The Circle

by David Poyer

  Yet how many waves, how many storms had Ryan endured? This was no easy weather, but he understood a hurricane, from a combination of Nathaniel Bowditch and Herman Wouk, to be much worse; and she must have lived through them, in the Western Pacific.

  How many men had she carried away from their loved ones, and after long voyaging brought home again? Time had swept her sisters from the seas. Grounded, capsized, lost to enemy action. But Ryan had come through it all. She’d go quietly, as ships went, though her end in a wrecker’s yard would be as noisy as her birth.

  That end could not now be so many years off.

  The old destroyer rolled like a stout woman doing the polka, then slammed so heavily the clock jumped free and clattered away into the dark. He slid sideways, fetching up against the line he’d rigged to hold himself in. How much margin had those wartime builders allowed in her frames and longitudinals? More to the point, how much was left after thirty years of rust, sandblasting, rust again? In the hot dark, a thread of light showed where the doorjamb had warped away from the bulkhead. His hand plucked restlessly across his chest through hair and sweat. He couldn’t sleep, so he lay listening, and his mind moved relentlessly on.

  He’d started his investigation the evening before in the berthing space. The men watched him sullenly from their racks as he prowled about with Chief Hopper, Ryan’s slow old master-at-arms. The beam in the overhead where the exec had found the marijuana was bare. He interviewed the men whose bunks were nearest it, fire controlmen from G Division. They shrugged and looked away as he questioned them. He checked the rest of the overhead, scrambling from top bunk to top bunk, probing cable runs and sheet-metal ductwork with a flashlight. He found dust, dead insects, and fuck books, curled yellow pages worn translucent by dozens of readers. He talked to the compartment cleaners, Higgins and Roseman. They were ignorant of where the grass had come from or whose it was. Or so they swore, and though there was no way to be sure, he believed them.

  Screw this, he thought at last. Dirty, disgusted, he wondered for a moment whether Bryce had put the grass there himself. Then he scowled. That made a lot of sense, all right.

  When he’d gotten back to the bridge at midnight, Silver told him the southerly swell was building and the barometer was dropping fast. The wind had veered easterly and was gusting to fifty knots, and twice the dark sky had opened for driving sleet that stuck to the wiper blades and did not melt. Packer had adjusted the racetrack, but even two miles downwind felt like forever. The breaking rollers battered at the ship like karate experts breaking bricks. The southwest leg was getting rougher, too, as the southerly swells rose, and the two patterns merged at times to create seas Dan no longer enjoyed watching. At 0230, after steering reported taking water through the overhead, not serious, but not good news. Talliaferro had called the bridge at 0300 to report one of the bilge pumps out, but the machinists had gotten it back on-line before Dan went off at four.

  And now it was 0500. Reveille in an hour, and it’d start all over again. Christ, he thought, if only I could sleep. But each time his consciousness began to unravel the ship slammed him into the bulkhead, or hung him, restrained only by the safety line, above a twelve-foot drop to the deck.

  He hugged his pillow to the hot skin of his chest and imagined it was her. Without wanting to, he remembered her delicate yielding, a half-reluctant turning away of the head as he moved, delighting in the way her hips followed his, unable to resist.…

  He struggled briefly with temptation, then yielded. He tried to call back her memory, her presence, her scent, as his hand moved beneath the sweaty sheet.

  They’d left the Yard late on Friday, escaping on the weekend he’d earned from a cross-country second against Virginia Tech. The instant her scarab green VW left the gate, he tore off his cap, threw it in back, and started unbuttoning his clothes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Civvies! I’m a civilian!”

  “Took you long enough.” But he was already pulling a knit shirt over his head, struggling to get his pants over his ankles. Shorts. Sandals! Miller time! He threw the sweaty uniform into the back, clawed an icy can out of the cooler, and dipped his head below the dashboard to drain half of it in one gulp.

  “Let me have a sip. So, what’s the surprise? Where are we going?”

