The Caine Mutiny (41 page)

“Okay, Tom. I’ve heard enough. Thanks.” The exec got up and hoisted himself onto his bunk. He sat at the edge, his thick bare legs dangling. “Now, would you really like to know why the captain has it in for Stilwell?”

“Sure,” said Keefer. “No doubt you have a much more profound theory, and I-”

“I don’t know any theories. I’m just a dumb comic-book reader who made a straight C-minus at college. But I know a fact or two that you don’t. The captain is out to get Stilwell because he blames him for the time we cut our own towline. He thinks Stilwell deliberately didn’t warn him, just to get him in trouble.”

Keefer was startled. “How do you know? We don’t even know that he realizes we
did
cut the towline-”

“He realizes. He told me in San Francisco what I just told you.”

“I’m damned!”

“And the captain feels that all his trouble with ComServPac, and for that matter with the
Caine
officers and crew, stems from that incident. He knows what an idiot that made him out to be. Don’t underrate the captain, Tom-”

The novelist shook his head in wonder. “You know, that’s the first backstage glimpse I’ve been allowed into that strange mind. Imagine, blaming Stilwell! When he himself-”

“How about all those theories of yours now, Tom? Frustration, Billy Buck, infantilism, inversion, and all that-?”

Keefer said, with an embarrassed grin, “You think you’ve caught me, don’t you? Not necessarily. What he told you may still be just a surface symptom of my diagnosis-”

“Okay, Tom. How about this? Will you come up with me tomorrow morning to the medical officer of the
Pluto
, and tell him what you think of the captain?”

Keefer took a long pause before answering. “Not me,” he said. “You can go. It’s your place, not mine.”

“I can’t explain all that psychological stuff. That’s your line.”

“Did you ever hear of a thing called conspiracy to undermine authority?” said the novelist.

“But if he’s crazy-”

“I never said he was crazy. I said he was teetering on the edge. That kind is almost impossible to nail. Once you accuse them, they shrink back into the most convincing goddamn normal attitudes you ever saw. They’re as cunning as acrobats at treading that thin line between being a bastard and being a lunatic. It would take a state-side civilian clinic to see into Queeg. Here we’d just hang ourselves.”

“All right, Tom.” The executive officer jumped off his bunk, and faced the gangling novelist, looking up into his eyes. “That was a request to put up or shut up. You won’t put up. Then
shut up
this talk about the captain being crazy. It’s like running around in a powder magazine with a goddamn blowtorch. You understand? I swear to Christ I’ll report to the captain any further statements you make along that line. Friendship, on this point, no longer means anything to me. That’s the straight dope.”

Keefer listened with a grave, tense face; only there was a tinge of mockery in the wrinkling of his eyes. “Aye aye, Steve,” he said quietly, and went out through the drawn curtain.

Maryk crawled up on his bunk. Propping himself on an elbow, he drew from under his pillow a red-bound volume, with the black and gold label,
Mental Disorders
. Across the top of the pages was an oval blue rubber-stamp mark,
Property of Medical Officer, U.S.S. Pluto
. He flipped open the book to a place marked with a burned match.

CHAPTER 24

Maryk’s Secret Log

It became known among the officers, shortly after the ship left Funafuti in a convoy to Noumea, that Steve Maryk had taken to writing late at night. He would draw his curtain, and through the gaps when it swayed he could be seen in the desk lamp’s blob of light, knitting his forehead over a yellow pad, and chewing the end of a pen. When anyone entered he would hastily turn the pad upside down.

Of course, in the constricted life of the
Caine
wardroom, such a scrap of novelty was delicious. Maryk was quickly accused of composing a novel, which he denied with grins and blushes. But he would not say what his writing was, beyond grunting, “It’s work I’ve got to get done.” That was met with groans and jeers, naturally. Willie and Keefer, one evening at dinner, started speculating on the probable title and plot of Maryk’s novel. Keefer finally dubbed it
All Quiet on the Yellowstain Front
, and began improvising ridiculous chapter headings, characters, and incidents, in a wild farce principally involving the captain, the wart-girl of New Zealand, and Maryk. The other officers caught the idea and began throwing ribald suggestions. Their mood flared into hysterical hilarity. Queeg finally telephoned down to inquire peevishly what was causing all the shrieks of mirth in the wardroom, and that ended it for the evening. But new improvisations for the novel brightened the dinner conversation at intervals for months. The joke was kept alive by Maryk’s persistence both in the writing and the secrecy.

Actually, Maryk had begun a record of the captain’s eccentricities and oppressions, labeled “Medical Log on Lieutenant Commander Queeg.” He kept it locked in his desk safe. Aware that the captain possessed a record of the combination, Maryk quietly opened the lock late one night and reset the dials. He gave a sealed envelope containing the new combination to Willie Keith with instructions to open it only in case of his own death or disappearance.

