by Cady, Jack;
"Calling Operations."
"That's their radioman, Diamond. I'd know that dago's voice anywhere. That's a tough dago."
"Stay on top of it,'' Dane told Glass. "I'll be back as soon as I get this kid to pasture." He looked at the radio, which, to all but Brace, suddenly seemed like a lethal gray box of fright. He looked once more at Brace, then at paint spills on the matting of the bridge, splashes on the wing, and pools between cleats on the ladder. Brace, his moment of defiance passed, stood miserable. He looked like a half-finished but brightly colored crayon drawing.
Glass pressed a buzzer, bent forward to a voice tube. "We need you on the bridge, Cap."
Dane took a deep breath, sighed, nodded to Brace. "You don't clean yourself until after you clean the starboard side. If you get crackin', you'll finish sometime this week."
"A tough dago," Glass muttered. "He ain't scared of nothing."
"He's scared of something." Dane absentmindedly gave Brace a small shove, saw green paint on his fingers, wiped the paint on Brace's shirt. "Get movin'."
Some days later, with Abner once more hanging on the opposite side of the pier, Howard talked to his best friend, Abner's yeoman Wilson. Wilson was a large man with an ordinarily chalky face, and his voice, ordinarily gruff, was still thin with a particular memory.
"The helm couldn't have been locked tighter if it was lashed," Wilson said. "He had this crazy quick-release gear that came down over the helm like a pair of hands. I never felt so spooky in my life."
If a dinosaur had appeared at prayer in Saint Peter's, it would have been only a little more remarkable than discovering a lobsterman underway seventy miles offshore and vaguely headed in the direction of Georges.
"It was wallowing along, making maybe one knot," said Wilson. "We'd been towing Ezekiel for an hour. The old man had just settled on the towing speed."
In the afternoon sun, but with rolling mist up to Abner's stern, the small lobsterman was like a remote, black and gray pinprick of solitude struggling toward the mist. Among those hermits who deal in lobster, those men who seek remoteness and silence as well as a catch, this lobsterman seemed hard-headedly intent on insisting that one could not have enough of a good thing. The boat rose and fell easily in a light swell. As cutter Abner approached, some quirk of monkish defiance seemed to turn the lobsterman across Abner's path. As the vessels closed, a collision course developed. Abner took off speed. The lobster boat moved as purposely across Abner's bow as might a small animal pursue its excursions across the face of a mountain and under a formation of clouds.
"No one aboard," Wilson said. "Our cap put over the small boat and our guys ran it down."
The lobsterman, locking his helm in the bleak waters that splashed against the dark islands that surrounded his trade, setting his speed like a hum to underline his solitude, had been pulling traps. The slowly moving boat closed on the marker buoy. The lobsterman plucked the line from the water and took a turn on a cleat. The low speed of the boat broke the trap loose from the bottom. The technique saved some hauling, and it was common practice; but this time the man missed the cleat, doubtless had a turn of line over his hand, and the trap dragged him overboard. The boat, still under way, left him struggling in icy water, in combat with his high boots; a struggle that was small in that wet vastness that closed, empty and complete, over the final solitude.
"We had such an eerie feeling," Wilson said, "but the worst of it came later."
News of "the worst of it" spread to Adrian like the chill of ice fog rolling toward and over an anchored vessel. News of "the worst of it" traveled to the Base, thence across the million-dollar bridge to the bars of Portland, along the piers and into the trawlers, the lobster boats, and, subsequently, south through the fishing fleet. It became a sea story. There was no conversation so light, so ridiculous or so gay that could not be stilled by mention of the lobster boat Hester C.
Lamp's leonine head was filled with auguries. He told stories of the Bermuda Triangle. He talked to the hobbling Indian Conally, asking after ancient spirit tales that might help him form a complete theory.
"Maybe some of the old people know," Conally said doggedly. "I never paid no attention to that stuff."
"'Tis coming on to winter."
Dane, who had seen a thousand frightened seamen, was unimpressed. He blustered and threatened.
Howard reluctantly admitted that he felt the gray chill. Glass sarcasmed at himself for a sudden urge to speak Yiddish.