  “New Carrollton, on the Beltway. Keep going out this road, then we’ll take Route Fifty. I got a reservation.”

  “A motel? Dan—”

  “Where’d you think we were going?” He stared at her. She drove with her lips pressed together, hair curled round her neck. He flipped it up and laid the bottom of the can against her nape.

  “Jesus! Dan, stop it!” She pulled the car back onto the road.

  “Sorry.” He kissed her shoulder blade. “It’ll be okay. As long as I’m out of uniform, they can’t tell I’m a mid.”

  “I’m not worried about that. Is it downtown? What if one of my teachers sees us?”

  “Come off it, Betts. Moira knew what we were doing when you snuck me into your dorm.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, what do you want? Separate rooms?”

  She didn’t answer, and he sighed, playing with her hair. Some instinct warned him to leave it alone. He hadn’t known her long, but he suspected that under what he thought of as her Chinese-American submissiveness there lurked a temper.

  After several miles of silence, she began talking about her physical anthropology class. She wanted to be an archaeologist. That disturbed him a little, at some level he could not articulate, but he said nothing. There was plenty of time.

  When they reached New Carrollton, he went into the lobby while she parked. The man behind the counter wore a flesh-toned hearing aid clipped to his glasses.

  “Hi. I reserved a double.”

  “Name?”

  “Lenson, Daniel.”

  “Lenson with an L. Yep, got you right here. Mr. and Mrs.?”

  He’d anticipated the question, and thought about what he’d answer. The problem was the honor code. This close to the end, two months before graduation, he wasn’t taking any chances. “No,” he said.

  The old man examined him, gaze lingering around the ears. But he said only, “Military rate?”

  “No … well … okay, I guess so.”

  “Here’s your key. Pool’s through the gate there, ice on the second floor. Checkout’s at twelve.”

  He was in, free and clear. He grinned at himself in a mirror when the clerk turned away. You monster, he told his reflection. You despoiler of women.

  They found the room, unpacked, and went down to the pool. She’d brought a swim-team suit that covered everything he was interested in, but still she looked good. Slim as a branch of willow, fast as a porpoise. She showed off, doing somersaults and back twists off the board. Her parents had a pool.

  When she backstroked to the ladder, he put his arm around her. Her flesh was smooth and cold. “Tired yet?”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Piña coladas.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Me, too.” They laughed. Beneath the water his hand found her thighs, round and goose-bumped. They clung to each other, and he wondered whether she could feel him through his shorts.

  In the room, he made a pitcher of drinks and they sipped them from hotel glasses, leafing through a guidebook. The rum cleared his head, unwound the tension that guarded speech and thought when he was in uniform.

  It didn’t take long to get undressed. He kissed her shoulders, still hard from the swim, her nipples, her belly. He wanted to do things he’d read about. She said no. But he was beginning to know, he thought, when she was being modest and when she meant it. When she spread her thighs at last, he gazed for a moment, curious. Not much hair there, brown rather than black; hardly any around the lips. They reminded him of the lining of a conch shell.

  He took a breath and lowered his face to her, to the salty flower between her thighs. Her hair tickled
his nose.

  “Jesus. I feel drunk. I don’t drink that much … Oh!”

  He raised his head. “You like?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Let’s do something else.”

  “Okay. You do it to me.”

  He didn’t know the right way, but the way she did it didn’t seem to be it. Maybe it took practice. At last he rolled over her. Her eyes slid closed, and she turned her head. He felt himself sharpening as he touched her there, wet, warm, opened.

  “Dan … are you going to use something?”

  “You want me to?”

  “I really like you. You know that. But I don’t want to get pregnant. Not right now.”

  “I’ll pull it out when I have to come.”

  “Do they teach that at the Academy?” she murmured, but a little frown appeared at the corners of her eyes. “I guess it’ll be all right.”

  He felt a great surge of tenderness at her trust. Wetness and warmth opened beneath his probing fingers. She gave a faint cry as he entered.

