Jonah Watch (6 page)

Brace's shaved head was a tribute to amon's engaged concern,
which was not patchy although Brace's haircut certainly was. In an attempt to save as much fur as possible, Amon snipped, clipped, razored, turned Brace's head this way and that, and proclaimed the finished job a masterpiece—and so it was, had Brace been a pagan living in Samoa. To the surprise of all hands, Brace took his ordeal with the insensateness of the Buddha. The mirror explained to him that he had a high forehead, above which, and fairly far aft, a low pool of fuzz rose like a spring, to flow forward in a questioning way toward his left ear where it was absorbed back into the water table of his skull an instant before it arrived. The right side of his head was clipped and spotted with patches of baldness, like an aging Marine suffering a twenty-year bout with jungle crud.

"It will grow back," Amon mourned. "Such is my fate."

Lamp, as practical as any cook ever gets, suggested that Amon borrow a camera and preserve the record. Amon sniffed with oriental disdain. "I am not a tourist," he told Lamp, then paused, " ... although I am a very long way from home."

"You look like you got hit by a flight of seagulls," Glass told Brace. "Sue the Chinaman."

"Like bilge scraping," said Fallon.

"Like shark bait," said Conally.

"Your envy is ugly," Amon told them. "You would foul up a free lunch. You would despoil the Last Supper."

"You are a heathen—yes—heathen." Lamp slammed the door of the oven, turned. "Now look what you made me do."

Dane sniffed like a consumer inspecting popcorn at the concession in a seedy theatre. "I liked him better when he was painted," Dane said to Conally. To Brace he said, "Get up the mast."

"The view is tremendous," Conally told Brace.

Dane yelled at the bridge watch. "Secure the transmitter. Man aloft. Acknowledge."

"I got it off," ... a distant yell.

Starting at the base of the mast and working upward, Brace chipped patches of rust, applied red lead to cleaned steel at the end of each day, climbed above the drying red lead on the next day, like a clam digger gradually following a tide. "If I start him at the top, he'll get dizzy and fall off," Conally explained to Howard.

Day followed day. Brace looked like a kite tangled among the wires of a telephone pole. He was perfectly situated to be the first man to see cutter
Abner
, bulked like a small, white and concentrated dot beside dark cliffs as it towed its string of refugees—but he was not the first. His attention was directed at placing an even coat of paint on the mast.

Lamp was the first to see
Abner
, or so in later years he claimed. "Boys, I be double-dog-damn," claiming one more minor miracle in that flat procession of days that saw
Adrian
hang against the pier impeccably dressed, like a partygoer waiting forever for an undispatched taxi.

Abner
looked like a missionary lady leading derelicts to soup and prayer.
Ezekiel
rode high, directly astern on a shortened tow, its load of fish returned to the mindless Atlantic, that maw of gulls and basking sharks. Behind
Ezekiel
,
Clara
seemed to huddle frightened and scorched on the water; smoke and burn like a Puritan brand staining the house where rust already worked beneath blisters of paint. Alongside
Abner
, on snubbed tow,
Hester C
. made brief, impelled, black and gray dashes, like a rebellious child trying to escape the determined grasp of a pedestrian aunt.

The appearance of the tawdry group of collected wanderers stilled work in Portland harbor. Men laid tools aside, or stepped from the salesrooms of ship's chandlers, or came blinking from bars, coal yards, fish sheds. In sympathy, it seemed, with the instincts of Lamp, each man in harbor wanted to be able to say that he had "seen it."
Hester C
., the star of the show, was set loose from
Abner
, its engine started, and a seaman guided it to the end of the pier where it would huddle like a small, dark demon flanked by the bows of
Adrian
and
Abner
.

Wide-hipped workboats moved like aging bankers with ambitions killed by the redundancy of profit. They splashed to
Ezekiel
and
Clara
, put lines aboard, chugged with bored avariciousness toward repair docks in Portland. In South Portland an ambulance appeared at the foot of the pier to receive the faceless Spaniard. Aboard
Adrian
, men stopped work, drifted to the main deck, spilled slowly and respectfully down the gangway, following Levere. In its entire battered history,
Abner
had never enjoyed so many line handlers in attendance on a pier.

"No need for it, chum, no need—its fuel allocations are cut—truth?—we're not cruising—is that true, Cap—true—true?—yes—okay, but look at those guys—no need for it, chum—yes, but just
look
at those guys—"

Abner
's fantail was like a stubby explosion of neglect. In no man's memory had there ever been Irish pennants, discarded chafing gear, tangled line piled, heaped, shoved aside on that fantail. The uncovered winch was skewed, no doubt in range of eventual repair, but enough tilted to alarm the heart. A gear locker sat dented, and paint on the heavy steel was indifferently shattered by an exploding line, while above the locker a floodlight dangled, broken from its base and wearing shards of the glass lens. The new towline lay in two unconnected mounds, like rubble.

