“Then get your butt down on the ground and give me fifty push-ups. When I want you to raise your hand I’ll tell you to raise your hand, only I’m never going to do that because it would indicate that I think you have an answer to a question I might be asking and I know for a fact that you and everybody else in this company is too dumb for that.”
I got down on the ground and struggled through ten push-ups, sure there was no way I was going to be able to finish fifty. But when I slowed down, I felt his boot on my back, and when I bent my arms to lower myself he shoved me all the way onto the ground.
“Oof!” I grunted, then struggled back up.
He shoved me back down again, hard, and kept doing that until I somehow managed to do the fifty push-ups. Or maybe we both just lost count.
Either way, when I finished and stood, he threw a length of rope at me—except I now knew in the navy you called it a line and not a rope. He told me to tie that bowline I was so eager to tie.
I was too exhausted to be nervous; besides, I’d tied bowlines a thousand times since I was little and growing up around boats on Ocracoke Island, where every time you needed to tie just about anything to anything else you used a bowline, especially on a sailboat. My fingers were frozen, though, and I messed up twice, which surprised me. Chief rolled his eyes. Before he could say anything, though, I took a deep breath and I guess my hands had warmed up enough by then so I could feel what I was doing because my fingers sort of worked automatically to tie the knot. That time it took me about five seconds.
Chief snatched the line from me, inspected it, yanked on it, and cracked just the tiniest hint of a smile.
“You been around boats before, boot?” he asked. The other guys were straining to listen.
“Yes, Chief,” I said. “Grew up on the Outer Banks in North Carolina.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen, Chief,” I said.
He shook his head. “How old are you really? Because I know they’re taking anybody who can walk through the door on their own two feet, and half this company lied about their age to get here, and that baby face of yours has never even seen a razor before.”
“Seventeen, Chief,” I said again, my voice still shaking. “Honest.”
He stared at me for a minute. Then he said, “All right, boot. I’ll make a deal with you. Tomorrow, the company that has the highest success rate in knot tying wins the Rooster Flag. You seen the Rooster Flag?”
I nodded. We’d all seen it—a flag in the mess hall with a red rooster on a white background.
“The Rooster Flag goes to the top company of the day, and B Company here—Baby Company—is going to be just that for at least one day during boot camp. I want that one day to be this week, and to help me out with that you’re going to teach every one of the men in this company how to tie a bowline—and a figure-eight, and a reef knot, and a clove hitch—by first light tomorrow. You do that and I’ll put you in for whatever assignment you want once you graduate from boot camp. But if you don’t, I’m finding out how old you really are, and then I’m sending you home to your mama so she can give you a good spanking for running away.”
My heart sank. There was no way I could teach a hundred guys how to tie all those knots, no matter how many times I’d tied them myself.
“Company fall out!” Chief ordered. “Our littlest boot here is going to give you all a lesson in knot tying.”
He pointed to a couple of wooden boxes that we’d been marching past since we’d been out on the Grinder. “You’ll find all the line you need in there. Have at it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing this could all disappear, or I could go back in time and not be so dumb as to raise my hand like some stupid little schoolboy. It was going to be a very, very long night.
At first everybody crowded around me in a circle, and I was so nervous I couldn’t speak. I fumbled with my line, and when I opened my mouth no words came out.
“Well, get on with it,” a guy named Tony Spinelli barked. He had a New Jersey accent. I just hoped he didn’t have a New Jersey temper, too.
“Okay,” I finally managed to squeak. I held my line up in front of me, made a small loop, and then demonstrated. “You take this end and run it through here and around here and back through here and then you pull here and—”
“Can’t hear you!” somebody said.
“Speak up!” somebody else added. “We’ll be here all night if you don’t speak up!”
I tried again but still couldn’t seem to make myself heard over the guys stamping their feet on the frozen ground to keep the feeling in their toes. Plus I kept stuttering.
“What the heck’s wrong with him?” Spinelli yelled. “I can’t hear nothing! Chief’s gonna make us stand out here forever waiting on this idiot.”
“Hey,” a familiar voice responded. “Don’t call him that. He’s doing the best he can. Just give him a second.”
It was the big guy from before, who had grabbed my arm and told me he wouldn’t want to see me trampled. The one who’d called me a boy and who I’d scowled at—and who’d laughed at me.
He stepped up beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, little buddy. I saw you tie that knot a minute ago. All you got to do is take it easy and explain it to the rest of us.”
He held up his line to show me he was ready. Woody sort of inched up closer to us as well. He didn’t say anything, but I appreciated that he was willing to stand by me, or at least kind of near.
“Go on, then,” the big guy said. “You can do it.”
I didn’t know why he was being so nice to me, but I appreciated it so much that I took his line and quickly tied a bowline for him.
“There,” I said. “Like that.”
“Okay,” the big guy said, taking back his line and studying the knot. “Only now you have to explain it so we can all do it.”
I glanced up at him and nodded, then looked nervously around. A couple of guys were attempting with their lines but already looked hopeless trying to follow along. One of them threw his on the ground and stomped on it. Spinelli scowled at me—a real scowl, not like the one that didn’t work when I tried to do it. His made me even more nervous.
