Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  This bank was run as a nonprofit enterprise - although I doubt if Internal Revenue would ever certify it as such. At any rate, it didn’t keep money out of circulation long. Each pay day, when other sailors were drawing their money from the government, Fatso and his boys whacked up the surplus in the bank. This left their regular pay on the books and available to the Treasurer of the United States. In this way, the bank helped ease the dollar shortage and was really a patriotic service.

  Chapter Two

  Happy Hour

  A half an hour after LCU 1124 came ashore, a Marine jeep whisked down the beach and slid to a halt in the sand at the end of the ramp. A VIP disembarked from the rear seat, said a curt word to the driver, and strode up the ramp to the well deck.

  The visitor was a lanky, weather-beaten character, big enough to be a line-backer for the Green Bay Packers but a little too old. He had piercing eagle eyes and the easy air of final authority that comes from years of being the boss man wherever you go. He was obviously either a Supreme Court judge, a Big League umpire, or a Marine Top Sergeant.

  “Take me to your skipper,” he growled at Satchmo, who met him at the head of the ramp.

  “Yes, SIR!” said Satchmo. “Follow me, SIR,” and he led the way to the mess room.

  Fatso was seated at the table finishing a cup of coffee.”

  “Gent’man to see you, skipper,” said Satchmo, as the Top Sergeant followed him in, ducking his head to get through the door.

  Characters like Fatso and the Marine don’t fiddle around with protocol when they first meet. Such men know a kindred spirit by instinct, developed only by long years of military service keeping just barely within the limits set by the Articles of War. Fatso and the Top Sergeant passed each other’s inspection at first glance.

  “Har ya, Cap’n?” said the Marine.

  “Hello, Sarge,” said Fatso. “Have a seat.”

  “Nice craft ya got here,” said the Marine, peering around the messroom as he sat down.

  “It’ll do,” said Fatso. “We take our bunks and our mess table along wherever we go. That’s more than you guys do sometimes.”

  “You’re telling me,” said the Marine ... “I hear you’re having a sort of happy hour aboard for my boys tonight.”

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “We figure there ain’t much for them to do on this here beach, so we thought we would have a little party for them tonight. It’ll do ‘em good to relax a little.”

  “Uh huh,” observed the Marine, lighting up a cigarette. The hand that held the match shook almost as if it had a dice box in it. “It’ll do you some good, too, from what I hear. What kind of action are you going to have?”

  “Roulette, craps, blackjack - which do you like?”

  “Personally, I ain’t a gambling man, myself,” said the Marine. “I figure I used up all my luck at Iwo Jima.”

  “Iwo?” said Fatso. “I was there too. Funny we missed each other.”

  “Well, I didn’t stay long,” said the Marine. “In fact, you might say I just barely got there - with the seat of my pants blown off.”

  “How come?”

  “Our boat got blowed up just before we got to the beach. I was lucky to get ashore at all with a handful of shrapnel where the seat of my pants should of been. I always say that landing gave me the worst pain in the ass of all I’ve ever been in.”

  “What beach was that on?” asked Fatso.

  “Charlie One.”

  “Which wave?”

  “The first one.”

  “I’ll be damn,” said Fatso. “I was in the first wave on Charlie One. We almost got it too. One of our own flyboys planted a bomb in the boat right next to us.”

  “Hah! That musta been the one I was in,” said the Marine. “That goddamnedn aviator claimed afterwards his bomb got hung up and fell off when he was on his way home, just as he crossed the beach.”

  “Imagine that,” said Fatso. “In the boat right next to me at Iwo! It’s a small world - ain’t it? That was tough luck, all right.”

  “I dunno,” replied the Marine philosophically. “If it hadn’t of been for that I might still be on Iwo. But here I am now in Crete, doing my last hitch on thirty years.”

  “Would you like a little snifter?” asked Fatso.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said the Marine.

  “Cabin” is a bit of an overstatement for Fatso’s pad. It was little more than a king-sized swab locker. It had a bunk, a small desk, a clothes locker, a washstand, and a porthole. But it did provide Fatso with privacy, which is the skipper’s traditional right on any ship.

