At the Midway (18 page)

The midshipman was busted.  Frantically, Beck scanned the crowd.  "Howard!  Ahoy, Howard!  Can you spare me a few dollars 'til--"

"Here now!" the Master-at-Arms interrupted.  "No cadging at the auction!"

"But, sir--"

"Six dollars going once, six dollars going twice….  Sold!  For the sum of six dollars, to Ensign Garrett.  And may I add, Mr. Garrett, that I am pleased to see you have found religion."

Garrett looked up, startled.  "Have I?"

Amos Macklin recognized the profundity in the handclasp of the oceans.  The average lubber saw only a universal mass of water, but experienced seamen knew the seas and oceans were not merely convenient labels invented by cartographers.  Each body of water had its own set of peculiarities--its conveniences, inconveniences, traps, tricks, sea life and seafarers.  The Strait, and Cape Horn to the south, was the ground of contention for two ancient gods.  Amos used his favorite ploy--taking out the slop buckets--to get his second look at the passage.

High seas had been prevalent last time.  He had been on board a cruiser which was being transferred to the Pacific Squadron.  If four wrestlers had stood holding the four sides of a blanket and shaken it violently up and down out of sync, they would have gotten an idea of the configuration of the water during that stormy week.

Amos had been too busy to do much sightseeing.  In any event, the clouds had been too low.  There was little to see.  A race with death, mountainous waves, foggy embankments, and fear--that was the impression the Strait had left on him.

It was a different world now--no worse than the Chesapeake on a blustery day.  Amos could clearly see the headlands--tree-covered heights that plunged suddenly at the water's edge, offering no anchorages.  There were no spectacular vistas like those offered by the coast of Alaska or Norway's fjords.  It was the rich texture of geographical and man-made history that awed him--which made him want to accept its challenge, rather than submit to the empty, profitless desert set out for him.

His back twitched and he leaned forward to ease the pain.

"Hey, Amos!"  One of the cooks stuck his head out the galley hatch.  "Get a move on!  I got more shit piling up in here."

"There's shit piling up everywhere."

"What's that?"

Amos tossed the scraps and went back inside.

"That crazy Gilroy's hearing spook voices again," Stoker Gilroy chuckled to himself when he went topside for air.  He crouched and listened to the two men dicker.

"It's pure gold!  Cm'on, what do you say, Slayton?  You could use the extra protection when you go busting heads in Nicaragua or wherever."

"It's not a St. Christopher's medal, Mr. Garrett," came the skeptical response.

"All right, make it eleven dollars.  And keep the chain, ha
-
ha."

"Well...."

Gilroy moved away from the quarterdeck, bored.  They hadn't been spook voices, after all.  Just a huckster trying to palm off a trinket to one of the uniformed natives.  The fireman leaned against the weather rail, wincing as the golden scarab reflected off the slate sea.  A sharp pain darted through his genitals.  He wondered if his old problem was flaring up again.

He'd gotten the clap in Massachusetts.  Admiral Evans had selected Provincetown for his headquarters several years earlier, when the Fleet held target practice in Cape Cod Bay.  Most of the ordinary seamen had taken up temporary quarters in the nearby town of Barnstable
-
-
which soon became notorious for its blind tigers.  The proprietors of these illegal taverns boasted they sold only labeled whiskey.  In fact, it was labeled wood alcohol. Drinking it made sailors not only drunk, but crazy drunk.  Adding insult to physical injury, the owners priced their half
-
pint bottles at five dollars.

Admiral Evans complained about the blind tigers to the local authorities.  He also lodged complaints about the prostitutes who operated out of the empty freight cars on the wharf.  To no avail.  The bar owners made so much money they could easily buy off the police.  And the hookers, it seemed, paid off in other ways.

In one of the most ironic turnabouts of Evans' tenure, the citizens of Barnstable protested to him about sailors playing baseball on Sundays.  Since that was one of the few days his men were free to relax, Evans told the citizens to take a hike.  For which, they brought suit against him and the rest of the United States Navy.

