Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

With rents so high everywhere, I don't know where we can relocate. Daddy is terribly discouraged and spends hours at night when he should be sleeping, asking God why He's sent us this latest trial. It's made me wonder if you might be right, if I haven't been the sinner who's been ruining the blessing the Lord wants to send to Daddy as a reward for all his trials. Oh, Frank, maybe now I understand why I've failed to awaken Jesus in my heart. Maybe it was my pride that blinded me to what you were saying about my sinfulness. But I swear to you there was love in my heart for you, Frank, and there still is love there, even if it is speaking in darkness now.

  Your friend, Teresa

  Dear Marty:

  I have gone through torments trying to write this letter. But it has to be written. I have adored all the letters I have received from you, telling me about the incredible ordeals you have been undergoing in that ghastly fire room. My admiration for your courage, your dedication, your moral grasp of this crusade against evil, keeps growing.

  But admiration and affection, dearest Marty, are two very different things. I don't think you should allow the memory of our little fling in New York to distort your understanding of this important truth. That was an episode, a momentary overflowing of admiration into the sort of warmth that precedes affection.

  For some time I have been seeing a Harvard man named Roland Hathaway. He's a poet of great promise and a political observer of enormous sensitivity. An ear infection, which left him with a perforation and subject to terrible attacks of vertigo, has barred him (to his great distress) from the armed services. Last night, he asked me to marry him and I accepted. Under the circumstances, I think we had better stop corresponding.

  Devotedly, Sylvia

  Curse Of An Aching Heart

  At 0200, as the Jefferson City cut through the dark waters of the Coral Sea, Harold Semple tiptoed past a snoring Jerome Wilkinson and other equally noisy sleepers in Deck Division One. Topside, he padded past a restored turret one to the bow. It was a moonless night, with a heavy overcast. At the bow, a lone lookout stared into the gloom. Still on tiptoes, Harold embraced him and whispered: "I love you."

  "Don't," Klein begged. "If we get caught—"

  "No one's going to catch us. They're all too busy trying to be heroes. I'll be waiting for you under mount four when you get off watch."

  They were going back to the heat and humidity of Espiritu Santo after spending ten delicious days in windswept Noumea while the damage to turret one was being repaired. Santo was six hundred miles closer to Ironbottom Sound, Guadalcanal, death. These facts were enough to explain Semple's recklessness. But there was more to it than the expectation of imminent doom.

  Klein was the sailor who had defended Semple against the hatred of the animals in the shell line. Semple had discovered he was Jerome Wilkinson's previous Prettyboy. It had stirred rage — and sympathy — in Semple's soul. Rage against the Great Ape, sympathy, pity, for Klein. He was so sad, so sweet, so lost.

  Later, Semple maintained he did not know, he never foresaw the implications of the affair. He insisted he was carried away by pure feeling. He did not understand that he had become Harriet — he had made the transition from manhood to womanhood and was imitating the way femmes fatales behaved in the movies.

  More meaningful at the time was the discovery that Klein, in a spasm of jealousy, had gone to the chaplain and accused Wilkinson of seducing him. The chaplain had gone to Wilkinson's division officer, Lieutenant MacComber, who naturally did nothing, except perhaps consider the possibility of getting Klein into his bed. Selvagee, as everyone called him, pranced around the ship as if he were wearing a ball gown.

  Inevitably, the Great Ape heard about Klein's treachery and thenceforth, his life became a twenty-four-hour-a-day hell. He always got the graveyard watches, provision and ammunition working parties, messcooking — the worst duty. The sadness in his eyes had grown deeper, darker. Semple found it irresistible.

  At 0400, as the ship's bell rang eight times, Klein's relief tapped him on the shoulder. In spite of his cautionary words, he could not resist the happiness. Semple offered him. It was not simply pleasure. It was the thought that he, Klein, the lowest of the low in Deck Division One, was taking Semple away from the Great Ape.

  Tonight was no different from the previous nights. "I'll never let him touch me as long as I have you," Semple whispered.