  “Have a chair, Sarge,” said Fatso, indicating the bunk while he seated himself at the desk, pulled out the bottom drawer, and produced a bottle of Old Granddad. He placed a shot glass alongside it, filled a tumbler half full of water, uncorked the bottle, and shoved it toward the Marine.

  “Help yourself,” he said.

  The Marine, his hand still shaking, filled the shot glass to the brim and set the bottle down. Then he picked up the shot glass, held it up toward the port and squinted at it judiciously, his hand now as steady as a concrete block. He took a small sip from it, swallowed it slowly with a studious look, and then tossed off the rest. Then he dumped the water out of the tumbler in the wash basin, filled the glass half full of whiskey and took a swig from it that left no more than three or four shot glasses full in the tumbler.

  “Not bad,” he announced, smacking his lips.

  Fatso corked up the bottle and put it back in the bottom drawer. “Yeah?” he said. “They claim it’s pretty good stuff. This is the hundred proof version of it.”

  “I thought it tasted a little sharp,” observed the Marine. “I guess that’s why ... Now, let’s talk business.”

  “Okay. What’s on your mind?”

  “This action tonight. I want a piece of it.”

  “You can have all you want of it,” said Fatso, as if he didn’t get what the Marine meant. “We got a ten-buck limit on the wheel, fifty on the crap game, and twenty-five on the blackjack. You can get pretty fast action in any of them.”

  “That ain’t what I mean,” said the Marine. “I want a cut on the house’s percentage.”

  “Well, now,” said Fatso. “I hadn’t given that much thought. Just how big a cut did you have in mind?”

  “Fifty-fifty,” said the Marine.

  “I wouldn’t hardly think it oughta be that much,” said Fatso. “After all, we provide the layout, run the whole show, and give each guy his first can of beer free. We wouldn’t even clear the nut on the joint if we split right down the middle with you.”

  “Yeah - I see what you mean,” said the Marine. “But, of course, if none of my boys come to the party, there won’t be nothin’ at all to split.”

  “You got a point there, all right,” said Fatso. “But another thing to think about is that when we’re playing with outsiders like the Army or sailors off the big flat tops, both zeros on the wheel go for the house. Playing with the amphibs or Marines, we don’t count the double zero.”

  “That’s mighty fair of you,” conceded the Marine. “But if you count both zeros tonight, then you could give me my cut and your take would still be the same as if you were only using one zero.”

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “But there’s another angle you got to consider, Sarge. When we make a one-night stand somewheres and we’re gonna leave the next day, then it’s smart to jack up the house cut as high as you can. But if you’re going to be somewhere for a week, then it’s smart to cut clown the percentage and prolong the action. You wind up with the same amount of dough either way. There’s just so much to be had out of a crowd like yours, and when you get it, the action is over. You can take it all the first night or string it out over several nights. I like to string it out. It gives the boys something to do and keeps ‘em out of trouble ... Tell you what I’ll do, Sarge. I’ll pay you a flat fifty bucks instead of a percentage. How about that?”

  The Marine tossed off the rest o
f the glass, deliberated a moment, and then said, “Let’s do it this way. I’ll take either a flat fifty bucks or a quarter of your net after the last night - whichever is the biggest.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso.

  “See you tonight,” said the Marine, getting up off the bunk. “Thanks for the snifter.”

  At dinner that evening, Scuttlebutt said to Fatso, “you know who that Marine was that come aboard this afternoon?”

  “Well, I guess you might say I met him,” said Fatso. “but I never did get his name.”

  “That was old Shaky Stokes,” said Scuttlebutt.

  “Shaky Stokes?” said Fatso. “I been hearing about him for years. Used to be a famous pistol shot, didn’t he?”

  “One of the best in the country,” declared Scuttlebutt. “And to watch him shoot, you wouldn’t think he could hit a elephant at ten paces. I’ve seen him at a pistol match hold that gun up in the air waiting his turn with his hand shaking like a leaf. When his turn came, he’d draw down, still shaking until the target came in his sights. Then he’d freeze, and squeeze off a shot drilling the bull’s-eye at fifty yards.”

