In the days of sail, a following wind was a blessing; not so in the days of steam.
En route to Funafuti, two hundred miles out of Kwajalein, the Caine was wallowing along at ten knots under masses of clouds like vast dirty pillows. It was enveloped in its own miasma, from which it could not escape. The breeze blew from astern at about ten knots. Relative to the ship there was no movement of air at all. The minesweeper seemed to be traveling in a nightmare calm. The stack gas swirled and rolled on the main deck, sluggish, oily, almost visible. It stank; it coated tongues and throats with an itchy, foul-tasting film; it stung the eyes. The air was hot and damp. The smell of the crated cabbages on the after deckhouse made a singularly sickening marriage with the stack fumes. The sailors and officers of the Caine, sweating, dirty, unable to obtain the relief of a shower, looked at each other with lolling tongues and dulled sad eyes, and worked with their hands to their noses.
The Caine and a destroyer-escort were screening six LST’s, lumbering fat shells more than three hundred feet long, shaped like wooden shoes, and withal strangely frail-looking; a determined assault with a can opener, one felt, on one of these paunchy hulls might bring about the abandon-ship alarm. The LST’s wobbled over the waves at eight knots, and the zigzagging escorts went slightly faster.
Queeg’s water ban was about twenty-four hours old when Maryk presented himself in the captain’s cabin. The Caine’s commanding officer lay flat on his back in his bunk, naked. Two fans, buzzing at full speed, blew streams of air down on him; nevertheless sweat stood in beads on his white chest. “What is it, Steve?” he said, not moving.
“Captain, in view of the extraordinary wind conditions, how about securing the water regulations after one day instead of two? Paynter tells me we’ve got plenty to last us until Funafuti—”
“That’s not the point,” exclaimed Queeg. “Why is everybody so god-damned stupid on this ship? Don’t you think I know how much water we have? The point is, the men on this ship have been wasting water, and for their own good they’ve got to be taught a lesson, that’s all.”
“Captain, they’ve learned their lesson. One day of this is like a week without water.”
The captain pursed his lips. “No, Steve, I said forty-eight hours and I meant forty-eight hours. If these men get the idea that I’m one of these shilly-shallyers who doesn’t mean what he says there’ll be no controlling them. Hell, I’d like a shower myself, Steve. I know how you feel. But we’ve got to put up with these inconveniences for the sake of the men’s own good—”
“I wasn’t asking for myself, sir. But the men—”
“Now don’t give me any of that!” Queeg raised up on one elbow, and glared at the executive officer. “I’m as interested in the men’s welfare as you are, and don’t you go playing the hero. Did they or didn’t they waste water? They did. Well, what do you want me to do about it—give them all letters of commendation?”
“Sir, consumption went up ten per cent. It was an invasion day. It wasn’t really what I’d call wasting—”
“All right, all right, Mr. Maryk.” Queeg lay back on the bed. “I see you simply want an argument for argument’s sake. Sorry I can’t accommodate you, but it’s too hot and smelly at the moment. That’s all.”
Maryk heaved his broad chest in a painful sigh. “Sir, how about one fifteen-minute shower period after the sweep-down?”
“God damn it, no! They’ll get enough water in their soup and coffee to keep from getting dehydrated. That’s all that matters. Next time they’ll remember not to waste water on my ship! You can go, Steve.”
The following wind did not desert the Caine that night nor the next day. Below decks, the air that came through the ventilators was intolerable; most of it was stack gas. The sailors swarmed out of the compartments and slept in clusters on the after deckhouse or on the main deck, as far from the stacks as they could get. Some of them brought mattresses, but mostly they curled themselves on the rusted deck plates, with life jackets for pillows. On the bridge everyone breathed in gasps through the night. During certain legs of the zigzag the breeze blew at a slight angle, instead of from dead astern, and then it was possible, by stretching one’s neck far out over the bulwark, to catch a gulp or two of warm, fresh, unbelievably sweet air.
A hot sun rose out of the sea next morning and glared redly on a ship which appeared stricken by a plague. Dirty half-naked bodies sprawled all over the decks, apparently lifeless. The boatswain, piping reveille, wrought only a halfhearted resurrection. The bodies stirred, and rose, and began to move through chores with leaden limbs, like the crew of dead men in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Caine was now fifty miles from the equator, sailing almost due south. With each hour that the sun rose in the sky the air grew hotter and more humid. And still the ship wallowed over the glittering sea, trapped in its own stench of stack gas and cabbages.
