier than you look, Nick."
Danzer spread his hands. "This fell in the family lap. A boot representative"—it took his listener a moment to translate that to traveling shoe salesman—"we deal with has a line of work wear he thought might interest the Forest Service. Just right for smoke jumpers, you know? The Cariston stores are one of his accounts too, so imagine his surprise when he paid a call to Seeley Lake and spotted Dex in there with the conchies. The rest of the conchies, I think it's safe to say."
Knowing what the answer would be, Ben grimly asked anyway:
"Are you spreading this around, back home?"
"Word might get out, I imagine. You know how these things are. People have no idea the heir to Cariston Enterprises is taking the yellow road through the war otherwise, do they." The offhand manner in which Danzer said it made Ben realize he had underestimated the man's disdain for the rest of humankind. He was the sort whose contempt you couldn't tell from the wallpaper. It was always there in back of whatever he said or did.
"That was one of your pieces I did happen to see, on Dex"—Ben stared back while Danzer delivered this straight at him—"and 'conscientious objector' did not leap out at me. At any rate, it might not reflect on him any too well, do you think? What with the rest of us putting in our tour of duty."
I get the message, you manipulating bastard. Make you look good or you and your Toggery bunch smear Dex and me along with it for covering for him. Silently Ben wrung the neck of the words he had just heard. Tour of duty. That's what Danzer was doing with it, all right, touring duty like a cynical sightseer for every spot of advantage it might offer him. The pampered tourist of the war who knew how to keep on pampering himself. The gleaming face confident it would never know doom until its allotted threescore and ten years, or more. For several seconds he did not trust himself to respond to Danzer, because the response he most wanted to give was to knock some teeth out of that smile.
"Nobody's perfect," he at last managed to keep it to, too much at stake not to, "but I do my goddamnedest to give everyone I write about a fair shake."
"Then I've been speaking out of turn about Dex and all, haven't I," Danzer provided with the grace of one who had won. "A man's best is all he can do." Showing every appearance of being pleased with that bromide, he made as if to go, but paused when the paper in the typewriter caught his eye. He cocked a look at the ragged margins of the typing, as when he had deigned to notice the classical music. "Writing poetry in your spare time?"
"If you have to know, it's a screenplay."
"Is it." Danzer seemed to weigh that information. "As I suppose they used to ask of Shakespeare, what's it about?"
None of your goddamn business. Something contrary sparked in the back of Ben's mind, and he gambled it on out.
"Purcell. The twelfth man. Football as we knew it, Dancer, war by another means."
Danzer's expression slipped several degrees of control. Ben thought he saw bleak surprise in those flinty eyes, something buried threatening to come out.
"It's about an accident of nature, then," the chiseled voice quickly recovered, at least. "Two of them. That freak kid himself and what happened to him on the Hill. I'm surprised you can't find anything more worthy of your talent, Ben."
You think you're surprised. Purcell does the trick on Slick Nick: that's a surprise.
Sitting there gratified at discovering a way to get under Danzer's skin, Ben still was finding it murky territory to try to explore. True, in the famous '41 season Purcell became the most glorified scrub there ever was, but still a scrub; he made the team only posthumously. What was there about the raw kid from nowhere to upset, even now, the receiving end of that impervious passing combination, Stamper-to-Danzer? "Stomp and Dance, the touchdown prance." Ted Loudon always went nuts over that, he had plugged it into his column all season long. You had your share of fame, Danzer, did you want Purcell's leftovers too?
Something had colossal staying power from back then, but what? The time since had changed the mortal balance in too many ways that Ben had seen, but not in this case. The Dancer was still scoring plentifully in the game of life, the Twelfth Man was still dead. Whatever grasp the specter of Purcell had, let Danzer squirm under it, he decided.
"Don't judge my script too soon, Nick," Ben flicked the page resting in the typewriter. "Maybe it'll turn out to bring back valuable memories for you."
