When Roth returned to the water, the Throttleman and his friends went after him. "Why the fuck should a Jew even have a life jacket?" the machinist snarled.
One had a knife. They cut Roth out of his life jacket. Moss warned them they would be court-martialed. The Throttleman told him to go fuck himself. Moss pulled Roth over to the raft and gave him one of the manropes. "I'm sorry, son," he whispered.
As darkness fell without a sign of a plane or ship, Roth decided he was going to die. The hope of marrying Anna Elias, of going to Stevens Tech or maybe even MIT and living up to Amos Cartwright's vision of his future had sustained him. But three days without sleep, and now the loss of his life jacket, made these visions more and more ridiculous. He was the schmuck from the Bronx, son of Izzy Roth, the unlucky halfhearted capitalist. He was about to disappear, like the Jews that Anna had told him about, the ones Hitler deported to camps from which there was no return.
Let go of the rope. It'll be easy. Maybe those anti-Semitic bastards did you a favor. It will be a lot easier than drowning in your life jacket.
A hand grabbed his arm. The chaplain whispered, "Here's a life jacket."
"Where did you get it?"
"Never mind. Put it on."
"Doctor," Willard Otis said, "I think Lieutenant MacComber needs help. He don't answer when I talk to him."
In the twilight, Levy could see MacComber in his life jacket, his head drooping forward. The doctor swam over to him and took his pulse. He was dead.
"No one can help him now, Willard," he said. "Get him out of the jacket and give it to someone else."
"Oh, Jesus."
Levy could not believe his eyes. Otis was weeping.
"What the hell's wrong with you? All he ever did was order you around."
"He was from home," Otis said.
The chaplain swam into the gray light, fishy, light-bodied, free. He had found the final stone in his private temple. He had given his life for a man who was neither his friend nor a Christian. The purpose of this ordeal was no longer opaque to him. The future into which he swam transcended the past, with its narrow theologies. He swam into a dream of fraternity, a new covenant in which all Americans vowed fealty to each other and to their pilgrim quest.
"Chaplain?" It was Moss, floundering after him in his waterlogged jacket. "Where are you going? What are you doing?"
"I'm going over to the other men to see if they need me."
"It's too far. Where's your life jacket?"
"I can swim better without it."
On he swam until he encountered a lone sailor bobbing on the light swell, his head lolling. Here was another man in need of help. "Son," he said, "come along with me. Join the others."
He reached out to the boy's scorched, oily face to gently slap him awake. He tipped over, and the chaplain saw he was only half a man. The sharks had devoured everything below the water.
"NOOOOOOOOOO. No!" the chaplain screamed. He rose up in the water and shook his fist at the darkening sky. All his loathing of this incomprehensible god who mingled cruelty and kindness in such discordant demoralizing ways returned. In the name of Captain McKay, in the name of the Jefferson City, he shouted defiance. In behalf of the honor they had redeemed, the fraternity they had achieved, the victories they had won, he cursed God. He cursed Him for his brother Alcott and the millions who had died in the barbed wire and trenches of the Western Front in the First World War, for the millions more who had died and were dying in this Second World War.
Moss was floundering toward him again, calling to him. Moss, the personification of duty, responsibility, narrowed to a knife blade on which he impaled himself. He had awakened faith in his squeezed Presbyterian soul. For what? The chaplain swam into the darkness and let Moss find the devoured sailor. He would take his life jacket, practical, tormented man. The perfect damage control officer.
The chaplain was through with damage control. He swam and swam until he was too tired, too sleepy, to swim any further. He lay on his back on the ocean's bosom like a child in a cradle. Suddenly he was in his grandfather's parsonage in Ohio. He heard his mother laughing on the porch. His brother was reading from Grandfather's book, The Spiritual Uses of Dark Things. "You see," Alcott said. "There's absolutely nothing to fear."
There wasn't now. He had done his ultimate duty as chaplain of the Jefferson City. He had rebuked God for His blunders. As he drifted down into the depths, Emerson Bushnell heard another voice, a whisper in the deep. Perhaps it was the Savior who had cried out on the cross against the Father's uncaring cruelty. Perhaps it was Captain McKay saying, "Well done."
As the fourth day dawned, water slopped against Flanagan's mouth. He had spent the night arguing with Jack Peterson. It had grown nasty. Jack had accused him of stealing his life. Didn't that give him the right to steal Flanagan's life? He had stolen Martha from Jack. Now Jack had a right to steal Flanagan, this sodden, scorched, blinded, dehydrated piece of human flotsam, from Martha. He was actually doing her a
favor. What was she going to do with him when the Navy dumped what was left of him at her door?
Jack was a clever son of a bitch. He was offering him booze now, Scotches and soda in the crew's mess. They'd turned it into a restaurant. Camutti was the bartender. Daley washed the dishes. They were all waiting for him down there. The mesquiteers too. His buddies.
Homewood swam over to him. "Lieutenant West's in a bad way. We got to get him onto that raft."
"How?"
"Someone's got to kill that son of a bitch Wilkinson. I can't do it. He's watchin' me every second. But if I get his attention, maybe you can get up on the raft and stick this into him."
