Jonah Watch (18 page)

Glass moved, skidded, and James flipped a heaving line after Glass, the line arriving like a throw to home. Glass caught the line, skidded to a stop, grabbed the pole in one hand—grabbed Dane's arm with the other. Glass stepped on Brace, kicked Brace's face in his scramble, and Dane struggled back aboard.

From topside in the superstructure another piece of ice crashed down, and it seemed to fill the night with sparkle. Brace tried to stand, gazed stupidly at his dangling arm, and then he settled in a curled slump around that pole as surely as Amon had ever curled beneath a table.

Pneumonia, which is not humble, and which cynics call the
enemy of youth and the friend of the aged, attended
Adrian
as the ship beat north at flank speed, homeward bound. Pneumonia, unlike fire and ice, is not worth talking about by sailors and poets. While fire is spectacular, and ice is occult, pneumonia is a cheap theatrical trick that waits in the wings. When a man is exhausted, cold, or injured, pneumonia steps toward the final chorus. Young men often manage to drive it away, old men almost never do.

Adrian
jolted and fled across the winter sea, as Snow and Howard traveled like foolish birds of passage between the dying man who lay in the chief's quarters, and the two men who were making their own fights in the crew's compartment. Majors was gussied up and fanciful with codeine, murmuring of miraculous guns. Brace had his own taste of pneumonia. Since neither Howard nor Snow knew if sedation would drop Brace's defense against disease, they sedated him very little; and Brace, on the thrusting, rocking, jolting bunk, no doubt suffered. Howard spoke to him, but Brace was mostly mute. He confided to Howard that he was "figuring something out."

Lamp held together the after part of the ship by talk and food—Lamp rendering a state of grace on the messdeck to match the same business which Levere attended to on the bridge.

The Indian Conally, in spite of the weather, stalked the boat deck in the wind, a man engaged in an act of communion, perhaps; perhaps in a sacrifice, or a demonstration of faith. Perhaps Conally was only confused.

Glass and James were not talking, not even to each other; and they sat on the messdeck in a sort of stunned silence, as they slurped coffee, and stared into the depths of their mugs like men freshly reacquainted with concepts of infinity. Even the loudmouth cracker Bascomb walked hushed.

Howard, as helpless as a revivalist facing reality, and with dull wits, watched the ancient and vibrating decks. Howard did not understand what he saw, and while Lamp bustled, and—may any stray forces of light, if they are worthy, protect and preserve the soul of Reeser Lamp—actually made chicken soup which Dane refused and so did Glass, Howard turned to Snow; for Howard had catalogued more facts than he could handle.

Snow stood beside Dane. Dane lay drawn, old. His thin hair was white across his pink and dying skull. He breathed in gulps and chokes. His thin lips pulled tight, like a circle of wire around his gulping mouth. He muttered to a woman, called a woman, unnamed here and forever unnamed. Sometimes he cursed. Sometimes he gave orders.

"Why do we put up with this," asked Howard, and he spoke as if he was the youngest man alive. "You've been around, Chief. Why do
you
put up with this?"

"I am a seaman," said Snow. "Do you truly want to know?" Snow stood beside Dane's bunk. Snow braced himself against the sharp pitch of
Adrian
as the ship crashed forward on strained engines; and it was clear that Snow then neither thought nor cared about engines. His small face was creased. His mouth was tight when Dane rambled coherently. Snow's mouth relaxed only a little when Dane was incoherent.

"I want to know," Howard said. "All of this means something. I used to be able to figure anything out. I used to know everything."

"As did I," said Snow. "A Scots lad gave me my instruction. He struck me in the mouth at a time when our destroyer was machine-gunning survivors from a submarine. They were swimming toward us. I recall that I was laughing." Snow leaned against a bulkhead, a small brown bird at rest, peering either at half a minute or half a century. "In the war," he said, "we were glad to indulge in madness. When the war was finished, we were still glad to indulge in madness. The reason I put up with this is that it is not madness."

Howard, discovering that he might not yet be a seaman, was awed. "It's embarrassing, what I'm going to do."