Fine citizens of Barnstable! Gilroy leered at the memory.  There they were, fighting to save the sanctity of the Lord's Day
-
-
while sailors went blind, and Gilroy got the clap.  He didn't even have a good time getting it.  The freight car had been too frigid to enjoy much of anything, especially when you were bare
-
assed.  Later that same cold afternoon, Gilroy had gone to the nearest blind tiger and purchased a half
-
pint.  As he sat in a dark corner, intent on staring down the golden scarab, a man in a blue uniform came up to him, rolled up Gilroy's sleeve, and stuck a needle in his arm.

"What's that?" Gilroy had asked.

"Heroin," said the stranger, who then walked away.

Too drunk to care, Gilroy had resumed his futile attempt to stare down his nemesis.

"All right, Slayton, my final offer
-
-
nine dollars! Believe me, I won't be making a nickel off it!"

Gilroy watched the ensign chase the marine across the upper gundeck. When they were gone, he whistled a few bars from 'It's a Grand Old Flag'.

Then he returned below.

March, 1908
 
California Current

It was the greatest surprise of Chandry's life--short of waking up a criminal in Victoria--when they came across an enormous bull sperm whale four hundred nautical miles west of Cape Mendocino.  And there was William Pegg, boatsteersman of the larboard boat.  The first mate's boat.  The lead boat.

It was as much a surprise to William, who never thought the captain would let him keep his promotion if a real prospect came along.  If the other boatsteerers had not hummed something close to mutiny the day they smoked the rats, it was likely Chandry would have indeed reversed his decision.

"Think you can handle 'er, boatsteersman?" Chandry leered as William raced to port.  He added a broad wink to his first mate, officer of the larboard boat.  If the new boatsteersman botched the strike, it would be his job to recoup the situation.  To kill the whale himself.  Chandry's wink was intended to confirm the joke.  The humiliation inflicted upon the boy if and when he failed would be meaningless if they lost a good profit in the process.

"Boatsteersman!"  Chandry clapped William on the shoulder.  "What do you say?  You'll make us rich, won't you?"

"Aye, sir."

"Aye!"

William had taken his promotion to heart.  He'd cleaned the irons, sharpened all points and barbs, made certain the pin on the harpoon would toggle properly once the whale was struck, and tightened loose stitches on the beckets.  He checked the grenades, saw they were dry and primed, then measured the rope and gauged its clearance.  He went over to the becket box and inspected its contents: the 'drug'--a drag pole--a six-inch doweled plank fastened to a two-foot post; the boat spade; and the waifs.  When the lookout spotted the short, telltale spout of the sperm whale, the larboard boat was as ready as any on the ship.

The boatsteerer's condition was another matter.  William's heart swooped and churned as he leapt into the whaleboat.  His arms felt weak.  He had to pee, but there was no time for it.  He wanted to pray, but by then the oar was in his hands.

Until they reached the whale, a boatsteerer was just another oarsman.  It was the officer of the boat who maintained the steering oars and watched where they were going.  After his first distant glimpse, William would not see his target until they were upon it.

He felt so weak... he was sure he was not pulling his share at the sweeps.  His two harpoons were in the becket at his crotch, and the bomb gun was in a niche next to his seat--everything sharpened or primed.  He only wished his heart could also be oiled and whetstoned.

Throughout the long chase, the
Lydia
Bailey
lay directly in William's line of sight.  The black shadow of Captain Chandry's head showed like a pustule above the poop railing.

Someone hit him in the leg.

"Breathe!" Lead Foot commanded.

No wonder he was ready to pass out!  He was so tight in the chest he had to make himself conscious of his lungs and force them to work.  But it was difficult now that reality was pressing in.  This whale was not meant to be a gift from heaven, but a gratuity from hell.  How he handled the next few moments would determine his future.

