Chapter 5
On the second of September we made our landfall off Moreton Bay, and that afternoon we went up the river to Brisbane. The river was full of ships waiting for their turn at the piers, and nobody on the beach seemed to know where we were going to dock. We anchored in the stream for a couple of hours while the pilot went ashore and argued with somebody. Then a little after dark the pilot came back with an American Army captain and the tugs took us downstream to dock in Hamilton Reach. As soon as the gangplank was over a gang of stevedores came on board and began unloading the cargo. The stevedores were Americans, from an Army dock battalion. They had the hatch covers off in five minutes and they seemed to know what they were doing. I started to tell one of them to crack the valve first and let the water out of the winch so he wouldn’t break it, but he said, “Don’t tell me, buddy, I was on the waterfront before you were born.” There was nothing to do on board, and Victor and I went ashore.
It was a twenty-minute tram ride from Hamilton into Brisbane. I had been in Brisbane a dozen times before but I hardly recognized it. Everything was blacked out after dark, and all the stores had sandbags stacked in front of the windows. The streets were swarming with American and Australian troops and there were no male civilians to be seen. Everybody in Australia had been expecting the Japanese to land in the Northern Territory for three months, and the country was mobilized to the teeth. When the merchant crews went ashore in civilian clothes middle-aged females would come up and pin white feathers on their chests to identify them as slackers. These women traveled around in swarms armed with hatpins; they seemed to have an unlimited supply of feathers and nothing better to do with their time. I got my white feather that first night on the tram, and I wore it all the time I was in Australia. When I changed clothes, I would take it off and pin it on the clean shirt. The patriotic females would look indignant every time they saw me, but at least this way they left me alone.
That first night Victor and I went straight to a place he knew in Red Hill, run by a Polish woman named Mrs. Lubin who wore flowery prints and looked like a perambulating garden. Mrs. Lubin had a girl in her house named Clara, who was stupid as a salmon and had a loose tooth she liked to wiggle between her thumb and forefinger. She used to wiggle it even when we were in bed; it interested her more than I did and sometimes she seemed to forget I was there. At first this bothered me, but after a while I decided I liked it better that way. You didn’t have to talk to Clara and she had found something to keep her amused while she worked. She was very clean and knew how to make her own bed, and she never drank. “I don’t know why people like it, it makes me woozy,” she confessed to me once.
Victor spent most of his time in this place talking to Mrs. Lubin, who sold him bogus scotch made in Hongkong for which she charged eight dollars a bottle. While I was upstairs she and Victor would sit in the kitchen talking Russian together, at least I supposed it was Russian, although for all I knew Victor might have known Polish along with his other accomplishments. Mrs. Lubin was an honest woman; she would write his name on the bottle of Chinese scotch and when he left she would paste a paper seal over the cork so no one would touch it until he came back. Victor spent more money in the place than I did because Clara, tooth and all, was very reasonable: two dollars short time, five dollars all night. Mrs. Lubin accepted only dollars because she had a hobby of saving American money; I think she was convinced Australia would be occupied by the Japanese and she wanted nothing to do with pounds. She left patriotism to the women with the white feathers, but she was very honest, and she was the only woman I ever saw Victor talk to for more than five minutes, which was a distinction in itself. Once I asked him what they were talking about, and he said, “Agh, we were telling each other a lot of lies. I told her I was on the Aurora, she said she knew Paderewski. I never knew a Pole that wasn’t a liar.” Except for going to Mrs. Lubin’s I didn’t know what to do with myself while the ship was in Brisbane. In the daytime it was too hot to walk around in the streets, and usually I stayed on board until after dark. One afternoon I went to a movie by myself. As it happened it was Walt Disney’s Bambi, but it was the only movie showing that afternoon and the theater was full of Australian soldiers. I remember that at one point this fawn who was the main character was tripping through the forest looking pathetic and calling out, “Mother! Mother!” Its mother didn’t seem to be around and finally a voice in the back said in disgust, “She’s owt with some bloody Yank.” Somehow I couldn’t associate myself with Bambi’s problems and I got up and left the theater. In a bookstore in Albert Street I bought a volume of Saroyan’s stories and took it back to the ship, but the stories didn’t seem to be any more real than Bambi, or perhaps there was something wrong with me. The first story was about a poet sitting up in a garret all day polishing a penny until finally he died of starvation. I tried for a couple of hours to read this and then I threw it overboard. After that I lay in my berth in the hot cabin, smoking and thinking of nothing, waiting for it to get dark so I could go to Mrs. Lubin’s.
