The Sand Pebbles (5 page)

“Yes, sir.” Bordelles gulped the last of his coffee and stood up. “It’s almost time for battle drills, sir. What shall we run today?”

“Repel boarders. Starboard,” Lt. Collins said.

Sew Sew ducked back down the hatch and Holman started forward. A bugle blasted and he heard Chief Franks’ voice from the boat deck, “All hands! Repel boarders, starboard! Repel boarders, starboard!” Sailors exploded out of the compartment and all over the ship feet thudded as they ran to their stations. Holman tried to get into the engine room to get out of the way and he met Burgoyne coming out, dragging a steam hose. Then Lynch grabbed him.

“Stand by here, Holman. You’re in the waist party.”

They stood by on the triangular quarterdeck. The arms locker behind the ladder to the boat deck stood open. Lynch snatched a riot gun, handed it to Holman, and motioned to him to join the men kneeling along the bulwark. The gate in it was closed and the short gangplank pulled inboard. Holman knelt and Burgoyne knelt beside him and balanced the steam hose nozzle on the steel bulwark. It was a valve and a short piece of pipe wrapped in gunny sacking.

“Waist party ma-a-anned and ready!” Lynch yelled. He had a husky voice. The bow and stern parties reported manned and ready.

Holman glanced around. A big flat-faced sailor was holding the bight of the steam hose waist high with heavy gloves. Lynch had a pistol in his left hand and a shiny cutlass in his right. He frowned and motioned with his cutlass for Holman to face outboard. Holman did, and noticed that the other men’s faces were keen and tense and their eyes were scanning back and forth. In addition to Burgoyne there were the pleasant-faced kid, Wilsey, with a riot gun, and the old electrician, Harris, scowling down the barrel of an automatic
rifle, his coarse white hair bristling. Holman sighted along his riot gun and felt stupid. A riot gun was a kind of sawed-off shotgun that fired buckshot. Holman had never fired one.

The same crowd of brown, ragged, cone-hatted coolies was up on the bank watching, all along the brick wall where Holman had stood, and twenty or more were down on the pontoon gazing stupidly into gun muzzles almost near enough to nudge them. Hard to figure what they made of it all, Holman thought. Probably not much. Ensign Bordelles came down the ladder to the quarterdeck. Lynch said, “Manned and ready, sir.” Holman felt the ensign’s eyes on his back.

“One of your riot guns has no reserve ammunition,” he said.

“He’s a new man, sir, not instructed yet.”

“Very well. Why haven’t you steam to the hose nozzle?”

“Condensation would start leaks in the hose, sir,” Lynch said. “I can’t drain it and warm it up on account of the slopeheads on the pontoon.”

“This is not Long Beach and it is not even Hankow,” Bordelles said sharply. “When
San Pablo
holds a drill it is always in Hunan Province and it is always in deadly earnest You know that, Chief. Now bear a hand and get steam on that hose!”

“Aye aye, sir! Stawski! Cut in the root steam.”

“Chien! Steam on the deck valve!” a voice yelled.

“Belay that! This is a battle drill, Stawski.
You
cut in that steam!” Lynch said angrily. “Crack it in slow. Frenchy, aim the nozzle down the side.” Lynch came to the bulwark and waved his cutlass.
“Cheelah!
Stand clear, you slopeheaded bastards!” he yelled at the coolies on the pontoon.

They stared stupidly and did not move. Stawski cut the steam in fast. The steam came pushing a plug of hot water ahead of it and the hose jumped like a snake and almost got away from Burgoyne. Scalding water sprayed out with a spluttering roar over the coolies and they pulled back with wild yells of fear and pain. Then steam came in a roaring, billowing cloud that hid the scrambling coolies.

“Maskee. Throttle off, Frenchy,” Lynch said.

Someone laughed on the boat deck. Bordelles ran up the ladder and snapped, “Silence during drills!” The steam cleared off and the last of the scalded coolies were still running up to the bank. The coolies up there were laughing and pointing fingers. They thought it was a good joke on the scalded coolies. The steam hose humped across the pulled-in gangplank, leaking badly even after being drained. It was made of interlocking brass strips wound in a spiral, with asbestos packing between the turns, and it was supposed to be self-tightening under pressure. But steam feathered all along it and it made the whole quarterdeck hot and wet and steamy.

