Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "Did you take a muster? Did all your men get out?"

  "I couldn't find Horrible, sir-he's the only one-I don't know, maybe he's around somewhere-" The chief tried to sit up. Willie pushed him back.

  "Never mind. I'll find him-"

  With a loud rumble number-one and -two stacks poured out a billow of inky smoke, and the ship vibrated. The executive officer and the chief looked at each other with grinning glad-ness. "Suction on one and two," said Budge. "We'll be okay-"

  "Well, guess I'll get under way and pick up the swimming party. Take it easy, Chief-"

  "Hope the captain enjoyed his dip," the chief said in a low voice. "He's got Queeg beat a mile for fast footwork-"

  "Shut up, Budge!" Willie said sharply. He went forward. From the time the Kamikaze hit until suction was regained, seventeen minutes had elapsed.

  During the rescue maneuvering in the next hour Willie re-tained the strangely clear vision and buoyant spirits and slowed calm time sense which he had acquired when Keefer jumped overboard. Nothing seemed hard to do. He made dozens of quick decisions as damage reports poured into the wheelhouse and little emergencies sprang up in the wake of the conquered big one. He nosed the ship slowly among the swimmers, taking care to stop his screws whenever he came near them.

  He turned over the conn to Farrington and went to the sea ladder when the captain was hauled aboard. Keefer was unable to climb; so a sailor dived into the water beside him and se-cured a line around his middle, and the novelist was fished out of the water doubled over, dripping, and clinging to the sopping gray sack. Willie caught him in his arms as he came up to deck level, and helped him to his feet. Keefer's lips were blue. His hair hung in strings over staring bloodshot eyes. "How the hell did you do it, Willie?" he gasped. "It was a miracle. I'll recommend you for the Navy Cross-"

  "Will you take the conn now, Captain? Do you feel all right?"

  "Hell, you're doing fine. Keep going. Pick 'em all up. I'll change my clothes-get pharmacist's mate to fix up this damn arm, it's killing me- Did you take a muster?"

  "Taking it now, sir-"

  "Fine-keep going-give me a hand, Winston-" Keefer stumbled toward his cabin, leaning on the boatswain's mate's shoulder, leaving a trail of water on the deck. "I'll be up on the bridge in half an hour, Willie-take a muster-"

  The list of missing men shrank as the ship picked up one swimmer after another. Finally-there was only one name with-out a line through it on Willie's penciled sheet: Everett Harold Black, water tender third class-Horrible. A search party went wading through the gutted, flooded fireroom in hip boots. They found the missing sailor.

  Keefer was on the bridge, his arm in a new white sling, when the report came up. The Caine was lying to in the waters where it had been hit. It was noon, and the sun was hot and dazzling overhead. A stale, sour smell of burning pervaded the sooty ship.

  "Okay, that does it, Willie. Everybody's accounted for.... Poor Horrible- What's the course to the channel entrance?"

  "Zero eight one, sir."

  "Very well, Helmsman, come to course 081. Quartermaster, make fifteen knots-"

  Willie said, "Sir, I request permission to lay below and supervise removal of the body."

  "Sure, Willie. Go ahead."

  The deck sailors were rolling away the hoses, sweeping clanking debris off the deckhouse and main deck, and chatter-ing happily about their own small heroisms. They greeted Willie with shouted jokes about a trip to the States. A cluster of them around the galley were munching crude thick sand-wiches or snatching loaves from the cursing cooks, who were trying to light off the soup vats and get lunch ready. There was a line of sight-seers around the roped-off chasm in the deck. The voices of the search party echoed up from the dark watery fireroom as from a flooded tomb. A couple of the new ensigns who had jumped overboard stood at the rope in fresh khakis, peering down into the hole and laughing. They fell silent when they saw Willie.

