Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  “How long have you been in the navy, Quinn?” the Captain asked quietly.

  “Twenty-six years come next month, sir.”

  “Somewhere along the way, Quinn, didn’t anyone tell you that sailors in the United States Navy don’t salute when their heads are uncovered, eh?”

  “Quinn’s hand whipped down to his side. “No offense intended,” he said.

  “Now what’s this I hear about Mount Fifty-two, Quinn?”

  Quinn stood at attention, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, painfully embarrassed. The keys on the ring hanging from his belt jingled musically. When he started to speak his voice was almost inaudible.

  “Speak up, Quinn, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” the Captain snapped, raising his own voice.

  “I said that Fifty-two’s not working, Captain.”

  Jones leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “He says that Mount Fifty-two is not working, Mister Lustig,” the Captain said quietly. Then he added in a hard voice: “I am well aware that Fifty-two is not working, Quinn. Why the hell do you think you’re here?” Jones switched back to the calm register. “What — if I may make so bold as to ask — what is causing Mount Fifty-two not to work?”

  “I don’t know yet, sir.” Quinn looked at Lustig for help. Lustig concentrated on his fingertips.

  “You don’t know.” Still in the calm register. “You don’t know.” Then coldly, biting off each word, Jones repeated the phrase: “You-don’t-know! Here we are, patrolling off an enemy coast, momentarily expecting to go into battle, and you don’t know. What is the navy coming to when the mount captain of Fifty-two doesn’t know why his mount is not working? You’ll have to do better than that, Quinn.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Quinn said weakly.

  “Perhaps I can help you, Quinn.” Jones had once been assigned, by mistake, as gunnery officer on one of the new aircraft carriers that carried no guns and fancied himself something of an expert on the subject. “Have you checked the firing circuits to make sure they’re getting four hundred and forty volts?”

  “Yes, sir,” Quinn said, “that was the first thing I thought of.”

  “Did you check the pressure in the hydraulic system rammer?”

  “Naturally, Captain — no sweat there either.”

  “What about the, eh, electro servo coupler?”

  “The electro servo coupler?” Quinn said, dumfounded. “Captain, there isn’t no electro servo coupler in Mount Fifty-two.”

  There was absolute silence in the Captain’s cabin. Jones leaned forward again. “Are you calling me a liar, Quinn?” he asked in a low, husky voice.

  “Sir?”

  “I said, are you calling me a liar?”

  “No, sir.” Quinn shook his head vehemently.

  “Then get back to your mount and check out the electro servo coupler.”

  Quinn stood rooted to the deck, an expression of agony on his face. Tears of frustration coated his eyes.

  “What’s the matter, Quinn? Don’t you know an order when you hear one?”

  “Captain, sir, I just don’t know what to do,” Quinn said. He looked around the room for help. There was none to be had.

  “It’s really very simple, Quinn. Turn around, open the door, walk to Gun Mount Fifty-two, and check out the electro servo coupler to see if it is contributing to the malfunction of your mount.”

  “But there is no electro servo coupler, Captain, there just isn’t none.”

  Jones turned sharply to the XO: “Get this man out of here before I lose my temper,” he said, biting his cuticles.

  “That’s all, Quinn,” the XO said roughly. He didn’t want the Captain to doubt whose side he was on.

  Still Quinn was not bright enough to turn and flee. “Aye aye, sir,” he said again. “But what do I do about the electro servo coupler?”

  The Captain pounced jubilantly. “So there is an electro servo coupler after all, eh?”

  “No sir, there is no such thing. I know every nut and bolt in them mounts. I’d know if there was. And I swear on the Bible I’d tell you, Captain, I swear to God I would.”

  It was Lustig who finally put Quinn out of his misery. “On your horse, Quinn. Out. That’s all. Go.”

  Totally confused, wishing desperately there was an electro servo coupler he could check, Quinn backed out of the Captain’s cabin, stumbled over the door frame and closed the door softly for fear the click of the latch would disturb the Captain’s equilibrium and bring on the demons again.

