Jonah Watch (7 page)

Howard stands arrested, silenced, emptied, in foreboding, in heart-shocking horror; watching a stance he has seen so often in excursions across this fiddley—the wide-legged, hunch-shouldered concentration of the drowned Cecil Jensen standing on oily plates beside the port engine; a wiping rag dangling from a hip pocket, another rag dangling from one hand. The stance is a collection of tallness compacted to bulk, only a little less unique than a thumbprint.

Howard shudders, reduces a yell, a scream, back into his instinctive interior, and stands in dispraise of his eyes which have fooled him.

It is only Brace standing there, timid, alert, entranced among the heavy voices of the engines.

On the bridge, Dane stands like a brick mortared between loran and radio. He looks seaward, squinty-eyed and thin-mouthed, unimpressed by the hook of Rodgers's body that dangles headless from the rubber mask over the radar scope. Glass twirls the helm to meet the sea, twirls back, the gyro repeater dances, swings. Levere mutters over the plot. James fiddles with log sheets, waits.

"How's the set?"

"Sea return, Cap. We could miss a freight train." Rodgers backs from the radar mask, blinking, a man reconnected.

"Eyes, chief. Call watchstanders."

The radio pops, blanks.

"
Abner
calling."

"We'll take the seaward leg."

The ships drop their mutual course;
Abner
climbs the chart to the northwest while
Adrian
, advancing under the spinning, kicky helm in the hands of the watchful Glass, beats to the southeast.

Watches changed, darkness approached, and the gray sea
turned black, marked by luminous and crashing runs of opalescent foam. Men carrying binoculars moved from the wings to the flying bridge, thrust into a netherland of increasing wind, and separated from the interfering, dull red lights below.
Adrian
paced back and forth across sixty-nine degrees latitude in a search across a line. Phosphorescence spun from the bow. The muted stack rumbled, whispered. As temperatures skidded, lookouts on watch wrapped mufflers across their mouths, turned from a defensive oblique that put the wind most often on their covered ears and raw cheeks, facing with greater frequency into the wind so that their breath would not fog the glasses. Each man searched his sector, silent, occasionally stomping feet against the deck and listening to the deepening tone and quality of the wind which worked across the vibrating strings of the halyards.

"Report everything," Conally instructed Brace.

"You can't see anything."

"Them rafts are yellow," Conally said. "Water will be washing around them. Sometimes they have flares."

"The trouble is, I think I see something and then it goes away."

"Don't stare. Look to one side. Look away, then look back."

"Why don't they all have flares?"

"They all do. Guys get scared and use them up. They get too cold and drop them."

Brace, as if chewing the information, stood hunched into an old foul weather jacket that was in need of overhaul. "Planes have been flying over all day."

"Planes ... couldn't spot a whale on a dinner plate."

On the bridge, Dane hunkered before the radar mask, he, too, now seemingly headless, thus less bulky, almost thin. He was less threatening as his face appeared to begin and end between flared nose and chin. Bosun striker Joyce, haggard not from fatigue but from proximity to Dane, spun the helm to meet a sea, spun it back. Levere, captain, who had been on the bridge for twelve hours and who would remain until the flyers were a clear fatality, slouched in a tall bridge chair. As the hours passed, and as Levere's experience combined with intuition in his communion with wind and water, the westward leg lengthened.

No one (nor would any have dared ask) knew how Levere—trusted at the time, and trusted without question afterward—managed his conscience over the drowning of Jensen. If Levere was of the cynical French, he was also of New England, and he was the captain. In that past winter of piling seas that saw Jensen under, Levere remained as remote from the crew as ever. After Jensen's death, exhausted men saw that Levere was increasingly reluctant to break off any search. He stayed on the grounds, mutely answering the cold and killing sea, or answering his conscience.
Adrian
's crew took a more reasonable view, holding that Jensen had tugged his final problem into his own spaces, and then slammed the hatch.

Yeoman Howard, who in Lamp's opinion "made too much of things," thought long and carefully about the matter. Howard had a special advantage. His occupation made him resemble a knitting needle. While Amon was a constantly running thread tying galley to messdeck to wardroom, Howard's job forced him into a skein of movement that covered the ship. In his busy way he was obnoxious, like a thin-minded bureaucrat, declaiming under law the divine right to distribute the largess of misery tendered by a loving government.

If, as Howard was often forced to point out, he must show Levere a constant watch list of the least tired men, that did not mean that he enjoyed it. He was scrupulous in scheduling his own watchstanding—the single reason why a sometimes driven crew managed to put up with him at all.

