Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Captain Kemble's toleration of liquor was one of the few things that had made life bearable aboard the Jefferson City. West thought for a moment about the bite of a Scotch and soda at the base of his tongue.

  "Sorry. I've got the watch."

  "Then you better get the hell up there. The captain's on the bridge."

  "Christ!"

  West began struggling into his foul-weather gear. Meade swigged his drink and recited from the Watch Officer's Guide. 'When the commanding officer is on the navigating bridge, the officer of the deck shall not, unless to avoid immediate danger, change the course, alter the speed or perform any important evolutions without consulting him.' Remember that one, West. It's a fetish with Captain Crumpleplate."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  Meade was the son of Clinch Meade, one of Captain Kemble's Annapolis classmates. Before Savo Island, he had practically levitated every time he talked about the Great Man. Now he sneered at him at every opportunity.

  "Listen. What do I get for tutoring you in basic seamanship? Maybe a date with Rita Hayworth?"

  "She's worn out from selling war bonds."

  Meade guffawed. "Hey, that's a new way of describing it. I like it."

  Every bachelor in the wardroom — and a few husbands — expected West to lead them straight to the nearest Hollywood orgy. He had tried to tell them that sex in Hollywood was usually a business arrangement. He might as well have spoken Chinese.

  Feeling as bulky as a bear in the fur-lined foul-weather jacket, West hustled down the dim passageway and almost collided with Ensign Herman Kruger. As usual, Kruger had a scowl on his Germanic face. The jutting jaw, the glaring thyroid eyes reminded West of several character actors who specialized in playing Dunker generals or Unterseeboot captains. Unfortunately, Ensign Kruger was real. A chief fire control man who had gotten a commission when the war began, he was at least forty and had been in the Navy twenty-three years. He found it hard to accept ninety-day-wonder West as his superior officer in charge of F Division.

  "Where the hell were you when that draft of boots came aboard?" Kruger growled. "You should have been there to say a few words to them, instead of letting that meathead Homewood handle it."

  "Nobody told me a thing about it," West said.

  "It's all right. I took care of it," Kruger said.

  "Oh — thanks."

  "The exec says the captain wants those bodies out of main plot before reveille the morning we arrive in Long Beach. We'll need a forty-man working party."

  The Jefferson City, rolled at least thirty degrees to starboard. West lost his balance and crashed into the bulkhead. Kruger never even swayed. He smirked and shook his head as West struggled to keep his feet. "Shall I order up the working party?"

  "Yes —would you?"

  "I think you should be there when we take them out."

  "Of course I'll be there," West said.

  They were talking about the fifteen drowned men floating in the water-filled coffin that the main battery plotting room — main plot — had become. One of them was the former commanding officer of F Division. If West stayed aboard the Jefferson City after she was repaired and returned to sea, he would have to go down into that compartment when they went to General Quarters. The thought made it difficult for him to get his breath. Did Kruger know that? Was that why the smirk was on his face?

  "I don't know why the hell we didn't bury them at sea," West said.

  "The captain nixed it," Kruger said.

  "Was he afraid it would hurt morale?"

  "I think he couldn't face them with the whole crew watching."

  Kruger too had turned against Captain Kemble. Before Savo Island, Kruger had admired his ferocious discipline, the harsh sentences he handed down for minor infractions of the regulations. Kruger's vision of the perfect ship was a crew of terrified robots who never broke a rule or loafed on the job.

  On deck, West was greeted by a cascade of icy saltwater. Beyond the rail, white-crested swells loomed against the black sky. The rain squall was building to a gale. They had lifelines up. He hung on to one as he made his way forward to the bridge. His watch read four minutes before the hour when he stepped into the pilothouse. The junior officer of the deck had already relieved his opposite number. So had all the other men, the telephone talker, the helmsman, the engine telegrapher, the quartermaster, the boatswain's mate of the watch. The officer of the deck stood in the usual place, on the starboard side. "Hello West," he said.