  Inside, Jones looked as if he had just produced a rabbit from a hat. “And that, gentlemen,” he said, “that will be our answer to Sweet Reason, eh?”

  Quinn’s Curriculum Vitae

  A short, heavy man with thick thighs and skin that looked like the hide of a bull elephant, Quinn rated as the senior man on board the Ebersole in point of service. He had reported aboard in 1944 two days after the ship was commissioned and had been with her ever since — through the kamikaze attacks at Okinawa during World War Two, through Korea, through the invasion of Beirut, through fifteen Med trips and ten shipyard overhauls, through a dozen skippers and a hundred chief petty officers. The day after he lost his finger at Iskenderun, Quinn had put in what for him was a routine request to extend his tour on board the Ebersole, which was almost up. He had long ago discovered that life was one long battle to belong. To walk into a place where he didn’t belong was excruciatingly painful to Quinn. Once he had begun to feel at home in the Ebersole, once he had begun to relax in its womblike familiarity, he had made up his mind never to leave. He planned to stay forever if they’d let him.

  The ultimate symbol of Quinn’s belonging was the eighty-eight keys that jingled from a large iron ring hanging from his navy-issue web belt. There were skeleton keys and latchkeys, rusted keys and bright silver keys, keys of every shape and size. Somewhere among them was one that could open almost any door on the Ebersole. It was more or less an Ebersole custom, in fact, for the petty officer in charge of a space to give a spare key to Quinn, saying: “Hey, listen, Keys, will you do me a personal favor and hang on to this in case I lose the original?” And Quinn, strictly as a favor to the petty officer, mind you, would add the key to his huge ring.

  Every once in a while someone would actually lose a key. Then the Quartermaster of the watch would pass the word on the ship’s loudspeaker system, “Now Keys Quinn, lay up to the midship’s passageway on the double.” Feeling more than ever as if he belonged, Quinn would rush down the passageway, his keys jingling on the ring, his eyes shining with a brightness that comes from being needed.

  Two hours after the confrontation in the Captain’s cabin over the electro servo coupler, Quinn’s application for another tour on the Ebersole came back. The first hint he had that something was wrong came when the XO passed him in the passageway and said, “The Captain feels it’s a violation of navy regs for one man to have keys to all these compartments — you’ll have to turn in your ring, Keys.” And the XO held out his hand.

  Keyless, the usual jingle missing from his walk, Quinn made his way back to the ship’s office and forced the yeoman who everyone thought was a homosexual to dig the application out of the service files.

  “Request for extension on board Ebersole denied,” the Captain had written in an almost illegible scrawl, “pursuant to BuPers Bravo 3756 Romeo of 21 May 1953, which states that petty officers are to be rotated from sea duty every two years unless (a) such rotation would be detrimental to the war readiness of the ship or (b) except in unusual circumstances.”

  Quinn flew into a rage. “The motherfucker,” he screamed. “I’ll break his balls, I’ll kill him.”

  “Jesus shit, take it easy,” McTigue told Quinn. “Maybe he don’t understand you been here since the ship was commissioned. I’ll talk to the XO. He’ll see things different.”

  The prospect that McTigue, the senior noncommissioned officer in the gunnery department, would intercede on his behalf calmed Quinn for the moment. “H
e better change that endorsement,” he said. “He fuckin’ well better.”

  Proper Comes Up with a Suspect

  “But you distinctly said tonight, Proper,” fumed Captain Jones. He was sitting on the bunk of his sea cabin aft of the pilot house, spit-shining his Adler elevators. The night reading lamp over his head filled the small, bare room with angular shadows. A flashlight and a worn Mickey Spillane paperback lay on the deck within arm’s reach. “You’ve let me down, Proper, you’ve certainly let me down.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but the typewriter thing didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I checked out every single one on board; two in engineering, three in operations, three in supply, two in gunnery, the XO’s, that’s eleven, plus thirteen private portables. That’s twenty-four in all. Not-a-one fitted the type on the fatal leaflet, not-a-one.”

