Sweet Reason (9 page)

“Gunner’s Mate First Quinn reporting as directed, sir,” Quinn snapped. He stood inside the door of the Captain’s cabin, holding his hat in one hand, saluting with the other.

“How long have you been in the navy, Quinn?” the Captain asked quietly.

“Twenty-six years come next month, sir.”

“Somewhere along the way, Quinn, didn’t anyone tell you that sailors in the United States Navy don’t salute when their heads are uncovered, eh?”

“Quinn’s hand whipped down to his side. “No offense intended,” he said.

“Now what’s this I hear about Mount Fifty-two, Quinn?”

Quinn stood at attention, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, painfully embarrassed. The keys on the ring hanging from his belt jingled musically. When he started to speak his voice was almost inaudible.

“Speak up, Quinn, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” the Captain snapped, raising his own voice.

“I said that Fifty-two’s not working, Captain.”

Jones leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “He says that Mount Fifty-two is not working, Mister Lustig,” the Captain said quietly. Then he added in a hard voice: “I am well aware that Fifty-two is not working, Quinn. Why the hell do you think you’re here?” Jones switched back to the calm register. “What — if I may make so bold as to ask — what is causing Mount Fifty-two not to work?”

“I don’t know yet, sir.” Quinn looked at Lustig for help. Lustig concentrated on his fingertips.

“You don’t know.” Still in the calm register. “You don’t know.” Then coldly, biting off each word, Jones repeated the phrase: “You-don’t-know! Here we are, patrolling off an
enemy coast, momentarily expecting to go into battle, and you
don’t know
. What is the navy coming to when the mount captain of Fifty-two doesn’t know why his mount is not working? You’ll have to do better than that, Quinn.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Quinn said weakly.

“Perhaps I can help you, Quinn.” Jones had once been assigned, by mistake, as gunnery officer on one of the new aircraft carriers that carried no guns and fancied himself something of an expert on the subject. “Have you checked the firing circuits to make sure they’re getting four hundred and forty volts?”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn said, “that was the first thing I thought of.”

“Did you check the pressure in the hydraulic system rammer?”

“Naturally, Captain — no sweat there either.”

“What about the, eh, electro servo coupler?”

“The electro servo coupler?” Quinn said, dumfounded. “Captain, there isn’t no electro servo coupler in Mount Fifty-two.”

There was absolute silence in the Captain’s cabin. Jones leaned forward again. “Are you calling me a liar, Quinn?” he asked in a low, husky voice.

“Sir?”

“I said, are you calling me a liar?”

“No, sir.” Quinn shook his head vehemently.

“Then get back to your mount and check out the electro servo coupler.”

Quinn stood rooted to the deck, an expression of agony on his face. Tears of frustration coated his eyes.

“What’s the matter, Quinn? Don’t you know an order when you hear one?”

“Captain, sir, I just don’t know what to do,” Quinn said. He looked around the room for help. There was none to be had.

“It’s really very simple, Quinn. Turn around, open the door, walk to Gun Mount Fifty-two, and check out the electro servo coupler to see if it is contributing to the malfunction of your mount.”

“But there is no electro servo coupler, Captain, there just isn’t none.”

Jones turned sharply to the XO: “Get this man out of here before I lose my temper,” he said, biting his cuticles.

“That’s all, Quinn,” the XO said roughly. He didn’t want the Captain to doubt whose side he was on.

Still Quinn was not bright enough to turn and flee. “Aye aye, sir,” he said again. “But what do I do about the electro servo coupler?”

The Captain pounced jubilantly. “So there is an electro servo coupler after all, eh?”

“No sir, there is no such thing. I know every nut and bolt in them mounts. I’d know if there was. And I swear on the Bible I’d tell you, Captain, I swear to God I would.”

It was Lustig who finally put Quinn out of his misery. “On your horse, Quinn. Out. That’s all. Go.”

Totally confused, wishing desperately there was an electro servo coupler he could check, Quinn backed out of the Captain’s cabin, stumbled over the door frame and closed the door softly for fear the click of the latch would disturb the Captain’s equilibrium and bring on the demons again.

Inside, Jones looked as if he had just produced a rabbit from a hat. “And that, gentlemen,” he said, “that will be our answer to Sweet Reason, eh?”

Quinn’s Curriculum Vitae

A short, heavy man with thick thighs and skin that looked like the hide of a bull elephant, Quinn rated as the senior man on board the
Ebersole
in point of service. He had reported aboard in 1944 two days after the ship was commissioned and had been with her ever since — through the kamikaze attacks at Okinawa during World War Two, through Korea, through the invasion of Beirut, through fifteen Med trips and ten shipyard overhauls, through a dozen skippers and a hundred chief petty officers. The day after he lost his finger at Iskenderun, Quinn had put in what for him was a routine request to extend his tour on board the
Ebersole
, which was almost up. He had long ago discovered that life was one long battle to
belong
. To walk into a place where he didn’t belong was excruciatingly painful to Quinn. Once he had begun to feel at home in the
Ebersole
, once he had begun to relax in its womblike familiarity, he had made up his mind never to leave. He planned to stay forever if they’d let him.

