Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  Around noon, human nature revolted. The black gang be-gan to bootleg water in the after engine room, where the evaporators were, so that no pressure would be found by Queeg in any pipes. The word passed through the ship like a telegram. The two narrow steel ladders descending to the broiling, clank-ing engine space became choked with sailors. Paynter quickly discovered what was happening, and reported it to Maryk in the charthouse. The executive officer shrugged. "Can't hear a word you're saying," he said. "Stack gas has got my ears ringing."

  This blessed relief was available only to the crew. Word of it soon reached all the officers; but, unanimously disloyal though they were to Queeg, a vague yet pervasive sense of the sym-bolism of an officer's cap kept them from descending the engine-room ladders.

  Ducely, indeed, dropped his head on his arms beside the coding machine at three o'clock, and bleated to Willie that he could stand it no more; he was going aft to get a drink in the engine room. Willie glared at him. Ensign Keith bore small resemblance at this moment to the chubby, cheery-faced piano player who had walked into Furnald Hall fourteen months earlier. He had marked lines around mouth and nose; cheek-bones and chin stood out from the round face. His eyes were sunk in smudged sockets. His face was grimy, and brown hairs bristled all over it. Trickles of sweat ran down his face into the neck of his open collar, staining the shirt dark brown. "You go back aft, you sad little bastard," he said (Ducely was three inches the taller of the two), "and you had better start living in your life jacket. I swear to God I'll throw you over the side."

  Ducely moaned, lifted his head, and resumed picking feebly at the coding machine.

  In one respect Captain Queeg's isolation from his officers was not as complete as he might have wished; having no private toilet, he was compelled to come below to use the officers' head in the wardroom passageway. These periodic appearances of the captain at odd hours sometimes led to trouble. It had become instinctive with all the officers to listen for the clang of the captain's door, and to spring into attitudes of virtue as soon as they heard it. One would leap out of his bunk and pick up a fistful of official mail, another would dart at a coding machine, a third would seize a pen and a mess statement, and a fourth would flip open a logbook.

  Since Willie and Ducely were honorably employed, the bang of the captain's door at this moment did not trouble them. Queeg appeared a few seconds later and flapped through the wardroom in his run-down slippers, pouting morosely at va-cancy as usual. The two officers did not look up from their coding. There was quiet while one might count ten, then a sudden frightful yammering in the passageway. Willie jumped up, thinking, or rather half hoping, that the captain had touched some defective light socket and electrocuted himself. He ran up the passageway, followed by Ducely. But there was nothing wrong with the captain, except that he was screeching unin-telligibly into the officers' shower room. Ensign Jorgensen, naked as a cow, his large pink behind jutting like a shelf from his sway back, stood under the shower, his shoulders unmistak-ably wet, the iron deck under his feel covered with droplets. One hand gripped the shower valve, and with the other he was mechanically fumbling at his car to adjust glasses that weren't there. His face wore an idiotically pleasant smile. Out of the captain's jumbled sounds emerged the words, "-dare to violate my orders, my express orders? How dare you?"

  "The water left in the pipes, sir-in the pipes, that's all," babbled Jorgensen. "I was just using the water in the pipes, I swear."

  "The water in the pipes, hey? Very good. That's what the officers on this ship can all use for a while. The crew's water restriction goes off at five o'clock. The officers' restriction will continue for another forty-eight hours. You inform Mr. Maryk of that fact, Mr. Jorgensen, and then submit a written report to me explaining why I should not make out an unsatisfactory fitness report for you" (he spat out the word "fitness" as though it were an oath) "at once!"

  "The water in the pipes, sir," groaned Jorgensen, but Queeg had flounced into the head, and slammed the door. Keith and Ducely stared at Jorgensen, with stern, hating faces.

  "Fellows, I've got to have my shower or I don't feel human," said Jorgensen, with injured self-righteousness. "I was only using the water in the pipes, really."

  "Jorgensen," said Willie, "the water supply for nine men dying of thirst has coursed away into that huge cleft between your buttocks. That's the right place for it, since your whole personality is concentrated in there. I hope you enjoyed it."