  He regarded them for a moment bleakly. They were buddies from a Western midshipmen school. They habitually whined and procrastinated about the officers' qualification course--didn't see any point to it. They grumbled about lack of sleep. Their carelessness in handling despatches and letters was un-endurable. Moreover, they never ceased commiserating each other for the wretched fate of having been assigned to the Caine. He wanted to ask them sarcastically to write up a quali-fication assignment if they had nothing better to do than sightsee; but he turned away without a word and climbed down the air lock. He heard them tittering behind him.

  The stink of burning and something worse than burning made him gag, as he backed down the narrow ladder of the shaft. He put a handkerchief over his nose and stepped into the fireroom. He slipped and stumbled on the wet, greasy catwalks. It was amazingly queer, it was like a nightmare, to see vertical white sunlight in the fireroom, and water sloshing in and out of the furnaces. The search party was far on the port side. Willie descended the last ladder; the water came up cold arid slimy inside his trouser legs. He waded across the fireroom in water that fell to his ankles and then rose to his waist as the ship rolled. The sailors of the search party stepped aside and one of them directed a powerful electric lantern at the water.

  "Wait till it rolls away, Mr. Keith. You'll see him pretty good."

  Willie wasn't used to the sight of dead people. He had seen a few relatives laid out in plush-lined boxes in the amber gloom of funeral chapels, with an organ mourning sweetly through loudspeakers and a heavy smell of flowers filling the air. No undertaker had intervened, however, to prettify the death of Horrible. The water washed away for a few seconds, and the lantern beam showed the sailor clearly, pinned down and crushed by the battered engine of the Jap plane, his face and his dungarees black with grease. The sight reminded Willie of the mashed squirrels he had often seen lying on the roads of Manhasset on autumn mornings. It was shocking to soak in, all in an instant, the fact that people are as soft and destructible as squirrels. The dark waters sloshed back over the body. Willie fought down the tears and the nausea, and said, "This is a job for volunteers. Any one of you who can't stand it is excused-"

  The search party were all of the black gang. He looked from face to face. They all had the expression that makes men equal, however briefly, before a dead body-a mixture of fright, bitterness, sorrow, and embarrassment. "Well, if you're all game, okay. The thing to do is rig a block and tackle on that crossbeam and get the wreckage off him. I'll get Winston down here with some canvas. Then you can lift him straight up through the hole in the deck with lines, instead of hauling him up ladders."

  "Aye aye, sir," they said.

  The man with the lantern said, "Want to see the Jap, sir? He's piled up on the port catwalk-"

  "Is there much left of him?"

  "Well, not a hell of a lot. It ain't too appetizing-"

  "Sure, lead the way:"

  The remains of the Kamikaze pilot were frightful. Willie turned away after a glimpse of bones and charred purple meat, jammed grotesquely in a sitting position in the telescoped cock-pit as though the dread thing were still flying; a double row of grinning yellow teeth burned all bare; and most appalling of all, undamaged goggles above the teeth sunk into the ruined face, giving it a live peering look. The smell was like a butcher shop.

  "Well, sir, like the marines say, the only good one is a dead one," the sailor said.

  "I-I guess I'll go and send Winston along-" Willie picked his way rapidly over the tangled rubbish of plane and deck plates and boiler fittings to the escape hatch and hurried up into the delicious streaming salt air.

  Keefer slouched in the captain's chair on the bridge, pale and languid, and allowed Willie to bring the ship into the harbor. He took over the conn to anchor, giving orders in a flat, tired voice. Sailors on nearby ships stopped working to stare at the Caine's torn-up seared deckhouse and the huge black hole amidships.

  Willie went below, discarded his wet, filthy clothes in a heap on the deck of his room, and took a steamy shower. He dressed in hi
s freshest khakis, drew his curtain, and stretched out on the bunk, yawning. And then he began to tremble. It was just his hands at first, but it spread quickly to his whole body. The strange thing was that the sensation was not unpleasant. It sent a warm feeling and slight tingles all along under his skin. He buzzed with a shaking finger for a mess boy.