Danzer regarded him stonily for a moment, then in turn tapped the radio where the Brahms had been. "Do you know your trouble, Ben? You let your heart be moved too easily. Dex. Purcell. The list doesn't stop there, I'm sure. You're the type lame puppies and roundheeled women sniff out, would be my guess." That last was flicked lightly enough, but the lash was unmistakably there. "Whatever it is, you let it get to you too much."
"Is that what's wrong with me?" Ben acted surprised, although he had to work to hold it to that. The sonofabitch can't know about Cass, too. Can he? "And here I thought it was an old pain from football acting up."
Danzer smiled that sterile smile as he got up to leave. "Those last on and on, don't they. Good night, Ben."
"General quarters. All hands, man your battle stations."
He woke up fighting mad at Navy games in the middle of the night and trying simultaneously to put on a light and his clothes.
Country club Sunday sailing sonsofbitches. If that captain thinks he is going to give me something to write about besides Danzer's pork chops by pulling a drill, he has another think coming.
The squawk box in a corner of the ceiling still was blatting the alarm when the compartment door flung open and the medical officer hustled in. He made a face at the clutter on the operating table. "I need that cleared," he said matter-of-factly, and with the sweep of an arm began gathering Ben's belongings and dumping them under the bunk.
"Hey!" Half-dressed, Ben lumbered across the room and protectively scooped up his typewriter and its carrying case. "What's all the rush?"
"A submarine is trailing us," the medico recited as if it were common knowledge. "You need to put your gear on and get out on deck, fast."
Feeling like he was in a severely bad dream, Ben in haste donned the helmet and life jacket he had been given and tumbled out of the sick bay into a passageway full of tousled sailors pulling on battle gear of their own. The general scurry conveyed him out onto deck, where the crew members spilled toward gun mounts and fire control hoses and other stations to which they were assigned. Pandemonium? Expertly drilled response to the worst of alarms? He couldn't tell which. The one thing he knew for dead sure was to stay out of the way, and he ducked off clear of any doors or deckpaths to let all the traffic pass. For whatever crazy reason he took notice of the full moon over the bow of the ship, like a searchlight barely on. In a rolling motion that made him stagger to keep his balance, the destroyer could be felt surging to a new speed and heeling in a fresh direction at the same time. He tried to think where in the maze of the ship Danzer's battle station might be, cursing himself for not having paid any real attention to that. Bolstering against the steel side of the superstructure while more figures in helmets pounded past, he was nearly knocked over by a crewman skinning down a ladder. He grabbed the man, recognizing him as one of the mess attendants. "Where's Lieutenant Danzer?"
"Chart house, should be, sir," the man stammered and raced off to pass ammunition.
Staying wary of anyone else plunging down the rungs from overhead, Ben climbed in spurts toward the bridge of the ship. There he slipped into a warren of tense officers and lookouts with binoculars pressed to their eyes. That frieze of unmoving figures glued to the night horizon could not have been more different from the scrambl
e below. In the low level of light everything looked sepulchral. Out beyond, it was a perfect Pacific night, the water trembling under the stars. Catching himself on tiptoe as he tried to see everywhere at once on the moonlit ocean, he realized the futility of that; long before he ever could, the binoculars would pick up any deadly white streak that was the wake of an oncoming torpedo. Too late then anyway. This thing can't outrun one of those. The captain peevishly snapped out orders, and the orders went down the line of command into the nerve system of the ship, to what effect Ben couldn't discern. The destroyer was zigzagging, dancing with an invisible devil, but was that enough? He had to hope the McCorkle's evasive action was as unreadable to a sub captain at a periscope as it was to him.
Not reassured by the scene on the bridge, he backed out to hunt up Danzer and found him in equally ghostly circumstances in the busy chart room, the combat analysis center. The dim greenish light etched ashen shadows beneath the battle helmets and into the hollows of cheeks. Here the executive officer was in charge, leaning over a translucent tabletop where the careening course of the destroyer was being plotted and exchanging aggravated questions with the strained-looking young communications officer and other distressed types crowded around the massive table. From what Ben could catch it amounted to an argument over whether to cut and run or turn and fight, and he didn't like any of what he was hearing or seeing. Faces that had not shown a worry in the world in the wardroom now appeared aggrieved, unsure. One person or another around that table swallowed hard too often. Fear not sliding down easily. Not ever. Now he had his own sudden taste of that lodged in his throat, the apprehension of dying in company such as this. How'd they get us into this in the first place? Among other things, a destroyer was a submarine-hunting machine. How had this one managed to become the hunted?