  It was delicious, their secret love. At this very moment, the Great Ape might be prowling the ship trying to find them. They giggled like naughty schoolgirls at the thought. Then they grew more serious and vowed to love each other unto death. Like many others, they were sure the Jefferson City's luck had to run out and they were going to die. Death even pervaded their dreams. In one of Klein's, he and Semple embraced on the main truck, at the top of the mainmast, while the Jefferson City sank beneath them and the crew scurried around the decks like terrified roaches.

  The night they arrived in Espiritu Santo, Wilkinson snapped. He dragged Semple to the handling room under mount one, the scene of Harriet's capitulation. For the tenth time the boatswain's mate tried to explain he was sorry he put Semple back in the shell line. He had told him the truth. He had needed him there.

  Semple barely listened. "I don't love you any more," he said. "I have someone else, infinitely more appealing."

  Wilkinson slapped him across the handling room. Semple sank to the deck sobbing. He was Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Ann Dvorak abused by a sadistic gangster. "Okay," Wilkinson said. "I'll put you back with me in Damage Control. But I ain't bringin' you any more dessert. I ain't billin' and cooin' over you, get me? It don't go down with the rest of the guys."

  Aha, dear Jerry was admitting the reassignment was not a simple manpower shortage after all. That aroused Harriet to a further demonstration of her powers.

  "I know," Semple said tempestuously. "Your job comes first. I'm not important. I just happen to love you."

  Those last words froze Wilkinson's sallow face. Semple thought he looked frightened. "If that's true, what the fuck are you doin' with this other guy?"

  "Showing you a thing or two," Semple said, combing his thick red hair. "The way you showed him."

  It was marvelous. He loved being a woman. He had the Great Ape on the defensive.

  Wilkinson clutched three fourths of Semple's shirt in his fist. "It's Klein? That little cocksucker? You like him better than me? What can he do for you? What can he give you?"

  The pain, the pathos on Wilkinson's face were irresistible. So was the thought of more delicious desserts, a return to safety and comparative comfort under the armored deck. "I like him ... in a different way," Semple said. "But you'll always be the man in my life, Jerry"

  They made unforgettable love that night. The Great Ape sighed and gurgled and vowed he would never, never disappoint his Prettyboy again.

  The next morning Klein gazed reproachfully at Semple in the chow line. Semple noticed his lower lip was split and one of his eyes had an ugly blue circle beneath it.

  "What happened to you?" he asked.

  "What do you think?" Klein said.

  They were surrounded by black gang sailors who paid no attention to them.

  "I'm sorry," Semple said.

  "You told him?" Klein said, tears in his brown eyes.

  "He wormed it out of me," Semple said. "Forget me. I'm no good. I guess I was only trying to make him jealous.”

  "You miserable little bitch," Klein said.

  Semple sighed and accepted the compliment. "Find someone else," he said. "It's the only cure for a broken heart."

  Oogah, oogah, oogah, went the ship's alarm. Wilkinson's voice boomed over the PA. "Air raid. Air raid. All hands man your battle stations."

  In the almost airless handling room, Klein and his fellow ammunition passers sent five-inch shells and canisters of powder to the hungry guns above them. A near miss shook the ship. The sailor who had taken Semple's place, a skinny kid named Lewis, started to cry. The captain of the handling room told him to shut up or he'd b
eat hell out of him. Everyone else except Klein echoed this sentiment.

  They got out of the harbor and spent the night at General Quarters. Every half hour they had a loading drill, to keep from going crazy. Klein went above to stand the graveyard watch on the bow. Alone, staring at the dark sea, he had time to assess the damage Semple had done to him. It was catastrophic. It multiplied the sadness Wilkinson had created to an unbearable degree. Before, he had merely been sad. Now Klein became sadness. His bones and his flesh were permeated with it.

  Klein spent four hours hoping for a torpedo. He would say nothing until it hit. Then his dream would be fulfilled. He would be flung high in the air and look down on the Jefferson City as it sank. Who knows how high up he would go, how long he would hang there in the updraft of the blast? He only hoped it would be long enough to watch the roaches begin to scramble. He despised them all.

  But dying that way would not achieve the thing Klein wanted most: revenge. He had given his heart to Semple. How could he protest Harriet's betrayal, how could he declare to the whole world what she had done to him? Suddenly Klein saw how to do it. His dream pointed the way. He saw how he could accuse Semple the bitch and Wilkinson the bastard, how he could prove to the chaplain that he had told him the truth about the Great Ape.

