"That was an absolutely atrocious performance, Mr. Parker. Without the proximity fuse, I'm sure this ship would have suffered serious damage with you as officer of the deck. Quartermaster, record in the log that Mr. Parker used obscene and rephrensible language to rebuke a sailor who had been mortally wounded."
"Aye, aye, Captain."
Duke Pearce watched, a small smile on his handsome face. He was not even slightly bothered by the way the captain abused his executive officer. Pearce seemed to like it. He probably thought he was learning something about command.
Captain McKay struggled to control his careening emotions. He wanted to get Pearce off his ship. He even wanted to get him out of the Navy. "I would say you could start working on that transfer to Los Alamos tomorrow, Duke," he said. "If you think a letter from me will do you any good, just let me know."
"Thanks, Art," Pearce said, oblivious to what was happening aboard the Jefferson City.
Madhouse Blues
"I think Art's coming unglued, I really do," said the Jefferson City's first lieutenant, Commander George Tombs.
In the privacy of his stateroom, Tombs was expressing the general shock and consternation among the ship's officers at the way the captain was crucifying the executive officer. Tombs was not an admirer of Commander Parker, but he was not his enemy. As the man at the bottom of the class of 1917, the first luff instinctively sympathized with strugglers against adversity. He had been hoping that a month in Sydney would enable Parker to get a grip on his nerves and make a fresh beginning with the captain. He was inclined to dismiss as rumors the stories of Parker's previous misconduct on the bridge. Tombs was a strong believer in hoping for the best from people and events.
Arthur McKay seemed determined to prevent any possibility of Parker's reform. He had, declared war on his executive officer. It was certain to cause turmoil throughout the ship. When the two top officers began feuding, the men were inclined to think no one was in command. Discipline collapsed, and the ship was on its way to becoming the most dreaded word in the Navy's lexicon, a madhouse.
"I gather the captain's had a history of... shall we say instability?" Moss said. "Did he show signs of it at Annapolis?"
"Hell no. He was third or fourth in the class. Right behind Kemble. A lot of people say he should have been ahead of him, but he didn't want to embarrass that arrogant bastard by beating him. I never, have figured out what Art saw in that son of a bitch. But you get that way about your roommate. At least some guys do."
George Washington Tombs was as honest as his name implied. He could not tell a lie. He also had no head whatsoever for the subtleties of modern psychology.
"That makes him something of an enigma," Moss said. "When did the trouble begin?"
"What do you mean — trouble?"
Moss told him about visiting the captain's cabin when McKay was too drunk to talk. The first lieutenant's blue eyes darkened. "I hope you haven't told this to anyone else."
"No."
"I would say that comes under the category of vicious gossip.”
Moss had collided with George Tombs's loyalty to his classmate.
Throughout this dialogue, Oz Bradley sat chewing his stump of a cigar. "You guys are missing the point," he said. He let that snotty bastard Pearce put us to sea with two boilers that could fall apart any minute. I don't know what the hell's going on. But I'll tell you this much, George. You and I have got some damage control problems to discuss."
A naked woman was lying against Frank Flanagan, her mouth open, her tongue pushing against his lips. He could feel every part of her body but he could not see her face.
They were lying in a back pew in Fordham's Gothic chapel, where Flanagan had knelt in prayer a hundred times. His spiritual mentor, Father Francis Callow, was at the altar saying Mass.
No, it's a sin. Can't you see we're in a church? When Flanagan tried to say this, the woman's tongue moved deep into his mouth.
Bells rang. Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, droned Father Callow. This is the Chalice of my Blood.... qui pro vobis et pro multis effundeteur in remissionem peccatorum.... which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins.
The words terrified Flanagan. The woman only laughed and moved against him. What would they do if Father Callow saw them? The priest on the altar whirled to meet Flanagan's eyes as he peered over the top of the pew. Wearing the black chasuble of a funeral Mass, Lieutenant Herman Kruger glared at him.
Don't be afraid, the woman said. He could see her face now. It was Martha Johnson.
Flanagan awoke. He was lying in his rack in F Division's almost airless compartment. Sweat oozed from every pore. Around him sixty other sailors breathed the same fetid air. He had a hard-on the size of an eight-inch gun barrel.
