Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  The fine rain drooled down eighteen-year-old Frank Flanagan's neck as a heavy jowled chief boatswain's mate focused a flashlight on a clipboard and droned the list of names. Kelly, Lombardi, Brodsky, King, Semple. For five days they had ridden across the continent from the Sampson Naval Training Station in New York, gazing open-mouthed at their country. Like most Easterners, they had only the dimmest idea of the reality behind those verses in "America the Beautiful" about verdant plains and shining mountains.

  Frank Flanagan was still dazed by the sheer immensity of the land. He had stared with disbelief at the wheat fields of Kansas and Nebraska, mile on endless mile to the flat horizon. Then came the stupendous majesty of the Rocky Mountains. The climax was the Hood River Valley as they descended it to Portland. Not a house, a road, a sign of human habitation anywhere. Nothing but the river glistening in the sun and the guardian trees on the surrounding mountains. It had evoked words like nobility, purity, power in Flanagan's mind.

  Beside him, diminutive Marty Roth, who shared with Flanagan a boyhood in the Bronx, stood on tiptoes to get a look at the USS Jefferson City.

  "Is it a battleship?" he asked.

  "A cruiser. They name cruisers after state capitals," Flanagan said.

  "What the hell state is Jefferson City the capital of?"

  "Missouri."

  "Jesus, is there anything you don't know?"

  In their first week in boot camp, Roth had christened Flanagan the Brain for his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of historical, geographical, religious and political facts. He could recite lists of the popes, the presidents, the kings of England. He also remembered a good chunk of the Declaration of Independence and the whole Gettysburg Address, huge passages of Longfellow's "Hiawatha and all of "Casey at the Bat." To Flanagan, none of these recitations was proof of intelligence. He simply happened to have a very good memory, which twelve years of Catholic education had strengthened, like a muscle that was constantly exercised. He stopped Roth from demanding more recitations by threatening to inflict the entire Baltimore Catechism on him.

  Roth had wanted to know why Flanagan was not in a V-12 program at Columbia or Harvard, on his way to getting a commission. Flanagan told him he did not like officers. He wanted to fight the war in the ranks with the people. Roth was impressed. He told Flanagan that he was an idealist like his cousin Harry Feder, who had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the fascists in Spain. "The only trouble is, he got himself killed," Roth said.

  Flanagan did not try to explain to Roth the real reason why he wanted to fight in the ranks. He was a man on the run from Father Francis Callow, S.J., student counselor of Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. With the enthusiastic support of Flanagan's mother, Father Callow had spent much of the previous two years trying to talk Flanagan into the priesthood. Hour after hour in the small office, almost knee to knee with Callow's hulking black-robed presence, Flanagan discussed the sins of the flesh and the difficulty of saving his soul. With impeccable logic Father Callow demonstrated that it was ridiculous to gamble eternal happiness for a few years of earthly pleasure.

  The war had rescued Flanagan. He had told Callow that for the time being he felt his country's fight against fascist tyranny was a higher, even a nobler calling than a lifetime of service in the Society of Jesus. After the war — if he survived - he would decide what to do with the rest of his life. Flanagan sometimes wondered if he was the only American who was glad the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Unfortunately, this escape left him with a large residue of guilt, which his mother and Father Callow did their best to augment. To prove he was not seeking aggrandizement in any form, Flanagan had spurned the V-12 program and chosen the enlisted ranks. He liked the pathos of his humility, his self-sacrifice. He regarded his fellow enlisted men with mild condescension, never dreaming that they too had spiritual dramas inside their heads.

  The chief boatswain's mate finished reciting the names and handed the list to a tall swarthy sailor in dungarees, with a white hat slung on the back of his head. "Draft 587 present and accounted for," the chief said in a bored voice. According to rumor, he had been drunk for the entire five days on the troop train.

  The tall swarthy sailor had an oddly shaped head. His forehead was broad but his face tapered to an almost pointed chin. There was something crafty — and mean — about his thin-lipped mouth. "Okay," he said, in a deep voice with a Midwest twang in it. "You're goin' aboard your first ship. When you go up that gangplank, you stop at the top and salute the flag on the fantail. That's her ass end — that way." He pointed to the stern of the ship, invisible in the rainy darkness. "Then you salute the officer of the deck and follow me below."

