Jonah Watch (16 page)

Howard opined that Brace was going to lead a lonely life.

"If that's the way it's got to be."

"It's a good ship."

"It's a ship," Brace said. "These guys have to be as good with their mouths as they are at sea." He leaned back in the chair, and the intensity that crowded him seemed to concentrate. "Dane rigged that patch. I don't know everything, but I know what I saw."

"You saw a bosun rig a patch," said Howard.

"That's a way of not lying. When you can do that."

"I guess," Howard told him, "that you have to be from Illinois." Howard slurped the last of his coffee, a man eager to make a quick departure.

"Nope," said Brace. "Every time I try to understand this, you, or somebody, wiggles away. Now quit wigglin' and talk."

"What am I supposed to say? We do what we do. It must be worth doing. Otherwise we wouldn't."

"That's what all the liars say." Brace's barely lined face seemed concentrated on memories of thousands of hundreds of liars. "I don't mean you. That's what my old man used to say about trombones. He could make a trombone sound exactly like a flat tire."

"Every time you guys talk about your fathers, I'm glad I didn't have one."

"But Dane isn't a flat tire. Snow isn't. Or not if they keep their promise ... " and Brace faltered.

"Okay," said Howard. "We do what we do because dopes can't take care of themselves. The world is mostly dopes and pimps. The pimps can take care of themselves." He rubbed at his empty coffee cup as though it were a crystal ball. He looked into the cup, looked at Brace. "I just lost a friend," he said apologetically. "A dope killed him."

"Only dopes and pimps?"

"I don't know," said Howard. "Scavengers. We're the scavengers, and we pick up the leftovers. We're crows, magpies, basking sharks, gulls ... "

"Ohio must be worse than I thought."

"It's not Ohio," said Howard. "It's every place. You asked for this. You enlisted."

"I'm not complaining."

"Yes, you are. But you can't think that Levere and the rest can waste time worrying about what some punk seaman deuce does."

"They better," said Brace, "or else they better start learning to play the trombone."

"If I see an admiral, I'll mention your name." Howard made motion to stand. "I get so sick of drinking. I'm going to a movie."

"One thing."

"Yes."

"You don't believe that about ghosts and Jonahs?"

"I believe it about the ghost," Howard said, and he was grim. "That ghost and I have been around and around—three times."

Howard stood, fished for his money, counted. "I have enough for two, if you have our bus fare back." He looked at Brace, who seemed fascinated by a flaming, crashing mast.

"A Jonah's just another name for bad luck," Howard said. "Maybe it's just another name for weather. We get tore up every year, we break at least one arm every year ... ." He paused, because his catalog suddenly foundered on a reality. "A guy doesn't get lost every year," he said.

"Is it going to be a funny movie?"

"Comedy," Howard told him. "You call them comedies."

On the clear winter horizon, a white ship, whitely asparkle
with ice.

Downeasters know these days, when the sky raises in the northeast and sunlight flashes, flares, floods, bursts, shatters.

Temperatures drop, drop further, suddenly plunge. The clear air is filled with sparkle. Moisture in the air freezes and pops with sudden brilliant transubstantiation into miniature flakes of ice. The moderate sea foams thickly at the bow. Salt water arcs cream-colored and stiffening toward rails and chains where it freezes, or it falls pebbled into the sea as drops change to pearls of ice in a three- or four-foot travel. The ship becomes a warm cave lined with ice. Brass frames of portholes telegraph the cold. Inside the ship, condensation freezes thick and frosty on the frames. Men sit warm (playing cards, yarning) beneath dull, vanilla halos of ice.

On deck, when a man is unlucky enough to have an errand, breath comes hard through a wool-mufflered nose. The air freezes moisture in the breath. Nose hair is a mat, a clogged and frozen filter through which breath is sucked. Teeth ache from mouthfuls of cold. The thickest and best homemade mittens, of the kind that only Maine women make, seem like thin paper shells. Feet are not stomped. The thickest boots with the thickest liners are only just thick enough. The sparkle and glitter and dance in the air are pinpricks of light; hitting the eyes, making the mind groggy as if the head suffered the aftermath of a blow.

Rigged lifelines are stiff with ice, like coated steel rods. The deck becomes a glaze that would knock the feet from under a cat. Where heaving lines once hung on the rails, there is now empty space. Conally has taken the lines and hung them in Howard's office where they will stay dry. A man cannot heave a frozen coil.

Cutter
Adrian
returned to sea as Lamp's calendar, aplot with menus, flipped to December. Thanksgiving, which Snow thought one of the larger advantages of the New World, lay like a subdued burp in the memory; and Lamp, still in combat with the invisible, confided to Howard, Brace and Conally that Christmas was going to make Thanksgiving look like "pale pink puddin'."

"We been a long time away," Conally mourned. "Our ladies will have found other guys."