  It was the air defense officer, Lieutenant Robert R. Mullenoe, Annapolis 1931. He was six feet two, with a jaw like the prow of a battleship and the thick neck, the tree-trunk legs of a heavyweight boxer. He had in fact won several amateur championships at the Naval Academy. His red hair and hard green eyes emanated a cool, controlled pugnacity. Unlike his rowdy friend Meade, who specialized in needling West, Mullenoe ignored him. The son and grandson of admirals, he would sit beside West at the wardroom table and discuss with Meade and other graduates the Academy football team, the antics of his class's 100th Night show, the idiosyncrasies of various Annapolis town characters. After a while, West — and other reserve officers — would begin to feel invisible.

  "Lieutenant West," said a voice from the darkness on the port side of the bridge. "You must have read in your Watch Officer's Guide that a good officer relieves at least five minutes early. At sea, as I think I've made it clear, ten minutes is a better time allotment. Especially at night."

  "Yes, Captain. I'm sorry. I was reading and lost track of time."

  "I'm not interested in your excuse, Mr. West"

  "It won't happen again, Captain."

  "We're at Condition Three," Mullenoe said, meaning a third of the crew was on watch. It was the standard condition for wartime cruising when an attack was unlikely. "There's a merchant marine report of hostile submarines in the area." He gave West the course and bearing and the location of their escorting destroyer, the USS Reuben Davis. Mullenoe noted that the barometer had fallen ten points and was expected to go down another five. The rest was the usual routine: what boilers were in use, initialing the night order book.

  "I relieve you, sir," West said.

  Lieutenant Junior Grade Montgomery West was now responsible for the 1,300 men and ten thousand tons of steel and oil and explosives beneath his feet. That was unnerving enough for a man whose chief worry, until nine months ago, had been memorizing two hundred lines of dialogue a week. The presence of Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble gave him an acute case of butterflies. West had never expected to have this kind of responsibility thrust on him when he let Uncle Mort pull a string or two and get him made a lieutenant junior grade (the equivalent of an Army first lieutenant) a month after he had been commissioned an ensign. Captain Kemble had promptly announced that a lieutenant junior grade had to stand watch as OOD and proceeded to tutor West in ship-handling in his coldest, most sarcastic style.

  "Steer course three one," West said, confirming the course they were on, as regulations required.

  "Do you mean oh three one, sir?" the helmsman asked.

  "Yes. I was just checking," West muttered. He could not understand why, when he made a mistake, the enlisted men showed him so little mercy. They seemed to have it in for him as much as the Annapolis types did.

  "Why did you join the Navy, Mr. West?" Captain Kemble asked.

  "I wanted to do something — after Pearl Harbor."

  "I mean — the Navy. Why not the Army? I thought you performed beautifully as the cavalry colonel in that western about the Oregon Trail. Just the right amount of stiff-jawed brainlessness.”

  "I thought the Navy had more class."

  West was not about to confess that he had also thought the Navy was safer. Nor was he going to tell Captain Kemble that if it were not for Ina Severn he would probably be in bed in his house in the Hollywood hills instead of on this damp cold bridge, surrounded by the heaving Pacific Ocean.

  "No doubt you'll be joining up?" she had said on the day after Pea
rl Harbor. When he shrugged, she had flung herself back in her commissary chair in appalled exasperation. "How can any real man ignore this war?" she cried.

  All the British in Hollywood were the same way, ready to work for nothing in the movies that urged the Americans to get into the battle to save dear old England's ass. Why had he let this icy English bitch get to him? He had stayed out of Hollywood's perfervid politics and felt no burning need to beat Hitler to save the world from fascism. Nor had the Nazis' persecution of the Jews disturbed him. He never thought of himself as half Jewish. Like his grandfather, who changed Hyman to Lyman, most of his mother's Connecticut relatives had anglicized their names and lost touch with Judaism.

  West was not especially patriotic, either. If anything, he had something of a grudge against his country. He would have grown up in comparative luxury if the idiotic Protestants had not rammed Prohibition down the nation's throat and forced his father to close down one of the oldest, most prosperous saloons in New Haven. There were times when he saw his father and to some extent himself as victims of American narrowness and instability.

