The Edge of Honor (57 page)

They crept slowly down the passageway, keeping themselves to the sides and flattening quickly into doorways if they thought either of the two drunks was going to turn around. When they got within ten feet of the mess decks door, they could hear Hooper, stage-whispering now, and, as usual, he was berating Coltrane.

“Awright, man, we’ve made it this far. We gotta get this sucker to the compahtment, awright? We gotta get it to the compahtment, and then we can put it in the bosun lockah an’ tell the guys, an’ then, an’ then, we can put it down in the chain lockah, see, so’s nobody’s gonna find it, an’ then, an then—shit\ Shit! We went the wrong fuckin’ way, Coltrane, goddamn it. You was s’posed to go the othah way, to Foirst Division compahtment—this is the fuckin’ mess decks, man. Whoa—who’s that?

Who’s that!”

Brian and the chief were standing with their backs flattened to the bulkhead just outside the mess decks doorway. Brian was sure one of the two drunks had seen them, but then he realized Hooper must have discovered Poppa Steiner from the noises coming through the shuttered serving line. They listened as Hooper and Coltrane scrambled to hide behind one of the tables, Hooper swearing furiously and Coltrane making little eeping noises as they dragged the bag behind the table. Then came a long silence. The chief looked across the doorway at Brian, who shrugged his shoulders. They heard Hooper again.

“Coltrane, you know what? That’s fuckin’ old man Steineh in theah. You know fuckin’ Steineh? He’s that fuckin’ guy works all fuckin’ night and sleeps all fuckin’ day. Yeah. That’s who that fuckin’ is. We rip off sweet rolls from him on the four-to-eights. Hey, Coltrane, let’s fuckin’ scare him a little. You wanna fuckin’ do that, huh? Yeah, let’s fuck around a lil bit heah. C’mon, help me with this fuckin’ bag. Heah, help me drag it over theah. Yeah, let’s go mess with ole Poppa Steineh.”

Through the crack between the mess decks door and the doorjamb, Brian could see them dragging the golf bag over toward the galley door. He signaled the chief that it was clear to look around the corner of the doorway.

Coltrane and Hooper had the bag right up against the galley door, and then Hooper had another bright idea.

“Stay right fuckin’ heah, Coltrane. Don’t let nobody fuck with this heah fuckin’ bag. I’m gonna go douse the fuckin’ lights, make it real fuckin’ dahk out heah, okay?

Then we can fuckin’ do it. You wait right heah now; don’t go nowheahs, awright, man?”

Hooper lurched over to the back bulkhead of the mess decks and opened the lighting panel, something he knew about from his days as a mess cook. After a couple of false starts, he managed to turn off all the lights, including the night lights, on the mess decks. Now the only light was coming through the cracks in the serving line’s shutters. The silhouette of the night baker could be seen moving around behind the shutters, accompanied by a thumping noise as he began to knead several large lumps of bread dough. Hooper crossed back over to the door and crouched down by Coltrane, who had gone quiet when the lights went out.

Together, they maneuvered the bag right up to the door.

“They got some kind of animal in there, all right,” Jackson said, joining Brian on his side of the door. Bet you it’s a goddamn monkey.

Steiner’s gonna go apeshit, a monkey loose in his galley.”

“We gonna let ‘em do it?”

“Well, you’re the CDO …”

Brian grinned at the prospect of a monkey loose in the galley, then watched as first Hooper and then Coltrane set up howling and wailing noises outside the galley door, apparently trying to sound like a couple of ghosts. Their noises were muted at first, but the two soon warmed to their work. From inside the galley, the noise of Steiner whacking on the mounds of bread dough stopped.

“All rrr-ight, all rrr-ight,” came Steiner’s voice through the steel shutters. “Who izz dis mezzing around mit me, what? Izz trying to sound like ghost, izz not scaring me, no, izz bunch of drunks, I’m linking.

You go way now. You go to bed, sleep it off. There’s a good boy, go on now, before Poppa Steiner has to call the Sheriff.”

Hooper tried to keep the ghost sounds going, but he had started laughing and was trying to cover his mouth and make the noises all at the same time. Coltrane looked alarmed but kept on with his version of the ooing and moaning, trying, as always, to do what Hooper said.

Steiner kept up his admonitions for the drunks to leave him alone and get along to bed as he began unlocking the galley door.