During the months that followed the log swelled to a voluminous record. By being sent to Funafuti the
Caine
had fallen into the clutches of the Southwest Pacific command, the Seventh Fleet, and it began a grinding, nerve-rasping tour of monotonous escort duty. These obsolete destroyer-minesweepers, bastards of the sea, attached to no permanent command, tended to become temporary serfs of any naval potentate into whose domain they steamed. It happened that the commander of the Seventh Fleet needed escorts at that time for his shuttlings of amphibious forces around the humid blue void of the South Pacific. When the convoy from Funafuti arrived at Noumea the
Caine
was detached and sent up to Guadalcanal with a group of LCI’s, scrubby landing craft that crawled at seven knots. After swinging to the anchor at Guadalcanal for a week it was sent back down again to Noumea, and westward to New Guinea, and back to Noumea, and up to Guadalcanal, and down to Noumea, and eastward to Funafuti for a brief glimpse of the beloved
Pluto
, and westward again to Guadalcanal, and south again to Noumea.

Days dissolved into weeks and weeks into months. Time seemed not to be passing at all. Life was a wheel of watches, a procession of paper work, a fever dream of glaring sun, glaring stars, glaring blue water, hot nights, hot days, rain squalls; logs to write; monthly reports to submit, monthly statements to audit, repeating so often that it seemed the months were passing as swiftly as the days, And the days as slowly as the months, and all time was running melted and shapeless like the chocolate bars in the canteen and the butter in the butter dishes.

During this captivity Captain Queeg became more irascible, secluded, and strange. When he emerged from his cabin he usually performed some minor outrage that was written down in Maryk’s log. He incarcerated sailors and put officers under hack; he cut off water, he cut off coffee, and when the movie operator neglected to send him word that a performance was starting he cut off movies for the entire crew for six months. He made endless demands for written reports and investigations. Once he kept all the officers sitting in session for forty-eight hours, trying to find out which mess boy had burned out a Silex (they never found out, and he announced a twenty-point cut in everybody’s fitness rating). He developed a settled habit of summoning officers for conferences in the middle of the night. The equilibrium of declared hostility between himself and the wardroom, established by his speech after the Stilwell court-martial, came to seem the normal way of life for the officers. They averaged four or five broken hours of sleep each night. A gray mist of fatigue settled over their minds. They were jumpy, easily moved to quarrel, and more scared and sickened, with every passing week, by the everlasting buzz of the wardroom phone and the message, “Captain wants to see you in his cabin.” And all the time Maryk doggedly kept adding to his secret log.

Early in June they were rescued from the treadmill delirium of Seventh Fleet duty. The operation order for the invasion of Saipan arrived aboard, and the
Caine
was assigned to the screen of the main body of attack transports. There was genuine joy among the officers and crew when the old ship set out on a high-speed run by itself through dangerous waters to join up with the attack force at Eniwetok. As between gunfire and a prolongation of the tedium, they would probably have voted twenty to one for the gunfire. It was pleasanter to be shot at than to rot.

On the first day of the invasion Maryk made one of the briefest and most important entries in his medical log: an incident involving Willie Keith.

An hour before dawn of the invasion day, with the night fading to blue and Saipan beginning to show on the horizon, a humped black shape, Willie was surprised to find himself badly scared. It humiliated him to be afraid, approaching his second combat experience, when he had been so valorously carefree the first time. His innocence was gone. The flame and noise and ruin and falling figures of Kwajalein had penetrated to his bones and viscera even while he had hummed
Begin the Beguine
.

But when the sun came up, Willie momentarily forgot his fear in enchantment at the beauty of Saipan. Terraced and gardened, it was like Japanese scenes on lacquered screens and porcelain jars; a broad island of rolling green cultivated hills dotted with rustic homes, rising out of the gray waste of the sea. A flower-scented breeze blew from it across the water. Glancing down at the dirty forecastle, where the number-one gun crew stood in a blue phalanx of ragged dungarees, life jackets, and helmets, peering at the shore, Willie felt a tiny flash of sympathy for the Japanese. He sensed what it might be like to be short and yellow-skinned and devoted to a picture-book emperor, and to face extermination by hordes of big white men swarming from everywhere in flaming machines. Although the sea and air bombardment had enlivened the island’s bucolic prettiness with patches of flame and mushrooms of dust and smoke, there was no such obliteration of the greenery here as there had been on Kwajalein. The rows of attack boats seemed to be crawling toward a recreation park instead of a murderous island fortress.