Around noon, human nature revolted. The black gang began to bootleg water in the after engine room, where the evaporators were, so that no pressure would be found by Queeg in any pipes. The word passed through the ship like a telegram. The two narrow steel ladders descending to the broiling, clanking engine space became choked with sailors. Paynter quickly discovered what was happening, and reported it to Maryk in the charthouse. The executive officer shrugged. “Can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he said. “Stack gas has got my ears ringing.”
This blessed relief was available only to the crew. Word of it soon reached all the officers; but, unanimously disloyal though they were to Queeg, a vague yet pervasive sense of the symbolism of an officer’s cap kept them from descending the engine-room ladders.
Ducely, indeed, dropped his head on his arms beside the coding machine at three o’clock, and bleated to Willie that he could stand it no more; he was going aft to get a drink in the engine room. Willie glared at him. Ensign Keith bore small resemblance at this moment to the chubby, cheery-faced piano player who had walked into Furnald Hall fourteen months earlier. He had marked lines around mouth and nose; cheekbones and chin stood out from the round face. His eyes were sunk in smudged sockets. His face was grimy, and brown hairs bristled all over it. Trickles of sweat ran down his face into the neck of his open collar, staining the shirt dark brown. “You go back aft, you sad little bastard,” he said (Ducely was three inches the taller of the two), “and you had better start living in your life jacket. I swear to God I’ll throw you over the side.”
Ducely moaned, lifted his head, and resumed picking feebly at the coding machine.
In one respect Captain Queeg’s isolation from his officers was not as complete as he might have wished; having no private toilet, he was compelled to come below to use the officer’s head in the wardroom passageway. These periodic appearances of the captain at odd hours sometimes led to trouble. It had become instinctive with all the officers to listen for the clang of the captain’s door, and to spring into attitudes of virtue as soon as they heard it. One would leap out of his bunk and pick up a fistful of official mail, another would dart at a coding machine, a third would seize a pen and a mess statement, and a fourth would flip open a logbook.
Since Willie and Ducely were honorably employed, the bang of the captain’s door at this moment did not trouble them. Queeg appeared a few seconds later and flapped through the wardroom in his run-down slippers, pouting morosely at vacancy as usual. The two officers did not look up from their coding. There was quiet while one might count ten, then a sudden frightful yammering in the passageway. Willie jumped up, thinking, or rather half hoping, that the captain had touched some defective light socket and electrocuted himself. He ran up the passageway, followed by Ducely. But there was nothing wrong with the captain, except that he was screeching unintelligibly into the officers’ shower room. Ensign Jorgensen, naked as a cow, his large pink behind jutting like a shelf from his sway back, stood under the shower, his shoulders unmistakably wet, the iron deck under his feet covered with droplets. One hand gripped the shower valve, and with the other he was mechanically fumbling at his ear to adjust glasses that weren’t there. His face wore an idiotically pleasant smile. Out of the captain’s jumbled sounds emerged the words, “—dare to violate my orders, my express orders? How dare you?”
“The water left in the pipes, sir—in the pipes, that’s all,” babbled Jorgensen. “I was just using the water in the pipes, I swear.”
“The water in the pipes, hey? Very good. That’s what the officers on this ship can all use for a while. The crew’s water restriction goes off at five o’clock. The officers’ restriction will continue for another forty-eight hours. You inform Mr. Maryk of that fact, Mr. Jorgensen, and then submit a written report to me explaining why I should not make out an unsatisfactory fitness report for you” (he spat out the word “fitness” as though it were an oath) “at once!”
“The water in the pipes, sir,” groaned Jorgensen, but Queeg had flounced into the head, and slammed the door. Keith and Ducely stared at Jorgensen, with stern, hating faces.
“Fellows, I’ve got to have my shower or I don’t feel human,” said Jorgensen, with injured self-righteousness. “I was only using the water in the pipes, really.”
