Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  Also by Robert Littell

  THE DEFECTION OF A. J. LEWINTER

  Copyright

  First American Edition

  Copyright © 1974 by Robert Littell

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-59020-901-1

  For Richard Stone

  Any penetration, however slight, is sufficient

  to complete the offense.

  From the Uniform Code of Military Justice

  Contents

  Also by Robert Littell

  Copyright

  Yankee Station

  THE FIRST DAY

  Yankee Station

  THE SECOND DAY

  Yankee Station

  THE THIRD DAY

  Yankee Station

  THE FIRST DAY

  Lieutenant Lustig Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

  IT RAINED during the midwatch — thick sheets of monsoon rain that slanted in at a ridiculous angle and chipped away at the flaking gray paint on the superstructure. Just before the four-to-eight watch came on deck it stopped, leaving behind the smell of wet wool hanging in the air and the sounds of a ship at sea. One was continuous: the river of ocean water brushing past the thin skin of the destroyer like a felt-tipped pen underlining never-ending sentences. The rest was punctuation: creaking joints, the dull throb of the main propulsion shafts, engines, reduction gears, fans, condensers, generators, exhausts, intakes, pistons, pumps, boilers, bilges, banging doors and banging plumbing, a tin cup clattering around the scullery, a muffled curse from somewhere below deck when nobody picked it up, a hundred thousand bubbles of air bursting as the two huge propellers pushed off into the sea, creating the river that brushed the hull. Astern the churning, phosphorescent wake played out, as if from a giant reel, into a starless, pitch-black night.

  On the open bridge the messenger of the watch, a squirrelish seaman deuce with dirt under his fingernails and blackheads sprinkled across his forehead like freckles, squatted on his haunches polishing brass plaques with navy-issue rags, elbow grease and Kool Aid granules left over from the ban on cyclamates. He had already finished one plaque

  EUGENE F. EBERSOLE DD722

  SWIFT AND SURE

  BETHLEHEM STEEL COMPANY

  STATEN ISLAND 20 DEC 1944

  and was halfway through a second, which the Captain had had the shipfitters weld up the day the Ebersole headed for the war zone — a stretch of ocean known as Yankee Station.

  FIGHT HARD WHEN WE F

  WORK HARD WHEN WE

  PLAY HARD WHEN

  AN

  AVOID UNN

  DURING

  “What he say then, Calvin?” the starboard lookout asked. He was standing with his back flat against the pilot house, his elbows locked into his chest to steady the binoculars through which he studied the night, sector by sector, the way he had been taught at boot camp. All the binoculars did was make the blackness seem closer and thicker and more oppressive. But he studied it all the same.

  “Your father, I mean,” the starboard lookout said again, trying to do what nobody else was able to do, which was keep a conversation with Calvin Tevepaugh going for more than three minutes. Anything to make the watch pass more quickly. “What he say after that?”

  Tevepaugh dabbed the damp rag into the pail of Kool Aid powder and rubbed away at the plaque in small concentric circles. “She-it,” he said, grudgingly holding up his end of the conversation, “he wanted me to be sumptin else than I am, but he couldn’t figure out what he wanted me to be. Neither could I. So here I am, what I am.”

  The plaque was clean now and Tevepaugh buffed it with a dry rag, digging the caked Kool Aid granules out of the etched letters with his thumbnail.

  FIGHT HARD WHEN WE FIGHT

  WORK HARD WHEN WE WORK

  PLAY HARD WHEN WE PLAY

  AND

  AVOID UNNECESSARY MOLESTATION

  DURING PERIODS OF RELAXATION

  The starboard lookout let the binoculars dangle from the strap around his neck. Tevepaugh started polishing the brass acceleration plaque.

  0 — 15 knots

  1 min

  15 — 18 knots

  ½ min

  18 — 22 knots

  1 min

  “So here you are, but what are you, Calvin?” the starboard lookout asked after a while. He could hear the pilot house clock ticking away inside the door.

