Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "Aye aye, sir." Willie folded the paper away carefully.

  "Now if there are any questions, any points that you and Porteous can't figure out between you, why, remember to bring the record up here to me. I don't want the big boys to throw it out on some goddamn technical point. I want this thing to stick, do you understand?"

  Willie took the confession to his room and read it. At first he was sure that Stilwell was lost. Then he opened Courts and Boards to the section on confessions, and studied it carefully, underlining several sentences. He sent for Stilwell. In a few minutes the sailor appeared in the doorway. He wore painfully clean dungarees, and wrung a new white hat in his hands. "You want me, Mr. Keith?"

  "Come in. Draw the curtain.... Sit down on that bunk." The sailor closed the curtain, and stood with his back to it. "Pretty sad business, Stilwell."

  "I know, sir. I'll take what's coming to me. Whatever it is, it was worth it. If that's all-"

  "Why did you confess?"

  "Hell, the captain had me cold, sir, with that Red Cross letter."

  "Oh, he showed that to you?"

  "He says, `Take your choice. A clean breast of it, and a summary court on the ship, or try to bluff through, and get yourself a general court back in the States, and probably ten years.' What would you do, sir?"

  "Stilwell, what has the captain got against you?"

  "Holy Christ! You tell me, sir."

  Lieutenant Keith pulled forward the open copy of Courts and Boards on the desk. He read the section on confessions aloud to the sailor. At first Stilwell's face lit with desperate hope, but the liveliness quickly went out of his face. "What's the use, sir? It's too late now. I didn't know about that book."

  Lighting a cigarette, Willie leaned back in his chair and stared at the overhead, smoking in silence for a minute. "Stil-well, if you quote me to the captain as saying this, I'll call you a liar. But if you'll call on me to bear you out from the book, I will. Do you see the difference? I want to tell you two things to think about overnight."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "First, if you repudiate that confession it can't possibly be used against you in court. That, I swear. Second-and don't ever tell the captain I said this-if you plead not guilty I think it's almost impossible for a summary court-martial on this ship to convict you."

  "Sir, that Red Cross letter-"

  "It doesn't prove anything. Your brother sent that wire. It's up to the court to prove that you instigated him. Without your testimony-and they can't make you testify against your-self-how can they possibly prove it? Where's your brother? Where's any record of a conversation between you?"

  Stilwell looked at him suspiciously. "Why would you rather have me plead not guilty?"

  "Look, I don't give a damn what you plead! My duty as recorder is to point out to you in my dumb way what the best legal course for you seems to me to be. Don't take my word. Go ask a chaplain, or the legal officer on the Pluto. Ask them about Courts and Boards yourself. Section 174."

  The sailor repeated mechanically, "Courts and Boards 174-174-174. Okay, sir. Thanks, sir." He went out. Willie fought down his irritation. It was only natural, he reasoned, that in the nostrils of the crew all the officers were acquiring the odor of Queeg.

  Stilwell was back next morning with a stiff new copy of Courts and Boards under his arm. "Mr. Keith, you're right. I'm gonna plead not guilty."

  "Oh? Who convinced you?"

  The sailor said eagerly, "Well, see, Engstrand, he's got a cousin on the Bolger, second can outboard. This cousin, he's big buddies with the first-class yeoman on the ship. Well, this yeoman, he's a fat Irish guy, bald, maybe forty years old. In civilian life he's a politician, they say. Only reason he ain't an officer, he never went to college. Well, he sold me this book. He says it ain't nothing secret, anybody can buy it off the government for a couple of bucks. Is that right?"

  Willie hesitated, and turned to the title page of his copy. At the bottom, in small print, was a legend he had not noticed before: For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D.C. "That's right, Stilwell." His tone contained a touch of his own surprise. He had assumed, for no good reason, that the book was re-stricted.

