by Cady, Jack;
"A contact? Maybe a contact?"
Adrian heeled from a westward leg and drove southeast, slipping sideways in a quartering sea as it made a dash farther down the line of search. At full speed the ship bucked, kicked, lunged in heavy forefoot stomps to starboard, the mast like a great crucifix attempting to dip the waves as if to calm them.
"Cap knows we'll get called in," radioman James told a few men assembled on the messdeck. "He's trying to steal a little sea room."
"He's tough. Ol' cap is tough." The mulatto McClean wore an ambitious black patch of grease on his dull-skinned cheek. "Lift eggs from under a settin' hen."
"Lift eggs right off your plate if this sea keeps up."
Farther south, in the gleaming District offices, sleek and chubby yeomen, radiomen, and bored JOODs no doubt finished morning coffee, licked donut sugar from plump, shore-going fingers, and noticed that Adrian had not yet broken off. By the time the message to secure arrived, Levere had stolen sixteen miles. Adrian set a homeward course, zigzagging across a westward line and inshore from its former line of search. The morning routine set in as jolts and spray climbed high about the decks from the northeast leg while cold men dropped like slick, wet stones down the ladder to the messdeck. The men were vaguely angry with the sea.
"What good does this do?"
"Levere's still giving it a shake."
"He's giving us a shake."
Gunner Majors brushed spray from his eyebrows as he kept his glasses tipped away from wind that scoured the flying bridge. No gulls flew on such a day, no basking sharks lay aslumber on the sea, and while flotsam was likely within fifty miles of the coast, Majors would later say that he already knew he had a target. He lifted the glasses to confirm. Dropped them to hang from one hand. Took a deep breath and lifted them to reconfirm. He leaned forward to press a buzzer beside a voice tube.
On the westward, inshore leg, sea anchor unstreamed, like a yellow mite on the gray immensity of water, the raft appeared, disappeared, appeared, tossed sporadic and water-filled, unbailed, like the last beat of a dying heart.
"All hands. All hands."
In the engine room, bells clanged and the pulse of engines broke free from its metronome throb. Forward in the crew's compartment, sleeping men felt the thrust of the engines. They tossed in their sacks, fumbled with belts buckles looped from waists around the rails of bunks. They slid blinking onto the rising and unsteady deck, rebuckling belts with one hand, reaching for foul weather gear with the other while they braced against the thrust of Adrian by jamming butts between bunks or against angles formed by lockers. In the engine room, Snow appeared like a short puff of magic, while above his head on the grates of the fiddley, men's feet hammered, staggered, bore pairs of hands toward the boat deck and the main deck. On the starboard wing a hatch erupted against the wind, as Dane, hollering with the certainty of an epistle, stubby as a boulder, yelled to the boat crew. Chappel relieved the helm and Adrian pressed in a sweep that would take it around the raft and place the bow into the sea. James wrote the log, danced thinly as he reached for radio message blanks and began to scrawl the contact report. Howard headed aft across the boat deck and down the ladder to the fantail to unlash steel basket stretchers. Above them all, Majors stood on the flying bridge, remote, his glasses sweeping the horizon, that vast orphanage.
Brace, the newest wanderer over water, stood beside Conally on the boat deck as Conally stripped the canvas cover off the boat. "Stand down to the main deck," Conally told him. "Make way for the boat crew."
"What'll I do?"
"Stop being stupid. Man the rail to fend off."
Dane, Conally, Glass, Joyce and Rodgers jumped, sat beside shipped oars, riding the boat in the wind of the deck like men preparing for a sail across the sky. Fallon, McClean and Racca tended lines, fended off, and the boat dropped in rapid jerks toward the sea, a controlled crash.
"Unhooked forward."
"Unhooked aft."
"Oars. Get ‘em over. Dig."
Howard staggered forward, packing a bulky stretcher, the straps free and dangling like a machine of the Inquisition prepared to clasp a victim. He bumped into Brace.
"What? What?"
"Stand by to take their lines. Unhook those chains. Let down fenders."
McClean arrived. "Child," he said to Brace, "do it this-a-way." To Howard he said, "I got it."
"Blankets," said Howard vaguely, and dashed toward a hatch beyond which brooded the medical locker.
