Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  The ship came closer, and the searchlight swung closer, too, until finally—thank God!—it found us. At that point I didn’t care if it was a U-boat or a pirate ship, I was just relieved.

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out that it was, in fact, our ship. A few minutes later the searchlight was fixed on us, and somebody was throwing a couple more life rings and a line with a harness over the side. Straub and I looped the harness around Woody, who was starting to come out of his stupor, and they hauled him up on board.

  Then they threw out the line again, and I fastened the harness on myself the way they’d taught us in boot camp, and they hauled me in, too. Straub insisted on going last.

  I thought everybody would be happy to see us and grateful that we were alive.

  Instead, once they got Woody up and moving around, Chief Kerr chewed us out for a good ten minutes in front of the entire crew—Woody for coming up on deck without a life vest, and Straub and me for going into the ocean after him instead of following standard procedure and sounding the alarm for man overboard. I felt about as low as I could be by the time he was finished. I guess he did it to make a point to everybody else about safety and following orders and everything, but it sure didn’t take long for me to go from feeling like I was some kind of hero to feeling like I’d let the whole ship down.

  I still knew, though, that if I hadn’t gone in after Woody—if I’d sounded the alarm and waited for the ship to turn around to find him—and if Straub hadn’t gone in after me—that Woody wouldn’t have made it out alive.

  Chief dismissed everybody and ordered me and Woody and Straub to change our wet clothes and get cleaned up and dried off. They put Woody in the sick bay since he was still pretty out of it, but Straub and I had to clean belowdecks for the whole rest of the night, even though we both had a scheduled watch until the next morning.

  For a long time we worked in silence. Then after a while I asked Straub if he thought Woody knew what had happened.

  Straub thought about it for a bit, then said, “I bet he doesn’t remember. And if he does, I guess maybe it’s best that we not say anything to him about it because he’d feel pretty terrible. And what the heck. I think just about anybody might lose their head in a situation like that. You never know, and I ain’t going to judge him or anybody else.”

  We got quiet again, finishing up mopping, and then, my eyes all red and tearing up, I said, “Thanks for saving me, Straub.”

  “It’s okay, Danny,” he said back. “You saved Woody. And he’ll return the favor to us one day.”

  * * *

  They let Woody out of the sick bay the next day and the first thing he did was come find me and Straub. We were both bleary-eyed from lack of sleep after being up all night, plus exhausted from being in the water for so long, and fighting the waves and Woody.

  He started to say something but got choked up, tears filling his eyes and spilling over down his cheeks.

  Straub put his arm around Woody’s shoulders. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “Could have happened to any of us. And you’d have been there, jumping in to save us, too.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I don’t doubt it for a second.”

  After a minute Woody found his voice. “I know I went kind of crazy out there,” he said. “I don’t much remember all of it, but I’m ashamed of what I do remember.”

  Straub waved as if he was swatting the words away like so many flies. “Water under the bridge,” he said.

  “Or under the patrol craft,” I added. “Anyway, one thing I didn’t tell you guys was I actually peed on myself when I saw Woody get swept overboard. I figured I had to dive in. Not so much to save Woody as to wash the pee off my pants. That way no one would know.”

  Straub and Woody broke out laughing. “Well, they’re gonna know about it now,” Straub said. And that was the end of that.

  Except for after my watch, when I climbed down from the observation post like a zombie because I was so tired and I ran into the chief. He was leaning on the rail looking at the ships strung out in front as far as the eye could see. He motioned me over.

  “Yes, Chief?” I said nervously.

  He was smoking a pipe. It reminded me of my dad’s pipe.

  He tamped out the tobacco and ashes and slid the pipe into his pocket. “I don’t know what mother back there on land is sitting up nights worrying about her son, but I do know that it’s my job to make sure that son—no matter how old he is—makes it home safe from this convoy and this war. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded but didn’t speak.

  “And another thing,” he started, then stopped.

  “Yes, Chief?” I said again.

  He grunted. “That was a heck of a thing you did last night to save your buddy. And a heck of a thing Straub did to save you. I guess if there is a mother back there on land sitting up nights worrying about her son, she’d be an awfully proud one if she knew.”

  When they let us off the ship for liberty in Key West, Florida, most of the crew headed to the bars, but I went looking for a bank and a post office. Straub and Woody tried to get me to go with them, but I wasn’t planning on spending any of my pay. I figured the sooner I cashed my paycheck and mailed off the money to Mama, the less chance there was that I’d change my mind about it. Plus, after two weeks of tight quarters on our little ship, I was ready to just be away from everybody for a few hours, including my pals.

  Before I mailed off my pay, I added a letter that was like the other letters. I thought about making up some things that might make Mama happy to read about—like always going to church, singing in the choir, and maybe going to night school after work—but I hated lying to her on top of breaking her heart by leaving the way I did, and her not knowing where I was or anything else about me that was real.

