A Commodore of Errors (31 page)

“Are you nuts?” the electrician said. “If that redhead wants breakfast in bed, I'm going to give it to her.”

It did not take long for the other sailors to see what he meant by that. They all made a mad dash for the galley. Even the chief jumped at the chance to bring Mitzi her breakfast. Only Captain Tannenbaume, Sylvia, and the mate stayed behind.

“I knew that redhead was going to be trouble the moment I set eyes on her,” the Mate said.

“I didn't know I could have breakfast in bed,” Sylvia said.

“You can't, dear,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “This is a ‘tween decker, not a cruise ship. Ms. Paultz will soon find that out. She's in for quite a surprise if she thinks—”

“Hello! Anybody home? Hello!”

Sylvia rolled her eyes when she heard Mrs. Tannenbaume's gravelly voice. Mrs. Tannenbaume came around the corner of the passageway and stopped when she saw her son.

“Oh, there you are. Beat-me-Daddy-eight-to-the-bar,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said. “Is there a fire on board?”

“No, Mother,” Captain Tannenbaume said, “the crew wants to bring Mitzi breakfast in bed.”

“Breakfast in bed? You told me this wasn't a cruise ship. Why does she get breakfast in bed? She's only the cadet. I'm the supernumerary. Why can't I have breakfast in bed?”

“Yeah,” Sylvia said, “why can't she have breakfast in bed? She's the supernumerary.”

Mrs. Tannenbaume looked at Sylvia, held her gaze for a moment, and nodded.

Captain Tannenbaume read his mother's mind. She felt she just won their first power struggle—Sylvia had acknowledged Mrs. Tannenbaume's position on board the
God is Able
. Captain Tannenbaume looked around at the cases of beer in the passageway and smiled. If that's what it took to get his mother and Sylvia talking, then so be it.

He put one arm around his wife and one around his mother. “Let's go to the officer's lounge and talk about it.”

The only one remaining at the scene of that morning's events was the mate. He was still at parade rest. Finally, he, too, left.

“God almighty,” he said aloud to himself as he walked away, “it just burns my ass.”

That evening, Captain Tannenbaume gathered his officers on the bridge at sunset so that he could reacquaint them all with the art of celestial navigation. There was no way he was going to let the chief think that his deck officers didn't know how to handle a sextant—not to mention, of course, the matter of it being the ship's only means of navigation at the present time. The truth was, Captain Tannenbaume cared about what the chief thought of his mates, but he could
care less what the chief thought of him. Actually, he already knew where he stood with the engineers. The engineers, the chief included, thought he was a buffoon, but then again, every engineer on every ship in the merchant fleet thought the captain was a know-nothing. That's how engineers were. It was a jealousy thing, of course, how could it not be? The engineers were stuck down in that inferno of an engine room while the captain sat on his high horse on a sunlit bridge deck all day. Who wouldn't be jealous?

When he got to the bridge, Captain Tannenbaume saw Swifty fiddling with the ship's old but reconditioned
Cassens & Plath
. It was clear Swifty didn't know how to handle a sextant.

“You're a kings Pointer, aren't you Swifty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They teach celestial at that school?”

“Sort of.” Swifty looked at the sextant inquisitively. “We spent part of one class on it. We passed a sextant around the room. It was a plastic thing, made in Japan. It didn't look anything like this heavy German one. Our professor told us what all the parts were for, but he never really showed us how to use it. All we did was practice the computations so that we could pass our Third Mates exam.”

“So you know how to use the sight reduction tables? H.O. 229? Or do you guys go with H.O. 249, the air almanac?”

The mates just stared at him.

“Does any of this sound familiar?” Captain Tannenbaume looked around at the second mate and the chief mate when he said it. The mates nodded their heads. “Yeah,” they said. “229. We used H.O. 229 on our license exams.”