"Do you believe," said Snow, and he spoke with absolute wonderment, "you Yanks are a curious people, and with strangely vivid explanations. I am about to use one. Do you actually believe that there is a free lunch?"

Lamp, the magic man, the spiritualist, who immediately understood—after the fact—why Jensen wanted Brace on deck and not in the engine room, behaved like a creative demon of food. He worked through the night, through the morning, and when
Adrian
put lines on the pier and Dane and Brace and Majors were taken ashore, Lamp sagged against a chain, and he was exhausted. He looked over the familiar home harbor of Portland where the channel was a black and narrow river running between ledges of ice. He looked to the mudflats, attempting to discover the ugly form of
Hester C
.; saw only the wreckage of a beat-up work boat scattered by storm along the tide line. Belowdecks, in warm spaces, men shook themselves like dogs ruffling out wet fur. They belched, burped, like old Romans waiting to get on with the feast. They returned to the messdeck where food lay steaming in glorious redundancy. The men muttered, were not hopeful, but began to feel that they might soon feel that way.

Yeoman Howard, headed to the Base where he would not pick up mail for yeoman Wilson, or for
Abner
, but only mail for
Adrian
, picked up an unusual creature instead. The creature's name was Iris.

"A real winner," the OD at the Base told Howard. "I'm glad you've got the punk."

Steward apprentice Iris, it developed, was a man who had been so gorgeously conned that no argument, no set of reasons, could convince him that the entire world was not in a state of error. During the short walk between Base and ship, Iris managed to explain three times that a recruiter in Hawaii had promised him a change in rate the minute he hit the States. Iris managed to explain four times that he had an engineering degree from a great and powerful university, and that the recruiter had promised that a man with such qualifications would immediately be sent to officer's candidate school. Steward apprentice Iris—who did not have a Chinaman's chance in a Turkish harem of getting a change in rate (being Hawaiian), leave alone O.C.S., and who doubtless had his sheepskin with him—was tall and spectacled and mildly oriental, if one discounted the indignant and confused expression on his face. Yeoman Howard, who was busy mistrusting all experience, kept his big mouth shut. He took Iris aboard and introduced him to bosun striker Joyce.

"What'd I do with him?"

"Square him away," said Howard. "I'll log it. See you below in a minute."

The minute stretched to five, because of the pickiness of the horse-headed Chappel. Chappel hunched above Iris's service record which lay glistening in stiff, new, undented covers. Chappel tsked and pursed his mouth and made worry noises. Chappel did not have an engineering degree.
Adrian
did not have a chief bosun. All that Howard had was a thick envelope from Personnel which he feared to open.

The logging-in ceremony completed to Chappel's scrupulous satisfaction, Howard laid below; where, with engineering certitude, steward apprentice Iris was hogging the whole show. He had gathered quite a crowd.

"You are a punk," Joyce was telling Iris. "We don't need your flak."

"You must not speak to me in that manner. I have an engineering degree."

"You are a punk with an engineering degree."

"This is the cutter
Adrian
," said Glass. "The captain is Phil Levere, mustang. The man on deck is Jim Conally. The cook is Reeser Lamp. You are steward apprentice Iris."

"You dislike me because am Hawaiian."

"True," said Wysczknowski, "but yids are worse. And admirals."

"You slant-eyes is all alike," Joyce advised Iris. "We'd ought to pack up the lot of you and send you back to Philadelphia."

"And Polacks," Glass told him. "There ain't nothin' worse than a Polack. I had a long weekend with a Polack lady once ... by mistake ... you can take my word."

"Niggers," said McClean. " ... now know something about this."

"What are you saying? What in the world are you trying to say?"

"We are saying," said Wysczknowski with considerable ease, "that there is an old, tired guy back aft, and he has been up all night and cooking. So unpack that sloppity seabag ... "

"And get crackin'."

The fat envelope, when Howard opened it, contained orders:

The dying Dane was ordered to take command, not of
Able
, but
Aaron
in Boston. Levere had
Able
. The captain of
Aaron
was to take
Adrian
, a grand swapping around that Howard did not then recognize as a rejuvenating and reaffirming principle. All Howard knew was that the auxiliary orders allowed Levere to take some men with him to subdue the jinx ship. Levere had been scrupulous in his requisitions. He had not wanted to short
Adrian
.

