by Cady, Jack;
"It don't pay to forget."
"You hit it the second time," Brace said.
"From solid decks. This pier's not moving." Howard laid another coil and began to practice. Radioman James, looking meager and remote and pale, with nearly whitened hair and washed gray eyes, was passing from the Base back to the ship. He stopped, watched, silently picked up a line. He made a throw, bounced the line from the edge of a target, turned to Brace. "Your coil's got no spring. Lay it like this ... "
"Don't teach him nothing fancy," Howard said. "Let him learn the plain way first."
If, from New Bedford, the lousy cutter Able could not tow the plug from a bathtub, that was all the more reason why deck seamen aboard Adrian and Abner learned to stand backup to a fireman's steaming watch. Firemen learned the helm, and how to make ready the decks to get underway. Yeoman Howard was third quartermaster, while senior quartermaster Chappel could type. Gunner's mate Majors, less than blessed to belong to a crew that could not, with the three-inch-fifty gun, hit the broad side of a continent at five hundred yards, acted as third bosun to Dane and Conally. Equipment was hard to come by. A less awful tradition said, "Patch it up and make it do," but even a frugal Treasury Department was generous in the matter of towline.
It came aboard in the first week of August. A new, enormous coil, spiky with small fibers poking through the lay like the remaining bristles on a balding brush. The line was stiff, hard, dry, waxy, unsalted, unbleached, unstained with rust, unmarked by chafing gear, and perhaps, even to Brace, it was beautiful.
Lamp appeared on the fantail like a priest investing a new house or enterprise. He tsked and worried, sat in the sun like a great, sweating slab of ham. The huge bundle was broken and the line laid the length of the port main deck, around the house, down the starboard side, and back up to port. Seamen walked the line, hand-rolling away fistlike loops, sweating and grunting, backs strained against the weight.
"The luck is turnin', boys."
"Which-a-way, cook, which-a-way?"
"Don't scorn luck, boys."
"Which way, cook?" Levere, hawk-faced, French-faced, and taciturn as a Scot, appeared on the boat deck to watch the investiture.
"How easy it works," Lamp exclaimed. "It's stiff but willin', cap."
"It's just well packed."
"Don't scorn luck, Cap."
"Nobody does," Levere told him. "You ought to give a good deal of thought to that, cook."
Howard, watching from the pier, his badge of office the immaculate white hat rolled and bleached over dark, brief waves of hair, stood beside the short, bear-shaped second engineman, Fallon, who had a reputation for smart hands; an instinct for machinery that Lamp could somehow explain by talking of Peter the Great. Fallon conversed with pumps, complained to sweat joints, held arterial arguments with webs of piping. He stood like a keg, parting the light breeze that blew down the pier between Adrian and Abner—heavy-browed, round-faced, and with grease-stained hands—perturbed to hear the unnatural squawk of gulls and the alien-whispering wind.
"We got orders for Jensen's replacement," Howard told him. "From cutter Aaron. A chief engineman name of Snow."
"He won't beat Jensen, chum. What kinda foolish name is Snow?"
"An easy-to-spell name," Howard told him. "You on top of it down there?"
"We just waitin' to get reported on the line."
"Snow shows up next week."
"We'll wait," Fallon said. "Belowdecks is clean. Be a shame to mess it up by usin' it." He sniffed suspiciously at the breeze, like a man divining for oil while suspecting he will strike water. "If we got a week, let's spend it. I want that new kid broken in."
"I'll mention it to Dane."
"Snow? What's his first name?"
"Edward."
"A Limey. We went for years without a chief in that engine room—an' without a Limey, neither."
"He'll spend his time in the wardroom."
"Not a chance," Fallon said morosely. "We waited this long. You can just bet your uppers that Levere has found hisself a hotrock."
Across the pier, the crew of Abner did its devotions before a new bundle of line. Seamen walked loops, snipes came blinking from below, or from the messdeck. Some of the men carried coffee mugs. They gabbled, slurped, chewed on sandwiches. The bridge gang clustered on the boat deck like a makeshift choir at a Sunday school picnic, a choir ambiguous in the face of hot dogs, pie, and amazing grace.
