Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Then I got sent to the fleet, you know, and that was a big disappointment to me and Daddy. He said fleet Marines were just toy soldiers, floating bellhops. I put in for a transfer to a regiment and that got me in a lot of hot water. I felt a little better when they explained to me that Marines were on the ship to make sure these swabbies don't wet their pants and mutiny in a battle. I felt sorry for them, like a Christian should for men who didn't have enough guts to join the Army or the Marines.

  Still I joined the Marines to kill Japs or Germans and I started to wonder if I'd ever get a chance. Sergeant Welsh had it in for me after that transfer idea and he gave me all the graveyard watches.

  That's midnight to 4 a.m. One night I fell asleep sitting outside the Captain's door and he put me on report. Sergeant Welsh told me that if I was in a regiment in a battle zone I'd have probably gotten shot. The Captain gave me ten days in the brig on bread and water. I tried to explain about the watches but he wouldn't listen to me.

  Sergeant Welsh decided I wasn't fit to fire the 20-millimeter anti-aircraft guns. So he gave me hatch duty. I know I told you some of this already Rosemarie but 'I got to write it all down. If something terrible happens when they take them out I want you to send this letter to my Momma and Daddy.

  The hatch they gave me was on the third deck over a ladder that went down to the main plot room. That's where they have a lot of machines that figure out the ranges for the main battery guns. They had 15 men down there, two officers and 13 swabbies. I guarded the hatch with my rifle loaded. I had orders to shoot anyone who tried to open it while we were at General Quarters. The hatch had a big silver wheel in the center of it that you spun down like a giant screw and a lot of small bolts around the edges that we call dogs. Once I screwed and dogged it down, no one inside could move it.

  It's a watertight hatch, see. If the ship gets hit by a torpedo or a shell and starts to flood, these watertight hatches and doors keep the water from running all through her and sinking her.

  Well we escorted the First Marine Division to Guadalcanal. Jesus how I wanted to land with them. Then we went out to sea to wait for the Jap navy. We stayed out there at General Quarters for 36 hours. For a day and a half I stood beside that hatch with my gun loaded. It was about 110 degrees below decks with every porthole and watertight door and hatch closed. I never spent 36 hours like that in my life, Rosemarie. I kept thinking about Daddy saying, "Son of a bitch the runt is a Marine after all." Thinking about those Marines on Guadalcanal fighting the Japs while I stood there staring at a goddamn hatch. What kind of a Marine was I?

  Suddenly there was a tremendous crash. The lights went out and the compartment filled with smoke. I could hardly breathe. I started praying for them to sound abandon ship. I didn't want to drown. I wanted to die fighting!

  Then I heard their voices. They were below the hatch, screaming for me to open it. I could hear their fists pounding on it. They were living men, white Christians, Rosemarie, dying down there underneath my feet. All I had to do was open that hatch and maybe they could save themselves. But I didn't open it. I was a Marine. I had orders. I stood there and listened to them die.

  We didn't sink. We didn't fight either. We just sort of sailed around in the dark while the other ships in our squadron got blown to pieces by the japs. The Marines who were topside said they never saw anything like it. They could see the gunfire in the distance, the ships burning. We kept on going the other way! Everybody blamed the Captain. They said he had a yellow stripe down his back a foot wide.

  That was when I started hearing the voices. When they started asking me why I obeyed orders and killed them when I could have opened the hatch and the ship wouldn't have sunk. Why did you obey a coward's orders, Marine? they asked. Are you a coward too?

  Maybe you're right, Rosemarie, it was Satan whispering that in my head. Maybe Satan is loose on this ship. We hear about things the deck apes do that could only come from Satan's black heart. Maybe Satan has possessed the Captain and turned him into a coward. I don't know.

  In a few hours we'll be in Long Beach. They're going to put the ship in dry dock and take the bodies out. I can't let them do it, Rosemarie. They'll haunt me as long as I live. They're Satan's servants now. They died cursing. I heard them. I've prayed and prayed and the Lord's told me the only way is to stop them like a Marine. If I die trying, Rosemarie, tell my Daddy I went down fighting.

