The Jonah Watch

Chapter 18

That first, that original jonah, sitting beneath wilted leaves in a drying wind and wondering what in the empty world to do next, could hardly have been more heartsick and confused than Howard who crept like a wounded man to the small sanctuary of his office. On his way across the messdeck he drew a mug of coffee, tasted the stuff, gagged. He emptied the mug and placed it in a rack.

Something definite had happened with the small boat. Adrian now ran head to sea, treading the high swell in a series of monotonous, crashing, engine-rumbling actions that seemed less sensible than the bobber on a fishline, no more sensible than empty rafts on an ocean. A few men clustered on the messdeck, sleepy from the long night, but huddling in the bright lights there rather than making the journey forward to the darkened crew’s compartment. Howard made movement to unlash a chair, thought better of it, and sat on his small desk. He propped his back against a file cabinet and braced his feet against a bulkhead. He sat fore-and-aft in the dark office, easy with the pitch, defenseless against a roll.

Bastions of belief—as old men remember—are tough walled. A man trots easily through zoonomias of belieflessness. Though he may have the most demanding and silly faith, he is sound for as long as the bastion stays unbreached. Howard gagged, pushed at the bulkhead as if he tried to shove the ship apart. Lamp appeared in the hatchway bearing a steaming mug. Lamp seemed somehow old and foolish, a man who carried a mug but who projected no illusion.

“This is fresh,” Lamp said. “I got a little teapot in the galley. Make a couple cups at a time.” He passed it to Howard.

Howard, grateful, and unerringly knowing that he was in no shape to express it, sipped at the coffee and stared past the bulking, shadowed form of Lamp. He looked from the darkened office onto the brilliantly lighted messdeck.

“Wilson wasn’t nosy enough to get killed,” Howard said. “He wasn’t even nosy enough to be a yeoman.”

“This is the worst winter, this is the baddest winter I ever remember.”

“It isn’t even winter. It’s October.”

“November,” Lamp told him. “We’ve passed over to November.” He hesitated, was apologetic. “Did their radioman say how it happened?”

“They’d never allow that on the radio, ever.” Howard sipped at the coffee, burned his mouth. “It’s a carnival. That kid is right.”

Lamp seemed ready to tell a story, to hark back to some miserable winter peopled with Chinamen, or to tales of wooden-hulled icebreakers parting the mists of Puget Sound. Then he thought better of it, standing in the hatchway with his back to the messdeck. He stared past Howard into the darkened wardroom. Lamp did not simply seem old. Lamp was old. The shock of that fact pressed Howard against the file cabinet in a sort of spasm of disbelief as his legs pressured the bulkhead. Lamp was not as old as Dane, but he was certainly older than Snow. Without the mug, and without the hasty solicitude, Lamp no longer looked foolish. He was not the man that any other man would choose for a father, if a man could choose a father; yet the sireless Howard watched him and perhaps felt—if only a little—that a few foundations were untumbled.

Lamp seemed to be peering into a long tunnel of night. He stared into the wardroom, and his heavy bulk was supported against the pitch by outspread arms. Like an overweight crucifix, a stretched Buddha, he hovered on ancient steel plates entombed between sea and sky.

“We’ve had enough, Jensen,” Lamp said. “If you had a job to do, you’ve done it.”

Lamp touched Howard’s knee. Pointed. Howard moved from his position, lost balance against the sea, regained his balance. He peered into the dark wardroom, and his eyes adjusted slowly after having looked at Lamp’s dark silhouette against the bright lights of the messdeck.

The apparition, the dark dungarees in the small black vault of the wardroom, slumped headless, handless. Legs disappeared beneath the table where feet, if there were any, might extend through steel and be planted against the hull itself. The darkness of the apparition was a faint illumination on the deeper darkness of the wardroom. The figure sat, leaned forward as though it placed an invisible head on dungaree-covered arms lying crossed on the table. It sat motionless, like an exhausted man sleeping.

“The boys can’t take no more,” Lamp said. “This is your crew, chum.”

Shoulders of the dungaree shirt raised, hunched, relaxed, raised, and it was clear that the figure wept. Sounds of weeping, or perhaps only sounds of the wash of the sea, echoed in the black chamber of the wardroom. Then fading, darkening, black merging into black—Jensen disappeared.

From behind Lamp, footsteps sounded in a hard pounding rush. The elfish, and frightened, and certainly guilty face of Masters appeared like a hiss of hysteria.

“Who are you talking to? What is it?” Masters shouldered his way past Lamp, stood looking at Howard, then turned to Lamp.

“He was talking to me,” Howard said, “and this office is off limits to punks.”

Masters stood in the darkened office, his guilt changing to desperate despair. “A quill driver,” he said, “and a fat cook. You lie like rugs.”

Lamp reached with one foot to kick away the curving brass hook that secured the door. He closed the door carefully, like a man determined not to break anything. He twisted the worn, black light-switch and the office was illuminated. Howard backed toward the wardroom, dropped the mug, heard it smash. Howard was not a little frightened. Howard, and possibly no other man, had ever seen Lamp behave as Lamp behaved. Masters was not less than six feet, weighed not less than one-hundred-seventy, and yet, when Lamp leaned forward to snatch him by the belt and raise him into a corner of the office, Masters seemed like a small rag doll.

“You yellowed on the boat deck,” Lamp told him. “You’re tryin’ to start something.” He gave Masters a shake, and Masters’s head bonged against the angle formed by bulkhead and overhead. “Ain’t you? Ain’t you?”

