Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Behind them, to port, a great froth of water continued to boil up along both sides of the tug. It had swung around so that the full power of its engine at Emergency Astern was pulling Eel away from the tanker. The tug’s bow was high, unnaturally so. Its stern squatted under the pull of its big tugboat propeller and the strain of the towing lines. Eel was moving sideways in a fairly satisfactory manner—and the tug’s diesels would need an overhaul when it got back to Mare Island. Now, the crisis past, Rich could see the tug skipper fumble with his engine annunciator. A moment later the wash from astern subsided. The man made a show of mopping his face, then picked up a megaphone near his feet.

  “Any damage over there?” he yelled. “You look okay—any injuries?”

  “We’re all right!” Richardson yelled back through his cupped hands. “He hit us up high. No damage to the hull!” He paused. Now that the emergency was over, another emotion was sweeping through his body. The adrenaline which had been commanding him was still surging through his system. He could feel the hot, impotent rage. “You get his name?” he yelled.

  “No! Too busy!”

  “Well, I did! I’ll file the report! That incompetent bastard ought to have his license lifted!” Rich could feel his hands trembling against his cheeks. Pilot or skipper, whoever had been conning the loaded tanker, should not get away scot-free. He should have known that his deeply laden ship could not have turned inside the approaching tug and tow, that the rules of the road required him, as the privileged vessel in a crossing situation, to hold his course and speed!

  The tugmaster waved his megaphone in acknowledgment. Two men appeared on his forecastle and another pair aft to handle his lines as he began to maneuver back to his original position on Eel’s port quarter.

  “He sure belongs to the Don’t Worry Club,” said Buck after a moment. “Me, I’m mad as hell at that tanker. What in the devil was that son of a bitch over there thinking of? Who taught him to handle a ship?”

  “He was a fool, that’s for sure,” said Keith. “Maybe we looked farther away than we were because we’re so small compared to him. That’s no excuse, though, even if he didn’t have a radar.”

  “He had a radar, all right,” Buck said. “I saw it turning on top of his bridge.”

  “At least he reversed his rudder in time,” said Rich, the fury still strong in him. Then he added, “Good thing he had the sense to stop his engine, too, when he saw we were going to hit aft.” He could feel the anger leveling out, the hot blood cooling into more professional indignation.

  “I’ll bet he was thinking more of bent blades than the damage the spinning propeller might do to us,” said Buck, angrily. “Besides that, some of us could have been hurt. You were right alongside the periscope shears. You could have been squashed between them and the overhang of that big tub of his.”

  The thought of personal danger seemed suddenly calming. The determination to make an official report of the incident was still fixed—it was his duty in any event, and the Brazilian Navy would no doubt want to know. So would the commander of the shipyard at Hunter’s Point, who would have to allocate funds for whatever repairs were thereby necessitated.

  Rich realized he was hungry too, as he heard Keith say, “Me, I’m all at once hungry. Do you think we might drop below and have one last meal in our old wardroom? Things look pretty clear now.”

  The prospect of leaving Eel’s bridge unwatched went against the grain, but a short shouted conversation with the tugmaster from the main deck abreast his pilothouse took care of the matter. His instructions punctuated by massive bites from the spread of sandwiches before him on top of the binnacle, the warrant boatswain sent one of his crew members over to the submarine, where he could relay immediate information below by telephone. Once this was arranged, the operation of the ship’s phones explained, Rich climbed down the familiar ladders into the control room, ducked through a watertight doorway and joined the others.

  Keith and Buck had arranged lanterns in the corners of the tiny wardroom—strange how small it looked—and they had spread a white tablecloth on the green linoleum of the tabletop. The cloth had seen better days. It was yellow around the edges and along its prominent creases. “Where did you find this?” asked Richardson, surprised.