Fallon stayed, but Snow was transferred with Levere. Chappel went with Levere, as did Joyce and Wysczknowski, Glass and James. Howard, not knowing whether it was a compliment, a disgrace, or neither, was not included.

We old men, those of us who are not sandpapered flat, as
we pontificate from the depths of comfortable chairs, are apt to lie, pretending that chance, youth, dreams and fortitude are bold matters of understood intent. The truth is elsewhere. We fumbled, we puzzled, and if we found any great meanings, the discoveries, like as not, were by plain luck.

Adrian
returned to piling seas. As engineman Fallon had done the winter before, taking over from the senior Jensen, now the Indian Conally walked the decks for Dane. Conally resembled a blunt hammer as he pounded a new deck gang into shape.

District offices, frustrated in the appointment of Dane, retained
Aaron
's captain aboard
Aaron
. District sent
Aaron
's chief bosun, freshly transformed to mustang, to
Adrian
. The new captain was Ed Chaney. He was an easygoing spendthrift ashore, a tough and unsleeping sailor the moment that the ship found deep water. He did not suit Conally, exactly; and he did not suit Howard, exactly; but each man had to admit that in any world of fools, Chaney was not going to qualify for merit badges.

Through piling seas
Adrian
towed
Mirabelle
,
Eben
,
Lorna
Ann
,
Catspaw
,
Vicky R.
and
Knight Ethelred
... a manly yacht.

From south came news that the decommissioned cutter
Ajax
, rusting on the scrap pile in Boston, was sold to a man who planned to turn it into a small and intimate seaside restaurant.

Cutter
Adrian
fought a fire at the coal yards in Portland. Ice once more formed in the bow, and ice sprinkled as drops fell skidded across the decks from the high arcs of water, while men and fought to stay afoot and in command of the heaving, pulsing hoses. The fire was red and gold against the backdrop of the whitened city, and black smoke rose to distribute the miserable smell of sulphur through the ship.

Seaman apprentice Brace refused sick leave, having nowhere to go, and he hung around the Base as an ambulatory patient—but he resembled, in his anxiety to "get on with it," a blind pup in a sausage factory. Conally spoke to Chaney, and Chaney read Levere's comments in Brace's service record. Brace became a full seaman, albeit a seaman with a temporarily unusable arm.

Cutter
Adrian
towed
Daniel
,
Misty
, and, on a day of glory, met cutter
Abner
at sea as
Abner
was returning home.
Adrian
and
Abner
closed, men waved, and then the two ships kicked apart on diverging courses to search for the overdue
Dominick
which was found two days later by dune pounders as the disabled vessel swung at the pick in shoal water.

Adrian
towed
Violet, Pride Of The Banks, Obadiah
.

Abner
, in an excess of family feeling, towed
Sister Sue, Seven Sisters, The Brothers
.

Able
towed
Erasmus
.

Word from south spread through the fleet, and the word said that cutter
Able
was "takin' a turn" and "lookin' good."
Able
towed
Jacqueline
,
Prester John II, Rockrose. Able
searched and found the overdue and written-off
Maiden Of Mist
, adrift with a starving crew that had been reduced to its next to last bottle of booze.

A thirty-six foot lifeboat was declared excess by the Base. It was invoiced as a gift to a troop of sea scouts. From north came radio gossip which hoped for the early breakup of the ice.

Adrian
towed
Whisper, Fife, Excalibur
.

Brace, healed and moving silently, slipped into the valued position that had once been held by Glass. Conally confided to Howard that Brace was "gettin' to be dependable." Brace, as mum as the library from which he withdrew books, spent his off-watch time on the messdeck. He read thrillers, mostly fiction, but thrillers, certainly.

Adrian
towed
Adrienne
, a possibly incestuous project, which, as Lamp gloomily observed, "just sooner or later
had
to happen." During the time of that tow, the State of Maine turned toward the glorious state of spring.