It took the Army stevedores four or five days to get the trucks out of the hold. Meanwhile a lot of stores were coming aboard, flour in sacks and cases of canned goods, as though we were going to make a long run somewhere. One afternoon a load of meat was delivered to the dock in a truck. Nobody in the crew believed it would be any better than the meat Kammerath had bought in San Francisco, and they were right; the Australian beef was worse than the other. It sat on the dock for two hours in the hot sun and the deck gang refused to carry it on board. The bosun wanted Kammerath to come down on the dock and look at it.
“He says to carry it down in the cold room,” Cheeney told him. “He can’t come out in the sun. It’s bad for his heart.”
“Tell him he better come out and look at it before it walks away.
Cheeney went back to Kammerath with the message, and the negotiations went on for about an hour. Finally there was a coin promise. The bosun and a sailor carried a side of beef, the worst one they could find, up the gangway onto the ship and set it down on deck. After a half an hour Kammerath emerged from his cabin floated out in the sunlight to look at it.
“What the hell are you complaining about?” he told them. “The meat’s all right. That’s only on the surface. You handle your job and I’ll take care of mine.”
He brushed the maggots off with a slow sweep of his hand, and then he turned ponderously and walked away. Nobody said anything. The deck gang wouldn’t touch the meat, and after a while the messboys came out of the galley and began carrying it down to the cold room.
From then on the messboys carried aboard all the provisions. We were supposed to have loaded stores for six months in San Francisco but Kammerath continually bought more: meat, dried milk, ice-cream powder, flour in hundred-pound bags, coffee by the case. Some fresh bread came aboard which by some miracle didn’t have weevils in it. In the mornings in Brisbane there was a continual coming and going of ship-chandlers and grocers’ agents in Kammerath’s cabin. They were the only happy men I ever saw on board the Chileno Cape. They all dressed alike, in blue serge suits with pants too wide at the bottom, and they had round, red, prosperous Australian faces. After they left, if you happened to be passing by the cabin, through the half-open door you could see Kammerath putting things away in his billfold.
After Brisbane nobody knew where the ship was going. There were all kinds of rumors and you could take your choice. Some people said we were going north into the war zone, to New Guinea or Port Darwin, but somebody else pointed out that if this was the case they wouldn’t have unloaded the Army cargo in Brisbane. There were other theories that we were going to Melbourne for wheat, that we were sailing empty to Chile for nitrate, that we would stay in Australia for six months on the coastal run. Nobody had any facts, and they couldn’t decide what they wanted anyhow. Some of them wanted to load the Australian grain and go right back to the States, and others wanted to run back and forth to Noumea and Port Moresby for a while and collect the port bonuses. You got two hundred and fifty dollars for every port the ship called at in the war zone, and somebody figured out that if you ran steadily between Townsville and Port Moresby you could clear a thousand dollars a week above your wages. But somebody pointed out this didn’t allow any time for loading or unloading. All the theoreticians has their pencils out.
For three or four days nobody talked about anything but port bonuses. Firmín stayed in his cabin all day, listening to the news on the radio and looking worried. It was about a month after the Marines had landed on Guadalcanal; I don’t know whether they got a port bonus or not but according to the radio they were having a rough time on the beach, and the prediction was that if we lost the Solomons the Japanese would be in Australia next. Here too everybody had his theory. Some said they would land around Port Darwin and others that they would bypass Australia and invade New Zealand. Victor’s theory was that it didn’t matter very much; the Japanese would probably let Mrs. Lubin alone, and as for the women with the white feathers what would happen to them was just what they needed. “That’s what they all need. Lady social workers, patriots, Edith Cavells.” It was true the girls at Mrs. Lubin’s weren’t very patriotic. I asked Clara once what she thought about the war and she said vaguely, “I don’t know, it’s more fun now. Americans, and there’s spam, I got some stockings.” She thought for a while as though she was working out some more profound political comment, and then she said, “They say that ’Itler doesn’t care for girls.”