“Jorgensen,” said Willie, “the water supply for nine men dying of thirst has coursed away into that huge cleft between your buttocks. That’s the right place for it, since your whole personality is concentrated in there. I hope you enjoyed it.”
The officers of the Caine went without water for two more days. They all took turns at cursing Jorgensen, and then forgave him. The breeze changed, and the horror of the stack gas and cabbage fumes abated, but the weather continually grew hotter and stickier. There was nothing to do but suffer, and slander the captain. The officers did plenty of both.
Funafuti Atoll was a necklace of low islands richly green, flung on the empty sea. The Caine entered it shortly after sunrise, steaming slowly through a gap of blue water in the long white line of breakers on the reef. Half an hour later the minesweeper was secured to the port side of the destroyer tender Pluto, outboard of two other ships. Lines for steam, water, and electric power were hurriedly run across; the fires were allowed to die on the Caine; and the ship commenced to nurse itself at the generous dugs of the Pluto. The tender with its litter swung to a heavy anchor chain, fifteen hundred yards from the beach of Funafuti Island.
Willie was one of the first over the gangplank. A visit to a destroyer tender’s communication office saved him whole days of decoding. It was part of the tender’s service to decode and mimeograph fleet messages. These AlPacs, AlComs, AlFleets, GenPacs, PacFleets, AlNavs, NavGens, SoPacGens, and CentPacGens were what broke the backs of overburdened destroyer communicators.
There was a choppy swell in the lagoon. Willie airily crossed the unsteady planks over the sucking, churning, murderous little spaces between the ships. From the destroyer next to the Pluto a broad, stout gangplank on rollers slanted upward. Willie mounted it and found himself in a roaring machine shop. He groped around the cavernous tender, through zigzagging passageways and up and down ladders, passing in and out of a blacksmith shop, a barbershop, a carpenter shop, a laundry, a stainless-steel kitchen where hundreds of chickens were frying, a bakery, and twenty other such civilized enterprises. Throngs of sailors moved sedately through these clean, fresh-painted spaces, most of them eating ice cream out of paper cups. They looked different from his own crew; generally older, fatter, and more peaceful; a species of herbivorous sailor, one might say, as contrasted to the coyotes of the Caine.
He stumbled at last upon the immense wardroom. Brown leather couches stretched along the bulkheads, and officers in khaki stretched upon the couches. There were perhaps fifteen of these prostrate figures. Willie walked up to a bulky body and touched the shoulder. The officer grunted, rolled over, and sat up, blinking. He stared at Willie a moment, and said, “I’ll be goddamned—the demerit king, Midshipman Keith.”
The jowly face had familiar, half-obliterated features. Willie studied the officer with some embarrassment and put out his hand. “That’s right,” he said, and added, with a sudden jolt of recognition, “Aren’t you Ensign Acres?”
“Good for you. Only it’s Lieutenant jg.” Acres uttered a wheezy laugh. “They don’t always recognize me. Coffee?”
“Yes,” he said, a few minutes later, stirring his cup, “I’ve put on at least forty pounds, I know. You do, on these damn tenders. There’s so much of everything—You look pretty good. Skinnier. Sort of older, somehow. You got a good deal?”
“It’s all right,” Willie said. He was trying to keep himself from staring in wonder at Acres. The once stern, handsome drill officer was a fat wreck.
“Can’t beat this deal,” said Acres. “Oh, you see these guys?” He swept a scornful thumb around at the sleepers. “Ask them, and half of them will cry that they hate this dull noncombatant life, being stuck forever in a godforsaken atoll. All they want is action, action, they say. They want to be part of this great battle, they say. When, oh when, will orders ever come, taking them to a fighting ship?… Horse feathers. I handle the ship’s correspondence. I know who puts in transfer requests and who doesn’t. I know who kicks and screams when the possibility arises of giving ’em some temporary staff duty with a commodore on a tin can. They all love this deal. I do, and I admit it. Want a cheese sandwich? We have some terrific roquefort.”
“Sure.”
The roquefort was exquisite, and so was the fresh white bread.
“The thing is, Keith, that all of us supine bastards are actually doing a damn good and damn necessary job. Have you tried the facilities of this ship? Destroyers beg to get a few days alongside the Pluto. We are the can-do ship. We’ve got it so well organized, and there’s so little waste motion, no steaming here and there and buttoning up for sea and going to GQ and all that combat crap that eats up honest worktime—” He took another slice of bread and lavishly smeared roquefort cheese on it. “You married, Keith?”
