Jonah Watch (8 page)

In the red-inked business of mercy at sea, a corpse
represents failure. Cold eyes stare or are backwardly rolled, white. That flat and toneless stare causes among seamen a pinching sense of harm, of futility. The pinch is as sharp as ice behind your ear. Men feel nebulous guilt and small grief. Corpses are partners to huge but repressed fear. The fear is diamond-backed and sharklike. Corpses are rolled in canvas and stored on the fantail. They are bulky and awkward to wrap. Stiff limbs are rigidly fixed in a hundred antic shapes, the slate gone blank in its arrested scamper, the world dissolved into time that will forgive the most harlequin mimicry. Most fresh corpses exude some blood, and you can predict that the blood will be watery and weak. Stale corpses gush with other secrets. Mouths are always open and newly washed. Jaws dangle, surrounding raw tongues with a small circus ring of teeth. The jaws are not artless. They have spoken final words from a great gulf emptied of all but one fact.

Men carry a corpse to the fantail. They secure it, either by rough handling and slightly restrained violence, or else with a tenderness that its owner could hardly have been lucky enough to know when the thing was still alive. Then the men turn back to the messdeck, or stand in the hatch of the galley, or droop on the fiddley to stare, themselves corpselike, into any source of heat. If the corpse was once male, as the great majority are, conversation will eventually open on the messdeck with a giggle. A man will recall a shore-going episode. The talk will be of women.

"Bad luck," whispered Lamp. "We don't get more than three or four deaders a year, and now we're starting off with one."

"Keep it shut, cook. That guy is coming around."

Men avoid the fantail, and, if pressed in that direction by some duty, move quickly, with precision, and with short glances at the humped canvas. Every crew has at least one man who is fascinated, sometimes perverse; or with guilt and fear mixtured in such quantity that he is brought compelled to the boat deck to stand and stare aft, muttering, sometimes drooling.

"Snow had more experience. I maybe wouldn't have saved the guy." Yeoman Howard spoke to
Abner
's yeoman Wilson when
Adrian
once more swung against the pier. The rescued flyer was by then removed to an ambulance; the dead man lay enclosed in the back of a paddy wagon, his arms still grasping after his last enemy. On
Adrian
's fantail, Racca, obsessed, leaned on a hose as he flushed the deck. The straight-stream nozzle rose against his braced arms like a living creature struggling to snap away—a creature that could become high-bending, a tall snake arching and cracking and wielding sharp and deadly blows.

"We got the guy talking," Howard said. "His plane dunked first. That meant that the others were somewhere up ahead."

"We figured we might go back out," Wilson said.

"We found another raft. Upside down." Howard seemed to be still looking, staring, absorbing the fact of a buoyant, bouncing, yellow raft, high-riding with futility. "Those were brand new planes. Fitted out with the wrong fuel gauges."

"So who do you kill?" Wilson's huge, chalky face seemed dispassionate as he gazed across the pier at Racca who directed the shattering water that knocked salt and the invisible traces of the dead from the decks. Then Wilson seemed to remember whom he was with. He looked at Howard, and he was helpless, angry, momentarily passionate. "So who do you kill, who?" He dropped his eyes, muttered. "I don't know why we put up with this, don't know."

"It was a carnival," Howard told him. "Amon was like a fruit salad. The new guy was ready to fight. Snow was working on that man in a way that I'd have been embarrassed."

"Snow talks funny. That guy talks funny." Wilson was uncomfortable. He looked as though he feared that a deadly but familiar beast was about to come woofing from a cave.

"I don't mean that," Howard said. "There wasn't anything like that."

"Planes with bad fuel gauges."

"I was rubbing the guy's legs," Howard said. "Snow was putting on hot packs and rubbing his back and belly and crotch arteries."

"I guess you got to."

"That Snow just kept whispering." Howard spoke in a low voice, as though he still heard Snow's whispers, still stood beside Snow as they worked on the flyer; still attempted to sense meaning from Snow's broken, husky whispering, and the small, busy hands that moved with the certainty of a pump as the flyer's circulation was restored. "He just kept whispering, ‘torpedoes, torpedoes, torpedoes,' just over and over."

"He got blowed up once. He was just scared."

"No," Howard said. "I don't understand everything I saw, but Snow wasn't scared."

"He only loves torpedoes."

Howard, almost wordless before the suspicious fact of near revelation, seemed resigned to the uselessness of speech. "I'm glad I missed that war."