  “What am I? What I am is the only single solitary member of the one-man orchestra on the oldest mother in the whole goddamn You-nited States of America Navy, that’s what I fuckin’ well am.”

  Tevepaugh’s description of himself was as accurate as any supplied by the computers in the navy’s Bureau of Personnel. On watch he was a messenger of the watch, polishing brass, carrying coffee, waking reliefs, doing whatever anyone who was senior to him (which was everyone on watch) told him to do. Off watch he was a seaman deuce deck ape whose job in life was to keep every square inch of brass and woodwork forward of the midship’s passageway gleaming or get his ass reamed by Chief McTigue, who ran the deck gang and Mount 51 with an iron hand. But when the Ebersole plowed through the seas alongside an aircraft carrier for underway refueling operations, Tevepaugh came into his own. As the two ships steamed on parallel courses fifty feet part, the destroyer sucking in vast gulps of fuel from the carrier’s cavernous tanks, he would hold court on the deck that used to house the torpedo tubes which were taken off in the early 1960s, ten full years after they had been declared obsolete. Sitting on a folding canvas captain’s chair, cradling a small, red electric guitar plugged into two enormous speakers, Tevepaugh would produce overlapping waves of hard rock that drowned out the thirty-man polished-brass bands on the carrier’s hangar deck which stuck doggedly to “Anchors Aweigh” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  Tevepaugh’s peculiar brand of one-upmanship was already an Ebersole institution when J. P. Horatio Jones took over as captain. Even so, the new skipper thought seriously about phasing out the act. “It’s not navy,” he complained to his executive officer. “Besides, you can hardly hear anything on the sound-powered phones for the noise.” But any idea the Captain had of sidelining Tevepaugh was shelved during a refueling operation off Norfolk when Jones focused his binoculars on the flag bridge high up on the carrier’s superstructure and spotted a smile on the thin lips of the Rear Admiral who nested in that rarefied atmosphere.

  “XO,” the Captain said, motioning toward Tevepaugh strumming away on the torpedo deck, “what’s that sailor’s name?”

  “Tevepaugh, Skipper. Seaman deuce Tevepaugh,” the Executive Officer answered.

  “Tevepaugh,” mused Captain Jones. “All right, let’s see if we can’t get him a folding canvas chair to sit on instead of that fuel drum, eh?”

  “Aye aye, Skipper,” snapped the Executive Officer, who dispatched a chit to the supply officer, who walked the chit through to the destroyer tender in Norfolk and came back with a spanking new folding canvas captain’s chair.

  “Goddamn right that’s what I am,” Tevepaugh was saying to the starboard lookout. “A one-man orchestra.” He rubbed the sleeve of his foul-weather jacket across his blackheads.

  “Me,” offered the lookout, trying to eke out another drop of conversation, “I’m a shorttimer, that’s what I fucking am.”

  “Shorttimer, my ass,” sneered Tevepaugh. “She-it, you’re career bait, man. You got career writ all over you. You’ll re-up the minute you smell the money.”

  “Won’t we all,” the
starboard lookout said, and he and the messenger of the watch laughed at the barefaced truth.

  Suddenly the blackness that the lookout had been staring at shattered into shards of strobe-bright light, and it flashed through his brain that, improbable as it seemed, there was a barnfire raging on the horizon. What it was was only Tevepaugh leaning against the open bridge railing an arm’s length away, lighting a cigarette with one of the ship’s store’s flame-thrower lighters.

  “WHO LIT THAT FUCKING LIGHT?” screamed the Officer of the Deck, a balding, chubby, round-faced, wide-eyed lieutenant junior grade named Lawrence Lustig. His voice was shrill with tension. “Don’t you know about darken ship? Next time that happens I’m going to put somebody on report.” (“Why don’t you signal them with a flare pistol,” Lustig imagined himself saying icily. He always went over his conversations, word for word, afterward. In these mini-daydreams there was never any need for threats or temper tantrums, for he invariably came up with a razzle-dazzle rejoinder that permitted him to bury his adversary under an avalanche of irony and logic and dignity. “Better still,” Lustig would have added if he could have run the reel through again, “why don’t you put up a neon sign that says ‘Here comes the Ebersole!’ ”).