Victor of course maintained that the war was just another shell game concocted by the Wall Street bankers. “What do you think? Agh, it’s all rigged—the Krupps, DuPonts, Rothschilds, the big cartels.” We would sit in Mrs. Lubin’s drinking Chinese scotch while he explained it to me. After the Russian Revolution, it seemed, the Rothschilds had picked out Hitler and financed him secretly because he was against the Jews. They knew that sooner or later he would start a war against Russia and lose, and this would make the Yids look good.
“How do you mean, look good?”
“What do you think? Hitler pushes them around a little and everybody feels sorry for them. Wall Street lent him the money to build the concentration camps. Agh, they’re all in it together, the English, Mussolini, the Japs. You ever heard of the Hairy Ainus? They live up in Japan in the northern islands, around Hokkaido. Sure, you’re a bright boy and you read books, you know it all. What you probably don’t know is that they’re pure Semitic, descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Listen, I’m telling you that the whole Jap royal family is descended from those Ainus.”
In later years I came to think that this was the most remarkable of Victor’s accomplishments, his malting the Emperor Hirohito into a Jew. He also claimed that the cable between Wall Street and Tokyo had never been cut after the war started, and there was a continual stream of messages going back and forth twenty-four hours a day.
“You know what they make smokeless powder out of?” he told me “Nitrocellulose. Sure, you know it all, but what you don’t know is that the Japs are malting it out of old movie films that Sam Goldwyn sent them, right up to Pearl Harbor Day.”
Finally one morning Firmín went ashore to some office and came back with orders to sail for Sydney and load general cargo for the States. The news went around the ship a little after lunch but there was some delay in the sailing; it seemed that Kouralis and a couple of AB’s were still ashore and nobody knew where they were. Around three o’clock they found the sailors, but the chief said he wouldn’t sail without a second engineer. A pair of Australian detectives came on board with an Army intelligence man to talk to Firmín. The door shut, then they opened the door again and sent for the old chief, and they had a conference in the cabin that lasted for a half an hour. When the chief came out he sent for me and told me Kouralis was on the beach in the hospital and was going to be left behind. He wanted me to stand watch-and-watch with the first engineer for the rest of the voyage, six on and six off. It wasn’t a union ship and he was within his legal rights; he didn’t have to hire another engineer until we reached our port of discharge. I told him in that case he better count on sailing without me too. I was a licensed engineer and I worked eight hours a day. He told me I had signed articles and if I refused duty it might mean trouble. That was all right with me; I would go to jail or to the hospital with Kouralis, but I wouldn’t stand six-hour watches.
“You wait, sonny boy, I’ll have your ticket when we get back to the States.”
“You can have it right now if you want it.”
Then he appealed to my patriotism. “We’ve all got to contribute. There’s a war on,” he said in an unconvincing voice.
“You contribute.”
At the end, this is what happened; the chief had to stand Kouralis’ watch himself. He went around looking black about it for a while, but Firmín consoled him by putting him on the payroll twice, once as chief and once as second engineer. The oilers and wipers used to argue about whether he could collect two port bonuses or not.
When we finally sailed it was after eight, and we went down the river in the dark. It was too hot to sleep and I sat out on the hatch while Welsh filled in on what had happened to Kouralis. It seemed that ever since the battle of the coffee cups he had been making dark threats and predicting some accident was going to happen to Kammerath. He had the engine room gang on his side, and he probably thought that if it came to a showdown they could handle the messboys. Then in Brisbane there was a new development: Kouralis was seen going ashore with one of the messboys, a Filipino named Malahay. “You seen him, the kid with the black eyes and all the oil in his hair, quiet like a cat.” They went around to all the pubs and sometimes they stayed out all night. For a few days Kouralis’ sweetheart Riga went around looking broody and dangerous; I had noticed this but I didn’t know what was wrong with him. Everybody thought that Kouralis had just found a particularly devious way of getting even with Kammerath, or that he was trying to provoke Kammerath into taking some action as he had with the coffee cups. Kammerath showed no sign that he noticed what was going on. No one knew what Malahay thought. “Anyhow them Igorotes, I guess they don’t care who buggers them,” Welsh concluded philosophically.
