The Jonah Watch

Chapter 7

At each nightfall the gray chill seemed to move like the whisking touch of a spirit hand across Adrian. As standing lights flared against the slowly encroaching dusk that layered with the cold and colder-growing diminishment of a waning summer, men chatted beside the galley, or walked the decks, or laundered, played cards, laughed and told stories. Commercial radios on the messdeck and in the crew’s compartment were turned higher. The compartments were filled with the voices of young women, touted as “hot chicks” by a local disc jockey who praised songs of love and its unavoidable sadness. The gray chill, experienced at outwaiting eons of illusions, dwelt like an ice-covered boulder planted at the foot of the gangway.

At 2200 hours, dead center in the eight-to-twelve watch, the stories faltered, the flaring and somehow suddenly beautiful incandescent lights went out, and the red nightlights were switched on. They signaled the approach of grayness. Watch-standers on the bridge and in the engine room turned the incandescent lights up in those spaces, rolled pencils across the faces of log sheets, listened suspiciously to normal sounds; but through the rest of the ship the red lights threw pale shadows that grew increasingly grotesque.

“Nobody’ s talking,” Mother Lamp confided seriously to Howard. “It’s like the boys are pretending t’isn’t there.”

“Maybe it’s behind your shoulder, cook.”

“You’ve got a smart mouth,” Lamp said, “but you’re not smart about this. This has the same feel of something that happened once in Hong Kong.”

“There aren’t enough Chinese in Hong Kong to match the number of times I’ve heard about Hong Kong.”

“You haven’t heard this.” Lamp seemed attentive to an inner voice, a communication rising from some heretofore great void, the cold of which only he had suspected. He shook his red-blond-haired head, looked at Howard like a mother doing her best to dote on an idiot child. Then his face changed. He was nearly timid, certainly sad. “I know you don’t like me much. It’s okay. Nobody hired you to.”

“I just give you a hard time, cook.” Howard was caught with the unease of a man who has stumped his toe on a fact. “Sometimes you make too much of things.”

“Sometimes I do,” Lamp said. “So do you.”

“We all do,” Howard said magnanimously.

“No, we don’t. Lots don’t. But you do, and I do.”

“What happened in Hong Kong?”

“You’re right,” Lamp said. “I’m making too much of a thing.” He refused to tell the story. The refusal, with even less precedent than men walking on unfrozen water, pressed Howard into silence.

The week seemed saturated with gray chill and green paint. Cutter Abner sent no messages about the haunt. That was left to the fate-stricken skipper of Ezekiel who was sitting above a load of fish packed in rapidly decaying ice. The skipper talked to fishermen friends on the radio as he watched Abner’s stern disappear at flank speed to assist the burning Clara. “Won’t even do for fertilize’,” Ezekiel’s skipper said. “Going to try to hang on, chum, but I make it that we’ll have to pitch the whole catch overboard. We got this jinx boat swingin’ alongside.” Long before Abner, trailing its string of refugees, made the Portland Lightship, the nub of the story and its amplifications had entered the bars.

“They were heads-up and lucky,” Abner’s yeoman Wilson told Howard. “The fire in the Clara started in wiring in the engine spaces. They got it out, but they had structural damage aft.”

“It caused some heat aboard our ship,” Howard told him. “The new kid got a burn.”

Brace, wearing the aroma of turpentine, and with stiff green hair, came off the four-to-eight and went to the messdeck to eat before making his renewed attack on spilled paint. In the wardroom which lay forward of the messdeck on the starboard side, with the ship’s office sitting between, Levere, Dane, and Snow discussed timber for emergency shoring. Dane sat toad-silent, listening, respectful of Snow. To the surprise and provisional despair of some, Dane seemed to like Snow completely. Lamp bustled about the galley to port where he made watchstander chow for Brace and engineman striker McClean. Amon peeled spuds and kept an attentive ear cocked toward the wardroom. Brace arrived with a ladder-thumping stomp, intended, no doubt, to announce that—green paint or not—he remained his own man. He drew coffee, sat in his customary place, and slurped in a seamanlike manner; stolid, nearly, as if the presence of a wrinkle on his forehead gave him the responsibility for new reserve. His hands trembled only slightly.

