Mister Roberts

by Thomas Heggen

  One day, during a lull in his reading schedule, a wonderful idea for the Captain came to Pulver. It was one so stunning that he was able to recognize it immediately as his tour de force. It did not reveal itself to him gradually, as did most of his schemes, but instead it came with the sudden, inevitable force of predestination. It was, quite simply, tremendous: he would get some good substantial firecrackers and throw them into the Old Man's room at night. It was a wonderful idea, and yet it was so simple, so indicated, and so necessary, that Pulver marveled he hadn't thought of it before. The bastard would be walking on his heels for weeks afterward! What a splendid idea! Ensign Pulver dedicated several full minutes to self-gratulation.

  After the first flush of creation, he permitted himself a little to be invaded by realism. He owned no firecrackers, he was sure there were none on the ship, and it was likely that the closest supply was at Honolulu, distant about two thousand miles. But such second-rate ' obstacles were no match for a thing predestined, and he easily surmounted them. Fireworks, he decided strongly, could be manufactured on the ship. Black powder, he thought, would do very nicely. He could make some kind of a fuse too. The idea was a natural- it couldn't possibly fail.

  When the plan was complete and glowing in his mind, he took it, as he took all of his plans, to Lieutenant Roberts. This was quite late at night and Roberts had turned in. He wasn't very enthusiastic when he was awakened to hear the new plan: in fact, he was definitely hostile, if not to the plan, then at least to Pulver. He cursed Pulver vigorously. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

  Ensign Pulver was a little hurt at this reception, but it didn't diminish his faith in the plan one wit. He lay in his bunk that night and stayed awake an excessively long time, fifteen minutes or so, savoring the whole thing. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. He went over in his mind just how it would be. He debated deliciously whether to attach a long time-fuse to the explosive, or to fix a short one, light it, throw it, and run like hell. He finally decided in favor of the short fuse as being the more exciting. He fell happily asleep, mesmerized by a vision of Captain Morton, pop-eyed with terror, quaking at the explosions that rocked his very sanity.

  Next morning he was up at the unprecedented hour of nine. He went right to work. He found some good stout twine to use as a fuse. For a container he cut into firecracker lengths the cardboard roll of a clothes- hanger. He went down to sick-bay and begged some potassium sulphate to saturate the fuse. Then he was ready for the explosive. Ensign Pulver was a competent metallurgist, but his knowledge of explosives was deficient. He had, in the course of the night, abandoned black powder as his choice and substituted fulminate of mercury. He knew that by repute fulminate of mercury was terrific stuff, and he reasoned that the best was none too good for this job. He went down to Olson, the gunner's mate, and obtained four primers used to detonate the old model five-inch bag ammunition. The primers contained fulminate of mercury.

  He was ready then for the test. In a state of high excitement he hurried down to the machine shop just aft of the engine room. The place was well chosen for its subterranean location, large cleared area, and corrugated steel deck. Ensign Pulver cut open the primers, sealed one end of a section of the cardboard tubing, filled the case with fulminate of mercury, inserted the potassium sulphate fuse and plugged the other end around it. He stood back then and viewed the product with an artist's pride. It bulged ominously and did not much resemble a firecracker. Ensign Pulver hummed and smiled happily as he found a match and lit the one-inch fuse.

  He had made two miscalculations. They were fairly grave. He had underestimated the rate at which the potassium sulphate fuse would burn. It went like a streak. And he had grossly underestimated and completely misunderstood the explosive character of fulminate of mercury, which, particle for particle, is just about the most furious substance in the world. The signalmen, way up on the flying bridge, claimed that they could feel the explosion; and certainly every man on the ship heard it. The men in the engine room were terrified; they knew that finally a torpedo had struck. If the Captain had been aboard, he would almost certainly have been screaming, "Prepare to abandon ship!" It was quite a firecracker.

  The Doc said that Ensign Pulver got off very light. His eyebrows and lashes were burned off, and the hair for an area of two inches back from his forehead. He received first-degree burns of the face, neck, and forearms. He was in sick-bay for a day soaking in tannic acid. After that he was up and around, but with his head and throat swathed like a mummy. Perhaps he was a proper object for sympathy, but his appearance short-circuited any that might have been forthcoming. He looked pretty silly without eyebrows and with his nose sticking out from the bandages like a beacon.

  Just as a matter of policy Ensign Pulver always tried to avoid the Captain. He did pretty well, too, sometimes going two and three weeks without even seeing him. Now, however, just a few days after his accident, rounding a corner in the boat-deck passageway, he ran smack into Captain Morton. The Captain hadn't seen or heard of Pulver's condition, and his response was typically childlike. For a moment he gaped and goggled, and then he started chuckling. He had a particularly lewd and rasping chuckle, and he stood pointing at the turbaned Pulver and laughing like a child confronted by a clown.

  "What the hell'd you do?" he demanded. "Stick your head in one of them goddam furnaces down there?" And he chuckled the more at his own wit.

  Ensign Pulver forced a grin, said "Yessir," and started edging toward the down ladder.

  The Captain looked at him benevolently. "Goddamn, boy," he chortled, "you want to keep your head out of those furnaces. Don't you know that?"