The ultimate symbol of Quinn’s
belonging
was the eighty-eight keys that jingled from a large iron ring hanging from his navy-issue web belt. There were skeleton keys and latchkeys, rusted keys and bright silver keys, keys of every shape and size. Somewhere among them was one that could open almost any door on the
Ebersole
. It was more or less an
Ebersole
custom, in fact, for the petty officer in charge of a space to give a spare key to Quinn, saying: “Hey, listen, Keys, will you do me a personal favor and hang on to this in case I lose the original?” And Quinn, strictly as a favor to the petty officer, mind you, would add the key to his huge ring.

Every once in a while someone would actually lose a key.
Then the Quartermaster of the watch would pass the word on the ship’s loudspeaker system, “Now Keys Quinn, lay up to the midship’s passageway on the double.” Feeling more than ever as if he belonged, Quinn would rush down the passageway, his keys jingling on the ring, his eyes shining with a brightness that comes from being needed.

Two hours after the confrontation in the Captain’s cabin over the electro servo coupler, Quinn’s application for another tour on the
Ebersole
came back. The first hint he had that something was wrong came when the XO passed him in the passageway and said, “The Captain feels it’s a violation of navy regs for one man to have keys to all these compartments — you’ll have to turn in your ring, Keys.” And the XO held out his hand.

Keyless, the usual jingle missing from his walk, Quinn made his way back to the ship’s office and forced the yeoman who everyone thought was a homosexual to dig the application out of the service files.

“Request for extension on board
Ebersole
denied,” the Captain had written in an almost illegible scrawl, “pursuant to BuPers Bravo 3756 Romeo of 21 May 1953, which states that petty officers are to be rotated from sea duty every two years unless (a) such rotation would be detrimental to the war readiness of the ship or (b) except in unusual circumstances.”

Quinn flew into a rage. “The motherfucker,” he screamed. “I’ll break his balls, I’ll kill him.”

“Jesus shit, take it easy,” McTigue told Quinn. “Maybe he don’t understand you been here since the ship was commissioned. I’ll talk to the XO. He’ll see things different.”

The prospect that McTigue, the senior noncommissioned officer in the gunnery department, would intercede on his behalf calmed Quinn for the moment. “He better change that endorsement,” he said. “He fuckin’ well better.”

Proper Comes Up with a Suspect

“But you distinctly said tonight, Proper,” fumed Captain Jones. He was sitting on the bunk of his sea cabin aft of the pilot house, spit-shining his Adler elevators. The night reading lamp over his head filled the small, bare room with angular shadows. A flashlight and a worn Mickey Spillane paperback lay on the deck within arm’s reach. “You’ve let me down, Proper, you’ve certainly let me down.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, but the typewriter thing didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I checked out every single one on board; two in engineering, three in operations, three in supply, two in gunnery, the XO’s, that’s eleven, plus thirteen private portables. That’s twenty-four in all. Not-a-one fitted the type on the fatal leaflet, not-a-one.”

“Sweet Reason must be hiding his typewriter then.”

“That’s always a possibility, of course, but I’m beginning to think that your Sweet Reason may have typed these seditious leaflets before we sailed from Norfolk.”

“But we didn’t know we were going to war when we left Norfolk.” The Captain got a certain amount of satisfaction out of having caught Proper in a slipup.

“Good point, Captain,” Proper conceded. “You’re certainly right about that. Revise my last to read: he probably typed them up in some port before we arrived in the war zone. And if that’s the case, this may be a one-shot affair.”

Jones looked relieved — and disappointed. “I don’t mind telling you, Proper, it galls me to think that Sweet Reason can get away with this, can get off scot-free. Not that I want any more of these things to turn up, you understand, but it galls the hell out of me.”

“Captain, there’s something I’d like to tell you but I’m
not sure how to begin,” Proper said. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his foul-weather jacket and drew his head, turtle-like, back into the neck.

“Well, speak up, Proper. Don’t worry, my boy. Anything you say here is strictly between us.”

“Well, Captain, sir, I have a person — that is, I have a suspect who —”

“A suspect? A sailor you suspect of being Sweet Reason? Why didn’t you say so before?”

“Not a sailor, Captain.”

“Not a sailor! What the hell are you talking about, Proper?”

“My suspect’s an officer, Captain.”

Jones stared at Proper. “An officer, you say.” He toyed with the idea the way one toys with a loose tooth. “Jesus, I never thought of connecting an officer with Sweet Reason,” he said more to himself. Jones turned on Proper and demanded: “Okay, out with it, my boy, who is it?”

“I want to stress that he’s only a suspect, Captain. Innocent until proven guilty and all that sort of thing, you get my point?”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Now who is it?”

Proper lowered his voice to a whisper. “The Poet, Captain.”

“The Poet?”

“That’s Ensign Joyce, Captain. Everyone calls him the Poet, even to his face. He’s the one.”

“What makes you suspect him, Proper?”

“Well, sir, there are a couple of things. First off, I found out that Ensign Joyce is very friendly with Boeth —”

“What’s suspicious about that?”

“Boeth is an
enlisted
man, Captain. The word is he and Boeth actually went to New York together last Christmas. And I know the two of them spend a lot of time down in Main Plot —”

“Just what is it you think they’re doing down there?” Jones asked, visions of homosexuals dancing in his head.

“I know what they do, Captain. They sit around and listen to classical music!”

Jones looked dubious. “Friendship with an enlisted man certainly shows poor judgment, but I don’t see —”

“There’s one more thing,” Proper said. “When I was checking the typewriters in the after wardroom I had occasion to pass by Ensign Joyce’s bunk. Captain, sir, he has a bulkhead smack full of subversive pictures over his bed!”

The Poet Stands Corrected