The Jonah Watch

Chapter 6

Chief engineman Edward Snow was small and quick, and only a little effeminate. He leered displeasure from a raised left eyebrow instead of hollering; and he took a tough and competent black gang and made it better.

“We’ll not do it that way, lads.”

Snow moved as accurately as a dipper gull, but he looked like a trim, khaki-colored towhee. By many pounds, and two or three inches, he was easily the shortest and lightest man aboard. Even the compact Amon seemed like a lumbering two-decker bus in comparison. Snow’s feet never tapped with impatience, but he caused others’ feet to tap as they pondered his administration. Fallon swore that Snow had typical brown English hair and was a socialist. When Howard pointed out that Fallon had never met a brown Englishman, socialist or not, Fallon muttered curses.

“He took down Jensen’s watchstanding orders.”

“The Ark of the Covenant,” Glass said. “Yids understand these things.”

“Don’t make jokes. ”

Snow pulled piping and wiring diagrams from the files. In league with Fallon and electrician Wysczknowski, he traced the systems and altered the diagrams. Cutter Adrian had been replumbed and rewired so many times that the diagrams were a cat’s-paw of revision. Quartermaster Chappel and yeoman Howard knew less about a drafting board than they knew about an abacus, but they began learning to draft. Revised schematics slowly began to stack up in the ship’s office, and even more slowly to appear in freshly redrawn form. Chappel and Howard struggled and cursed. Adrian’s twin, cutter Abner, was at sea and equally struggling. Seaman apprentice Brace was tilted slaunchways from another encounter with Dane and—because of the lost Mona, or made lonely by the dying summer—was constructing a new hero.

“All hands belowdecks must memorize these diagrams,” Snow told Howard. “Work with great care.”

“It’s the only way you can work, when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You are receiving a large favor,” Snow told him. “Few quill-drivers ever learn how to draft.”

With Adrian on standby, the crew found itself testy after a summer of inaction. Men grumbled that since they could not go ashore it was foolish to hang against the pier. They muttered against the judgment of First District Operations as they followed the steadily increasing troubles of cutter Abner.

“Levere already asked,” radioman James told an assembly on the messdeck. “Operations won’t give us a proceed-and-assist.” To Lamp he said, “I thought Abner was supposed to be lucky.”

“The sea’s not running hard, boys.”

“That’s blamed small luck.”

“It’s touchy, boys. It’s touchy. Don’t think bad thoughts.”

Across the pier, and on the seaward side, where the familiar shape of Abner had seemed rooted during the summer, there now lay only the long perspective of distance.

The harbor still sparkled with sunlight, the inner islands were black, tree-covered and faraway humps, while clean-lined and freshly painted Norwegian freighters stood at the docks beside rusty Panamanian buckets, scarred coastal tankers, trim Britons, Canadians and a small white-and-green Irishman sparkling with pride and polish. Spectral French and Italian death ships mouldered against the docks like ghosts suffering extreme unction through the sacramental wine in their scuppers, rust in their bilges, and the oil that enclosed their hulls. Gray and white American tankers flew snapping corporation colors from their masts like small testimonials to efficiency; and, hanging like spiders in great clusters of drying nets, the ever present trawlers were aromatic with sweat and sun and fish as men forked the catch from the holds like farmers pitching hay—while, in the channel, yachts and lobster boats moved like a swirl of gnats above the face of a drowsing absolute.

Cutter Abner, en route to the grounds, laid line aboard the trawler Ezekiel, disabled with a cracked piston while inbound with a full catch packed beneath rapidly melting ice. Glass, standing bridge watch on the moored Adrian, was joined by Howard who was taking a break. Glass intermittently checked Abner’s progress. He switched the radio to the working frequency of 2694.

“They’ll save the load,” Howard said, “if he don’t break his seal too often staring down his hatch.”

“We’ve raised to eight knots,” said the static-crackling voice of Abner’s captain. “How are you riding, cap?”

“Raise it more if you wa-nt-a.” Ezekiel’s radio was stronger than the rig on Abner. “This load ain’t too thrifty.”

“We’ll stay with eight,” Abner crackled.

“No sea to speak of,” said Glass, “if they’re shagging it that fast.”

“They better shag it fast. They’re sitting on a perfume factory.”

It was then that Brace, passing a gallon of paint from the main deck to a man on the boat deck, learned that you never lift an open can of paint by the bale.

Glass switched the set back to the faintly popping watch frequency. Through the open hatch, and distant, sounded the snap of the commission pennant, while from the buoy yard a crane groaned and whirred. An engine chugged and idled in the small boat basin. There was a thump, a small confusion of voices, a shout, and then whoops and hollers of laughter which gave way to a heavily trudging step along the main deck. Silence accompanied the walker, and then low laughter resumed as a thin, birdlike whistle of amazement seemed to nudge the heavy steps forward and up the ladder to the bridge.