  “We were wondering if it was still here,” said Keith. “Remember our last meal aboard, back in ’45? There weren’t many of us left, then, just a couple of the chiefs and two other sailors, plus Woodrow and the three of us. So all of us were around this table for that last breakfast. The lights were already out, too, just like now, and we had to use the battle lanterns. Anyway, after it was over we cleaned up, and I folded the tablecloth and stuck it in a drawer under my desk. That’s where I found it, right where I left it.”

  Keith’s words loosed a compartment in Richardson’s mind. Some locked door, as yet only imperfectly opened, suddenly flung itself wide. A naval career always involved leaving behind old friends, and old ships, and moving on to new ones. Knowing the day was coming when it would be necessary to turn the key on the ship and crew which had meant so much to him, knowing that things could never be the same anyway, he had nerved himself to go through the ritual. If he had been the only one to consider, he would simply have gone away. But there had been a decommissioning ceremony, a required inspection in company with the reserve force commander who was about to add Eel to the list of ships of which he was nominally commanding officer. There was completion of the machinery history and the deficiency list, and a hundred other items invented by Navy bureaucracy for the better administration of its ships. All were now unnecessary, outmoded, no longer relevant. They were required because some regulation, or some senior officer, somewhere, said so. But few were actually of any earthly significance in the particular circumstance of the postwar decommissioning and mothballing of the Eel. The last thing of all was the official terminal entry in the log, which he had made himself.

  He had submerged himself in these details, railed at them because they could not be avoided, spent his time accomplishing them because some amorphous, unidentifiable authority, unnamed, unknown and probably nonexistent behind the myriad façade of Fleet Orders, Force Instructions, Navy Department Orders, Bureau of Naval Personnel Letters and rules and regulations of every conceivable kind, simply prescribed them. Now he realized he had secretly been glad they existed.

  The reality, he had frequently reminded himself—it had been something like a placebo for his mixed-up feelings—was in that quonset hut in another part of the Mare Island Navy Yard, where he had brought Laura. Where, like a hundred other wives in like circumstances, she was struggling to create a home inside the curved walls and rudimentary facilities which were all the Navy could provide for seagoing personnel. He would never have believed, then, what he knew now, that even Laura’s gentle ministrations had not been adequate to assuage his depression, that he had welcomed the mountain of meaningless detail because it gave a sense of accomplishing something for the Eel (inanimate steel that she was) and her steadily decreasing crew. It was almost as though the Navy understood that wartime skippers of small, tightly knit ships like submarines or destroyers might need something to keep them from going mad during the enforced dissolution, and had deliberately provided it.

  Buck Williams’ voice cut through, started a new train of thought. “We sure used to spend a lot of time thinking up big schemes in this little place. Remember the rockets we took on our third patrol, and how we finally used them on the emperor’s palace?”

  “Getting there was really something,” chimed in Keith. “Those rockets had just one range, you know, and we couldn’t train the launcher, either. So we had to get to the exact spot we picked, and lie to there with the boat exactly stern-on to the palace. That’s when I earned my navigator’s merit badge. If old Doherty hadn’t been helping me we’d never have made it.”

  “That was just one of the good jobs you did for us, Keith,” said Richardson. “More power to Doherty, too. He was a sharp navigating qu
artermaster. Wonder what he’s doing now—but it was really you, you know. Remember how you found our carrier? The ultra message was wrong, and you were the one to realize it. If you hadn’t made me change position at the last minute we’d not have found him.”

  “Sure, Skipper,” said Buck, “and if you hadn’t got the damned torpedoes squared away earlier she’d never have sunk, either. We only had four fish left, remember.”

  “Admiral Small gets the credit for the torpedoes in my book,” said Rich. “He’s the man who fought that fight all the way to the top. Joe Blunt was his honcho for the experiments, and I was lucky to be around with my bum leg after the Walrus. That was right before the Eel showed up needing a new skipper.”

  “And crew, too,” said Keith. “That was some training period you put us through. After that, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. I guess chasing that convoy out of Tsingtao was the toughest thing, ending up in the fight with the Mikura tincan. But getting those Chinese coast watchers right out from under the Japanese Army on our next run was no picnic either. I’m still envious of Buck, too, for having the most fun of all, going ashore to blow up that train in the tunnel.”