Dane stood at the sweep, grunted orders, swore thinmouthed and violent as the boat returned, sliding into the lee made when Levere turned the ship. Dane's mouth hammered out shapes of words above his eyes which flashed with eternal-seeming pain; either the hot pain of rheumatism or the cold burn of the sea. In the boat a flyer bent forward, jammed between two oarsmen, leaning like a drunk or a propped dead man against the post of Conally's back, while Conally dabbed at the sea with an oar, ineffective, off balance.
With the helm trusted to the hands of his first quartermaster, Levere appeared on the main deck as the boat came alongside.
"How is he, chief?"
"Near froze."
"Can he talk?"
"He's too froze."
"The other one?"
"Not a chance."
"Chief Snow to the messdeck," Levere told Brace. "On the double, sailor." Levere turned to Howard. "Assist Chief Snow. Get this man talking."
"Easy there, take it easy."
With no time to brood over his summary relief from a job he detested in the first place, Howard helped swing the stretcher aboard. The flyer was pale, vaguely blue, as though a spectral self rose from beneath his flesh. Wet clothing bunched on either side of the compressing straps, and drops squeezed from the fabric to run across a sheen of deep water that lay like a well of cold in his waterproofs. His legs were held by the straps, but his feet were free to flop with the movement of the ship. He was without control of his lower body, and his puffy eyelids were red with cold and salt. His lips trembled, opened, closed, opened, smiled. The man seemed amused at the cleverness of a satisfactory speech, just delivered from tombs and cast wisely before an ignorant but temporarily interested world. His short hair glistened with water, his fingers clutched.
At the head of the stretcher, and with McClean at the foot, Howard staggered toward the after hatch and the ladder to the messdeck. Dane cursed from his position alongside the ship. Men grunted. The small boat turned away from Adrian and headed back for the raft, where the second pilot lay sloshing in unbailed water. Chief Snow flitted from fiddley to passageway to the ladder leading to the messdeck.
At the head of the ladder Howard turned, took a new grip on the stretcher and braced himself against a bulkhead to regain balance before making a backward descent. He glanced through the hatch leading to the fiddley, that fiddley where Howard had recently been shocked because he thought he had seen Jensen.
Now Amon stood on the grates, staring downward into the engine room; rigid, fixed, Amon's open mouth trying to search for any sound as he stood frozen in wide-eyed horror.
Chapter 11
In the red-inked business of mercy at sea, a corpse represents failure. Cold eyes stare or are backwardly rolled, white. That flat and toneless stare causes among seamen a pinching sense of harm, of futility. The pinch is as sharp as ice behind your ear. Men feel nebulous guilt and small grief. Corpses are partners to huge but repressed fear. The fear is diamond-backed and sharklike. Corpses are rolled in canvas and stored on the fantail. They are bulky and awkward to wrap. Stiff limbs are rigidly fixed in a hundred antic shapes, the slate gone blank in its arrested scamper, the world dissolved into time that will forgive the most harlequin mimicry. Most fresh corpses exude some blood, and you can predict that the blood will be watery and weak. Stale corpses gush with other secrets. Mouths are always open and newly washed. Jaws dangle, surrounding raw tongues with a small circus ring of teeth. The jaws are not artless. They have spoken final words from a great gulf emptied
of all but one fact.
Men carry a corpse to the fantail. They secure it, either by rough handling and slightly restrained violence, or else with a tenderness that its owner could hardly have been lucky enough to know when the thing was still alive. Then the men turn back to the messdeck, or stand in the hatch of the galley, or droop on the fiddley to stare, themselves corpselike, into any source of heat. If the corpse was once male, as the great majority are, conversation will eventually open on the messdeck with a giggle. A man will recall a shore-going episode. The talk will be of women.
"Bad luck," whispered Lamp. "We don't get more than three or four deaders a year, and now we're starting off with one."
"Keep it shut, cook. That guy is coming around."
Men avoid the fantail, and, if pressed in that direction by some duty, move quickly, with precision, and with short glances at the humped canvas. Every crew has at least one man who is fascinated, sometimes perverse; or with guilt and fear mixtured in such quantity that he is brought compelled to the boat deck to stand and stare aft, muttering, sometimes drooling.