Brace, both then and earlier, was occupied with other matters, matters so personal and intense that no sea story could penetrate his unhappiness.
With stiff green hair and stiff dungarees, Brace cleaned paint for three days in the sun. At night he was allowed to remove his clothes and sleep in a paint-stained bunk. Dane was scrupulous. Not a fleck of paint escaped him. On a dozen occasions Brace swore that he was finished, and Dane found more paint between the grill of the ladder, on the underside of a rail, spotted beneath the mats on the bridge, or tracked to other parts of the ship on the clothes or shoes of seamen. At the end of three days even Dane was content. Brace, unable to accomplish a personal cleanup, begged Amon for help, and Amon shaved Brace's head.
"There are such tales on the Grand Banks," chief engineman Snow mentioned with little interest to second engineman Fallon. "Come, lad, when we plot the bilge piping, the job is complete."
"The lobster boat was nearly out of fuel," Abner's yeoman Wilson told Howard. "Been wallowing along for two or three days. His lobsters was dead but not stinkin'."
Abner had streamed grapples and gone through the necessary hours and motions of a hopeless box search. The ice in the trawler Ezekiel's hold was melting.
"We rigged a short tow aft of Ezekiel," Wilson told Howard. "Put a seaman aboard. All the kid had to do was lock down that helm and keep watch."
Abner, according to yeoman Wilson, settled into a straight double tow toward nightfall. A double tow was not common, but it was something Abner had done a dozen-twenty-times before. The deck force was short one watchstander because of the man on Hester C. Still, enginemen and firemen were running two on, four off. An eight- to ten-knot breeze rose. The tows rode well and Abner maintained speed.
"We were just changing watch for the mid," Wilson said. "That kid on the lobster boat got the engine started somehow. He dropped the tow and came kiting around Ezekiel's stern like he had a pocketful of pus. Ran the boat alongside, eyes bulging like a cod, and yelling that the boat was haunted. We lost an hour rerigging the tow."
"And that's when the Clara caught fire?"
"No," Wilson shook his head in wonderment. "The Clara didn't catch fire until they were relieving the four-to-eight. I was aboard that bumboat at the time.
"It was just nothing, at first," Wilson said after a moment spent thinking. "We rode for nearly an hour, me, and this seaman with his teeth chattering and pretending like he was brave. The dead lobsters were sloshing around in the well. We couldn't run the engine because of the low fuel. It was just real quiet, and the running lights were dirty and dim and things were all shadowy." Wilson looked at Howard, knowing that Howard had already heard the story, thinking, perhaps, that Howard would say that the story was only crazy.
"This hand came up over the transom," Wilson said. "It just hung there for maybe thirty seconds, just pale and graspy, and then it slipped away. I ran aft and there wasn't nothing. No splash. That kid seaman started to cry. Ten minutes later the hand came back again. I ran forward and started leaning on the whistle to signal for a stop." Wilson looked ashamed, and then indignant. "We were only trying to help," he said. "Trying to get the boat back in so at least his old lady could sell it. That guy was dead. He didn't have any right to do that. He didn't have any right at all."
Chapter 7
At each nightfall the gray chill seemed to move like the whisking touch of a spirit hand across Adrian. As standing lights flared against the slowly encroaching dusk that layered with the cold and colder-growing diminishment
of a waning summer, men chatted beside the galley, or walked the decks, or laundered, played cards, laughed and told stories. Commercial radios on the messdeck and in the crew's compartment were turned higher. The compartments were filled with the voices of young women, touted as "hot chicks" by a local disc jockey who praised songs of love and its unavoidable sadness. The gray chill, experienced at outwaiting eons of illusions, dwelt like an ice-covered boulder planted at the foot of the gangway.
At 2200 hours, dead center in the eight-to-twelve watch, the stories faltered, the flaring and somehow suddenly beautiful incandescent lights went out, and the red nightlights were switched on. They signaled the approach of grayness. Watch-standers on the bridge and in the engine room turned the incandescent lights up in those spaces, rolled pencils across the faces of log sheets, listened suspiciously to normal sounds; but through the rest of the ship the red lights threw pale shadows that grew increasingly grotesque.