Lamp held to the opinion that Conally's "kind of ladies" had waited no longer than fifteen minutes.

"There's nice girls at the Salvation Army."

"I don't want to meet somebody who's Salvation Army nice," said Brace.

"They have a brass band," Howard explained to no one in particular.

On these days of lapse between storms, the coastal waters flourish with traffic. Boats move between ports, shift moorings, make brief dashes toward wintered-in islands. The harbors freeze. Tugs with icebreaker bows plow the narrow road of the channel. Buoy snatchers break off replacement and salvage among wrecked aids to navigation. The snatchers make fast trips to resupply the lighthouses. Men listen to radio Boston, gauge the weather, and the men take thin sniffs at the air, judge the "signs." Sometimes the men take chances.

The ill-prepared and lousy double-ended auto ferry
Islander
, three hundred feet long and taller than a house, en route from Canada to its startling new port of Seattle, ran empty along the coast. It carried a working crew of six men for bringing it through the Panama Canal. In the inshore water, spray mounted the forward end of the low car deck. The thing became like a skating rink—or—the vast, open car deck was like a frozen playing field. As wind arrived, spray ran the length of the car deck. The deck, stanchions, bulkheads became coated.
Islander
resembled a floating tunnel of ice.

Aboard
Adrian
, Brace peeled apples while men sat at tables telling lies about liberties in Boston. Images of eager and easily satisfied women seemed to hover kibitzing above a poker game that, because it was the wrong side of payday, had a nickel limit. In the wardroom, Dane and Levere sat with as much ease as they had ever displayed at sea. They spoke in low tones that Howard, no matter his acute and nosily trained hearing, could not decipher. From forward the engines were as smooth and certain as the low and easy swell beneath
Adrian
's keel. The ship moved with the rich, studied regularity of a cruise liner peopled by touristing millionaires.

The cracker Bascomb hollered the up cards as he dealt five-card stud. Conally, it seemed, looked at two tens showing. Conally bet two cents, was called. The cards slapped around. Conally dragged a pot worth sixty cents. If Howard had not known Conally well, he would have sworn that Conally was no different than ever.

Lamp appeared in the office doorway and blocked the view of the messdeck. He handed Howard a short list of galley items for the quarterly requisition. Lamp pretended to be all business, and he was not. His red-blond-haired red-faced head tipped slaunchwise over huge shoulders, and his head seemed like a teacup precariously perched on a cabinet.

"I got something to say," he whispered. "Come forward."

"Where?"

"I think maybe the boat deck," Lamp whispered. "There won't be anybody on the boat deck."

"You gotta be kidding."

"Boat deck," Lamp insisted. He turned and was clearly headed forward to get his gear. Howard stood, plucked his jacket from a hook, kicked off his shoes and began to pull on his boots. He looked up, saw Conally watching. Conally stood, raked in his change. He walked across the messdeck.

"Boat deck," Howard whispered. "Don't ask why."

"I guess I know."

"We don't want a parade."

"There won't be no parade," Conally whispered. "It's gettin' on toward thirty below up there."

In Maine, in December, and with a lot of fat, a lot of thrashing and more luck than comes with loaded dice, a man can live in the water for five minutes. Most men die immediately of shock.

Conally followed Howard. The two men walked across the fiddley, unclogged a forward hatch, stepped onto the port side of the main deck. A lifeline angled from a stanchion and forward into the bow. The line was as stiff and hard as cable. Conally reached with a mittened hand, attempted to twang the line. The line creaked. Shatters of ice were like brilliant rain in the sunlight. Thin ice formed on the house, so that the ship momentarily seemed made of mother of pearl. Wind of
Adrian
's passage was light, sharp as an assault by needle points. The men turned their backs to the wind. Conally dogged the hatch.

"This better be about something."

"Nobody said you had to come."

"You an' me," said Conally. "Now we know better."

"Levere knows something he isn't telling," said Howard. "Maybe Dane knows."

"You mean New Bedford?"

"I know how District works. I figure
Abner
to New Bedford, and
Able
comes up here. I figure we ride herd on
Able
."

"If it ain't no worse than that," said Conally, "then I reckon I could stand it."

"What could be worse?"

Conally looked at the light swell that ran beneath brilliant sunshine. He hunched his shoulders and faced aft.

"Dane's going to take mustang grade," Conally said in a voice of misery. "District is gonna give him
Able
." Conally conjectured with the certainty of an accused man before a hanging judge. He looked upward at the boat deck, where, leaning against the stack, Lamp stood red-faced and waiting.

"Dane's different," Conally said. "All last month." Conally turned toward the ladder and the boat deck.

Howard followed, shocked with the awful fear that Conally was correct. In his worst imaginings, Howard had never imagined a thing so terrible.