  "Well, Jesus, I don't know why every sailor in this goddamn outfit don't own one!" said the gunner's mate. "I been up all night reading it. I never knew I had all them rights. Well, anyway, sir, this Callaghan, this yeoman, he said I sure as hell ought to plead not guilty. He says I'm a cinch to get acquitted."

  "He's not an officer, so you can probably believe him."

  "That's how I figure it, sir," the sailor said with perfect seriousness.

  "Okay, Stilwell- Well. This brings up a lot of problems. You have to have counsel, and I have to prepare exhibits, and dig up witnesses, and in general the whole thing turns into a trial, just like in the movies-"

  "You think I'm doing the right thing, don't you, sir?"

  "I'd rather not see you get convicted, naturally, if there's a way out. I think I'd better talk to the captain right away. You wait here."

  Stilwell clutched the brown book tightly in both hands, and ran his tongue over his lips. "Ah-aye aye, sir."

  Willie hesitated outside Queeg's door for a couple of min-utes, rehearsing answers to hypothetical shrieks and snarls of the captain. He knocked. "Come in!"

  It was dark in the cabin. The black-out curtain hung over the porthole. Dimly, Willie could see the bulge of the captain's form in the bunk. "Who is it and what do you want?" said a voice muffled by a pillow.

  "Sir, it's Keith. It's about the court-martial. Stilwell wants to plead not guilty."

  The captain reached a curved talon out from under the pillow and snapped on the bed lamp. He sat up, squinting, and scratching his naked chest. "What's all this? Not guilty, hey? Just a born troublemaker, that man! Well, we'll fix him. What time is it?"

  "Eleven, sir."

  Queeg rolled out of the bunk, and began splashing water on his face at the basin. "How about his confession? How in hell can he plead not guilty after confessing, hey? Did you ask him that?"

  "He's going to repudiate his confession, sir."

  "Oh, he is, hey? That's what he thinks- Pass me that tube of toothpaste, Willie."

  The young lieutenant waited until the captain's mouth was full of foam. Then he said cautiously, "He seems to have been getting some legal advice from a very savvy yeoman on an-other ship in the nest, sir. He's got himself a copy of Courts and Boards-"

  "I'll Courts and Boards him," mumbled the captain around his toothbrush.

  "He says there's no evidence that he sent any fraudulent wire, and the confession, he says, he dictated under duress, and it doesn't mean anything."

  The captain blew out a mouthful of water explosively. "Duress! What duress?"

  "He claims you said something about a general court-mar-tial-"

  "For plain, wrongheaded, inside-out stupidity you can't beat an enlisted man who suddenly gets hold of a goddamn book of regulations! Duress! I was offering him a way out of a general court-martial. I could probably get a reprimand for such undercover clemency. And that little sneak calls it duress!... Give me a towel."

  Queeg mopped his face and hands. "Kay," he said, tossing the towel aside and picking a shirt off the back of his chair, "where is our poor little mistreated innocent?"

  "In my room, sir. He just told me-"

  "Send him up here."

  Stilwell was in the captain's cabin for an hour. Willie lurked on the well deck, perspiring in the vertical bluish glare of the noon sun, watching the captain's door. At last the gunner's mate came out. In one hand he carried his Courts and Boards, in the other a sheet of white paper. His face was lead-colored, and trickling with sweat. Willie ran up to him. "What's the dope, Stilwell?"

  "Look, Mr. Keith," the sailor said hoarsely, "maybe you mean well, but I don't know, every time I have anything to do with you I wind up in worse trouble than before. Lay off me, will you? The captain told me to give y
ou this. Here it is."

  Willie read a handwritten scrawl: I hereby state that the confession made by me on 13 February 1944 was made voluntarily, under no duress. I was glad to be given a chance to make a clean breast of it, and I have been given no in-ducement or promises of better treatment for confession. I will repeat these true facts under oath if necessary. It was signed by Stilwell in a schoolboyish hand; the bright blue ink and the broad pen nib identified the instrument as Captain Queeg's fountain pen.