Danzer was off to one side, near the forward bulkhead, looking removed from the intense debate at the plotting table. Ben edged around to him. Danzer's duty station there, he deciphered, must have been to maintain the battle status board with code names and whereabouts of other U.S. ships in the fight. The problem with that was that there were not any, none nearer than somewhere around the Australian port in one direction and New Guinea in the other. Just the Cork and the enemy. Different war than it was a couple of minutes ago, isn't it, Nick.
Reaching Danzer, he whispered: "How are they going to shake us loose from this?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," Danzer whispered back, and for once sounded nervous.
"What's a Jap sub doing way down here? Who spotted the thing?"
"Who do you think? I was officer of the watch."
"No crap? You saw it?" Ben began surreptitiously scrawling in his notepad, trying to hear what was being said at the plotting table and listen to Danzer at the same time. Here of all things was the heroic piece on Slick Nick. If he stayed alive to write it.
"It's dark out in case you haven't noticed," Danzer muttered sarcastically. "Sonar picked it up. Can't you hear it?"
The pips registered on Ben then. Ping ping. Ping ping. Until that moment, the pulsations of sound had gone by him as some piece of the destroyer's equipment that might contribute to raising hell with the submarine. Now that it was identified as the pulse of hell coming the ship's direction, the pinging sounded louder.
Ben peered at the stiff-necked supply officer anew. If Danzer turned out to be the Paul Revere of the South Seas, the only thing to do was to write him up that way. "What then?" he resumed the under-the-breath interview urgently. "You got on the horn and ordered general quarters? On your own?"
"No, that's not by the book," Danzer said between his teeth. It was remarkable how nettled a whisper could sound. "There's a standing order to call the captain." Which in this case meant waking him up with maximum bad news. Danzer's drawn expression suggested it was an experience that stayed with a person.
Just then the exercise in exasperation around the plotting table broke up. "We're not shaking the bogey at all," the exec was saying, striding for the bridge. "We need to tell the skipper our only chance is to go at it."
Hearing that, Ben banged Danzer roughly in the vicinity of the collarbone for luck—he only later realized it was the old shoulder-pad slap the team traded before the game started—and bolted out onto the wing of the bridge to watch.
Sea air rushed by, there on the steel promontory into the dark. A mane of moonsilver flowed back from the destroyer's bow, and a matching tail of wake behind it. As his eyes adjusted, Ben could just make out the long narrow deck below, armaments jutting ready if they only had a target, faces of the gun crews pale patches foreshortened by helmets. Whatever discussion the executive officer had with the captain did not take long. The ship cut sharply to one side and kept on leaning like a skater fashioning a circle. Standing there witnessing the might of a fully armed vessel turning on its nagging foe could have been thrilling, Ben was duly aware, except for the distinct chance of being blown out of the water at any second. Drowned like a kitten in a sack. He tried to swallow such prospects away, down a throat dry as paper. The lack of any least sign of the enemy out there in the total surround of ocean seemed to him the worst part. On land he had been shot at by experts and never felt this much fear.
Determinedly not watching for a salvo of torpedoes except for moments when he couldn't stand not to, he strained instead to follow the burst of action at the McCorkle's stern. He could just see the shadowy figures of the depth charge crew crouching ready, their barrel-like explosives neatly racked for firing. At some chosen point in the attack maneuver—he wondered whether it was decided by hunch, or some definitive echo out of the sonar equipment; on this ship, it likely did not come from combat experience—the commands were hurled out:
"FIRE ONE!"
"FIRE TWO!"
