Jonah Watch

by Cady, Jack;

  Aboard Islander one side of the yoke was freed, then, moments later, the other side. The towline slid toward the surf like a dying snake.

  "It's all they could do. I reckon it is."

  "Where's that rock?"

  "If we double up on one bitt ... "

  "Can't tow that way, can't tow on a slaunch."

  "Dear Jesus, Jesus dear, it's cold."

  On those northern shores, when the wind sets north-north-east above that line where land and water meet, the surf holds claws, steeples of rock, the discarded tops of mountains—and to be spit onto those shores through that rocky surf is a certain warrant that a man has misplaced his faith in something—towline, perhaps.

  Yeoman Howard climbed across the small helm like a tortured prisoner on a wheel, as Adrian came about, while Islander again swung broadside the surf. Close to land, the swells began to build. The water seemed to move closer together in a gesture of frozen companionship. Adrian rose, fell, jolted, jolted again. As Levere brought his vessel into the lee of Islander, Adrian rattled like an empty freight car on rough track. A white sheet of ice fell from the flying bridge, dropped before Howard's eyes; a slate on which might be written the names of men. Defrosters on the bridge chuffed, whirled, blew. The glass panes between helmsman and sea were streaked, running with icy glaze through which the icy bow appeared. The caked ice in the bow blanked the dead eyes. The anchor chain was buried beneath ice. Ice rose from the mats of woven hawser that hung over the bow, the ice rising above the mats like small walls of ice.

  "I have the eighty-three boat on the horn," said Chappel. "I'm sure it is the contact."

  "Distance."

  "An hour."

  "Lay us alongside," said Levere. "Our engineers have no luck." He paused. "I hope they have some."

  Chappel droned, was calculating as he droned. "Bibb Rock bears two-two-zero, range eighteen hundred." Levere did easy sums, as did Howard and radioman James.

  "Chief Dane to the bridge. The faster we get alongside ... "

  "Cap, if we can clear that rock, we'll have the time."

  "We'll clear."

  Radioman James laid aft like a wisp, a quick moving spirit, to fetch Dane. Adrian lay rolling in Islander's lee. Islander's crew grasped lifelines, passed lines, leaned forward to grasp the hands of Snow and McClean. A canvas tied to bursting with asbestos and shims and springs was drawn aboard with a line.

  Dane appeared on the bridge, followed by James, and Dane stomped up the ladder in spite of feet that were surely almost frozen. His foul weather jacket was wet with melting ice. His mouth was clamped tight, thin, froglike, in control; and Dane was cold and clearly on the raw edge of control. He huffed as he stomped. The fathometer went click-whickety-whickety.

  "We'll tow from the starboard cleat," Levere told Dane. "Try to get sea room. At least we can swing it sharp down wind."

  "Short tow. Double the line."

  "Take some men." Levere looked forward, into the bow which carried a burden of ice that canted Adrian heavily forward into the sea. The bow shook, shed ice, added more. The buildup on deck was so great that it was impossible to tell where the deck ended and the rails began. A faint sound flashed from aft as ice in hundred-pound hunks crashed to the boat deck.

  "If I have to shove the thing," Levere said, "I'll take it on the starboard quarter, turn it end for end to spin it."

  "You want fenders. Crash mats. They don't have ‘em."

  Levere looked at Dane, and in the red lights of the bridge Levere's face was shadowed, stern. "All they have is you," he said. "As a matter of fact, all we have is you."

  "That Conally," said Dane. "Now he's a good kid, and he has the deck. That punk Joyce, now he just ain't so bad." Dane wiped the back of his hand across his thin mouth, then flipped water from his hand. "Phil ... bust this thing one more time, and they'll hang you."

  "With a short drop," Levere told him. "Ops is already telling me that I'm a shipkiller."

  "This iron's been dead for twenty years."

  "You know it," said Levere, "and I know it."

  "Key to the arms locker," said Dane by way of a request. "I got a notion, and gunner Majors caught hisself a little trouble."

  "Now that should be logged," said Chappel. "What is the nature of the trouble?" He turned, horse-headed, from the radar.

  "He got some clothesline across his gut," said Dane. "What's the range, quartermaster?"

  Chappel, wordless, stepped back to the radar. Levere fished for his keys.

  "Lamp is tapin' him," said Dane. "Don't worry."

