Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "I've learned a few things, Admiral. But it's been mostly by accident. I haven't tried to conduct an investigation. I don't think I can be the captain of that ship and a prosecuting attorney at the same time."

  He meant those words. His first lieutenant George Tombs, his steward, Horace Aquino; and others had confirmed what Chaplain Bushnell had told him — a lot of officers and enlisted men believed a board of inquiry would greet them at the dock in Pearl Harbor. The expectation explained Parker's defiant manner and the veiled threats made to men such as the fire controlman Peterson. It all added up to tearing his ship apart if he allowed curiosity — or Rita's advice —t o turn him into a detective.

  They walked in silence for a good five minutes while Nimitz digested that answer. Arthur McKay was telling Cincpac and Cincpac would soon tell Cominch, scowling Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, that they could not expect any inside information from Captain McKay that would enable King to hang Win Kemble. That was how King would hear it. This very different man probably heard it too. But he was not a hangman by instinct. He also heard the other side of what Arthur McKay had just said. He heard a captain telling him that he wanted to lead his men out of the shadow of disgrace by appealing to their courage, their pride. Slowly, somberly, Admiral Nimitz nodded. "I think you're right," he said.

  It was their second and last night in Hawaii. They were sailing tomorrow for the Solomon Islands. Overhead, the Pacific sky was an incredible splendor of stars. Across the inky waters of Pearl Harbor, boats moved cautiously, displaying only small riding lights. On highways in the hills, tiny slits of moving light revealed cars. The rest of Oahu was a blacked-out mass of darkness.

  Flanagan's section did not have liberty. He sat on the platform outside main forward talking to Peterson and Camutti, who had his usual tale of conquest to tell, this time with an authentic Hawaiian maiden, who had showed him sexual positions hitherto unrevealed to white men. "She made me promise not to tell anyone else," Camutti chortled. "She said it would make Pele, the volcano god, angry."

  "Camutti, you're full of shit, but at least it's entertainin' shit," Peterson said.

  There was a commotion on the dock. The Shore Patrol were trying to get a sailor out of one of their cars; he was resisting them. A basso voice drifted up to them: "Go fuck yourselves!"

  "Good Christ, it's Homewood," Peterson said. "Come on."

  As they raced down the ladders, the commotion on the dock grew more violent. They found Lieutenant Robert Mullenoe in charge of the quarterdeck. "Lieutenant," Peterson said, "don't call the Marines. Let us go down and get him. We can handle it.”

  "Okay. But make it fast."

  They ran down the gangplank and along the darkened dock to the Shore Patrol car. Four HASPs were trying to drag Homewood out of the car. "I want to go back for a blow job," he roared. "You fuckers don't have the balls to stop me."

  "Boats, Jesus Christ, you're gonna to have the whole Marine division down here with drawn bayonets," Jack Peterson said.

  "Bring 'em on. I’ll put half them in the water before they get me," Homewood bellowed.

  "Flanagan's here. What a hell of an example you're settin' him."

  "You should talk, you raunchy son of a bitch. What the fuck's wrong with it anyway? Jesus Christ, you know where we're goin' tomorrow. Goin' up against a bunch of fuckin' slant-eyed killers without doin' nothin' to straighten out this ship. What the fuck else should a man do but get drunk and laid?"

  "I know, I know. Let's get aboard and talk it over in the compartment. Mullenoe's the OOD. He says the exec'll be along any minute."

  "Great! I'll wipe up the fuckin' dock with that cowardly son of a bitch."

  While Homewood ranted, Peterson had somehow eased him out of the patrol car. "Any charges?" he asked the white-belted HASPs.

  "Nah. He busted up one of the Chink joints. They shouldna let him in the first place. He done the same thing when you guys came through here last year."

  "Grab his other arm," Peterson told Flanagan. Together they walked Homewood down the dock and struggled up the gangplank with him. Several times his legs crumpled and Flanagan had to support the man's massive bulk. At the top of the gangplank, Peterson said, "Boatswain's Mate First Class Homewood, F Division, reporting from liberty, sir."

  To Flanagan's amazement, Homewood stood erect, saluted the flag on the stern and the OOD. But he needed serious help getting down the ladders to F Division's compartment. They sat him on his rack out in the passageway and Peterson began untying his shoes.

