Sweet Reason (20 page)
A
N HOUR
into the midwatch Sonarman Third Dwight Proper put the sonar on automatic scan and settled back in his imitation leather swivel chair with a paperback detective novel. He was up to the part where the beautiful young heiress answers the doorbell wearing a gold bracelet around her left ankle and nothing else. “ ‘Yes, I’m Cynthia Crespin,’ she told Mullins in a throaty, almost hoarse, half-whisper. She brushed her long blond hair away from her breasts with a snap of her head. ‘Won’t you come on up:’ ‘Baby, I already have,’ he answered and followed her into the house.”
Proper crossed his legs over his own erection and started to turn the page when he heard the first “brrrrrrrrp-
brp
.”
“Je-sus,”
he said and snapped off the overhead light to cut the glare on the sonar scope.
From a small dome attached to the keel of the ship pulses of sound shot into the surrounding water at the rate of one a second. If the sound waves struck nothing all you heard was the “brrrrrrrrp” of the outgoing beams. This time, however, there was a short, sharp echo to indicate that the sound waves were bouncing off something. Proper adjusted the electronic bug and measured the range and bearing to the echo, which registered as a white blip on the sonar scope. Then he flipped the 21MC on the bulkhead to “bridge” and yelled: “Bridge,
this is sonar. I have a sonar contact bearing 180, range 1200 yards.”
“A what!” the Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant junior grade Moore, called back. “You have a what?”
“A sonar contact,” Proper said excitedly. “I’m in the sonar shack looking at the scope and there’s a contact bearing one eight zero at twelve hundred yards.”
“My God,” Moore shouted down, “what do you think it is?”
Proper bent his head and concentrated on the sound. “Brrrrrrrrp-
brp
. Brrrrrrrp-
brp
. Brrrrrrrrp-
brp
.” The echo had a distinct down doppler — a slightly lower pitch than the outgoing sound beams — indicating that the target was heading away from the
Ebersole
. “Well,” Proper yelled back up to the bridge, “it sounds suspiciously like the ass end of a submarine to me.”
Concentrating on the steady “Brrrrrrrrp-
brp”
that filled the small sonar shack, Proper hardly heard the tingling ripple of the general alarm peeling through the ship. He didn’t look up when Ensign de Bovenkamp, the sonar officer, came charging into the shack.
“Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp. He was wearing silk pajamas and chewing away rhythmically on a stick of gum. “Hot gawddamn.”
Ensign de Bovenkamp’s Curriculum Vitae
“Give me a Y.”
“Y.”
“Give me an A.”
“A.”
“Give me an L.”
“L.”
“Give me an E.”
“E.”
“What does it spell?”
“Yale.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“
YALE.
”
“I still can’t hear you.”
“
Y-A-L-E.
”
Bedlam broke out in the gymnasium. The coach laughed and waved to two trustees and then bent back into the huddle. Instantly the expression on his face changed. “Awright now, here we go,” he yelled, dealing out sticks of gum. “I told you men once, I told you a thousand times, the trick is you got to think of ’em as enemy.”
“We’ll kill ’em,” said the right guard.
“We’ll murder ’em,” said the center.
“We’ll maim them,” said de Bovenkamp, working the gum around in his mouth and nodding in anticipation.
“Awright, awright,” the coach yelled. He glanced at the other team with pure hate in his eyes. “They’re not opposition, get that straight, they’re enemy, see, and you guys are gonna mop up the court with them as a matter of self-defense. Awright, you got the message, what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation? Now what I want you to do is I want you to get on out there and fight — for yourself, for your school, for your coach.”
“Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp, and he slapped his hands onto the coach’s hands and other hands slapped down on top of his. With the cheers ringing in his ears, de Bovenkamp burst from the huddle and led the team to victory.
As far back as he could remember de Bovenkamp had been a winner. From the age of eight, when he walked away with a spoon and egg race, he knew what all winners know: everybody
hates a winner. Or more precisely, everybody hates a winner who wins the way de Bovenkamp won — easily, casually, with a “Look Ma, no hands!” expression on his face.
There was only one flaw in this picture of the supersuccessful American: for the life of him, de Bovenkamp couldn’t score. Sexually, that is. Oh, he could get it up all right, but he couldn’t keep it up; at what is commonly called “the crucial moment” he always wilted. Various female acquaintances, turned on by the challenge long after they had been turned off by de Bovenkamp himself, had tried any number of “cures,” but he had never been able to rise to the occasion and achieve actual penetration. “Gawd, I’d consider premature ejaculation a triumph!” he confided to the psychiatrist he finally took his troubles to.
De Bovenkamp talked guardedly at first, then opened up and they made some progress; the doctor traced the problem to de Bovenkamp’s Caspar Milquetoast of a father and his soaring eagle of a mother. Armed with a fistful of sixty-dollar-an-hour insights, de Bovenkamp went out and fell in love with the first girl he could find who didn’t remind him of his mother.
Her name was Evangeline and she taught chemistry in a high school. She was soft and womanly and walked around with bare feet indoors. What really attracted him to her was that she had a very low opinion of herself, a brilliant flash of a smile and stunning Irish eyes. But when the romance reached the point where coitus un-interruptus was the next dish on the menu, de Bovenkamp panicked. Without a word he packed his matched Gucci duffel bags and hightailed it to Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. Desperate, she wrote him: “I love my family, I love teaching, I love my godchild Jennifer I still love them now but I love you more than all of them. All you have to do is say you want me with you and I’ll be there in less than two hours. Nothing else matters to me.”