"It starts again," said Fallon.
"Abner takes the duty Monday," Howard told him. "Us, we still got a little over a week."
Howard spoke to Dane, who spoke to Fallon, who passed the word to Brace. When Brace understood that he was ordered to stand cold-iron watch and take instruction on steaming, he went to Dane, complaining bitterly, his mouth running hot with adolescent vigor. He was shocked to find his words probing beneath Dane's professional cussedness, to enter the true cussedness of a land where no grown man would ever want to visit.
Dane, squat, froglike, less gracious than a crocodile, his thin lips as tight with anger as his shape was tight with rheumatism, shoved Brace into the ship's office.
"I don't want to see this punk for a week," Dane told Howard. "Full duty below. Watchstanding and bilges. Lots of bilges."
Brace stood, like a man immersed in memory. He murmured.
"What?"
"I got rights."
"You got hoof-and-mouth disease," Howard told him kindly. "Your big hoof in your fat mouth. I keep telling you."
"Restriction," Dane said. "If I catch him ashore, I'll gut him."
"You've been having a wonderful summer aboard," Howard said when Dane was gone. "You're going to love the bilges."
Brace stood protesting that a seaman was not a fireman, that black was not white, and that people couldn't just go changing things. Howard said that this was not Illinois; Brace said, what did that mean; and Howard understanding on some inarticulate level that the youthful Brace was perfervidly asking for order in both the visible and invisible universes, said that as soon as Brace learned that he was a crew member of Adrian, and not just a prima donna ex-cow milker striking for seaman, then the happier all of them would be.
Brace went to the engine room, to the sweet, slightly rotten and clammy odor of the bilges where red lead never completely dried, to the sure and perfectly cutting scent of ozone rising hot in the nose, to air layered with the thin and oily taste of diesel, and the smartly grabbing stench of wet valve packing. His thin nose wrinkled, but he discovered that belowdecks he was never bothered by Dane. Brace was loading a cargo of auxiliary information. The engine spaces were in good order. The enginemen could afford to go easy.
"I like it down there," Brace confided to the sweating and bustling Lamp. "They got a different attitude."
"Because of Jensen. He was good." In anticipation of Adrian's return to duty, Lamp was heavy shouldered about the galley, mixing meringue, as though a special treat of lemon pie was a ritual end to summer.
"Snipes is always late getting the word," Glass said in passing.
"You are a bad man," Lamp groaned. "Bad."
"Jensen made a mistake," Howard said from his position by the coffee urn. "And Glass, you just now almost made one."
"Be careful with your mouth," Lamp said. "I feel it, boys. The luck is skiddy."
Things (as if they were endorsing Lamp's bleak guess) began to disappear. The key to an ammunition locker checked out missing, to be found two days later by gunner Majors in a pocket he had delved into a dozen times. Majors ran his inventory and it was intact. Amon, always precise, could not locate twenty pounds of coffee; to find it, after chattering bursts of frenzy, nestled for no scrutable reason in a locker in the wardroom. Howard searched desperately for a lost requisition which, the following week, appeared like a flick of sorcery between unused pages of the ship's log.
In later years while cooking at the Base, Lamp would vow that nothing had been exactly unusual, nothing exactly wrong. There had been only the feeling
that gravity had slipped and time was laughing. Events, normal enough when isolated, had piled up, jumbled and tumbled together, swept back and forth like a lost net washed onto a rocky, pooling beach.
As Lamp revealed that Pluto was conjuncting in some dismal way with Venus and the local newspaper spoke of sunspots—while reporting that the nation's president had lost another golf ball in a sand trap—Brace received a "Dear John" letter from a teenager named Mona. Glass gossiped to Howard that while on midwatch he saw Brace walk silently to the rail and drop a flat object which plunked into the dark water.
A piece of waste materialized in a rebuilt check valve. There was a revolution in Chile. Engineman-designate Racca, with luck as bad as his bad mouth, and ashore with a deep thirst, encountered a young person named Peak's Island Sally and a subsequent dose of penicillin, both for the very first time.
"Boys, boys. Boys, boys."