  "You never seen anything like it," Homewood said.

  "Nothin' touched that woman but the head of my cock. It was absolutely the most elegant fuckin' I've had since Shanghai."

  "I hope you put a boot on it," Peterson said.

  "Sure I did, You can't fool around with that kind of pussy 'thout one. But she loved it. She was ready to do anythin' for another ride on old Peter. Then it just went sour. I started thinkin' about Me-i-ling. How I treated that woman. Left her with our kid and nothin' but a month's pay. Started thinkin' what a bum I was. Thinkin' maybe I deserved to be on this fuckin' messed-up ship."

  "Oh, bullshit. If you're a bum I'm a fuckin' Western desperado and Flanagan here is the original Bronx punk."

  "S'truth," Homewood said as Flanagan helped Peterson pull off his pants and jumper. "I'm a fuckin' bum. If it wasn't for the Navy I'd be a goddamn hobo livid out of garbage cans. No fuckin' good, Jack. Never treated any woman right in my life. Specially Mei. She was sweetest, smallest thing y' ever seen. I met 'er in Chungking and took her back down the river in my bunk. Old gunboat Panay. Captain knew it, but he had one in his bunk too. Way it went in those days. But somethin' 'bout her, so goddamn tender. Set 'er up in Shanghai in lil hole in wall and got myself transferred to the Helena. Jesus I couldn't wait to see her every liberty. I never went nowhere else. Shore Patrol couldn't figure out why the fuckin' city was so peaceful all of a sudden.

  "Then wham, ship's goin' back. I just let her the money and goodbye. Couldn't even kiss her, I was so goddamn 'shamed of myself"

  "We've all done that to a dame at least once," Peterson said. "You should stay away from Chinese pussy. It stirs up all these morbid thoughts."

  "On'y kind I like any more. Can't even get it up sometimes for these white whores," Homewood muttered.

  "Listen," Peterson said. "In two weeks we'll be in the Solomons. We'll be so goddamn busy shootin' the Japs you won't have time to think about pussy. Maybe the captain knows what the fuck he's doin'. Wouldn't that be a novelty? Now roll in there and sleep it off."

  "Yeah. Thanks, boys."

  The big body fell back on the mattress. Peterson and Flanagan retreated to the compartment. "That happens every time he goes to a Chink whorehouse," Peterson said. "That little slant-eyed dame really got to him."

  "What happened to her?"

  "Who knows? When he got back to Shanghai the Japs had bombed the shit out of it. He never found her or the kid again."

  Flanagan suddenly felt very young. He realized how childish his own spiritual adventures in Pearl had been, how self absorbed. His conscience still bothered him for abandoning Leo Daley to drunken despair. Jack Peterson would not have done that to Boats Homewood. Flanagan found himself wondering about the savage letter he had written Teresa Brownlow, describing his visit to the River Street whorehouse. He compared it to Homewood's treatment of his Chinese mistress, Peterson's dismissal of that crime and his cool response to Martha Johnson's love. Was learning to hurt women and not worry about it part of becoming a sailor? Maybe they all deserved to be on a messed-up ship.

  Captain McKay stood on the brow of one of the hills overlooking Pearl Harbor. Below him, the lochs, the ships, the narrow channel to the sea were reduced to the size of an aerial photograph. He was seeing it as the Japanese pilots had seen it as they roared over this hill on the morning of December 7 to change everyone's lives forever.

  If Franklin D. Roosevelt had not badly underestimated Japan's readiness to start a war
with the United States, McKay would still be on the faculty of the Naval War College in Newport, perhaps putting the finishing touches to his history of the Union Navy in the Civil War. He also might be divorced from his wife. That was one of the many threats Rita had hurled at him when he told her he wanted to spend the rest of his naval career as a scholar.

  But Captain McKay was not up here to ruminate about what might have been. He was visiting a kind of shrine to happiness. Behind him was a sprawling house in the old-fashioned colonial style of the late nineteenth century, with French windows and whirring fans high in the dim ceilings. It was where he and Rita had lived for two years when he was captain of the destroyer Stacy Wright.