When they secured, Lynch told Holman that he would be second in command of the waist party. He gave Holman a key to the arms locker, the same key Pitocki had carried for twelve years. Holman was going to have to co-sign all the Title B cards with Lynch, for the stuff in the locker. There was a lot of stuff, including a box of grenades and a dozen cutlasses. It was not good news to Holman.

“Chief, do you have quarters and battle drills like this every day on here?” he asked.

“All but weekends. Some days we skip the battle drills.”

Holman did not let his dismay show on his face.

It was not until after dinner that Holman could get into dungarees and into the engine room. He sniffed in the smell, and his heart beat faster. Seven or eight half-naked coolies were scrubbing and shining. One was Po-han, and Holman winked at him. He started at once to learn the plant. The main plant was the two boilers, the engine, the main condenser, the main circulating, air and feed pumps, and all the piping that served them. The auxiliary plant was the dynamos and the remaining pumps and heat exchangers and piping. The piping was hardest to learn, and almost all navy engineers figured they knew it when they knew all the key valve combinations for routine operating. On any ship the piping had hundreds of valves and fittings and it branched and snaked behind things and through bulkheads and in and out of the bilges until a man’s eyes became lost and dizzy trying to trace and remember. On an old ship there would always be hidden cross connections and plugs and blanks and drain
valves, put in for some forgotten purpose by men long since dead or transferred, and no one would even know they were there. No one but Jake Holman. It was part of his secret to take all of the piping, clear and sharp in detail, inside his head.

He started with the steam at the boiler shells and traced it through every branching to every outlet and memorized the position of every valve. Then he went to the log desk and sketched the system from memory and checked his sketch against the actual piping, and he had it, all right. He took up the exhaust system. The tracing took him all around the engine room and he could feel the coolies watching him and not liking it and the boss coolie liking it least of all. The boss coolie wore a black jacket with cloth buttons to how that he did not work. He was old, with a bony, cruel face and a few long hairs on his chin. Holman knew that feeling from his other ships, although it was strange to feel it from Chinese. There was always a clique of old hands in an engine room, and they always wanted a new man to learn from them as much as they wanted him to know and wait his time for admission to the clique. It always disturbed them to see Jake Holman learning by himself. They were afraid he would learn too much and have power over them, and they were right. It was rough on them. They couldn’t try to learn more themselves, because they had spent too many years pretending they already knew it all. They couldn’t openly stop Holman from learning, because learning the plant was supposed to be good. So they always tried by the weight of their silent disapproval to force Jake Holman to stay as fumbling and ignorant as they were, and nothing in the world could spur Jake Holman on more than that silent disapproval. The machinery was always on Jake Holman’s side, because machinery was never taken in by pretense and ignorance.

Holman could not really believe he was going to be in a struggle with the coolies. They were just coolies and even Stawski, the fireman, could give them orders. Holman finished the feed system and he was ready to start tracing lines in the bilges and he needed help. Po-han and another coolie were scrubbing the white round of the auxiliary condenser.

“You, Po-han. You, Joe,” Holman said, pointing at them. “My looksee bilge side. Take up floh plate. You sabby?”

“My sabby. Catch fye sclapah,” Po-han said.

He dropped his rag in the bucket and went around the engine to the workbench. The other coolie just stared at Holman. The boss coolie came up. He was angry.

“Bilge pidgin no can do,” he said. “Lynch speakee me washee poht side.”

“My talkee Lynch by-m-by,” Holman said.

“No can do bilge pidgin!”

The old man’s voice rose high and cracked and he had spittle on his lips. The coolies had all downed rags to watch, and now face was involved. Holman had to save both their faces. He tapped his chest.

“My do bilge pidgin. Looksee pipe, larn pidgin all pipe, you sabby?” he said mildly, wanting all of them to hear. “Must have one man floh plate pidgin.”

“One piecee man can do,” the boss coolie said grudgingly. “Two piecee man, no can do.”

He was willing to save face, but he was still angry. Holman shrugged. Po-han came with a file scraper and Holman had him lift a floorplate beside the main air pump. He found it dark and hard to get around in the bilges. The main engine foundation ran along the keel like a wall and heavy I-girders ran curving down and across from the bilge stringer to the engine foundation. Fore-and-aft brace and tie plates between the girders made a honeycomb of what were called bilge pockets. Along the side were the auxiliary machinery foundations and the water ends of pumps. Holman had to squirm across the tops of the girders, between the light angle-iron framing that supported the floorplates.