  “She-it,” Tevepaugh muttered under his breath, crunching out the cigarette in the ashtray next to the captain’s sea chair.

  Taking his cue from the Officer of the Deck, the bo’s’n mate of the watch, gunner’s mate third class Melvin Ohm, a squat Californian with a receding chin and a grating voice that sounded as if it originated in a cement mixer, popped his head out the pilot house door. “Jesus, Calvin, the lookout here couldn’t see the enemy with his prick dangling if he was right under his nose,” he said loudly enough for Lustig, who was the Ebersole’s gunnery officer as well as Ohm’s division officer, to know that he was cracking down on the offender. Too often petty officers tended to let this kind of thing slide. But not Ohm, who knew which side his bread was buttered on. “Don’t you know nothing about night vision, Calvin?”

  “I know a lot,” Tevepaugh said sullenly. “The navy pays me for what I know.”

  (Lustig thought of “No wonder you’re always broke,” but as usual it was too late to get it into the conversation, for by then the talk in the pilot house had moved on to other things.)

  “I knowed a girl once who shaved it off because she thought men went for women who looked like little girls,” said the helmsman, a hairy deck ape named Carr who looked like King Kong from the back. He watched the compass card under the lubber’s line slide past 310 and put on three degrees left rudder to ease her back.

  “You’re kidding,” said Tevepaugh, straddling the pilot house doorway, his polishing chores over. “I mean, she-it, I never seen no such thing. You’re kidding, ain’t you?”

  “If I was telling a joke,” the helmsman said with exaggerated dignity, “it’d have a punch line. I wasn’t telling no joke. I was telling a social phenomenon.” He kept his eyes glued to the dimly lit compass card. It held on 310 for a second, then slid past in the other direction and Carr shifted the rudder to bring it back again. “She shaved her snatch to look like a kid. That’s what I said she done’n that’s what she done.”

  “Was it someone you knew?” Tevepaugh asked, trying not to appear overeager.

  “More’r less,” allowed Carr.

  “I’ll be fucked,” said Tevepaugh and he poked Ohm, who was absent-mindedly inventing games he could play on the radar repeater. “You never seen nothin’ like that, have you, Melvin?”

  Ohm swiveled the range bug around so rapidly it left an electric wake on the radar scope. By varying the range with his left hand as he swiveled the bug with his right, he could create sinuous designs, something like waving a burning ember in a dark room.

  “I heard of a girl once,” Ohm said, fiddling with the radar as if it were a pinball machine. “Her old man was due back from a Med cruise, so she knotted red ribbons in her pussy to surprise him. Halfway to the ship she jumped a light and whammed into the back of a truck, and when they stripped her at the hospital …”

  “She-it,” giggled Tevepaugh.

  “The way I heard it, her husband, who was a boilerman third on the Manley, finally found her — in the loony bin at Norfolk General. And he had one hell of a time convincing them she wasn’t no nut.” Ohm couldn’t keep from laughing at his own story.

  “She-it,” groaned Tevepaugh.

  “Red ribbons!” moaned Carr. “Whoosh, that there must have been a sight for sore eyes.”

  Lustig stuck his cherubic face through one of the open portholes. The roundness of the porthole provided a perfect frame for his head. “You running one of your pools today, Ohm?” he asked.

  Hardly a day went by on the Ebersole when Ohm didn’t have some sort of pool going: the anchor pool, the maximum roll pool, the fuel consumption pool, the freshwater production pool. You name it, Ohm had a pool on it.

  “Naturally, Mister Lustig,” Ohm rasped. “I’m running a sixty-bet sheet on which minute of the hour we take our first shot at the enemy. You want to buy in? Buck a throw. Winner takes fifty-five bucks.”

  “Put me down for a buck,” Lustig said, and he handed a dollar bill through the porthole to Carr, who passed it over to Ohm. “What numbers you got open?”