  Up the mainmast Klein climbed, with a coil of rope around his shoulder. At the main yardarm, where the albatross had hunched in the moonlight, he secured one end with a timber hitch. He looped the other end and fashioned a hangman's knot and placed it around his neck. Then, without making a sound, like the albatross he sprang into space. His body performed the grotesque dance of the victim. But his soul, freed of the body's sadness, soared up, up into the night sky to smile exultantly down on the Jefferson City.

  Fire And Brimstone

  As dawn began to gray the sky, Frank Flanagan swiveled his gun director to make sure the men on the mount were awake. Dawn and dusk were favorite times for a single Japanese plane to sneak out of the murky sky to plant a bomb on an American ship.

  The deck apes on the swiveling mount looked over their shoulders and gave him a cheerful finger. Flanagan had gotten friendly with them on the beach in Noumea. They had invited him to play basketball on their team. It was one of the dirtiest games he ever played, but he had learned plenty of foul moves in the playgrounds of the Bronx, and he more than held his own. They had beaten teams from other forty-millimeter mounts and the five-inch guns and won a lot of money.

  One of the apes pointed to something behind Flanagan. Suddenly they were all whirling around, staring up at the something, shock and fear on their faces. Flanagan turned around and saw a sailor dangling from the main yardarm. Instantly he felt the same fear. It was a curse, a doom. Why?

  In his small sea cabin, a few feet aft of the bridge, Captain McKay, unable to sleep, reread the letters he had received from his wife and from Lucy Kemble. What to do? His wife's letter, gloating over Win's humiliation, filled him with rage. Lucy's letter overwhelmed him with pity. Neither emotion was the answer to the situation. The answer stood on the bridge — Commander Daniel Boone Parker.

  No, Parker was only part of the answer. Even if he successfully prosecuted him for cowardice and misconduct under fire, what good would it do Win? Only if Win had made the same accusation — and proved it — would it have any relevance to Savo. Why hadn't Win tried it if so much was at stake?

  McKay tried to thrust the question from his weary mind. He had a ship to run, battle tactics to refine, a new admiral to satisfy. He picked up the silver fountain pen Rita had given him for a twentieth-anniversary present and began writing a message to his crew. It was time to tell them some good news.

  A few days ago, while we were being repaired in Noumea, the Japanese tried to land an entire division of troops on Guadalcanal. Admiral Halsey, in one of his most daring maneuvers, risked our only carrier, the Enterprise, to stop them. Planes from the Big E sank seven out of eleven troopships. If we had not helped keep the Enterprise afloat when she was attacked off the Santa Cruz Islands, she wouldn't have been around to launch those planes. I'm telling you this because I want you to know that we're winning this war and you're making a big contribution to it.

  The telephone rang. "Captain," said an agitated Lieutenant Mullenoe, the officer of the deck, "there's a man hanging from the main yardarm."

  "Cut him down instantly,"

  From the signal bridge McKay watched Boats Homewood climb to the yardarm and cut the rope. The body swung like a pendulum, the arms dangling, as Homewood gripped the rope and began his descent. Clinging to the mast with one mighty arm, Homewood lowered the man to a team of sailors on the catwalk beside the forty-millimeter gun director. Although the man was unquestionably dead, they took the body below to the sick bay.

  "Have you ever seen anything like that before in the Navy, Boats?" McKay asked as Homewood returned to the bridge. "Once, on a destroyer in Tsingtao. The guy done exactly the same thing."

  “Why?”

  "A broken heart, we thought. They had a daisy chain on that ship like you wouldn't believe. A lot of guys cracked up."

  Daisy chain was Navy slang for a homosexual ring.

  "Have we got one aboard?"

  "Not in my division we ain't," Homewood said.

  McKay knew he could not expect the boatswain's mate to go any further. The unspoken gulf between officers and enlisted men now took charge of the conversation. Homewood would not say another word, even if he knew every name and rate in the chain.

  "I wouldn't worry about that as much as what it's liable to do to our luck, Captain. A week after it happened on that old four-piper, we went out in the China Sea and lost our bow in a squall that was a first cousin to a typhoon. Thirty good men went with it. Not a goddamn one of them queer, either, as far as I knew."