He handed Flanagan his knife. "Boats," he said, "I'm so goddamn weak."
"You can do it! Come on. Pull yourself together. West and a lot of other guys are gonna die if we don't get rid of that bastard."
We're going to die anyway, Flanagan thought. But he struggled to respond to Homewood's leadership. He was now the boatswain mate's only follower.
On the raft, Semple watched the drama unfold. Homewood asked Wilkinson to let Lieutenant West aboard the raft. Wilkinson refused. Flanagan swam around the other side of the raft while Homewood and Wilkinson insulted each other with every obscenity in the Navy's vocabulary. Flanagan slipped out of his life jacket and tried to get into the raft.
Wilkinson whirled when Flanagan had only one leg over the side. He kicked Flanagan in the face, knocking him into the water. Flanagan clung gamely to the side of the raft. Wilkinson shoved his head under the water.
"Stop it, you're drowning him!" Semple cried.
Flanagan carried Semple back to boot camp, to the era before the Great Ape deflowered him, before he became Harriet, Clara, all his female incarnations. Homewood was trying to get into the raft and the others, the Great Ape's sycophants, were pushing him back. Wilkinson just laughed and held Flanagan's head underwater. Semple remembered Hawaii, when Lieutenant West had joined the captain in rescuing him from Portsmouth Prison. He remembered West toiling eighteen hours a day in the CIC to keep the Jefferson City afloat. He remembered his longing to touch, to kiss, that haggard, handsome face, his officer-hero, his shipmate and symbol of American nobility, his link to the dreamworld of glamour and beauty. Wilkinson was the enemy, the destroyer of these precious dreams.
"No!" Semple cried. He picked up the Very pistol. There was a bright red flare already attached. "No, Jerry"
Wilkinson turned. Semple pulled the trigger. The flare hit Wilkinson in the face, blowing his head apart, scattering blood and red phosphorus all over the raft.
The sycophants went berserk. They threw Semple over the side. They clubbed the sailors still clinging to the manropes and paddled away with the Great Ape's corpse, a parody of a funeral ship. No one ever saw them again.
Homewood ordered Semple to take charge of Lieutenant West. Semple's time on the raft had left him stronger than anyone else. The lieutenant was delirious. When Semple put his arms around him, West thought it w
as his wife. "What a part I've got, Gwen," he said. "It's the best damn part ever play. I only wish you were here to see it. I'm good at it Gwen. I really am. For the first time in my life I'm really good at something."
"I am here," Semple whispered. "I love you, darling."
"Say that again," West sighed.
"I love you," Semple said, tears oozing down his blackened face.
Suddenly there was a plane, a PBY, roaring low over them, waggling its wings. It dropped stuff to the larger group to the north, a raft, some water. The southern group was too weak to swim up to share them. No one tried to swim down. They were all close to death.
Flanagan regained his life jacket. The plane disappeared into the glaring blue sky. Hope flickered in his dehydrated brain. If he could only keep his head above water.
"How long do you think it'll take for a ship, Boats?"
"At flank speed for a destroyer? Maybe twelve hours."
"Jesus. That means another night in the water. I don't think I can take another one. Jack keeps talking to me."
"He's no fuckin' good! He was never any fuckin' good! Do you hear me? He was a fuckin' liar — and a thief!"
Even though he was practically comatose, Flanagan realized the enormous significance of those words. Homewood had known Jack was the thief! He had loved him so much he had allowed him to go on stealing. The truth flashed like a bursting shell in Flanagan's exhausted brain. Stealing had been Jack's way of saying fuck you to Homewood as well as to the Navy, to everyone.
Jack really was no good. He was evil.
Everyone strained his eyes toward the horizon, yearning to see a ship. But night began to fall without a glimpse of a mast Maybe the PBY had crashed. Maybe his radio was not working. They could not last another day without water.
Flan, you don't believe Homewood's bullshit about me, do you? Did I ever steer you wrong? Didn't you always have the best booze, the best nooky on the beach? Why don't you trust me now, you cowardly son of a bitch? Afraid of the dark, afraid of coming down here with me. You know who's here? That guy you gave to the shark back in the Solomons. He's got a claim on you in some ways better than mine. Come on down and apologize to him.
Flanagan's heart pounded in his chest. Who, what, can defend him against this evil voice?
With the last dregs of energy in his soul, Flanagan prayed. He leaped across the chaplain's absurdity, across the void to the Unknown, the Unknowable. To the creator of the shark. To the ruler of the sea. To the lord of the universe.
Suddenly rough arms surrounded him. Someone was putting another life jacket on him. In the darkness he fought against it, wondering if the man was trying to drown him. But he did not have the strength to resist. He hung there while deft hands knotted the other bigger jacket around him.
"You'll make it now," Homewood whispered. "Even if they don't get here before dawn. Just promise me this. Amount to somethin'! Don't be a fuckin' wise guy all your life."
"Boats — no."
He had finally grasped what was happening, what Homewood was doing.
"Never mind. Amount to somethin'!"
Homewood told Dr. Levy he was going to swim to the other group and bring back a keg of water. "It's too far. You can't make it," Levy said.