“No.”
“I am. Got married I guess during the next class after the one you were in. You were the December ’42 bunch, weren’t you? It’s all getting hazy. Well, anyway, I met this girl, blonde, she was a secretary in the English Department at Columbia. Got married in three weeks.” Acres grinned, and sighed, and noisily sucked up his cup of coffee and poured more. “Well, you know, we instructors had a pretty good deal, Keith. What we put in for, we got. I always had figured that when my year of teaching was up I’d put in for subs. Had read up all the submarine doctrine—well. That was before I married. I studied all the ships in the fleet roster, Keith, and put in for destroyer tender. Smart. The mail comes here mighty regularly, and I live for it, Keith. Got a baby two months old I’ve never seen. Girl…. I’m the communicator on this bucket. I should have asked you before, is there something I can do for you?”
Acres took Willie to the communication office, a spacious room on the main deck furnished with new chairs and desks of green-enameled metal, bubbling coffee makers, and several sleek scrubbed yeomen in fresh blue dungarees. At a word from Acres the yeomen sprang up, and out of clean cabinets and flawlessly regular files they produced in a few minutes all the decodes Willie wanted, and a series of new fleet letters. Weeks of piled-up work melted away for the Caine’s communicator. He looked around at the shelves of books in alphabetical order, at the wire baskets almost clear of correspondence, at the handsome plexiglass file boards of Fox skeds and decodes, and wondered at this weird antiseptic efficiency. His gaze rested on Acres, whose belly bulged in two khaki rolls above and below his belt. The Pluto’s communicator, flipping through a sheaf of AlNavs, glanced up at Willie’s collar pin. “Is that gold or silver?”
“Gold.”
“Should be silver, Keith. You make jg on the new AlNav. Class of February. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Willie, shaking hands, “but my skipper still has to approve.”
“Oh, hell, that’s automatic. Buy yourself some collar pins while you’re here. Come on, I’ll show you where. Got everything?”
When Willie left Acres at the gangway, the communicator said, “Come on over and eat with me any time. Lunch. Dinner. We’ll shoot the breeze some more. We have strawberries and cream all the time.”
“Sure,” Willie said. “Thanks a million.”
He crossed the nest to the Caine. As he came over the gangplank and set foot on the rusty, littered quarterdeck, he straightened like a German and threw Harding a salute which brought a smile of mournful amusement to the first lieutenant’s face. “I report my return aboard, sir!”
“Got the jerks, Willie? A salute like that can break your arm.”
Willie walked forward. He smiled at the dirty, ragged Apaches of the crew, passing here and there on the deck in their accustomed tasks. Mackenzie, Jellybelly, Langhorne of the long bony jaw, Horrible with his pimples, Urban, Stilwell, Chief Budge, one after the other they went by and Willie realized that he had never had relatives or friends whom he knew as well and could estimate as clearly as any second-class seaman of the Caine. “Jellybelly,” he called, “six fat sacks of mail for us on the tender—four official, two personal—”
“Aye aye, sir. Get ’em right away.”
On the well deck a group of deck hands were dividing and devouring an immense round yellow cheese, plunder from the Pluto, with the shrill chattering of blue jays. Crumbs of the cheese were scattered on the deck. Willie accepted a broken, fingerprinted yellow morsel from the red-headed Jew, Kapilian, and crammed it in his mouth.
In his room Willie stuck the lieutenant junior grade bars into the collar of a new khaki shirt he had bought on the Pluto. He drew the green curtain, put on the shirt, and examined himself in the mirror by the dim yellow overhead light. He noted his flat stomach, his lean face, his tired, black-rimmed, dogged eyes. His lips were dragged downward and compressed.
He shook his head. With that gesture, he gave up a plan which he had been secretly harboring for a week. There was a chaplain on the Pluto; he had passed his office; but Willie knew now that he was not going to hunt up the chaplain and tell him the story of the water famine. “You may not be much,” he said aloud to his mirror image, “but you don’t have to go weeping to anybody on the Pluto. You’re Lieutenant Keith of the Caine.”