Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "Sure you could do it tomorrow, Prettyboy. You could do a lot of things tomorrow. You could be out of this fuckin' sweatbox tomorrow if you did something else first."

  "What?" Semple said. He knew what Wilkinson meant. His soul still revolted but his exhausted body whispered surrender. The boatswain's mate was too big, too powerful to resist. For some reason the blanket under his arm made it inevitable.

  "Take off your pants."

  His dungarees slid slowly down his legs. Had he unbuckled the belt? He could not remember. Wilkinson pulled down his shorts and his hands moved slowly, relentlessly over his rump, his penis. "Lie down," he said.

  There was no air now, only the factory smell of paint and grease. Once his father had taken Semple to the factory, to the roaring clanging assembly line, and there was the same smell. Then Semple's face was against the hot metal deck and he was smelling the harsh soap the Navy used, an ammonia smell like the kitchen at home after his mother scrubbed it on her hands and knees. Now he was on his hands and knees and Wilkinson enveloped him, grunting, growling. He was so big he was like the great ape in the movie King Kong. Semple was a doll, a puppy, in his ravenous grasp.

  Somewhere below them the engines throbbed. The sea sloshed against the bulkhead. Then there was nothing but pain — pain and a kind of oblivion — as Wilkinson entered him. Oblivion in the sea's sound and Wilkinson's guttural groan of pleasure. The shred of manhood to which Semple had been clinging slid into the blank depths of another life. He was lost forever in this life now.

  Semple lay flat on the deck, sobbing. The boatswain's mate knelt beside him. Imagining himself as Fay Wray in King Kong, Semple rolled over and looked up at Wilkinson with pleading eyes. "It's okay, Prettyboy, it's okay," Wilkinson said. "Once I get that release, everything's okay. I'm your friend now. We'll have good times together. You'll have swell stuff to eat. Sweet jobs. No more workin' parties. No more decks to swab."

  "Oh, thank you, thank you," Semple said, from the far shore of oblivion.

  "Flan, come on, you gotta loan me another ten. I can get back in the game with ten. I feel it. Them dice gotta turn."

  "Jack, I don't have another ten. So help me. You owe me forty bucks already."

  Ever since they left Pearl, Peterson spent most of every night in turret three's handling room playing craps. The game was getting wilder and wilder. Five and six hundred dollars changed hands on a single roll. Flanagan went down and watched it one night but he did not bet. That was one thing his cop father had hammered into his brain. Heavy betting was for suckers or crazies. Flanagan was beginning to think Jack Peterson was a crazy.

  Peterson went through the compartment wheedling money out of other members of the division. Boats Homewood watched him, scowling. "It's gonna ruin him," he said. "I told him that when he came aboard the Pennsylvania ten years ago. He was, the skinniest, meanest kid you ever seen. I tried to stop him then and almost talked him into it. But the minute he gets heavy with a dame, he goes back to it. I don't understand it."

  Flanagan was beginning to get some idea of the complicated emotions that linked Homewood and Peterson. Jack was a kind of son to the boatswain's mate, a troubled, rebellious son. At least Boats had stopped worrying about Jack getting thrown overboard. Flanagan had been relieved from bodyguard duty. But Homewood remained intensely disappointed by the captain's failure to investigate what had happened at Savo Island. To Homewood this meant the dead were unsatisfied; their honor — the ship's honor — remained impugned.

  "You coming up to our hotel in the sky tonight, Boats?" "Yeah, I think I will," Homewood said.

  They had been sleeping in their work station, main forward.

  With the fore and aft hatches open, it was the coolest place on the ship. A lot of people had begun sleeping topside since they entered the tropics. Below decks the ship's engines seemed to multiply the ninety degree temperatures outside.

  "You can have Peterson's spot," Flanagan said.

  Homewood got his blanket and they climbed the ladders to the station, forty feet above the main deck. A spectacular full moon bathed the ship and the sea with golden light. The blowers blended with the rush of the water against the hull and the throb of the engines to create a unique sound. The ship was like a living creature in the night.

  Behind him, as they reached the platform outside main forward, Flanagan heard Homewood exclaim, "Holy jumpin' Jesus." He turned to find the boatswain's mate staring up at the main yardarm, the crossbar high on the mainmast. There was something large and white there. Flanagan could not make it out at first.