This went on for four or five days. Then the night before the ship sailed Malahay lured Kouralis up a dark alley behind the railroad where the other messboys were waiting. “They took him out in the lots and worked him over with the vegetable knives,” said Welsh. “I don’t know what they done to him, but I don’t think he’s going to be so fond of the boys anymore.” He spat on the deck and placidly spread it around with his foot. “Before you cross that Kammerath you want to pay up your insurance.”
I went on watch at midnight. At the mouth of the river we dropped the pilot and started down the channel around Moreton Island, but a half an hour later the bridge rang down stop engines again. The boilers were all fired off for sea and the steam pressure began to rise. After ten minutes I called the bridge and asked them if we were going to be stopped for long. They said they didn’t know; the signal station on Moreton Island was sending us a message. Finally the word spread that we had orders to turn around and go back to Brisbane. Nobody knew what it was about. It took Firmín almost an hour to turn the ship around in the narrow channel without a pilot, but finally he got it headed the right way and back up the river. Somebody started a rumor that the reason we had turned around was a Japanese invasion force was headed for Sydney. When the first engineer relieved me at four o’clock he said the story was we were going to load the same trucks again and take them to New Guinea.
“I’ll buy that, it sounds like the Army,” Welsh grunted.
“Why?”
“Because there ain’t roads in New Guinea.”
“At seven o’clock in the morning we docked again at the same pier in Hamilton. This time there was no going ashore. The Army put guards at the gangway, and some types in civilian clothes and military haircuts came aboard to talk to Firmín. The ship was reloaded in twenty-four hours, working around the clock under floodlights in spite of the blackout. They put four thousand tons of artillery shells and anti-aircraft ammunition in the holds, and the types in Army haircuts told us to drain part of our culinary water and load fuel oil in the tanks. Evidently they needed a lot of fuel oil wherever it was we were going, and nobody seemed to care whether we were thirsty or not. The only one who left the ship during the twenty- four hours was Cheeney, who went ashore in the afternoon and came back in a taxi with a crate of live chickens. None of these chickens ever showed up in the messroom, although Cheeney was seen in the galley once chewing on a wing. “Father Kammerath will be telling us soon whether we can have the feet,” growled the old chief.
The morning of the second day we sailed again, this time with an Australian naval lieutenant aboard instead of a civilian pilot. The lieutenant came on board in white shorts, a white shirt with epaulets, and a spotless white peak cap. I don’t know what he thought of the dirty dungarees the rest of us wore in the messroom. Probably he had a rather low opinion of the ship in general, but he never expressed himself on the subject. He didn’t even permit himself to comment on the food. Whenever anybody said anything to him he would agree in a clipped British accent: “Quite so. I dessay.”
Probably the lieutenant and Firmín knew where we were going, but if they did they didn’t confide in anybody else. About noon we passed Moreton Island again and settled on a course to the northeast. A little after I went on to watch Firmín called the engine room and told us to make fourteen knots. The ship had never made more than twelve, and I didn’t think the old machinery would stand it. The steam lines began springing leaks and we spent the watch wrapping them in white lead and rags. Under the vibration the hull began to leak; there was more rust than steel in the old plates and the strain was loosening the scams. I didn’t particularly care one way or the other; I thought perhaps the ship would shake itself apart and this would prove to Firmín it couldn’t make fourteen knots. By the end of the watch I could hear the water gurgling back and forth in the bilge under the floor plates.
Then the feed-water pump broke down, as I had been expecting it would for a month. We shifted to the auxiliary pump and tore it down. I was supposed to go off watch at four but I had to stay below and work on it with Welsh and the first engineer. We could only make twelve knots on the auxiliary pump, and the Australian lieutenant kept calling down from the bridge to ask how we were doing. “Tell him we ain’t doing nothing if we have to keep talking Australian to him on the phone,” said Welsh. All that afternoon and most of the night I worked on that pump until I knew every bolt and nut in it by heart. About ten o’clock we put it together again, and the first engineer set up too hard on a bolt and cracked the casing. We had to take it apart again and weld it. I was covered with sweat and my nerves were ragged; that collection of gears and shafts and bolts spread out over the engine-room floor had begun to stand in my mind for the stupid intractability of all physical things, the whole world of shoddy objects that broke in your hand and smelled of fuel oil and grease. I couldn’t convince myself that the pump had any importance or that it really mattered whether the ship got to where it was going or just sat there in the middle of the Coral Sea until it rusted and sank. At two o’clock in the morning we finally got the pump back in the line and began making fourteen knots. Immediately the vibration began again, and Welsh came forward with his oil can and told me the shaft alley was full of water.