  Ohm consulted his sheet, which was divided into sixty squares, most of them with names of bettors already written in. “You can have, let’s see, seven, twenty-seven; ah, I skipped thirteen. Also forty-one, forty-three. That’s it. No, here’s another. Fifty-nine.”

  Lustig thought a moment. “I’ll take lucky thirteen,” he said finally, and Ohm wrote his name in the square with the number thirteen in the upper-right-hand corner.

  “Lucky thirteen it is, Mister Lustig,” he said.

  Combat Information Smells a Skunk

  Nighttime watches on the bridge of a destroyer have a distinctive rhythm. For the first hour or so there is a considerable amount of physical movement and the constant chatter of sea stories, some true, some half-true and some that have been told so many times nobody can remember whether they are true or not. An hour into the watch come the doldrums, when everybody is bored with himself and everyone else and realizes that bored or not, the watch still has three long hours to go. At this point the men on watch tend to stand or sit in one place, without moving a muscle, for long periods of time, letting their minds or the conversation meander. Their sole aim in life is to forget the clock ticking away on the bulkhead, on the theory that when you forget it time passes more rapidly. But they concentrate so hard on forgetting the clock they can’t get their minds off it.

  Lustig’s watch had reached the doldrums. Except for an occasional report from the talker with the headphones (“Combat Information has a skunk bearing zero one seven at twelve miles and tracking on a parallel course”), the officers and men whose job it was to run the ship from 0345 until 0745 were subdued, moodily withdrawn into their private selves. Ohm had given up toying with the pilot house radar and was sitting on it, staring at the pit log, which told how fast the ship moved through the water, thinking about the second-class exam he would take the following week. He had flunked it twice already but Lustig had agreed to give him another shot at it. Carr, the helmsman, played a game that he often used to while away the time on watch. The idea was to see how long he could keep the lubber’s line on a given heading. “One one-hundredth, two one-hundredth, three one-hundredth, four,” he counted to himself. The lubber’s line moved off and he brought it back. Then he put on enough opposite rudder to hold it and began counting again. “One one-hundredth, two …” Tevepaugh retreated to the flag bag aft of the pilot house, fetched up an armful of signal flags and nestled in the bag using the flags as a cushion. He sat there trying to conjure up the image of the girl tying red ribbons in her pubic hair.

  Nearby two Negro signalmen — who like most blacks on board kept pretty much to themselves since the fight on the mess deck back in Norfolk — sat on the wooden
deck with their backs to the Captain’s sea cabin, their knees drawn up to their chests. Both of them were smoking pot, passing the cigarette back and forth and cupping the burning end with their palms. If any of the officers or petty officers saw them, they never said a word — darken ship or no.

  “I want out, man,” Angry Pettis Foreman was saying. Angry Pettis was a tall, rail-thin black who always had one toothpick jutting from between his teeth and three or four spares stuck into his Afro. He went to great pains to look like what he thought a street blood ought to look like — menacing, angry, sexy, above all cool. “Trouble is,” he added, barely moving his lips, “don’t nobody know how to get out.”

  There was a long silence as the two men sucked in turn on the cigarette and held the smoke in for as long as they could.

  “What would you do if you were out, Angry?” asked Jefferson Waterman, a southern black who had been drafted into the navy by an all-white draft board midway through his senior year at a southern Negro college. “I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d be so shit-scared you’d duck right back in — especially when they lay that thick wad of re-up money on the table.”

  “Fuck the bread, this time I gonna keep my black ass out, you see.” Angry Pettis dragged on the cigarette, held his breath and exhaled. When Waterman didn’t say anything, he started to get belligerent. “You don’t believe me, man? I want oh-you-tee out. I’m not sure I wanna even live in the U.S. of A. when I get outa this navy, man. When I say out, I mean far out. Maybe I’ll even try me another country.”

  Waterman thought about that for a moment. “Somebody once told me there are only two countries no matter which country you’re in. There is city country and there is country country.”

  “If’n that’s so,” laughed Angry Pettis, “the po-litical pricks put them borders in all the wrong places, man.”