"Stick around for the next one, chum. We can't have you being glad." Wilson paused, thought about it. "In the next one," he said, "try not to trust anybody's gauge but your own."

Across the pier, on
Adrian
's boat deck, Conally appeared from behind the house. He was followed by Brace. Conally began unfolding the boat cover while Brace stood like a lank shadow as he waited to accept instruction on cleaning and securing and making ready the boat.

"Your boy looks okay now," Wilson said.

"No, he doesn't. You'd have to know him." Howard flipped vaguely through the small package of mail collected for him by Wilson. He looked at Wilson, as if they were about to share a secret, and then changed his mind. "He's kind of jammed up, is all." Then Howard changed his mind again. "We've got a mess going with that kid. It started just after we picked up the first guy."

The small boat, lap straked and carrying on its bows the placid information that it belonged to cutter
Adrian
, had seemed like a minor revolutionary battering at the gates of the gray, patriarchal sea. The boat was a small white smear on the water, and it seemed as uncertainly fixed as was Brace on his first search and rescue.

"He was actually doing pretty good," Howard told Wilson. "He was making mistakes, but he was willing."

Brace had hovered close beside Howard, standing at
Adrian
's rail as they watched the boat which rocked, plunged, took spray and seemed for a moment to join with the yellow raft. Across a hundred yards of tossing water, Dane's voice was thin with propelling curses, as if only a voice of arrogance and scorn could answer the indifference of the heat-draining sea.
Adrian
came ahead slowly. Levere settled on the right measure of revolutions per minute.
Adrian
met the swell, treading like a dancer moving from quick, dramatic action into a slow coda. The small-boat's crew shipped oars. The sky was a gray, luminous frame suggesting that the sun had not yet abandoned the planet. Cold wind moved from the mouth of the luminosity like a dissenting opinion from a court of natural law.

"That's when we got that guy aboard," Howard told Wilson. "The old man wanted Snow fetched to the messdeck. He sent the kid."

Brace seemed to have a nesting instinct for the engine room. He had moved like a homing pigeon flying in heavy wind.
Adrian
was by then cross seas, wallowing, brought about by Chappel to make a lee. Men advanced about the decks in short rushes, were brought up against bulkheads or rails with jarring shocks. In the galley, a mug or bowl spun from the rubber fingers of a rack that was guaranteed to prevent all minor disasters. The crash was like the report of a small rifle echoing through open hatches and accompanied by the shout of Lamp's despair. Brace climbed the deck, clambered, advanced in small dashes, arrived at the engine room ladder. He descended and spoke to his hero, Snow.

"Take the board," Snow said to the elflike Masters. He turned back to Brace. "Back him up on the plates until I send relief." Snow disappeared up the ladder, and Brace, asked for the first time to be competent in a situation that was not a drill, stood watchful and prepared beside the port engine. He dangled a wiping rag from one hand and watched the brilliantly lighted engine room rise, dash sideways, fall, as
Adrian
slipped into the trough and seemed trying to shake the heavy engines loose from mountings or drive them through the hull. Lights flickered, flared in brilliant surges as the generator faltered and then took hold.

Brace had little training, but, for the moment, he had enough. He listened for disturbance in the systems, studied what he knew of the fluid movement through piping. He was entranced, and might temporarily have forgotten his latest problem.

"Talked to Snow while they were on watch," Howard told Wilson. "Maybe that's why he blew up later."

"No transfer, huh?"

"Not until he hacks the deck. Not until Dane calls him a seaman."

"I understand your boy. Hate my own rate. I rather almost be a cook, even."

"You aren't nosy enough. Not even for a yeoman. But I know what you mean."

"He can make seaman in another six months."

"If the offer still stands," Howard said uncomfortably. "It was made before the steward went crazy."