  “I noticed his hand shook a little,” said Fatso.

  “He used to drink quite a lot,” observed Scuttlebutt.

  “Used to?” snorted Fatso. “If he’s tapering off now, I’m glad I never offered him a snifter when he was working at it.”

  Scuttlebutt got a gleam in his eye as old sailors always do when they are about to tell a tale. “The Marines tell a story about him taking his annual physical some years ago,” he said. “At the end of it, the doctor asked him about the shakes. He says, ‘I guess maybe I’m smoking a little too much, doc.’ ‘How much do you smoke?’ says the doc. ‘Oh, I dunno - maybe three or four packs a day,’ says Shaky. The doc tells him ‘Yeah, you ought to cut down a little’ - and then he says, ‘It takes more than smoking to make you shake the way you do - how about liquor?’ So Shaky says, ‘Yeah - I guess maybe I drink a little too much, too.’ ‘How much do you drink?’ asks the doc. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ says Shaky; ‘I don’t keep track of it.’ ‘Can’t you give me some idea?’ says the doc. ‘Is it as much as, say, a quart a day?’ ‘Aw hell, doctor,’ says Shaky, ‘I spill more than that.’”

  Later that evening, the happy hour was in full swing on the well deck. Lights were discreetly shaded to shine downward, and the bow ramp was up so nothing was visible from the beach. A hundred or so Marines divided their play about equally among the roulette wheel, crap game, and blackjack table. Fatso’s boys were professionals so the action was brisk, and the gaming was just as orderly as that at Monte Carlo. Except, of course, for the language.

  Most of these Marines were pink-cheeked lads just out of boot camp. At boot camp, for reasons known only to the Marines, the first thing they teach the recruits is how to inject a word rhyming with “duck,” with proper blasphemous modifiers and amplifying phrases, into every declarative statement they make, except when speaking to military superiors directly. It may be that this is done to safeguard the boys’ morals. Such language is apt to get you thrown out of any well-run whorehouse in the western world, and most of these lads are too young to be patronizing such places.

  Fatso also thought they were too young to drink hard liquor. So all he sold them on LCU 1124 was beer. Scuttlebutt tended the bar at one end of the mess hall, where beer was ten cents a can after the first one on the house.

  Fatso and Shaky Stokes were seated at the other end of the messroom surrounded by a group of spellbound admirers. On the table between them there was a Gordon Gin bottle. Fatso wasn’t about to put his Old Granddad bottle within reach of Shaky again. Matter of fact, the gin bottle contained a mixture of medical alcohol and water, which of course looks the same as gin. After a snifter or so, it tastes about the same, too.

  Fatso and Shaky were swapping lies about what they had done in the war, with their young fans listening in popeyed amazement.

  After a while they got around to the characters they had served with in the old days. Some of them were dillies. Any ordinary citizen listening in on these sagas would wonder how in the world we managed to win World War II with such oddballs in high command posts. We probably wouldn’t have won it, except, of course, we had Fatso and Shaky on our side too.

  “I was in old Thirty-Knot Dugan’s tin-can division for a while after the Lexington got sunk,” said Fatso. “There was a character for you. Never a dull moment in his outfit. We used to call ourselves ‘Dugan’s Johnny Busters.’ We was based in Espiritu and the channel to the lagoon where we anchored ran right close to the beach for about a mile. The Army built a big camp right along that beach and to save themselves the trouble of digging latrines, they had a row of a couple of dozen privies sitting on beams that stuck out over the water. After they got them built, every time old Dugan took us out of that lagoon he’d bend on about thirty knots. Of course we would drag a stern wave behind us about six feet high, and the beams those privies sat on were only about two feet above the water. When our wake hit that row of privies it would knock ‘em over like ten pins. Funniest sight I’ve ever seen was all them shit houses popping up in the air one after another with soldiers scrambling out of them hauling their pants up as they ran. Old Dugan used to look back at ‘em and say, ‘The Army must be feeding the boys those Mexican jumping beans again.’ The General was in one of ‘em when it I got clobbered, and he had a hell of a time getting out. Damn near got drownded. There was hell to pay about that. It got all the way up to Admiral Nimitz, and he made old Dugan knock it off. The Army was going to take it clear up to the Joint Chiefs if he hadn’t.”