  I didn’t feel much like that boy who took the dinghy across the sound just a couple of months before and spent the night shivering, curled under the boat. I’d been homesick ever since I left, but I was usually too busy or too tired for it to mess me up. One night up on my bunk I’d started missing Danny so much that I guess I must have made a noise, a big sigh or something, because Straub shot up in his bunk underneath me and asked me what was the matter, were we under attack, did something happen?

  “No,” I’d whispered, not wanting to wake up anybody else. “I was just missing home is all.” Which was true enough.

  After I mailed the money home to Mama I wandered around Key West. It wasn’t like I had so much as a nickel in my pocket, so there wasn’t much of anything I could do. I left the downtown and wandered through a cemetery where all the graves were aboveground, I guess because everything was barely over sea level in Key West. The stones were so white they hurt my eyes. I kept going, down palm-lined streets where people lived in big houses with grand porches and white picket fences. In front of one house, the biggest on Whitehead Street, a couple of cats were out front wrestling with each other. They didn’t look too wild, so I bent down to pet them and they let me. One even let me pick him up, and pretty soon he was purring, that cat motor running loud as long as I rubbed his belly. The other cat swam around my legs but didn’t want to be picked up—just seemed to want to be close by.

  I liked having them with me, and in a few minutes other cats emerged from the shrubs and bushes that surrounded the house and eased their way over to also rub up against my legs. Some let me scratch their heads or behind their ears, or even rub their bellies like the first one. I hadn’t ever liked cats that much—the only animal I much cared about back on Ocracoke was my beach pony—but for some reason I liked this a lot.

  Then I heard a kid’s voice addressing me from the yard. “They’ve got six toes, you know.”

  I looked around but couldn’t see anybody among the flowering shrubs, banana trees, coconut trees, and palm trees. I knew he was in there somewhere, though.

  “Count them if you don’t believe me,” the kid added.

  I counted the cat’s toes and sure enough t
here were six on each foot.

  “Pretty strange, huh?” said the kid, standing up and wading through the bushes and the flowers. He was about my age—my real age, not the age I was pretending to be.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Are they all that way?”

  The kid sat down beside me in the grass.

  “Most of them. A ship captain gave that one to Papa. Her name is Snow White. I guess they’re all freaks. But they’ll still let you pet them.”

  The kid said his name was Patrick and he asked how old I was, and for some reason I gave him my real age.

  “That’s how old I am, too,” he said. “But you’re in the navy. How did you join? Papa told me you have to be seventeen to sign up.”

  “I might have fibbed some about my age,” I said. “You can’t tell anybody.”

  Patrick waved away the suggestion. “Ah, who would I tell? Anyway, Papa’s coming to get me pretty soon on his boat and he’s taking me back to Cuba where he lives, and him and me are going to go hunting U-boats. You know about U-boats? That’s the German submarines.”

  I had to laugh. Did I know about U-boats? They were all I’d been thinking about for the past three months!

  “So you and your dad are going to go after the U-boats in, what, a fishing boat or something?”

  “Deep-sea fishing boat,” Patrick said. “Papa says we’ll radio the navy when we spot one, and they’ll come over from the base they have in Cuba and blow it up. Plus Papa has rifles.”

  “A rifle isn’t going to do you any good against a submarine,” I said.

  “Do you know who my papa is?” Patrick said, as if that was any kind of answer.

  I shook my head. “How would I?”

  “He’s Ernest Hemingway,” Patrick said. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said, surprised but trying not to sound like it. “Ernest Hemingway the author. Everybody’s heard of him.” I didn’t mention that I’d never read any of Ernest Hemingway’s books.

  “He used to live here in Key West with us, but he doesn’t anymore,” Patrick said, looking kind of sad. “He married somebody else.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that, so I just kept petting Snow White.

  “Hey, you want to go swimming in our pool?” Patrick asked.

  I’d never met anybody with their own swimming pool before. The only pools I’d ever seen, in fact, were the giant ones at Great Lakes and in Miami at the training centers. There sure weren’t any on Ocracoke Island.

  I followed Patrick through the jungle of a yard, the cats still swarming around us the whole time, to the back of the big house, where there was a huge rectangular pool filled with blue water. “There’s some extra trunks in the house,” Patrick said. “I’ll get you some. Come on.”

  A few minutes later I was out of my navy whites and into a pair of swimming trunks that I had to cinch around my waist with a piece of string to keep them from falling down. And then off we went back to the pool, which turned out to be salt water, because there was no freshwater on Key West except for rainwater they caught in cisterns, as Patrick helpfully explained.

  “Let’s do depth charges,” he ordered.

  “Depth charges?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, you know, what they shoot off ships to blow up U-boats.”

  I told him I knew what depth charges were, and that we had them on our patrol craft and fired them off with something called a K-gun. I was just wondering what he meant when he asked me if I wanted do depth charges.

  “Like cannonballs,” Patrick said, and he ran toward the pool and jumped as high as he could go and grabbed his knees, curling his head and shoulders forward just before he landed and made a giant splash.

  “Right,” I said, and I did it, too.

  As soon as I came up, somebody else cannonballed into the Hemingways’ pool, too, yelling “Geronimo!” on the way down.

  It was a boy wearing what looked like a girl’s swimming suit.