  “The British did the same thing in World War One,” said Buck. “Do you still have that book of yours, Skipper? We all read it for ideas. That Sea of Marmara submarine business of theirs was wild, the way they went through nets and minefields with those old simple boats. They didn’t have any of the special stuff we had for our Tsushima caper.”

  The conversation was animated, each bringing up his own memory nuggets, each reliving the exciting days, hardly waiting for the preceding episode to be savored before claiming attention for his own latest recollection. They had, as a matter of course, ranged themselves in their habitual places in the wardroom. Richardson could almost imagine all of them turned back in time, himself included. All were fifteen years older: Keith and Buck designated to command new submarines the like of which had not even been dreamed of when last they had sat here; himself, now nearly as old as Joe Blunt had been, named to be their squadron commander. Yet, in Richardson’s eyes, all looked the same. Buck’s hairline had receded a trifle, lines had become permanently etched around his mouth and eyes, and he was a little heavier, though still the wiry, humorous activist. Keith looked precisely as before. His shock of brown hair was as full as ever, the wide-spaced light gray eyes looking as directly and sincerely as always from a still youthful, though more mature and self-confident, face. If anything, he was even more trim than before. Only his capable hands and stubby fingers, slightly more wrinkled, betrayed that he must be nearing forty years of age.

  Richardson himself looked no different in his own eyes, certainly felt no different, although he had had to make the usual adjustment to growing astigmatism: glasses for reading in artificial light. His two juniors would have testified that the intervening years sat lightly on him, forgetting that the change in their own perspectives worked both ways. The sandy hair was farther back over the temples, the nose with that strange crease in it was slightly heavier, the skin under his chin a little more lined, looser. He, too, had kept his weight, although (his own confession) it had been a battle because of Laura’s good cooking.

  The lunch, despite coming out of boxes, was excellent. All three were ravenous, ate swiftly. There was a tacit understanding that they could not stay too long below. Besides, San Francisco Bay had too much of interest.

  “I wonder what Furakawa is doing now,” said Keith, pouring himself a second cup of coffee from the thermos jug. “He was one of those dedicated naval officers. Samurai, I’ll bet. Actually I rather got to like him, even though I was certainly afraid of him for a while.”

  “Yancy said none of them would have lasted another day in the water,” said Richardson. “They were in a pretty bad way at first. But I agree with you. After he got back on his feet, he was a menace until the surrender.”

  “Lining them all up outside the wardroom, in the passageway, to hear the surrender broadcast was a stroke of genius,” said Buck. “Remember the look on their faces? I’m sure it was old Hirohito himself, because they all bowed down to our radio. That was the day we realized for sure they were planning something really desperate. Old Furakawa had the oddest expression when we paraded him through the boat and showed him the stuff we had laid out to clobber his people with.”

  “That was after his personal surrender, wasn’t it, Skipper? Didn’t he personally tell you the war was over so far as he was concerned? But I can recall being petrified when you let him come into your room alone. What if he’d tried to attack you right then?” Keith frowned at the memory.

  “Well, I was ready for him, and we knew he had no weapons,” said Rich. “Besides, he was a man of honor, and I figured he’d keep his word. If it had been Moonface, now, from our second run, you can bet I’d have been a lot less accessible. I’d like to see Furakawa again, too. Someday he may be running the new Japanese Navy. He was an honest, dedicated man, as you said, and an enemy to be respected, even while he was a prisoner. I learned a lot about his country from him while we were waiting to get out of the Sea of Japan.” He glanced at his watch, lifted his cup for the last gulp of coffee.