De Bovenkamp wired back: “Think of this separation as a test.”
She answered with a post card: “Dummy — the real test is being together, not apart.”
Much to his relief he never heard from her again.
From the start of his navy career de Bovenkamp seemed destined for great things. No matter that he wound up eighth from the bottom of his class at Officer Candidate School; more to the point, his contemporaries voted him the man who
looked
most like an officer.
After graduation a computer in Washington assigned him to the
Eugene Ebersole
out of Norfolk. Standing on a long pier in the destroyer base in Norfolk on a bright Monday morning, de Bovenkamp caught sight of the sun glinting off rust. It was the
Ebersole
. His heart sinking, he lugged his matched Guccis across the gangway to the quarterdeck, drew himself up to his full height and snapped off the salute he had perfected in Newport. “Request permission to come on board?” said de Bovenkamp.
Tevepaugh, all blackheads where his dirty white sailor hat met his forehead, lazily returned the salute. “Why not,” he said. “You must be the new George, right?”
“George?”
“George is what we call the junior ensign on the ship,” Tevepaugh explained.
“Who’s the Officer of the Deck?” de Bovenkamp demanded.
“That’d be Mister Lustig.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Well what
sir!”
“You don’t have to call me sir,” Tevepaugh said. “Me, I’m not the Officer of the Deck, Mister Lustig is the Officer of the Deck.”
There were tears of frustration behind de Bovenkamp’s
mask of imperturbability. “Where is this Mister Lustig?” he asked.
“Taking a crap, where else?” Tevepaugh said.
De Bovenkamp never did get to see Lustig until after dark when the free-for-all broke out on the mess deck over which channel to watch on the single television set. It seemed that the white sailors wanted one program and the blacks another. De Bovenkamp discovered Lustig kneeling at the top of the ladder leading to the mess deck (he was, he later admitted, afraid to descend into the pit) screaming, with no visible effect, for everyone to stand at attention. De Bovenkamp took the practical step of commandeering another television and setting it up on the other side of the mess deck. And that’s how he came to meet the man who was to have such a great impact on his life, Captain J. P. Horatio Jones.
“If you ask me it was a clear case of high spirits,” Jones told Lustig the next morning when he muttered something about a race riot. Jones turned to de Bovenkamp. “But
you
certainly used your head, my boy. Keep it up and I’ll write up a fitness report on you that’ll knock your eye out, eh?”
Spurred on by this early success de Bovenkamp set out to endear himself to the Captain. He organized an
Ebersole
basketball team (with himself as player-coach), exhorted it to victory with phrases borrowed from
his
coach (“think of them as enemy”) and in short order picked up a gold basketball from the Commander Destroyers Atlantic. Much to the Captain’s delight, a photograph of the Admiral congratulating Jones and the
Ebersole
team made the Norfolk papers, and that was followed by a personal letter from the Commander Destroyers Atlantic, Jones’s ultimate boss, complimenting the Captain of the
Ebersole
on coping with the problem of morale in an active and thoughtful manner. “In this day and age of drugs and long-haired pansies,” the Admiral wrote, “it is a pleasure to see a destroyer Captain
who can draw inspiration from American basics such as basketball.”
In the months that followed de Bovenkamp turned out to be the Captain’s staunchest ally on the ship. At Iskenderun it was de Bovenkamp who, alone of all the officers, supported Jones’s decision to go alongside the burning tanker and fight the blaze. Later, during the first war council after the
Ebersole
arrived on Yankee Station, it was de Bovenkamp again who responded wholeheartedly to the Captain’s pep talk. And it was de Bovenkamp who came up with the idea of using Proper, the ex-cop, to catch Sweet Reason. “My God,” Jones told the XO, “if all my officers were like young de Bovenkamp, I could put my career on automatic and retire to my sea cabin.”
If de Bovenkamp was Jones’s favorite, Jones in turn filled an important need for the young ensign — he became his surrogate father. De Bovenkamp had never really seen a
man
give orders before and it affected him profoundly. He began to feel that he had a lot in common with the Captain — the one isolated (as Jones never tired of telling him) by the loneliness of command, the other isolated (as de Bovenkamp explained when he got to know the Captain better) by the loneliness of being a winner.
Gradually de Bovenkamp began to think of himself as something more than a winner. He was, as he confided to Jones late one night, “a captain too — the captain of my fate.” De Bovenkamp in fact began to sense the sap rising within himself. He actually managed a premature ejaculation in the Black Cat Inn in Piraeus — a sequence, incidentally, which anyone on the
Ebersole
could see, for five dollars ahead, on Cee-Dee’s late, late show. Sexually speaking de Bovenkamp still tended to wilt at crucial moments, but he felt that in time, given the inspiration of working for
Captain Jones, he could hold up, if not his member, at least his head.
De Bovenkamp Sights Sub, Sinks Same
De Bovenkamp peered over Proper’s shoulder at the sonar contact. Three other sonarmen had joined them in the shack. They stretched and craned, peering over de Bovenkamp’s shoulders. Proper turned up the volume — the “Brrrrrrrrp-
brp”
filled the small room — and pointed to the small blip on the scope.
“Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp, chewing away on a stick of gum. “You think it’s a you-know-what?”
“Sure looks like it,” said one of the other sonarmen.