  The officers of the Caine went without water for two more days. They all took turns at cursing Jorgensen, and then for-gave him. The breeze changed, and the horror of the stack gas and cabbage fumes abated, but the weather continually grew hotter and stickier. There was nothing to do but suffer, and slander the captain. The officers did plenty of both.

  Funafuti Atoll was a necklace of low islands richly green, flung on the empty sea. The Caine entered it shortly after sunrise, steaming slowly through a gap of blue water in the long white line of breakers on the reef. Half an hour later the minesweeper was secured to the port side of the destroyer tender Pluto, outboard of two other ships. Lines for steam, water, and electric power were hurriedly run across; the fires were allowed to die on the Caine; and the ship commenced to nurse itself at the generous dugs of the Pluto. The tender with its litter swung to a heavy anchor chain, fifteen hundred yards from the beach of Funafuti Island.

  Willie was one of the first over the gangplank. A visit to a destroyer tender's communication office saved him whole days of decoding. It was part of the tender's service to decode and mimeograph fleet messages. These AlPacs, AlComs, AlFleets, GenPacs, PacFleets, AlNavs, NavGens, SoPacGens, and Cent-PacGens were what broke the backs of overburdened destroyer communicators.

  There was a choppy swell in the lagoon. Willie airily crossed the unsteady planks over the sucking, churning, murderous little spaces between the ships. From the destroyer next to the Pluto a broad, stout gangplank on rollers slanted upward. Willie mounted it and found himself in a roaring machine shop. He groped around the cavernous tender, through zigzagging passageways and up and down ladders, passing in and out of a blacksmith shop, a barbershop, a carpenter shop, a laundry, a stainless-steel kitchen where hundreds of chickens were fry-ing, a bakery, and twenty other such civilized enterprises. Throngs of sailors moved sedately through these clean, fresh--painted spaces, most of them eating ice cream out of paper cups. They looked different from his own crew; generally older, fatter, and more peaceful; a species of herbivorous sailor, one might say, as contrasted to the coyotes of the Caine.

  He stumbled at last upon the immense wardroom. Brown leather couches stretched along the bulkheads, and officers in khaki stretched upon the couches. There were perhaps fifteen of these prostrate figures. Willie walked up to a bulky body and touched the shoulder. The officer grunted, rolled over, and sat up, blinking. He stared at Willie a moment, and said, "I'll be goddamned-the demerit king, Midshipman Keith."

  The jowly face had familiar, half-obliterated features. Willie studied the officer with some embarrassment and put out his hand. "That's right," he said, and added, with a sudden jolt of recognition, "Aren't you Ensign Acres?"

  "Good for you. Only it's Lieutenant jg." Acres uttered a wheezy laugh. "They don't always recognize me. Coffee?"

  "Yes," he said, a few minutes later, stirring his cup, "I've put on at least forty pounds, I know. You do, on these damn tenders. There's so much of everything-You look pretty good. Skinnier. Sort of older, somehow. You got a good deal?"

  "It's all right," Willie said. He was trying to keep himself from staring in wonder at Acres. The once stern, handsome drill officer was a fat wreck.

  "Can't beat this deal," said Acres. "Oh, you see these guys?" He swept a scornful thumb around at the sleepers. "Ask them, and half of them will cry that they hate this dull noncombatant life, being stuck forever in a godforsaken atoll. All they want is action, action, they say. They want to be part of this great battle, they say. When, oh when, will orders ever come, taking
them to a fighting ship?... Horse feathers. I handle the ship's correspondence. I know who puts in transfer requests and who doesn't. I know who kicks and screams when the possibility arises of giving 'em some temporary staff duty with a commodore on a tin can. They all love this deal. I do, and I admit it. Want a cheese sandwich? We have some terrific Roquefort."

  "Sure."

  The Roquefort was exquisite, and so was the fresh white bread.

