by Cady, Jack;
Adrian seemed like a polished piece of antique crystal stored forever behind the closed doors of a buffet. The men hesitated, remained silent, as if finally captured by a grim decree that made them outcasts even from their avowed purpose. Then forward and distantly sounding through steel bulkheads, the blurred resonance of a bell arrived like an echo.
"Calling the engine room."
"It's another drill."
"I told you I had a feeling, boys."
"Something's up."
"We're starting to get some breeze."
Gale warnings, which almost never occur on a clear day, are like a dark and hollering mouth of triumph. The sky lowers in the northeast, and against the footings of the million-dollar bridge, gray foam rises like the fingers of the harbor. Yachts, swinging at anchor, seem the focus of attack by fleets of dories as owners hastily arrive, secure sail and loose gear, chug engines into life and move out in search of moorage. Toward the Portland Head, the sea, graying toward the sky, begins to pile and churn, white-maned with the wind; and the dark green islands lie like black smears fronted and circled by rocks that carry surf in their teeth. On the windward side of the pier, Abner is flung in short thumps by crashing water, and to leeward Adrian tugs at its lines, falls backward into the small resulting trough, is surrounded by the rush and sigh and hasten of swift water. At the Base the new signal, twin flags, reports in sharp snaps from the tower, while across the bristling, whitening harbor, above the blown spray, a thin layer of black rises in churning dust from the coal yards to march like a line drawn across the windy face of Portland.
"Plane down."
"He's bought it."
"Three planes. Air Force."
"Get off my back."
"I think it's three. That's what James yelled at Dane."
"I'd like to yell at Dane. Chum, if I ever yell at Dane."
"You'll yell, ‘yessir Chief, yep', that's what you'll yell."
"How can three planes go down at once?"
"Out of the way, there. Quit tryin' to explain the Air Force."
Engines rumble onto the line, dark smoke like a period to an idle sentence pops from the stack and into the wind. The engines settle, the smoke disappears. Yeoman Howard tumbles down the gangway in a splayed run, bumps against the wind like a comma, his watch cap battening his ears, the wind at his face while he crosses to Abner where yeoman Wilson dashes along the main deck to the gangway.
"You, too."
"Six guys out there."
"Give me that." Wilson grabs sailing lists and mail, runs to drop them at the Base. Aboard Adrian, seamen single up on the mooring while Dane stands on the wing with the broad certainty of a tugboat, bellowing. About the decks Conally secures gear, rages. The gangway is shoved clattering toward Howard, to be pulled by him past the lip of the pier. He swings aboard forward of the breast line, turns to see Wilson dashing from the Base in jerky bursts against the wind. On the bridge the high-tuned crackle of the radio, faint in the wind, blanks as James sends the departure message, "Various courses and speeds, maneuvering to assist"; the lines let go, tended by Glass, who leaps aboard as if propelled by the wind; and Adrian, on cold engines, moves slowly into the stream to gather speed evenly as combustion raises engine heat.
"Nine minutes. Log it. Zero nine fifty-two."
"What took so long?"
"The cook was talkin'."
Maligned Lamp, appearing on the main deck, watches Adrian's stern slide past the dark, ugly blot of Hester C. He shakes his head, retreats below to secure the galley as Abner noses from the pier. Decks of both ships seem momentarily peopled with men making up and securing lines. In the channel, Adrian brushes at the heavy chop, presses, vibrates from engines, from shaft; a vibration sensed more than felt, like a football lineman poised instantly, a split second ahead of the count, delicately timed to avoid a penalty. Men off watch, hesitant with the anxiety of a job that offers no current action, drift to the messdeck to wait for news brought by radioman James who drops galleyward like a pale Lord, his coffee mug dangling from one thin hand like a small and forgotten chalice.
"The word. What's the word?"
Amon, headed forward with coffee for the bridge gang, pauses, listens. Three trainers are out of fuel and down.
"That kind without propellers," said McClean. "I don't trust nothing without a propeller."