"Nobody' s talking," Mother Lamp confided seriously to Howard. "It's like the boys are pretending t'isn't there."
"Maybe it's behind your shoulder, cook."
"You've got a smart mouth," Lamp said, "but you're not smart about this. This has the same feel of something that happened once in Hong Kong."
"There aren't enough Chinese in Hong Kong to match the number of times I've heard about Hong Kong."
"You haven't heard this." Lamp seemed attentive to an inner voice, a communication rising from some heretofore great void, the cold of which only he had suspected. He shook his red-blond-haired head, looked at Howard like a mother doing her best to dote on an idiot child. Then his face changed. He was nearly timid, certainly sad. "I know you don't like me much. It's okay. Nobody hired you to."
"I just give you a hard time, cook." Howard was caught with the unease of a man who has stumped his toe on a fact. "Sometimes you make too much of things."
"Sometimes I do," Lamp said. "So do you."
"We all do," Howard said magnanimously.
"No, we don't. Lots don't. But you do, and I do."
"What happened in Hong Kong?"
"You're right," Lamp said. "I'm making too much of a thing." He refused to tell the story. The refusal, with even less precedent than men walking on unfrozen water, pressed Howard into silence.
The week seemed saturated with gray chill and green paint. Cutter Abner sent no messages about the haunt. That was left to the fate-stricken skipper of Ezekiel who was sitting above a load of fish packed in rapidly decaying ice. The skipper talked to fishermen friends on the radio as he watched Abner's stern disappear at flank speed to assist the burning Clara. "Won't even do for fertilize'," Ezekiel's skipper said. "Going to try to hang on, chum, but I make it that we'll have to pitch the whole catch overboard. We got this jinx boat swingin' alongside." Long before Abner, trailing its string of refugees, made the Portland Lightship, the nub of the story and its amplifications had entered the bars.
"They were heads-up and lucky," Abner's yeoman Wilson told Howard. "The fire in the Clara started in wiring in the engine spaces. They got it out, but they had structural damage aft."
"It caused some heat aboard our ship," Howard told him. "The new kid got a burn."
Brace, wearing the aroma of turpentine, and with stiff green hair, came off the four-to-eight and went to the messdeck to eat before making his renewed attack on spilled paint. In the wardroom which lay forward of the messdeck on the starboard side, with the ship's office sitting between, Levere, Dane, and Snow discussed timber for emergency shoring. Dane sat toad-silent, listening, respectful of Snow. To the surprise and provisional despair of some, Dane seemed to like Snow completely. Lamp bustled about the galley to port where he made watchstander chow for Brace and engineman striker McClean. Amon peeled spuds and kept an attentive ear cocked toward the wardroom. Brace arrived with a ladder-thumping stomp, intended, no doubt, to announce that—green paint or not—he remained his own man. He drew coffee, sat in his customary place, and slurped in a seamanlike manner; stolid, nearly, as if the presence of a wrinkle on his forehead gave him the responsibility for new reserve. His hands trembled only slightly.
"The problem ain't technically storage," said Dane. "But where can we store it so we can get at it fast?"
"Not below, of course," said Snow. "To be rapidly available it must be abovedeck."
"Got to keep the working decks clear."
"Paint it against rot," Levere said. "Cut it to fit as a false deck for the flying bridge. Secure it with light cable and quick-release gear."
"That'll work. Now, how do we get hold of it?"
"There is salvageable scrap stacked behind the Base," said Snow.
From the galley came the distant voice of Lamp asking watchstander Brace if there were later news on Clara.
Brace's voice, filled with hatred of paint, with frustration of green hair and stiff clothes, with anguish over the unfair death of dreams, and certainly with the violence that attends confusion, answered in a voice of low and malicious satisfaction.
"That's one we won't have to haul. That one isn't going to cause anybody much more trouble."
In the wardroom there was momentary silence.
"Excuse me, Captain. Chief." Snow picked up his coffee mug, stepped through the office and onto the messdeck, a man walking casually on an errand only a little less innocuous than the Creation. Like an inquiring, small brown towhee, he stopped before Brace and peered. Then, with distaste for either the man or the job, he backhanded Brace across the mouth. The blow seemed casual, light, and yet Brace's head was thrust as sharply as if he had been hit by a hatch cover. Brace recovered, started to rise, sat back down and looked upward at Snow through shock, as if questioning Snow's fortitude and his own.