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “That’s my little brother. We call him Gigi. He likes to wear stuff like that. Don’t ask me why.”

  Gigi just grinned. I shrugged and we all climbed out and did it again, this time yelling “Bombs away!” every time we did a cannonball. After about half an hour, a woman who I guess was their servant or their maid came out with a tray with three big glasses of lemonade and a plate of cookies. I didn’t even wait to be invited. I drank one of the lemonades in one giant gulp and would have eaten every single cookie if Patrick and Gigi hadn’t jumped out of the pool and joined me and stuffed some in their mouths, too.

  It was the funnest time I’d had since Danny got hurt, and even though our bellies were totally full from the lemonade and cookies, we didn’t wait an hour before we went back in the water like you were supposed to. There were U-boats down in the bottom of that pool and we were the depth charges that were going to sink them for good, so no time to waste!

  A lady looked out at us a couple of times from an upstairs window in their house. Patrick said it was their mom and she didn’t come outside very much. She waved to us and I waved back and then she disappeared. I thought of my mom, and how sad she was for a long time after we lost my dad, and wondered how much it was like that for Mrs. Hemingway, even though her husband hadn’t passed away. He was still gone, though, married to a different lady, so maybe it was the same.

  Patrick and Gigi and I played in their swimming pool pretty much the whole rest of the afternoon, interrupted every now and then by their servant coming out with more lemonade, and sometimes we climbed out to chase six-toed cats around their yard. It sure was nice getting to be a kid again.

  Finally, though, it was time for me to change back into my uniform and go back on board my ship.

  Little Gigi, still wearing his girl’s swimsuit, gave me a book just before I left—one their father had written recently called For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then he ran off. Patrick walked with me halfway down the street toward the docks.

  “That book, it’s about an American guy in Spain who is fighting the fascists,” he said. “They’re like the Spanish Nazis. Mama won’t let us read it, but I bet you’ll like it. Papa’s the best writer there is.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Good luck hunting U-boats with your dad down in Cuba.”

  I thought about them in just a fishing boat, with a radio and a rifle, and I added, “Be safe.”

  “You too,” Patrick said.

  We shook hands like grown-ups.

  We didn’t run into any trouble crossing the Straits of Florida, the sort of dividing line between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, which took us back to the shipping lanes for the return trip up the East Coast. Lieutenant Talley must have gotten some kind of warning in Key West, because he seemed worried and walked the deck constantly, confirming everybody’s positions, double-checking weapons and ammo, haunting the sonar room. I half expected him to climb up to the lookout platform where I spent most of my watches. He stood on the bridge and stared at me a lot, though, as if just waiting for me to sight something and initiate the call to general quarters.

  The merchant ships were loaded with tons of sugar and bananas and coffee and frozen meats from all around the Caribbean and South America, bound for New York and then probably with another convoy over to England. There were also dozens of civilians whose passenger ship had been sunk by U-boats out in the Caribbean the week before. Only half of those on board had survived. My heart sank watching them board the ship for the voyage back north. All they had was the clothes they were wearing and blankets. Everything else they owned must have been lost when their ship went down—along with their friends and their families. Their faces looked drained of color. Nobody smiled. Hardly any of them spoke. They trudged up the gangway as if they were going away to prison.

  We were halfway up the Florida coast when word came from the sonar room that there were U-boats stalking the convoy. Our patrol craft was the usual blur of activity as everybody raced
to battle stations. I was in the crow’s nest and warned the other ships about the danger with the signal flags because we’d been maintaining radio silence since leaving port.

  A minute later our PC surged ahead, peeling off from the convoy to where the sonar guys had spotted a U-boat lying in wait. So far I hadn’t seen a thing, but I trained my binoculars ahead, hoping to see something that might help.

  One of the other PCs on our side of the convoy took off as well in pursuit of a second U-boat, while the third escort stayed on course. All the ships increased their speed, but that still wasn’t very fast with all the cargo they carried. They also began the zigzag pattern to make it at least a little harder for the U-boats to aim their torpedoes, though as slow as they traveled it was hard to believe it would help very much.

  After five minutes giving chase, Lieutenant Talley issued another order and the battery crew launched a couple of depth charges. I held on to the rail, bracing myself for the blast, and once again it felt as if the ship was lifted high out of the water, landing with such force that it was a wonder we didn’t break apart right then and there. No sooner did we settle than the second depth charge went off. I was grinding my teeth so hard that my jaw ached.

  Oil and debris came to the surface, and guys all over the PC started shouting that we’d made a direct hit. They were practically dancing all over the deck until Chief Kerr jumped off the bridge and stormed up and down yelling at them all to knock it off. “Back to your stations!” he bellowed. “We didn’t hit nothing! It’s an old sub trick!”

  I remembered the training back in Miami and he was right. U-boats had been known to intentionally release oil, mattresses, and clothes through their torpedo chutes—anything that might convince us that they’d been hit. But what they were really doing was either getting away, or hiding on the bottom, or lining up for another torpedo shot—maybe even at the ship that was in pursuit.