Sweet Reason (14 page)

Proper Comes Up with a Rain Check

A quarter to the hour had come and gone and the reliefs were still nowhere in sight.

“Shit, fuck, fart, piss and corruption,” shouted “Striker” DeFrank, a stringy, nineteen-year-old apprentice boilerman
whose main regret in life seemed to be that he only had to shave once a month. Stimulating the sparse stubble with the back of his hand DeFrank added: “Shoot, how much longer they gonna keep us roasting down here?”

“We set till they tell us to get, then we get till they tell us to set again,” Duffy yelled back good-naturedly. The senior man in the after boiler room and the oldest chief petty officer on the
Ebersole
, Duffy ran the watch with a firm, fatherly touch and an uncanny sense of the limitations of both men and equipment.

“Well, balls on Sweet friggin’ Reason for causin’ all this trouble,” DeFrank yelled, but the sting had gone out of his voice and he smiled the ear-to-ear grin that always flashed on, like a neon sign, when the going got rough.

Snipes, which is what the engineering people are called, were like that — patient, plodding, not normally given to griping. They had become more or less used to conditions that made duty in any other part of the ship seem like a seaside vacation; temperatures that seldom dipped below 130 degrees even when the huge blower system that was the last word in air conditioning in 1945 was working; a noise level (when the boilers were not “down” for repairs) that forced them to yell directly into someone’s ear to be heard; a workload that had them standing four hours on, four hours off, round the clock; and a water shortage that made it practically impossible to wash off the grime and grease and sweat that crusted on the skin like a scab.

But there was one thing that could set off a snipe. That was when the reliefs failed to show up on time. For four hours the most important thing in the boiler room to the men on duty was the large-faced electric clock on the bulkhead. The men made the time pass as best they could, baking potatoes stolen from the spud locker on the main deck in the water drum casing (where the temperature reaches 489 degrees)
and wolfing them down with warm Cokes, taking a turn around the boiler room to check levels and temperatures and pressures. All the while their eyes kept darting back to the electric clock — to the hour hand and finally to the minute hand inching toward the moment when the hatch two decks up would be flung open and feet would show at the top of the ladder. Psychologically speaking, the high point of the watch was the end point of the watch.

Today, of course, there was no relief in sight. Soon after the eight-to-twelve people trooped on deck, Ohm’s voice had come grinding over the loudspeaker. “Now all hands will” he said — breaking the sentence in the wrong places — “remain at their stations due to a” — break — “search of the ship being” — break — “conducted to turn up the” — gulp of air — “person or persons unknown responsible” — break — “for the seditious” — break — “leaflet.”

Relief time, not to mention chow time, had come and gone, then noon, then 12:15. Finally at 12:25, a foot swung over the lip of the hatch and Proper started down the ladder. He had already worked his way through the after spaces — after steering, the after crew’s quarters, the after magazines and storage spaces, Mount 53 and its handling room, the after head, the first-class lounge, the barber shop, the after wardroom, the post office, the damage control office and half-a-dozen other compartments that had no names but only letter and number designations. As the search progressed, Proper seemed to grow more confident. He knew the typewriter was out there somewhere; it was merely a question of narrowing down the area to be searched. In his mind’s eye he saw himself, not as the uniformed cop directing schoolchildren at rush hour, but as a plainclothes detective, a faint “I’ve seen it all” smile playing on his lips, a forty-four-and-a-halfounce Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum in his spring-assisted shoulder holster, telling a suspect in a slightly bored monotone:
“In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miranda versus Arizona, we’re required to advise you of your rights, and that’s what I’m doing.”

“The Captain ordered me to search the ship and that’s what I’m doing,” Proper said matter-of-factly when his foot touched bottom in the boiler room.

“You’ll have to speak louder,” Duffy called back, funneling his words directly into Proper’s ear with cupped hands.

“I said, the Captain ordered me to search the ship and that’s what I’m doing,” Proper yelled. “I want to start at one end —”

“One what?”

“One end — E as in echo, N as in November, D as in delta — one end, and work my way systematically through to the other. I want to check every space where someone could stash a typewriter.”

“Help yourself,” Duffy yelled, and turned back to study the dozen or so dials that told anybody who understood them how ridiculously inefficient the boilers really were.

“I’ll start here,” Proper yelled, pointing to a wooden footlocker wedged behind the access ladder. “Who has the key?”

“It’s hanging on the hook over your head,” shouted Striker DeFrank.

“If the key is right out here in the open, why do you lock it?” yelled Proper.

“Why shoot, so them’s that don’t know where the key is won’t get into the box,” DeFrank explained as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Crisply, professionally, Proper unlocked the box and threw back the lid. Inside were the boiler room’s mess stores — forty or fifty spuds, a dozen or so onions (a boilerman on the midwatch made a fantastic onion soup), a few half-rotten stalks of celery, two jars of instant coffee and a coffee pot, seven cans of anchovies, a small plastic bag of truffles, a jar of chives, another of peanut butter, assorted knives and
spoons and can openers and a well-thumbed copy of
The New York Times Cookbook
.

