Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "We'll get it out," Chase said. Calmly, he had cut six inches off another powder case and rammed it into the breech. They got rid of the hot shell and completed the firing exercise. But Meade wondered what Chase and the gun crew thought of his moment of panic. He knew some of the sailors called him Baby face behind his back. Was it his fault he looked too young to be an officer?

  Down in the handling room under mount one, Harold Semple's arms trembled as he placed another fifty-five-pound five-inch shell in the hoist. In other hoists, cans of gunpowder were waiting for the order to rise to the hungry guns. With a shrill whine, the shell vanished. Instantly the man behind Semple thrust another shell into his arms. Semple's stomach churned. What was he doing here caressing these snub-nosed metal monsters?

  In the mount, the gun captains opened the breeches and the rammer men shoved the shells home with their electrically powered rammers. Next came the powder cans. The gun captains slammed the breeches and reported to Mount Captain Chase.

  "Ready one."

  "Ready two."

  Ensign Meade pressed the ready button, informing Air Defense Officer Mullenoe and Gunnery Officer Moss that mount one was prepared to fire. As the other five-inch mounts and eight-inch turrets began to report, a shout ripped into Meade's ears on the telephone circuit. "Loose shell in mount one handling room!"

  Harold Semple had lost the shell as he tried to place it in the hoist. It rolled across the deck. Hulking Fred Kraus, the captain of the handling room, dove on top of it like a football player going after a fumble. If that snout smashed against the bulkhead as the ship rolled, a large chunk of the Jefferson City might go skyward in a million fragments.

  "Jesus fucking Christ," snarled Kraus. "I told Boats not to put that green little kid on the shell line."

  "I'm sorry," Semple sobbed. "They're too heavy. I can't lift them."

  Ensign Meade dropped into the handling room, his face livid. Commander Moss's denunciations were still ringing in his ears. "Everyone report here at 1900 hours. We're going to rehearse loading until your goddamn arms fall off," Meade snapped. He was not going to let these idiots ruin his Navy career.

  "Hey, Monsignor, take off your shoes. I want to make sure you ain't part rabbit," Jack Peterson said.

  "Nah, I've got a cloven hoof," Flanagan said.

  There were no smiles on the other nine or ten faces in the handling room beneath turret three at the stern of the ship. For an hour they had cursed and scowled and slammed big fists against the steel bulkheads as Jack made pass after pass with the dancing dice. In front of him there now rose a veritable pile of five- and ten-dollar bills.

  Flanagan was feeling almost as cocky as Jack. In spite of the blasts of the big guns, which were as bad as Peterson had predicted they would be, he had run up the best score of any of the fire control men on the forty-millimeter directors. Jack had announced this fact to the high rollers in his unique way ("Thanks to my peerless instruction, et cetera"). It made Flanagan feel he could gamble with these old salts if he kept his mouth shut most of the time.

  "Start countin' them, Monsignor," Jack said as he blew on the cubes. "This'll be my last round."

  "What the fuck are you talk in' about?" growled Jerome Wilkinson. "You got a give us a chance to win some of that back."

  "Relax, Jerry," said Master at Arms Biff Nolan.

  "He'll be back tomorrow night. He can't have this kind of luck two nights runnin'."

  "Tomorrow night we'll be in Pearl, you asshole," Wilkinson said. "We may have a lot of other things on our minds."

  "You might, Wilkie," Jack said. "I don't know about the rest of us. I hear a lot of guys in your division are dyin' for a chance to talk to somebody about you. All we gotta do is get rid of our fuckin' executive officer. It'll be like pulling the lid off a can of goddamn worms."

  "What the fuck are you doin' here if you ain't one of the worms, wise guy?" Biff Nolan said.

  "I happen to be a sailor. That automatically makes me a worm that the pricks in the wardroom like to step on. But even a worm can turn, Biff It depends on what's at stake."

  Wilkinson pointed a finger at Jack as he rolled the dice. "I told you once, your ass is at stake. Literally."

  "Eight. Anyone wanta bet I make it on the first pass? How about makin' it with two fours? I'll give you fifty bucks on both of them."