  As they hoisted their seabags to their shoulders, a half dozen sailors reeled out of the drizzly darkness. Sticking their hands in their peacoat pockets, they leaned drunkenly against each other and smirked at the new recruits. "Hey, gobs," one of them called. "They issue you a yellow stripe down your backs? That's what everybody on the Shitty City wears."

  "Yeah," chortled another smirker. "I hear they're gonna paint a big one down the forward stack."

  The swarthy sailor whirled. "One more word out of you tin-can, heroes and you'll be swimmin' for your fuckin' lives."

  "Ain't that what everybody who depends on the Shitty City winds up doin'?" asked a short bucktoothed sailor.

  Flanagan did not see the swarthy sailor's hand move — the punch traveled so fast. Suddenly the bucktoothed sailor was lying on his back, clutching his mouth. His buddies snarled curses at his assailant. "Get him out of here," he growled. "One blast on this pipe and I'll have enough men on this dock to put you all in the hospital."

  For the first time Flanagan noticed the small silver instrument with a slight bend in the reed dangling from a cord around the swarthy sailor's neck. It was his first glimpse of a boatswain's pipe. It would soon be shrilling through Flanagan's dreams.

  The tin-can heroes looked over their shoulders at the cruiser, picked up their semiconscious buddy and dragged him down the dock.

  "Let's go, swabbies, let's go," barked the swarthy boatswain's mate.

  Flanagan followed him up the gangplank and performed the two salutes with, he hoped, military precision. An officer who did not look much older than the new seamen second class returned a very perfunctory salute and said to the boatswain's mate, "What the hell happened down there?"

  "Don't worry about it," the boatswain's mate said.

  Flanagan thought the officer's soft, thick-lipped mouth betrayed anger. But he did not answer this peculiar boatswain's mate, who seemed to treat him as an inferior. Maybe the officer was too busy returning all the salutes as the new recruits streamed aboard. Flanagan did not have time to think about it. "Come on, sailor," the boatswain's mate said, grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving him toward a hatch.

  Flanagan had trouble descending the steep ladder with his seabag on his shoulder. He missed the last step and lurched into the steel bulkhead on the other side of the passageway. His head thudded against the unyielding metal. "Jesus Christ," the boatswain's mate said, hoisting him to his feet. "How are you yo-yos gonna keep your feet when this old girl does one of her thirty-degree rolls?"

  Flanagan got a strong odor of cheap cologne as the boatswain's mate pulled him erect. His head ringing, Flanagan followed him into the interior of the USS Jefferson City. There was nothing but steel and more steel and a bewildering array of pipes and wires snaking along the bulkheads and overheads. Fire hoses were coiled on polished metal wheels every ten feet, so it seemed to Flanagan, who saw nothing that looked even slightly inflammable.

  They struggled through numerous narrow hatches with foot-high bases. Several of the newcomers tried to walk through them as if they were ordinary doors and fell on their faces, further enraging the boatswain's mate. In some compartments, these blunders provided entertainment for sailors lying in tiers of bunks, four deep, suspended by steel chains from the overheads.

  "Hey, we
got some boots," someone yelled.

  "How are you, girls? Have a nice trip?" someone else shouted.

  Finally they reached a big compartment full of tables and benches with a stainless steel cafeteria setup along one side: the crew's mess. A half dozen older men were waiting there, some in dungarees, one in the blue uniform and visored hat of a chief petty officer. The swarthy boatswain's mate threw the list of names and the bulky manila envelopes containing their service records on one of the tables.

  "Okay, you birds," he said, when the recruits had crowded into the compartment. "Here's the most important guy you're gonna meet on this ship. Chief Boatswain's Mate Biff Nolan. He's the master at arms. That means he's in charge of makin' sure you behave. He used to be light heavyweight champ of the Navy. When he says shit, you squat and strain, get me?"

