Mister Roberts

by Thomas Heggen

  Ensign Keith shut the door behind him. He looked quickly and accusingly around the room. "You men are gambling," he announced.

  No one spoke. No one affirmed or denied the charge. No one moved. Six pairs of sullen, menacing eyes watched Ensign Keith.

  "Don't you know," he demanded, "that gambling is a general court-martial offense?"

  A look of craftiness came to Dowdy's face. "Oh, we ain't gambling, sir," he said kindly, as though Keith had made a perfectly natural mistake. "We're just shooting a little crap for fun. It's not for money."

  "Then what's the money doing out there?" Keith asked triumphantly.

  Dowdy smiled and dismissed it with his hand. "Oh, that's just to keep score with. We figure out that way who has the most points and then at the end of the game we give it all back." He smiled disarmingly at the officer. "It's the best way I've found yet to keep score." He added righteously, "No, sir, we can't none of us afford to gamble. We've found that gambling never pays."

  Ensign Keith stood there, doubt and anger and uncertainty chasing each other across his face. He lifted his cap and replaced it on his head. He pinched his nose. He looked suspiciously around the room and saw the glasses and the pewter crock, and he smelled the funny smell.

  "What's that?" he demanded. "In that jar there? What are you drinking?"

  Dowdy looked over at the crock. "That?" he said soothingly. "Oh, that's some fruit juice. That's some pineapple juice we got from the galley. That's all that is.

  Ensign Keith wasn't satisfied. "Let me see," he said to Olson.

  Olson shot a quick, questioning glance at Dowdy.

  Dowdy smiled benevolently. "Sure," he said. "Give Mr. Keith a drink of fruit juice. Here's a glass."

  At any given time there were apt to be brewing on the ship fifteen different batches of jungle juice, but it was agreed that Olson made the most distinctive brand. His jungle juice had character, everyone said. For one thing, through influential connections among the mess cooks, he had access to more ingredients than his competitors. Olson would take an empty ten-gallon water breaker, fill it half-up with raisin mash, add whatever fruit juices — orange, pineapple, grapefruit, it didn't matter — the mess cooks had been able to provide, add sugar, stir well, and stow the breaker in an unlikely corner of number two hold. After a week to ten days of turmoil, the mixture was ready for tapping. It was as unpredictable as a live volcano. In taste, it was as deceptively tranquil as sloe gin, and one or two glasses would creep up on the uninitiated like a well-wielded hand-billy. The night Biddle, the butcher, ran amuck and tried to "kill all the Guinnies" with a meat-cleaver, he had been prodded by several glasses of Olson's jungle juice.

  It was ten o'clock when Ensign Keith left the bridge.

  At eleven, Ed Pauley had occasion to call the flying bridge, and Keith's absence was reported to him. Pauley was irritated, but more than irritated he was surprised that Keith was doping off: it wasn't at all consistent. He sent the messenger around to find Keith, and when, after a thorough fifteen-minute search the messenger reported negatively, he became slightly worried. He considered the vigorous feeling against Keith. He remembered the threats he had heard. He wondered if it wasn't just possible that something had happened. He thought about this, and the more he thought, the more plausible it seemed. He sent the messenger out again, and the messenger returned with the same report. Eleven-forty-five and Ensign Mulholland arrived to relieve Keith. Now Pauley was really alarmed. He could visualize Keith swimming far back there in the desolate wake, the sharks following at a respectful distance. For a frantic moment he thought of calling the Captain — after all, the thing had happened on his watch — and then he controlled himself. He had best be sure first; he would search the ship himself; he would look in every goddamn conceivable place.

  When Lieutenant Carney relieved him, he took Bergstrom, his quartermaster, and set out. Bergstrom carried a flashlight. Pauley fully expected to find Keith down in the bilges with a marlinspike in his back — if he found him at all. First they exhausted the likely places; all the officers' staterooms, radio room, offices, engine room, heads. Then they started on the infinite number of unlikely places which, the way Pauley figured it, were really the probable ones. They went through the crew's compartment and looked in every bunk. They opened storerooms and even opened the refrigerator spaces. They looked in the Chief's quarters. They looked in the boatswain's locker. They even looked in the spud locker. Glumly, Pauley led the way through the 'tween-decks spaces on his way to the holds. This was a hell of a thing. If he didn't find him in the holds, he'd have to call the Old Man. There'd be hell to pay for this. As he passed the armory, Pauley heard music and voices. He stopped, for the loudest of the voices was clearly Keith's.