He grunted and squirmed along. It was hot, hard and dirty work, and just because of that, the bilge piping was always the least known. Most of the piping ran on top of the girders, but some went lower, through the limber holes of the girders, and Holman looked at every inch of it and ran his hands along the sides that he could not see. He
did not want to miss any hidden fitting or cross connection. Even if it was only an ear left on a gasket, he wanted to know about it.

Po-han was a good helper. Whenever Holman tapped on the underside of a floorplate, Po-han was right there to lift it and let light flood in. The bilges were very dry and clean, for bilges, and they smelled cleanly of paint and oil. Everything was painted with red lead except the bottom plating, which was coated with black bitumastic. In places the plating bulged inward and even some of the girders looked slightly askew. There was no dirt or rust. But red lead in bilges never gets quite dry and down beside the engine oil had rotted the bitumastic, and when Holman came out to make his first sketch he was dripping sweat and smudged from head to foot with red and black.

Po-han took sharp interest in the sketch. He pointed to the crosses and said, “Wowel? B’long wowel?” until Holman understood he meant “valve” and nodded.

Holman worked across back of the engine and along both sides and finally across the front. He was getting very tired, and part of it was the mental concentration of so much learning. The pockets across the front were the worst of all, with heat from the steaming boiler softening the bitumastic and a tangle of hot drain lines to dodge, but quite a bit of light came down the backs of the boilers and there was no need to lift floorplates. He had just traced a feed suction line over to a hydrokineter when Chinese yelling broke out above him and someone cried, “Jehk! Jehk!” and a slug of hot water hit him on the back of his legs. He scrambled into another bilge pocket just in time. Steam roared and blasted where he had been and came through the limber hole beside him very hot and choking.

“Turn off that steam! You sons of bitches, turn off that steam!” Holman yelled.

It stopped. Holman was shaken and angry. He crawled back to where a floorplate was up and came out. Someone had blown down the boiler water glass, but no one was near it now. The coolies were all going up the starboard ladder.

“Stop! Which one of you bastards blew that glass?” Holman
yelled through the engine at them.

They went on up. Holman ran around the engine and got control of himself at the foot of the ladder and stood there fuming. Po-han, his face a blank, stood over by the workbench. He would not meet Holman’s eyes. Holman calmed himself down. He knew that boss coolie had blown the glass. Po-han had objected and had tried to warn Holman, but Po-han probably had good reasons for being afraid of the boss coolie. Po-han was still all right.

“Holman! What the hell happened to you?”

Wilsey was coming down the ladder, clean in white shorts.

“Been in the bilges,” Holman said. “That Goddamned bone-faced boss coolie blew the glass right on top of me!”

“Old Chien? Well, we always blow the glass when the watch changes.” Wilsey stopped at the foot of the ladder. “None of us ever goes in the bilges,” he said. “Chien probably didn’t know you was there.”

“He knew. He knew, all right. Then they all hauled ass.”

“They always knock off at four o’clock, and Chien always blows the glass then,” Wilsey said soothingly. “Chien’s a good old guy. If you treat him right, he’s always respectful and does what you tell him.” He edged past Holman and went to the log desk. “We couldn’t get along without old Chien,” he said.

“By God, I can get along without him!”

Wilsey turned. His round, pleasant face looked annoyed. “Just what in hell were you doing in the bilges in the first place?” “Tracing lines.”

“I’d’ve been glad to show you where the valves are. On this ship, only coolies go bilge crawling.” He looked Holman up and down and frowned. “We all lose face when a white man gets as filthy and dirty as you are right now. If you want Chien to respect you, just stay out of the bilges.”

“I don’t give a shit about your face,” Holman said. “Chien don’t have to respect me, but he better God damned well not cross my bow again. I just want to learn this plant, and nothing’s going to stop me!”

Wilsey shrugged and turned his back and began writing up the log. Holman scowled at him a moment, then shrugged too and went back into the bilges. He did not have much more to go. When he finished and came out, Wilsey was gone.