  “Hurts?”

  “Not anymore.”

  She wasn’t tight; he could feel no resistance; yet every centimeter of him was—caressed, was the only word he could fit to it. “Pinch me, Betts?” he murmured, lost.

  She tightened obediently. “Nice?”

  “Delicious.”

  “You won’t forget?”

  He didn’t answer, lost in the heat. At first she lay passive, absorbing his thrusts. Gradually her hips began to rock, too, and her hands came up, cupped his back, tightened around him. Her breathing matched his, short, fast, shorter, faster. She began thrusting against him, with him, in step, in rhythm. He clung to her shoulders, feeling it begin deep down in his belly.

  He closed his lids on a blaze of light. Then pushed away, crying out as wave after wave burst free and ebbed out onto the sheets.

  When he was done, she laid her cheek to his. She left little kisses on his neck, his chest, his stomach, and, after hesitating, on the slippery skin of his still-erect penis.

  “Oh. Betts. That was tremendous.”

  “I liked it too. I was almost … Why’d you stop?”

  “I couldn’t hold it in any longer. You were just too nice.” He stroked her back. His head felt light, as if he’d just finished a calculus final. It came to him suddenly that they hadn’t had dinner. But she hadn’t come yet. “Do you want me to do it with my mouth, some more?”

  “Hmmm … Is this worn-out? Still feels good to me.” Her tongue moved lightly along the shaft, tentatively, then her mouth engulfed him. When he looked down, her eyes were closed and her hair lay like a shining blanket over his thighs.

  They made love twice more that night, and again between breakfast and a tour of the White House. By Sunday afternoon they were experts, and she was talking about seeing the school doctor for the Pill.

  But by then, he now thought, trembling spent in the hot dark of his upper bunk, it had been too late, though neither of them knew it.

  He’d been speechless when she told him. They’d talked it over, her plans for graduate school, his going to sea, and cried together. It would be tough. She’d have to postpone her career. But he promised to help all he could, and put in for shore duty at the first opportunity.

  The wind rose to a scream and the bunk dropped away and he seemed for a moment to float, free of the ship, free of sea and earth.

  I love her so much, he thought. And it was as if she heard him, as if she were God, and he was praying to her. I love you, Susan.

  He wanted it to be good and true and beautiful, and he wanted it to last for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  MABALACAT had set the fiddleboards and wet the tablecloth. Confined by the wooden grid, the dishes only stirred uneasily when Ryan took one of her savage leans. Dan and Evlin and Reed began without waiting for the captain, who’d called down for a covered plate.

  “How the runs going, Aaron?” Evlin asked.

  “Getting data.”

  Dan said, “Can you hold a submarine in this weather?”

  “Sure. The surface return degrades the ducting, but we’ve got a thermocline at two hundred and a solid channel under that. Storms aren’t all bad. You get a lot of surface mixing.”

  “So you’re getting what you need?”

  “Oh sure. The idea’s to wring it out. The rougher it gets, the better, far as we’re concerned.”

  “I’m still not sure I understand why,” he said, tentatively, because Reed never seemed to want to explain things, the way Evlin did.

  “Why what?”

  “Why, uh—why we need to test it way up here.”

  “Well, see, the hull-mounted sonars, they were okay down south. But up here, this is just too freaking rough. You can use the twenty-four, our hull-mounted dome, maybe one day out of three. You can fly a helo maybe one day out of four. Unfortunately, this is where the war’s gonna be fought. So the thirty-five, the new fish—it’s a big deal, all right.”

  Dan nodded, picking at his omelet. He felt sleepy and his arms and legs ached from bracing himself. He was hungry, but food appealed to him about as much as fried sawdust.

  He planned to spend today, what there was left of it when he was off the bridge, interviewing his men one by one. Not just about the marijuana; it would be a chance to get acquainted. I’ve neglected that, he thought. But it was becoming more and more evident that there was something wrong in the division, and to fix it, he had to find out what it was.

