Ice Brothers (11 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't count on Mr. Farmer. There's two kinds of sailors: one goes on local knowledge, and the other goes on the knowledge of how to run a ship anywhere. Fishermen go on local knowledge. Get them out of their own territory, and they ain't much better than lubbers. And no fishermen ever knew how to handle men on a long voyage.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And we can't count on Greenberg. I don't know how he ever got in the service in the first place.”

“His name is Green, I believe, sir. He has no experience at sea but he seems very intelligent to me.”

“You ever hear of a Sheenie sailor?”

“Well, none that I can name at the moment. I'm sure there have been many.”

“I never seen a Sheenie sailor, except for yeomen and supply officers. Tell Greenberg he's our supply officer, along with communications, and when I give him a list of things I want, I want all of it fast, even if he has to steal it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now Yale, I want you to remember one thing. I've got no hope for Greenberg and no hope for Mr. Farmer, but you I just might be able to shape up. Six months from now I have to send in a fitness report on you. If you've shaped up, I'll make it good enough so you just might get a command of your own inside of a year—in time of war, things move fast. But if you fuck up, I've got a job already picked out for you. You'll be in command of a Quonset hut so far north that they won't even think of looking for you until the war's been over for a year, if they remember you then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you can start by getting this ship cleaned up. If the men have to dry clothes and bedding, they can rig lines ashore.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And clean up that stack where the name of the ship is.
Arluk
means hunter—get somebody to paint on a picture of an Eskimo throwing a harpoon. And over the name of the ship I want the Coast Guard motto. Do you know what that is?”

“
Semper Paratus
, always prepared,” Paul said with a smile.

“Well, it ain't
semiparatus mañana
, like it looks this ship should have painted up there now. Put up the Coast Guard motto and under that put my
personal
motto in red letters:
DON'T FOUL UP HERE
.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Now,
git!
”

The men jumped to the task of taking in their laundry, but one seaman had been sent ashore for supplies, and his garments continued to flutter from a rail on the forecastle head. Before Paul could have these taken in, the general alarm rang, a Klaxon horn which throbbed with ear-splitting urgency. For the first time Paul heard the shrill call of a boatswain's pipe aboard that ship, followed by the hoarse call, “Fire drill, fire drill!”

There was a disorderly scramble for the hoses which Mowrey watched sardonically from the gun deck. When they finally got pressure and were directing thick jets of water into the bay, he strolled to the well deck, took the nozzle of one hose from the crew and directed it toward the offending bits of laundry on the forecastle rail, sending them spinning into the harbor.

“Secure from fire drill,” he said pleasantly.

CHAPTER 8

Captain Mowrey did not allow any of his officers or men to go ashore that day even to go to a telephone. Instead he arranged to allow each man to make one short call from the telephone on the bridge. To make sure that no military secrets were divulged, he sat on a high stool near the telephone, smoked a cigar and sardonically listened. It was while he was placing his call to his wife that Paul realized that his admiration for Mowrey was mixed with sheer hatred.

“Hello, Sylvia?” Paul said.

“When are you coming home?”

“I can't. Not for weeks maybe.”

“Why?”

“I can't explain now and I may not be able to call again for days.”

“What's going on?”

“Sylvia, there's a
war
going on—that's just about all I can say.”

“Are you mad at me? You sound so angry.”

“I'm not mad at
you
! I'll call as soon as I can. Don't worry about me—I'm in no danger at all—”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you more than I ever have in my life,” he concluded, and hung up.

“That's nice,” Mowrey said, licking the end of his cigar. “That's
sweet
. Now if you want to save your ass for your lover-girl, get it below and put it on a chair. I want a clean copy of a watch, quarter and station bill right now.”

As soon as Paul finished one task on that memorable first day under Mowrey's command and tried to steal enough time for a cup of coffee, he heard his captain bellowing from the bridge, “Yale! Yale! Send that bastard Yale up here!”

