Jonah Watch (2 page)

He had not been a fool, this dead man who would shortly
become the nemesis of Ernie Brace. Jensen was an idealist with occasional poor judgment, and now he was a drowned idealist. In that past winter of treacherous seas there were occasional days of alarming calm. Downeasters know such days, when the North Atlantic seems gathering its forces to crack holes in the planet.

"Crazy?" In later days at the Base it would always be a young voice asking that. Only the young needed to ask.

"No," Lamp would say, and always he was serious. "Jensen was motivated. Very much. Also religious and good." By the time Lamp would tell the tale in its hundredth version, the figure of Cecil Jensen acquired the stature of major saint on Lamp's calendar.

"Poor judgment?"

"He might have made it."

That was true. At the time no one doubted that he would make it, and Jensen (who was not religious, but who may have been good) most likely died while losing a bet with himself.

A day of calm saw him under. Those calms are, in their way, as treacherous as ice on superstructure. In some men they bring out the underlying romance, for seaman cynics are secretly romantic; believing the tradition of "you have to go out, you don't have to come back" ... and let us say—for a chance—that the tradition is not a myth, but true.

Let us suppose that the weight of belief makes that awful proposition real and—although it will not here be held—that when the earth was railed by horizon, and flat to seamen's perceptions, that their belief made it flat—but in matters of the abstract. Well, then; true, no doubt, and if old men still believe the proposition, perhaps that is only because it is easy to believe from the depths of a comfortable chair.

Still, in some minds there is a difference between life and property. Jensen carried a submersible pump aboard
Adrian
's ancient acquaintance, the fishing vessel
Louise
, on the day it sprang the last of its legendary leaks.

Adrian
received the distress call while homeward bound from Rockland during one of those weeks God makes for drownings. Souls of the coast would remember that week as the week of the
Redstart
.

It was a terrible storm. Fishermen, lighthouse tenders, seamen and fishermen's wives from Newfoundland to Boston hovered helpless and voiceless and tense, with radio transmitters idle in their hands, as a nearly laconic voice from
Redstart
gave its last loran readings and was cut off in midsentence. Somewhere a cartographer placed a small red x on a chart. Cutter
Abner
beat a hopeless box search, struggling to stay alive, scaling the waves like a small white toy indifferently tossed into a riptide. On the coast, nine more crosses were planted along the cliffs, bearing the world's most lonely legend.

The storm was abating as cutter
Adrian
cleared the Rockland jetty. Enough weather remained to supply a sleigh ride. Rockland fell below the horizon at noon on a day when the gray light was absorbed into the gray sea so that only white spume blown from the tops of waves suggested the seam between wind and water. The voice from
Redstart
still echoed in the ears of the bridge gang. The trawler
Mary Rose
was now safe in Rockland, but it was little comfort that one crew was drying its socks while another crew was under.

Adrian
skidded before a quartering sea, the steep swells piling and breaking with a rush on the fantail. The superstructure began to ice. Stanchions bulged with rime like stubby posts, and chains stretched between them as thick as dismembered arms linked in futility against the sea. The covered winch swelled with ice, bulking in the stern like a great dog huddled against the wind. Cold smoked from the sea, as if the waves were dry ice. It circulated through the ship and stretched even through the grates of the fiddley and into the engine room. Portside hatches were lashed partly open so that ice would not immobilize them.

Lamp fretted, made coffee and hot sandwiches, muttered either prayers or spells. The crew cursed with fatigue ... a comfortable cursing because they knew the ship and this was not desperate weather. On the bridge Levere stood like a slumped, hawk-faced monument. He stood watch on watch as his ship added weight.
Adrian
had no steam hoses, but it had fire axes and hammers. As the storm blew itself out, the crew hacked ice. Then the radio popped, crackled, and through the heavy static the heavier voice of terror from the
Louise
.
Adrian
put the helm to port and headed into the sea.

That
Louise
was an abomination. It was a crate, a bucket, a ragtag of rust and frayed cable and wine dregs in the hold that could pickle an ocean or a wilderness or a nation of cod. From Gloucester to Portland it was scorned, sneered at, called the "Stinky Louise."
Adrian
had towed it three times in eighteen months. The thick-liquored voice of terror on the radio belonged to its Portuguese skipper who should have been in prison—and would have been had he not fled New Bedford. What crimes he committed ashore were not a seagoing concern. His crime against the
Louise
was astounding, for in three years he had taken a competent trawler and turned it into a rusting arcade of junk.

Louise
's worn pumps were beginning to lose suction, the myriad leaks beginning to take on the authority of a policeman-executioner, and the liquored Portuguese and his liquored crew were imprisoned on the face of the sea.