Clearly they were in a bad way on
Abner
. The dago radioman Diamond, ordinarily as clean and efficient as an electronics tube, appeared at the rail where, while docking, he customarily had no business. He grumbled dispassionate instructions to line handlers. His black hair was lank and filled with grease, his shirt ripped, and a mixture of oil and soot scarred his face below a formerly white hat that seemed to have been dipped in the bilges.

A bosun's mate limped, leaned heavily against a stanchion like a man supported only by his conscience, while seamen stood stupidly at the rail, holding lines that they studied with the dull curiosity of idiots.
Abner
's captain slumped on the wing, muttering helm and engine orders to yeoman Wilson, who stood inside at the telegraph and muttered to the helmsman. A quartermaster wandered aimlessly on the flying bridge, like a man trying to remember an errand.

Abner
's crew, it developed, had been standing six on, two off, six on, two off, for over five days. Had the crew been able to sleep on those two-hour breaks, their job would have only been terribly difficult.

"It was just a nothing kind of sea," yeoman Wilson told yeoman Howard. "Maybe ten- to twelve-foot swells, but they were wide. No matter how you rigged, part of the tow would be hitting the backside of one just as you were coasting down the front of another. Line broke six times."

Yeoman Howard, recalling similar fiascos, although none so great, and with a resolution to do better by Lamp whom he had possibly in some way offended, took his feelings of indetermination to Lamp.

"The winch tore up on the first day when they tried to adjust the tow to that crazy sea. They walked the line the rest of the time. All hands."

"New towline ... " Had Lamp been informed of God's suicide, his universe could hardly have been more shaken.

"They went through every scrap of line they had aboard," Howard said. "They had to pump
Clara
three times.
Ezekiel
was yelling about being in the middle of the tow, afraid it would spring the keel."

"It must of sprung the keel," said Lamp. "They wouldn't tow to a dry dock just for a busted engine."

"Helmsman on the lobster boat, helm watch, towing watch, steaming watch ... the line broke a couple of the bosun's ribs."

"Lucky. He was lucky."

"He sure was." Howard, in spite of the warm galley, shivered.

"I been to the fantail," Lamp admitted, "to look at the new line. I got this queasy feeling, like."

One by one the men drifted aft to look at the new line.

"I forgot the date," Lamp said, less portentously than Howard expected. "It's gone and turned to September."

"Just keep something in the pot," Howard said. "Those guys are going to wake up starving."

The secular world of a ship rarely extends beyond its own gangway, and only under intimate conditions.

Brace, like a cloud-walker on the mast, looked down at the curious sight of
Adrian
's crew boarding
Abner
.
Abner
's crew disappeared to gamey-smelling and finally immobile bunks where they lay like a small company of mostly clothed corpses, drawn faces gradually relaxing beneath the red nightlights that were turned on in the waning afternoon. Howard, checking the crew list, stood silent, counting, hugely moved by a small intimation of fear.

On
Adrian
, the bosun Conally stood at the foot of the mast and yelled, "Secure the job."

Had they been offered,
Abner
's captain would not have accepted watchstanders from the Base, which was too remote, too uncertain. He would have asked his crew to muddle through. Levere, given the same circumstance, would have refused as well.

"Move quiet," Dane hissed above
Abner
's fantail. "Flake the line on the pier. They'll want to repair it themselves."

Brace, knowing the spectacular solitude of the mast, and having had time to consider the largest implications of Snow's backhanding, stepped to earth with new convictions.

"I should be over there helping."

"We're splitting crew," Conally said. "Double watches. You take the four-to-mid."

"What can I do now?"

"Pretend we're steaming," Conally told him. "Sack out until your watch. Let your hair grow.''

Once again, the gray chill moved down the pier, insinuating between the ships, concentrating at the end of the pier where
Hester C
. rode on its mooring, unclaimed, certainly unloved, and absolutely feared. By the time Brace relieved the watch at 1600 , the local newspaper was on the streets carrying an ignorant, journalistic account, together with a ten-year-old photograph of
Abner
's captain taken when he was exec on the snatcher
Bluebell
. Various deities, all of whom could be accused of inventing the sea, and of instigating the notion of things that float, were flagrantly thanked in Portland's missions and churches.