Green had it easier, because as supply officer he was often sent ashore, but many of the items which Mowrey demanded that he get, such as a standby gyrocompass and full sonar gear, were simply not issued to trawlers. When he reported this to Mowrey he got such a brutal tongue-lashing, all couched in the most vile anti-Semitic language, that his long mournful face went pale, and he developed such a tremor in his fingers that he put his hands in his pockets, which infuriated Mowrey all over again.

“I'll try, I'll try,” Green kept saying, and stayed ashore as much as possible, though Mowrey demanded that he spend his nights aboard.

Farmer was the only man on the ship who did not seem in the least affected by Mowrey. He just smiled when the captain called him “that farmer” and went about the ship cheerfully doing the best he could.

Most of the trawler captains ate in the forecastle with the other officers and men, but Mowrey dined alone in his cabin, big ship style. The first night Cookie carried up a tray with a dinner which included a choice steak with mushroom sauce, delicately whipped potatoes, fresh vegetables that he had purloined during a visit to the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a selection of French pastries which he had made himself. Mowrey was malevolently staring at Cookie's tall chef's hat when he removed the inverted bowl covering his repast. He was, as a matter of fact, on the point of grabbing his nonnautical headgear and pitching it overboard when he realized that he was being served no ordinary Coast Guard meal. After tasting the steak, he reached into a drawer, took out his sealskin overseas cap and put it on his head.

“Cookie, you and I are the only two men aboard this ship who have earned the right to wear nonregulation hats,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Cookie replied. “I work hard all day to fix food like this, and chefs are generally allowed to go ashore every night, while we're in port, of course. Is that all right with you, sir?”

“Cookie, as long as we all get food like this, you can go ashore whenever you want, but if the quality of the grub falls off, you're restricted.”

“Yes, sir!”

Cookie tried the first salute of his life and hurried happily back to his galley.

Mowrey disapproved of the watch, quarter and station bill that Paul drew up and demanded that it be corrected that very night. Paul had no idea how late it was when he finally fell into his bunk, too exhausted even to commiserate with Green, who lay in his bunk, staring up as though he were a corpse. Farmer was already asleep, snoring contentedly.

A little before three in the morning, the three officers were awakened by the howl of the general alarm and the shriek of the boatswain's pipe, which was followed by “Collision Drill, Collision Drill!”

“Oh
my!
” Farmer said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“The bastard, the bastard, the bastard!” Paul said, putting on his trousers.

Green said nothing, but his lips moved a lot.

On deck Paul found complete confusion while half-dressed men dragged a heavy collision mat from the hold. The weather had turned cold again, and a light rain was falling. Wearing a parka, Mowrey stood on the wing of the bridge with a glass in his hand. He was smiling happily. On the wing of the
Nanmak's
bridge the young lieutenant with the broad freckled face was also watching, and also smiling. A young machinist's mate who had got his hand caught in a watertight door came on deck holding it against his chest and whimpering. Green took him below.

“If this were a real collision, I figure we'd be about a hundred fathoms down by now,” Mowrey said. “Speed it up, girls! This is the big game!”

A week went by with more drills at every hour of the day and night. When the 20-millimeter guns arrived, Mowrey expressed amazement that Paul did not know how to assemble them and ordered him to learn immediately. While Paul was working with guns, and some men from the yard on the complex mechanisms, he noticed that Mowrey was standing on a wing of the bridge blinking a signal light on him.

“Did you want something, sir?” he asked, wiping some grease from his face.

Mowrey said nothing but the light continued to blink. Getting the idea at last, Paul said, “I'm sorry, sir, but I can't read blinker lights yet.”

“I can see that,” Mowrey said pleasantly. “If you could read what I just called you, you'd be after me with a monkey wrench. I want you and Greenberg to practice blinker lights at least an hour a day.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Paul said, and bent over the jigsaw puzzle of the guns again.