  "The thing is, Keith, that all of us supine bastards are actually doing a damn good and damn necessary job. Have you tried the facilities of this ship? Destroyers beg to get a few days alongside the Pluto. We are the can-do ship. We've got it so well organized, and there's so little waste motion, no steaming here and there and buttoning up for sea and going to GQ and all that combat crap that eats up honest worktime-" He took another slice of bread and lavishly smeared Roquefort cheese on it. "You married, Keith?"

  "No."

  "I am. Got married I guess during the next class after the one you were in. You were the December '42 bunch, weren't you? It's all getting hazy. Well, anyway, I met this girl, blonde, she was a secretary in the English Department at Columbia. Got married in three weeks." Acres grinned, and sighed, and noisily sucked up his cup of coffee and poured more. "Well, you know, we instructors had a pretty good deal, Keith. What we put in for, we got. I always had figured that when my year of teaching was up I'd put in for subs. Had read up all the submarine doctrine-well. That was before I married. I studied all the ships in the fleet roster, Keith, and put in for destroyer tender. Smart. The mail comes here mighty regularly, and I live for it, Keith. Got a baby two months old I've never seen. Girl.... I'm the communicator on this bucket. I should have asked you before, is there something I can do for you?"

  Acres took Willie to the communication office, a spacious room on the main deck furnished with new chairs and desks of green-enameled metal, bubbling coffee makers, and several sleek scrubbed yeomen in fresh blue dungarees. At a word from Acres the yeomen sprang up, and out of clean cabinets and flawlessly regular files they produced in a few minutes all the decodes Willie wanted, and a series of new fleet letters. Weeks of piled-up work melted away for the Caine's communi-cator. He looked around at the shelves of books in alphabetical order, at the wire baskets almost clear of correspondence, at the handsome plexiglass file boards of Fox skeds and decodes, and wondered at this weird antiseptic efficiency. His gaze rested on Acres, whose belly bulged in two khaki rolls above and below his belt. The Pluto's communicator, flipping through a sheaf of AlNavs, glanced up at Willie's collar pin. "Is that gold or silver?"

  "Gold."

  "Should be silver, Keith. You make jg on the new AlNav. Class of February. Congratulations."

  "Thanks," said Willie, shaking hands, "but my skipper still has to approve."

  "Oh, hell, that's automatic. Buy yourself some collar pins while you're here. Come on, I'll show you where. Got every-thing?"

  When Willie left Acres at the gangway, the communicator said, "Come on over and eat with me any time. Lunch. Dinner. We'll shoot the breeze some more. We have strawberries and cream all the time."

  "Sure," Willie said. "Thanks a million."

  He crossed the nest to the Caine. As he came over the gang-plank and set foot on the rusty, littered quarterdeck, he straightened like a German and threw Harding a salute which brought a smile of mournful amusement to the ensign's face. "I report my return aboard, sir!"

  "Got the jerks, Willie? A salute like that can break your arm."

  Willie walked forward. He smiled at the dirty, ragged Apaches of the crew, passing here and there on the deck in their accustomed tasks. Mackenzie, Jellybelly, Langhorne of the long bony jaw, Horrible with his pimples, Urban, Stilwell, Chief Budge, one after the other they went by and Willie realized that he had never had relatives or friends whom he knew as well and could estimate as clearly as any second-class seaman of the Caine. "Jellybelly," he called, "six fat sacks of mail for us on the tender-four official, two personal-"

  "Aye aye, sir. Get 'em right away."

  On the well deck a group of deck hands were dividing and devouring an immense round yellow cheese, plunder from the Pluto, with the shrill chattering of blue jays. Crumbs of the cheese were scattered on the deck. Willie accepted a broken, fingerprinted yellow morsel from the redheaded Jew, Kapilian, and crammed it in his mouth.

  In his room Willie stuck the lieutenant junior-grade bars into the collar of a new khaki shirt he had bought on the Pluto. He drew the green curtain, put on the shirt, and exam-ined himself in the mirror by the dim yellow overhead light. He noted his flat stomach, his lean face, his tired, black--rimmed, dogged eyes. His lips were dragged downward and compressed.