Brace relieved the watch, checked the phone, entered weather observations in the log, turned up the radio, looked to the mooring, and made himself acquainted with the current traffic in Portland harbor. As the dusk gathered, he surveyed the lights of Portland where, it might be, lonely young women of worth waited with hope for the friendship of some man who did not wear a white hat. As dusk accumulated, and the tide fell,
Hester C
. dropped below the end of the pier until only the mast was visible.

With Dane and Snow aboard
Abner
, Conally found himself serving as OD, and it was Conally, shaken from sleep sometime after 2300, who looked into the pale, terrified features of Brace, who, although not yet drooling, was idiot-eyed. Conally was on his feet and starting to dress before Brace could speak.

"It's adrift."

"What?"

"That lobster boat is adrift."

Conally relaxed. "Things drift," he said, preparing himself almost optimistically for an eventual return to sleep. "We'll call the Base. Let them pick it off with a small boat."

"Things don't drift against the tide," Brace chattered.

Hester C
., like a small blot of self-destruction, faced the tide in a drift toward the mudflats.

Conally, shaken to the denied roots of his Indian-raised soul, swore later that his hair stood straight. He raced to the bridge, called the Base, watched a picket boat pick up the tow and return it to the pier. Conally checked the lines, found them sound, and made up the mooring himself.

"Sometimes the tide pools up," he told Brace. "It gets to working in circles." He checked his watch. "Time to call your relief."

Brace, withdrawn to silence, and with shame over his fear, returned to the bridge. Conally went belowdecks like a confused bear retreating to a cave—only to be wakened an hour and a half later by Glass, who was resolute and in control, and perfectly articulating a language that Conally thought was either Arabic or Armenian.

"Speak English."

"It's doing it again," Glass said.

Small craft warnings on a clear day are like a bright
exclamation. Beneath slanting sunlight, wind pebbles the water in small runs across the harbor, and the flag is a red tongue that wags, laughs, gossips about the sun, mountains, islands, and wind. Gulls fly straighter, their circles flatten, and they rise or descend on the wind like squawking and feathered yo-yos. Distant in the harbor, dories appear bobbing between splashes, while buoys ride solid, displaying the wind as they separate the lightly running chop. Susurrous murmurs wake between the hull and the pier, and men, not exactly intimidated by the cooling wind, place their hands on sunlit steel of the leeward side where there remains a memory of excellent warmth. The breeze nudges like a sniffing, snuffling dog, nose-bumping indifferent elbows, intent on gaining affection. Men step belowdecks to rifle seabags from which are fetched questionable-looking socks, watch caps, long johns and mittens that have survived the preceding winter. On the messdeck and in the crew's compartment, foul weather gear is pulled almost apologetically into view. Needles are clumsily threaded and loose buttons tightened, with triangular snags patched and sealed with tar.

"Fit out," Glass advised Brace.

"Come payday. "

"Come first liberty. I'll take you to the credit Greek. I rake off a percentage."

"So does the Greek," Howard said. "If you want the perfect crime, open an Army-Navy store."

"I already got the perfect crime," Glass told him. "After years of study. I'm going to design perfect crimes and sell them."

"For a percentage."

"For a flat fee
and
a percentage. "

"It's warm in the engine room," Brace said, "and that's where I'm going."

"You're going to the Army-Navy store."

Brace, in single-minded determination, was, approximately, mentally unsound on the subject of the engine room. He was engrossed with a dream that had been sketchy before his days on the mast. Now, that dream was firmed into the maniac certainty that Levere, Dane and Snow would welcome what Brace's unbalanced mind called "logic." While other men walked the chilling decks, watched repair proceed on
Abner
and cast hesitant glances at the wayward and ugly
Hester C
., Brace thought only of the engine room.

Hester C
. settled into watchful sullenness that forced quartermaster-designate Rodgers, formalistic, Catholic-inclined, skinny, exact, red-haired, and plagued with ceremony, to make the sign of the cross each time he walked the gangway. Sometimes Rodgers crossed himself before saluting the colors, sometimes after. "I try to make it half and half," he confided to Lamp, "‘cause it's hard to say which should come first."

Lamp, believing that the pope was a kind of superannuated rabbi, opted for prayer without ceasing.

"You got to be kidding," Rodgers said. "Protocol. You ever hear of protocol, cook?"

"Something pulled that tramp to us," Lamp complained. "It wasn't protocol."

"It was
Abner
."

"You are simpleminded. Simple."

"I climbed all over that scow," Conally told them. "There's nothing different about that boat from any other boat."

"It's plotting mischief, boys, I got a feeling."

"Pull the plug," said Howard. "Poof."

"And have it lay at the end of the pier for always."