He lay there in the darkness listening to the Jefferson City's engines thrumming, the sea rushing past them outside the hull. He had been having these bad dreams ever since they left Australia. Annie Flood's tears, her fears for Flanagan's soul and her complicity in his damnation were ruining his sleep.
Lying there in the clammy dark, Flanagan realized Martha Johnson was part of it too. Maybe the most important part. Jack had showed him the loving letters she wrote in response to Flanagan's lying ones. It made him feel guilty. It also made him wish he had a woman like Martha — a woman who wanted a man's love and wasn't afraid to admit it.
Maybe it was just the letters. All those personal details Jack told him to put in. How they liked to do it twice in a row. The second time around, Jack called it. Sweet seconds, Flanagan had written I keep thinking of your sweet seconds, baby. Maybe he just wanted some of those seconds.
Wanting. Flanagan lay there, desire throbbing in his body, in syncopation with the Jefferson City's turbines. The same desire was beating in the bodies of the sixty men around him. In Jack Peterson's body across the aisle. In Camutti's, even in Daley's.
At night, when they were not at General Quarters, Flanagan lay in his rack and thought of the ship as a giant bomb, six hundred feet long, throbbing with desire. Sometimes Flanagan wondered why the crew did not go berserk, assault the officers, smash the engines, turn the guns on other American ships. It was amazing that they kept any kind of order aboard her.
"Let's go, kiddo."
Boats Homewood's big hand shook his shoulder. A moment later, eight bells rang. It was 0400. Time for the messcooks to hit the deck. A different emotion consumed Flanagan. Desire was replaced by resentment.
A new order reigned in F Division. Their movie star leader, Montgomery West, had been promoted to full lieutenant and put in charge of the ship's Combat Information Center. Herman Kruger had been promoted to lieutenant junior grade and given command of F Division. He immediately recommended that F Division should be subject to calls for routine working parties, just like other deck divisions — and should also contribute messcooks for three-month stints — like the other deck divisions. Naturally, both ideas were welcomed by the officers of the other deck divisions.
Kruger had also decreed that no one in F Division could sleep topside. It took the men in main plot too long to get to General Quarters. Although almost everyone else had GQ stations topside, it was unfair to penalize the main plot men. Besides, the ship was an unmilitary mess, with sleeping bodies sprawled all over the decks.
For the first draft of messcooks, Kruger selected everyone who was even slightly friendly with Jack Peterson. This included Flanagan, although seamen first class were not supposed to be subject to messcook duty.
When Boats Homewood had pointed this out, Kruger had snapped, "He may be a seaman first on the books, but he's still second class to me."
Flanagan stumbled to the head, where he was joined by a dozen other unfortunates, including Daley and the Radical, who cursed steadily while he shaved. "Fuckin' fuckin' fuckin'." When Flanagan suggested he shut up, the Radical called him a capitalist pimp. Flanagan threw Booth against a bulkhead. The Radical whipped the blade out of his razor and dared him to do that again.
Homewood calmed them down and they trudged sullenly to the galley to begin their labors.
In F Division's sleeping compartment, the temperature had been around ninety degrees. In the galley it was a hundred and would soon be a hundred twenty. The cook of the watch greeted them with a sardonic smile. He was a tall lean Swede with tattoos up both arms and a voice that resembled a bow drawn across an untuned violin. "Awright, get y'selves some coffee and wake up. We got six hundred pounds of powdered eggs to cook and two hundred pounds of bacon. You two big guys" — he pointed to Flanagan and Camutti —"get the bacon out of the freezer, and you two little guys start mixin' the egg-shit with water."
Flanagan's appetite had declined fifty percent since he began his tour of duty as a messcook. He saw the vile dehydrated eggs in their primitive state, before water made them semi-edible. He observed the pale gray meat as it came out of the freezers, before the cooks added the artificial coloring and flavors to make the stuff palatable. He cleaned the slop from the trays and lugged the garbage topside to dump it overboard for the sharks, the only enthusiasts for the Jefferson City's menus. When he stood at the hot table shoveling the stuff onto the passing trays, he meditated obscure, inchoate schemes of revenge on his persecutor, Lieutenant Kruger. He did not realize he was in a mutinous frame of mind.