Brace stepped through the hatch wearing a single wrinkle on his otherwise smooth forehead, and doused with green paint splashed in his hair, across one cheek, and saturating his shirt like a slick lustre of green blood. The paint ran the length of one leg and colored a shoe. Brace looked like a member of the walking wounded, but, though bowed, stood as unrepentant as a cannibal unfairly baptized by a zealot.

“I have,” Brace said, “three years, seventeen days…” He stooped forward like an old man to look at Glass’s wristwatch, “…eleven hours and thirteen and a half minutes to pull in this fun house. I want a transfer to the engine room.”

“That’s the way all thirty-year men talk,” Glass said. “Me, I ain’t a thirty-year man. I’m putting in time ’til the Mafia calls.”

“Stop dripping,” Howard told Brace.

“Let him drip if he wants,” Glass said. “How much worse off can he get?”

“A request mast,” Brace said. “I want to change my rate to the engine room.”

Howard stared at Brace and seemed to be giving the matter his deepest attention. “There shouldn’t be any trouble in getting a mast,” he said in tones that displayed great thoughtfulness. “I hear it climbing the ladder.”

Dane’s slow step was accompanied by puffs of deep breath drawn against rheumatism, and they made mere doom seem like a cheap and silly thing. Dane appeared in the hatch that led to the wing and he squinted. His eyes widened and stared, froglike. His thin mouth was as tight and straight as any line on Howard’s beginning diagrams. Dane blinked, made motion to move onto the bridge, stopped.

No one, in Howard’s memory, had ever before seen Dane speechless. The radio crackled. The commission pennant popped. The indifferent idling of the engine in the small boat basin smoothed and rose with a controlled growl as the boat set off on harbor patrol.

“Illinois,” Dane whispered hoarsely, “I wisht they sent the cow, instead.” He stepped through the hatch and onto the bridge. At first he looked both awed and reverent. Then he eyed Brace in the way that a hungry man might view a pork chop, but when he spoke his voice was low and seemed nearly kind. “I don’t want to know how you did it,” he told Brace. “I don’t want to know why you did it…” He slowly straightened like an inflatable raft filling and stretching toward shape. Howard and Glass watched, backed away, fascinated by the swelling chest beneath the khaki shirt as Dane gulped air to roar from full lungs and a fuller heart—

“But why in the name of God and the Holy Clap did you track it around!”

The radio crackled. The departing boat’s engine was a rhythmic and diminished hum. In the buoy yard the crane snuffled and clanked. Brace opened his mouth to protest, looking like a man trying to spit out too much air as he faced a hurricane wind.

The radio popped, fizzled, settled to a hum as somewhere at sea a transmitter opened:

“Priority. Priority,” said a nervous, frightened voice from Abner. “Nan-mike-fox from nan-mike-fox-two-one… priority, priority.”

Howard stood stunned. Brace drooped. Howard looked at Glass, at Dane, and saw their shocked and temporarily vacant faces.

“Calling Operations.”

“That’s their radioman, Diamond. I’d know that dago’s voice anywhere. That’s a tough dago.”

“Stay on top of it,” Dane told Glass. “I’ll be back as soon as I get this kid to pasture.” He looked at the radio, which, to all but Brace, suddenly seemed like a lethal gray box of fright. He looked once more at Brace, then at paint spills on the matting of the bridge, splashes on the wing, and pools between cleats on the ladder. Brace, his moment of defiance passed, stood miserable. He looked like a half-finished but brightly colored crayon drawing.

Glass pressed a buzzer, bent forward to a voice tube. “We need you on the bridge, Cap.”

Dane took a deep breath, sighed, nodded to Brace. “You don’t clean yourself until after you clean the starboard side. If you get crackin’, you’ll finish sometime this week.”

“A tough dago,” Glass muttered. “He ain’t scared of nothing.”

“He’s scared of something.” Dane absentmindedly gave Brace a small shove, saw green paint on his fingers, wiped the paint on Brace’s shirt. “Get movin’.”

Some days later, with Abner once more hanging on the opposite side of the pier, Howard talked to his best friend, Abner’s yeoman Wilson. Wilson was a large man with an ordinarily chalky face, and his voice, ordinarily gruff, was still thin with a particular memory.

“The helm couldn’t have been locked tighter if it was lashed,” Wilson said. “He had this crazy quick-release gear that came down over the helm like a pair of hands. I never felt so spooky in my life.”

If a dinosaur had appeared at prayer in Saint Peter’s, it would have been only a little more remarkable than discovering a lobsterman underway seventy miles offshore and vaguely headed in the direction of Georges.

“It was wallowing along, making maybe one knot,” said Wilson. “We’d been towing Ezekiel for an hour. The old man had just settled on the towing speed.”

In the afternoon sun, but with rolling mist up to Abner’s stern, the small lobsterman was like a remote, black and gray pinprick of solitude struggling toward the mist. Among those hermits who deal in lobster, those men who seek remoteness and silence as well as a catch, this lobsterman seemed hard-headedly intent on insisting that one could not have enough of a good thing. The boat rose and fell easily in a light swell. As cutter Abner approached, some quirk of monkish defiance seemed to turn the lobsterman across Abner’s path. As the vessels closed, a collision course developed. Abner took off speed. The lobster boat moved as purposely across Abner’s bow as might a small animal pursue its excursions across the face of a mountain and under a formation of clouds.