  "You got it," Wilkinson said, throwing down a hundred dollars in tens. Biff Nolan threw in fifty against the two fours. Everyone else was either broke or too intimidated by Jack's streak to buck him again. Flanagan, who had won nothing on his own rolls, threw down ten dollars behind Jack and Wilkinson covered him.

  Exactly where these sailors, none of whom had a base pay of more than $138 a month, got this kind of money was a question Flanagan was unable to answer. But listening to them talk for the past two hours had been an education in the Jefferson City's underworld. There were several crap or card games like this one going on almost every night. One of the men in the game, a bald, wizened storekeeper named Conti, whom everyone called Tony Bucks, was kidded about losing or winning five for four. As the son of a cop, Flanagan knew the terminology. That was shorthand for a loan shark's standard rate of interest, twenty percent. The ship's baker was one of the big losers, which inspired a lot of jokes about him being forced to raise his prices. Another heavy loser was the wiry yeoman who kept the books for the ship's gedunk stand, where sailors bought ice cream. There were a lot of jokes about green and red ink in that department.

  "Give us your blessing, Monsignor," Peterson said. He had introduced Flanagan as an escaped seminarian who was eager to be corrupted by the sinners of the Jefferson City.

  "Veni, vidi, vinci," Flanagan said, making a sign of the cross over the cubes.

  The dice scampered across the brown blanket on the handling-room deck. Everyone stared in disbelief at two fours.

  "Okay, Biff, the drinks are on me," Jack Peterson said.

  He threw a twenty-dollar bill to the master at arms, and Nolan handed out flasks of bourbon to all hands. A single flask, courtesy of their host, had been passed around during the game. Flanagan did not need any more to drink. He was aghast when everyone chugalugged half of his bottle. Flanagan's eyes rolled, but he managed to get the whiskey down.

  Flanagan counted $420 in Jack's pile. They handed fifteen percent to the master at arms; it was part of the deal. Flanagan wondered whom Nolan paid off up the line.

  "Let's get some sea air," Jack said.

  "Let's hit the sack instead," Flanagan said as they left the handling room.

  "I'm too jazzed up to sleep," Jack said as they climbed the ladders to the main deck. Before they opened the hatch, Jack counted out a hundred dollars and offered it to Flanagan.

  "No," he said.

  "Bullshit, I never had luck like that before. Except the night after I met Martha Johnson. I told her about it and she gave me a lecture on why I shouldn't gamble. The next night I lost every dollar I had. That dame's brought me nothin' but grief."

  "I didn't see or hear any grief when we went down to that beach house."

  "Yeah, she's great in the sack. I never met anyone like her in that department. But she wants to reform me, for Christ's sake. If a dame ain't tryin' to ruin you, she's tryin' to reform you. Either way they spoil things. Don't you do the same thing by pullin' a straight-assed Catholic act on me."

  Flanagan let Jack cram the hundred dollars in the pocket of his shirt. On deck, they strolled toward the bow. "Jesus, look at them stars," Peterson said. "That's why I stayed a sailor, Flan. I love to look up at those goddamn things at sea. They don't look the same on the fuckin' beach. There's always a house or a telephone pole in the way. You can look up there and forget you're a shitbird who's gotta salute and say yes sir to a lot of asshole officers who ain't any better than you are and some are a lot worse."

  "You think they're going to ask you to testify about what happened at Savo Island?"

  "I don't know. This captain's playin' a cool game. No one can f
igure out his moves so far. The Marine orderly said the exec came out of dinner in the old man's cabin the other day lookin' like he'd just swallowed a pound of shit. Which is more or less what he did, because the captain fed him the crew's chow."

  "Get them," rasped a voice, as they passed turret two.

  There was a rush of shadowy figures. Flanagan reached for his knife, but he had forgotten to keep it loose in the sheath. Before he could get it out, someone hit him hard on the back of the head and he fell to his knees. Jack was down on the deck too, held by at least two sailors. A tall figure stood over them with something in his hand. It gleamed faintly in the starlight. A knife?

  "The money — get the goddamn money," Jerome Wilkinson said.

  "I can't find it."

  With a terrific effort, Flanagan cleared his swimming brain. He dove on top of one of the sailors holding Jack down and pressed the blade of Homewood's knife against the side of his neck.