But the big guy tapped me on the shoulder and that brought me back to what I was supposed to be doing.
“Maybe if you teach it to us the way it got taught to you, that’d be the way to do it,” he said.
And I realized that was the answer. Dad had this special way of teaching the bowline, and I remembered it as clear as anything. It had worked for me when I was three years old, so it ought to work with grown men—or nearly grown men anyway.
“Okay,” I said, starting over with my small loop and fighting to make my voice louder—and not stutter. “This is the bunny’s hole.”
Everybody started laughing. “Are you freaking kidding me?” Spinelli howled. “A bunny hole?”
The big guy turned to Spinelli and told him to just keep quiet and let me finish. Spinelli actually growled at him.
“I guess you could just call it a rabbit hole instead,” I said.
“How about a hare?” somebody drawled in a thick Southern accent. “Ain’t that another name for a bunny, too?”
“Hare today, gone tomorrow,” somebody else chimed in. Everybody groaned when he said that.
“Anyway,” I said, actually gaining a little confidence now that I’d started. “Bunny hole, rabbit hole, doesn’t matter what you call it. This short end of your line is the bunny, and you start off holding it behind the hole. So what you do after that is your bunny comes out of the hole, goes around the tree, then goes back in the hole. Pull it tight and there’s your bowline.”
The guys laughed some more, and then they made me tell it to them again—and show them again.
“One more time,” said Spinelli, who didn’t sound mad anymore. At least he wasn’t growling.
“Okay,” I said, and I went through the bunny story a third time, and then they all tried it. H
alf got it on the first try, and just about the whole other half got it on the second. I couldn’t believe it! Woody was the last to get it, but finally even he did as well, with those two guys punching on his arms the whole time.
The big guy patted me on the back—so hard he nearly knocked me down. “I knew you could do it,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand.
Woody was standing right next to me now, too. “I knew you could do it, Danny,” he said.
“Thanks,” I sort of mumbled, even though I doubted that was true.
The big guy introduced himself—he said his name was Josef Straub—and I told him who I was, and who Woody was, and he said, “Well, nice to meet you, Danny. Now how about those other knots, ’cause it’s getting mighty cold out here and there’s a bunch more to go. More bunny holes and such you can tell us about?”
“No bunny holes,” I said. “But there are some other tricks my dad taught me.”
“Let’s hear ’em, then,” he said, and so we got back to work.
Once they had the bowline down, it didn’t take very long at all for me to teach them the other knots Chief wanted us to learn, using Dad’s knot stories from when I was little—even Woody, with his problem knowing his right from his left, figured it out. And once we showed Chief we’d mastered them, he let all the guys head over to the mess hall to be first in line for evening chow.
He held me back, though.
“I’m not in the habit of giving out compliments, boot,” he said. “And if you tell anybody what I’m about to say, I’ll deny saying it and you’ll be out here doing drills by yourself on the Grinder all night long, understood?”
I nodded. “Understood, Chief.” I wasn’t stuttering, but my voice was back to being kind of shaky.
“All right, then,” he said. “I don’t know how old you are or you aren’t, and quite frankly I don’t care. I wouldn’t bet on you being a day over fourteen, but, again, I don’t care. The navy needs men. The war needs men. And those men need to know how to tie proper knots and at least a hundred of them now do thanks to you. So, good job.”
“Thank you, Chief,” I said.
“So what’ll it be?” he asked.
I was confused. “What do you mean, Chief?”
“I told you if you could teach those numbskulls how to tie knots you’d get your pick of assignments. We have five more weeks of boot camp, but no reason not to say now. So what’ll it be? Desk job? Signal corps?”
“Subchaser,” I said, without even hesitating, the shakiness gone. “I want to be a subchaser.”
Chief studied my face for a minute, as if he was looking for a clue to something. Then he said, “How come a subchaser?”
I couldn’t tell him, but he guessed, of course.
“U-boat got somebody you know?”
I nodded.
“Somebody in your family, over there off the Outer Banks?”
I nodded again and felt the tears welling up behind my eyes. I couldn’t speak or I knew I’d start crying, thinking about Danny, and I didn’t want Chief to ever see me doing that.
He looked around, saw that there wasn’t anybody else out on the Grinder—except Straub and Woody, who were waiting for me about twenty yards away in the direction of the mess hall—and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do to make it happen,” he said, and then he dismissed me to go to the mess hall.
I noticed he stayed out on the Grinder by himself for a pretty long time, and it made me wonder if maybe a U-boat hadn’t gotten somebody he knew, too.
* * *
If I thought Chief was going to go easy on me after that—or on the company—boy, was I ever wrong. A couple of nights later he woke us up again, banging on a trash can lid and yelling at us to “Move it, move it, move it!”
It was Spinelli’s turn to be stupid. “But it’s three o’clock in the morning. Do we have to?”
He was still in his skivvies when he said it, and that was as far as he got getting dressed because Chief blasted him: “It’s not your mommy asking you! It’s me and I’m telling you! And now you get fifty push-ups first.”