“No one aboard,” Wilson said. “Our cap put over the small boat and our guys ran it down.”

The lobsterman, locking his helm in the bleak waters that splashed against the dark islands that surrounded his trade, setting his speed like a hum to underline his solitude, had been pulling traps. The slowly moving boat closed on the marker buoy. The lobsterman plucked the line from the water and took a turn on a cleat. The low speed of the boat broke the trap loose from the bottom. The technique saved some hauling, and it was common practice; but this time the man missed the cleat, doubtless had a turn of line over his hand, and the trap dragged him overboard. The boat, still under way, left him struggling in icy water, in combat with his high boots; a struggle that was small in that wet vastness that closed, empty and complete, over the final solitude.

“We had such an eerie feeling,” Wilson said, “but the worst of it came later.”

News of “the worst of it” spread to Adrian like the chill of ice fog rolling toward and over an anchored vessel. News of “the worst of it” traveled to the Base, thence across the million-dollar bridge to the bars of Portland, along the piers and into the trawlers, the lobster boats, and, subsequently, south through the fishing fleet. It became a sea story. There was no conversation so light, so ridiculous or so gay that could not be stilled by mention of the lobster boat Hester C.

Lamp’s leonine head was filled with auguries. He told stories of the Bermuda Triangle. He talked to the hobbling Indian Conally, asking after ancient spirit tales that might help him form a complete theory.

“Maybe some of the old people know,” Conally said doggedly. “I never paid no attention to that stuff.”

“’Tis coming on to winter.”

Dane, who had seen a thousand frightened seamen, was unimpressed. He blustered and threatened.

Howard reluctantly admitted that he felt the gray chill. Glass sarcasmed at himself for a sudden urge to speak Yiddish.

Brace, both then and earlier, was occupied with other matters, matters so personal and intense that no sea story could penetrate his unhappiness.

With stiff green hair and stiff dungarees, Brace cleaned paint for three days in the sun. At night he was allowed to remove his clothes and sleep in a paint-stained bunk. Dane was scrupulous. Not a fleck of paint escaped him. On a dozen occasions Brace swore that he was finished, and Dane found more paint between the grill of the ladder, on the underside of a rail, spotted beneath the mats on the bridge, or tracked to other parts of the ship on the clothes or shoes of seamen. At the end of three days even Dane was content. Brace, unable to accomplish a personal cleanup, begged Amon for help, and Amon shaved Brace’s head.

“There are such tales on the Grand Banks,” chief engineman Snow mentioned with little interest to second engineman Fallon. “Come, lad, when we plot the bilge piping, the job is complete.”

“The lobster boat was nearly out of fuel,” Abner’s yeoman Wilson told Howard. “Been wallowing along for two or three days. His lobsters was dead but not stinkin’.”

Abner had streamed grapples and gone through the necessary hours and motions of a hopeless box search. The ice in the trawler Ezekiel’s hold was melting.

“We rigged a short tow aft of Ezekiel,” Wilson told Howard. “Put a seaman aboard. All the kid had to do was lock down that helm and keep watch.”

Abner, according to yeoman Wilson, settled into a straight double tow toward nightfall. A double tow was not common, but it was something Abner had done a dozen-twenty-times before. The deck force was short one watchstander because of the man on Hester C. Still, enginemen and firemen were running two on, four off. An eight- to ten-knot breeze rose. The tows rode well and Abner maintained speed.

“We were just changing watch for the mid,” Wilson said. “That kid on the lobster boat got the engine started somehow. He dropped the tow and came kiting around Ezekiel’s stern like he had a pocketful of pus. Ran the boat alongside, eyes bulging like a cod, and yelling that the boat was haunted. We lost an hour rerigging the tow.”

“And that’s when the Clara caught fire?”

“No,” Wilson shook his head in wonderment. “The Clara didn’t catch fire until they were relieving the four-to-eight. I was aboard that bumboat at the time.

“It was just nothing, at first,” Wilson said after a moment spent thinking. “We rode for nearly an hour, me, and this seaman with his teeth chattering and pretending like he was brave. The dead lobsters were sloshing around in the well. We couldn’t run the engine because of the low fuel. It was just real quiet, and the running lights were dirty and dim and things were all shadowy.” Wilson looked at Howard, knowing that Howard had already heard the story, thinking, perhaps, that Howard would say that the story was only crazy.

“This hand came up over the transom,” Wilson said. “It just hung there for maybe thirty seconds, just pale and graspy, and then it slipped away. I ran aft and there wasn’t nothing. No splash. That kid seaman started to cry. Ten minutes later the hand came back again. I ran forward and started leaning on the whistle to signal for a stop.” Wilson looked ashamed, and then indignant. “We were only trying to help,” he said. “Trying to get the boat back in so at least his old lady could sell it. That guy was dead. He didn’t have any right to do that. He didn’t have any right at all.”