  Francis Marion Purcell, eighteen, carefully folded this letter and put it in the breast pocket of his blouse. He put a round in his Springfield rifle and went forward to the compartment containing the main plot hatch. Not for the first time, Purcell talked softly to the dead men below his feet. "It wasn't my fault. It was an order. I'm a Marine. I'm really sorry."

  He particularly remembered one of the swabbies, a tall rangy fellow Virginian from Charlottesville. They used to exchange joking remarks. "You're gonna let me out, ain't you Purcell?" he used to say. "I can swim. None of these Yankees can swim, so it won't make no difference to them."

  Now he could hear him calling, "Purcell, Purcell. You promised to let me out."

  "It's too late now," Purcell whispered, almost weeping. "Just keep quiet."

  He could deal with the ghost of a fellow rebel. It was the Yankees who would devour his guts. They were Satan's servants. He could not let them out. The haunting would start then, like in that movie he saw when he was ten. Where dead people got out of their graves and drank the blood of the living. He had not been able to sleep for a week after seeing it. His mother had had to hold him in her arms each night as if he was a baby. His father started calling him "Frances Mary Purcell" and his brothers picked it up.

  Rosemarie said she was praying for him. He had wanted to fuck her so bad when they were together on the last night of his boot leave, but all she let him do was touch her teats. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, why can't you stop the voices? Why can't you stop that dream where the hatch opens and they come out and begin drinking my blood? Why can't you stop Satan? I thought you conquered him by getting up on that cross.

  "Okay, here's what we can do."

  The speaker was the damage control officer, a big thick-necked South Carolinian who reminded Francis Marion Purcell of his father. They were about the same size. With him was a first class boatswain's mate. What was his name? He was always talking to the executive officer. Wilkinson.

  "The captain wants them out of here before we go into dry dock," the damage control officer said. "I think we can open this hatch and pump out the compartment, now that we've got everything fore and aft of it watertight." He peered at Francis Marion Purcell. "What are you doing here, Private?"

  "On guard, sir," Purcell said.

  "By whose order?"

  "Sir," Purcell said, "I got orders. They can't come out."

  "Why not?"

  "I've got orders to stop them. Orders from the Lord, Commander. I was just doing my job. I didn't want to kill them."

  "He's apeshit," Wilkinson said.

  "Now listen son--" the damage control officer said.

  Purcell leveled his rifle. "I got orders, Commander. I'm fightin' for my life!"

  "Let's get the hell out of here," Wilkinson said.

  The damage control officer let the boatswain's mate drag him out of the compartment. They ran down the passageway and started yelling in the Marine compartment. Sergeant Welsh appeared in the doorway. "What the fuck are you doing, Purcell?" he roared.

  Francis Marion Purcell put a bullet one eighth of an inch from the sergeant's big close-shaven head. He would have liked to put it between his eyes, but he could not kill a fellow Marine. The bullet clanged against the steel bulkheads in the next compartment. The sergeant ran, howling. Some Marine.

  Chaos. Shouts, yells. Then a sudden silence.

  "Attention, attention," someone called. Captain Kemble stood in the doorway.

  "What's wrong with you, Purcell?"

  "They want to let them out, Captain. They want to let them out to haunt me."

 
; "They can't hurt you."

  "Yes they can. They'll drink my blood."

  "Give me that gun."

  Captain Kemble walked toward Private Purcell. The muzzle of his rifle was aimed at the captain's left breast, just above the ribbons. He thought of the times when the captain called him into his stateroom to take a message to the executive officer. Kemble had seemed like a movie star or a New York millionaire. The stateroom had been decorated with Chinese paintings. There were ivory statues of pagan gods. He seemed to live in another world, totally different from the crowded Marine compartment. Now all Purcell had to do was press the trigger and he would kill him. Maybe then the dead would be satisfied. He would have killed the coward who had murdered them. Maybe he would be killing Satan.