“What’s this?” yelled Proper, fingering a small package of what looked like herbs and tobacco mixed together.

“Herbs and pipe tobacco mixed together,” said DeFrank with a straight face. Duffy kept his back turned, oblivious to everything but the dials in front of him.

Proper had his orders about “tobacco.” So far he had turned up at least a dozen satchels that the owners described as tobacco or snuff or “a kind of Italian sugar.” Proper had also uncovered three revolvers, at least a dozen containers filled with whiskey or vodka or brandy, a small box of Spanish fly, a life-sized inflatable female doll, a seven-foot African spear and a shopping bag full of assorted women’s underwear. He had come across his biggest haul — film shot through a peephole in a Piraeus bar called the “Black Cat Inn” showing a number of the
Ebersole
’s officers in compromising positions — hidden in a hollowed-out fire extinguisher in the barber shop.

“Whatcha gonna do wit them?” asked Cee-Dee, who had arranged for the films to be shot and was showing them at five dollars a head whenever he could get his hands on the crew’s movie projector.

“I’m gonna come see them — gratis — as soon as you send me an engraved invitation,” Proper had said pointedly.

“Sure, anytime, anytime at all,” Cee-Dee had said, smiling broadly. “Take a rain check. Whatcha doin’ tonight?”

Proper knew what he was after and he covered every inch of the boiler room searching for it. He looked behind the generators and made DeFrank unscrew the casing on the reduction gear. He poked into obscure corners over the steam pipes and dragged a stick through the bilges to make sure there was nothing there but water. Then he had Duffy shut down the blower system and crawled into the main duct to make sure there was nothing there but air.

Twenty minutes later — soaked in sweat, his face and hands and clothes grease-streaked, his head splitting from the unaccustomed heat and noise — Proper emerged from the boiler room to tell the XO: “That space is clean.” And he plunged into the after engine room with another “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision” look on his face to continue the hunt.

McTigue Puts a Word in for Quinn

The XO looked up from his desk at McTigue. “What can I do for you, Chief?”

“It’s about Keys Quinn, XO. I promised him I’d —”

The phone rang and the Executive Officer snatched it off the bulkhead bracket. He listened for a second. “Who’s this Haverhill?” He listened again. “And who’s Filmore?” The XO nodded. “Okay, I’m on my way.”

Grabbing his hat, the XO brushed past McTigue and raced from the cabin.

“About Quinn —” McTigue called after him.

“The answer is no.”

“But —”

But the XO had disappeared.

The XO Thinks of All the Angles

At long last the chickens were coming home to roost, J. P. Horatio Jones thought, and he took the steps three at a time and burst straight into the radio shack — breaking one of his
cardinal rules about giving warning so he would not be confronted with the sweet smell of pot.

“Well, what they say, eh?” the Captain asked. Is he coming? How long have we got? Did they say why us? Did he pick us himself? Or were we assigned? Goddamn it, XO, fill me in, will you.”

“From what I gather from Commander Filmore, who is the Pentagon P.R. guy handling the whole thing —”

“You spoke with this Filmore fellow?” Jones interrupted.

“Not actually, Skipper. But I spoke to his aide, a Lieutenant Commander Haverhill, on the single sideband here. He says that Filmore says that the Congressman specifically asked to include us in the itinerary when he heard about the business with the Commie patrol boat yesterday.”

“Wow!” said Jones, his enthusiasm bubbling to the surface. “All I can say, XO, is it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, eh?”

A few minutes later, in the privacy of the Captain’s cabin, the two began making plans.

“How do we get him?” the CO asked. “Helicopter?”

“Haverhill says Filmore says he wants to be highlined over. It’ll give them some good film footage.”

“When? When do we pick him up?”

“They want us in approach position at thirteen-fifteen. They’re recovering a strike group at thirteen-hundred and as soon as that’s out of the way, we’re to haul ass in and get him. They want to get off another strike at thirteen-thirty.”

“Thirteen-fifteen — Christ Almighty. That doesn’t give us time to pipe chow. What’ll we do if he finds out the crew hasn’t eaten, eh?”

As usual the XO had a scheme. “Listen, Skipper, people like that don’t do much talking to ordinary sailors. When they do they always ask them what state they’re from or what football team they root for or crap like that. And ordinary sailors know better than to do any bellyaching” — the XO chuckled at the appropriateness of the phrase — “in public.
In any case, if he gets wind of it all we’ve got to do is let on the crew skipped lunch and donated the money to some war orphans. He’ll eat it up.”

“But the men don’t pay for lunch.”

“He won’t know that, Captain.”

“XO, irregardless of the obstacles you think of all the angles. Remind me to polish my superlatives when I write up your fitness report.”

Both men were all smiles.

“Anybody else coming with him — a governor or a senator or an actor or anything like that?”