Adrian
's fourteen knots of flank speed were respectable in those waters. As the storm blew out and the speed rose, so did the anguished howling from the radio. The man was in a continuing seizure of fear, although if he had to take to his boats he was not in much trouble. The wind died, the swells began to knock down, and at worst he looked forward to an ugly night.

Of course, if his boats leaked worse than his trawler, the lot of them were dead.
Adrian
's task was to make knots. The Portuguese's task was to pump and pray. It seemed a shame if he died, since he was going about the matter so badly.

They were a crew of sober men in the morning light. The sea was flat like a lake, and winter sun oiled its surface with a thin, red glow. The trim trawler silhouette changed from a high-riding, high-bowed sea boat before the morning sun. It looked like a pile of clutter on the horizon, like a barge on which spare parts of trawlers were randomly stacked. The bow was down, the stern riding low but enough exposed to make the wretched old crate look like a cigar butt wallowing in a gutter.
Louise
's boats were tied alongside, and, as
Adrian
closed, the Portuguese and his crew took to them. They waved and hollered and wept. They shrieked until
Adrian
was within a hundred yards, coasting off the way, reversing screws so easily that not enough turbulence entered the calm water to as much as rock the boats.

The deck gang hauled them aboard. They came like rats, but without the sleekness of rats. A thin, urchin-like Spaniard babbled his mother's name and wept. An Italian, teeth chattering with cold, was pulled aboard and collapsed, uttering small puffs of shrieks. A beer tub of a German, leather-jacketed and swarthy, blubbered between thick lips. They smelled raw with booze, musty from sleeping for a week in their clothes. They stank like trash fish which someone had forgotten to throw to the gulls. They hugged icy stanchions, bundled onto the mess-deck to warm hands on coffee mugs and burn gullets with heavy slurping. Lamp tsked, served out food, crooned sympathy, and was obviously and thoroughly disgusted.

The abominable Portuguese would see the captain. Property was at stake. He climbed the ladder to the bridge, in a nervous state because he could not carry his coffee mug and still wring his hands. The Portuguese was thick, medium colored and of medium height. His entire sea ability was in the cut of his whiskers, which were as well greased as his pumps were not. Levere dismissed him to the main deck. The Portuguese rolled his eyes, gasped, incoherently babbled about seagoing codes. He stamped his feet like a child. He whined like a dog. He prayed to the Virgin and the devil.

Louise
stood on the thin red water with gunnels still a foot above the surface. No decision was correct.
Adrian
's flotation would not support the trawler. If Levere came alongside and tied on, and if
Louise
slid,
Adrian
would be dragged over. Either that, or breaking lines might kill a man.

Yet, legally, Levere could not just allow the thing to die. It hovered on the sea, bowed like a tired workman, old and disgraced and unworthy. It had once been a strong, downeast work boat before the coming of the Portuguese. Now, in that romance of the seaman, it seemed that
Louise
wanted to die. The rusting winch and rusting cable lay in a last small chaos of despair. The rails were pocked deep, bleeding rust, and the thin pipe of the stack was disfigured where rust had flaked away and eaten out the top. Oil surrounded the gunnels to make the trawler a small blot on the rust-colored sea.

There was a hurried conference on the bridge, men muttering in the red dawn, casting pale shadows. Dane, Levere, Jensen. Howard jogged the dead helm and watched the drift. A quartermaster stood ready by the engine room telegraph and watched
Louise
.

"Not enough freeboard—submersible is ready—yes, well, but we must—of course—," they murmured, unsecretly hoping that
Louise
would take the decision from them. "A snipe—no, I'll go myself—life jacket—sure, sure, yes chum—back down after you're aboard, ‘twill give you room—take a line—'twould foul surely—I mean
carry
the thing. Don't tie on—"

The crew silently stood at the rail, and silently aided Jensen. The Portuguese swore blessings, cried in the name of the pope.
Louise
shuddered but rode no lower.

That Jensen loved not life but living. In later days Lamp would say that he was spiritual, but spiritlike is how he looked. He made two trips, moved quickly, lithe in the bulky life vest, walking soft across
Louise
's tumbled deck like a man treading on sharp pebbles. The submersible pump and the portable engine were heavy. He swung sideways. He was like a dancer portraying a crippled dream. His shadow was a wisp, faded and thin in the red light.

He approached the ladder that led below, looked about him, suspicious.
Adrian
was backing dead slow, the screw barely turning. Jensen shoved the submersible into the hatch, sat back on his heels, began to rig.