In Maine in spring, the interminable days of March disappear with a kind of final vengeance, a well-delivered backhand of wind and sleet and rain. April offers a cold cacophony of rain. Rain runs in the brick streets, and it pounds into the plowed facades and banks and pillars and stockades of snow. The piled snow is like a fort besieged, gradually giving way and breaking down before the blows of an inexorable invader. Crud and dirt, grime, soot from wood fires, bleeds darkly from roofs, washes into the streets, and disappears toward the harbor. Old men stretch, yawn, interrupt their yarning to look through wet windows at the dismal weather. The old men read the "sign." Young men hunger and begin to laugh, and the young men are unamazed by tales.

Yeoman Howard, who had looked forward to blowing his reenlistment bonus on bountiful women and a dandy hotel room, found instead that he was groping. He was still young, but he did not feel at all young anymore. With a desperation that he could not then understand, he threw himself at work, gave over to work, and thus, soon ran out of work. The days rolled past, boring, incomplete. Howard, for the first time ever, thought of the future. He decided to change his rate, take a one-grade bust and reenlist as a junior quartermaster. As spring arrived in green splashes, and as liberty was granted, Howard went ashore. Drinking.

The beer tasted just elegant, but it no longer held the alcoholic bite of perfectly inferred freedom. In the bars the jukeboxes blared, and the women seemed to laugh louder and longer at dull jokes. Dane's shack job, Flossie, sat every night at a table beside a chief damage controlman. The silken, stitched tiger on the rolled sleeve of Howard's tailormades was slightly frayed.

The women laughed, haw, haw.

Howard typed his reenlistment papers, signed them, tucked them in his desk. He went ashore, got drunk, really drunk, falling-on-his-face-in-it drunk. Conally dragged him back to the ship. Howard slept, woke, showered, muzzled coffee beneath the protective and concerned eyes of Lamp. In two days, when Howard was sure he was sober, truly certain, he opened the desk drawer and tore up the reenlistment.

YMCAs, where young lads run naked and screaming through the hallways as they snap each other on the butts with wet towels, are the curse of the forlorn, the lost, the wanderer; and any YMCA can eventually cure most men of inambition. Howard nosily visited YMCAs, a grand tour of Y's in Boston, New York, Winston-Salem. He toured the coast, saw cutter
Abner
on one occasion, cutter
Able
on another. He visited Fairhaven, Newport News. He decided that he must leave the coast. He thought that if he left the coast he might feel young again; return to youth.

He toured the heartland, was revolted. The cow colleges, the house trailers, the daft certainty. Like a man intent on suicide, he pressed on to California. He drank, but he did not get so drunk that he could not find the bus station in L.A. He fled back east, wandered along the docks. He fished for a season, thought of going for a purser's ticket in the merchant marine; dismissed the thought.

He seemed nudged by a hand that momentarily extended from the invisible world, touching his shoulder, returning him to Boston.

It was in Boston, he told himself, that he would have to "make or break," and, although he did not understand why, he still did understand that awful proposition that is not a myth, but true. Because it was in Boston—no matter how bloody and wrongheaded and fire filled the history might be—it was in Boston that the primer had been written. It was in Boston that he gained a sense, a first and original taste of a new kind of youth. He discovered that, after all, he was not a man who made history, but a man who studied history. In an excess of redeemed youth, and of beautiful and certain ignorance, he began his work.

He worked well during his thirties, mastering the facts, sweeping instinctively with the flow, feeling intuitively that the slowly rolling wheel of events would someday, and soon, make mists of confusion flow away as before a night wind. He got married, the first time to a singer, the second time to a librarian; but, in spite of his attentions, the women became bored, somehow. They found other and more clever companionship.

In his early forties, he found himself pondering matters over which other heads—and better, doubtless—had already pondered. He added to the matters a small touch here, an addition there. His accomplishments, if they were accomplishments, produced works that better heads in the future might ponder, use, if only to disprove. He again married, a fellow historian, and that woman chose to stay beside him.

In his late forties he enjoyed a flurry of hope, good will, and he worked well. He believed, with some justice, that he had an original notion. He thought, studied, worked, turned fifty.