  "I wish I didn't hear all this." James spoke, but he did not take his eyes, his face, his stance, his effort from the fathometer. "Seven-eight," he said, "and take me with you, Chief. We got water 'til near all the way in."

  Dane stomped, opened his frog mouth, looked at the puniest, weakest man aboard. He began to say no. He stared at the deck like a philosopher immersed in a grand platitude. "Get your clump aft the minute you get relief. I'll send Rodgers to relieve." To Levere, Dane said, "A guy could take the helm and still give engine orders." He spun from the bridge, stomping down the ladder like a troll that walks where and when it wills.

  "Stay on the helm," said Levere. "Chief Dane has a lot on his mind."

  Howard, who in later years would have cause to wonder if he had ever done anything correctly, thankfully stayed on the helm.

  Opening the arms locker with Levere's keys, Dane ignored the line-throwing gun which was the only weapon that Adrian had ever earnestly used. He climbed aboard Islander, and he was packing a .45 pistol. Dane looked like a top sergeant leading an attack uphill. Behind him Glass, Brace, and James followed like hooded monks in attendance on one crusade or another. The men rigged a doubled line to the starboard cleat of Islander, then disappeared from the iced deck as Adrian once more turned into the sea.

  When the line parted the second time, men fell along icy decks, attempted to recover line, and they banged against stanchions, sprawled like squashed spiders. They braced their feet against the stanchions, against piles of backup hawser, against lockers. They lay on their backs, braced, rose to grab line, fell backward as it came aboard. The line shook drops of water that laid a funnel of ice along the deck over which the line ran. The line was like a frayed end of failure, and the men heaped it on deck with contempt, with fear, with hatred.

  Above the crash of surf, and distant on the car deck of Islander, Dane's pistol popped like a small and unimportant theory, as Dane—knowing that he did not have time for sophisticated equipment like marlinspikes—blew holes through every mattress he could find in Islander's cabins. Brace and James, with Glass as a desperate and cooperating overseer, ran line through the holes and tied the mattresses into bulky lumps, overlays of padding that would have to serve for crash mats. The mats looked like overstuffed, cartoon pillows as Adrian, with the port searchlight flaring, closed slowly onto Islander's starboard quarter. In the sharp, glaring light, Dane's face seemed two dimensional, white and blanched and worried; as only a face can look when it views what it considers will be disaster. Glass, Brace and James stood beside Dane, attending the lines, ready to adjust the crash mats.

  Somehow, and Howard would never know if Levere had made the correct command decision, nor would Levere, the plates held. Adrian dug in with its screws. Ice cracked from the bow in shatters, chunks, massive sheets. The great bulk of Islander moved in a slow spin to seaward, shoved turning in a pirouette of slow motion so that it slid past the rock with something under a hundred yards to spare. Conally rigged towline. The 83 boat arrived. What one vessel could not do, two vessels could. Islander was pulled seaward as Snow and McClean repaired the clutch. Islander proceeded to Boston under its own power.

  In the last minutes, as lights flared and every man on both vessels held his breath, perhaps prayed, and certainly talked to steel plates, the best seaman in the world lost his title.

  Dane backed from the scene, away from the flashing ice that still splintered from Adrian's bo
w which hovered like a crazily dressed spectre above Islander's open-ended deck. Dane turned toward the inner recess of the car deck, headed for the bridge and the radio. He walked aft as a sheet of ice rattled loose from Islander's superstructure.

  The ice crashed about Dane. In the brilliant light the ice turned into an explosion of sparkles, cold fire, prisms; and Dane momentarily stood in the explosion like a figure of myth consumed by flames. Then he fell, slid, flailed across the open end of the car deck, and he grasped for lifelines and did not find them; a squat form with short, waving arms, and he was followed by Brace, who, like a football lineman faked into a wrong move, recovers only in time to get one hand on a runner's arm. Brace skidded beside Dane, struggling, missing the life lines too; then Brace had a streak of beginner's luck. He skidded hard into a steel pole on the lip of the deck—the pole designed to hold a guard line to restrain future commuters from simplemindedness, from premature advances on their busy and important rounds. Brace hit the pole with one arm, and that arm went limp. He spun, hooked his knees on the pole like an acrobat on a swing, and he kept his grip on Dane's arm. Dane spun forward, over the lip of the low deck, and into the sea. For moments in the flaring lights all that could be seen was Dane's hand rising above the deck and held in Brace's failing grasp, as white water framed the background, as white water rose and thickly turned to ice.

