by Todd Tucker
“You okay, nav?”
Still without saying a word, the navigator bent back down over the chart and resumed making corrections. Jabo watched him for just a second, and then closed the study’s door.
Well, he thought. That was fucking weird.
• • •
Angi took the Kingston to Edmonds ferry, on her way to Muriel Taylor’s condo. She was able to walk onto the ferry, leaving her car behind in Kingston and saving five dollars, as the Taylors lived within walking distance of the other ferry terminal. She’d decided to make the short, pleasant trip across Puget Sound to tell her friend about the baby.
The cat was not quite out of the bag, but it soon would be. Cindy Soldato, for all her good qualities, was not discreet, and besides, Angi was showing to the point that her pregnancy would soon be undeniable. She and Muriel had drifted apart in the last two patrols, but they had been close friends at one time, and Angi would always be grateful to her for showing her the ropes when she first arrived, all the things a clueless new navy wife needed help with, from getting a military ID card to how to shop in the Navy Exchange. Back in those days, they both often talked about how they wanted to have a child when the time was right—and how the time seemed like it would never be right. Muriel had withdrawn since then, and rarely attended any of the social functions that brought the wardroom wives together, so they rarely spoke anymore. Muriel’s absence was accompanied by the predictable rumors of trouble in their marriage. But Angi decided she still wanted Muriel to be one of the first people to know about her baby, and that she would tell her in person.
She called ahead but Muriel hadn’t answered, so she took a chance and hopped on the ferry anyway. Even after three years, the Washington State Ferries had not lost their novelty, and she loved drinking her latte (decaf now) and watching the scenery from a window seat, hard to believe the ride you could get for a six bucks. There were days, and especially nights, when the thought of pregnancy scared Angi very much, most often in the form of her wondering if she was up to the task. But there were more days like this, when she was excited beyond words, happy to be pregnant, happy that she and Danny were doing this. She felt the ferry rumble as the big engines reversed; they were pulling into Edmonds.
She disembarked and made the quick walk through the ferry terminal into the cute streets of Edmonds. Coffee shops, crafty boutiques, a music store that was somehow surviving the age of digital music. A few nice restaurants that were still closed because of the early hour. She thought with a brief pang of loneliness how nice it would be to eat dinner there with Danny, watching the ferries come and go.
Soon she was at the door to Muriel’s condo; she could feel the effect of the pregnancy in the short walk, she felt more winded than she should have been. Just as she was getting ready to knock on the door, it flew open, and she saw Muriel, looking completely shocked and exhausted, standing in the doorway, the room behind her filled with cardboard boxes.
“Muriel?”
“Angi? Oh my God…” She put her hands over her mouth.
“Are you moving?” she asked, stating the obvious.
Muriel shook her head, and started to motion her in. “What am I thinking…there’s no where to sit. Let’s go get some coffee. Or maybe some wine.”
I can’t have either, thought Angi, but she decided to wait. It seemed they both had big news to share.
• • •
They went to Waterfront Coffee Company, an old hangout, and it made Angi remember how much time the two of them used to spend together, and how long it had been. At the counter, Muriel ordered a double shot of espresso, and Angi ordered a decaf latte.
“Decaf?” Muriel said. “It’s only ten o’clock.”
Angi smiled, and pulled her hands down to her hips, pulling her oversized windbreaker tight across her belly.
“Oh my God!” said Muriel, and her face finally brightened, looking something like the Muriel she used to know, optimistic and always enthusiastic. “How long?”
“Almost three months,” she said. “You’re almost the first person here I’ve told. I had to talk to Cindy to get the ball rolling on some of the insurance stuff.”
“Well if Cindy knows, I’m surprised I haven’t heard yet.” The heavily pierced employee handed them their coffees across the counter, and they found an isolated table in the back.
They spoke at length about the pregnancy: the due date, the morning sickness, the odds (unlikely) that Danny would be by her side at the birth. Finally the conversation hesitated and Angi decided to ask.
“So…moving?”
Muriel looked down at the scratched table and nodded.
“Are you guys going to your next duty station? Does Mark have orders for shore duty yet?”