Amon pauses, then begins his climb to the main deck. "Jets would splash hard in this weather."
"In any weather."
"Headed up to Bangor?"
"Along that line."
"We won't find 'em."
"We'll take a turn on trying."
On the occasion of his first visit to water above the shelf, Brace stood as stalwart as a young hound. He listened, seemed thoughtful, then went above to the main deck where he leaned on the rail as if fixed by romance as strong as McClean's faith in things that churned. The luminous and beckoning engine room, the lost Mona, the harsh words and rage of Dane were doubtless lost in the gray mist and blown spray rising before the lighthouse at Portland Head which for more than a century and a half had stood watch over curious sights and cold survivors of the sea.
Howard, who in lucid moments swore to Lamp that all prayer was directed to the ridiculous, approached.
"You'll love it in a little while," he said to Brace. "Wait until we clear the head.''
Brace turned with the vacuous look of total absorption in great matters. He seemed surprised by the intrusion of another consciousness into his arena of sensation. His watch cap fell to his eyebrows, from beneath which his eyes were dark brown and lightly glazed with either romance or memory, or possibly wind. He steadied himself, leaned against the rail, both hands forward and gripping easily like a magician or a strong man who was singly holding together the ancient collection of parts that was the cutter Adrian.
"I like it," he said. "I've been thinking how much this don't look like Illinois."
Howard, who in a dim way may have sensed a bond between himself and Brace in some near past, paused, then resumed his task.
"You learn the helm, then practice steaming. Twelve-to-two on the bridge, two-to-four in the engine room." Then, a man pressed into confidences by the rare occasion of privacy, he said, "It isn't like Ohio, either."
"You're from Ohio?"
"Did you think you invented it?"
The glaze over Brace's eyes disappeared in favor of intuition and recognition. He pushed himself upright from the rail, looked at Howard.
"I guess I thought I did. Does everybody?"
"I don't know, but probably I'll think about it."
Beyond the Portland Head, the sea rises unfettered in its crush toward the land. Above the widely moving swell which lifts and drops vessels as surely as the faith asked of a philosophic premise, runs a chopping swell that is a creature born of wind. The confused sea delivers shocks against the hulls of the largest ships, and smaller vessels nose the wind like determined and uneasy immigrants to a sometimes violent land. The wind, flavored with salt, picks spray from the bow, to wash decks, house, rails, the unused and unthought-of guns; wind rising from the tops of waves to swirl spume like a dust devil awhirl across a plain. Salt accumulates in the corners of men's mouths, to be licked away, causing a momentary taste of the sea's huge proclamation. The wind speaks in the open tones of unmuted instruments. Gales do not howl or scream or screech, as does a storm. They moan, weep, play the blues, are lubricating and liquid over lonesome, tricky waters.
"It's a tough rap," Glass said to Brace. "Some say to puke and get it over with. Others say that if you once start pukin' you can't get stopped."
Brace, making a choice, or more likely in the firm grasp of his body's knowledge, spilled breakfast to leeward in illustration of young wisdom. Then he climbed weak-kneed and pale to the bridge and began to discover some of the things that a helm will not accomplish.
After the first urge of action and compassion, Adrian's crew settled into the routine of a steaming watch that poin
ted the vessel toward unknown positions and easily guessed agony. In September in Maine, and with a little fat, a lot of thrashing, and all the luck left to him, a man can sometimes live for twenty minutes in the water. If the crews of the planes had not made it to their life rafts, their books were already closed. If they were on the rafts, jacketed and booted, their paltry scrap of canvas clutched over them against the wind, hypothermia might not spin them from the edge of their circle for fifteen or twenty hours.
On small ships, as watch follows watch, and as the sea continues through shocks to search for loose gear, and, finding none, seeks to loosen gear to fling it, daily work on the ship ceases. Men who are not yet reduced to walking on bulkheads are still unable to trust their tools, their sustained balance, even their intent.