The depression into which Chaplain Emerson Bushnell had plunged on the way to Australia was beginning to lift. He emerged from his cabin to renew his contacts with the crew. He held divine services on the fantail while they were anchored in Espiritu Santo. He resumed his bridge games with Dr. Cadwallader and Lieutenant MacComber. Sailors came to see him seeking his counsel about women with whom they had become heavily involved in Sydney. He gave them advice full of sonorous uplift that made them feel better, at least.
In theological terms, Bushnell remained in a state of despair. But he decided there still might be some useful work for him to do aboard the ship. He reminded himself that his uncle, Bronson. Bushnell, had confided to his diary when he was forty that he had lost all semblance of faith in God. But he remained in the ministry, pursuing a career in the social gospel, fighting racial inequality, anti-Semitism and unemployment, until he died in the odor of secular sanctity at the age of eighty.
Bushnell soon sensed a different atmosphere aboard the Jefferson City. Dark emotions seemed to be swirling through the ship — the very opposite of what one would expect after three weeks of orgiastic pleasure in Sydney. Over a rubber of bridge, Dr. Cadwallader and Lieutenant MacComber filled him in on the captain's declaration of war on Executive Officer Parker and his crony, Supply Officer Tompkins. "It's absolutely hilarious," MacComber said as he bid three no trump.
"I think it's shocking," Dr. Cadwallader rumbled.
The chaplain did not need any prompting from the doctor to sympathize with these victims of military tyranny. The captain soon displeased the chaplain in other ways. He held a series of masts at which he handed out extremely stiff sentences — reductions in rank, heavy fines, in several cases brig time for offenses committed ashore. Each sentence was accompanied by a ferocious attack on the executive officer's leniency in such matters, in effect blaming him for the crew's misconduct in Australia.
The captain also began making surprise inspections. Accompanied by the executive officer, he marched grimly through the ship, running a white-gloved finger across tops of lockers, breeches of guns, the stoves in the galley. Whenever a speck of dust or grease appeared on the glove, he excoriated Parker publicly for failing to run a clean ship. The real losers, of course, were the weary sailors, who had to spend hours when they were not on duty scrubbing, and polishing everything in sight.
The situation produced a surprising rapport between the chaplain and Lieutenant Commander Edwin Moss. As the son of a Presbyterian minister, Moss had taken an instant dislike to Bushnell's eclectic theology. In every generation since 1800, Bushnells had been at war with Moss's rigid ilk. Now Moss appeared like a supplicant in the chaplain's cabin to confess he too was beset by doubts.
God, the Navy, his father and the captain were entangled in Moss's mind. All had disappointed him in one way or another. God and the Navy had failed to elevate him on the latest promotion list. His father persisted in wondering why he had been stupid enough to marry a Catholic. The captain was the most confusing paradigm of all.
Since he was within range, most of Moss's wrath was directed at the captain. He was a riddle wrapped in an enigma. "At first I thought he was the finest kind of officer, someone I instinctively admired. But it's been downhill ever since. He's erratic. He started out saying he was going to forget the past, all he wanted us to do was fight. Now he's persecuting Parker and Tompkins. God knows who or what he'll attack next. It's very discouraging. I'm thinking of asking for a transfer. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I find myself wondering about the Navy as a career. I never thought I'd do a thing like that. It makes me feel like a traitor, as if I'm betraying something or someone."
"Now, now," Chaplain Bushnell said. "You're the one who's been betrayed. Organizations like the Navy, based on violence and death, have betrayal built into them. Their adherents war on each other as much as they do on some putative enemy."
Lieutenant Commander Moss gazed into Chaplain Bushnell's myopic eyes. "There's some truth to what you're saying. But not much consolation."
"Think about it. The consolation will come, I promise you."
Toward 2300 hours Mess Stewards Willard Otis and Clifford Johnson finished the last of the dishes in the wardroom scullery and peeled off their sweat-soaked clothes in their compartment. Chief Steward's Mate Walter Davis had told Johnson he was in the scullery "permanently" for stabbing the Australian, and Otis, his partner in crime, had a similar sentence. "I'd rather do brig time," Otis had said, which prompted Chief Davis to bang his head against the bulkhead several times.