  Nevertheless, West had enlisted — without bothering to tell Uncle Mort, who almost had a seizure when he heard about it. West intended to fight the goddamn war and prove to Ina Severn — and himself — that behind his spoiled-scion facade lurked a genuine male.

  Captain Kemble's unnerving voice floated from the darkness again. "Well, you've given a pretty good performance so far. Most of the time the average observer would think you're a genuine Navy officer."

  "Thank you, Captain," West said.

  West could see smiles playing across the faces of the helmsman and the boatswain. They had watched the captain eviscerate this ninety-day wonder before.

  "Fame," Captain Kemble said. "Is that what you're after, West?"

  "Not really. I like acting."

  "Why? Always pretending to be someone else — someone unreal. Isn't that a strain after a while? Don't you start to lose sight of who you really are? You've even changed your name — not that I blame you for wanting to get rid of Joseph Lyman Shuck."

  The helmsman's grin widened. Captain Kemble had dug West's real name out of his personnel file within a week of his coming aboard. It had been a running joke in the wardroom for the next six weeks. The gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin Moss, six feet four inches of towering Annapolis snobbery, had professed bewilderment that a man could change his name and his identity. He seemed to think there was something immoral about it. Meade and several other Annapolis types called him "Shuckie" for a while.

  "Acting's an art, Captain. As long as you think of yourself as an artist, you're in control. As a matter of fact, I think everyone does a lot of acting. There's a lot of it in the Navy."

  "Oh?"

  "The men know it. They know the officers don't believe fifty percent of the stuff they hand out about God and country."

  "I don't think that's a healthy attitude for a Navy officer to have, West."

  Kemble's voice had shot up several decibels. West had struck a nerve. "Sorry, Captain. I thought this was a personal conversation."

  "I don't have personal conversations with anyone on this bridge, West."

  "I understand, Captain."

  He could not see Winfield Scott Schley Kemble's handsome face in his dark corner of the bridge. But West could visualize it easily enough — the arrogant, disdainful mouth, the cold blue eyes, the beaked nose. He was named after some Spanish-American War admiral, and he looked it. He looked like a man who was born to command lesser men. Yet, according to his more vociferous critics in the wardroom, in a moment of terrific crisis thirty days ago, he had failed catastrophically. Why?

  West wanted to ask him, because he was more than a little angry at losing his thousand-dollar-a-week salary for the past nine months and getting nothing for his trouble but a sour taste in his mouth. Who the hell was writing this script, anyway? If Louis B. Mayer were running the show, he would have fired him long ago. Come to think of it, if the rumor of the captain's being relieved was true, maybe he had been fired.

  They would probably bring him back to Washington and make him an admiral. These goddamn Annapolis graduates stuck together no matter what happened. Only schnooks without that ring on their fingers got crucified for making mistakes.

  "Man overboard!"

  The telephone talker's shout clanged around the bridge like a pistol shot.

  "Where away?" Lieutenant West gasped.

  "Off the fantail to starboard."

  "Right full rudder," West said.

  Too late, he heard Ensign Meade's mocking voice. When the commanding officer is on the navigating bridge, the officer of the deck shall not, unless to avoid immediate danger, change the course ... without consulting him.

  "Steady as you go," snapped Captain. Kemble. "What the hell are you doing, West?"

  "I was going to execute the Williamson turn, Captain."

  "We have a half dozen flooded compartments amidships, West. You try to turn thirty degrees in this sea and you could find yourself broaching to. In the second place, we've received a warning of enemy submarines operating off this coast. Only a fool would risk thirteen hundred lives and a capital ship to save one man."

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Order life buoys overboard and send the Davis back to look for him."

  West obeyed both commands. Pounding ahead at twenty-five knots, they were already a half mile from where the man had gone over the side. The buoys were a pathetic gesture, no more. The Reuben Davis, their escorting destroyer, had no more chance of finding him than West had of persuading Captain Kemble to let him try the Williamson turn, a maneuver that enabled a ship to regain the same course in the opposite direction without reducing speed.

  "Muster the ship. Let's find out who he is, at least," Captain Kemble ordered.