  "Let him go or I cut this guy's fucking throat from ear to ear," he said.

  "Okay, wise guy," Wilkinson said. "We ain't had no gripe with you so far. Now you're on our list too. Get it straight. If Jack here shoots off his big mouth to the wrong people, we'll take care of you eventually. It'll be some dark night on some ship a year from now. Or in some bar when you're about to score with a luscious broad. We got a lot of friends in this man's Navy, high and low.”

  Arthur McKay picked up the telephone to the bridge. "This is the captain. Would you tell the supply officer I want to see him?"

  An hour later, the supply officer had yet to appear. This time Captain McKay ordered him summoned over the PA system. He arrived within five minutes. Lieutenant Leroy Tompkins was a small balding man with mournful brown eyes and a smile that was closer to a grimace. He looked as if he had never won a bet or a woman in his life. His shoulders slumped, a potbelly bulged, the sole witness to some modest success in the pursuit of pleasure. Like most officers in his line, he was not an Annapolis man. McKay gestured him to a chair beside his desk.

  "Mr. Tompkins, I told Commander Parker to speak to you about improving the crew's food. He tells me he did speak to you. But the food hasn't improved. Why not?"

  "We're using up a lot of second-rate stuff we took aboard in Manila."

  "Manila? That was nine months ago."

  "We got more of the same when we went to Bombay to get our hull repaired."

  "That was four months ago. Why didn't you get rid of it and completely reprovision the ship when we were in Long Beach?"

  "No one gave me an order to that effect, Captain. You signed for what we had aboard without a word."

  Checkmate. Captain. McKay could only sit there. Ordinarily, a relieving captain made a thorough inspection of the ship before he signed his approval of the readiness reports from the various departments. After the highly unpleasant conversation he had had with Win the day he took command, McKay had signed all the reports without reading them. It had been a feeble, feckless gesture of reconciliation. He had been trying to show Win how much he trusted him.

  Sometimes Arthur McKay wished he had never met Win Kemble. But that kind of thinking led to a whole list of nevers. Never went to Annapolis. Never met Rita and Lucy Semmes. Never was born in Kansas.

  "I've been looking over your service record, Lieutenant. It's remarkable how often you and Commander Parker have served together. The only place you didn't go with him in the last ten years was to the U.S. Embassy in London."

  "Yes," Lieutenant Tompkins said, showing a gold incisor in his nervous smile. "We been workin' together a long time. He always sends for me whenever he gets a command."

  "You're both from Missouri."

  "That's right. I'm from Jefferson City, in fact."

  "Fascinating. I want to see the crew's food get a lot better, Lieutenant. From now on, submit all your menus to me a week in advance."

  "Captain — I haven't got the staff to handle that sort of paperwork."

  "Then write them up yourself when you're off duty. While you're at it, give me a complete audit of your books for the past year.”

  At a pace reserved for the unlikely moment when Abandon Ship was sounded, Supply Officer Tompkins rushed from Arthur McKay's cabin to the office of the executive officer. The elongated yeoman first class pounding the typewriter outside the door waved him into the inner sanctum without even an inquiry. A breathless Tompkins told Commander Daniel Boone Parker the orders he had just received from the captain.

  "He's out to get us, Dan. Any way and every way he can."

  Parker poured his colleague a drink of twelve-year-old Scotch to steady his nerves. "Calm down. I've got people in Washington checking him out. If half of what I've heard is true, we'll get him first."

  After another day of firing the Jefferson City's guns at targets towed by the destroyers and at sleeves towed by the scout planes, Captain McKay sat down to supper with his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin Moss; the ship's first lieutenant and damage control officer, Commander George Tombs; and the chief engineer, Commander Oswald Bradley. They were first among equals, under the executive officer. If they did not get along, a ship was perpetually threatened with chaos. The problem was as old as the Navy. They all wanted to use the same men.