"A man had to do that for me once, lad. I think to pass on the favor."
Brace sat dumb. Snow absentmindedly walked to the coffee urn, refilled his mug, and stepped back into the wardroom. Engineman striker McClean, normally quiet to the point of near idiocy, his long mulatto head and his jug ears as incongruous in society as his narrow fingers and thin wrists were around machinery, understood. "You've never seen a fire at sea," he told Brace.
"Please excuse it, Chief," Snow said to Dane. "The man is in your section."
"It's just against regs, is all," Dane mumbled.
"This is not the English navy," Levere said. "It isn't even the American navy. Did you have to do that, Chief?"
"I suppose I thought I must," Snow said. "Otherwise I would not."
Brace stood, nearly stumbled, looked amazed to find himself upright. He rubbed the red flush on his mouth and seemed to be counting his teeth. His eyes adjusted to his upright condition. His mouth pulled into a quavering line, and then his eyes reflected awe, or, it may be, understanding, but they certainly reflected one of the countless varieties of love. He walked in a tentative way through the office and to the open wardroom door. Knocked.
"You've been up to your white hat in troubles, sailor." Levere, normally remote and with full trust in his section leaders, and with a temper that was rare and thus awesome, did not like what he thought was about to happen.
"To speak to Chief Snow, sir." Brace stood erect, with outthrust and trembling lower jaw, as resolute-seeming (were it not for his green paint) as an advertisement for breakfast cereal. "I apologize," Brace said. "I deserved it."
"Indeed you did," Snow told him, "and the apology is accepted."
"Why do you apologize?" At close range Levere's face was always mildly shocking. Beneath the swarthy Frenchness, and under the flesh of the left cheek, a small and ulcerous growth caused one side of his face to seem swollen.
"Because I was wrong—sir."
"We know that, sailor. Do you understand why?"
Brace mumbled. It was only clear that he understood a compulsion of feeling, and was not, in his scarcely burnished cynicism, able to articulate his feeling.
"You are a crew member of this ship," Levere told him, "with rights as well as duties. Chief Snow is tec
hnically outside of regs. Do you want this logged?"
"No, Captain." Brace turned to Dane, and Brace's face for an instant was covered with despair. Then he squared his shoulders again, took a shallow breath. "I know what you think, Chief, but I've been trying. I really have been trying."
"Cows try," Dane told him. "When they plop in a field. Get turned-to on that paint."
Brace, shocked at being repulsed, his grand gesture lost in cow plop, began to slump away.
"Sailor."
"Captain?"
"I was going to transfer you after that display with the paint. Chief Dane insisted it would be a mistake."
Brace stood, unable to absorb a further jolt of information.
"I am now willing to admit that Chief Dane is probably correct. Dismissed." As Brace left, Levere turned to Snow. "Set your gang to work on the shoring, then come to my cabin."
"I am physically not a large man," Snow said instead. "Now that I am once provoked, I am sure that the crew has no further questions."
"In that case, go about your duties." Levere shook his head, mused as if dreaming. "I thought it was the Irish who were supposed to be lucky."
Abner's yeoman Wilson was impressed when Howard told the story. "Where did Levere find that one?"
"A small fishing village. A place called Liverpool."
"Get off my back. I can read a chart."
"He got busted up and concussed on a Limey can doing escort during the war. It scrambled his brains. They dropped him off here and he liked the place."
"Look for the woman," yeoman Wilson advised.
"I always do," Howard said. "World without end."
The gray chill was momentarily held in check because of the incident between Snow and Brace. For a while men gossiped, laughed, formed estimates of Snow that they could live with, while thinking little that was new about Brace. Cutter Abner struggled. By the time Abner had Clara in tow, returning to the disabled Ezekiel, the story turned from the main street of the crew's attention to a back alleyway of disregard. It was a small memory, to be fished from a man's ditty bag of tales at some future time, on some future messdeck, where youth might need advice.