I called the bridge and told them the ship was leaking and I would have to take some steam out of the line to pump it out. There was a long discussion while I waited on the phone. The third mate was explaining it and in the background I could hear the clipped British voice saying, “I dessay but we cahn’t help that.” Finally Firmín himself came on the phone and asked me what was the matter.
“The shaft alley’s full of water. It’s coming in through the packing or through the hull seams. I’ve got to take some steam out of the line to pump it out.”
“Well, let it leak,” said the discouraged voice over the phone. “The lieutenant here says we got to make fourteen knots.”
On the floor plates under the main engine Welsh and the Mexican wiper were wading up to their knees in greasy water to oil the machinery. I had been in the engine room for sixteen hours without any rest. I started up the bilge pump anyhow and bailed out the shaft alley so the oilers could work. After that we made thirteen point nine knots, but nobody seemed to notice.
In the night we passed Noumea and went to the north. I got five hours’ sleep, and then a little after nine they called me and told me I was wanted on the bridge, right away. The gray lump of New Caledonia was on the horizon behind us and I heard the roar of engines; a plane was circling around the ship a half mile or so away. It was Victor’s watch and the lieutenant and Firmín were both on the bridge. It seemed the plane was trying to send us a message and the Aldis lamp wouldn’t work because a fuse was blown in the wheelhouse. Still half-asleep, I stuck in a new fuse and ran the extension cord out to the wing of the bridge. While I was working the plane made a low pass over the ship and then bent away to the south with one wing down. It was a Catalina flying boat with red-white-and-blue Australian emblem on the side, and it passed so low you could see the pilot looking at us with big rubber earphones clamped on his head. Finally they got the Aldis lamp working, and on the plane a light started blinking out of the glass gun-blister. The code was coming to fast for anybody but he lieutenant to read, and he had to take the message himself. The plane went round and round like a circus horse while he called out the words for a sailor to write down: “Cape... cahncel...immeejityly… priority...”
When they got it all down they read it to Firmín. “Previous orders Chileno Cape canceled proceed immediately Noumea priority reassignment ComSoPac1.”
“They ought to make up their minds,” said Firmín discouragedly.
“I dessay there’s some reason.”
“Yeah, they always got a reason, but they keep changin’ their reason.”
“I don’t doubt the logistic situation is quite fluid.”
“They got the fluid inside their heads, is where they got it.”
“My dear fellow, I didn’t invent this war,” the lieutenant told him a little stiffly. “Frankly there are several other places I would rather be. But my orders are to take this ship to its destination, and I dessay the people who are running the war have not lost their wits entirely.”
While they were arguing about it, Victor has already laid out the new course on the chart. “Come right to two sixty,” he told the helmsman without looking up from the chart table.
“Two six oh,” repeated the helmsman a little startled. He spun the wheel with both hands, the wake behind curved into a ragged U and snaked back and forth for a while until finally it settled into a straight line. “Two sixty, you sheepherder,” Victor glared at him. “Where are you going, the South Pole?”
“If we’re just gonna run back and forth across the ocean we might as well go twelve knots,” complained Firmín. “It makes the ship leak, goin’ so fast.”
“Fourteen knots, old fellow,” said the lieutenant between his teeth. “Fourteen knots. And you,” he told me, “if you’ve finished your business here, off the bridge, if you please.”
In Noumea we sat in the harbor and nobody knew what we were going to do. All you could see of the town was a pier, a lot of tin roofs, and the steeple of the French cathedral. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and dead calm; at anchor the ship was unbearably hot and it was five hours before it would get any cooler. There was a steamy moulding smell to the air like the smell of a poorly ventilated laundry. On the pier a mile away there was a warehouse with a tin roof and a flagpole, and on the flagpole a little French flag hung limply in the heat.