  But Purcell saw something that froze his trigger finger. The captain was already a haunted man. It was there in his eyes, a sadness that surpassed Francis Marion Purcell's understanding. The captain was hoping he would pull the trigger. It would be much worse punishment if he did not pull it.

  Francis Marion Purcell let Captain Kemble take the rifle out of his hands. The Marine stood there laughing into the captain's tormented face.

  The Sea Gives Up Its Dead

  “Let's go, sailor."

  A big hand shook Frank Flanagan's shoulder. He stared into Boats Homewood's moon face in the red glow of the compartment night lights.

  A working party. He and about forty other seamen from F Division had been tapped for a 4 A.M. working party. A hell of a thing. F Division seldom got called for working parties. Usually these chores were reserved for the deck apes, the men of the ship's four deck divisions. Flanagan struggled into his dungarees, paid a hurried visit to the head, and assembled with the rest of the party in the passageway forward of their compartment.

  Before they had hit their racks, Homewood had claimed he had no idea what they were going to do. Now he told them. "We got a lulu of a job. We got to get them bodies out of main plot and up to the quarterdeck. They want them ashore before dawn. They've been down in that compartment for a month. It ain't goin' to be pretty."

  Uneasiness rippled through the group. Many of the new men were still feeling queasy after the rough voyage from Portland. Flanagan had been delighted to discover he was immune to seasickness. He even survived one of the oldest gags in the fleet. A couple of jokers had advised the new arrivals to spend some time on the fantail as the best antidote to the greenhorn sailor's usual affliction. In a heavy sea, the fantail rose and fell as much as thirty feet every sixty seconds, causing stomachs to do loops worthy of a berserk stunt pilot. In no time almost everyone was puking his guts out.

  Montgomery West, their division officer, appeared out of the gloom forward. "I know this is a bitch of a job, guys. But it's our responsibility," he said. "They're our men."

  "He thinks he's in some fucking movie," George Jablonsky whispered in Flanagan's ear. He was the division's Falstaff, a big blond Pole from Chicago.

  Behind West stood Ensign Herman Kruger. "You'll see a lot more dead men before you get out of this man's Navy," he snapped. He specialized in upstaging West.

  "Kruger belongs in a fucking movie," someone else muttered. "Dracula Joins the Navy.”

  They went down a deck and trooped into the Marine compartment. The Marines were all awake, milling around in their green shorts and T-shirts. One of them, a runty kid who did not look more than sixteen years old, seemed to have flipped out. He was in a corner, crying and laughing at the same time. "Shut up, do you hear me, Purcell?" the sergeant yelled in his face.

  No one in F Division had heard the gunshot or the uproar that Purcell had caused when he went berserk. The Jefferson City was aptly named. It was a floating city where tragedy, comedy and all the gradations in between often occurred without people on the next deck or even in the adjoining compartment knowing a thing about it. It reminded Flanagan of the stories his father told about appalling or amusing events at the 113th Precinct. He would look in vain for them in the newspaper the next day.

  "I want this area sealed off until further orders," a Marine officer was telling another sergeant. "Let's get some men fore and aft of the ladders from here to the quarterdeck."

  As Flanagan and his fellow sailors watched, the damage control officer, a big broad-shouldered lieutenant commander, undogged the hatch to main plot. Water lapped onto the deck around their feet. Briskly, the damage control officer ordered a half dozen men to lower a large pump into the water, with a big hose attached to it. "Why the hell didn't they pump the water out long ago?" Jablonsky asked.

  "Then they'd really stink," Ensign Kruger said.

  "That's a salvage pump," the damage control officer said. "We don't carry pumps that big aboard ship."

  The hose, which was at least six inches wide, descended into the blackness. A moment later, it twitched like a living thing. Water whooshed up its expanded girth to the main deck. In ten minutes grisly sucking sounds rose from the compartment. "That's it," the damage control officer said.

  There was a pause. Everyone inhaled the odor curling up from the open hatch. It bore no resemblance to anything Flanagan had ever smelled before. But it did not require any comparison or analysis. It was nauseating on a level of perception that every member of the species possessed.

