Sweet Reason
Sweet Reason
Robert Littell
Overlook (2012)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Tags: Thriller
Thrillerttt
A Vietnam era "Catch-22" by the author of "The Company"
Robert Littell is often compared to John le Carre, Alan Furst, and Len Deighton. But in "Sweet Reason," this master of the spy genre takes a dramatic departure to brilliantly satirize career militarists and other absurdities of war.
Somewhere off the coast of Southeast Asia, the U.S.S. Eugene F. Ebersole-a rusted World War II relic whose best days are far past- patrols the waters on a mission to protect American values in this suddenly-not-so-Cold War. The decrepit destroyer's mission is to apprehend or annihilate anything suspicious, but someone on board is preaching peace and the ship's motley crew is not quite as motivated as its ambitious commander.
THE DEFECTION OF A. J. LEWINTER
First American Edition
Copyright © 1974 by Robert Littell
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-901-1
For Richard Stone
Any penetration, however slight, is sufficient
to complete the offense.
From the
Uniform Code of Military Justice
Contents
Lieutenant Lustig Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is
I
T RAINED
during the midwatch — thick sheets of monsoon rain that slanted in at a ridiculous angle and chipped away at the flaking gray paint on the superstructure. Just before the four-to-eight watch came on deck it stopped, leaving behind the smell of wet wool hanging in the air and the sounds of a ship at sea. One was continuous: the river of ocean water brushing past the thin skin of the destroyer like a felt-tipped pen underlining never-ending sentences. The rest was punctuation: creaking joints, the dull throb of the main propulsion shafts, engines, reduction gears, fans, condensers, generators, exhausts, intakes, pistons, pumps, boilers, bilges, banging doors and banging plumbing, a tin cup clattering around the scullery, a muffled curse from somewhere below deck when nobody picked it up, a hundred thousand bubbles of air bursting as the two huge propellers pushed off into the sea, creating the river that brushed the hull. Astern the churning, phosphorescent wake played out, as if from a giant reel, into a starless, pitch-black night.
On the open bridge the messenger of the watch, a squirrelish seaman deuce with dirt under his fingernails and blackheads sprinkled across his forehead like freckles, squatted on his haunches polishing brass plaques with navy-issue rags, elbow grease and Kool Aid granules left over
from the ban on cyclamates. He had already finished one plaque
EUGENE F. EBERSOLE DD722
SWIFT AND SURE
BETHLEHEM STEEL COMPANY
STATEN ISLAND 20 DEC
1944
and was halfway through a second, which the Captain had had the shipfitters weld up the day the
Ebersole
headed for the war zone — a stretch of ocean known as Yankee Station.
FIGHT HARD WHEN WE F
WORK HARD WHEN WE
PLAY HARD WHEN
AN
AVOID UNN
DURING
“What he say then, Calvin?” the starboard lookout asked. He was standing with his back flat against the pilot house, his elbows locked into his chest to steady the binoculars through which he studied the night, sector by sector, the way he had been taught at boot camp. All the binoculars did was make the blackness seem closer and thicker and more oppressive. But he studied it all the same.
“Your father, I mean,” the starboard lookout said again, trying to do what nobody else was able to do, which was keep a conversation with Calvin Tevepaugh going for more than three minutes. Anything to make the watch pass more quickly. “What he say after that?”
Tevepaugh dabbed the damp rag into the pail of Kool Aid powder and rubbed away at the plaque in small concentric circles. “She-it,” he said, grudgingly holding up his end of the conversation, “he wanted me to be sumptin else than I am, but he couldn’t figure out what he wanted me to be. Neither could I. So here I am, what I am.”
The plaque was clean now and Tevepaugh buffed it with a dry rag, digging the caked Kool Aid granules out of the etched letters with his thumbnail.
FIGHT HARD WHEN WE FIGHT
WORK HARD WHEN WE WORK
PLAY HARD WHEN WE PLAY
AND
AVOID UNNECESSARY MOLESTATION
DURING PERIODS OF RELAXATION
The starboard lookout let the binoculars dangle from the strap around his neck. Tevepaugh started polishing the brass acceleration plaque.
0 — 15 knots | 1 min |
15 — 18 knots | ½ min |
18 — 22 knots | 1 min |
“So here you are, but what
are
you, Calvin?” the starboard lookout asked after a while. He could hear the pilot house clock ticking away inside the door.
“What am I? What I am is the only single solitary member of the one-man orchestra on the oldest mother in the whole goddamn You-nited States of America Navy, that’s what I fuckin’ well am.”