  Like the house in which Lucy Kemble was staying in the Hollywood hills, Kalakaua House (named for a long dead Hawaiian king) belonged to their Annapolis classmate Clinch Meade. Over Clinch's protests, Arthur McKay had insisted on paying a token rent. Win Kemble and Rita had told him he was crazy but McKay did not like owing favors to people like Clinch Meade. He had inherited a suspicion of Eastern capitalists from his farmer forebears. Being Kansas Republicans, they had never voted for William Jennings Bryan, but the McKays had agreed with his contention that Wall Street was ready to crucify mankind on a cross of gold.

  These niceties of her husband's conscience were irrelevant to Rita. She loved the house and loved him for agreeing to rent it. She had given lavish parties on its porches and in this garden, parties that had undoubtedly had a lot to do with Arthur McKay being promoted to captain and sent to the Naval War College. Not many relatively junior officers had such a showplace to lure staff officers and even an occasional admiral to discover that laconic Arthur McKay had quite a brain hiding behind his modest manner.

  McKay shook his head. It was dismaying, the way Rita's voracity invaded even this memory. Happiness was what he wanted to remember here. He was reaching across the years, not to the promotion parties (as Rita called them) in this garden, but to the nights when they would sneak out here and make love in the lush grass, with the trade wind sighing around them.

  At first, Rita had been like a wild woman, clawing and biting him, babbling all the vile words she had learned in Shanghai. Then came nights of unbelievable tenderness, when she whispered, "I love you," and it rang true in his deepest self. For some odd reason, that made him feel he could master anything. At the conn of the USS Stacy Wright he had made some of the boldest two-bell landings in the fleet. He had won Navy E's for gunnery and ship-handling on fleet maneuvers. Old salts in the deck force had uttered the word captain with genuine respect.

  They had been the best years with Barbara and Sammy too. They had been old enough to enjoy Hawaii's social life. They had had their own parties in this splendid house. But they were young enough to remain reasonably obedient and worshipful of both mother and father. When they went to Newport and he and Rita began quarreling about his inclination to accept an appointment to the War College faculty, the disillusionment had begun. Now Sammy was determined to defy both parents when he graduated from Annapolis. Barbara had turned into a Navy hater with a list of grudges the length of a battleship. She and Rita could not spend five minutes in the same room without shouting at each other. It was a replay of Rita's war with her father.

  Happiness. Did it only reside in memory? Was he aware then of how precious the two years in this house would become? Arthur McKay's eyes filled with tears. Probably not. That line about "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers" had a Navy version. Drilling and swilling? Fussing and cussing? Worrying and currying?

  Oh, well. Perhaps the best thing about memory was its independence of time. The days were there, in sunshine and starlight, a shrine to visit whenever the spirit faltered.

  "Captain McKay? Arthur?"

  It was Mildred Meade, a woman whose company he always enjoyed. He had not even known she was in Hawaii. The house had looked closed.

  A willowy blonde, Mildred would have made an ideal Navy wife. She was smart but never showed it — one of Rita's flaws. She was charming without being flirtatious — another of Rita's flaws. Unlike Lucy Kemble, Mildred had no scores to settle with SOB-type admirals. She seldom found fault with anyone in a Navy uniform. Serving the country appealed to the deep vein of idealism in her New England soul. She was perfectly willing to devote the several million dollars she had inherited to making Clinch an admiral. But he had had other ideas about what he could do with that money.

  "What a pleasant surprise," McKay said, kissing her on the cheek.

  "I'm giving the house to the Navy to use as a rest home for wounded men who are well enough to get along outside a hospital," Mildred said.

  "A lovely idea."

  "I'm going to run it, if the Navy lets me. I think they will. I don't want any special thanks for it. I have this absolutely awful need to do something in this war besides sit home and worry.”

  "Of course."

  "I tried to get you on the phone. But Dick said they didn't even hook you up at the dock, you're going to be here such a little while."

  "We're sailing tonight. I came up here for some auld Tang syne. Even captains have to keep up their morale. Rita and I had two wonderful years in this house."

  "I envy you that," Mildred said.

  In recent years she had not tried very hard to conceal her unhappiness with Clinch.