When they heard the galley door being unlocked, Hooper reached forward and pulled the red cloth out of the top of the bag, pointing the mouth of the bag at the door. The galley door swung open in a blaze of white light, revealing Poppa Steiner’s expansive flour-covered paunch standing in the doorway, a huge blob of bread dough in his two hands and an annoyed look on his shiny red face.

“Now I’m tellink you, you—Gott in Himmel!”

With an incredibly loud hiss, a four-foot-long crocodile lunged out of the bag and into the doorway. Steiner tried to turn around, run, scramble backward, and simultaneously pick up both feet to get away from the equally terrified reptile, who himself was trying to get away from the bag at a great rate of knots. Steiner did the only sensible thing, which was to pitch the entire ten-pound blob of bread dough at the croc, who, failing to reach the night baker, obligingly tried to bite it.

Steiner ended up sitting down abruptly on his considerable posterior while scrambling backward away from the monster in the doorway, knocking over a table of bread pans and sending up a huge cloud of flour in the galley. The croc froze in place, trying hard to hiss but mostly strangling on the bread dough, making noises similar to those being made by Hooper, who was rolling around in tears out on the mess decks. Even Coltrane was grinning.

Brian was laughing so hard, he had to sit down himself, and Chief Jackson, who had been trying to look stern, finally gave it up and roared with laughter. The baby croc staggered around the mess decks with the blob in its mouth, manfully trying to eat it while he looked for a way out of the situation. Sixty million years of evolution told it to head for the nearest hole, which turned out to be the scullery.

Slithering rapidly across the waxed tiles of the mess decks, the croc, blob and all, dived into the open door of the scullery. Jackson ran over to the door and slammed it shut, then called the quarterdeck to get some help.

It took him several minutes to convince the petty officer of the watch that it was indeed the chief master at-arms on the line, and that, yes, he did need some assistance on the mess decks to deal with a stowaway crocodile. His case was not strengthened by occasional fits of laughter on his part. The command duty officer, still sitting on the deck, tears of laughter running down his face, was of no help whatsoever.

It took another hour to assemble a suitable task force to capture the croc, and a half hour after that to convince Steiner to come out of the galley, whose door he had barricaded with every piece of movable equipment in the galley just as soon as the croc had manned up the scullery.

The flour-covered croc, who had made considerable progress with the blob by the time the final assault was made on the scullery, was captured by six volunteers using a ten-foot-long divisional laundry bag. Then he was pitched unceremoniously off the fantail into the harbor, a couple of feet of white bread dough hanging from his mouth. Two Filipino welders coming aboard for the second half of the graveyard shift saw the disposition and did an abrupt about-face on the brow to go report to their supervisor that a crocodile had eaten a white man in the Hood, When it was all over, the OOD asked Brian what he should put in the deck log.

“Not one word, Chief. Not one goddamn word.”

Rockheart sat back in his seat on the shuttle bus headed for the main gate. It was one of the late buses, purposefully chosen to ensure that the bulk of the night’s liberty party had already gone through the gates by the time he got there. The sun had long since set and the base was almost pretty in the early evening, with all the carefully trimmed lawns and flowers, the waving palms, and the first signs that the day’s heat was breaking. He wanted the gate Marines to be bored and tired of searching bags and looking at ID cards, indifferent to an E-6 strolling through at the back of the crowds.

He shifted again on his seat, the chest pack filled with bills creating -a large square patch of perspiration under his T-shirt. He had called his contact, and tonight was the night. This was another sweet deal set up by Rackman and carried on by Rocky. To resupply, all he had to do was make one phone call into town and then check back each afternoon at 1500. When the stuff was ready, he would strap on his money pack, make a liberty run to a certain bar, ask to have a hotse bath, and leave the money pack in his clothes with the bath attendant. When he was finished with the bath, his clothes would have been cleaned, pressed, and relieved of the fifteen thousand dollars in mixed bills. He could then go out and have a beer, maybe catch the animal acts at the crocodile bar, and be back aboard before midnight.

The sweet part was the delivery. His source had a guy, a Filipino civilian, in the base post office. The stuff would be put into two fourth-class mail packages, suitably wrapped against drug dogs, and then the inside guy would put all sorts of customs and post office stamps and inspection stickers on them, label them with a fictitious return address in the States, bash them up a little, put a

“Cookies, please do not crush” stencil on them, and then spirit them past the internal customs people and into a mail sack destined for Hood.