  “Thanks, sir, that clears it up. Excuse me, please.”

  “See you later.”

  Bloch was standing by the door of his stateroom. “Morning, sir.”

  “Hello, Chief. Come on in. How’s the Constitution going?”

  “Slow, sir.” Bloch sat, glancing around. He asked whether he could smoke.

  “Those King Edwards?”

  “Yessir. Good cigars for the price. Though the Tampa Nugget’s nice, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll try one.”

  They lighted up. Bloch hooked the trash can toward them with his foot. “How you like this weather, Chief?” Dan asked him.

  “Okay by me, sir. You roll like this for a while, it knocks your brains out. Then you’re a real destroyerman.”

  “How’s work going?”

  “Isn’t. I had to pull the men off cleaning and send them up on the oh-two level with chippers. If we don’t get some of this ice off, stability will go to hell. Traven says we’ve picked up a hundred tons already.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Leading damage controlman. Uh, sir, I understand the XO found some grass in number-one berthing.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Come on, sir. Hopper and me go back a ways.”

  “Okay, you’re right. Bryce—Commander Bryce—wants me to find out whose it is. What do you think? Is it someone in our division?”

  Bloch trickled smoke like a broken steam line. “Right off, I’d say Lassard, but then I’d think. It’s easy to blame him for everything. Maybe too easy. Way I see it, there’s always going to be troublemakers. Deck gang’s not the best-behaved bunch aboard, or they wouldn’t be where they are.

  “But things have changed since I was a seaman. Specially the last couple years. I was their age, guys’d drink and fight and go UA, but there wasn’t this anti-American shit. Burnin’ the flag, sit-ins, riots … What I was going to say, suppose we caught Slick with it and fired him off the ship. After a while, somebody else’d take over selling it. There’s always the ten percent that fouls things up for everybody else aboard.”

  “You’re probably right. But we’ve got to try. How about performance? Have you noticed any of the men acting like they use drugs?”

  “Hell, sir, how would I know? Brute Boy, he was born that way, I guess. Gonzales, Greenwald, Hardin, they’re not real alert a lot of the time. They act fucked-up a lot. That mean they’re using it? Or are they just naturally fucked-up? I don’t know. They don’t do it in front o
f me.”

  It was the first time he’d seen Bloch on the defensive. “Well, let’s try it another way. If it was you, where would you go to smoke it?”

  “Topside, probably. You couldn’t smell it then.”

  “On watch?”

  “Christ, I hope not. That could screw us royal.”

  “Ali X. did a good job of steering for me yesterday.”

  “Who? Oh, Coffey. Yeah, he could be a good man, get him away from Lassard and them. There’s good and bad, his color.”

  “Which kind is Isaacs?”

  “Lemond didn’t do too great on the first-class test, sir. He got advanced on some special selection deal. Make the statistics look good, I guess. I been trying to train him. He knows what he’s supposed to do.”

  “That’s not much of a recommendation, Chief.”

  “Sorry, sir. He don’t mean to screw up. It just happens.”

  “How much do you think there is aboard? A lot, or do they just smoke it once in a while?”

  “Like I say, sir, I could tell if they were drunk, but…”

  “I see. Well, my idea’s to have a one-on-one with the men, see if any of them want to talk in private.”

  “I don’t know, sir. Don’t expect too much. The guys stick together when they talk to zeros—to officers. But you might get something out of the older ones.”

  “Thanks, Chief. Let’s start with Isaacs, okay?”

  While he waited Dan worried it through again. The search had gotten him zip point nothing. If he didn’t come up with something soon, he’d have to go back to Bryce empty-handed. That wouldn’t be pleasant. “Get me somebody to hang,” the XO had said. But then, just knowing the brass was on the alert might make people cool it. If he put the pressure on, maybe they’d ditch what they had, throw it overboard.

  “Mr. Lenson?”

  “Come in, Petty Officer Isaacs.”