The main deck served as a funnel for ice, and where water splashed and ran toward the scuppers, ice lay in ridges. Close to the house the ice was thin. The two men held rails that were welded to the house. They walked closely and kicked their boots into the angle formed by house and deck.

"You could run hot water pipe," Conally said. "Right under the deck. Like a great big heater."

"Cost a lot. Cost more than this thing's worth."

"I only saying what you could do."

The boat deck was free of ice, but in the scuppers lay small wind pockets of snowy ice wrung from the air. The easy passage of
Adrian
was not fast enough to bring stack fumes to the boat deck. Above the men's heads the warmth flowed like an insulating blanket that mostly obscured the sun and not the cold. Lamp huddled against the stack which was nearly as cold as the surrounding rails and stanchions and deck. Lamp looked at Conally with no surprise or resentment. Lamp looked at Howard. "He's in on it?"

"Isn't everybody?"

"No," said Lamp. "Everybody isn't. Most of the boys have forgot."

"They loaded it off with Masters."

"That's what they did," said Lamp. Lamp leaned against the stack as if he were trying to hold it up. His hooded foul weather jacket enclosed his face so that he seemed only a red mouth, a red nose existing in a cavern. He had pulled on no foul weather pants. The thin cotton of his cook's whites stretched across heavy shanks, and his legs were on the road to frostbite. "I've studied it and studied it," said Lamp. "Only I just now got it figured out."

"You sure picked a pretty day."

"I just now figured it out." Lamp looked at Conally, and Lamp's red nose twitched with suspicion. "You ain't going to believe this, boys."

"If I'm not going to believe it," said Howard, "let's go where I can disbelieve it in comfort."

"We had two ghosts," Lamp said earnestly to Conally. "That guy on
Hester C
. was tellin' us about Wilson. Jensen's been telling us about Dane."

Sunlight glanced and flashed from a patch of ice on the fantail. The wake foamed. The cover on the small boat was white with frost that had been distilled from the canvas. A thin line of frost lay on top of the boom that ran above the small boat. The stack purred, colored the clear air with layers of fumes. Conally shifted his weight, looked upward to the flying bridge as if he expected to see spies.

"You're right," said Howard. "I don't believe it."

Conally shifted his weight, hesitated, seemed trying to decide whether to stay or go.

"I kinda do," he said. "Tell me what you figure."

Lamp's figuring, less fulsome than it would have been on a warm messdeck, figured that Jensen would not return. "I told him his job was done. You remember."

"Yes," said Howard.

Lamp's figuring, as intense as any sinner-priest's theology, had followed a predictable course. He "thought ‘n thought" and got nowhere. Then, on a day that was not remarkably different from other days, he saw Levere and Dane sitting in the wardroom.

"That's when it hit me. When we saw Jensen, Jensen was sitting in Dane's chair."

"I don't know nothin' about that," said Conally. "Jensen said to look out for ice. Now we got ice."

"We're talking about the best seaman in the world."

"I don't know all the seamen in the world."

"The lines are all rigged," Conally said helplessly. "Hawser's ready to go. Back-up hawser's ready." Conally looked at the ship, turned and looked all around, as if he searched for an enemy.

"Do we have a Jonah? Did we have one?"

"In a manner of speaking," said Lamp. "I've thought an' thought about this."

"Who?"

"I got to get inside," said Lamp. "My legs are freezing." He smacked his thighs, the front of his legs. "A Jonah ain't who, it's what," said Lamp. "A green kid, a yellow snipe ... " Lamp faltered before his spectrum of color.

"Sure," said Conally. "I can see that." Conally looked like he had been searching arduously for the right tool and had found it. "There is something a guy can do," he said. "Just keep the kid away from Dane."

Lamp was clearly beginning to suffer from cold, was stiff from leaning against the stack. He stood away from the stack, took a hobbled step, bounced to shake his legs alive. He looked at his feet, and he regretted the bounce. At Lamp's back the stack rumbled, seemed to hesitate, and then the deepening rumble opened like the low notes of a pipe organ. The men listened, sensed the shaft increasing its whip, saw the stem set slightly lower as
Adrian
put on speed.

"Goin' somewhere," said Conally. "I hope it ain't about anything."

"That's a good kid," Lamp said. "Don't lean."

"Didn't say anything about leanin'," said Conally. "And I got nothing against the punk." He turned to face forward into the needling wind. He looked at the sea. "Twelve knots," he said. "We're full, not flank. Maybe Snow's just blowing coke from the engines." He turned back to Howard and Lamp. "You guys got anything else?" A rain of ice vibrated from the lip of the stack, and the ice was black with diesel exhaust. It shattered, scattered, scampered across the deck like black rain.

"Nothing," said Howard. "Except a chill."

"I still think Dane's gonna take mustang grade," said Conally. "All last month he's been telling me things. Been telling me stuff that's going to need doing next spring."