  “Sweet Reason must be hiding his typewriter then.”

  “That’s always a possibility, of course, but I’m beginning to think that your Sweet Reason may have typed these seditious leaflets before we sailed from Norfolk.”

  “But we didn’t know we were going to war when we left Norfolk.” The Captain got a certain amount of satisfaction out of having caught Proper in a slipup.

  “Good point, Captain,” Proper conceded. “You’re certainly right about that. Revise my last to read: he probably typed them up in some port before we arrived in the war zone. And if that’s the case, this may be a one-shot affair.”

  Jones looked relieved — and disappointed. “I don’t mind telling you, Proper, it galls me to think that Sweet Reason can get away with this, can get off scot-free. Not that I want any more of these things to turn up, you understand, but it galls the hell out of me.”

  “Captain, there’s something I’d like to tell you but I’m not sure how to begin,” Proper said. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his foul-weather jacket and drew his head, turtle-like, back into the neck.

  “Well, speak up, Proper. Don’t worry, my boy. Anything you say here is strictly between us.”

  “Well, Captain, sir, I have a person — that is, I have a suspect who —”

  “A suspect? A sailor you suspect of being Sweet Reason? Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “Not a sailor, Captain.”

  “Not a sailor! What the hell are you talking about, Proper?”

  “My suspect’s an officer, Captain.”

  Jones stared at Proper. “An officer, you say.” He toyed with the idea the way one toys with a loose tooth. “Jesus, I never thought of connecting an officer with Sweet Reason,” he said more to himself. Jones turned on Proper and demanded: “Okay, out with it, my boy, who is it?”

  “I want to stress that he’s only a suspect, Captain. Innocent until proven guilty and all that sort of thing, you get my point?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. Now who is it?”

  Proper lowered his voice to a whisper. “The Poet, Captain.”

  “The Poet?”

  “That’s Ensign Joyce, Captain. Everyone calls him the Poet, even to his face. He’s the one.”

  “What makes you suspect him, Proper?”

  “Well, sir, there are a couple of things. First off, I found out that Ensign Joyce is very friendly with Boeth —”

  “What’s suspicious about that?”

  “Boeth is an enlisted man, Captain. The word is he and Boeth actually went to New York together last Christmas. And I know the two of them spend a lot of time down in Main Plot —”

  “Just what is it you think they’re doing down there?” Jones asked, visions of homosexuals dancing in his head.

  “I know what they do, Captain. They sit around and listen to classical music!”

  Jones looked dubious. “Friendship with an enlisted man certainly shows poor judgment, but I don’t see —”

  “There’s one more thing,” Proper said. “When I was checking the typewriters in the after wardroom I had occasion to pass by Ensign Joyce’s bunk. Captain, sir, he has a bulkhead smack full of subversive pictures over his bed!”

  The Poet Stands Corrected

  “Do I understand you correctly, Captain? You want to know about the photographs I have over my bunk?”

  Joyce sat stiffly in the straight-backed wooden chair next to the washbasin. His long, thin face looked longer and thinner because of the shadows in the room.

  He and the Captain had already been through the business about Joyce’s friendship with Boeth. “You know why I don’t allow myself to become friendly with the enlisted men, or with anyone for that matter?” Jones had asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s entirely possible we may come under atomic attack some day. You may remember that when a ship comes under atomic attack, everyone gets off the weather decks to protect against radioactive poisoning. Well, Mister Joyce, let me put it to you — what would happen if everyone was inside and the ship suddenly came under attack from enemy aircraft? What would happen is I’d send some men topside to man the antiaircraft guns aft, that’s what would happen. I’d order these men to expose themselves to deadly doses of radioactivity, and I’d do it without batting an eyelash. Now this may sound callous to you, Mister Joyce, but I don’t want to take the risk that I’d hesitate to send a man to certain death merely because he was my friend. So I keep my distance” — the Captain’s eyebrows shot up to underscore the point — “and you’d do well to take your cue from me.”