  Glass moved, skidded, and James flipped a heaving line after Glass, the line arriving like a throw to home. Glass caught the line, skidded to a stop, grabbed the pole in one hand—grabbed Dane's arm with the other. Glass stepped on Brace, kicked Brace's face in his scramble, and Dane struggled back aboard.

  From topside in the superstructure another piece of ice crashed down, and it seemed to fill the night with sparkle. Brace tried to stand, gazed stupidly at his dangling arm, and then he settled in a curled slump around that pole as surely as Amon had ever curled beneath a table.

  Chapter 24

  Pneumonia, which is not humble, and which cynics call the enemy of youth and the friend of the aged, attended Adrian as the ship beat north at flank speed, homeward bound. Pneumonia, unlike fire and ice, is not worth talking about by sailors and poets. While fire is spectacular, and ice is occult, pneumonia is a cheap theatrical trick that waits in the wings. When a man is exhausted, cold, or injured, pneumonia steps toward the final chorus. Young men often manage to drive it away, old men almost never do.

  Adrian jolted and fled across the winter sea, as Snow and Howard traveled like foolish birds of passage between the dying man who lay in the chief's quarters, and the two men who were making their own fights in the crew's compartment. Majors was gussied up and fanciful with codeine, murmuring of miraculous guns. Brace had his own taste of pneumonia. Since neither Howard nor Snow knew if sedation would drop Brace's defense against disease, they sedated him very little; and Brace, on the thrusting, rocking, jolting bunk, no doubt suffered. Howard spoke to him, but Brace was mostly mute. He confided to Howard that he was "figuring something out."

  Lamp held together the after part of the ship by talk and food—Lamp rendering a state of grace on the messdeck to match the same business which Levere attended to on the bridge.

  The Indian Conally, in spite of the weather, stalked the boat deck in the wind, a man engaged in an act of communion, perhaps; perhaps in a sacrifice, or a demonstration of faith. Perhaps Conally was only confused.

  Glass and James were not talking, not even to each other; and they sat on the messdeck in a sort of stunned silence, as they slurped coffee, and stared into the depths of their mugs like men freshly reacquainted with concepts of infinity. Even the loudmouth cracker Bascomb walked hushed.

  Howard, as helpless as a revivalist facing reality, and with dull wits, watched the ancient and vibrating decks. Howard did not understand what he saw, and while Lamp bustled, and—may any stray forces of light, if they are worthy, protect and preserve the soul of Reeser Lamp—actually made chicken soup which Dane refused and so did Glass, Howard turned to Snow; for Howard had catalogued more facts than he could handle.

  Snow stood beside Dane. Dane lay drawn, old. His thin hair was white across his pink and dying skull. He breathed in gulps and chokes. His thin lips pulled tight, like a circle of wire around his gulping mouth. He muttered to a woman, called a woman, unnamed here and forever unnamed. Sometimes he cursed. Sometimes he gave orders.

  "Why do we put up with this," asked Howard, and he spoke as if he was the youngest man alive. "You've been around, Chief. Why do you put up with this?"

  "I am a seaman," said Snow. "Do you truly want to know?" Snow stood beside Dane's bunk. Snow braced himself against the sharp pitch of Adrian as the ship crashed forward on strained engines; and it was clear that Snow then neither thought nor cared about engines. His small face was creased. His mouth was tight when Dane rambled coherently. Snow's mouth relaxed only a little when Dane was incoherent.

  "I want to know," Howard said. "All of this means something. I used to be able to figure anything out. I used to know everything."

  "As did I," said Snow. "A Scots lad gave me my instruction. He struck me in the mouth at a time when our destroyer was machine-gunning survivors from a submarine. They were swimming toward us. I recall that I was laughing." Snow leaned against a bulkhead, a small brown bird at rest, peering either at half a minute or half a century. "In the war," he said, "we were glad to indulge in madness. When the war was finished, we were still glad to indulge in madness. The reason I put up with this is that it is not madness."

  Howard, discovering that he might not yet be a seaman, was awed. "It's embarrassing, what I'm going to do."