The firing kept on, each charge sprung into the air like a fat ejected shell, out away from the ship, then to sink to the depth that would detonate it. Nothing happened for long enough that Ben began to suspect duds. Then he felt the shudder up from the water. Astern, explosions bloomed white in the darkness. Knowing this to be one of the sights of a lifetime, he watched with an intensity near to quivering. Not often is it given to you to stare away death, see it go instead in search of your sworn enemy. There in the destroyer's wake, the geysers of destruction blew and blew. It was impossible to imagine anything human surviving in that cauldron of concussions.
Poor bastards. They'll never see the surface again. On the wing of the bridge, existence seemed benignly extended, stable as the feel of steel underfoot. Forgiving the Cork and its lucky-star crew all their sins of leisure, Ben raced back into the chart room to see how they marked the sinking of an enemy submarine.
He could have spared himself the effort. The jammed room was as still as a funeral parlor except for the pinging.
"It's still there, sir," the sonar operator called out, perhaps in case anyone's hearing had gone bad. In the greenish gloom, Danzer's face was a study in trepidation.
The executive officer at last spoke up. "Something's fishy about this. They can't shadow us that close after we blew up half the ocean floor." They must have taught logic at Annapolis.
Once more, the exec went calling on the captain. This time, their conference produced a marked slowing of the vessel. All hands stayed at battle stations as the sonar deepfinder was reeled in for inspection. Ben was there, scribbling like mad, when the sonar technician took a look at the sound head at the end of the cable and sourly gave his diagnosis:
"It's all chewed to hell, messed up the signal. A shark must have got at it."
Ben waited until general quarters was called off, waited while the decks emptied of cursing sailors and sheepish officers, waited as the medical officer vacated the sick bay, waited until he was alone in the soundless compartment. Then he put his hands to his face and laughed into them until he had to gulp for air.
Chortles were still coming like hiccups when he sat up to the typewriter in its restored spot. He was at full speed on the keys by
the time the rap on the door came.
Danzer stepped in looking dazed.
"If it isn't the famous officer of the watch," Ben greeted him. "I guess next time you'll roust out the sonar tech ahead of everybody else, huh?"
With visible effort, the caller let that pass. He squared up as much as he was able and began: "I'm in a bit of a spot. The captain sent me to ask if you'll be writing anything about"—Danzer looked as if he would rather bite off his tongue than say it—"what happened tonight."
Ben couldn't help but grin and tap the typing paper in answer. "The case of the submarine that never was, you mean? Can't you see the headline? THE HUNTING OF THE SHARK. Beware the frumious Bandersnatch next, Lieutenant Danzer."
Danzer's face was a funny color, as if the ghoulish light of the chart room stayed with him. "Damn it, if you—"
Ben held up a hand. "Don't. As much as I'd like to, I'm not going to skin you in public. The outfit I have to answer to isn't going to let you look ridiculous, don't worry." He tapped the typing paper again, this time in a tired manner. "Oh, I could write it that way, hell yes, and it'd be red-penciled beyond recognition. So I'll do up tonight's stunt and then TPWP will take its turn. And in the end it'll come out as just one more unpleasant thing that can happen in war, Dancer."
10
The war changed tongues somewhere in mid-ocean as Ben hooked rides on anything that flew in the days beyond Australia. The spatter of sand and syllable where he eventually put down was a sparse island called Eniwetok, and out around it in the central latitudes of the Pacific were scattered other lingual odds and ends now synonymous with the battles on their beaches—Kwajalein and Tarawa, with Saipan and Okinawa and Iwo Jima and others yet to come. Eniwetok itself, Ben found, had been remade from the waterline up in the few months since being taken from the Japanese. Laundries, volleyball nets staked like flags, movie amphitheater, officers' club, enlisted men's canteen, chapel, library: it was all there, the practically magical portable platform of American amenities that materialized wherever U.S. fighting forces went. The skinny but vital island, key link in an atoll with a lagoon that went to the horizon, was surrounded by countless moored naval vessels; if a typhoon blew through, the yanking anchor chains would pull the plug on the Pacific.