“The problem ain’t technically storage,” said Dane. “But where can we store it so we can get at it fast?”

“Not below, of course,” said Snow. “To be rapidly available it must be abovedeck.”

“Got to keep the working decks clear.”

“Paint it against rot,” Levere said. “Cut it to fit as a false deck for the flying bridge. Secure it with light cable and quick-release gear.”

“That’ll work. Now, how do we get hold of it?”

“There is salvageable scrap stacked behind the Base,” said Snow.

From the galley came the distant voice of Lamp asking watchstander Brace if there were later news on Clara.

Brace’s voice, filled with hatred of paint, with frustration of green hair and stiff clothes, with anguish over the unfair death of dreams, and certainly with the violence that attends confusion, answered in a voice of low and malicious satisfaction.

“That’s one we won’t have to haul. That one isn’t going to cause anybody much more trouble.”

In the wardroom there was momentary silence.

“Excuse me, Captain. Chief.” Snow picked up his coffee mug, stepped through the office and onto the messdeck, a man walking casually on an errand only a little less innocuous than the Creation. Like an inquiring, small brown towhee, he stopped before Brace and peered. Then, with distaste for either the man or the job, he backhanded Brace across the mouth. The blow seemed casual, light, and yet Brace’s head was thrust as sharply as if he had been hit by a hatch cover. Brace recovered, started to rise, sat back down and looked upward at Snow through shock, as if questioning Snow’s fortitude and his own.

“A man had to do that for me once, lad. I think to pass on the favor.”

Brace sat dumb. Snow absentmindedly walked to the coffee urn, refilled his mug, and stepped back into the wardroom. Engineman striker McClean, normally quiet to the point of near idiocy, his long mulatto head and his jug ears as incongruous in society as his narrow fingers and thin wrists were around machinery, understood. “You’ve never seen a fire at sea,” he told Brace.

“Please excuse it, Chief,” Snow said to Dane. “The man is in your section.”

“It’s just against regs, is all,” Dane mumbled.

“This is not the English navy,” Levere said. “It isn’t even the American navy. Did you have to do that, Chief?”

“I suppose I thought I must,” Snow said. “Otherwise I would not.”

Brace stood, nearly stumbled, looked amazed to find himself upright. He rubbed the red flush on his mouth and seemed to be counting his teeth. His eyes adjusted to his upright condition. His mouth pulled into a quavering line, and then his eyes reflected awe, or, it may be, understanding, but they certainly reflected one of the countless varieties of love. He walked in a tentative way through the office and to the open wardroom door. Knocked.

“You’ve been up to your white hat in troubles, sailor.” Levere, normally remote and with full trust in his section leaders, and with a temper that was rare and thus awesome, did not like what he thought was about to happen.

“To speak to Chief Snow, sir.” Brace stood erect, with outthrust and trembling lower jaw, as resolute-seeming (were it not for his green paint) as an advertisement for breakfast cereal. “I apologize,” Brace said. “I deserved it.”

“Indeed you did,” Snow told him, “and the apology is accepted.”

“Why do you apologize?” At close range Levere’s face was always mildly shocking. Beneath the swarthy Frenchness, and under the flesh of the left cheek, a small and ulcerous growth caused one side of his face to seem swollen.

“Because I was wrong—sir.”

“We know that, sailor. Do you understand why?”

Brace mumbled. It was only clear that he understood a compulsion of feeling, and was not, in his scarcely burnished cynicism, able to articulate his feeling.

“You are a crew member of this ship,” Levere told him, “with rights as well as duties. Chief Snow is technically outside of regs. Do you want this logged?”

“No, Captain.” Brace turned to Dane, and Brace’s face for an instant was covered with despair. Then he squared his shoulders again, took a shallow breath. “I know what you think, Chief, but I’ve been trying. I really have been trying.”

“Cows try,” Dane told him. “When they plop in a field. Get turned-to on that paint.”

Brace, shocked at being repulsed, his grand gesture lost in cow plop, began to slump away.

“Sailor.”