  The gunnery officer wanted to keep the men drilling at the guns from dawn to dusk. The first lieutenant was responsible for the ship's cleanliness and good appearance (which won him the title of ship's bitch) as well as her seaworthiness when damaged. He wanted the deck divisions to spend their time painting, polishing, scrubbing. He also wanted them to learn the location of every pipe, fire main, wire, hose and watertight hatch in the part of the ship to which they were assigned to fight fires and flooding. For damage control the first tuff also drew men from the engineering department, which often got him into arguments with the chief engineer, who had his own agenda for the black gang.

  Each of these senior officers of the Jefferson City gave Captain McKay something to worry about. A string of glittering fitness reports for his skill as a staff officer had won Gunnery Officer Edwin Moss rapid promotion. Although he knew the technical side of the job, McKay feared he was not temperamentally suited for it. He wanted a gunnery officer who emanated aggression and confidence in his men and his weapons. Moss emanated a fussy egotism more than anything else. At Annapolis, where he had graduated third in his class, his nickname had been "Eaglebeak." He continued to look condescendingly down on those who lacked his intellectual and moral qualifications. If there was one officer whose transfer McKay would have welcomed, it was Moss.

  Stumpy snub-nosed George Washington Tombs, the first lieutenant, was new to the ship. He had been lateraled to the Jefferson City when he screwed up a tour as commander of a fleet of destroyer escorts in the Atlantic. Several of his inexperienced naval reserve captains had run aground, and Cominch King had landed on George with both feet. Tombs was particularly vulnerable to a man with King's unrelenting eye. He had graduated 182nd in the 182-man class of 1917.

  Arthur McKay still winced, remembering George's agony as he struggled to make sense out of hydromechanies, steam turbines, electrical engineering and other mysteries of the Academy's science courses. As the class's anchorman, forever on the brink of expulsion, he had won everyone's admiration and sympathy. Arthur McKay had spent more than one night tutoring George before a march down Devil's Highway to Satan's Palace, the Academic Building where examinations were held.

  George was no genius, but he tackled every assignment with the same energy and earnestness that had gotten him through the Academy. Captain McKay had no doubt that he would try to be the most thorough first luff that the Jefferson City had ever seen. Tombs was appalled by the mess the Terminal Island yardbirds had made of the ship and had submitted a work schedule which would give him control of the deck sailors and the black gang half of each day. George obviously expected his classmate from good old 1917 to back him up.

  The chief engineer, Oswald Bradley, growled defiance at this idea. A lant
ern-jawed laconic man, Oz had accumulated a lot of resentments in his twenty-three years in Navy engine rooms. He considered most deck officers ignoramuses who made impossible demands on a ship's equipment. One of the reasons for McKay's visit to the engine room had been a desire to diminish some of this resentment.

  Oz's disposition had never been sunny. At Annapolis, he was always getting into fistfights with people who sneered at his native state, New Jersey. Fate had compounded this problem by marrying him to a virago who used to get drunk and berate him and the Navy in public. He had finally divorced her, and since that time, as far as McKay knew, Oz's only love affair was with his machinery.

  Bradley had a program of his own that he wanted to pursue in the engine and fire rooms. He was particularly worried about the parlous condition of the Jefferson City's eight-year old boilers. He was also alarmed by the high percentage of good petty officers he had lost in transfers — and the second -raters and screwups he had gotten in exchange. "I'm working with guys who barely know a pliers from a monkey wrench — and they're boiler tenders third class," he said. "Somebody with a lousy sense of humor gave me Calvin Clark for a chief machinist's mate. I've recommended that psycho for a general court-martial three times. If we can do any swapping at Pear Harbor, Art, I've got a list as long as the anchor chain."

  "I suspect the only thing we'll do at Pearl is take the gunnery tests," McKay said. "Which brings me to the main point of this get-together. "We're going to have to shoot a lot better than we have so far to pass those tests — and get this ship back in one piece when we go up against Yamamoto's boys."

  "I know, sir," Lieutenant Commander Moss said. He was in torment for several reasons. He felt outranked and inexperienced confronting these men from the previous generation at Annapolis. Simultaneously he felt humiliated because so many things had gone wrong during the gunnery drills. Moss wanted to defend himself, but he wondered whether to tell the truth. Could he get away with putting the blame where it really lay? Where did McKay stand as far as his Annapolis roommate Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble was concerned?