  Pulver made another grin, said "Yessir" again sheepishly, and then, when he saw a chance only moderately rude, he ducked down the ladder. He was so furious he couldn't see straight. The goddamned smart-aleck, loud-mouthed son-of-a-bitch! He tried very hard to keep his anger focused on the Captain, but all the time he knew better. What really rubbed, he knew, was his conviction of the considerable justice in the Captain's laughter.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lieutenant Carney, the first division officer, and Lieutenant (jg) Billings, the communicator, had a fight one day. It wasn't a fight, really—more of a spat than anything else—but even so aborted a difference between the two was an event of genuineness. Until this particular day they had roomed together for fifteen months without so much as a sharp word. While the other officers fretted and cursed and complained, Carney and Billings had made a separate peace with each other and with the ship. While the other officers prowled the ship and plotted against the Captain and wore themselves out seeking diversion, these two lay in their bunks and wrestled such conflicts as whether to get up now or wait half an hour until noon. Carney and Billings had reduced life in stateroom number nine to the ultimate simplicity, and were working constantly to push it beyond that point. All the needs of man were right there: the room owned a private head and twenty steps down the passageway was the wardroom with its food and coffee Silex and acey-deucey board. What more could a man want? Billings hadn't been out of the amidships house in two months, since the time he got lost looking for the paint locker.

  They lived a little idyll in stateroom number nine. Billings, who stood no watches, slept every day until noon, but one day out of four Carney had to get up at eight. The process of arising at noon and greeting the not-very-new day was always the same: Billings, who occupied the top bunk, would dangle an arm or a leg over the side; Carney would command fiercely, "Get back in there where you belong"; Billings would comply and say meekly: "I'm sorry"; and Carney would finish off, "And stay there!" This happened three days out of four, and every day—sometimes two and three times a day—another little ritual would be acted out. One would say to the other: "Feel like getting your ass whipped?"; to which the reply was- "Think you're man enough?"; and the reply to that was: "Yes, I think so." Then the two would march to the wardroom, for this was the invitation to acey-deucey combat.

&nb
sp; These sequences were the fixed points of the day, the clichés, the rituals, and like all rituals they were performed automatically, unconsciously, and without awareness of repetition. The plan for the rest of the day was fixed too, but it allowed some small room for improvisation. There were at least two ways in which the afternoon could be spent. Carney was from Osceola, Iowa, where he operated his father's shoe store; Billings was from Minnesota, where he ran a dairy farm. Many afternoons slipped by in thoughtful talk, Carney picturing for Billings the romance of the shoe business, Billings pointing out the grievously neglected fascination of animal husbandry. Other happy afternoons would be devoted to what might be called (if the word did not imply the contrasting present of a gainful occupation) avocations. Carney painted in water colors. He started out on landscapes: he painted a simple pastoral scene, animals grazing in a field, but perspective gave him unexpected trouble, and the cows seemed to be suspended in air over the pigs. He decided he wasn't ready for landscapes. Next he did from a photograph a portrait of his wife, but it was unfortunate too. One eye was larger than the other and focused in another direction, the nose was crooked and the mouth was pulled up as though with paralysis. Carney decided he wasn't ready for portraits either and painted from life a red and yellow-striped thermos bottle which was more successful.

  Billings's hobby was socialism. He had acquired it unexpectedly by reading Upton Sinclair, and been confirmed in it by the pamphlets of Norman Thomas and the essays of Bertrand Russell. He had placed himself on the mailing list of twelve Socialist organs and three Communist, and these of an afternoon he would read aloud to Carney at his painting. Billings tried earnestly to bring Carney to his persuasion, but, although Carney always listened politely, it was clear that he would not become a convert during Billings's lifetime. In the room, though, they lived a quite definite communal life. When the laundry was late, Carney wore Billings's skivvies, and Billings Carney's shirts. Whichever toothpaste happened to be out was the one used. Books had no ownership at all. Through an unuttered agreement Billings supplied cigarettes and soap for the room, while Carney provided Coca-Cola, which he had bought from a merchant ship. Everything in stateroom nine was organized like that; every problem that life could throw up was absorbed, smothered, controlled. Carney and Billings had made an approach to Nirvana equaled by few in our time. It was strange, then, that they should have this quarrel.

  It happened while the ship was unloading again at Apathy island. It was a wretched place, flat and rank and bilious green; bad enough to look at and worse to smell. Great fat swollen flies with a sting like a bee's swarmed out from the island and infested the ship. Long, vicious mosquitoes came out too. Eight- and ten- foot sharks patrolled the ship to prevent swimming. There wasn't a thing over on the beach; not an officers' club, not even a single bottle of beer. And hot!—all day long the sun pounded down through the breathless air, and all day the porous jungle absorbed and stored the heat. And then at night, when the sun had set and the cool time should begin, the jungle exhaled in a foul, steaming breath the day's accumulation of heated air. It was a maddening place; everyone got on the nerves of everyone else; there were five fist-fights while the ship was there. Still, you had a right to expect Carney and Billings to be impervious to all this.