Amon, who suffers in the first hours of large movement, lies huddled beneath a table of the messdeck in Asiatic contemplation, from which, like Lazarus, he will in a few hours rise wide-eyed and knowledgeable from the explored depths of a great mystery.
"If he'd just quit fighting it and puke, he'd be all right. I keep telling him." Lamp, who is smart about the galley in his heavy-shanked way, builds, constructs, fusses over half-filled vats of soup and regiments of sandwiches, the most that can be claimed from this kind of sea.
Men off watch sit on the messdeck, or sack out in jerkily plunging bunks. The Indian Conally roams the slick upper decks in communion with wind and water, ostensibly checking against things adrift that may crash or vanish. Heat swirls through the grates of the fiddley, where Howard, in time, passing forward to the bridge, sniffs, as if he expects sulphur to rise from the hot depths in which Snow, like a small brown bird, perches beside the engine-order-telegraph and before the great bank of dully gleaming gauges, dials and valves that look like waving, plunging sculpture.
Howard stands arrested, silenced, emptied, in foreboding, in heart-shocking horror; watching a stance he has seen so often in excursions across this fiddley—the wide-legged, hunch-shouldered concentration of the drowned Cecil Jensen standing on oily plates beside the port engine; a wiping rag dangling from a hip pocket, another rag dangling from one hand. The stance is a collection of tallness compacted to bulk, only a little less unique than a thumbprint.
Howard shudders, reduces a yell, a scream, back into his instinctive interior, and stands in dispraise of his eyes which have fooled him.
It is only Brace standing there, timid, alert, entranced among the heavy voices of the engines.
On the bridge, Dane stands like a brick mortared between loran and radio. He looks seaward, squinty-eyed and thin-mouthed, unimpressed by the hook of Rodgers's body that dangles headless from the rubber mask over the radar scope. Glass twirls the helm to meet the sea, twirls back, the gyro repeater dances, swings. Levere mutters over the plot. James fiddles with log sheets, waits.
"How's the set?"
"Sea return, Cap. We could miss a freight train." Rodgers backs from the radar mask, blinking, a man reconnected.
"Eyes, chief. Call watchstanders."
The radio pops, blanks.
"Abner calling."
"We'll take the seaward leg."
The ships drop their mutual course; Abner climbs the chart to the northwest while Adrian, advancing under the spinning, kicky helm in the hands of the watchful Glass, beats to the southeast.
Chapter 10
Watches changed, darkness approached, and the gray sea turned black, marked by luminous and crashing runs of opalescent foam. Men carrying binoculars moved from the wings to the flying bridge, thrust into a netherland of increasing wind, and separated from the interfering, dull red lights below. Adrian paced back and forth across sixty-nine degrees latitude in a search across a line. Phosphorescence spun from the bow. The muted stack rumbled, whispered. As temperatures skidded, lookouts on watch wrapped mufflers across their mouths, turned from a defensive oblique that put the wind most often on their covered ears and raw cheeks, facing with greater frequency into the wind so that their breath would not fog the glasses. Each man searched his sector, silent, occasionally stomping feet against the deck and listening to the deepening tone and quality of the wind which worked across the vibrating strings of the halyards.
"Report everything," Conally instructed Brace.
"You can't see anything."
"Them rafts are yellow," Conally said. "Water will be washing around them. Sometimes they have flares."
"The trouble is, I think I see something and then it goes away."
"Don't stare. Look to one side. Look away, then look back."
"Why don't they all have flares?"
"They all do. Guys get scared and use them up. They get too cold and drop them."
Brace, as if chewing the information, stood hunched into an old foul weather jacket that was in need of overhaul. "Planes have been flying over all day."
"Planes ... couldn't spot a whale on a dinner plate."
On the bridge, Dane hunkered before the radar mask, he, too, now seemingly headless, thus less bulky, almost thin. He was less threatening as his face appeared to begin and end between flared nose and chin. Bosun striker Joyce, haggard not from fatigue but from proximity to Dane, spun the helm to meet a sea, spun it back. Levere, captain, who had been on the bridge for twelve hours and who would remain until the flyers were a clear fatality, slouched in a tall bridge chair. As the hours passed, and as Levere's experience combined with intuition in his communion with wind and water, the westward leg lengthened.