Chief engineman Edward Snow reported aboard a day early to the consternation of a black gang still smarting with a plugged valve; the same day that Brace left the engine room, and the day when the phone on-shore connection failed for two hours, only to be discovered when a messenger arrived from the Base with a testy TWX message from First District saying that Operations was trying to make a routine call to Levere.
"Skiddy, boys. I be double-dog-damn if it's good nor bad. Just backwards."
The ordinarily smart-moving Indian Conally sprained an ankle and hobbled in tape like a wounded racehorse. An admiring senator spoke of proud traditions and of cutting the service's budget. The commandant sent an all-units memorandum to express the hope that each man would do his best; and cutter Abner, showing its stern, steamed toward a mess that would soon work out to be one of the biggest flukes in the history of line breaking.
Chapter 6
Chief engineman Edward Snow was small and quick, and only a little effeminate. He leered displeasure from a raised left eyebrow instead of hollering; and he took a tough and competent black gang and made it better.
"We'll not do it that way, lads."
Snow moved as accurately as a dipper gull, but he looked like a trim, khaki-colored towhee. By many pounds, and two or three inches, he was easily the shortest and lightest man aboard. Even the compact Amon seemed like a lumbering two-decker bus in comparison. Snow's feet never tapped with impatience, but he caused others' feet to tap as they pondered his administration. Fallon swore that Snow had typical brown English hair and was a socialist. When Howard pointed out that Fallon had never met a brown Englishman, socialist or not, Fallon muttered curses.
"He took down Jensen's watchstanding orders."
"The Ark of the Covenant," Glass said. "Yids understand these things."
"Don't make jokes. "
Snow pulled piping and wiring diagrams from the files. In league with Fallon and electrician Wysczknowski, he traced the systems and altered the diagrams. Cutter Adrian had been replumbed and rewired so many times that the diagrams were a cat's-paw of revision. Quartermaster Chappel and yeoman Howard knew less about a drafting board than they knew about an abacus, but they began learning to draft. Revised schematics slowly began to stack up in the ship's office, and even more slowly to appear in freshly redrawn form. Chappel and Howard struggled and cursed. Adrian's twin, cutter Abner, was at sea and equally struggling. Seaman apprentice Brace was tilted slaunchways from another encounter with Dane and—because of the lost Mona, or made lonely by the dying summer—was constructing a new hero.
"All hands belowdecks must memorize these diagrams," Snow told Howard. "Work with great care."
"It's the only way you can work, when you don't know what you're doing."
"You are receiving a large favor," Snow told him. "Few quill-drivers ever learn how to draft."
With Adrian on standby, the crew found itself testy after a summer of inaction. Men grumbled that since they could not go ashore it was foolish to hang against the pier. They muttered against the judgment of First District Operations as they followed the steadily increasing troubles of cutter Abner.
"Levere already asked," radioman James told an assembly on the messdeck. "Operations won't give us a proceed-and-assist." To Lamp he said, "I thought Abner was supposed to be lucky."
"The sea's not running hard, boys."
"That's blamed small luck."
"It's touchy, boys. It's touchy. Don't think bad thoughts."
Across the pier, and on the seaward side, where the familiar shape of Abner had seemed rooted during the summer, there now lay only the long perspective of distance.
The harbor still sparkled with sunlight, the inner islands were black, tree-covered and faraway humps, while clean-lined and freshly painted Norwegian freighters stood at the docks beside rusty Panamanian buckets, scarred coastal tankers, trim Britons, Canadians and a small white-and-green Irishman sparkling with pride and polish. Spectral French and Italian death ships mouldered against the docks like ghosts suffering extreme unction through the sacramental wine in their scuppers, rust in their bilges, and the oil that enclosed their hulls. Gray and white American tankers flew snapping corporation colors from their masts like small testimonials to efficiency; and, hanging like spiders in great clusters of drying nets, the ever present trawlers were aromatic with sweat and sun and fish as men forked the catch from the holds like farmers pitching hay—while, in the channel, yachts and lobster boats moved like a swirl of gnats above the face of a drowsing absolute.