  He shook his head. With that gesture, he gave up a plan which he had been secretly harboring for a week. There was a chaplain on the Pluto; he had passed his office; but Willie knew now that he was not going to hunt up the chaplain and tell him the story of the water famine. "You may not be much," he said aloud to his mirror image, "but you don't have to go weeping to anybody on the Pluto. You're Lieutenant Keith of the Caine."

  23

  Court-Martial of Stilwell

  "Mistuh Keith, exec want to see you, sub."

  "Okay, Rasselas." Willie reluctantly dropped on his desk the nine mildewed letters from May that had just come in the mailbags from the Pluto, and went to the exec's room.

  "Things are closing in, Willie." Maryk handed him a long typed letter on Red Cross stationery. Willie read it, squatting on the coaming of the doorway. He felt sick, as though he himself were trapped. "Captain seen it?"

  Maryk nodded. "Summary court-martial for Stilwell day after tomorrow. You're going to be the recorder."

  "The what?"

  "Recorder."

  "What's that?"

  The exec shook his head and grinned. "Don't you know any Navy regulations? Get out Courts and Boards and get hot on summary court-martials."

  "What do you think will happen to Stilwell?"

  "Well, that's up to Keefer, Harding, and Paynter. They're the court."

  "Well, then, he'll be okay."

  "Maybe," Maryk said dryly.

  A couple of hours later Rasselas went searching the ship for the communicator and found him flat on his face on the flying bridge, asleep in the sun. Jellybelly's ragged copy of Courts and Boards lay open on the deck beside him, the pages flapping in the breeze. "Suh, Mistuh Keith, suh. Cap'n wants you, suh."

  "Oh, God. Thanks, Rasselas."

  Queeg looked up from his jigsaw puzzle with a remarkably pleasant, youthful smile when Willie came into his cabin. It brought back forcibly to Willie how much he had liked Queeg at their first handshake so long, long ago.

  "Well, Mr. Keith, here's something for you." Queeg took several clipped sheets from an overflowing wire basket and gave them to the communicator. They were Willie's appoint-ment to lieutenant junior grade. Queeg stood, and offered his hand. "Congratulations, Lieutenant."

  Willie had been comforting himself for months with a dark fantasy. He had resolved that if ever a moment came when Queeg offered to shake hands with him, he would refuse. With that one gesture he would tell the captain once for all what the world of gentlemen, in the person of Willie Keith, thought of people like Queeg. Now it had suddenly come, the chance to make the daydream real-but the sad fact is, Willie meekly took the captain's hand and said, "Thank you, sir."

  "Not at all, Willie. We have our little differences, naturally, but as an officer you measure up very well-very well, on the whole. Now then. All set to be recorder at the court-martial?"

  "Well, sir, I've been boning up on this Courts and Boards--seems I'm a combination prosecutor and legal adviser-"

  "Yes, well, don't let all that legal gobbledygook throw you. I've been a recorder five, six times and the last thing I know anything about-or want to know anything about-is law. The important thing is to have a yeoman who's on the ball and gets the whole thing typed up right, according to the form in the book.
Porteous knows his stuff, so you'll be okay. Just bear down on him and make sure he dots the i's and crosses the t's. Stilwell's going to get a bad-conduct discharge and I want to be damn sure it sticks."

  Willie blurted in plain puzzlement, "How do you know what he's going to get, sir?"

  "Hell, he's guilty, isn't he? A fraud like that calls for the stiffest sentence a summary court can give, which is a BCD."

  "Sir, it's just that-well, it sure looks as though Stilwell is guilty-but-to prove it legally may be a little tougher than-"

  "Prove it, hell! Here's his confession." Queeg snatched a typewritten sheet from the wire basket and tossed it on the desk in front of Willie. "There's a way of doing these things. The court-martial is a formality, that's all. How the hell could four ignoramuses like you and Keefer and those two others try a not-guilty plea? You'd make a million mistakes. You take that confession now."