The Jonah Watch

Chapter 8

Brace’s shaved head was a tribute to amon’s engaged concern, which was not patchy although Brace’s haircut certainly was. In an attempt to save as much fur as possible, Amon snipped, clipped, razored, turned Brace’s head this way and that, and proclaimed the finished job a masterpiece—and so it was, had Brace been a pagan living in Samoa. To the surprise of all hands, Brace took his ordeal with the insensateness of the Buddha. The mirror explained to him that he had a high forehead, above which, and fairly far aft, a low pool of fuzz rose like a spring, to flow forward in a questioning way toward his left ear where it was absorbed back into the water table of his skull an instant before it arrived. The right side of his head was clipped and spotted with patches of baldness, like an aging Marine suffering a twenty-year bout with jungle crud.

“It will grow back,” Amon mourned. “Such is my fate.”

Lamp, as practical as any cook ever gets, suggested that Amon borrow a camera and preserve the record. Amon sniffed with oriental disdain. “I am not a tourist,” he told Lamp, then paused, ”… although I am a very long way from home.”

“You look like you got hit by a flight of seagulls,” Glass told Brace. “Sue the Chinaman.”

“Like bilge scraping,” said Fallon.

“Like shark bait,” said Conally.

“Your envy is ugly,” Amon told them. “You would foul up a free lunch. You would despoil the Last Supper.”

“You are a heathen—yes—heathen.” Lamp slammed the door of the oven, turned. “Now look what you made me do.”

Dane sniffed like a consumer inspecting popcorn at the concession in a seedy theatre. “I liked him better when he was painted,” Dane said to Conally. To Brace he said, “Get up the mast.”

“The view is tremendous,” Conally told Brace.

Dane yelled at the bridge watch. “Secure the transmitter. Man aloft. Acknowledge.”

“I got it off,”… a distant yell.

Starting at the base of the mast and working upward, Brace chipped patches of rust, applied red lead to cleaned steel at the end of each day, climbed above the drying red lead on the next day, like a clam digger gradually following a tide. “If I start him at the top, he’ll get dizzy and fall off,” Conally explained to Howard.

Day followed day. Brace looked like a kite tangled among the wires of a telephone pole. He was perfectly situated to be the first man to see cutter Abner, bulked like a small, white and concentrated dot beside dark cliffs as it towed its string of refugees—but he was not the first. His attention was directed at placing an even coat of paint on the mast.

Lamp was the first to see Abner, or so in later years he claimed. “Boys, I be double-dog-damn,” claiming one more minor miracle in that flat procession of days that saw Adrian hang against the pier impeccably dressed, like a partygoer waiting forever for an undispatched taxi.

Abner looked like a missionary lady leading derelicts to soup and prayer. Ezekiel rode high, directly astern on a shortened tow, its load of fish returned to the mindless Atlantic, that maw of gulls and basking sharks. Behind Ezekiel, Clara seemed to huddle frightened and scorched on the water; smoke and burn like a Puritan brand staining the house where rust already worked beneath blisters of paint. Alongside Abner, on snubbed tow, Hester C. made brief, impelled, black and gray dashes, like a rebellious child trying to escape the determined grasp of a pedestrian aunt.

The appearance of the tawdry group of collected wanderers stilled work in Portland harbor. Men laid tools aside, or stepped from the salesrooms of ship’s chandlers, or came blinking from bars, coal yards, fish sheds. In sympathy, it seemed, with the instincts of Lamp, each man in harbor wanted to be able to say that he had “seen it.” Hester C., the star of the show, was set loose from Abner, its engine started, and a seaman guided it to the end of the pier where it would huddle like a small, dark demon flanked by the bows of Adrian and Abner.

Wide-hipped workboats moved like aging bankers with ambitions killed by the redundancy of profit. They splashed to Ezekiel and Clara, put lines aboard, chugged with bored avariciousness toward repair docks in Portland. In South Portland an ambulance appeared at the foot of the pier to receive the faceless Spaniard. Aboard Adrian, men stopped work, drifted to the main deck, spilled slowly and respectfully down the gangway, following Levere. In its entire battered history, Abner had never enjoyed so many line handlers in attendance on a pier.

“No need for it, chum, no need—its fuel allocations are cut—truth?—we’re not cruising—is that true, Cap—true—true?—yes—okay, but look at those guys—no need for it, chum—yes, but just look at those guys—”

Abner’s fantail was like a stubby explosion of neglect. In no man’s memory had there ever been Irish pennants, discarded chafing gear, tangled line piled, heaped, shoved aside on that fantail. The uncovered winch was skewed, no doubt in range of eventual repair, but enough tilted to alarm the heart. A gear locker sat dented, and paint on the heavy steel was indifferently shattered by an exploding line, while above the locker a floodlight dangled, broken from its base and wearing shards of the glass lens. The new towline lay in two unconnected mounds, like rubble.

Clearly they were in a bad way on Abner. The dago radioman Diamond, ordinarily as clean and efficient as an electronics tube, appeared at the rail where, while docking, he customarily had no business. He grumbled dispassionate instructions to line handlers. His black hair was lank and filled with grease, his shirt ripped, and a mixture of oil and soot scarred his face below a formerly white hat that seemed to have been dipped in the bilges.