  "All hands, all hands except the watch report to your division compartments for muster," West said over the PA.

  For the next half hour there was silence on the bridge as they plowed into the storm. Then Radio Central reported a message from the Davis. No sign of the overboard. About five minutes later, the executive officer, Commander Daniel Boone Parker, came puffing onto the bridge. His big belly made it difficult for him to climb ladders.

  "It seems to be Quartermaster First Class George Massie, Captain."

  "What do you mean, it seems to be?"

  Between Captain Kemble and Commander Parker there was a gulf filled with barely disguised loathing. West usually sympathized with the executive officer. Parker, too, was not an Annapolis man. He had joined the Navy in 1917, when World War I began, and stayed in. He made no secret of how much he resented Annapolis favoritism. He frequently pointed out at the wardroom table that he had been commissioned three months before Captain Kemble.

  "He didn't answer muster call. Someone said they saw him going topside."

  "Why in God's name would he go up on deck on a night like this?"

  "I have no idea, Captain. Maybe he liked wet weather."

  "Make out a report."

  "Aye, Captain."

  West stared into the rain and wind. Kemble did not give a damn. A man had just drowned and this Annapolis bastard did not give a damn. West had stood several watches with Massie, a slight fussy man, as quartermasters tended to be. They were the keepers of the ship's log, the guardians of the navigation charts. Massie had told West one night that his ambition was to retire from the Navy and breed Irish setters.

  Captain Kemble went below with a farewell thrust. "Don't change your course without consulting me, West."

  "Aye, aye, Captain," West said.

  For another minute the bridge was silent. Then West heard the quartermaster cursing.

  "What's the matter with you?" he asked.

  "He was my buddy, George Massie. One of the straightest, best buddies I ever had in this fucking Navy.”

  “I’m sorry."

  "Yeah. Sure you're sorry. You know as well as I do what happene
d to him — and why."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "He was on the bridge that night. Off Savo Island. He knew too much."

  West stared into the storm. The wind seemed to be rising. A huge wave crashed onto the bow of the USS Jefferson City, burying everything up to and including turret one. The ship staggered under the impact of the tons of water. For a moment she seemed to be angling down into the depths. All West could think about were the fifteen dead men from F Division in main plot. They were not a fighting ship, they were a floating coffin, about to meet their doom. This script was neither a mystery nor an adventure story, it was a horror show.

  Like a tired but still game athlete, the Jefferson City refuted these bizarre products of West's Hollywood imagination. Her forty-foot-high prow rose from the churning sea. White water poured from her decks. Bolts creaked, steel plates groaned. She was up, proud, free, thrusting her bow into the next wave.

  Officer of the Deck Montgomery West stood there on the bridge, trying to make sense of what the quartermaster had just told him. What was happening aboard the Jefferson City was a mystery, all right. But it was not made in Hollywood.

  And A Few Marines

  Purcell, you son of a bitch. We're coming to get you. We're going to live in your crotch, Purcell. We're going to eat out your guts.

  Rosemarie, I got to write you all this fast because tomorrow they're going to take them out and then I don't know what will happen. I'm in my bunk in the Marine compartment on the Jefferson City and it's maybe 0300 hours. That's 3 a.m. I went to see the chaplain like you told me I should and I talked to him about the voices but he just said I ought to let God take care of them. I was only obeying orders but I can still hear them talking Rosemarie. I can hear their fingers scratching at that hatch.

  Rosemarie when I went into the Marines I only wanted to do something that my Daddy would like. I figured maybe he'd stop calling me the runt and going on about the way Momma spoiled me. As if anyone gets spoiled when he's got older brothers who beat the shit out of him every time Momma turned her back. Daddy was a Marine, I think I told you, Bellow Wood and all that World War I stuff. I thought I would die at least twice during boot camp when those DI's got on me just the way Daddy used to do but I made it and came home with that uniform on and Daddy said, "Son of a bitch who'd think the runt would make a Marine. But he sure as hell is one." He took me all over Westmoreland County showing me off to his friends. They all shook my hand and said I was Jeb Stuart Purcell's son sure enough and I had a job waiting for me when I came home.