  "Do you believe," said Snow, and he spoke with absolute wonderment, "you Yanks are a curious people, and with strangely vivid explanations. I am about to use one. Do you actually believe that there is a free lunch?"

  Lamp, the magic man, the spiritualist, who immediately understood—after the fact—why Jensen wanted Brace on deck and not in the engine room, behaved like a creative demon of food. He worked through the night, through the morning, and when Adrian put lines on the pier and Dane and Brace and Majors were taken ashore, Lamp sagged against a chain, and he was exhausted. He looked over the familiar home harbor of Portland where the channel was a black and narrow river running between ledges of ice. He looked to the mudflats, attempting to discover the ugly form of Hester C.; saw only the wreckage of a beat-up work boat scattered by storm along the tide line. Belowdecks, in warm spaces, men shook themselves like dogs ruffling out wet fur. They belched, burped, like old Romans waiting to get on with the feast. They returned to the messdeck where food lay steaming in glorious redundancy. The men muttered, were not hopeful, but began to feel that they might soon feel that way.

  Yeoman Howard, headed to the Base where he would not pick up mail for yeoman Wilson, or for Abner, but only mail for Adrian, picked up an unusual creature instead. The creature's name was Iris.

  "A real winner," the OD at the Base told Howard. "I'm glad you've got the punk."

  Steward apprentice Iris, it developed, was a man who had been so gorgeously conned that no argument, no set of reasons, could convince him that the entire world was not in a state of error. During the short walk between Base and ship, Iris managed to explain three times that a recruiter in Hawaii had promised him a change in rate the minute he hit the States. Iris managed to explain four times that he had an engineering degree from a great and powerful university, and that the recruiter had promised that a man with such qualifications would immediately be sent to officer's candidate school. Steward apprentice Iris—who did not have a Chinaman's chance in a Turkish harem of getting a change in rate (being Hawaiian), leave alone O.C.S., and who doubtless had his sheepskin with him—was tall and spectacled and mildly oriental, if one discounted the indignant and confused expression on his face. Yeoman Howard, who was busy mistrusting all experience, kept his big mouth shut. He took Iris aboard and introduced him to bosun striker Joyce.

  "What'd I do with him?"


  "Square him away," said Howard. "I'll log it. See you below in a minute."

  The minute stretched to five, because of the pickiness of the horse-headed Chappel. Chappel hunched above Iris's service record which lay glistening in stiff, new, undented covers. Chappel tsked and pursed his mouth and made worry noises. Chappel did not have an engineering degree. Adrian did not have a chief bosun. All that Howard had was a thick envelope from Personnel which he feared to open.

  The logging-in ceremony completed to Chappel's scrupulous satisfaction, Howard laid below; where, with engineering certitude, steward apprentice Iris was hogging the whole show. He had gathered quite a crowd.

  "You are a punk," Joyce was telling Iris. "We don't need your flak."

  "You must not speak to me in that manner. I have an engineering degree."

  "You are a punk with an engineering degree."

  "This is the cutter Adrian," said Glass. "The captain is Phil Levere, mustang. The man on deck is Jim Conally. The cook is Reeser Lamp. You are steward apprentice Iris."

  "You dislike me because am Hawaiian."

  "True," said Wysczknowski, "but yids are worse. And admirals."

  "You slant-eyes is all alike," Joyce advised Iris. "We'd ought to pack up the lot of you and send you back to Philadelphia."

  "And Polacks," Glass told him. "There ain't nothin' worse than a Polack. I had a long weekend with a Polack lady once ... by mistake ... you can take my word."

  "Niggers," said McClean. " ... now know something about this."

  "What are you saying? What in the world are you trying to say?"

  "We are saying," said Wysczknowski with considerable ease, "that there is an old, tired guy back aft, and he has been up all night and cooking. So unpack that sloppity seabag ... "

  "And get crackin'."

  The fat envelope, when Howard opened it, contained orders:

  The dying Dane was ordered to take command, not of Able, but Aaron in Boston. Levere had Able. The captain of Aaron was to take Adrian, a grand swapping around that Howard did not then recognize as a rejuvenating and reaffirming principle. All Howard knew was that the auxiliary orders allowed Levere to take some men with him to subdue the jinx ship. Levere had been scrupulous in his requisitions. He had not wanted to short Adrian.