  Pauley had prepared himself for almost anything, but not for what he found in the armory. Dowdy and Keith and Olson were standing against the workbench. Dowdy and Olson had their arms flung about Keith, simultaneously supporting him and leaning on him. Loudly and with much stress on certain words the three were singing a thoroughly obscene tune called "Violate me in the Violet time in the Vil-est way that you know." Within the compass of his two supporters, Keith was flopping his arms about to no discernible rhythm. His eyes were glassy and a huge white grin was pasted on his face. The phonograph beside them was unobtrusively playing a Strauss waltz. Over by the bulkhead Vanessi and Stefanowski teetered on their haunches and peered nearsightedly at the dice on the deck. They argued noisily about what the dice read. In the corner, lying on his back, cradled on two life jackets, Schaffer slept soundly. His mouth was open and a marshmallow was propped in it. There were at least two broken glasses on the deck and the air was fragrant with the smell of jungle juice. Everyone, less Schaffer, greeted Pauley hilariously.

  When he had recovered a little, Pauley pointed at Keith: "Who's that?" he asked.

  Dowdy peered into Keith's face to find out. He shook him by the shoulder and Keith's head bobbed back and forth. "That?" said Dowdy. "That's old Jim Keith. You know old Jim Keith."

  Keith nodded his head solemnly and grinned some more. "This is old Jim Keith," he echoed. "You know old Jim Keith."

  Dowdy winked widely at Pauley. He continued to shake Keith's shoulder. "Yessir," he announced, "old Jim's a good son-of-a-bitch."

  Keith nodded heavy approval. "Yessir," he mumbled. "Old Jim's a good son-of-a-bitch." Then without a sound, a surprised look on his face, as though the idea had just occurred to him, he slipped easily to the deck, sound asleep.

  It turned out he was right about being a good son- of-a-bitch. His old rectitude collapsed like a pricked balloon. He never gave the boys trouble again. He took to sleeping until noon and sitting around the wardroom with his feet in bedroom slippers propped on a table. Until the Captain put a stop to it, he wore for a while a tan polo shirt that was screamingly non- regulation. He and his messenger would spend the gangway watches playing checkers on a miniature board, and at sea Keith would sit on a ready box and listen to the stories that fanned from his gun crews. He turned out to be a nice, good-natured kid. As Dowdy said, it just took a little while to get him squared away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The doctor was variously described as a crazy little bastard, a son-of-a-bitch, a good son-of-a-bitch, a hell of a good medico, a quack from the word go, and a nice guy. The area of agreement in all these estimates is that the Doc was contradictory and unpredictable. The Doc was that. The story went that, on the outside, he had held a lucrative Hollywood practice, but he didn't look the part. Doc was rather a plump little man, balding, in his middle thirties; and if it is true that humans always resemble some animal type, then perhaps he most suggested an outsized, juicy, cherubic mouse — with certain qualifications. The qualifications being really contradictions and most un-mouselike, the comparison doesn't mean much. The contradictions were the face and the man —the satanic little mustache, the wide, unblinking eyes that were simultaneously cruel and compassionate, the shockingly soft voice that never quite concea
led the steel beneath. Among the crew he seemed to inspire two antagonistic feelings in equal degree: fear, and a rather boundless admiration. Anyone who had ever drawn the wrath of his sharp little tongue had good cause to hold the Doc in respect, but on the other hand there were many whose relations with him had been of the friendliest sort imaginable. The pharmacist's mates, who had cause to feel both ways, swore by him, and would have, even if he did not, as he did, crack a frequent bottle of grain alcohol with them.