  "It's an albatross," Homewood said.

  Now Flanagan could see it. The bird was huge, with a hunched neck and gull-like beak and sinister-looking black brows. He just sat there staring down on the ship, utterly silent

  "Don't make a goddamn sound. The longer he stays the more luck he brings," Homewood said.

  He rushed down the ladder to spread the word below decks. Soon practically every man on the ship except the engine-room watch was on deck, staring up at the magical bird. Even Captain McKay joined them. He climbed all the way up to main forward with Homewood. "What kind do you think it is?" he asked.

  "It's a Wanderer, I'm pretty sure, Captain," Homewood said. "The biggest kind. Wait'll you see his wingspan. I've seen'm eleven feet tip to tip. They nest all the way down to Antarctica. He's been flyin' a long way."

  "And we've been sailing a long way," the captain said.

  "He's gonna change our luck, Captain, I guarantee it."

  "I hope you're right," Captain McKay said. He gazed up at the bird. "Some people think that's where the souls of dead sailors go."

  Flanagan was astounded. Did the captain believe in Homewood's dark fate-ridden universe?

  "Maybe it's one of our shipmates, tell in' us it's okay. Now that we've come back to fight."

  "Maybe," Captain McKay said. "Let me know how long he stays.

  The captain went below. For another half hour they steamed across the moonlit sea with the silent bird above them. Then, without a sound, the albatross stretched his immense black-fringed wings and flew into the night. Flanagan heard a long sigh escape from his shipmates' throats and from his own throat. Was it a sailor's prayer?

  "That's not much of a stay," Homewood said. "I've seen'm roost for a couple of days on some ships. But we'll be okay for a while. As long as we don't do nothin' to spoil that luck."

  "Captain," Montgomery West said, "I've got a confession to make. You may decide to kick me the hell off this ship, but that's okay, I deserve it. If it saves a life, it'll be worth it."

  "Calm down, Mr. West," McKay said. "I don't believe in kicking people off ships. What's on your mind?"

  West told him why Schnable had crashed. "Now his buddy Jackson is into the sauce day and night, blaming himself for it. Neither one of them ever should have been assigned to a cruiser, Captain. They were fighter pilots. If you don't transfer Jackson to a carrier, the same thing's going to happen to him."

  "The same thing may happen to him anyway," McKay said. "On a carrier, the pilots drink any time they feel like it."

  "If he shoots down a few Japs, he may start feeling better about Schnable."

  "Maybe he should feel bad about Schnable," McKay said. "It sounds like he gave him some pretty lousy leadership."

  West was startled by McKay's momentary transformation. Darkness gathered in his eyes. He looked capable of hanging Jackson - or West — from the main yardarm. Then the mild gray color, the slightly bemused expression returned.

  "You're probably right. He belongs on a carrier. The wise guy at flight school who tried to punish them by assignment is really to blame." He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. "If you look at anything long enough, West, you can usually find a way to blame the system. It's the easy way out."

  West did not know what to say. Was he about to hear a denunciation of that sacred entity, the U.S. Navy?

  "But most of the time it comes down to a man or a few men fuc
king up, as we've been fucking up since the Garden of Eden."

  West had nothing to add to that observation, either.

  "I'll see what I can do about getting Jackson on a carrier. Try not to feel too bad about Schnable. I would have done the same thing at your age."

  "I think the uniform of the day should be dress whites," Commander Parker said. "I was on Admiral Ghormley's staff for a while in 'thirty-nine. He's a regulations man all the way."

  McKay was dubious. The crew was weary from the weeks of drilling and paint chipping. For the last five days they had wilted under tropic temperatures. Sailors hated dress whites more than any other uniform. It was hard to do anything on a warship without getting them dirty. On the other hand he had not let Parker win any arguments lately. "Okay," he. said.

  When the word was passed to the destroyers, the TBS (Talk Between Ships) radio became a series of agitated squawks from the two captains. One intimated his men might mutiny. The other said it would make them the laughingstock of the South Pacific. McKay decided it would look worse to back down, and as the OTC (Officer in Tactical Command) reiterated the order.