The Australian lieutenant spent the afternoon climbing up and down the bridge to send messages ashore with the Aldis lamp. The signal station was down the beach in the middle of the jungle, a mile or two from town. The lieutenant, covered with perspiration, would bang away with the Aldis lamp for a long time, and finally a sleepy yellow pinpoint in the jungle would start blinking back. After he sent the message the yellow light went out. There was never any answer.
In between signals the lieutenant would go down into the holds with a thermometer to see whether it was getting too hot for the cargo. He didn’t say whether it was, but about five o’clock the bosun got a gang and went around rigging canvas ventilators to deflect the wind into the holds. Probably this was not very effective, since there wasn’t any wind. A rumor went around the ship that cordite exploded at a hundred and twenty degrees. It seemed at least that hot on deck; there was no telling what it was in the hold.
Nobody had any appetite because of the heat, and nobody ate very much supper. That night there was an air raid, which it seemed to be a regular evening feature in Noumea. It began around eleven o’clock. For a half an hour you could hear the sound of sirens from across the water, and then there were flashes in the sky on the other side of town and some muffled thuds, like heavy weights falling onto the ground. The thumps and flashes went on for some time. Now and then the sound seemed to come closer, but the flashes were still across the hill on the other side of town. If they were trying for the harbor their aim was bad. An Australian corvette got under way and went charging around in the dark with its lights out but it had nothing to shoot at. It was the second night I hadn’t slept more than four or five hours but I sat out on deck watch the raid until it was time to go on watch at midnight. It was too hot to sleep anyhow, and the crew sat out on the hatches watching the distant flashes against the hills and listening to the rumble. No one said anything, but in the darkness you could see the whites of their eyes and you knew they were thinking of the four thousand tons of ammunition they were sitting on.
A little before midnight I went into the messroom for a cup of coffee and found Victor sitting there smoking. He hadn’t even gone out on deck to look at the raid. You could still hear the bumps and thumps on the hill. I borrowed a cigarette from him.
“Are they talking port bonuses out there now?”
“They aren’t talking anything.”
“Agh, that bunch of vags. They thought they were getting the bonus for nothing,” he muttered contemptuously into his coffee mug. “Let me tell you, kid, nobody gives you anything for nothing.” He didn’t seem to want to talk and I went on watch.
The next day it was even hotter, or at least it seemed hotter, but perhaps it was only because it was getting on our nerves. Firmín stayed in his cabin listening gloomily to the radio, and the Australian lieutenant spent the morning checking the temperature in the holds. In between inspections he would climb up to the bridge again to blink away at the jungle with his Aldis lamp. Finally about eleven o’clock a launch came crawling out from across the water from town, and an American naval commander came on board to talk to Firmín in his cabin. The commander was in unpressed khakis with his shirt open at the neck and he was wearing a khaki baseball cap; evidently they played softball over there on the beach. Five minutes after he left, word went around that we were sailing for Tulagi in the Solomons.
Out on deck under the awning somebody got out a map, an old National Geographic chart of the South Pacific that the engineers had been passing around from hand to hand until it was covered with grease. There was Tulagi, right across the sound from Guadalcanal. It was the place the announcer on the radio called Iron Bottom Bay, where the Japanese navy had been coming down every night to shell the beach. Half the gang out on deck said it was a mistake, and the other half thought they were probably sending us there because it was an old ship and not worth a damn anyhow. The sea lawyers all started trying to prove they had no right to send a merchant ship there and that we hadn’t signed articles to go in the combat zone. This point hadn’t come up when they were talking bonuses, three or four days before. Theories bloomed like flowers in the spring. The third mate said they had originally planned to send us to Espiritu Santo and transship the cargo to Guadalcanal in barges, but they needed the ammunition right away and had decided they didn’t have time for the barges. I don’t know where he found out this piece of intelligence; perhaps from the Navy commander, or perhaps from one of the messboys. There was a rumor that Guadalcanal was going to be evacuated anyhow; somebody had heard on the radio that the Marines were going to pull out and make a stand on New Guinea, but this may have been a Japanese broadcast. Most of the people on the Chileno Cape didn’t care whether the Marines made their stand in Dixieland or on top of Mount Everest. They had lost their interest in the war now and were willing to give the port bonuses to anybody who wanted them. “Next trip I’m shipping out on the Great Lakes,” said Welsh, snuffling his nose with the back of his hand. “Ore boats. They pay scale.”