  Flanagan's father was captain of the 113th Precinct in the Bronx. That added special interest to his study of the Jefferson City's top cop. He saw an Irish face that he had encountered a hundred times at picnics and parties thrown by his uncle, Barney Flanagan, one of the chieftains in Boss Flynn's Bronx political machine. The brow was low, the nose pug, the mouth hard. Venality and stupidity mingled in the sneering smile. Nolan was the sort of lug his father would transfer out of his precinct in five minutes if he could get away with it. But that was not always possible. Lugs often had powerful friends.

  Only one man seemed interested in the records. Built like a barrel, with ruddy cheeks and hair so blond it was almost white, he wore a boatswain's pipe around his neck. He began reading the manila-bound files, one by one.

  "For Chrissake, Homewood," snapped the swarthy boatswain's mate. "We ain't got time to go through that paper. Let's just divide them up."

  "It don't matter what kind of trash you get in your division, Wilkinson. I need guys with brains," Homewood said. He had a thick Southern accent.

  "You fuckin' fire controllers," Wilkinson said.

  "All your fuckin' brains couldn't hit Australia if we was moored in Sydney Harbor."

  "With you and your asshole buddy on the bridge, Australia's the only thing we'll ever shoot at," Homewood said.

  "You watch your fuckin' mouth, Homewood. A man could be up to his ears in shit for talkin' that way," Wilkinson roared.

  "Go fuck yourself," Homewood said, continuing to look through the service records. "Jesus. Here's one I want. Flanagan. Look at that IQ ratin'."

  "Look at that mechanical aptitude," Wilkinson said.

  "The guy mustn't know a wrench from a screwdriver."

  "We'll teach him if he's got brains," Homewood said.

  "Flanagan, where the hell are you?"

  Flanagan raised his hand. Homewood looked him over. "You're in F Division."

  "God damn it, Homewood," Wilkinson said. "Look at the size of him. He's the kind of muscle I need in a handlin' room or on a workin' party."

  "You got plenty of muscle already," Homewood said.

  "We got fifteen empty racks to fill. I want a good man in each one of them to replace the good men we lost."

  Something about the hard, deliberate way Homewood said this reduced Wilkinson to surly silence. Homewood selected another fourteen recruits and led them out of the mess compartment. His Bronx buddy Roth gave Flanagan a glum wave as they departed. So did Harold Semple, a shy red-cheeked kid from Michigan who had been Flanagan's boot-camp bunkmate.

  The new members of F Division followed Homewood up a ladder and found themselves in a compartment that the boatswain's mate told them was amidships. "That's the center of the ship." He gave them a quick rundown of other nautical lingo. "You never go upstairs. You go above. Or downstairs. You go below. This is not a boat. It's a ship. A she, not an it. You don't go to the back — you go aft. Or to the front — you go forward. It's all in your Bluejacket's Manual, but I'm presumin' that you all are like every other sailor who's ever been issued that goddamn thing. You put it in the bottom of your seabag and never looked at it. I want you to remember these things, 'cause you're an F Division sailor. You're supposed to be the best we got aboard. We aim them guns, see. We score the hits. The rest of the crew's black gang and deck apes —they keep the engines oiled and the guns loaded. But we make this old lady a warship."

  He paused and paced up and down the compartment. "Get one thing straight. You never talk down your ship to outsiders. You don't let anyone else talk her down either. That includes everyone from flyboys to Marines. When we hit Long Beach the day after tomorrow and you get liberty, you may hear some shitty things said about the old J.C. Don't take 'em lyin' down."

  "What if they're true?" asked a voice that floated from the shadows in the far corner of the compartment.

  "Shut your mouth," Homewood roared.

  "Hey, Boats," said the voice, "why don't you, stop shovelin' it against the tide and admit the truth? We fucked up. We fucked up royally. They probably got twelve admirals and thirty-six captains in Washington right now tryin' to explain it away."