"Snow had more experience. I maybe wouldn't have saved the guy." Yeoman Howard spoke to Abner's yeoman Wilson when Adrian once more swung against the pier. The rescued flyer was by then removed to an ambulance; the dead man lay enclosed in the back of a paddy wagon, his arms still grasping after his last enemy. On Adrian's fantail, Racca, obsessed, leaned on a hose as he flushed the deck. The straight-stream nozzle rose against his braced arms like a living creature struggling to snap away—a creature that could become high-bending, a tall snake arching and cracking and wielding sharp and deadly blows.
"We got the guy talking," Howard said. "His plane dunked first. That meant that the others were somewhere up ahead."
"We figured we might go back out," Wilson said.
"We found another raft. Upside down." Howard seemed to be still looking, staring, absorbing the fact of a buoyant, bouncing, yellow raft, high-riding with futility. "Those were brand new planes. Fitted out with the wrong fuel gauges."
"So who do you kill?" Wilson's huge, chalky face seemed dispassionate as he gazed across the pier at Racca who directed the shattering water that knocked salt and the invisible traces of the dead from the decks. Then Wilson seemed to remember whom he was with. He looked at Howard, and he was helpless, angry, momentarily passionate. "So who do you kill, who?" He dropped his eyes, muttered. "I don't know why we put up with this, don't know."
"It was a carnival," Howard told him. "Amon was like a fruit salad. The new guy was ready to fight. Snow was working on that man in a way that I'd have been embarrassed."
"Snow talks funny. That guy talks funny." Wilson was uncomfortable. He looked as though he feared that a deadly but familiar beast was about to come woofing from a cave.
"I don't mean that," Howard said. "There wasn't anything like that."
"Planes with bad fuel gauges."
"I was rubbing the guy's legs," Howard said. "Snow was putting on hot packs and rubbing his back and belly and crotch arteries."
"I guess you got to."
"That Snow just kept whispering." Howard spoke in a low voice, as though he still heard Snow's whispers, still stood beside Snow as they worked on the flyer; still attempted to sense meaning from Snow's broken, husky whispering, and the small, busy hands that moved with the certainty of a pump as the flyer's circulation was restored. "He just kept whispering, ‘torpedoes, torpedoes, torpedoes,' just over and over."
"He got blowed up once. He was just scared."
"No," Howard said. "I don't understand everything I saw, but Snow wasn't scared."
"He only loves torpedoes."
Howard, almost wordless before the suspicious fact of near revelation, seemed resigned to the uselessness of speech. "I'm glad I missed that war."
"Stick around for the next one, chum. We can't have you being glad." Wilson paused, thought about it. "In the next one," he said, "try not to trust anybody's gauge but your own."
Across the pier, on Adrian's boat deck, Conally appeared from behind the house. He was followed by Brace. Conally began unfolding the boat cover while Brace stood like a lank shadow as he waited to accept instruction on cleaning and securing and making ready the boat.
"Your boy looks okay now," Wilson said.
"No, he doesn't. You'd have to know him." Howard flipped vaguely through the small package of mail collected for him by Wilson. He looked at Wilson, as if they were about to share a secret, and then changed his mind. "He's kind of jammed up, is all." Then Howard changed his mind again. "We've got a mess going with that kid. It started just after we picked up the first guy."
The small boat, lap straked and carrying on its bows the placid information that it belonged to cutter Adrian, had seemed like a minor revolutionary battering at the gates of the gray, patriarchal sea. The boat was a small white smear on the water, and it seemed as uncertainly fixed as was Brace on his first search and rescue.
"He was actually doing pretty good," Howard told Wilson. "He was making mistakes, but he was willing."
Brace had hovered close beside Howard, standing at Adrian's rail as they watched the boat which rocked, plunged, took spray and seemed for a moment to join with the yellow raft. Across a hundred yards of tossing water, Dane's voice was thin with propelling curses, as if only a voice of arrogance and scorn could answer the indifference of the heat-draining sea. Adrian came ahead slowly. Levere settled on the right measure of revolutions per minute. Adrian met the swell, treading like a dancer moving from quick, dramatic action into a slow coda. The small-boat's crew shipped oars. The sky was a gray, luminous frame suggesting that the sun had not yet abandoned the planet. Cold wind moved from the mouth of the luminosity like a dissenting opinion from a court of natural law.
"That's when we got that guy aboard," Howard told Wilson. "The old man wanted Snow fetched to the messdeck. He sent the kid."