Cutter Abner, en route to the grounds, laid line aboard the trawler Ezekiel, disabled with a cracked piston while inbound with a full catch packed beneath rapidly melting ice. Glass, standing bridge watch on the moored Adrian, was joined by Howard who was taking a break. Glass intermittently checked Abner's progress. He switched the radio to the working frequency of 2694.
"They'll save the load," Howard said, "if he don't break his seal too often staring down his hatch."
"We've raised to eight knots," said the static-crackling voice of Abner's captain. "How are you riding, cap?"
"Raise it more if you wa-nt-a." Ezekiel's radio was stronger than the rig on Abner. "This load ain't too thrifty."
"We'll stay with eight," Abner crackled.
"No sea to speak of," said Glass, "if they're shagging it that fast."
"They better shag it fast. They're sitting on a perfume factory."
It was then that Brace, passing a gallon of paint from the main deck to a man on the boat deck, learned that you never lift an open can of paint by the bale.
Glass switched the set back to the faintly popping watch frequency. Through the open hatch, and distant, sounded the snap of the commission pennant, while from the buoy yard a crane groaned and whirred. An engine chugged and idled in the small boat basin. There was a thump, a small confusion of voices, a shout, and then whoops and hollers of laughter which gave way to a heavily trudging step along the main deck. Silence accompanied the walker, and then low laughter resumed as a thin, birdlike whistle of amazement seemed to nudge the heavy steps forward and up the ladder to the bridge.
Brace stepped through the hatch wearing a single wrinkle on his otherwise smooth forehead, and doused with green paint splashed in his hair, across one cheek, and saturating his shirt like a slick lustre of green blood. The paint ran the length of one leg and colored a shoe. Brace looked like a member of the walking wounded, but, though bowed, stood as unrepentant as a cannibal unfairly baptized by a zealot.
"I have," Brace said, "three years, seventeen days ... " He stooped forward like an old man to look at Glass's wristwatch, " ... eleven hours and thirteen and a half minutes to pull in this fun house. I want a transfer to the engine room."
"That's the way all thirty-year men talk," Glass said. "Me, I ain't a thirty-year man. I'm putting in time 'til the Mafia calls."
"Stop dripping," Howard told Brace.
"Let him drip if he wants," Glass said. "How much worse off can he get?"
"A request mast," Brace said. "I want to change my rate to the engine room."
Dane's slow step was accompanied by puffs of deep breath drawn against rheumatism, and they made mere doom seem like a cheap and silly thing. Dane appeared in the hatch that led to the wing and he squinted. His eyes widened and stared, froglike. His thin mouth was as tight and straight as any line on Howard's beginning diagrams. Dane blinked, made motion to move onto the bridge, stopped.
No one, in Howard's memory, had ever before seen Dane speechless. The radio crackled. The commission pennant popped. The indifferent idling of the engine in the small boat basin smoothed and rose with a controlled growl as the boat set off on harbor patrol.
"Illinois," Dane whispered hoarsely, "I wisht they sent the cow, instead." He stepped through the hatch and onto the bridge. At first he looked both awed and reverent. Then he eyed Brace in the way that a hungry man might view a pork chop, but when he spoke his voice was low and seemed nearly kind. "I don't want to know how you did it," he told Brace. "I don't want to know why you did it ... " He slowly straightened like an inflatable raft filling and stretching toward shape. Howard and Glass watched, backed away, fascinated by the swelling chest beneath the khaki shirt as Dane gulped air to roar from full lungs and a fuller heart—
"But why in the name of God and the Holy Clap did you track it around!"
The radio crackled. The departing boat's engine was a rhythmic and diminished hum. In the buoy yard the crane snuffled and clanked. Brace opened his mouth to protest, looking like a man trying to spit out too much air as he faced a hurricane wind.
The radio popped, fizzled, settled to a hum as somewhere at sea a transmitter opened:
"Priority. Priority," said a nervous, frightened voice from Abner. "Nan-mike-fox from nan-mike-fox-two-one ... priority, priority."
Howard stood stunned. Brace drooped. Howard looked at Glass, at Dane, and saw their shocked and temporarily vacant faces.