  "Flanagan, Daley, Jablonsky and Ford, each take one of those," Homewood said, pointing to a pile of canvas sacks, "and follow me and Lieutenant West."

  West looked surprised and not exactly pleased. Flanagan suspected the movie star would have been glad to let them go down without him. West took a deep breath, switched on a flashlight with a huge beam and led them down the ladder to main plot. The steps were covered with green slime, and Flanagan lurched against the bulkhead, which was equally slimy. The odor grew thicker, more nauseating.

  A muffled cry rose from the darkness. Homewood blundered into Lieutenant West, who had stopped halfway down the ladder. "Christ," Homewood said.

  Peering over Homewood's shoulder, Flanagan saw West's flashlight beam trembling on the face of a dead man. The cheeks were pale blue and so grotesquely swollen the eyes had receded to colorless dots and the mouth had dwindled to a pucker. A fish, Flanagan thought. He looks like a fish.

  He heard Homewood whisper to West, "Steady, Lieutenant, steady. The men are depending on you." In a louder voice he said, "There's the first one. Christiansen, I think."

  The body was lying on a platform at the bottom of the ladder. To the left down another shorter ladder was the compartment. Flanagan followed West and Homewood down, stepping gingerly around the dead man. In the flashlight's swinging beam he saw a charnel house in bedlam. Dead men were everywhere. One was draped face down over a computer the size of a Ping-Pong table. Another had gotten wedged in an overhead pipe and dangled by one foot, head down. Several were piled on top of each other like driftwood. The sea gushed through a ruptured outboard plate and swirled around them. The big pump sucked it up as fast it came in. But the pump did not inhale the odor. It thickened around them, stirring fear and nausea in equally awful proportions.

  Some lines from Virgil's description of the pagan underworld leaped into Flanagan's head.

  Hence wild desires and groveling fears,

  And human laughter, human tears,

  Immured in dungeon-seeming night,

  They look abroad, yet see no light.

  Beside him, Flanagan could hear Leo Daley, a chunky freckled towhead from Connecticut, whispering a Hail Mary. Daley did not like the Navy. His thick lips had been twisted in a grimace of disapproval since their first day in boot camp. While Lieutenant West played his flashlight around the compartment, Daley prayed faster and faster. "Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-at-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen. I'm get in' the hell out of here."

  He whirled to bolt up the ladder. Homewood reached past Flanagan and grabbed him by the collar. "No you ain't. These were brave men. They shoulda been buried at sea the day they died. Let's treat them with respect and maybe they won't p
ut a curse on this fuckin' ship. We'll start with him."

  He pointed to the body sprawled half on the platform, half on the ladder.

  "I'm getting sick," said a sad-faced kid from Michigan who was still on the ladder behind Jablonsky. On the voyage from Portland, he had committed the classic greenhorn boner of throwing up to windward; the stuff had blown back into his face.

  "You puke on me and I'll beat the shit out of you," Jablonsky said. "The Polacks have had people puking on them for ten centuries. We're not taking any more of it."

  Everybody laughed. To Flanagan's surprise, the corpses lost some of their horror. Maybe there was a kind of courage in Jablonsky's crazy humor.

  "It's okay, son, I feel like pukin' myself," Homewood said. He gave Daley his flashlight and pulled the body that might be named Christiansen off the platform by the feet. It thudded down the ladder. "Spread out your burial sack on the computer and help me put him in it," he said to Flanagan.

  "Yes. Help him put him in it," Lieutenant West said. He sounded as if he might throw up or faint any second.

  Slipping and sliding in the watery slime, Flanagan helped Homewood lift Christiansen onto the canvas burial bag. The man's swollen body had split open his dungaree shirt in several places. The flesh beneath the cloth felt squishy. Flanagan was surprised and secretly pleased that these dead men did not affect his nerves. Was it because, as a believing Catholic, he was not afraid to die? Daley was at least as devout and he was in a panic.

  Flanagan wondered what Homewood meant about putting a curse on the ship. He did not believe in such superstitions, although his father did. Tom Flanagan broke into a sweat if he saw a black cat about to cross his path.