  Willie said, "Stilwell, this isn't the end. He got this under duress, too. If there's anything you want me-"

  "Please, Mr. Keith!" A sudden desperate glare came into the sailor's eyes. "That's it, see? That's the way I want it, that's the truth, that's how it's gonna be. There wasn't no duress, see? Duress!" Stilwell flung Courts and Boards over the side. "I never heard of duress! Keep your goddamn nose out of my business!"

  He ran off down the port passageway. Willie mechanically looked over the side. Courts and Boards lay under water, caught between the two hulls, amid floating splinters and gar-bage. The ships rolled slowly together; the book was squashed to a shapeless wad.

  The beer was icy, golden, keenly gratifying and delicious, gurgling out of the triangular holes in the misted cans. Keefer, Maryk, Harding, and Willie lay under palm trees in sweet breezy shade and rapidly drank off a couple of cans each, to quench thirst. Then, more slowly, they began their social drink-ing. The spot they had chosen was a secluded curve of the recreation beach. They were alone with sand and palms. Far out on the green-blue lagoon the Pluto drifted slowly back and forth at the end of her anchor chain carrying the six nursing destroyers with her.

  Willie had resolved to say nothing to the other officers about the Stilwell matter. It seemed unethical for the prosecutor and court members to gossip over the case on the day before the trial. But a few beers dissolved his resolution. He told them about the abortive not-guilty plea, and the documents Queeg had extorted from the sailor.

  None of the others spoke for a while. Harding rose and began plunging holes in three more cans of beer. Keefer sat with his back to the bole of a palm, smoking a pipe. Maryk lay face down on the sand, his head on his arms. He had rolled into this position halfway through the story, and re-mained so.

  The novelist accepted a beer can from Harding and drank deeply. "Steve," he said in a quiet tone. Maryk turned his head sideways. "Steve, has the thought ever occurred to you," said Keefer, gravely and calmly, "that Captain Queeg may be in-sane?"

  The executive officer sat up with a grunt, and squatted cross-legged, red-brown and thick, white sand clinging to the folds of his skin. "Don't bust up a good afternoon, Tom," he said.

  "I'm not making jokes, Steve."

  "There's no point in that kind of talk," said the exec, shaking his head impatiently like an animal.

  "Look, Steve, I'm no psychiatrist, but I've read a lot. I can give you a diagnosis of Queeg. It's the clearest picture I've ever seen of a psychopathic personality. He's a paranoid, with an obsessive-compulsive syndrome. I'll bet a clinical examination would back me up a hundred per cent. I'll show you the de-scription of the type in the books-"

  "I'm not interested," said the exec. "He's no crazier than you are."

  "You're in a big jam, Steve."

  "I'm in no jam."

  "I've seen this coming for a long time." The novelist got up, tossed his beer can aside, and punched holes in another. Foam boiled over his hands. "See, Steve, about a week after Queeg came aboard I realized he was a psychopath. The shirt-tail obsession, the little rolling balls, the inability to look you in the eye, the talking in secondhand phrases and slogans, the ice-cream mania, the seclusion-why, the man's a Freudian delight. He crawls with clues. But that doesn't matter. Some of my best friends are psychopaths. It could be argued that I'm one. The thing is, Queeg is an extreme case, bordering on the twilight zone between eccentricity and real psychosis. And because he's a coward, I think that being in a combat zone is beginning to drive him over the red line. I don't know whether there'll be a sudden crack, or-"

  "Tom, it's a known fact that you read a hell of a lot more than I do and talk better, and all that. The only thing is, com-mon sense is worth more than all the talk and all the books in the world." Maryk lit a cigarette in a swift scratch of flame and spurt of smoke. "You're all wound up in big words, paranoid, psychopath, and all that. Captain Queeg is nothing but a strict guy who likes to have his own way, and there are a thousand skippers more or less like him. Okay, he rolls little balls. You sit in your room before reveille filling your desk drawers with a lot of scribbling. Everybody is a screwball in their own way. It doesn't make them crazy."