Once aboard, the ship’s postal clerk would call Rocky down in his compartment and laughingly tell him to come get his latest batch of home-cooked crumbs, and his biggest problem was being razzed for not sharing his care package with the other guys in 01 division. He had even taken to buying bags of cookies in the Subic base commissary so that he did have something to share. As long as they had the inside guy, it was foolproof. For once, he was getting extraordinary service from his friendly post office.

The bus pulled up to the main gates and the small load of sailors got out. Rocky stayed in the middle, Mr. Casual, his MAA badge strapped to the inside of his wallet opposite his UD card to make sure the gate guard would recognize a kindred spirit. He was waved through with a big yawn. When he crossed the Shit River and got to the beginning of the main drag, the crowd of jeepneys and hustlers was much depleted, as the action had already moved uptown. He found the driver almost at once, parked at the head of the jeepney line, and slipped into the back of the small Japanese car. The car made good time, dropping him at the bar in five minutes.

He walked in and headed directly for the back row of tables, where he ordered a San Miguel and watched the band for a few minutes. He told the first hostess that he was here for a bath. She disappeared and he began idly counting the minutes. He smiled when he sensed a new presence behind him, smelled the rich perfume, and felt the soft hand on the back of his neck. He covered the hand with his and pulled it forward, pressing a soft kiss on her wrist.

“Josie,” he said without looking up, “it’s good to see you.”

The night after the crocodile incident, Chief Jackson invited Brian to have dinner with him at the Subic Chief Petty Officers’ Club. Brian recognized the invitation to be the extension of an offer of friendship on the part of the chief. Under the unwritten rules of naval etiquette, a chief petty officer could invite a commissioned officer to his club, although the converse was rarely done. Jackson probably wanted to expand their official relationship into something more personal, and Brian thought that it was related to Hood’s drug problem.

They arrived at the Subic CPO Club at 1830, both of them dressed in civvies. Brian was surprised to find that the CPO Club was bigger than the Officers’ Club and slightly more posh. Jackson explained that the chiefs were simply ready to spend more money on the club amenities than the officers, and besides, there were more of them. They took a table in the main dining room, where Brian was surprised again to see chiefs enjoying dinner with women who appeared to be their wives.

“Lots of CPOs stationed here at Subic,” Jackson said.

“It’s an accompanied tour, so the families are here, too.

It’s actually supposed to be great duty. Everyone has at least one maid, and usually a gardener—the labor’s from Olongapo, and it costs next to nothing.”

They ordered steak dinners and reminisced about the infamous crocodile.

The exec at officers’ call the next morning had given a straight-faced lecture about the evils of importing dangerous species aboard ship that had everyone in stitches. The engineer was less amused, as he could not get the Filipino welders from the shipyard to come back on board until their shop stewards had inspected the entire ship for lizards. The Supply officer had had to borrow bread and rolls from another destroyer because Poppa Steiner refused to go back on the mess decks until daylight.

Over dinner, their conversation inevitably moved to the problems of race relations in the Navy. Brian realized that he would have felt just a little conspicuous sitting in the Officers’ Club with a black man, but that in the CPO Club, he felt entirely at ease. He hesitated, then mentioned that observation to Jackson.

“That’s because the officer corps in the Navy is almost entirely white,”

Jackson said. “The chiefs are at the top of the chain of the enlisted world, so we got all kinds—white, black, Spanish, Filipino, you name it.”

Brian nodded, looking around the dining room, remembering Martinez’s remark about white people’s hang-ups on race.

“But if we really go after the drug ring here in Hood, does that put you in a bind as a black chief petty officer?”

“No—but it will as just a black man. See, how it is: A black man in the Navy has two identities—one as a bosun’s mate, or a gunner’s mate, or whatever, and a second one as a black man.”

“Which identity rules?”

Jackson put some sugar in his coffee and smiled at that one. “Way
see it, the one that gets you where you wanna go. I signed up, wanted to move up, get my chief’s hat one day. So the black man, he went into the background in what I saw as a white-run Navy, and I got my hat. Problem comes for those guys who don’t stand much chance of going up in the ranks, for whatever reason, and then the black man steps out of the shadows, and he’s pissed.”p>