Dane descended from the bridge, tapped two seamen, and the three climbed into one of
Louise
's boats. They shoved off and hovered between the two vessels.
Adrian
's crew stood like a silent crowd along the rail. The Portuguese moaned.

Jensen rocked forward in his crouch, cursed, and with one smooth movement disappeared down the ladder. Dane's yell was blanked out by
Adrian
's whistle. Levere's voice followed, stern, sad and urgent. The sounds were like sparks over the eternal hush of the sea.

Jensen was what? A fool? No one knew what Jensen saw, what problem he faced that allowed him to make that decision. A discharge line snagged below
Louise
's tumbled deck? In that dark space his voice echoed as he cursed the pump. Thumps, movement and his distant voice swearing ... and then a shiver through the old trawler and it shifted deeper, hesitated, and then it was gulped.

It made a rapid hole in the sea as it slid. The rusted stack tipped slightly aft. There was a motion, a last movement; an attempt to retrieve life at the hatch ... like the fluttering of a Mother Carey's chicken. The sea closed over the hole and the small boat carrying Dane and the seamen jumped and bucked.
Adrian
heeled. Waves splashed white, turned to ripples, fell back to red; and Dane—stony-eyed and unbelieving—returned to the ship and began systematically to kill the Portuguese. Levere and the deck gang pulled him off and locked the man in the safety of the lazarette. The Portuguese lived to make wine-soaked threats in the bars of Gloucester.

Flashing neon. Tailor-made blues. dragons stitched in Chinese
silk. Men and women laughing. Old faces. Young faces. Liberty.

"I want a transfer."

"You want another beer."

"Me, too," said Glass. "I want a transfer. To that
Andy
cutter down in Florida. I'm her next captain."

"A zoo. An absolute zoo." Brace's unremarkable features were pale. He seemed alarmed at the thought of another beer.

"Make bags of money being captain," Glass said. "Rake off the duty-free stores. Smuggle them to Cuba."

"You want to grow up," Howard told Brace kindly. "You want some sea time. Plus you want another beer."

"You got it made," Glass explained to Brace. "Me, I don't got it made. Not 'till get next to those rich Cubans."

Red neon. Blue neon. Green neon. Tattoo neon. Light pulsing on the wan faces of bar girls with names that were fabulous: Jungle Judy, Radar the Snipe, Feelie.

"I never did anything to make Dane hate me."

"You never did nothing to make him love you."

"And there's rich Cuban ladies." Glass traced bountiful lines in the air with his hands. "We shouldn't never forget the ladies."

"Those ladies all smoke cigars," Howard told him.

The bars of Portland and the crusty waterfront, etched stark by sunshine where weathered gray boards of buildings stand like tall slats against the northeast wind; the bars which ruin "livers and lights" are places where crews unhunch from frustration, and drink against the illusion that fear is swept away.

Glass pointed out that if there were no bars there could be no waterfront missions. Unsaved souls would have to wander through mists more terrible than any imagined by the spiritualist Lamp.

Howard agreed. Howard said that bartenders were seminarians.

The crew went ashore and gradually got straight. Cutter
Adrian
slumbered on repair status. Cutters in Portsmouth, Boston and New Bedford took the duty.
Adrian
would cross courses with all of them during any year, small ships appearing ghostly from fog or mist, ships seen laboring in gale, and ice-covered from piling seas or from the black and howling mouth of storm; the new and competent 83 boats, the harbor and ocean-going tugs with towing screws to envy.

When the luck was thin, like ice in the knitted wool of a watch cap, the lousy cutter
Able
, of New Bedford, might be working alongside.
Able
was the broken strand in the hawser, the frail anchor line in the web of competence reaching from Argentia to Block Island. It was the ship that could not do, would not do, and which no one trusted.
Able
was sloppy and unhappy, perpetually changing officers and crew in a hopeless search for the combination that would make it a going concern.

In later years, forming one more grand theory of ships, Lamp would claim that when
Able
's keel was laid the wives of seamen wept. "Boy, boys ... I be double-dog-damn." According to Lamp,
Abner
was lucky,
Adrian
was well sinewed, and
Able
was jinxed.

"You got it made, chummy," Glass insisted. "You coulda been sent to
Able
. It's a sub."

"It's the navy has the submarines," Brace said wisely into his fourth fresh glass of beer.

"He means," said Howard, "that every time you see it you're surprised it's still afloat."

"I seen that thing in dry dock," Glass said. "It rusted the dry dock."

When you are young, experience seems to be a silk dragon or a cleverly stitched tiger on the sleeve of your tailormades. The ancient, ever-moving and murmuring sea pops small waves onto the beach through the summer calm. At Portland Head, the lighthouse is glazed cake-frosted white with sun, like a building from the Med plucked by Greek gods and transported.