“He might,” she said. “I have no idea. But I’m going home.”
Angi hesitated, knowing the rest of the story would come out. It certainly wasn’t uncommon—every patrol, a certain number of wives would just decide they couldn’t take it anymore, and head back to wherever they’d come from. Being a Navy Wife was hardest during deployment, and that’s also when leaving was the easiest. But it was still shocking, and sad, to see it happen to a good friend.
“Can I ask why?”
Muriel took a deep breath. “Honestly Angi…I think Mark is going crazy.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’d been little things, of course, but I just wrote it off to the stress. I mean, don’t they all have to be a little crazy to do what they do? But I really started to worry after his third patrol, Mario’s last. Mark had just completed all his command qualifications, and Mario had given him a stellar fitrep. Everybody is telling us he’s going to screen early for XO. And then—he doesn’t.”
“Oh no!”
“So he starts working even harder than normal, round the clock, all the time wondering how he failed the Navy. He’s pouring over old fitreps, looking for faint praise, anything that might have stopped him from screening early. Now keep in mind, it’s not like he’s been passed over— he just hasn’t screened early. But there’s no telling him that.”
“I know it’s a really tough jump, from department head to XO.”
“Even tougher now because they’ve gotten rid of so many boats—Mark’s year group has just been decimated. I understand all that. But I start to see changes in him. He stops eating, for one thing. He’s losing weight like crazy, and he didn’t have that much to begin with. And then the nightmares start.”
“Nightmares?”
“He starts moaning in his sleep, every couple of nights, really tortured sounds, sometimes bordering on yelling. I tell him to get to a doctor, you know, a psychiatrist, but he won’t hear of it, says that will be the end of it, that he’ll never screen if the Navy thinks he’s crazy.”
Angi nodded, and didn’t say what she was thinking: that Mark was right. Nothing would end a career faster.
“Here, look at this,” said Muriel, digging something out of her gigantic purse. She handed Angi a small black book.
“A bible?”
“Right about the time he doesn’t screen early, he starts reading two books constantly. Whenever he’s home, which is not that often, he’s sitting there reading either the bible, or Rig for Dive.”
“Rig for Dive?”
“Some old World War II submarine book. He’d sit there with both books, at the kitchen table with a highlighter in his hand, like he was studying them. Goes from one to the other…Rig for Dive to the Bible and back. This is a guy, keep in mind, who didn’t spend a Sunday in church the whole time he was growing up. Didn’t even want to get married in a church, I had to insist on it. Now he’s studying the bible like his life depends on it. Look inside.”
Angi flipped it open. There were passages highlighted in a rainbow of colors. Muriel had been right; the density of highlighting increased rapidly near the back of the book, where nearly every word was highlighted. There were also densely written notes in the margins. Angi looked close.
“What does this say?”
Muriel nodded. “That took me a while to figure out too. They’re equations. Engineering equations. He’d write them all over the freaking bible while he was reading about Armageddon.”
“Do you have the other one? The submarine book?”
“No, I looked. I think he took that one with him. I guess he gave up on the bible.”
Angi felt a deep sense of unease as she paged through it; it did look crazy. The juxtaposition of all the mathematical symbols against the numbered, columned pages of the King James Bible was positively creepy. But still…
“They’re all nerds,” she said. “One time I caught Danny writing on a notepad as he watched football—he said he was ‘keeping score in hex.’”
Muriel nodded vigorously. “I know what you mean, but I’m his wife. Something is definitely wrong with him. So finally, after he refuses to listen to me about seeing someone, I invite over my neighbor one night to meet him. A neighbor who happens to be a psychologist.”
“Oh Muriel…”
“That’s pretty much what Mark says as soon as he realizes who he’s talking to. Asks the guy to leave, very politely, and then tells me that I am trying to ruin his career. No I’m not, I said, I’m trying to help you!”
She started crying then and Angi reached out to touch her hand.
“So, he pretty much moves onto the boat at that point. I didn’t see him or talk to him for a week before. When they left early—I didn’t even know. He didn’t even call me. So, I sat around here for a week, and just thought—I guess our marriage is over. So I called the movers and here I am.”