  The quarrel began in the morning and gathered momentum through the day. It began when it became too hot even to sleep, when both Carney and Billings awoke at the unheard-of hour of nine. For a while they lay in their bunks and didn't move and didn't talk. From the top bunk Billings could look out the porthole and see the glaring water and the seedy island. Carney couldn't see them from the bottom bunk, but he knew they were there. Then Billings dangled a foot over the edge of the bunk. "Get back in there," Carney said listlessly, out of old habit. Billings's answer was unexpected and startling: "Cut it out," he said sharply.

  For a moment, after it was said, it was very quiet in there. Neither said any more and after a little Billings sat up and crawled down from his bunk. He was sweating and he plodded to the head to take a shower. He came out cursing: the water was off: it was outside of water hours. Angrily, he put on his shoes and started dressing. He couldn't find his shirt right away. "Where's my goddamn shirt?" he grumbled, more to himself than to Carney. It didn't require an answer, but Carney, smarting under Billings's testiness of a few minutes back, gave him one. "How the hell should I know?" he snapped.

  If Billings had said something then, if perhaps they had exchanged a few words, they might have removed the whole matter from their chests. But Billings turned his back and didn't say a word. He went down to the wardroom for a cup of coffee and he was sore. He was sore and simmering when he went into the wardroom, but when there was no coffee on the Silex he flared into anger. That son-of-a-bitch, he thought: and curiously enough he wasn't designating the steward's mate who had neglected the coffee, he was thinking of Carney.

  Within the next half-hour a combination of several things set his nasty temper like plaster. Upon investigation he found that tonight's movie was a dreary, stupid musical which had already been shown once on the ship and which he had seen in the States three years ago. That took the last bit of hope from the day right there. Then the Captain called him up and ate his ass out for the way the signalmen were keeping the flying bridge. After that Billings sat down and broke a message which ordered the ship, upon completing discharge, right back to the place it had left, a place almost as sorry as this. And, finally, he learned that the unloading was going very slowly, so slowly that they wouldn't be out of here for a week anyway.

  Everyone had counted on getting out in four days at the most.

  That did it, the last piece of news did it. A little later Billings went down to the room. Carney was up now, sitting at the desk in his shorts writing a letter. His clothes were thrown across Billings's bunk. Billings exploded: "Get your goddamn crap off my bed!" He flung the clothes onto the bottom bunk.

  Carney didn't look up from his letter. "Screw you, you silly bastard," he said coldly.

  "Right through the nose," Billings replied and went out. The thing was declared then; it was out in the open. From then on, it mounted steadily. Noon chow, consisting of a New England boiled dinner despised by all, eaten in collaboration with a hundred arrogant flies, didn't help matters. After lunch Carney got into the room first and into the shower first. That was at twelve- thirty; the water went off promptly at one. Billings wanted very much to take a shower. He sat around the room quite obviously waiting to do so. At one minute to one Carney, singing happily, stepped out of the shower.

  "You're pretty goddamn smart, aren't you?" Billings snarled.

  "I think so," said Carney blandly.

  "Jesus!" Billings said disgustedly. He stalked out and the heat of his anger climbed higher and higher. "Jesus," he fumed, "what a cheap son-of-a-bitch!" As the afternoon wore on, he thought furiously and obsessionally of his roommate, and the more he thought, the angrier he got. And, curiously, the angrier he got, the thirstier he got. By three o'clock he craved a drink, specifically a Coca-Cola, more than anything in the world. Every afternoon at three he and Carney would drink a Coca-Cola cooled with ice from the wardroom refrigerator. It had become an addiction for both, and Billings had to have his now. It was, of course, out of the question to ask that son-of-a-bitch Carney for one, so Billings decided to steal it. But when he went down to the room to accomplish this, Carney was there, sitting at the desk, approximately the size of life. He was painting what seemed to be a native outrigger canoe, and on the desk beside him was a frosty glass of Coca- Cola. Billings went out without a word. Craftily he went to the wardroom and seated himself so that he could watch the door. It wasn't long until Carney came out and went down the passageway. It wasn't long then until Billings streaked for the room. The cokes, he well knew, were at the bottom of Carney's closet. He was delighted with himself, exhilaratingly revenged, elated, until he tried the closet door. It was locked.

  To Billings's credit, it must be said that he took
this in stride. He did the only thing possible under the circumstances. He collected all of the cigarettes, all the matches, all the soap, even tiny slivers from the trays, and locked them in his drawer. It wasn't enough, but it was the only thing he could do. He went out and when it was time to wash up for evening chow, he returned to the room. Carney was still there. Without a word Billings unlocked his drawer, took out the soap and washed himself. Then he locked up the soap again.

  Carney watched, smiling superiorly. "My," he said, "aren't we smart?"

  "I think so," said Billings. He knew that Carney was burned up.

  That was the penultimate round. The climax came after the movie. The picture turned out poor as everyone knew, and some of the crew didn't even wait for the finish. Billings and the amiable Ensign Pulver left early and were sitting talking in stateroom nine when Carney came in. Pulver, who was ignorant of the day's tension, greeted Carney cheerily: "Hi, Louie," he said.

  "Sit down and let's have one of your cokes."