Brace's instincts were sometimes good about the decks of a vessel on repair status, but they were lacking in other ways. He saw the sea and told Glass of a summer visit he had once made to Lake Michigan. Brace was not going to sea, and he was not going ashore with much success. The crew knew that repair status was more than luxury, it was luck. Brace was missing a bandstand opportunity.

The crew was woman-needful and brash. The men toured the bars, breathing the cool, stale beer smell of the bar that was as much their familiar as the sea. They engaged in territorial movement, like eager dogs wetting boundaries around hydrants. The crew was wary of foreign ships, of fancy and gorgeous uniforms that captured the entranced attention of the only women they knew.

"I hear your queen's got bow legs."

"Mate, you can't say that about our queen."

"There's this about your queen ... ."

The fight, often joyous, with split lips and broken teeth.

"Honest, judge ... "

"It was double jeopardy," Glass said. "I studied this."

"You missed one Holy Roller of a fight," Howard told Brace. "You miss just about everything, kid."

Each night Dane sat in a booth in the aft end of the bar, cool in khaki among the white uniforms or optional blue uniforms of his deck gang. Dane with his shack job, Florence, or "Flossy," drinking beer after beer as he spoke easily and with humor to the not unattractive, spoiled woman who drove expensive automobiles and enjoyed slumming. Outdrinking his deck gang, Dane seemed to be saying, was just one more boring part of his job.

"He won't leave us alone," Bruce said. "Even ashore."

"He leaves me alone."

"You can always go to another bar."

"I got drunk once, really drunk," Brace said with deep and awful meaning. "If he keeps it up, I'm going to do it again."

Seaman Glass, recognizing a statement of experience that yeoman Howard at first missed, pursued the matter during the shore-going, and hot, and too short summer.

"He's deep," Glass told Lamp.

Lamp tsked to Amon. Amon's flat, Hawaiian face, which was principally Japanese, became studious in that way that happened when Lamp talked of mysteries. Amon may have thought Lamp in touch with old gods, or with living dragons wise with centuries; or, lighted by his name, thought him the one glow of sanity in Amon's otherwise closeted and lonely life. Amon, with an unease not otherwise known in New England, refused to wrestle with the source of revelation. He went to Howard instead.

"Brace is deep," Amon told Howard.

Brace was deep. Jensen was dead. Jensen's story, it was believed, was told. Brace's tale was only beginning, and Glass, responding to the unlined forehead and occasional petulance of Brace, was shocked and morally twinged to learn that Brace had even a meager kind of history.

Lamp, in contrast, clucked to the crew over Brace's virtue. He hinted boldly to Dane that Brace would make a fine apprentice cook.

The crew eased mentally sideways, commented, judged and forgot. Brace's life story was not a sea story, but a small tale of the messdeck where Joyce, Majors and Conally sat to starboard, hunched and chomping, left thumbs—through habit—anchoring trays to table, forks stabbing from right hands with the delicate precision of men accustomed to eating rapidly below wildly skidding decks. The black gang—McClean, Masters, Wysczknowski, Racca and Fallon—chomped to port. At a small table near the ship's office the bridge gang of Rodgers, Chappel, James and Howard were a coffee-muzzling crew. The seamen, firemen, and
Adrian
's young pigeon, Brace, sat midships. Lamp stood like a wide-butted archangel wielding the hot sword of his galley fires. Amon was a constantly running thread tying all to the wardroom where Levere and Dane sat solitary.

The tale, transcribed from the beer-drinking confidences of Brace, through the twinge of Glass, and arranged into a morality play by Lamp, was not human drama until after a great deal of thought.

Brace had an older cousin—Jim or John, it makes no matter—and perhaps his last name was Smith; but as surely as old ships are reengined between wars, young men must have heroes.

"A jerk," Glass confided to Lamp. "He'd last five minutes in Boston."

This Jim or John was a midwestern miracle of a type so common in those parts that the miraculous is the standard of Rotarians. He raised 4-H cattle that won prizes, played basketball for a state university, and was healthy and blond and tanned and modest. He was, in sum, decent; a moral and right-thinking body, who, in the distance of time and miles translated through Brace's memory, was the ideal creature of conduct that Lamp applauded. On the surface, Brace's hero was sinless and guileless, and, if presented with his actual shape, Lamp would not have known what to do with him.