  There wasn't really much call for a doctor on the ship and the Doc had little to do. Most of the time he sat in his room, working advanced calculus problems, reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, or talking with anyone who chanced in the doorway. Once a day, at eight-thirty in the morning, he held sick call. The attendance at sick call would vary from time to time, but the complaints — the legitimate ones, that is — seldom did. For all practical purposes, such as codification, there were only three: constipation, fungus infection, and what the Navy calls cat fever. Once in a while there would be boils needing lancing, a case of appendicitis and maybe even an appendectomy, or simple lacerations such as might be produced by a fist, but by and large all complaints fell into the conventional and approved diagnoses. The attendance was not so uniform, and seemed to be subject to various irrelevant influences. On a holiday routine (with sleeping-in authorized) never would more than a handful turn out. But the very next day — if the day called for a vigorous program of chipping and scraping decks — might see a queue extending all the way to the galley lined up in the passageway outside of sick-bay. Any other medical man than the Doc would have been amazed that such a number of cases, and such acute ones, of hangnail, hernia, stomach ulcers, mastoiditis, piles, and strep throat could develop overnight. It had been a long time since anything had amazed the Doc, but every once in a while he had to own himself impressed at the imaginativeness of the sick-call complaints. He was certainly impressed when, on a day the first division was scheduled to paint over the side, Farnsworth, a first division man, announced that he thought he was coming down with Huntington's chorea, a disease of such rarity as to constitute a medical phenomenon. When Biddle, the butcher, took his meat-cleaver and made realistic attempts to "kill all the Guinnies" on the ship, the Doc transferred him to an island hospital with a diagnosis of war neurosis and excellent prospects for a medical survey. At sick-call next morning five new cases made their appearance, and it took the Doc a week to stamp out the epidemic of war neuroses which suddenly flourished on the ship.

  There was one time, one sick-call, when the Doc was indisputably amazed. It happened, too, on a morning when he was physiologically not quite equal to amazement. For a week the ship had been anchored in the bay of this rank, weedy, desolate little island, and still there were no prospects of early departure. Quite a palpable depression was beginning to settle on the crew, who agreed to a man that this was the most miserable island of them all, and whose testimony on the subject of miserable islands was irrefutably competent. There was a small Army base ashore, a smaller Naval base, a "dirty little native village unmolestedly off by itself, and excessive quantities of mud and dust and jungle and smell: that was all. It was truly the end of die world. Like everyone else, the Doc had fallen prey to the smothering depression that emanated from the place, and the night before he had taken practical remedial measures: he had depleted the medicine locker by one quart of one-hundred-fifty proof, government specification grain alcohol, which he shared with Lieutenant Roberts and Ed Pauley. Grain alcohol and orange juice make a pleasing but not very gentle drink, and this morning Doc had an active headache and a tendency to impatience. Attended by Lupich, the first-class pharmacist's mate, he disposed of the morning's turnout of hypochondriacs with immoral speed, issuing the blanket prescription of aspirin tablets for all complaints, including athlete's foot. "You need an aspirin," was his uniform diagnosis, and twice he added, "See, I'll have one with you."

  Finally there was one man left: Lindstrom, a hulking, grinning seaman who lived up to every inch of the Dumb-Swede tradition. Lindstrom was a farmer boy from South Dakota, had a thatch of yellow hair that could easily have been straw, a hammered-down nose, wing-like ears, maddening good nature, and had once been summarized by Dowdy: "When they were passing out brains, that son-of-a-bitch stepped out for a beer." He had arrived early at sick-call and the Doc had noticed him moving back to the end of the fine, repeatedly giving up his place to late-comers. Now he stood grinning awkwardly and flapping his cap up and down to no apparent purpose.

  The Doc swiveled around in his chair and looked at him. "What's your trouble?" he said coldly.

  Lindstrom grinned some more, flapped his cap with one hand and scratched his head with the other, and finally said plaintively: "I got the clap, Doc."

  The Doc was in no mood for phantasy. "Don't be silly," he snapped. "Now what's the matter with you?"

  Lindstrom kept grinning, shook his head doggedly and insisted: "I got the clap, Doc."

  The Doc began to get angry. "I said don't be silly! Where in the hell could you get the clap around here, boy?" He wasn't expecting any answer at all to that, and certainly not the one Lindstrom gave.