Through the pages of the past, and all about him in the present, messiahs spoke with thrilling commands. Politicians and generals spoke in warm, even-heated, thrilling commands—of national honor and pride as they dealt in disgrace. Teachers, scholars, the businessmen ... who spoke in thrilling commands ... the notion faltered; and suddenly, Howard, who made too much of things, one day discovered that he was becoming old.

He was affrighted, returned to thought, and emerged from the fright with a sort of low joy. Age, at least, meant that you did not have to put up with it much longer. If asked about "it," he would have replied with all certainty that history's greatest gift was that you did not have to take "it" with you.

And then, while walking less than sprightly through a wet autumn in Boston, Howard momentarily stood before the window of a well-groomed, middle-aged and average restaurant.

At a table which faced the street, a familiar face chewed, as if the chewer thought of other years and other matters. Brace, that aging Jonah, with his face lined like a walnut, weathered like an old barn, sat in a well-blocked but ancient uniform that bore the worn, dull rings of a lieutenant. Brace stared, half rose from his seat, seemed momentarily joyful. He beckoned.

Howard, with a hot heart and cold feet, entered the restaurant.

They spoke at first of predestination, or at least they spoke of vicissitudes. They shook hands, clapped shoulders, ordered wine so expensive that the restaurant owner was compelled to hold a long search in the dusty basement he called a cellar. They chortled like mature fools, and about them people sat, watched, smiled with the genuineness of small contempt. In short bursts of conversation men were resurrected, thrust back into the earth—or the sea ... "Lost overboard up north ... would of ever thought that a guy from Mississippi would die in ice?"

" ... dead, of course ... bad circulation ... good cook, tho' ... James the same, just always kind of frail ... Levere retired, Snow retired—heard he went back to England ... Conally—charge of a buoy snatcher, Joyce, charge of a snatcher ... Fallon—engineer on that new west coast icebreaker ... more'n enough to do on that ship ... ."

"The rest?"

"I don't know. They come'n go."

"Yourself?"

"It's all different," said Brace. "More money, newer ships, air support." He stared at his wine glass, then looked down at his sleeve. "The world's oldest lieutenant," he said. "Never got off of search and rescue."

"It makes you the last of a kind," said Howard, who, in a vague way, had managed to persuade himself that he had "kept up"—who in a vague way felt that he was asked for endorsement, or asked to accept an apology.

"One of the last. Levere was like that. Chaney. All different now, of course." Brace rubbed at the two dull gold stripes. "It means, at least, that you always have a command."

Wet automobiles passed in the street, and along the sidewalks people moved through a haze that promised winter, a rain so light and dull that it was scarcely even rain. Thick mist, perhaps.

"Married," Brace told Howard. "Nearly fifteen years. The first time didn't take."

"I think ... another bottle?"

"Can't think of a single reason why not ... I just remembered. Glass has the deck on a
Morgenthau
class ... never made the Mafia ... presume that things kept coming up."

"I certainly remember Glass."

Young girls huddled in raincoats, walked beneath umbrellas to protect their hair. A gray-haired woman passed, then two young sailors, then a businessman who strode brisk and grayly. In the streets cars glistened, dull hazed with a sheen of water. Brace and Howard talked, measured—from the lofty view of experience—how much the other drank, matched but did not exceed the amount.

" ... had to leave," said Howard. "Figured it all out later. A lot later. When Dane died, I gave out. It was as if I had become unpropped."

Brace, about to light a cigarette, paused. Even before he spoke, before his voice gave other inflections, his face showed that he had dropped the gossipy conversation. He thumbed a lighter. It flared. He lit the smoke, and he slurped smoke with a sort of gratitude for the momentary pause that smoking grants. His thin, narrow nose, below the heavily wrinkled forehead, beside cheeks that were furrowed, running with seams—his nose made him look hawklike. He did not look like Levere had looked, but he looked like a man emigrated from the boundaries of Levere's country, the inshore sea.

"I wanted to be a musician once," said Brace. "Once I was a pretty good musician, for a kid. My father, who was not a musician—" He again drew smoke, this time slowly, and smoke curled around the lines etched above and beneath his eyes— "taught me not to be a musician. Now, I am not exactly certain what that means, but I am willing to talk about Dane."