  "Bring me a meat sandwich, Rasselas-anything, so long as it's meat-and hot coffee, hot-hot as live steam."

  "Yassuh."

  "I'm going to put my thumb in the coffee and if it don't blister you're on report."

  "Hot coffee. Yassuh."

  The trembling fit was dying down when the food came: two thick cold lamb sandwiches, and coffee hidden by its own vapors. Willie wolfed the sandwiches. He took from his desk drawer a cigar which he had received from Horrible, two days earlier; the sailor had passed a box around the wardroom upon being promoted to water tender third. He hesitated, feeling odd about smoking a dead man's cigar; and then he did smoke it, leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk. The usual after-pictures came into his mind. He saw the Kamikaze hitting the bridge instead of the main deck and mashing him. He saw himself ripped open by a flying fragment of the ready box; shot through the head by an AA bullet; burned to a grinning half skeleton like the Jap pilot by the explosion of a magazine. The thoughts were fearful and pleasing at once, like a good horror story; they whetted the extreme luxury of being alive and safe and past the hour of danger.

  Then it occurred to him that Horrible's promotion had been his death sentence. Two days ago he had been transferred from the after engine room, which was now entirely un-damaged, to the watch in the fireroom where he had died.

  With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, per-haps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts-not the words, the realities-break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime. Willie Keith crushing the stub in the ashtray was not the Willie who had lit the cigar. That boy was gone for good.

  He began writing in longhand the draft of a letter to Horrible's parents. The phone buzzer rang. It was Keefer, speaking in a quiet, decidedly cordial tone: "Willie, if you're all squared away would you mind coming up here for a mo-ment?"

  "Aye aye, Captain. Right now."

  On the well deck many sailors were perched along the rails in the afternoon breeze, and there was a lively hum of chatter. Willie heard the words "Mr. Keith" repeated several times. The conversation died down when he stepped out of the hatch-way. Some of the sailors jumped off the rail. They all regarded him with a look he had not seen on their faces before-directed at him. Long ago he had noticed them looking that way at Captain de Vriess after some neat ship handling. It was a wonderful look. "Hello, Mr. Keith," several of them said, quite pointlessly, since Willie went in and out of the hatchway twenty times every day without being greeted.

  "Hi." Willie grinned at them, and went to Keefer's cabin. The novelist was on his bunk in a red bathrobe, resting against a pile of pillows. The sling hung empty around his neck, and the bandaged arm lay along the side of the bunk. He was drinking something dark brown in a water glass. He waved the glass at Willie, slopping the contents over the rim. "Medic-inal brandy. Specific for loss of blood, prescribed by the phar-macist's mate-Also I dare say for nerves tried by a day of of heroism. Have some."

  "I will, thanks, Captain. Where is it?"

  "Locker under the bunk. Use the glass on the washbowl. Good stuff. Help yourself, and have a seat."

  The brandy ran down Willie's throat like warm water, with-out the slightest sting. He rocked back in the swivel chair, enjoying the glow. Keefer said suddenly, "Ever read Lord Jim?"

  "Yes, sir, I've read it."

  "Good yarn."

  "His best, I'd say."

  "Curiously apropos to today's events." The novelist swung his head around heavily and stared at Willie, who kept his face politely blank. "Don't you think?"

  "How, sir?"

  "Well, guy jumps overboard when he shouldn't-commits this one act of impulsive cowardice-and it haunts his whole life-" Keefer drank off his glass. "Pass me the brandy. I just got this by visual. Read it."

  He took the bottle and gave Willie a despatch. CO Caine report Commodore Wharton aboard Pluto 1700.

  "Can you go, sir? Is your arm all right?"

  "Hell, it's just stiff, Willie. A few muscles torn. Nothing. No excuse whatever. I'm afraid I'll have to go. Will you come with me, please?"