After Jensen's death, Howard muttered privately to Conally that the old man was taking it hard. Levere was prone to inactivity and silence.

"Like he's brooding," Howard told Conally.

"What's to brood about? We done our best."

"That's not the point."

Now, in another season, the point began to reassert itself.

Your large ship, suffering a thirty degree roll, finds the matter so monstrous that the event is entered in the log.
Adrian
(and electrician Wysczknowski swore this each time the rolling ship tripped his generator off the line) would toss its heart out on a duck pond. As the night drifted slowly past in spume, sharp shocks and breaking waves, the constant battering combined with the fact of too few watchstanders. Fatigue common to a night sweep at sea descended. Watches changed, then changed again, then changed again. The gale faltered, renewed, seemed trying to decide whether to tuck it in, or change over and become a full storm. In heavy, blanketing dark that was penetrated by the thin skim of a wary-seeming dawn, Lamp shushed and cautioned and troubled over Amon's health.

"I don't know why you don't just puke."

"Buddhists don't," Amon said, "or me, either. It's no cinch to be Hawaiian."

Howard trudged away from watch on the flying bridge. He descended a ladder to the main deck, entered through a hatch, crossed the fiddley in a mild stupor, glancing below for portents and finding none. Wysczknowski now sat at the board. Masters, a tall snipe who had a face that looked like an elf's, stood gazing at machinery, bracing himself against a rail, muttering; in elvish, perhaps.

Howard crossed the fiddley, trudged to the messdeck. He drew watchstander coffee from a small pot as Amon prepared the large coffee urn. Howard stared at the steaming mug of coffee as if debating whether to drink the stuff or use it to warm his hands. He hesitated again, between the alternatives of sleep or a wait for boiled eggs and toast from Lamp's sloshing, rattling machinery.

"
Abner
's broken off the search," he said. "Those guys have been down for twenty-two hours."

"We've lost ‘em." Lamp's voice was filled with honest misery.

"Secure it soon. Head back in." Amon poured a brown stream of ground coffee, watched the roll of
Adrian
tip his hand to throw a dry sprinkle of brown across the messdeck. "I always spill. I tell myself I won't. I tell myself, Amon, this time ... but look at it, how clever."

"You sound like Glass."

"I know a great deal about life."

"‘Tis bad luck, losing the first ones of the year."

"I don't think we'll break off," said Howard. "I think the old man will hang around until District sends us in."

"To our misery."

"You're not in the water, sonny. Don't talk about misery—"

"Hold up ... we're coming around."

"A contact? Maybe a contact?"

Adrian
heeled from a westward leg and drove southeast, slipping sideways in a quartering sea as it made a dash farther down the line of search. At full speed the ship bucked, kicked, lunged in heavy forefoot stomps to starboard, the mast like a great crucifix attempting to dip the waves as if to calm them.

"Cap knows we'll get called in," radioman James told a few men assembled on the messdeck. "He's trying to steal a little sea room."

"He's tough. Ol' cap is tough." The mulatto McClean wore an ambitious black patch of grease on his dull-skinned cheek. "Lift eggs from under a settin' hen."

"Lift eggs right off your plate if this sea keeps up."

Farther south, in the gleaming District offices, sleek and chubby yeomen, radiomen, and bored JOODs no doubt finished morning coffee, licked donut sugar from plump, shore-going fingers, and noticed that
Adrian
had not yet broken off. By the time the message to secure arrived, Levere had stolen sixteen miles.
Adrian
set a homeward course, zigzagging across a westward line and inshore from its former line of search. The morning routine set in as jolts and spray climbed high about the decks from the northeast leg while cold men dropped like slick, wet stones down the ladder to the messdeck. The men were vaguely angry with the sea.

"What good does this do?"

"Levere's still giving it a shake."

"He's giving
us
a shake."

Gunner Majors brushed spray from his eyebrows as he kept his glasses tipped away from wind that scoured the flying bridge. No gulls flew on such a day, no basking sharks lay aslumber on the sea, and while flotsam was likely within fifty miles of the coast, Majors would later say that he already knew he had a target. He lifted the glasses to confirm. Dropped them to hang from one hand. Took a deep breath and lifted them to reconfirm. He leaned forward to press a buzzer beside a voice tube.

On the westward, inshore leg, sea anchor unstreamed, like a yellow mite on the gray immensity of water, the raft appeared, disappeared, appeared, tossed sporadic and water-filled, unbailed, like the last beat of a dying heart.

"All hands. All hands."