Otis and Johnson trudged to the head for a shower. Who would be in there, cooling off, but Chief Davis. He took two or three showers a day and always used a lot more water than regulations permitted. The two stewards ignored him and he ignored them. Otis, unable to shut his mouth as usual, could not resist mentioning that he had heard Commander Bradley complaining about the amount of fresh water the crew was using. Chief Davis glowered at them, but he began soaping up.
Suddenly, as they all reached the point where white suds were gleaming all over their bodies, the water stopped running. "Son of a bitch!" roared Chief Davis.
He raced out of the head just in time to see a dungareed figure disappearing down a ladder to the lower decks. It was the third time this had happened in the past two weeks—but the first time it had happened to Chief Davis. On the two previous occasions, the chief had received a phone call from someone in the black gang informing him the water was going to be turned off at inconvenient times until the chief agreed to supply them with the kind of well-cooked chickens and tender hams and succulent steaks on which the officers dined.
"This ship is turnin' into a fuckin' madhouse," the chief said as he tried to get the dried soap off his large torso. "I told Commander Bradley what those engineering assholes are tryin' to pull, and he says, 'Tell it to the captain.”
The telephone in the compartment rang. "For you, Chief," said the steward who answered it.
"Okay," the chief said, after listening to the caller for several minutes. "Okay. You got it,"
Chief Davis awoke Wilbur Jones, the head cook in the wardroom galley. "Startin' tomorrow, you cook a dozen extra of everything."
"I can't believe it," Willard Otis said. "You're not goin' to charge the fuckers anything for it?"
The chief banged Willard against the bulkhead for a while and told him he was going to get his wish about brig time. The captain had decided to give him and Cash Johnson a month each for stabbing that Australian, and the chief was not going to say a word in their defense.
Peck pick peek. Harold Semple was learning to type. He had to get up to thirty words a minute to become a yeoman striker. That
was what the Navy called someone who was going for a rate.
Edward McKenzie let him practice every night on his typewriter in the exec's office. Meanwhile, Harold was still in Deck Division One. That was not a pleasant place to be, because Boatswain's Mate First Class Jerome Wilkinson was in a vile mood. It had nothing to do with Harold giving him the freeze. It had a lot to do with the way the captain was working on the executive officer, Wilkinson's protector.
Wilkinson took it out on the men. Everyone hated him now. He was particularly nasty to Harold. He sensed it was, all over between them. The thought of returning to his apelike embraces revolted Harold. He had met men of refinement in Sydney, men who played Lohertgrin in the background, who showed him their collections of erotic statuary, men who made love between silk sheets on, perfumed pillows.
Yet there were nights like this one, nights when the heat below decks seemed to bring his blood to a kind of froth in his throat, when he yearned for the touch of a loving hand. That was when he prowled the ship in search of action. When dear Jerry's favorite word, release, floated in his mind like a burning star shell.
Edna, dear Edward McKenzie, had told him never to do it on the ship. It was a court-martial offense. Two years minimum in Portsmouth Prison, where Marine guards took special pleasure in tormenting queers. Never, Edna said. He grew almost angry when Harold told him about a small compartment he had found in the bow, below the capstan, where the anchor chain was stored. There was just enough room to be cozy.
Never, Edna had said. Besides, who'd be the man?
Pick peck pick. Typing was a bore. He was not a typist, he was a vamp. Harold ended his practice session ten minutes early and wandered the ship. He dawdled in the Marine compartment, playing Edna's game. He looked at all those brawny bodies and undressed them one by one. Then a hulking sergeant loomed over him. "Hey, swabbie, what the fuck you want in here?"
Like a frightened fawn Semple fled down a maze of ladders amidships toward a roaring sound. He had never been in the engine room. Suddenly he was face to face with Marty Roth, friend of boot camp days. Roth took him down to the fire room, where men peered anxiously at gauges and twisted valves and joked about how fast they could get out if one of the boilers let go.
Time and Tide Page 46