  A sailor emerged from behind the row of bunks. He was only about five feet eight, but he walked with a rolling swagger that matched the cocky smile on his handsome face. Except for the way he wore his white hat parked on the back of his head, instead of the regulation two inches above the eyebrows, he might have stepped off a recruiting poster. His black shoes gleamed. His dark blue blouse and pants were so tight they seemed glued to his burly body. On his sleeve was sewn a small horizontal pipe on a tripod with a single V-shaped stripe beneath it. He was a fire controlman third class. Lower on his sleeve were four slanted white stripes called hash marks, which meant he had been in the Navy twelve years.

  "Peterson's the name, guys," he said. "Anything you want, gedunk at bedtime, a little action with the bones or a hot deck, the best nooky on the beach, speak to Poppa Jack. But remember, his services don't come cheap."

  "You son of a bitch, how'd you get liberty here?" Homewood said.

  "I got a sick sister in Portland, Boats," Peterson said. "She called the chaplain, who called our new division officer, who broke down and cried at the thought of me goin' back to war without seein' her."

  "Jesus Christ," Homewood fumed. "Can't you shut that trap of yours long enough to let me give these kids some esprit de corpse?"

  "The corpses are down in main plot, Boats," Peterson said. "Maybe they ought to hear about them before you hand out the assignments.”

  "They'll find out about them soon enough," Homewood said. "The thing I want them to understand is — We wanted to fight. We're still a fightin' ship..."

  The boatswain mate's face was flushed, his broad brow was furrowed. He was struggling with an emotion he did not want to admit. An emotion that was almost incomprehensible to this brawny sailor whose huge hands and massive arms looked as if they were capable of bending steel.

  Peterson's abrasive style softened surprisingly. "I know, Boats. We'll be one again — if they give us a chance."

  Flanagan and his fellow recruits could only exchange bewildered stares. Yellow stripes down backbones and smokestacks, corpses in main plot, whatever that was. What had happened aboard the USS Jefferson City?

  Black Gang

  "What do you do on the ship?" Marty Roth asked as he followed the man who had chosen him and ten others for something called B Division down an endless series of ladders into the bowels of the Jefferson City.

  The man had a flat sullen face and pale blond hair slicked down on his head. Without looking back, he replied, "The same thing you're gonna be doin'. Sweatin' your fuckin' balls off"

  Down one more ladder they struggled with their seabags on their shoulders into a compartment half full of men lying in racks. It had a different odor from the rest of the ship, which smelled of metal and electricity. A lot of talcum powder was used in this compartment.

  Some of the faces on the racks looked as old as his father's. But Roth's attention quickly focused on a stumpy man with a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth, standing in the center of the compartment. He wore the khaki uniform of
an officer, without a tie or coat.

  "Okay, swabbies," he said. "My name's Oz Bradley. I'm the engineering officer on this tub. That means I'm your boss. It also means you aren't swabbies any more. You're firemen. You're in the engineers, the black gang. For your information, that's the most important part of this ship. Those assholes up on deck can't get this thing away from the dock without us. They hate to admit that. They'll try to prove their fucking superiority by shitting all over you. Anytime they try it, let me know. They won't try it again.

  "One more thing. You'll hear some lousy stories about this ship. Pay no attention to them. We did our jobs. It was those heroes on the bridge who screwed up."

  Bradley mounted the ladder to the upper decks and vanished. The flat-faced man resumed charge of their destinies. He read off their names and assigned them lockers and racks. "Roth," he said, "take the top rack back there in the corner."

  In the corner, Roth found two Slavic faces confronting him. They shared narrow creased foreheads and small pointed noses. One was beefy, the other bony. Roth," the bony one said, "are you a fuckin' Hebe?"

  "Yeah. I'm Jewish," Roth said, frying to push past them.

  "We don't want no fuckin' Hebes back here," the beefy one said, blocking his path. "It stinks bad enough back here already.”

  In one of the middle racks, a man was lying with his face to the bulkhead, apparently asleep. He rolled over and simultaneously uncoiled onto the deck. Between Roth and his persecutors stood a Negro who was at least six feet four. He looked as if he could play fullback for the Chicago Bears on five minutes' notice. "Did that last remark by any chance refer to me?" he asked.

  "What if it did?" said the beefy bully, a sneer flitting across his face.