Amon, his seasickness overcome, had trotted forward like a short shadow to the bridge with a half-filled pitcher of fresh coffee. He staggered and pinged and ponged in the passageway as
Adrian
rolled. The stretcher crew came through the hatchway, maneuvering the rescued flyer, and Amon gave way and stepped onto the fiddley. He began to cross the fiddley on a journey he had made a thousand unremarkable times. He glanced down into the flaring and flickering lights, was held fixed by the ghastly sight of Jensen standing on the plates. Amon opened his mouth to scream, found himself without breath or voice; or found himself under the slapping control of the satisfied and smiling Buddha. The stretcher party passed. Amon stood trembling. He conversed with his feet. He praised his feet. He lied to them with astounding deceptions in an effort to get them to walk. The hump-shouldered figure of Jensen stumbled against the roll of the ship. It righted itself like a clumsy doll. Amon stared. Stared. A wiping rag dangled from Jensen's hand, as it had always dangled from Jensen's hand when Amon had made trips across this fiddley. Jensen was sanely in control in this sea world, and because of that, Amon's world changed into a surreal and desperate place. The ship skidded, fell away, banged into the trough and the lights flickered, died, returned and then died again as the generator kicked off the line. Yells from below rose, jumped, swarmed in the darkness. Amon, deranged, heard Jensen's voice. In the distance, but rapidly approaching, moved the voice of Wysczknowski cursing loudly at the sea.

Amon's deceived feet began to slowly move him backward. He stepped from the fiddley into the after passage, turned, and slowly walked through a hatchway to the main deck.
Adrian
rolled, slammed, plummeted. Amon dumped the coffee into the scuppers. Then, softly treading the banging ladder, he took the pitcher to the galley, groping, and secured it with great care. Wordless, Amon walked to the wardroom past the grunting urgency of men who stripped the flyer and assisted Snow. Amon knelt on all fours and crawled beneath the wardroom table. When Lamp, abustle in official alarm, found him there an hour later, Amon was mute. He tried to speak. Produced a whimper.

Watches changed. On the flying bridge, Conally and Glass stood searching their sectors like men digging for one bright coin in that huge pocket of sea. They were remote, isolated, unreported. In Boston, Natchez, London, Madrid, Hong Kong, there occurred murders. Along the Yangtze there were murders, and in Moscow and in Lima, Peru. Somewhere in the east, murder occurred along a vaguely theoretical line termed MLR by Marines. Murder was like a wilted flower in Chicago and Rome. There was murder in L.A. and in Anchorage, in Frisco, Mexico City and Tampa. Conally and Glass searched, kept tight lips closed over teeth that, exposed, would ache in the wind. Glass sighted the second yellow raft. Conally saw that it was upside down.

"Still crazy?"

"He came out of it in three or four hours," Howard told Wilson, "then he went back in."

Murder ran red and surging in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, and it pulsed redly in Cape Town. Murder attended a fish war in Bristol Bay. Murder colored a street in Melbourne, popped like a small and hotly glowing flare in Sydney, in Paris, and Krakow.

"It got toward sunset," Howard told Wilson. "Lamp kidded Amon along. Got him talking. We put the flyer in the wardroom, and Amon was kind of hiding on the messdeck."

Brace, perhaps with curiosity over a rumored madman, or more likely in need of coffee after a turn on the flying bridge, descended to the messdeck.
Adrian
was corkscrewing on a downward leg that had the sea on its quarter. Brace carried a wet foul weather jacket poxed with small, triangular tears. He had somewhere borrowed a needle and thread. In the bright lights of the messdeck his face no longer seemed unremarkable. His high forehead rising toward his brief cap of fur was damp from spray, and from sweat caused by hood and watch cap. His forehead wrinkled. His mouth, formerly lax and unimportant, was clamped in a knowledgeable line. In spite of the odds, he looked like a man who knew what he was doing.

Mother Lamp hovered about Amon. He clucked, joked, looked like a man fighting a chill. The brightly lit messdeck was damp and disarranged. A sprinkle of wet salt lay like a small white trail blazed across a table. The flyer's wet clothing hung drying in the galley, swinging with the plunge of the ship like a hanged man dancing. Lamp tsked. Amon murmured. Wysczknowski, his long Polack face, thin-nosed and blue-eyed beneath washed blond hair, slumped at the engineer's table. He fumbled a deck of moist, nearly undealable cards like a man who has newly discovered that he detests solitaire.

Amon looked up, round faced and open eyed. He licked a corner of his mouth, stuttered. He lifted one arm, placed a finger in his mouth as though trying to dislodge an elephant. He shuddered, gurgled, and went catatonic, pitching forward to the deck where he lay like a man fallen from a tall building. Lamp yelled, shrieked, shrieked, jumped upright as if pierced by a sharp iron weapon. Howard leapt from his retreat in the cubicle of the office, and Wysczknowski, as though thankful, tucked the pack of cards in his shirt pocket. Amon's eyes rolled back, the rigidity of catatonia disappeared and Amon's left arm thumped, flailed. His legs kicked. His body heaved and shuddered and flopped.