  "How's Dick doing?" Mildred asked.

  "On the basis of three weeks' observation, I'd say he's the perfect ensign. He knows his job and does it without blowing his horn."

  Mildred beamed. "Win Kemble gave him high marks too." Her smile faded. "I gather something awful went wrong aboard the ship at Savo Island. Dick won't talk to me about it."

  "I think everyone will forget it as soon as the shooting starts again," McKay said.

  He regretted the words the moment he saw their impact on Mildred. Her lips trembled. She was obviously thinking of what had happened off Savo Island. "Will you be going into action right away? Dick says with so many new men aboard you might do convoy duty to Australia or something like that — until you shake things down."

  Ensign Meade was obviously trying to help his mother sleep nights. "There's a good chance we might do something like that," Arthur McKay lied.

  "Good. Here's Clinch. He'll be as glad to hear that as I am."

  Clinch Meade came toward them with a pleased smile on his wide puffy face. Most people thought Clinch had gotten his nickname at Annapolis as captain of the wrestling team. But the class of 1917 had given it to him for his boast, "Once I get a dame in a clinch, she's finished." She was too, as Mildred Rogers Meade could mournfully attest.

  A slab of a man, Clinch had been one of the leaders of the class of 1917. His decision to leave the Navy had shocked everyone. The reason was visible now on his face. Each year brought more egotism and venality to the surface. Arthur McKay believed that after the age of forty almost everybody was responsible for his face.

  "You son of a gun I was just about ready to recruit a boarding party and storm that tin tub you're commanding. I wasn't going to let you get out of that harbor without at least shaking hands."

  Mildred told him what McKay had said about convoy duty. "Great," Clinch said. "You better go through the house and decide what furniture you want to leave. The movers'll be here tomorrow morning."

  Mildred kissed McKay and left him with Clinch, whose jolliness vanished almost instantly. "Art," he said, "there's something I want you to do. You don't understand why Dick asked to become a gunnery officer. He's never gotten over the bullshit stories I told him when he was a kid about my heroic exploits in turret one aboard the old Marblehead. I want him back in Damage Control, under the armored deck, where Win had him. I'll get him off your hands onto somebody's staff, MacArthur's, I hope, in two months or less."

  McKay said nothing, his usual tactic when he was angry. He was more than angry, he was outraged by Clinch's assumption that he had the right to arrange for his son's safety. He was also dismayed that Win Kemble had go
ne along with it.

  Clinch, in a hurry as usual, assumed McKay's silence was assent. "What have you found out about this Savo Island screwup? Is Win in the clear?"

  "What's he told you?"

  "Not a damn thing. What's he told you?"

  McKay described Win's letter to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.

  Clinch was appalled. "Jesus Christ, Art, he's taking on Roosevelt, King, the whole fucking works. I'll lay you ten to one they try to pin Savo on him."

  "How can they do that if he isn't guilty?"

  "Come on, Art. You know how the fucking system works. They almost hung your ass in China in 1928."

  "That's Win's version of it. I never had the slightest doubt I'd be vindicated."

  "Win stuck by you in China. Even when he didn't agree with you. He might ask you to stick by him this time."

  "I don't think the two things are comparable, Clinch." Arthur McKay was troubled by the bitterness in his voice. But he meant what he had just said. If anything, the incident on the Yangtze had been blown out of proportion by Win's oratorical letter in defense of McKay's decision to ignore a trigger-happy Chinese warlord's shore battery.

  McKay suddenly wondered if Clinch was here to find out where he stood in regard to Win. This sudden exhumation of the Yangtze furor made him suspect the letter to Secretary Knox had already backfired.

  It was time to take charge of the conversation. McKay dealt first with Meade's weakest demand. "Clinch, if I put Dick back in Damage Control, he'll know you did it and he'll lose all respect for you, me and himself."

  He was speaking as the captain of the Jefferson City now. He was telling Clinch Meade what he had learned about leading men in the years since Clinch had quit the Navy.

  "Maybe you're right, Art. But I can't stand the thought of losing him. I can't do anything with the younger boy. He's a fucking ethical philosopher like his mother. Since Savo, I haven't been able to sleep two hours a night."