The
Caine
was sent to an anti-submarine patrol sector as soon as the invasion got under way, and there it steamed endlessly in a figure-eight path several thousand yards long. Twelve other ships moved in unison with it, back and forth at ten knots, in a protective fanning curtain around the transports anchored close to the beach. It seemed like a safe place, and Willie’s spirits improved as the hours passed. His morale stiffened when he observed that Queeg was really shuttling from one side of the bridge to the other so as to remain sheltered from the beach. There was no mistaking it this time, because the ship kept reversing course every few minutes; and regular as clockwork, each time it presented a new side to Saipan, Queeg would come strolling around to the seaward wing. This gave Willie a dearly cherished chance to display his contempt for the captain by doing exactly the opposite. He sensed that the sailors were noticing Queeg’s conduct; there was a lot of sly grinning and muttering. Willie ostentatiously moved to the exposed side with each turn of the ship. Queeg took no apparent notice.

Things were so quiet in the patrol sector that the captain secured the crew from battle stations at noon, and went below to his cabin. Willie was relieved of the deck. He was desperately tired, having been awake for more than thirty hours, but the captain’s edict against daytime sleeping made retirement to his bunk too risky. He knew Queeg was heavily asleep in his cabin; but there was always the chance that a call of nature would bring the captain down to the wardroom. Willie went up to the flying bridge, nestled down on the hot iron deck, and slept in the blazing sun like a cat for four hours. He went back to the wheelhouse for the afternoon watch much refreshed.

Shortly after he took over the binoculars from Keefer, a Navy Corsair came flying across the northern hills of the island toward the
Caine
. All at once it burst into a rosette of flame, and arced into the water with a great splash halfway between the minesweeper and another patrol vessel, the new destroyer
Stanfield
. Willie telephoned the captain.

“Kay, head over there at twenty knots,” was the sleepy reply. Queeg arrived on the bridge wearing khaki shorts and bedroom slippers, yawning, as the
Caine
and the
Stanfield
were closing to within a thousand yards of each other at the place of the crash. There was no remnant of the plane on the water; only a rainbow-colored film of gasoline.

“Bye-bye Corsair,” said Queeg.

“Went down like a stone,” murmured Willie. He glanced at the paunchy little captain, and felt a stir of shame. What had happened to his sense of proportion, he wondered, that a comic-opera monster like Queeg could annoy or upset him? A man had just died before his eyes. The buzzing TBS transmissions spoke of thousands more dying on the shore. He had not yet seen blood spilled on the
Caine
except in careless handling of tools. Thought Willie, “I’m in danger of becoming a self-pitying whiner after all, the scum of military life-”

Towers of white water suddenly grew out of the sea on both sides of the
Stanfield
. For half a second Willie was puzzled, and thought they might be a queer tropical weather trick. Then the words burst from his throat: “Captain! The
Stanfield
’s being straddled!”

Queeg looked at the subsiding splashes and shouted into the pilothouse. “All engines ahead full! hard right rudder!”

“
There
, Captain!” Willie pointed to an orange flash followed by a puff of black smoke, high on a cliff to the north. “That’s the battery, sir!” He ran out on the wing, and shouted up to the flying bridge, “Gun watch!”

Jorgensen poked his head over the bulwark. “Yes, Mr. Keith?”

“Shore battery bears 045 relative, distance 4000, top of the cliff!
There
, see that flash? Train the main battery on it!”

“Aye aye, sir! ... All guns, shore battery, 045 relative, elevation 10, distance 4000!”

The
Stanfield
was whirling in a tight circle through a rain of splashes, and, even as it turned, it blasted an earsplitting salvo from its five-inch guns. Willie saw the
Caine
’s gun crews jump to their places. The line of three-inch guns swung parallel, pointing more and more astern each second as the ship turned.

“Rudder amidships! Steady as you go!” Willie heard Queeg say. The minesweeper was now headed directly away from the shore battery, leaping through the water at twenty knots. Willie ran into the pilothouse.

“Captain, main battery manned and on target!” Queeg seemed not to hear. He stood at an open window, with a squinting smile on his face. “Captain, request permission to come broadside and fire at the shore battery! We’re on the target, sir!” The guns of the
Stanfield
roared two more salvos astern. Queeg paid no attention. He did not turn his head or his eyes. “Sir,” said Willie desperately, “I request permission to open fire with number-four gun! A clear shot over the stern, sir!”

Queeg said nothing. The officer of the deck ran out on the wing and saw the destroyer, a dwindling shape, fire its guns again. A thick ball of dust enveloped the place on the cliff where the battery had been. Flames darted out of the dust as the salvo struck. Again the
Stanfield
was straddled. It fired four rapid salvos. There were no answering shots; at least there seemed to be no more splashes rising near the destroyer. Already the
Caine
was too far away for Willie to be certain.

He whispered the story to Maryk after dinner. The exec grunted, and made no comment. But late that night he wrote in his log:

19 June. Saipan. I did not see this at first hand. It was reported to me by an OOD. He states that this vessel was investigating the scene of an air crash with a destroyer. The destroyer, 1000 yards on our beam, was taken under fire by a shore battery. Captain reversed course and left scene without firing a shot, though battery was well within our range and our guns were manned and ready.