Gunner Majors, ordinarily quiet, as if stilled by his preoccupation with things that explode, claimed that
Hester C
. would make a wonderful target. The men stood before the galley, or loafed on the messdeck, their heads idle—except for the jaws—their hair still short but now untrimmed; red faces, wan faces, swarthy faces. About them lay clean decks, squared-away gear, and the encroaching idleness that was dulling and insensitive and blunt. The coffee urn steamed. Amon hummed, spoke to himself in Japanese as he scrubbed an immaculate wardroom.

Adrian
seemed like a polished piece of antique crystal stored forever behind the closed doors of a buffet. The men hesitated, remained silent, as if finally captured by a grim decree that made them outcasts even from their avowed purpose. Then forward and distantly sounding through steel bulkheads, the blurred resonance of a bell arrived like an echo.

"Calling the engine room."

"It's another drill."

"I told you I had a feeling, boys."

"Something's up."

"We're starting to get some breeze."

Gale warnings, which almost never occur on a clear day, are like a dark and hollering mouth of triumph. The sky lowers in the northeast, and against the footings of the million-dollar bridge, gray foam rises like the fingers of the harbor. Yachts, swinging at anchor, seem the focus of attack by fleets of dories as owners hastily arrive, secure sail and loose gear, chug engines into life and move out in search of moorage. Toward the Portland Head, the sea, graying toward the sky, begins to pile and churn, white-maned with the wind; and the dark green islands lie like black smears fronted and circled by rocks that carry surf in their teeth. On the windward side of the pier,
Abner
is flung in short thumps by crashing water, and to leeward
Adrian
tugs at its lines, falls backward into the small resulting trough, is surrounded by the rush and sigh and hasten of swift water. At the Base the new signal, twin flags, reports in sharp snaps from the tower, while across the bristling, whitening harbor, above the blown spray, a thin layer of black rises in churning dust from the coal yards to march like a line drawn across the windy face of Portland.

"Plane down."

"He's bought it."

"Three planes. Air Force."

"Get off my back."

"I think it's three. That's what James yelled at Dane."

"I'd like to yell at Dane. Chum, if I ever yell at Dane."

"You'll yell, ‘yessir Chief, yep', that's what you'll yell."

"How can three planes go down at once?"

"Out of the way, there. Quit tryin' to explain the Air Force."

Engines rumble onto the line, dark smoke like a period to an idle sentence pops from the stack and into the wind. The engines settle, the smoke disappears. Yeoman Howard tumbles down the gangway in a splayed run, bumps against the wind like a comma, his watch cap battening his ears, the wind at his face while he crosses to
Abner
where yeoman Wilson dashes along the main deck to the gangway.

"You, too."

"Six guys out there."

"Give me that." Wilson grabs sailing lists and mail, runs to drop them at the Base. Aboard
Adrian
, seamen single up on the mooring while Dane stands on the wing with the broad certainty of a tugboat, bellowing. About the decks Conally secures gear, rages. The gangway is shoved clattering toward Howard, to be pulled by him past the lip of the pier. He swings aboard forward of the breast line, turns to see Wilson dashing from the Base in jerky bursts against the wind. On the bridge the high-tuned crackle of the radio, faint in the wind, blanks as James sends the departure message, "Various courses and speeds, maneuvering to assist"; the lines let go, tended by Glass, who leaps aboard as if propelled by the wind; and
Adrian
, on cold engines, moves slowly into the stream to gather speed evenly as combustion raises engine heat.

"Nine minutes. Log it. Zero nine fifty-two."

"What took so long?"

"The cook was talkin'."

Maligned Lamp, appearing on the main deck, watches
Adrian
's stern slide past the dark, ugly blot of
Hester C
. He shakes his head, retreats below to secure the galley as
Abner
noses from the pier. Decks of both ships seem momentarily peopled with men making up and securing lines. In the channel,
Adrian
brushes at the heavy chop, presses, vibrates from engines, from shaft; a vibration sensed more than felt, like a football lineman poised instantly, a split second ahead of the count, delicately timed to avoid a penalty. Men off watch, hesitant with the anxiety of a job that offers no current action, drift to the messdeck to wait for news brought by radioman James who drops galleyward like a pale Lord, his coffee mug dangling from one thin hand like a small and forgotten chalice.

"The word. What's the word?"

Amon, headed forward with coffee for the bridge gang, pauses, listens. Three trainers are out of fuel and down.

"That kind without propellers," said McClean. "I don't trust nothing without a propeller."

Amon pauses, then begins his climb to the main deck. "Jets would splash hard in this weather."

"In any weather."

"Headed up to Bangor?"

"Along that line."

"We won't find 'em."

"We'll take a turn on trying."