  "Certainly, Captain, if you think I'm needed-"

  "Well, you know a little more about what went on than I do. Seeing as how I was safely in the drink all the time you were saving my ship-"

  "Captain, your decision to abandon ship wasn't an act of cowardice, there's no point in your stewing over it. With the whole deckhouse blowing up and men jumping overboard and the flame and smoke and the general obscure picture, any prudent officer might have done the same-"

  "You don't really think that," Keefer said, looking him straight in the face, and Willie took a swallow of brandy and didn't answer.

  "Nevertheless," the captain said, "I'll be everlastingly grate-ful to you if you'll say as much to Commodore Wharton."

  "I'll say it to the commodore."

  After a silence Keefer said, "Why did you stay on board, Willie?"

  "Well, Captain, don't forget, I'd seen the actual damage amidships and you hadn't. And you were wounded and shocked, and I wasn't-if things had been the other way around-"

  "I would still have jumped." Keefer threw his head back on the pillows and stared upward. "See Willie, there is one lousy thing about having brains. Makes me worse off than Queeg. He could swallow all his own feeble self-protecting lies because he was a stupid man. But I can analyze. I'm im-prisoned forever by the fact that I jumped. It has given me an identity. I can't forget that fact except by going paranoid like Queeg, and I'm pretty clearheaded. Not much guts, but a lot of brains. The combination is quite possible-in fact maybe there's a correlation, I don't know-"

  "Captain, pardon me, you've been through a hell of a tough time and you've lost blood, and nothing you're saying about yourself makes any sense. You have all the guts anybody needs to-"

  "Willie, it was you who left the steel balls on my pillow, wasn't it?"

  Willie looked down at his glass. He had done that one morn-ing after Keefer had rammed a tanker coming alongside and then screamed at the helmsman and put him on report. "I-yes, I did it. I'm sorry, Captain, it was a stupid thing-"

  "I want to tell you something, Willie. I feel more sympathy for Queeg than you ever will, unless you get a command. You can't understand command till you've had it. It's the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It's a nightmare, un-less you're an ox. You're forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes. At any moment you can commit a hundred manslaughters. An ox like De Vriess doesn't see that or he doesn't have the imagination to be bothered by it-and more, he has a dumb ox-like sure-footedness for the right path. Queeg had no brains, but he had nerves and am-bition, and it's no wonder he went ga-ga. I think I've managed to do pretty well-until today-haven't I?"

  The tone of appeal made Willie hot with embarrassment. "Of course, Captain-"

  "Well, it's been a struggle. Exec is nothing. It's command, command-I don't know, I might still have bulled through if not for that goddamn out-of-nowhere son of a bitch of a Kamikaze-"

  Keefer's voice cracked, and tears spurted out of his eyes. Willie jumped up, averting his face. "Captain, I'll come back a little later, you're not well at all-"

  "Oh, stick around, Willie. I'm okay. I just feel goddamn bad about being Lord Tom for life-"

  Willie reluctantly leaned against the desk, still not looking at the captain. In a moment Keefer said dryly, "It's okay, I'
m all right now. Have another brandy."

  The tears were gone from his face. He held the bottle out to Willie. "Possibly the most humiliating aspect of the whole thing-I'm wondering whether after all my yappings, all these years, there isn't an occult wisdom in the Navy's mysterious ways. They put Roland on carriers, and sentenced me to the Caine. And by some diabolical chance we were both faced with the same test, a Kamikaze fire, and Roland died saving his ship, and I jumped-"

  "Captain, you're reading all kinds of meanings into a random accident. Pull yourself together and forget it. If you're going to see the commodore at 1700 you ought to start getting ready- Arm bother you?" Keefer was grimacing as he sat up.

  "Hurts like hell-that's another thing, I want to go to the Relief-okay, Willie-" The captain swung his legs out of the bunk, moving his arm carefully. "Have another shot before we go?"

  "No, thanks, sir-"