  The others were torn between the desire to preserve a delicious nostalgic moment and the need they all felt to go on deck again. Twenty minutes below, now exceeded, was long enough for almost anything to happen. But Buck tried to hold the magic an instant longer. “Speaking of Moonface,” he said, “makes me think of poor old Commodore Blunt. What a shame no one realized how sick he really was. He should have been in a hospital instead of being sent to sea as our wolfpack commander. I don’t suppose any hospital could have helped his brain tumor, but if you hadn’t had Yancy put him out that day . . .” he stopped uneasily. Something, a shadow intensified by the dim light, had crossed Richardson’s face. Keith’s smile had changed to a thundercloud. He should have remembered that Jobie Richardson’s real name was Joseph B., and that the middle initial stood for “Blunt.” “Sorry, Skipper,” he muttered, thoroughly abashed. “That was dumb of me. I know how much you thought of him.”

  Richardson was looking at his watch again, rising from the table, his countenance expressionless. “That’s okay, Buck,” he said. “Joe Blunt was my first submarine skipper, and I wish none of that had happened, that’s all. But I think we’d better go back topside. Seeing San Francisco Bay like this is too good to pass up.” He strode purposefully into the passageway, did not hear Keith’s savage, low-voiced comment to Williams as they busied themselves with the cleanup Richardson had forgotten.

  “What in God’s name made you bring that up, Buck? Both of us know it was about the only thing we could do, but I bet he’s been killing himself over that ever since. We never made any official report about giving Blunt that mickey, you know, and haven’t you heard some of the weird stories on the wives’ circuit?”

  “No. What stories?”

  “Peggy says the rumor is he didn’t die of a brain tumor at all!”

  “What did he die of, then? That’s what the doctors found when we brought him back!”

  “That’s what they said they found, Buck. Some folks will see dirt anywhere. You know that!”

  “Like what, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Like maybe someone did him in, if you want it cold turkey! We were pretty desperate during that depth charging, remember. He damn near got us sunk! Rich saved us. No one else could have. The whole crew knew it. The way we all felt after that, maybe someone could . . .”

  “That’s crazy, Keith!”

  “You know that. We all know that didn’t happen. But don’t forget, we were in damn bad shape. The idea must have crossed quite a few minds, about then. A lot of rumors get started that way. After the fact. And when did the truth ever stop one? It’s been fifteen years, and Peggy said some gal whispered it to her a while ago. I just hope it never gets back to Rich or Laura!”

  “Do you think there’s a chance of that?”

  “Ho
w should I know? I just know nobody better say anything like that around me. But I thought you must not have heard it.”

  “Thanks, Keith,” said Williams somberly, as the two friends reached the watertight door leading to the control room. “Depend on me to keep my smarts from now on. This is plain sick—” They ducked through the door.

  Richardson was standing there, one hand on the ladder leading to the conning tower, much as he had been accustomed to in times past. “I thought you might have gone up ahead of me,” he said. “I just took a quick turn through the after compartments. The dehumidification machinery did a pretty good job. She looks clean and neat, just the way we left her. I didn’t see any rust or moisture stains.”

  “We’ll probably have one last tour through with the Brazilians, won’t we?” said Keith. “Isn’t that what ComSubPac wants?”

  “No doubt, but this is our last look while she’s still ours.” Rich stopped. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I don’t know what I expected to find, or feel. It was good to sit in the wardroom and talk, and think about things that used to go on. For a minute it almost felt like those old days. But it isn’t the same to stand here and look at all this cold equipment. Even when we walked off the last time, back then, it didn’t feel like this. Up to now, I’ve always thought of this control room as being full of people, with plenty of room for all of them to do their jobs. Now, I can’t see where we put them all. It’s exactly the same place, and yet it isn’t. And I don’t think it ever will be again. It’s the same with the galley and crew’s mess hall, the whole after battery, and the engineroom. She’s a dead ship, and you can feel it.”

  Keith and Buck nodded their understanding. Much the same thought had occurred to them as well. It was not something one could lay one’s hands on. The old atmosphere was gone. Their attempt to revive it in the wardroom had succeeded only for the instant, had collapsed because there was no way it could be perpetuated.