“I don’t know what to say, Muriel. I’m so sorry.”
She looked down at the table. “He was such a sweet guy when we got married. And smart! My God, he was smart, the smartest boy I’d ever met. And now he’s a wreck. I swear, Angi—I hate the fucking Navy.”
Angi held back on that one—she wasn’t about to defend the Navy in this situation.
“The only thing I’m wondering about now…should I tell someone?”
“What do you mean?”
“Should I tell somebody that I think they’ve got a certifiable nutcase onboard the Alabama? Should I give this bible to someone?”
Angi thought that over. “I don’t know, Muriel.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “What would I tell them? That my husband has been having bad dreams and reading the bible? They wouldn’t believe me, so fuck it. Let the Navy deal with him.”
• • •
As Angi rode the ferry home, she wondered if she should say something. After all, it wasn’t just the Navy’s problem. Her husband was onboard that boat, the father of her unborn child. And if the navigator was losing his mind, that was probably information she should share with someone. But, she kept coming back to what Muriel had said—she didn’t have a lot to go on. Nightmares and bible reading, hardly enough evidence to declare a man insane. And what if Muriel was wrong? What if she was just another disgruntled Navy wife trying to stir up trouble for her husband? A call like that really could spell the end of Mark’s career, just the suspicion it might cause, especially as he was on the verge of screening for XO. Danny had certainly never said anything about the Nav going crazy, just that he worked harder than anyone he’d ever met and wasn’t particularly fun to hang out with. But certainly, he’d never said anything about the man losing his mind. She looked at the black surface of the water as they sped across the Sound. She remembered the first time she’d ridden the ferry during Danny’s first patrol, how while looking out at the water she was almost struck dumb with the thought: Danny’s under there. As the ferry pulled back into the Kingston terminal, Angi decided just to keep Muriel’s conversation to herself. If there was a possibility that the Navigator was going crazy, she’d just have to add it to the long list of things she worried about while Danny was at sea.
• • •
Kincaid watched as the red digital numbers on the treadmill turned from 4.9 to 5.0. Halfway there. He felt strong. He wasn’t breathing too heavy, and the dull pain in his right knee had departed, as it usually did around mile three. He cranked up the speed to 7.0, put the incline up another half percent. He felt his legs respond, a satisfying tightness in the hamstrings, and felt the sweat start to soak through the collar of his T-Shirt.
Kincaid was the only black officer on the boat, and one of just six African-Americans on the entire crew. The Navy was historically the least integrated service, Kincaid well knew, and the nuclear navy was the most lily white part of the whole operation. In addition, Kincaid was the only prior-enlisted officer on the boat. He’d signed up right out of high school, gone to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and completed the whole, grueling, nuclear power training pipeline as an enlisted man. He got halfway through one patrol on the USS Tecumseh, and in looking around at the officers it occurred to him: I’m as smart as those guys. So he applied for a special commissioning program for nuclear-trained enlisted men, got accepted, and attended Hampton College on a full ride courtesy of the US Navy. Then he went through the nuclear training pipeline all over again, this time wearing khaki and an ensign’s gold bars.
All that made him a few years older than his JO peers: he was twenty-seven. But Kincaid made sure none of them thought they were in better shape. He devoted every spare minute to working out, using every piece of the paltry exercise equipment the ship stored in Missile Compartment Lower Level: the treadmill, a rowing machine, a stationary bike, and a punching bag. Unfortunately, everything except the treadmill and the punching bag was broken. It had all been scheduled for replacement, but their orders had changed before the new equipment arrived. The broken gear didn’t disrupt Kincaid that much; his routine centered on the treadmill. But it bothered him deeply, as a submariner, to go to sea with shit broken.
Kincaid tried to run five hundred miles every patrol, tracking his progress on a sheet of graph paper taped to the state room wall. Each sheet from each patrol went into green half-inch binder. Whenever possible, he did his run in ten-mile increments, which took him about ninety minutes. It was the longest he could go, especially early in a patrol, without pissing people off for monopolizing the treadmill. Already, though, the competition down there in Missile Compartment Lower Level was starting to wane. People were getting lazy. A new patrol was like the New Year: everybody had resolutions. I’m going to qualify chief of the watch. I’m going to learn to play guitar. I’m going to lose twenty pounds. But usually by the third week, he pretty much had the place to himself.