In the officers’ mess everybody sat around listlessly drinking lukewarm tea. The engine room was ready to sail, boilers lit off and steam to the throttle. Victor had already left to go up forward and heave the anchor short when Cheeney came in to the messroom to talk to the captain. Cheeney whispered, while Firmín looked at him with the wrinkles screwed into his brow. Finally he got up and went away with Cheeney, still carrying his napkin and chewing slowly. In five minutes he came back and called the Australian lieutenant out into the passageway. In the messroom it was too hot to talk and you could hear them through the open door.
“Listen Lieutenant, my steward here is sick. I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, we’ve got to sail in a half an hour.”
“I dunno, he looks pretty sick. He looks to me like he ought to be in the hospital.”
“Ah, see here now. What’s wrong with the fellow?”
“I dunno, I’m not a doctor, but it looks to me like he had some kind of a stroke. I wonder if mebbe we ought to wait and see how he’s going to be, before we sail.”
“Out of the question. Out of the question.”
After a lot of discussion it was decided to send for a doctor from ashore. It was an hour before he came out, and the lieutenant kept pacing back and forth looking at his watch. When the doctor finally came alongside in a launch he was afraid to climb the pilot ladder to the deck. He was a frail little old Frenchman in a white linen suit, and he could only use one hand because he was carrying his bag in the other. He climbed the ladder one rung at a time with his knees shaking. When he managed to get over the rail they took him to Kammerath’s cabin. In about ten minutes he came out, and there was a long argument involving the doctor, Firmín, and the Australian lieutenant. The doctor knew very little English, and he kept saying, “Alors je m’en fiche, je m’en fiche.” Finally Victor called the bosun and told him to break out the cargo gear and rig a boom over the side; they were going to put Kammerath in the doctor’s boat and send him ashore.
The deck gang laid out a cargo net on deck under the boom, and then they went in to get Kammerath with a wire Stokes litter. There was a bumping and stumbling in the passageway, and four sailors came out carrying Kammerath in the litter wrapped in blankets. His face was the color of sour milk, and there was a branchlike pattern of purple across the cheek. One side of the face was drawn down and on that side the eye was shut; the other eye stared straight up, unblinking. The sailors set the litter down in the middle of the cargo net, and then they gathered up the four corners of the net and hooked it onto the cargo gear. Now the litter was inside a kind of cage made out of the net, and inside the litter was Kammerath. At this point there was a curious reaction on the face. The milky cheek trembled and twisted with effort, the mouth opened and a little saliva appeared at the corner, and finally an extraordinary croak came out.
Somebody sent for Cheeney. He bent down and Kammerath made the croaking noise again. After he had listened several times Cheeney managed to understand what it was that Kammerath was saying. He went away to the cabin, and in a little while he came out carrying a billfold. Although he tried to hold it concealed in his hand you could see it was stuffed with Australian and American currency, so full it wouldn’t shut. Cheeney tucked the billfold away among the blankets; both eyes in the sour-milk face were shut now. The bosun got on the cargo winch and began carefully tapping the throttle. Slowly Kammerath was hoisted up; the litter curved outward over the rail and began to descend, even more slowly, toward the water. When it settled into the launch the Kanaka boatman unhooked the net, and the doctor climbed trembling down the ladder again. The launch went off, the little doctor sitting in his white linen suit holding Kammerath’s wrist. On the pier a mile away you could see an ambulance parked in the shade of the warehouse.
By sundown New Caledonia was only a blue smudge on the horizon. The darkness came down suddenly without any twilight, and across the absolutely black sea the ship went on to the northwest. It’ was a humid and stifling night and the clouds hid the stars. From the bridge you could hear the Australian lieutenant yelling, his voice beginning to crack a little. “Shut out that bloody light or I’ll shoot it out!”
1 Acronym: Commander, South Pacific.