  “Speaking of shit houses,” said Shaky, with an I-can-top-that-one gleam in his eye, “when we were in Noumea getting ready to land on Guadalcanal, old Grandma Gillis was our division commander. How he ever got two stars I’ll never know - except this was early in the war, and he was one of those peacetime soldiers who used to make it just by outliving everybody else. They got rid of him just before the invasion, and it’s a damn good thing they did. Otherwise, the Japs would of wound up in Australia. Old Grandma was the most indecisive guy I’ve ever known. Never could make up his mind about anything. It used to take him ten minutes each morning at breakfast to decide whether he wanted his eggs fried straight up or turned over. Anyway, when we were building the camp, Grandma wanted a special privy of his own right near his Quonset hut. He told his Chief of Staff he wanted a two-holer, with green and yellow stripes on it, a field telephone to HQ in it, and a wind vane on top. The COS told the Top Sergeant, and the top told me. I had to build it.

  “Our Top was old Squarehead Bates, and he couldn’t stand people who hemmed and hawed about deciding things. His mind was made up about everything the day he was born, and he never changed it. When old Squarehead had told me what to build, he said a one-holer, and that’s what I did. When I got it finished, stripes, battle phone, wind vane, and all, Squarehead brought the COS around to inspect it. The Colonel said, ‘What the hell - I told you I wanted a two-holer.’

  “Squarehead says, ‘Yessir, Colonel, but I figure if we gave the old gentleman a two-holer, while he was making up his mind which hole to use, he’d crap in his pants.’”

  When the whoops over that yarn subsided, Fatso shook his head and said, “I wonder what’s become of all the old characters we used to have?”

  Shaky took a studious swig of “gin” and observed, “I dunno. But we sure don’t have ‘em like that any more.”

  One of the young listeners nudged the guy sitting next In him and said, under his breath, “Get a load of those two balmy old (suitably modified) bastards saying there ain’t no more characters in this outfit.”

  When the party broke up that evening, the Sergeant said to Fatso, “Okay, Cap’n - see you tomorrow night.”

  “Righto,” said Fatso. “Same time.” There had been quite a redistribution of wealth among the Marines that night. But it was only Marine money that changed hands. Fatso and his boys never gambled - they j
ust ran the games, handled the money, and took the usual cut for the house.

  When they closed up that night there were three hundred and fifty new dollars in the bank. This wasn’t bad, considering that when playing against the Marines, Fatso would not allow the house to use certain dice that were not exactly in dynamic balance or cards you could read just us well from either side, when you knew how.

  “Pretty good night,” announced Scuttlebutt, when he finished counting the dough. “This brings the welfare fund up to just over a thousand dollars.”

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “We’ll do just as good tomorrow night too. We gotta declare a dividend pretty soon.”

  Chapter Three

  Change of Plans

  While Fatso and his lads were entertaining the Marines, the skipper of their mother ship, the USS Alamo, had the Commodore of the squadron in his cabin for dinner. Over their coffee they were reviewing recent events of global significance.

  “I almost hit that goddamned Russian cruiser the other night,” said the skipper.

  “Yeah. I saw that,” replied the Commodore. “For a minute I thought you were going to hit him.”

  “It was mighty close,” said the Captain. “I think he was trying to get hit. He spent an hour getting into position where he could suddenly cut across my bow showing me his red light. I had to go hard right and back full to miss him. What the hell are they trying to prove, anyway?”

  “There’s no use trying to make sense out of what they do,” observed the Commodore. “They’re just out to stir up trouble. If they can get hit when they’ve got the legal right of way, they may think they can make something out of it.”

  “What do you think would happen if I hit him next time?”

  “As long as the Navy handled it, you’d have no trouble at all. In fact, the Admiral might feel like slipping you a medal under the table. He’s burned up about the Roosians. But of course, a thing like this becomes an international incident, and gawd knows what the naval strategists in the State Department would do.”