Brace was not a minister's son, except as all sons of southern Illinois in those days were spiritually sired by ministers. Brace was a son of dusty town squares, gravel roads, fields of corn and pumpkins, soybeans, tomatoes, sugar cane, hay, oats, rye, wheat, and the thin gleaning of daft certainty held by men who own clean barns, bulging red silos, sleek herds, chores, and pitchfork morality. Practically, Brace was the son of the high school bandmaster, a man who breathed the better quality of air, and who produced music that was mechanically sound. The father had a voice like the horns of Joshua. After a night in the bars, Brace claimed that if his old man had not done so much yelling it would have been easier to handle the big, fat, loud mouth of Dane.

"My pop wanted to be a doctor," Glass said, "but he's a yid. Works in a drugstore. Make a lot of money with a drugstore."

"At least he don't yell. Right?"

"He hates drugstores."

"Mine's a lawyer," a seaman said.

"A crook. I like you better, now," Glass told him.

"If you chase enough ambulances, you'll catch a few."

"Mine's a taxi-driving pimp."

"Mine's a dope."

"We didn't have one in our family,'' Howard admitted. "We were too poor."

"They're all crooks," Brace said knowledgeably into his beer. "I used to didn't know that."

Your seaman cynic, carrying in his heart that awful tradition that is not a myth, but true, is born of offenses rendered in the invisible world. One must go out, but the tradition does not require you to haul spurious cargo. The tradition is a jealous god. Your seaman cynic, that voluntary Jonah, may be forever offended by all other things, and that suits the tradition, just fine.

Brace's hero was three years his senior, experienced (as was Brace) at trumpeting in the band. Brace's hero did other and greater things: firing plinking rifles, grappling with dates, breeding cattle, driving at high speeds and shooting basketballs. He was blond and beautiful and, when Brace was not overcome with awe of his hero, Brace loved him. Brace, a son of copper-throated music and copper-fitted morals, looked up to a creature who lived comfortably with copper while having a wonderful time. Following the local ethic of seeking a profitable education, Brace arrived at the cow college where his hero was a star basketball player engaged in shaving points.

"A gorgeous con," Glass told Lamp. "Nobody got hurt. The team won and the gamblers won. You got to admire the set."

"Is that what they teach you in those fancy synagogues?"

"They teach delicatessen management," Glass said thoughtfully. "It just occurs, cook ... this ship ain't kosher."

Texture fooled Brace. After years of being quietly followed as a hero, the man finally took an interest in Brace. There were motives, of course, but Brace did not even dream of such things. It seemed to him that he was magically launched into the deep meaning and pleasures of adulthood. Lovely young women talked to him. Young men, sensing him an important satellite to the charging and dribbling star, wished to be his friend. Without understanding the seediness of the situation, and without knowing how or why, Brace found himself in the role of an intermediary. Men visited his room and said they were alumni. The men left envelopes for the basketball player. Brace, stricken with uncritical worship, did not at first even try to understand.

"It's the drop man gets the trouble," Glass confided to Lamp. "Don't never get conned into taking the drop."

Lamp groaned and prophesied.

Understanding came slow. Through most of the season Brace cooperated, while running his small but increasing fund of knowledge through his conscience. He balked at the harm his mind was trying to discover; for heroes, after all, are not easy to come by, and young love suffers not from its lack of truth but from its lack of discrimination. He walked nighttime streets, stood in shadows before his hero's fraternity house, and, it may be, wept. When he finally understood the message of his conscience, he took that message back to the wise, older men who had given the conscience to him in the first place.

Brace talked to his father. His father spoke in broad and certain tones like the voice of a trombone. His father said that Brace was doing the right thing. His father said that Brace made him proud. His father told Brace to take his information to the minister.

The minister blinked with emotion, as if struck in a mortal place by a beatitude. He shot his cuffs, adjusted his tie, fondled a hymn book, gave a brief prayer of thanks. The minister said that Brace was doing the right thing. God was glad. The minister said he would speak to the basketball coach.

The basketball coach towered above Brace. He laid manly hands the size of hoops on Brace's shoulders. The coach thanked Brace for doing the right thing in the name of clean sportsmanship.

Brace's hero disdained him. When Brace phoned the lovely young women, with the lovely, tight-fitting angora sweaters, their roommates said that they were not in. His new men friends greeted him coldly, or not at all. Alumni stopped visiting. Through the rest of the season Brace attended the games, watched wins by narrow margins flash triumphantly on the glowing scoreboard. In the spring, his hero graduated and was hired at a high salary by a professional team.

Brace's father, this time in a voice like a tuba, decided that in the following year Brace would attend a smaller college nearer to his home.

It would take nearly another year, a year of loneliness that accumulated through silences and avoidance and summary conversations, before Brace understood that every man he knew detested him. His womenfolk could not help. They knew nothing of the affair. Brace's instincts told him that it was best left that way.