Homewood ignored him and swam into the night. Somewhere in that journey the boatswain's mate discovered there was a limit even to his strength. He was a man not a myth. A man with the burden of an exhausted body and a wounded soul. His beloved Navy, with its perpetual insistence on order, regularity, system, its hierarchy of respect and responsibility, had failed him. They had abandoned him and his shipmates to the sea's cruelty. He had confessed to Flanagan and to himself that he had also failed the Navy by allowing Jack Peterson to go on stealing, unpunished.
Flanagan saw none of this during that night in the water, of course. In that final night of horror he could only concentrate on keeping a tiny fragment of life aglow in his body. Around midnight, Lieutenant West died, in spite of Semple's pleas for him. Dr. Levy was the only officer left. Totally abandoning his scientific objectivity, he cursed them, he exhorted them, he ordered them to stay alive. The mere sound of his rasping voice may have helped some men make it even though sharks struck again and others vanished without a cry. Semple sobbed and sobbed, weeping for them all.
Suddenly there were motors, searchlights glaring through the dawn. Hands dragged them into whaleboats and lifted them to steel decks and then to sick bays where pharmacist's mates bathed their fragile bodies and soothed their ulcerated wounds. Later they were carried aboard the hospital ship Tranquility, where smiling nurses reintroduced them to the possibility of a woman's touch.
At Guam, Admiral Spruance visited them. He told them how much he grieved for their lost shipmates, especially his friend Captain McKay. He tried to explain what had gone wrong, why it had taken so long to rescue them. In the middle of it he started to weep. The tears were better than any explanation he could have given them.
The admiral's chief of staff, Captain Maher, added some good news. He told them that the war had ended with the explosion of the atomic bomb which the Jefferson City had brought to Tinian.
Their voyage was over.
Ave Atque Vale
On July 26, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the Jefferson City's torpedoing, Martha Flanagan finished reading the last page of this book. She put the manuscript aside and paced up and down the room, running her hands through her dark hair. She looked out at another full moon spilling gold on the Pacific's blank face. The high tide rumbled and crashed against the cliff below the house.
Frank Flanagan was writing a letter to Marty Roth, who was chairman of the annual reunion of the surviving members of the Jefferson City's crew. He was urging Roth to invite as a speaker Captain Robert Wallace Mullenoe, Annapolis '64, currently commander of one of the Navy's new supercarriers. Roth, now associate professor of naval engineering at the Webb Institute, had helped design her.
Flanagan added other bits of gossip he had picked up as corresponding secretary of the Jefferson City Association. Harold Semple was in Paris, selling off his art collection to finance his pursuit of perfect love. He and Fire Controlman Ralph Bourne were still writing to admirals and congressmen trying to get a Navy Cross for Lieutenant West. Johnny Chase, the turret captain with the charmed life, had recently died in bed at eighty-two. Dr. Aaron Levy was still thriving as professor of surgery at Tel Aviv University. Captain McKay's grandson, Commander Semmes McKay Meade, had just become the executive officer of the nuclear submarine Kingfish. He was rising rapidly in the Navy, even though he had not gone to Annapolis.
"Do you think you've been fair to everyone?" Martha asked.
"Of course not," Flanagan said.
"I'm serious," Martha said.
"So am I.”
"You think it's impossible?"
"Yes.”
"All right."
Martha placed the manuscript before a Chinese painting of a solitary traveler descending a mountain. They had found it in a used furniture store in Honiara, the ramshackle capital of Guadalcanal, thirty years ago. No one could tell them how it got there. The bored Chinese merchant said the store's previous owner, an Australian, might have bought it from a passing freighter whose crewmen might have stolen it in Hawaii or California or New York. He sold it to them for a hundred dollars.
The manuscript would remain there for a week to see if further messages emerged from the mysterious depths in which books were born. Flanagan did not expect any for this book.
The Jefferson City's voyage into history had begun.
Other Great Reads
Published by New Word City Inc, 2013
www.NewWordCity.com
© Thomas Fleming
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61230-720-6
"Never Give All the Heart." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Com
pany from The Poems by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
"A Prayer for My Daughter." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from The Poems by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
Translations from the Chinese. Translated by Arthur Waley. Copyright © 1919, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
"Under Ben Bulben." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from The Poems by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.
Virgil by T. R. Glover. Copyright © 1912 by Methuen & Co., Ltd.
"Waltzing Matilda." Music by M. Cowan, words by A. P. Paterson. Copyright © 1936, 1941 by Carl Fischer, Inc., New York. Reprinted by permission.
"The White Cliffs of Dover." By Walter Kent and Nat Burton. Copyright © 1941 renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., New York, and Walter Kent Music, Woodland Hills, California.
"Who." Written by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, and Jerome Kern. For U.S.: Copyright © 1925 T. B. Harms Company (do The Welk Music Group, Santa Monica, CA 90401) and Bill/Bob Publishing. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. For all other territories: Copyright © 1925 T. B. Harms Company. Copyright renewed (c/o The Welk Music Group, Santa Monica, CA 90401). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
BOOK ONE
BOOK TOW
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK SIX
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
OTHER GREAT READS
Time and Tide Page 79