  Keith and Harding looked from one speaker to the other with the intensity of children at a family quarrel.

  "You're whistling in the dark," said Keefer. "Ever hear of a captain in his right mind trying to rig a court-martial as crudely as he's doing it?"

  "It happens every day. What the hell is a summary court--martial but a farce? Nobody on a ship ever knows any law. Hell, how about De Vriess with Bellison-and Crowe?"

  "That was different. De Vriess fixed the court to let them off. He was going through the forms because the Auckland police were so sore about the riot. But rigging a trial to convict a man-moral considerations aside, he's violating all his Navy principles. That's what makes me think he's going off his head. You know damn well that the enlisted man is God in this Navy. For two reasons, first, because he is the Navy, and second, because his relatives back home pay the Navy's ap-propriations. Sure, hounding the officers is standard emotional ping-pong for skippers. But the enlisted man? The regulations bristle with his rights. Queeg's juggling dynamite and giggling happily."

  "When it comes right down to it, Stilwell is guilty," said Maryk.

  "Of what? Christ, Steve! Wanting to see his wife, when poison-pen letters from home were accusing her of adultery?"

  "Look, try the trial tomorrow," said Maryk. "Give us a beer, Harding. Drop it, Tom, or I'm going to semaphore for the gig."

  The rest of the afternoon went by in increasingly sullen beer drinking.

  The plan of the day read: 1400. Summary Court-Martial of Stilwell, John, GM 2/C, in the wardroom.

  Shortly after lunch Queeg sent for Harding. Then he sent for Paynter. In another quarter hour, Paynter brought the same message for Keefer. The novelist rose. "Nothing like polling the jury for the verdict before the trial starts," he said. "Eliminates all that unpleasant suspense."

  Willie was in the ship's office, his mind whirling in a fog of legal rituals and phrases. The yeoman, obese as a pudding in shrunken dress whites, was helping him arrange the papers for the trial. When Chief Bellison, the master-at-arms, came to the door, smooth-shaven and immaculate, his shoes gleaming black, and announced, "Fourteen hundred, Lieutenant Keith. Ready in all respects for the court-martial," Willie had a pan-icky moment. It seemed to him that he was utterly unprepared for his task. He blindly followed the yeoman and the chief into the wardroom, where the three officers were ranged around the green table, looking strangely dressed up in their black ties, and grave and embarrassed. Stilwell came shambling in, picking at his cap, a meaningless half-smile on his face. The trial began.

  Willie sat with Courts and Boards open before him, care-fully acting out the ritual step by step. Jellybelly prompted him, and he prompted the accused and the court. As Willie pushed the limping trial along he was reminded continuously of his high-school fraternity initiation, which had been enacted shamefacedly from a printed script by perplexed boys, half amused, half solemn, in a dim room around a steaming skull.

  It was the simplest possible situation, a guilty plea with a typewritten confession in the record, and yet time wasted and wasted in entrances and exits, clearings of the court, wrangles over the meanings of words in Courts and Boards, and search-ings through Navy Regulations and the court-martial manual. At the end of an hour and a half of this weariness, Keefer declared the trial finished, whereupon Stilwell
roused himself from a horse-like apathy and announced that he wanted to make a statement. This occasioned further flurries of debate. At last he was allowed to proceed.

  "The captain give me six months' restriction for reading on watch, and that's why I had to get that phony wire sent. I had to see my wife or my marriage would of busted up," Stil-well said, in halting, self-conscious tones. "I didn't think read-ing a comic book at the gangway was enough reason to ruin my life. But I'm guilty. Only I think the court ought to re-member why I done it."

  Willie swiftly copied down as much of this as he could, and read it back to Stilwell. "Is that the substance of your state-ment?"

  "That's fine, Mr. Keith. Thanks."

  "All right," Keefer said. "Clear the court."

  Willie led out the yeoman, the accused, and the orderly. He waited in the ship's office for forty minutes, and then Bellison called him and the yeoman back to the wardroom.