Well maybe they weren't as useless as he thought. And when he began showing them the different parts of the sextant, it looked to him like they were picking it all up pretty readily.
The academy must have taught them something about what it is to be a ship's officer, after all. The place could not be all about marching in straight lines, could it?
he thought. Captain Tannenbaume remembered what old Captain Holmes—the man who taught him everything he knew about celestial, and everything else about ships for that matter—used to say. Captain Holmes was a hawse piper himself, who'd learned everything
he
knew from an old salt as well. He said the idea was to pass down the stuff
that mattered—such as how to navigate by the heavenly bodies. Or how to tie a stopper on a hawser that was under a heavy strain, or sweep a lee for the pilot. He used to say that the United States Merchant Marine Academy ought to teach its students less about marching a straight line and more about following a rhumb line. Captain Tannenbaume could not agree more, although, he had to admit, he had been teaching the new kids less and less in recent years. They just weren't interested in learning. By the time they got out of the academy, they figured they knew it all. And how could he argue? With GPS, and Automatic Radar Plotting Aids, Chart Plotters, and Moving Maps, what did they need with an old sextant?

Captain Tannenbaume showed the mates how to use the sextant. He shot six stars in six minutes, an unheard-of feat. And then he reduced each sight to an LOP, a line of position, and plotted them on the chart. His plot was a perfect pinwheel, the sign of a real pro.

“And, look.” He pointed at the horizon. “You can still see the horizon. A good mate ought to be able to plot his position before darkness falls.”

The mates' heads just bobbed. Captain Tannenbaume thought he detected a slackness in their jaws, along with their head bobbing. He knew that only an absolute expert could get his position charted as fast as he just had.

He hoped he hadn't intimidated the poor fellows.

While Captain Tannenbaume was on the bridge shooting stars, Sparks was in the radio shack reading the evening telexes. The telexes came out in one long ream of paper that folded up on itself when it hit the floor, and Sparks sat in front of the machine holding the scroll-like paper between his legs while he read. Sparks knew that the
God is Able
would have to pass close aboard the Somali coast on the way to the Red Sea so he was not the least bit surprised to read telex after telex from the state department warning ships in the area to keep a sharp lookout for pirates. When the redundant telexes finally stopped coming, Sparks tore the long ream of paper off and stuffed it in the metal filing cabinet across from his desk.

BREAKFAST IN BED

A
crowd of sailors stood outside of Mitzi's stateroom with plates of runny eggs and untoasted white bread, jostling for position. The electrician declared that he was the one who was going to serve Mitzi in bed. He'd answered the phone, not them, and they could all just kiss his ass. Before entering her room, he took a moment to balance the plate of eggs with one hand so that he could fix his ponytail with the other.

It was the steward who knocked the plate out of the electrician's hand, sending the runny yolk down his pant leg and on to his boots.

The sight of yellow egg yolk on the electrician's nubuck leather workboots sent him into a dither, and he spun on the crowd behind him, demanding to know who did it. Ski stepped in front of the steward and said he was the one who did it. “What are you planning on doing about it?” he asked.

Somewhere during his response, the electrician made the unfortunate mistake of calling Ski a dumb Pollack, and it went downhill from there. The
mate, writing up the scene later in the deck log, described what he saw taking place outside Mitzi's stateroom as “pell-mell.”

Mitzi got out of bed when she heard the plates smashing on the deck. She opened her door to find a full-blown food fight right outside her stateroom.

“Hey!”

The sound of Mitzi's voice silenced the crew. They all turned and stared at her. The deck was a mess with broken plates and egg yolks and not one sailor had anything to offer Mitzi for breakfast.

“You call this room service?” Mitzi said.

“Yes, as matter of fact, I do.”

The voice came from behind them. Mitzi saw that it was the big Swede, the guy they called the chief. The sailors all turned to see him walking up with a breakfast tray of fresh fruit, yogurt, a bagel, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and one of those tin metal covers over a plate. When the chief stopped in front of Mitzi, he lifted the cover to reveal an impressive display of steaming eggs Benedict smothered in Hollandaise sauce. And it wasn't just the breakfast that was impressive. The chief was in a brand-new white boilersuit, with an ascot wrapped around his neck.

Mitzi took the polyester ascot in her fingers and pulled it slowly off the chief ‘s neck. “You look like Elvis in this getup.”

Mitzi then wrapped the ascot around her own neck and led the chief into her stateroom. The chief gave a big wink to the crew, who moaned as the door closed.

Inside, the chief set the tray on the metal side table attached to the metal bunk, and lowered the shade over the porthole to keep out the white-hot Indian Ocean sun. Mitzi got in bed and sat up against the bulkhead. She pulled the covers up to her waist.

“I'm ready,” Mitzi said.