It wasn't the work, the exhaustion, nor even the fact that he was not allowed to go ashore long enough to telephone his wife that bothered Paul. It was not even the necessity of working harder than he ever had known he could without the slightest hope of praise or relief from criticism that tormented him. The worst part of the ordeal was the growing conviction that he could never please Mowrey, that he could never change himself from a college boy to a skilled Coast Guard officer in a few weeks, months or even years. One thing he learned quickly was that there was nothing of the fake about Mowrey. His contempt for his officers and men was not feigned for a purpose and his promise to arrange horrible assignments for those who failed to shape up was probably no idle threat. Paul became obsessed with the fear of being assigned to some tiny weather station or supply depot deep within the Arctic Circle, where he might be left for however many years the war lasted.

Sometimes when he was too tired to sleep, Paul lay in his bunk planning how he might explain to Mowrey that it really was not his fault that he had been a college boy, not an old Greenland hand, when the war started, and that he was really working as hard as any man could to make up for his lamentable deficiencies. This sounded reasonable, but he realized with shock that Mowrey was not susceptible to this kind of logic. The truth was, he suspected, that Mowrey hated him for reasons which had little to do with his inefficiencies. The classic, justified anger which a mustang who had taken twenty years to earn a commission felt for a reserve officer who had won his almost overnight was undoubtedly a large part of it. If Mowrey, as he said, had started his career as a fisherman's cabin boy, he might have developed a healthy or unhealthy hatred for anyone, especially a college boy, who appeared to be rich, “upper-class,” and soft while mysteriously being given most of life's luxuries without effort. If Mowrey felt this way, he might really enjoy torturing his “Yale” for a few months before finally crushing him with the worst, most humiliating assignment he could devise.

Perhaps I'm going paranoiac, Paul thought, but there was at least a horrifying possibility that this dark diagnosis of his situation was right.

Paul's confusion was increased by the fact that he continued to admire Mowrey as much as he hated him. There was no doubt whatsoever that the man was fast turning the
Arluk
from a shambles into an efficient Coast Guard cutter. Mowrey was much easier on the enlisted men than on his officers and most of them clearly respected, almost loved him. They worked hard and cheerfully for him, and as a reward, many of them were already being allowed regular liberty ashore.

Perhaps he was just being ridiculously oversensitive, Paul told himself. Farmer, after all, endured his share of insults without apparent resentment, and though Green looked tormented, he grimly tried to do his duty without a word of complaint. In a way Paul almost envied Green, because he could rightfully blame Mowrey's crazy anti-Semitism rather than his own weaknesses for most of the abuse he got. If Green were transferred with a bad fitness report, anyone who thought about it would know that almost no Jew could get along with Mad Mowrey, and Green would not have to spend the rest of his life questioning himself.

The hell with it, Paul always concluded. As Sherman said, war is hell, but I didn't understand that this is true even when we're thousands of miles away from any foreign enemy.

About ten days after Mowrey came aboard he made such a complete ass of himself that for once Paul did not have to wonder who was right and who was wrong. Immediately after dinner that memorable night, Mowrey got all dressed up in his best blue uniform and went ashore, presumably for the night, as he usually did, but on this occasion he returned shortly before midnight. To the astonishment of the quartermaster on duty, he had a woman with him, a buxom blonde in a bright green coat. “Tell Yale I want to see him,” he said and went to his cabin with his friend.

“Captain wants you,” the quartermaster said, shaking Paul awake, and slyly added, “You're going to get a little surprise.”

Paul was indeed astonished to see Mowrey pouring a scotch for a blonde who was sitting on his bunk in the sacrosanct commanding officer's cabin.

“You wanted me, sir?” he said, trying to keep his face expressionless.

“Yale, I want you to meet Helen here. Helen, this is my Yale, a good boy if I can whip him into shape.”

Helen giggled and said, “Pleased.”

“Pleased,” Paul said.

“Yale, I want you to rouse up Cookie. Tell him we want scrambled eggs, sausages and coffee.”