  But quite obviously, Joyce’s friendship with Boeth didn’t interest the Captain as much as the pictures over the Poet’s bunk.

  “You understand me correctly, Mister Joyce,” Jones was saying. He swung his legs onto the deck so he could face the Poet. “Among other things, I’m responsible for the morale of this ship —”

  “Do you mind if I ask who told you about the photographs, Captain?”

  “That’s neither here or there, Mister Joyce.”

  “It was Proper, wasn’t it?”

  “I said that’s not important, Mister Joyce. What is important is those pictures. Now what about them?”

  “It’s really very simple, Captain. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect paperweights. Some people collect barbed wire. I collect photographs of people being killed. I have one showing a soldier getting shot during the Spanish Civil War. His body is being pushed backward by the force of the bullet passing through him. I have another of a South Vietnamese police chief putting a pistol to the head of a suspect and blowing his brains out in the streets of Saigon. I have a shot of the Nazis stringing up some partisans in Yugoslavia. There’s a photograph of a beaming Cambodian soldier brandishing two severed heads. And another of two small children in a South Vietnamese village called My Lai taken just before they were gunned down by American soldiers. There is another I consider a collector’s item—”

  “I think I get the idea, Mister Joyce.”

  “Do you, Captain?”

  “You’re queer for dead people.”

  “No, sir, that’s not it at all. I’m terrified of dead people. When my father died I didn’t even go to the funeral because I couldn’t stand to see him like that, laid out in a coffin with his hands folded and a plastic carnation in his lapel. You know something, Captain, I’d never even seen a dead body in my life until Wally tried to pull that one out of the sea today.”

  “Then I guess I don’t understand, Mister Joyce. If you’re trying to avoid the sight of dead people, I can see why you prefer the navy to the army. But then why all the pictures?”

  “But that’s precisely it, Captain.” The Poet leaned forward, eager to explain. “Out here on a ship or in a bomber, ten miles from the target, it’s easy to forget that there are people being killed when we shoot. It’s all so mechanical, so impersonal. The computers shoot at coordinates on a map. It’s easy to wage war this way because you never see the war. There’s no morality involved. It’s all a game. Everyone gets a certain amount of satisfaction out of playing well — coping with the mathematics and the mechanics involved and hitting a target you can�
��t even see. But I want to remember all the time that there are people on the other end of this game — and that we’re killing them. I want to feel sick to my stomach everytime I hear a gun go off.”

  “Will that help them any, or just make you feel better, eh?”

  The two men looked at each other across a vast gulf. Jones reached down and hefted the flashlight, flicking it on with his thumb. He got a feeling of power from being able to touch something across the small room with the beam of light.

  “Captain, I haven’t expressed myself very well, I know. Maybe I can tell you a story that will explain how I feel.”

  Toying absently with the beam of light, Jones nodded. “Come ahead, my boy. I’ve heard a lot of things in my time. I suppose I can hear one of your, eh, stories.”

  “I remember,” the Poet began, talking earnestly and fast, “I remember once I was with some friends on a picnic. We were eating lunch when this little girl walked by with her mother. They were holding hands and the mother was very angry. I remember she said to the little girl — I suppose it was her daughter — she said: ‘Now that’s no way to treat a butterfly.’ Something like that: ‘That’s no way to treat a butterfly.’ I remember I spent all afternoon trying to guess what the little girl had done to the butterfly — whether she had torn its wings off or squashed it with her foot or swatted it in midair with her hand or pinned it to the ground with a bobby pin.” Joyce lost some of his steam. “Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Frankly, I don’t understand a goddamn word you’re saying, Mister Joyce. I suggest you forget about these butterflies of yours and concentrate on what you were sent here to do.”

  “No questions asked, is that it, Captain?”

  Jones nodded. “No questions asked. No conscience salved.”

  Joyce shrugged. “I won’t argue with you, Captain. I stand corrected — maybe I am salving my conscience. But at least I don’t pull the trigger. I have that going for me.”

  “But you communicate, don’t you, Mister Joyce?” The Captain was suddenly very angry.