In the engine room, bells clanged and the pulse of engines broke free from its metronome throb. Forward in the crew's compartment, sleeping men felt the thrust of the engines. They tossed in their sacks, fumbled with belts buckles looped from waists around the rails of bunks. They slid blinking onto the rising and unsteady deck, rebuckling belts with one hand, reaching for foul weather gear with the other while they braced against the thrust of
Adrian
by jamming butts between bunks or against angles formed by lockers. In the engine room, Snow appeared like a short puff of magic, while above his head on the grates of the fiddley, men's feet hammered, staggered, bore pairs of hands toward the boat deck and the main deck. On the starboard wing a hatch erupted against the wind, as Dane, hollering with the certainty of an epistle, stubby as a boulder, yelled to the boat crew. Chappel relieved the helm and
Adrian
pressed in a sweep that would take it around the raft and place the bow into the sea. James wrote the log, danced thinly as he reached for radio message blanks and began to scrawl the contact report. Howard headed aft across the boat deck and down the ladder to the fantail to unlash steel basket stretchers. Above them all, Majors stood on the flying bridge, remote, his glasses sweeping the horizon, that vast orphanage.

Brace, the newest wanderer over water, stood beside Conally on the boat deck as Conally stripped the canvas cover off the boat. "Stand down to the main deck," Conally told him. "Make way for the boat crew."

"What'll I do?"

"Stop being stupid. Man the rail to fend off."

Dane, Conally, Glass, Joyce and Rodgers jumped, sat beside shipped oars, riding the boat in the wind of the deck like men preparing for a sail across the sky. Fallon, McClean and Racca tended lines, fended off, and the boat dropped in rapid jerks toward the sea, a controlled crash.

"Unhooked forward."

"Unhooked aft."

"Oars. Get ‘em over. Dig."

Howard staggered forward, packing a bulky stretcher, the straps free and dangling like a machine of the Inquisition prepared to clasp a victim. He bumped into Brace.

"What? What?"

"Stand by to take their lines. Unhook those chains. Let down fenders."

McClean arrived. "Child," he said to Brace, "do it this-a-way." To Howard he said, "I got it."

"Blankets," said Howard vaguely, and dashed toward a hatch beyond which brooded the medical locker.

Dane stood at the sweep, grunted orders, swore thinmouthed and violent as the boat returned, sliding into the lee made when Levere turned the ship. Dane's mouth hammered out shapes of words above his eyes which flashed with eternal-seeming pain; either the hot pain of rheumatism or the cold burn of the sea. In the boat a flyer bent forward, jammed between two oarsmen, leaning like a drunk or a propped dead man against the post of Conally's back, while Conally dabbed at the sea with an oar, ineffective, off balance.

With the helm trusted to the hands of his first quartermaster, Levere appeared on the main deck as the boat came alongside.

"How is he, chief?"

"Near froze."

"Can he talk?"

"He's too froze."

"The other one?"

"Not a chance."

"Chief Snow to the messdeck," Levere told Brace. "On the double, sailor." Levere turned to Howard. "Assist Chief Snow. Get this man talking."

"Easy there, take it easy."

With no time to brood over his summary relief from a job he detested in the first place, Howard helped swing the stretcher aboard. The flyer was pale, vaguely blue, as though a spectral self rose from beneath his flesh. Wet clothing bunched on either side of the compressing straps, and drops squeezed from the fabric to run across a sheen of deep water that lay like a well of cold in his waterproofs. His legs were held by the straps, but his feet were free to flop with the movement of the ship. He was without control of his lower body, and his puffy eyelids were red with cold and salt. His lips trembled, opened, closed, opened, smiled. The man seemed amused at the cleverness of a satisfactory speech, just delivered from tombs and cast wisely before an ignorant but temporarily interested world. His short hair glistened with water, his fingers clutched.

At the head of the stretcher, and with McClean at the foot, Howard staggered toward the after hatch and the ladder to the messdeck. Dane cursed from his position alongside the ship. Men grunted. The small boat turned away from
Adrian
and headed back for the raft, where the second pilot lay sloshing in unbailed water. Chief Snow flitted from fiddley to passageway to the ladder leading to the messdeck.

At the head of the ladder Howard turned, took a new grip on the stretcher and braced himself against a bulkhead to regain balance before making a backward descent. He glanced through the hatch leading to the fiddley, that fiddley where Howard had recently been shocked because he thought he had seen Jensen.

Now Amon stood on the grates, staring downward into the engine room; rigid, fixed, Amon's open mouth trying to search for any sound as he stood frozen in wide-eyed horror.