“Captain?”

“I was going to transfer you after that display with the paint. Chief Dane insisted it would be a mistake.”

Brace stood, unable to absorb a further jolt of information.

“I am now willing to admit that Chief Dane is probably correct. Dismissed.” As Brace left, Levere turned to Snow. “Set your gang to work on the shoring, then come to my cabin.”

“I am physically not a large man,” Snow said instead. “Now that I am once provoked, I am sure that the crew has no further questions.”

“In that case, go about your duties.” Levere shook his head, mused as if dreaming. “I thought it was the Irish who were supposed to be lucky.”

Abner’s yeoman Wilson was impressed when Howard told the story. “Where did Levere find that one?”

“A small fishing village. A place called Liverpool.”

“Get off my back. I can read a chart.”

“He got busted up and concussed on a Limey can doing escort during the war. It scrambled his brains. They dropped him off here and he liked the place.”

“Look for the woman,” yeoman Wilson advised.

“I always do,” Howard said. “World without end.”

The gray chill was momentarily held in check because of the incident between Snow and Brace. For a while men gossiped, laughed, formed estimates of Snow that they could live with, while thinking little that was new about Brace. Cutter Abner struggled. By the time Abner had Clara in tow, returning to the disabled Ezekiel, the story turned from the main street of the crew’s attention to a back alleyway of disregard. It was a small memory, to be fished from a man’s ditty bag of tales at some future time, on some future messdeck, where youth might need advice.

As the tale moved into shadows, and Abner’s problems increased, so also increased a cold sense of unease, punctuated by bursts of exasperation because Abner was forced to go it alone.

“That could be us out there,” Glass complained .

“The sea got up,” yeoman Wilson told Howard. “It was seven hours to Clara and twenty coming back. The jury rig on their steering broke twice.”

“We didn’t hear you send for a long time.”

“Those fishing skippers had this crazy idea.”

Clara, outbound, was fully iced.

“They tried to transfer ice,” Wilson said. “Our cap went along with it for awhile, but the sea kept working.”

In a gray dawn, cutter Abner steamed slowly through mist, keeping visual and radar check on its three charges. Clara and Ezekiel wallowed together, fending off, their crews a bucket brigade passing ice above a gray, cold sea. The hard-pitching, smaller Hester C. was streamed to a sea anchor two miles distant.

“And that’s when the guy on Joan of Arc got hit?”

“Who does the first aid on your ship?”

“Me.”

“Me, too,” Wilson said. “Me and our cook. We’d ought to have a corpsman.”

On Joan of Arc, a rusting cable had snapped, tearing away most of a man’s face.

“We steamed at them flank,” Wilson said, “and they were making knots toward us. It only took a couple hours. Couldn’t get a seaplane.”

“I’ve seen them put down on open ocean.”

“Not that open ocean.”

“He was one of those hysterical Spanish guys, and he moaned all the time,” Wilson continued in the clear tones of misery. “He moaned for five days straight an’ all you could do was clean him up. Sulfa and bandages and soup and keep his breathing clear, and a little morph. Bone stickin’ out of his face.”

Abner, receiving the injured fisherman, wheeled back and returned rapidly to its three radar targets.

“I was still holding that guy’s hand,” Wilson said, “so I didn’t see what happened. Our radioman, Diamond, told me.”

Through the mist, Hester C. was a pitching, black and gray dot on a gray sea. As Abner closed, Diamond picked up the 7 x 50s to check the lobsterman’s trim. He gasped, put down the binoculars and picked up the 20-power telescope. The figure of a man was bending over the well of dead lobsters.

“I wish it swamped,” yeoman Wilson said. “That guy fixed his old lady good. Nobody will ever buy that thing.”

“Nobody was aboard.”

“Sure there was,” said yeoman Wilson, and his chalky face contorted with indignation and confusion. “Not when we got there, of course. He just zapped out like if you pulled the plug on a movie.”

“But that was the end of it?”

“That was the end of the scary part,” Wilson said. “We finally got all the tows rigged, and we started off at a red-hot two knots, and that’s when things got miserable. That’s when we started breaking towline.”