So as the rest of us pulled on our uniforms and peacoats, there was poor Spinelli in his underwear struggling through his push-ups—and with Chief’s boot on his rear end, too. I almost felt sorry for him, but mostly I was just glad it wasn’t me again.
But then I remembered how much I appreciated Straub and Woody standing up for me, or with me, when I was trying to teach everybody to tie the knots, and decided I would hang back and wait for Spinelli—even though he was the guy giving me the hardest time about the knots.
“Those push-ups ought to be illegal so early in the morning,” I said to him once he’d gotten dressed and we hustled to catch up to the rest of the company, which had already left the barracks.
“Ah, I can handle it,” Spinelli said. “Ain’t nobody soft that’s from Jersey.”
“Sure,” I said. “But still lousy when it’s you that’s having to do them.”
“You’re right about that,” he said. “Teach me not to open my big, fat mouth.”
I laughed and he did, too, then we picked up the pace to catch up with the others.
“Hey, thanks for waiting for me,” Spinelli said.
“I just wish we’d had time to go to the head,” I said.
Spinelli suggested I try peeing while running, but I didn’t think that was such a good idea. Maybe it was something they did in New Jersey. I made a note to ask him about it later on when I wasn’t so out of breath.
Five minutes later, Spinelli and I were past the Grinder down by the lake with the rest of the company, lifting these heavy whaleboats over our shoulders, thirteen of us to a boat, and jogging with them down to the shore. I could barely keep my hands on our boat since the other guys were holding it pretty high, so I knew I wasn’t carrying my share of the load.
Once we were there I jumped in and grabbed an oar, but Chief had other ideas. He went from boat to boat tagging the smallest guy in each to be the coxswain—the guy who sits in the stern and yells out directions to the rest of the crew, which, of course, are all the guys pulling on the oars. At first I felt bad that I wasn’t doing my part, but then, because I wasn’t exercising and the others guys were, they heated up and I just sat there and froze.
We spent the next freezing couple of hours rowing out onto the lake under a full moon, keeping the shoreline in sight as best we could, though most of the boats did a lot of zigging and zagging, the coxswains barking orders through their megaphones but having a hard time getting everybody’s strokes coordinated. One boat was stuck going in circles. Several slammed into one another, and a couple threatened to capsize, which would have been murder to anybody who fell in, even with our life jackets on.
Somehow I managed to keep my crew working pretty much together and going in a straight line—or at least a straighter line than any of the others. It also helped that I was so skinny and we didn’t have any extra weight in our whaleboat. Straub and Woody were on different boats. Spinelli was an oarsman on mine. He might not have been soft, coming from Jersey and all, but he was sweating a river and grunting with each pull on the oar just like everybody else on the boat—well, except for me.
Then Chief announced that we were going to race. He was standing at the end of the dock with a bullhorn when he told us. Then he pointed east, along the shoreline, and barked, “Go!”
Our boat jumped quickly into the lead, and pretty soon we started pulling away. I kept up the orders, having one side pull harder if we veered off course one way, and the other side pull harder if we went too far in the opposite direction. I kept the pace of the rowing steady, too. I’d been in enough rowboats to have some idea of what would work, even though I’d never done this coxswain thing before. My throat was raw from all the yelling, even with the megaphone, and after a while I started sweating, too, despite how cold and windy it was.
The only problem was I didn’t know where we were racing to, and when I finally turne
d back to look, I couldn’t see any of the other boats. I had the crew slow down until the other boats came into sight, but they never did. So we just waited, the waves rocking us and the night wind whistling through and making everybody chilled now that we were all sweaty but no longer working and no longer generating any body heat.
“We should have brought blankets,” Spinelli grumbled.
“Do you guys think we should turn back?” I asked, but nobody said anything. They were just like me, though, I was pretty sure—gone from thinking we were the best boat on the water to wondering if we’d gotten lost, or hadn’t heard an order, or something bad.
It turned out to be something bad, all right. When we returned to shore, Chief was furious at us for taking off the way we did and leaving the other boats behind.
“But you told us it was a race,” Spinelli said, before the rest of us could stop him. “We thought we were supposed to go fast and win.”
Chief turned red in the face and stepped over to confront Spinelli.
“And what happens if one of those other boats capsizes?” he demanded. “Who’s gonna rescue those sailors who are in freezing water and drowning if you don’t keep them in sight?”
“Uh, the other loser boats that are back there with them?” Spinelli answered.
Chief exploded. “Wrong! Race or no race, you are responsible for your fellow sailors. No man left behind.”
Spinelli managed to keep his mouth shut after that, but the damage was done.
Chief didn’t make us do push-ups. He made us carry all the whaleboats and oars back up to the boathouse and then clean and secure all the equipment while the rest of the company got to sit around a couple of fire pits and thaw themselves out and laugh at us. Then Chief ordered our crew to march over to the mess hall and peel potatoes.
I apologized to the other guys, but they all said I shouldn’t worry about it. “It ain’t your fault,” Spinelli said as I scurried to keep up with the bigger guys holding a whaleboat over their heads so I’d at least be able to touch the side of the boat, even if I once again wasn’t helping to actually carry it.
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