  The torpedoman walked around and around the long gleaming monster on the stern of the Jefferson City. "It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen, Captain," he said.

  An alert lookout had spotted the torpedo on a beach on the Japanese-controlled shore of Guadalcanal. Captain McKay had sent the motor whaleboat in under the cover of his guns and towed it out to the Jefferson City. Back in Espiritu Santo, he had asked a veteran torpedoman from one of the destroyers to take a look at it.

  The thing was almost twice the length of a standard American torpedo. After carefully defusing it, the torpedoman had reported that it also carried twice the explosive punch.

  "What would you estimate its range to be?" McKay asked the torpedoman.

  "Ten miles, minimum. Look at that fuel capacity."

  McKay told the torpedoman to ferry the weapon ashore and take it apart and write a report on it with the help of the officers on his destroyer. They would forward it to Comsopac and he would forward it to Cincpac, who would forward it to Cominch, who would send it to the Bureau of Ordnance; and maybe, with a little luck, in a year the whole Navy might be alerted to this secret weapon. In the meantime God knows how many ships might go down before its lethal power and range.

  At the door of McKay's cabin, Buzz Jamieson, the communications officer, reported there was heavy traffic coming in from Comsopac Halsey in Noumea. A big Japanese task force had sortied from Rabaul and was heading down the twisting waterway through the Solomons, which everyone called the Slot. "I think you better make sure we've got steam up," Jamieson said.

  McKay nodded. He found himself welcoming the simplicity of battle, the possibility of an instant solution to his dilemmas with Parker and the women in his life. What better fate for a sailor than to go down with his ship, all guns blazing against a courageous enemy? That was always part of the choice he had made when he put on a Navy uniform. Yet a part of his mind scorned this dolorous solution. The McKays who had fought the slave-owning bushwhackers in Bloody Kansas were not losers.

  A telephone call from the signal bridge. "Captain, Admiral Standish would like you to report to the Brockton immediately."

  In the wardroom of the heavy cruiser Brockton, McKay fo
und Rear Admiral Theodore E. Standish, the captains of the five cruisers, and the commander of the destroyer flotilla in Task Force 78. Bald, redfaced "Buddy" Standish was a battleship man by training. He had commanded one of the battleships that Halsey had embarrassed in his famous destroyer attack in 1937.

  It was bad enough that Standish had almost no experience commanding destroyers or cruisers. Worse, he had arrived to take over Task Force 78 only yesterday. Whoever was handing out the assignments in Washington was not thinking very long or hard about the South Pacific. All the big brains were obviously absorbed with the invasion of North Africa, which had begun two weeks ago.

  Speaking in tense, nervous spurts, Standish confirmed there was a major Japanese battle force coming down the Slot toward Guadalcanal. He said they would follow the battle plan COMSOPAC had worked out for them. The cruisers and destroyers would operate independently. The destroyers would deliver a torpedo attack first and the cruisers would open fire at twelve thousand yards and maintain that distance. Searchlights were banned. Everyone carefully noted the code words for commence firing and cease firing.

  Listening, Arthur McKay wondered if his outburst to Halsey had actually done some good. These were good tactics. For the first time the Americans were trying to learn from their mistakes. But there was a new problem — that Japanese torpedo. "Admiral," he said, "I think we ought to discuss some special evasion tactics."

  He described the torpedo and its probable range. Standish was clearly not interested. He already had too much on his mind. "Has anyone else seen this thing?" he asked testily. "Has Buord put out anything on it?"

  "If we wait for Buord to do something, we'll all have beards down to our knees or be feeding the fishes," McKay said.

  Too late, he remembered that Standish had been running the Bureau of Ordnance when the war began. "They do a few things right, for your information, Captain McKay," he snapped.

  "Sorry, Admiral. You get an us-against-them attitude toward Washington when you're out here for a while."

  "The only us-against-them attitude anyone should have out here is us against the enemy," the Admiral said. He proceeded to elaborate on that point throughout a five-minute pep talk. It was embarrassing — and idiotic. Fifty-year-old cruiser captains did not need pep talks. McKay sometimes thought playing for the Navy football team was the worst possible training for a future admiral. Standish had been a star fullback in 1912.