Tevepaugh’s description of himself was as accurate as any supplied by the computers in the navy’s Bureau of Personnel. On watch he was a messenger of the watch, polishing brass, carrying coffee, waking reliefs, doing whatever anyone who was senior to him (which was everyone on watch) told him to do. Off watch he was a seaman deuce deck ape whose job in life was to keep every square inch of brass and woodwork forward of the midship’s passageway gleaming or get his ass reamed by Chief McTigue, who ran the deck gang and Mount 51 with an iron hand. But when the
Ebersole
plowed through the seas alongside an aircraft carrier
for underway refueling operations, Tevepaugh came into his own. As the two ships steamed on parallel courses fifty feet part, the destroyer sucking in vast gulps of fuel from the carrier’s cavernous tanks, he would hold court on the deck that used to house the torpedo tubes which were taken off in the early 1960s, ten full years after they had been declared obsolete. Sitting on a folding canvas captain’s chair, cradling a small, red electric guitar plugged into two enormous speakers, Tevepaugh would produce overlapping waves of hard rock that drowned out the thirty-man polished-brass bands on the carrier’s hangar deck which stuck doggedly to “Anchors Aweigh” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Tevepaugh’s peculiar brand of one-upmanship was already an
Ebersole
institution when J. P. Horatio Jones took over as captain. Even so, the new skipper thought seriously about phasing out the act. “It’s not navy,” he complained to his executive officer. “Besides, you can hardly hear anything on the sound-powered phones for the noise.” But any idea the Captain had of sidelining Tevepaugh was shelved during a refueling operation off Norfolk when Jones focused his binoculars on the flag bridge high up on the carrier’s superstructure and spotted a smile on the thin lips of the Rear Admiral who nested in that rarefied atmosphere.
“XO,” the Captain said, motioning toward Tevepaugh strumming away on the torpedo deck, “what’s that sailor’s name?”
“Tevepaugh, Skipper. Seaman deuce Tevepaugh,” the Executive Officer answered.
“Tevepaugh,” mused Captain Jones. “All right, let’s see if we can’t get him a folding canvas chair to sit on instead of that fuel drum, eh?”
“Aye aye, Skipper,” snapped the Executive Officer, who dispatched a chit to the supply officer, who walked the chit through to the destroyer tender in Norfolk and came
back with a spanking new folding canvas captain’s chair.
“Goddamn right that’s what I am,” Tevepaugh was saying to the starboard lookout. “A one-man orchestra.” He rubbed the sleeve of his foul-weather jacket across his blackheads.
“Me,” offered the lookout, trying to eke out another drop of conversation, “I’m a shorttimer, that’s what
I
fucking am.”
“Shorttimer, my ass,” sneered Tevepaugh. “She-it, you’re career bait, man. You got career writ all over you. You’ll re-up the minute you smell the money.”
“Won’t we all,” the starboard lookout said, and he and the messenger of the watch laughed at the barefaced truth.
Suddenly the blackness that the lookout had been staring at shattered into shards of strobe-bright light, and it flashed through his brain that, improbable as it seemed, there was a barnfire raging on the horizon. What it was was only Tevepaugh leaning against the open bridge railing an arm’s length away, lighting a cigarette with one of the ship’s store’s flame-thrower lighters.
“
WHO LIT THAT FUCKING LIGHT
?” screamed the Officer of the Deck, a balding, chubby, round-faced, wide-eyed lieutenant junior grade named Lawrence Lustig. His voice was shrill with tension. “Don’t you know about darken ship? Next time that happens I’m going to put somebody on report.” (“Why don’t you signal them with a flare pistol,” Lustig imagined himself saying icily. He always went over his conversations, word for word, afterward. In these mini-daydreams there was never any need for threats or temper tantrums, for he invariably came up with a razzle-dazzle rejoinder that permitted him to bury his adversary under an avalanche of irony and logic and dignity. “Better still,” Lustig would have added if he could have run the reel through again, “why don’t you put up a neon sign that says ‘Here comes the
Ebersole
!’ ”).
“She-it,” Tevepaugh muttered under his breath, crunching
out the cigarette in the ashtray next to the captain’s sea chair.
Taking his cue from the Officer of the Deck, the bo’s’n mate of the watch, gunner’s mate third class Melvin Ohm, a squat Californian with a receding chin and a grating voice that sounded as if it originated in a cement mixer, popped his head out the pilot house door. “Jesus, Calvin, the lookout here couldn’t see the enemy with his prick dangling if he was right under his nose,” he said loudly enough for Lustig, who was the
Ebersole
’s gunnery officer as well as Ohm’s division officer, to know that he was cracking down on the offender. Too often petty officers tended to let this kind of thing slide. But not Ohm, who knew which side his bread was buttered on. “Don’t you know nothing about night vision, Calvin?”
“I know a lot,” Tevepaugh said sullenly. “The navy pays me for what I know.”
(Lustig thought of “No wonder you’re always broke,” but as usual it was too late to get it into the conversation, for by then the talk in the pilot house had moved on to other things.)
“I knowed a girl once who shaved it off because she thought men went for women who looked like little girls,” said the helmsman, a hairy deck ape named Carr who looked like King Kong from the back. He watched the compass card under the lubber’s line slide past 310 and put on three degrees left rudder to ease her back.
“You’re kidding,” said Tevepaugh, straddling the pilot house doorway, his polishing chores over. “I mean, she-it, I never seen no such thing. You’re kidding, ain’t you?”
“If I was telling a joke,” the helmsman said with exaggerated dignity, “it’d have a punch line. I wasn’t telling no joke. I was telling a social phenomenon.” He kept his eyes glued to the dimly lit compass card. It held on 310 for a second, then slid past in the other direction and Carr shifted
the rudder to bring it back again. “She shaved her snatch to look like a kid. That’s what I said she done’n that’s what she done.”