  So the Jefferson City and her escorts stood into Noumea, capital of French-owned New Caledonia and headquarters of COMSOPAC, with all three crews at quarters in their whites. The harbor was a messy clutter of merchant ships with seamen lazing on their decks. The harbor pilot, a weatherbeaten chief boatswain's mate, said, "Good thing you got the word on the uniforms, Captain. The admiral's chewed the ass off the last two captains who came in here in dungarees."

  Commander Parker gave him a triumphant look. "I'm glad you didn't listen to those tin-can loudmouths," he said. "I'd report them to the admiral if I were you, Captain."

  "I don't see much point in that," McKay said. "Send them over some ice cream instead. They got us here in one piece. They've got a right to complain a little."

  A breathless radioman appeared on bridge. "Urgent message from Admiral Ghormley."

  The message read: WE WELCOME THE JEFFERSON CITY BACK TO THE SOUTH PACIFIC COMMAND. REPORT TO ME IMMEDIATELY.

  In fifteen minutes, Arthur McKay was in his gig heading across the harbor to a stubby gray supply ship, the Argonne, where Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley lived and worked. Sweat streamed down McKay's face and neck. His armpits were soaked. It was at least a hundred degrees in the crowded harbor, with the tropic sun beating down on the still black water. His high-necked white uniform was almost suffocating him.

  Aboard the Argonne, he was welcomed by a classmate, lanky Commander Vince Casey, who described himself as the personnel man on Ghormley's staff. Casey was in pressed khakis, with a tie and coat - clothing almost as incongruous in the heat as McKay's dress whites.

  "How's it going, Vince?" McKay said.

  Casey sighed. "He'll tell you."

  McKay did not know Ghormley well, but Win Kemble had worked for him when Ghormley was head of the War Plans Division in Washington in 1938. Win had wryly, perhaps enviously, pronounced Ghormley the supreme politician. He had spent most of his career on staffs of influential admirals. A tour at the White House as naval liaison officer with President Roosevelt had been even more helpful. When the war broke out, Ghormley was serving as a special naval observer in London, a job Roosevelt had created to help him run his undeclared naval war against Germany.

  As McKay remembered him, the admiral had been a handsome square-jawed, strong-browed man, with a marvelously self-assured, ingratiating manner. He was the sort of senior officer who was seldom impressed by Arthur McKay's laconic, self-deprecating style, and McKay was prepared to feel several inches shorter before the interview was over.

  The admiral he saw behind a desk piled with papers bore no resemblance to the one McKay had met in Washington. The sixty-year-old Ghormley looked at least seventy. His face was gray with fatigue; the corners of his once-confident mouth drooped. He shook hands and gestured McKay to a seat in front of his desk. "How is Win?" he asked.

  "All right, as far as I know"

  "If you hear anything from him, I hope you'll let him know I had nothing to do with relieving him. That emanated entirely from Washington — from which nothing but bad tidings seem to come these days."

  "I'll tell him that if I get a chance, Admiral."

  "I thought his conduct at Savo Island, in the light of the situation as it developed, and has developed since, was eminently sensible. Nothing would have been gained by sacrificing the Jefferson City the way we sacrificed the Asiatic Fleet----to utterly no avail."

  McKay nodded. He was beginning to see where Win had gotten some of his defeatism.

  "Is the Jefferson City ready to fight?"

  "I think so, Admiral."

  "We'll soon find out. You and the destroyers should get under way as soon as you refuel. You'll have orders to our forward base in the New Hebrides, where Norm Scott is trying to put together a semblance of a task force. The Japs have been bombarding the airfield on Guadalcanal night after night. They're pouring troops ashore. The Marines are hanging on by their fingernails. I frankly think the best we can hope for is an evacuation."

  "Its that bad, Admiral?"

  It's worse," Ghormley said.

  He began reciting a catalogue of his woes. Everything was wrong, from the way they were failing to battleload the supply ships in California to a longshoremen's strike in New Zealand which made it impossible to reload them there. Noumea lacked the port facilities to offload a rowboat. As a result the Marines on Guadalcanal were being threatened with starvation as well as annihilation by the Japanese. Washington refused to commit more men or planes or ships. MacArthur's land-based B-17s were worse than useless. Bombing from 20,000 feet, they had yet to sink a single Jap warship and frequently had trouble telling foe from friend. The other day they had attacked two American destroyers.