Masters gasped, tried to arch backward, either to kick, or to relieve pressure from the belt that was cutting beneath his small ribs, chewing at his kidneys.

“Because if you can start something,” Lamp said, and he rattled Masters against the bulkhead, “if you can get everybody scared, then the boys will forget you’re yellow.”

“He’s about to get hurt bad,” Howard said timidly. “It’s breaking his back.”

Lamp’s forearm trembled. His voice lowered. He gave Masters a shake that rattled Masters’s head into the corner with a beat as steady as a fighter on a bag.

“I don’t book guys,” Lamp told Masters. “And I don’t threaten them. This here’s a promise.”

Masters choked, looked like he was dying.

“One word. One. There ain’t a place far enough, or a hole deep enough, that I can’t find you. Got that? Have you got that?”

Masters choked and gulped, tried to nod his banging head.

“Okay. Out.” Lamp dropped Masters, and Masters thumped gasping into the corner.

“And take the word to Racca,” Lamp told him. “Does he want something busted besides his arm?”

Lamp shrugged, turned toward Howard in a nearly placid manner. He was like a man easy in his mind after making a small and successful decision. “I got this bad temper,” he said apologetically. “Had to fight it pretty much all my life.”

Howard, who was mildly democratic, and who would have sworn that he could deal with reality, felt that the world which he thought he understood had just turned fish-belly up. “I better pick up these pieces,” he said apologetically. He began to kneel to get the broken mug.

Adrian skidded, kept skidding, kept skidding, to end with a thump that bent hinged knees and threw Lamp and Howard into squats. Masters, feeling his way to his feet, was knocked backward. He fell. Masters banged an already well-banged head.

“Where did that come from?”

“Count seven.”

Adrian ran another swell, banged hard, but it did not run the long line of travel that accompanied the first swell.

“That’s one.”

On the seventh swell, Adrian skidded, skidded, kept skidding, skidding, and the jolt rattled tables that were welded to the deck in wardroom and messdeck.

“It’s a new storm,” Lamp said. “Or the other one moved in a circle.”

“No wind.”

“It’s out there someplace.”

“If it’s circling.”

“It may find us. Maybe not.”

Masters managed to stand. He did not exactly look chastened, but he looked like a man with a brand new way of viewing matters. “We got guys aboard that scow.” He propped himself against a bulkhead, flapped one hand, helpless, turned to the hatch. He fled with all the dignity he could muster, about the same dignity owned by a mired donkey.

“At least you stopped him talking.”

“Naw,” Lamp said. “He’ll talk. He just won’t talk as loud.”

“What do you make…?” Howard pointed to the darkened wardroom.

“It’s a sign,” Lamp said easily. “What we got to do is figure out the sign.”

Howard had lost count. He thought the next wave might be the seventh. He steadied himself. “You weren’t afraid.” The wave was the seventh. Adrian roller-coastered, thumped, crashed.

“Nothing to be scared about,” Lamp said. “Jensen was a shipmate.” Lamp prepared to leave. “I got to figure some way to get these guys some coffee. I got to get something in some bellies.” He was suddenly a man ridden by anxiety, like a high school boy dared by his pals into a date with an older and experienced woman. He seemed ready to bustle, to explain legends, to become, in fact, the Lamp whom Howard had known for so long.

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Does Levere?”

Howard was about to say that it was not the same. “I guess I ought to check Racca,” he said. “Then go to the bridge. We’re in for it.”

Lamp flapped one hand, helplessly. “I’ve lost friends,” he said. “I’m awful sorry about your friend Wilson.” Then he fled, a man chased by abstract demons of memory which now wore the mild and practical names of hot cereal and fresh coffee.

In the hours before dawn the temperature plummeted; Howard, headed forward, stepped to the main deck to lean against a chain with both hands. The cold steel, the freezing air, and wisps of spray thrown from forward by the bow helped wake him. He stared into the dark sea that ran alongside, and he stood spraddle-legged against the increasing pitch. Phosphorescence spun past the hull in thin flashes like schools of fish. He tested for wind, found none except the small breeze raised by Adrian’s passage. In the scuppers, water ran from the breaking bow wave, and, along the edges of the scuppers, mushy salty-water ice formed a thin line, a promise, a threat; the line like a pencil of definition running the circumference of the ship.

Forward and to starboard, no more than a half mile distant, Aphrodite glowed against the dark sky and darker sea. Men were clustered forward. In the bright floodlights powered by a portable generator, the men moved like a congregation of shadows, as water washed across the sagging bow. They were like creatures of surf, primal; forms rising from the immense tide pool of the sea. Alongside Aphrodite the small boat bounced, was fended off by three, or possibly four, dark figures. The small boat moved alongside Aphrodite’s hull, and the figures bent over a bulky lump from which lines radiated to the deck.

Dane was attempting to rig a sea patch. Dane was not fooling around by casting the thing on the breath of a little hope, a little prayer. As Howard watched, Aphrodite turned its stern two points across the sea to press rushing water against the hull. The patch went over, the lines straightened, and the boat closed against the pitching yacht. For minutes Howard stood, leaning against the chain, mute. Then, from a distance, he heard shouting. He pushed himself erect, ready for action, a jolt of fear urging his feet toward the bridge. Then he stopped. The shouts were cheers. The wide mouth of the leak had sucked the patch.

“We’ve got it,” Howard said. “They did it, chum. They did it, Wilson.” He hesitated, looking up and down the deck as if he expected a reply. The only sounds were the sea, the distant hum of the generator, and the faint and distant voice of Dane hollering commands.