Brace seemed to have a nesting instinct for the engine room. He had moved like a homing pigeon flying in heavy wind. Adrian was by then cross seas, wallowing, brought about by Chappel to make a lee. Men advanced about the decks in short rushes, were brought up against bulkheads or rails with jarring shocks. In the galley, a mug or bowl spun from the rubber fingers of a rack that was guaranteed to prevent all minor disasters. The crash was like the report of a small rifle echoing through open hatches and accompanied by the shout of Lamp's despair. Brace climbed the deck, clambered, advanced in small dashes, arrived at the engine room ladder. He descended and spoke to his hero, Snow.
"Take the board," Snow said to the elflike Masters. He turned back to Brace. "Back him up on the plates until I send relief." Snow disappeared up the ladder, and Brace, asked for the first time to be competent in a situation that was not a drill, stood watchful and prepared beside the port engine. He dangled a wiping rag from one hand and watched the brilliantly lighted engine room rise, dash sideways, fall, as Adrian slipped into the trough and seemed trying to shake the heavy engines loose from mountings or drive them through the hull. Lights flickered, flared in brilliant surges as the generator faltered and then took hold.
Brace had little training, but, for the moment, he had enough. He listened for disturbance in the systems, studied what he knew of the fluid movement through piping. He was entranced, and might temporarily have forgotten his latest problem.
"Talked to Snow while they were on watch," Howard told Wilson. "Maybe that's why he blew up later."
"No transfer, huh?"
"Not until he hacks the deck. Not until Dane calls him a seaman."
"I understand your boy. Hate my own rate. I rather almost be a cook, even."
"You aren't nosy enough. Not even for a yeoman. But I know what you mean."
"He can make seaman in another six months."
"If the offer still stands," Howard said uncomfortably. "It was made before the steward went crazy."
Amon, his seasickness overcome, had trotted forward like a short shadow to the bridge with a half-filled
pitcher of fresh coffee. He staggered and pinged and ponged in the passageway as Adrian rolled. The stretcher crew came through the hatchway, maneuvering the rescued flyer, and Amon gave way and stepped onto the fiddley. He began to cross the fiddley on a journey he had made a thousand unremarkable times. He glanced down into the flaring and flickering lights, was held fixed by the ghastly sight of Jensen standing on the plates. Amon opened his mouth to scream, found himself without breath or voice; or found himself under the slapping control of the satisfied and smiling Buddha. The stretcher party passed. Amon stood trembling. He conversed with his feet. He praised his feet. He lied to them with astounding deceptions in an effort to get them to walk. The hump-shouldered figure of Jensen stumbled against the roll of the ship. It righted itself like a clumsy doll. Amon stared. Stared. A wiping rag dangled from Jensen's hand, as it had always dangled from Jensen's hand when Amon had made trips across this fiddley. Jensen was sanely in control in this sea world, and because of that, Amon's world changed into a surreal and desperate place. The ship skidded, fell away, banged into the trough and the lights flickered, died, returned and then died again as the generator kicked off the line. Yells from below rose, jumped, swarmed in the darkness. Amon, deranged, heard Jensen's voice. In the distance, but rapidly approaching, moved the voice of Wysczknowski cursing loudly at the sea.
Amon's deceived feet began to slowly move him backward. He stepped from the fiddley into the after passage, turned, and slowly walked through a hatchway to the main deck. Adrian rolled, slammed, plummeted. Amon dumped the coffee into the scuppers. Then, softly treading the banging ladder, he took the pitcher to the galley, groping, and secured it with great care. Wordless, Amon walked to the wardroom past the grunting urgency of men who stripped the flyer and assisted Snow. Amon knelt on all fours and crawled beneath the wardroom table. When Lamp, abustle in official alarm, found him there an hour later, Amon was mute. He tried to speak. Produced a whimper.
Watches changed. On the flying bridge, Conally and Glass stood searching their sectors like men digging for one bright coin in that huge pocket of sea. They were remote, isolated, unreported. In Boston, Natchez, London, Madrid, Hong Kong, there occurred murders. Along the Yangtze there were murders, and in Moscow and in Lima, Peru. Somewhere in the east, murder occurred along a vaguely theoretical line termed MLR by Marines. Murder was like a wilted flower in Chicago and Rome. There was murder in L.A. and in Anchorage, in Frisco, Mexico City and Tampa. Conally and Glass searched, kept tight lips closed over teeth that, exposed, would ache in the wind. Glass sighted the second yellow raft. Conally saw that it was upside down.