The thought made him feel stronger, as he listened to the repetitive slapping of his Nikes on the belt beneath his feet. He didn’t listen to music when he ran. The treadmill ran on a non-vital electrical bus, the first busses, by design, to start shutting down if things went wrong with the ship’s electrical plant. On his first patrol as an officer, he’d been on the bike when the 2MC announced a reactor scram. Another JO was listening to some heavy metal on his head phones, trotting along dumb and happy on the treadmill. Kincaid yelled out to him, but he didn’t hear him any more than he heard the announcement. A second later the bus dropped, the treadmill shut off, and the JO ran clear over the rails, flipped over, and broke his collarbone. So Kincaid decided he could live without the music, listening instead for any announcement, bang, or alarm that would make getting off the treadmill a good idea.
He saw Jabo climbing down the ladder at the far forward end of the compartment. He spotted Kincaid and struck a Kung Fu pose. Kincaid jacked up the speed a couple of more tenths, feeling competitive. Jabo was strong, a natural athlete, one of those guys Kincaid would want next to him if he ever needed to be dragged out of a smoke-filled compartment. But he didn’t want Jabo to think for a minute that he was in better shape. For a variety of reasons, Kincaid usually had a chip on his shoulder about other junior officers. But liking Jabo was effortless. And in addition to being his best friend, he was a superb naval officer: smart, loyal, and good. He took o
n every task with a complete devotion to getting it done properly. A word popped in Kincaid’ head that he didn’t think he had ever used to describe another human being. Jabo was dutiful.
Jabo had made his way to his side. “Come on Hayes, let’s go.”
“Let’s go what?”
“We’re burning Enter the Dragon.”
Kincaid looked down at the console. “Two and a half more miles.” He consciously made his words sound as easy as he could. “Almost done.”
“Thirty minutes on the treadmill,” said Jabo, pointing to a laminated sign that hung on the bulkhead. “That’s the limit. I’m here to enforce the rule.”
“Fuck that. You see anybody else down here?”
“Maybe I want on it.”
“When I came down here, it still had my stats from yesterday on it. Ten miles in an hour and twenty-two minutes.”
“Maybe it was somebody else.”
“No one else on this pig could do that run,” he said.
Jabo put his hand over the red emergency stop button.
“Don’t you fucking do it!” said Kincaid, laughing now.
Jabo feigned he was hitting the button again. Kincaid was losing his rhythm laughing. He finally dialed down the speed, and brought the treadmill to a stop. “Alright, motherfucker. Seven point five miles. Let me go write it down and I’ll meet you in the wardroom.”
“An old guy like you shouldn’t be running like that anyway,” said Jabo. “Gonna fuck up your joints.”
“Old guy? Feel like going for a race?”
“I feel like watching a movie,” he said. “Eating some shitty food, drinking some watery Coke, and watching a movie while we still can.”
• • •
The movie ended just in time for Jabo to complete his pre-watch tour prior to relieving Hein on the conn. In missile compartment third level, the level where the majority of the crew slept in nine-man bunkrooms, Jabo stopped at the ship’s laundry. Petty Officer Howard was wearing boxers and a t-shirt, doing laundry while reading a well-worn copy of The Shining.
“Shouldn’t you be studying for your quals?” asked Jabo, pointing at the book. Howard was his favorite kind of sailor—enthusiastic without being a kiss ass, smart, and funny—the kind of guy you didn’t mind spending a couple of hundred days a year with sealed in a steel tube. He’d gotten himself in trouble after the last patrol, driving drunk from the E Club on base to the barracks. It was a classic kind of stupid, avoidable, young man’s mistake—the distance from the E Club to the barracks was about two hundred yards. Howard had said he wanted to get his car out of the E Club lot because he was worried his stereo would get stolen. Jabo was one of several officers who’d gone to bat for him after the incident.