  "Over on the beach, Doc. I was over on a working party the other day and this native guy, he took me up to his shack. This woman was there and I give her my knife and a pack of Chesterfields." He was absorbedly shifting from one foot to the other, as though he had just discovered the gift of movement. "She was pretty ugly," he added pertinently.

  The Doc's eyes were very wide. "Come here," he said quietly. He made his examination without a word. Then he turned around and stroked his mustache and regarded Lupich. "Well, I'm a son-of-a-gun," he said finally, and then, "Well, lance me for a tiger." He leaned back in the chair, joined his hands behind his head, and delivered a brief speech. "Here," he said, "is a man who, on the most god-forsaken womanless island in the whole goddamn god-forsaken ocean, gets himself a dose of clap. That, I insist, is one for the medical journals. That is comparable to getting sunstroke in Alaska, or leprosy in Valhalla. I will write this up for the medical journals, furnish documented proof, and I will become famous." He eyed Lindstrom. "But not half so famous as you, young man."

  Lindstrom considered this speech dubiously. "Yessir," he said.

  The Doc kept looking him over while he twisted the waxy villainous tips of his mustache. "Well," he said genially, "you've got the clap. What do you come to me for?"

  Lindstrom didn't find the question at all unreasonable. "Well," he explained obligingly, "I thought maybe you could fix it up."

  "Fix it up?" The Doc's voice was incredulous. "Do you mean cure it?" The cold, regarding eyes went wide in consternation.

  The Swede was visibly unsettled. "Yessir," he said haltingly, the grin fading from his face. "Can't you do that, Doc?"

  "Why, of course I can do it. The simplest thing in the world! But you surely don't want me to. You're not serious, are you?"

  The cap was flapping now in furious agitation, and on Lindstrom's face a sudden cloud of bewilderment had settled. "Yessir," he said apologetically. "I'd kind of like to get rid of it if you could do it, Doc. I'd sure appreciate it."

  "Listen to me, son." The Doc leaned forward earnestly and his voice purred with reasonableness. "You don't want to get that cured and I'll tell you why." He tapped the desk. "How many men would you say there are out here in the Pacific?" he asked softly.

  Lindstrom knotted his forehead, considering. "There's a pile of them," he said finally.

  "Thousands?" the Doctor prodded. "Would you say there were thousands?"

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "A million, perhaps? Would you say there were a million?"

  "Yeah, I guess a million."

  "All right," said the Doc. "All right. Now there aren't many women out here, are there?"

  The grin came back to Lindstrom's face. "There ain't any, except for this gal over here!"

  "All right," the Doc said. "All right. There aren't many chances to
get the clap, then, are there?"

  Lindstrom didn't guess there were.

  "The clap must be pretty rare, then, among all these men, would you say?"

  Lindstrom guessed it was.

  "How many cases would you say there were?"

  Lindstrom's brows were pulled down in a deep frown of concentration. He shuffled the floor. "Not many," he decided.

  "Well, I'll tell you." The Doc spoke with the coy self-gratulation of a man about to bestow a gift. "I'll tell you. Yours is the only one. You have the only case. Out of a million men in this ocean, you have been chosen. You stand out." He beamed almost pridefully at Lindstrom. "Now what do you think of that?"

  The Swede pawed the floor uncomfortably. "Yessir," he said.

  "Do you see what I mean?" the Doc purred on. "You are distinctive. You have something a million guys would give their left leg to have. You're the only one who has it. Now you surely don't want to lose it, do you?"

  Lindstrom was trying to paw a hole through the deck and apparently so absorbed in the work that he couldn't answer.

  "Let me put it this way," the Doctor went on. "If you had been awarded the Congressional Medal, you alone out of a million men, would you give it away?"

  Lindstrom thought this over, and then he asked: "What's the Congressional Medal?"

  "That's the highest military decoration in the land. Would you give that away?"

  The answers were clearly taped out for Lindstrom, but on this one he stepped outside the tapes. "I'd give it to my old lady," he said suddenly. He looked to the Doc for approval of this sentiment.