The first mate signaled and William stood, took a harpoon in hand, then turned.  The sperm whale greeted him with an explosion of air from its spout-hole surprising William with the hotness of its breath.  They were to leeward, close up, and the spout was moist and explicit.  Rising only four feet, the atomized water fell forward and to the left, like a mist of snow drifting off a bush.  It seemed to William to be punctuating the fact that it was alive.

Steadying his right foot on the peak, he hefted the iron.  He was struck by a sudden sense of... knowledge.  Until that moment, he had not realized he'd been born knowing what every other Nantucket boy knew before taking a breath: where the heart of a sperm whale was located.  Raising the harpoon, he struck.  Automatically, he slid the second iron from the becket and lanced it into the whale next to the first.  Then he reached for the bomb gun.

A familiar hand restrained him.

"No," said Lead Foot.  "You got him.  Let him flurry."  He glanced back at the first mate.  "The
Lydia's
too far off.  If we kill him too soon, he might sink."

The mate nodded agreement.

"You got him, William.  He's spouting blood.  Let him face the sun before he dies.  We've got time."

William stared at the whale, stunned.  Indeed, the rainbow mist from its spout-hole had turned red.  With mere rods of iron, he'd slain a giant.  The boat rocked violently as the whale thrashed in the water.

"Slack your lines," the first mate ordered.

More than anything else, those words planted the compliment for all to see.  William had thrown his darts so hard the barbs had hooked deep within the animal.  The head pins broke properly and the hafts lay down on the whale like bizarre leeches as the harpoons toggled.  As William paid out the lines, the distance between the whale and the boat increased.  The sperm whale began its peculiar death dance, known to whalers as the 'flurry.'  It swam out as far as the rope allowed.  Then, instead of taking them on a Nantucket sleigh ride, as a whale not mortally wounded would have done, the animal struck a circle nearly a quarter mile from them.

"They know," said Lead Foot, taking his pipe out from under his oilskin.  "That's the damnedest thing about this business.  They
know
."

The rest of the whaleboats came up.  The other boatsteerers withheld their plaudits.  With reappraising glances, they realized William was one hell of a big bastard.  And only a growing boy, at that.

The
Lydia
Bailey
steamed towards them.  In retrospect, the chase seemed quite brief.  Yet the mother ship was miles away.  William had lost all sense of time.

The whale circled.  The larboard boat turned gently.

"There's the finish," said Lead Foot softly.

The whale had turned to face the sun.

It was a doleful, familiar and intensely dramatic scenario in the lore of the leviathans.  So often as to be a fact, sperm whales faced the sun before they died.

But as the steamer drew close and they began to haul the whale in, the animal abruptly showed signs of life.  William was toppled and hit the thwarts with a hard thud.  Chandry's curses rained down from above.

Lead Foot dropped his pipe and rushed to the cleats to secure the lines.  For an instant he seemed as callow as William.  It was obvious a romantic notion important to him had been chopped from under his feet.  More critical, his advice to let the whale flurry was butchered under a harsh light.  "That whale was fooled, too," he murmured to William.  "He thought he was dying."

William said nothing, but struggled painfully to his knees and helped secure the lines.

In the end, they were compelled to use the bomb gun.  William was a little afraid of the gun.  The loud report and the violent recoil were not as easy to brace for as the hard thrust of the irons.  When the bomb exploded in the whale's vitals, he covered his eyes, fearful of fragments.  A pungent stink filled the air as the whale lost control of its bowels.  In its death throes it lobtailed, whipping its tremendous tail flukes down and soaking the men in the larboard boat with shit and blood-stained water.

The other boatsteerers unleashed laudatory songs for William.  He was no superhuman, after all.  Like the rest of them, he had to resort to bombing.  This made him a fine fellow in their eyes and they reached across the gunnels to slap him on the back.  Chagrined, William accepted their compliments as consolation.