On the occasion of his first visit to water above the shelf, Brace stood as stalwart as a young hound. He listened, seemed thoughtful, then went above to the main deck where he leaned on the rail as if fixed by romance as strong as McClean's faith in things that churned. The luminous and beckoning engine room, the lost Mona, the harsh words and rage of Dane were doubtless lost in the gray mist and blown spray rising before the lighthouse at Portland Head which for more than a century and a half had stood watch over curious sights and cold survivors of the sea.

Howard, who in lucid moments swore to Lamp that all prayer was directed to the ridiculous, approached.

"You'll love it in a little while," he said to Brace. "Wait until we clear the head.''

Brace turned with the vacuous look of total absorption in great matters. He seemed surprised by the intrusion of another consciousness into his arena of sensation. His watch cap fell to his eyebrows, from beneath which his eyes were dark brown and lightly glazed with either romance or memory, or possibly wind. He steadied himself, leaned against the rail, both hands forward and gripping easily like a magician or a strong man who was singly holding together the ancient collection of parts that was the cutter
Adrian
.

"I like it," he said. "I've been thinking how much this don't look like Illinois."

Howard, who in a dim way may have sensed a bond between himself and Brace in some near past, paused, then resumed his task.

"You learn the helm, then practice steaming. Twelve-to-two on the bridge, two-to-four in the engine room." Then, a man pressed into confidences by the rare occasion of privacy, he said, "It isn't like Ohio, either."

"You're from Ohio?"

"Did you think you invented it?"

The glaze over Brace's eyes disappeared in favor of intuition and recognition. He pushed himself upright from the rail, looked at Howard.

"I guess I thought I did. Does everybody?"

"I don't know, but probably I'll think about it."

Beyond the Portland Head, the sea rises unfettered in its crush toward the land. Above the widely moving swell which lifts and drops vessels as surely as the faith asked of a philosophic premise, runs a chopping swell that is a creature born of wind. The confused sea delivers shocks against the hulls of the largest ships, and smaller vessels nose the wind like determined and uneasy immigrants to a sometimes violent land. The wind, flavored with salt, picks spray from the bow, to wash decks, house, rails, the unused and unthought-of guns; wind rising from the tops of waves to swirl spume like a dust devil awhirl across a plain. Salt accumulates in the corners of men's mouths, to be licked away, causing a momentary taste of the sea's huge proclamation. The wind speaks in the open tones of unmuted instruments. Gales do not howl or scream or screech, as does a storm. They moan, weep, play the blues, are lubricating and liquid over lonesome, tricky waters.

"It's a tough rap," Glass said to Brace. "Some say to puke and get it over with. Others say that if you once start pukin' you can't get stopped."

Brace, making a choice, or more likely in the firm grasp of his body's knowledge, spilled breakfast to leeward in illustration of young wisdom. Then he climbed weak-kneed and pale to the bridge and began to discover some of the things that a helm will not accomplish.

After the first urge of action and compassion,
Adrian
's crew settled into the routine of a steaming watch that pointed the vessel toward unknown positions and easily guessed agony. In September in Maine, and with a little fat, a lot of thrashing, and all the luck left to him, a man can sometimes live for twenty minutes in the water. If the crews of the planes had not made it to their life rafts, their books were already closed. If they were on the rafts, jacketed and booted, their paltry scrap of canvas clutched over them against the wind, hypothermia might not spin them from the edge of their circle for fifteen or twenty hours.

On small ships, as watch follows watch, and as the sea continues through shocks to search for loose gear, and, finding none, seeks to loosen gear to fling it, daily work on the ship ceases. Men who are not yet reduced to walking on bulkheads are still unable to trust their tools, their sustained balance, even their intent.

Amon, who suffers in the first hours of large movement, lies huddled beneath a table of the messdeck in Asiatic contemplation, from which, like Lazarus, he will in a few hours rise wide-eyed and knowledgeable from the explored depths of a great mystery.

"If he'd just quit fighting it and puke, he'd be all right. I keep telling him." Lamp, who is smart about the galley in his heavy-shanked way, builds, constructs, fusses over half-filled vats of soup and regiments of sandwiches, the most that can be claimed from this kind of sea.

Men off watch sit on the messdeck, or sack out in jerkily plunging bunks. The Indian Conally roams the slick upper decks in communion with wind and water, ostensibly checking against things adrift that may crash or vanish. Heat swirls through the grates of the fiddley, where Howard, in time, passing forward to the bridge, sniffs, as if he expects sulphur to rise from the hot depths in which Snow, like a small brown bird, perches beside the engine-order-telegraph and before the great bank of dully gleaming gauges, dials and valves that look like waving, plunging sculpture.