A bosun’s mate limped, leaned heavily against a stanchion like a man supported only by his conscience, while seamen stood stupidly at the rail, holding lines that they studied with the dull curiosity of idiots. Abner’s captain slumped on the wing, muttering helm and engine orders to yeoman Wilson, who stood inside at the telegraph and muttered to the helmsman. A quartermaster wandered aimlessly on the flying bridge, like a man trying to remember an errand.

Abner’s crew, it developed, had been standing six on, two off, six on, two off, for over five days. Had the crew been able to sleep on those two-hour breaks, their job would have only been terribly difficult.

“It was just a nothing kind of sea,” yeoman Wilson told yeoman Howard. “Maybe ten- to twelve-foot swells, but they were wide. No matter how you rigged, part of the tow would be hitting the backside of one just as you were coasting down the front of another. Line broke six times.”

Yeoman Howard, recalling similar fiascos, although none so great, and with a resolution to do better by Lamp whom he had possibly in some way offended, took his feelings of indetermination to Lamp.

“The winch tore up on the first day when they tried to adjust the tow to that crazy sea. They walked the line the rest of the time. All hands.”

“New towline…” Had Lamp been informed of God’s suicide, his universe could hardly have been more shaken.

“They went through every scrap of line they had aboard,” Howard said. “They had to pump Clara three times. Ezekiel was yelling about being in the middle of the tow, afraid it would spring the keel.”

“It must of sprung the keel,” said Lamp. “They wouldn’t tow to a dry dock just for a busted engine.”

“Helmsman on the lobster boat, helm watch, towing watch, steaming watch… the line broke a couple of the bosun’s ribs.”

“Lucky. He was lucky.”

“He sure was.” Howard, in spite of the warm galley, shivered.

“I been to the fantail,” Lamp admitted, “to look at the new line. I got this queasy feeling, like.”

One by one the men drifted aft to look at the new line.

“I forgot the date,” Lamp said, less portentously than Howard expected. “It’s gone and turned to September.”

“Just keep something in the pot,” Howard said. “Those guys are going to wake up starving.”

The secular world of a ship rarely extends beyond its own gangway, and only under intimate conditions.

Brace, like a cloud-walker on the mast, looked down at the curious sight of Adrian’s crew boarding Abner. Abner’s crew disappeared to gamey-smelling and finally immobile bunks where they lay like a small company of mostly clothed corpses, drawn faces gradually relaxing beneath the red nightlights that were turned on in the waning afternoon. Howard, checking the crew list, stood silent, counting, hugely moved by a small intimation of fear.

On Adrian, the bosun Conally stood at the foot of the mast and yelled, “Secure the job.”

Had they been offered, Abner’s captain would not have accepted watchstanders from the Base, which was too remote, too uncertain. He would have asked his crew to muddle through. Levere, given the same circumstance, would have refused as well.

“Move quiet,” Dane hissed above Abner’s fantail. “Flake the line on the pier. They’ll want to repair it themselves.”

Brace, knowing the spectacular solitude of the mast, and having had time to consider the largest implications of Snow’s backhanding, stepped to earth with new convictions.

“I should be over there helping.”

“We’re splitting crew,” Conally said. “Double watches. You take the four-to-mid.”

“What can I do now?”

“Pretend we’re steaming,” Conally told him. “Sack out until your watch. Let your hair grow.”

Once again, the gray chill moved down the pier, insinuating between the ships, concentrating at the end of the pier where Hester C. rode on its mooring, unclaimed, certainly unloved, and absolutely feared. By the time Brace relieved the watch at 1600, the local newspaper was on the streets carrying an ignorant, journalistic account, together with a ten-year-old photograph of Abner’s captain taken when he was exec on the snatcher Bluebell. Various deities, all of whom could be accused of inventing the sea, and of instigating the notion of things that float, were flagrantly thanked in Portland’s missions and churches.

Brace relieved the watch, checked the phone, entered weather observations in the log, turned up the radio, looked to the mooring, and made himself acquainted with the current traffic in Portland harbor. As the dusk gathered, he surveyed the lights of Portland where, it might be, lonely young women of worth waited with hope for the friendship of some man who did not wear a white hat. As dusk accumulated, and the tide fell, Hester C. dropped below the end of the pier until only the mast was visible.

With Dane and Snow aboard Abner, Conally found himself serving as OD, and it was Conally, shaken from sleep sometime after 2300, who looked into the pale, terrified features of Brace, who, although not yet drooling, was idiot-eyed. Conally was on his feet and starting to dress before Brace could speak.

“It’s adrift.”

“What?”

“That lobster boat is adrift.”

Conally relaxed. “Things drift,” he said, preparing himself almost optimistically for an eventual return to sleep. “We’ll call the Base. Let them pick it off with a small boat.”

“Things don’t drift against the tide,” Brace chattered.

Hester C., like a small blot of self-destruction, faced the tide in a drift toward the mudflats.

Conally, shaken to the denied roots of his Indian-raised soul, swore later that his hair stood straight. He raced to the bridge, called the Base, watched a picket boat pick up the tow and return it to the pier. Conally checked the lines, found them sound, and made up the mooring himself.

“Sometimes the tide pools up,” he told Brace. “It gets to working in circles.” He checked his watch. “Time to call your relief.”

Brace, withdrawn to silence, and with shame over his fear, returned to the bridge. Conally went belowdecks like a confused bear retreating to a cave—only to be wakened an hour and a half later by Glass, who was resolute and in control, and perfectly articulating a language that Conally thought was either Arabic or Armenian.

“Speak English.”

“It’s doing it again,” Glass said.