  "We're losing the war out here, and no one will listen to us," Ghormley said.

  It was worse than defeatism. It was despair. McKay could hear Win Kemble snarling, I'm going to let you find out for yourself the kind of war we're fighting out there.

  Vince Casey rushed in with an urgent message. "Oh, my God," Ghormley said, mopping his streaming neck and face. The temperature below decks aboard the Argonne was at least twenty degrees hotter than the harbor.

  McKay said goodbye to Ghormley and chased Casey down the passageway to ask him to transfer Lieutenant Andrew Jackson to a carrier and find him two replacement pilots for the Jefferson City. Casey wiped his forehead and said it would take a few days. "We're all close to collapse, trying to work and sleep in this goddamn hotbox. Those French fuckers won't give us any quarters on the beach."

  Casey launched into an incredibly complicated explanation of why the French governor of New Caledonia was being backed by Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French in London, in his refusal to cooperate with the Americans. De Gaulle apparently thought they were planning to steal the miserable island from la belle France. "I'd like to sink the fucking place," Casey said.

  "Why don't we just take what we need and let them squawk until doomsday?" McKay said.

  "They're afraid that will upset the applecart in North Africa. They need de Gaulle's cooperation there."

  While McKay shook his head in bewilderment, Casey asked the inevitable question. "What's old W. S. S. Kemble doing? Going on Cominch's staff to win the war for him, after practically losing it for us out here?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you find out what the fuck he was doing at Savo? Or thought he was doing?"

  "No. Has anybody found out what Kelly Turner thought he was doing?"

  Casey stared over McKay's shoulder, his eyes blank with apprehension. McKay turned to find himself face to face with Admiral Turner in person. His black brows bristled; his usually sallow hollow-cheeked face was livid. "McKay," he said, "I hear you've been bad-mouthing me all over the Pacific."

  "That's an exaggeration, Admiral "

  "You better make damn sure your ship performs at the four point oh level, Cap
tain. Otherwise you're in a lot of trouble."

  "As far as I can see, everybody's in a lot of trouble where we're going," McKay said.

  Admiral Ghormley appeared in the doorway of his office with the emergency cable in his hand. "Commander Casey. What are we going to do about this?" He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

  Back aboard the Jefferson City, McKay was greeted by Commander Parker on the quarterdeck. "Are they as fucked up as ever?" he asked, within earshot of Ensign Meade, the junior OOD, and a half dozen enlisted men.

  "Hell no," Captain McKay said. "They're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They wished us good luck and good shooting."

  Warm-Up

  “Enemy aircraft, bearin’ zero zero zero,” drawled the telephone talker on the bridge.

  “Sound General Quarters,” Captain McKay said.

  The Marine bugler stepped to the PA microphone and sent his brassy notes pealing through the ship. Ernest Homewood, the boatswain’s mate of the watch, followed him with a shrill call on his pipe. “Now hear this. General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations,” he roared, endangering the crew’s eardrums. When Homewood got excited, he did not need a PA system.

  McKay stepped out on the port wing — the open part of the bridge. Dead ahead in the cloudless blue sky, twelve Mitsubishi Zero-1 medium bombers flying in two V formations seemed to be barely moving. They looked like lazy harmless insects. Their engines were not more than a buzz. The rush of the sea past the cruiser’s hull was a louder sound.

  “Bettys,” McKay said, using the planes’ American nickname. “Tell the engineroom to get up all the steam they can find.”

  McKay stepped to the PA microphone. “Men. This is your captain. I told you last night we’d probably meet this reception committee. It’s the Japs’ way of saying welcome to the Solomon Islands. Just stay calm, shoot straight and we’ll do fine.”

  A nice performance, Captain, he thought. But the play is only beginning. How would he handle himself under fire? That was the crucial question. He knew it was in the mind of every man on the ship. Only once before had Arthur McKay experienced the sensation of people firing bullets and shells at him—aboard the Monocacy on the Yangtze River, when he was twenty-five years old. His reaction had almost mined his naval career.