No one (nor would any have dared ask) knew how Levere—trusted at the time, and trusted without question afterward—managed his conscience over the drowning of Jensen. If Levere was of the cynical French, he was also of New England, and he was the captain. In that past winter of piling seas that saw Jensen under, Levere remained as remote from the crew as ever. After Jensen's death, exhausted men saw that Levere was increasingly reluctant to break off any search. He stayed on the grounds, mutely answering the cold and killing sea, or answering his conscience. Adrian's crew took a more reasonable view, holding that Jensen had tugged his final problem into his own spaces, and then slammed the hatch.
Yeoman Howard, who in Lamp's opinion "made too much of things," thought long and carefully about the matter. Howard had a special advantage. His occupation made him resemble a knitting needle. While Amon was a constantly running thread tying galley to messdeck to wardroom, Howard's job forced him into a skein of movement that covered the ship. In his busy way he was obnoxious, like a thin-minded bureaucrat, declaiming under law the divine right to distribute the largess of misery tendered by a loving government.
If, as Howard was often forced to point out, he must show Levere a constant watch list of the least tired men, that did not mean that he enjoyed it. He was scrupulous in scheduling his own watchstanding—the single reason why a sometimes driven crew managed to put up with him at all.
After Jensen's death, Howard muttered privately to Conally that the old man was taking it hard. Levere was prone to inactivity and silence.
"Like he's brooding," Howard told Conally.
"What's to brood about? We done our best."
"That's not the point."
Now, in another season, the point began to reassert itself.
Your large ship, suffering a thirty degree roll, finds the matter so monstrous that the event is entered in the log. Adrian (and electrician Wysczknowski swore this each time the rolling ship tripped his generator off the line) would toss its heart out on a duck pond. As the night drifted slowly past in spume, sharp shocks and breaking waves, the constant battering combined with the fact of too few watchstanders. Fatigue common to a night sweep at sea descended. Watches changed, then changed again, then changed again. The gale faltered, renewed, seemed trying to decide whether to tuck it in, or change over and become a full storm. In heavy, blanketing dark that was penetrated by the thin skim of a wary-seeming dawn, Lamp shushed and cautioned and troubled over Amon's health.
"I don't know why you don't just
puke."
"Buddhists don't," Amon said, "or me, either. It's no cinch to be Hawaiian."
Howard trudged away from watch on the flying bridge. He descended a ladder to the main deck, entered through a hatch, crossed the fiddley in a mild stupor, glancing below for portents and finding none. Wysczknowski now sat at the board. Masters, a tall snipe who had a face that looked like an elf's, stood gazing at machinery, bracing himself against a rail, muttering; in elvish, perhaps.
Howard crossed the fiddley, trudged to the messdeck. He drew watchstander coffee from a small pot as Amon prepared the large coffee urn. Howard stared at the steaming mug of coffee as if debating whether to drink the stuff or use it to warm his hands. He hesitated again, between the alternatives of sleep or a wait for boiled eggs and toast from Lamp's sloshing, rattling machinery.
"Abner's broken off the search," he said. "Those guys have been down for twenty-two hours."
"We've lost ‘em." Lamp's voice was filled with honest misery.
"Secure it soon. Head back in." Amon poured a brown stream of ground coffee, watched the roll of Adrian tip his hand to throw a dry sprinkle of brown across the messdeck. "I always spill. I tell myself I won't. I tell myself, Amon, this time ... but look at it, how clever."
"You sound like Glass."
"I know a great deal about life."
"‘Tis bad luck, losing the first ones of the year."
"I don't think we'll break off," said Howard. "I think the old man will hang around until District sends us in."
"To our misery."
"You're not in the water, sonny. Don't talk about misery—"
"Hold up ... we're coming around."
