Sweet Reason (2 page)

“Was it someone you knew?” Tevepaugh asked, trying not to appear overeager.

“More’r less,” allowed Carr.

“I’ll be fucked,” said Tevepaugh and he poked Ohm, who was absent-mindedly inventing games he could play on the radar repeater. “You never seen nothin’ like that, have you, Melvin?”

Ohm swiveled the range bug around so rapidly it left an electric wake on the radar scope. By varying the range with his left hand as he swiveled the bug with his right, he could create sinuous designs, something like waving a burning ember in a dark room.

“I heard of a girl once,” Ohm said, fiddling with the radar as if it were a pinball machine. “Her old man was due back from a Med cruise, so she knotted red ribbons in her pussy to surprise him. Halfway to the ship she jumped a light and whammed into the back of a truck, and when they stripped her at the hospital …”

“She-it,” giggled Tevepaugh.

“The way I heard it, her husband, who was a boilerman third on the Manley, finally found her — in the loony bin at Norfolk General. And he had one hell of a time convincing them she wasn’t no nut.” Ohm couldn’t keep from laughing at his own story.

“She-it,” groaned Tevepaugh.

“Red ribbons!” moaned Carr. “Whoosh, that there must have been a sight for sore eyes.”

Lustig stuck his cherubic face through one of the open portholes. The roundness of the porthole provided a perfect frame for his head. “You running one of your pools today, Ohm?” he asked.

Hardly a day went by on the
Ebersole
when Ohm didn’t
have some sort of pool going: the anchor pool, the maximum roll pool, the fuel consumption pool, the freshwater production pool. You name it, Ohm had a pool on it.

“Naturally, Mister Lustig,” Ohm rasped. “I’m running a sixty-bet sheet on which minute of the hour we take our first shot at the enemy. You want to buy in? Buck a throw. Winner takes fifty-five bucks.”

“Put me down for a buck,” Lustig said, and he handed a dollar bill through the porthole to Carr, who passed it over to Ohm. “What numbers you got open?”

Ohm consulted his sheet, which was divided into sixty squares, most of them with names of bettors already written in. “You can have, let’s see, seven, twenty-seven; ah, I skipped thirteen. Also forty-one, forty-three. That’s it. No, here’s another. Fifty-nine.”

Lustig thought a moment. “I’ll take lucky thirteen,” he said finally, and Ohm wrote his name in the square with the number thirteen in the upper-right-hand corner.

“Lucky thirteen it is, Mister Lustig,” he said.

Combat Information Smells a Skunk

Nighttime watches on the bridge of a destroyer have a distinctive rhythm. For the first hour or so there is a considerable amount of physical movement and the constant chatter of sea stories, some true, some half-true and some that have been told so many times nobody can remember whether they are true or not. An hour into the watch come the doldrums, when everybody is bored with himself and everyone else and realizes that bored or not, the watch still has three long hours to go. At this point the men on watch tend to stand or sit in one place, without moving a
muscle, for long periods of time, letting their minds or the conversation meander. Their sole aim in life is to forget the clock ticking away on the bulkhead, on the theory that when you forget it time passes more rapidly. But they concentrate so hard on forgetting the clock they can’t get their minds off it.

Lustig’s watch had reached the doldrums. Except for an occasional report from the talker with the headphones (“Combat Information has a skunk bearing zero one seven at twelve miles and tracking on a parallel course”), the officers and men whose job it was to run the ship from 0345 until 0745 were subdued, moodily withdrawn into their private selves. Ohm had given up toying with the pilot house radar and was sitting on it, staring at the pit log, which told how fast the ship moved through the water, thinking about the second-class exam he would take the following week. He had flunked it twice already but Lustig had agreed to give him another shot at it. Carr, the helmsman, played a game that he often used to while away the time on watch. The idea was to see how long he could keep the lubber’s line on a given heading. “One one-hundredth, two one-hundredth, three one-hundredth, four,” he counted to himself. The lubber’s line moved off and he brought it back. Then he put on enough opposite rudder to hold it and began counting again. “One one-hundredth, two …” Tevepaugh retreated to the flag bag aft of the pilot house, fetched up an armful of signal flags and nestled in the bag using the flags as a cushion. He sat there trying to conjure up the image of the girl tying red ribbons in her pubic hair.

Nearby two Negro signalmen — who like most blacks on board kept pretty much to themselves since the fight on the mess deck back in Norfolk — sat on the wooden deck with their backs to the Captain’s sea cabin, their knees drawn up to their chests. Both of them were smoking pot, passing the cigarette back and forth and cupping the burning end with
their palms. If any of the officers or petty officers saw them, they never said a word — darken ship or no.

“I want out, man,” Angry Pettis Foreman was saying. Angry Pettis was a tall, rail-thin black who always had one toothpick jutting from between his teeth and three or four spares stuck into his Afro. He went to great pains to look like what he thought a street blood ought to look like — menacing, angry, sexy, above all cool. “Trouble is,” he added, barely moving his lips, “don’t nobody know how to get out.”

There was a long silence as the two men sucked in turn on the cigarette and held the smoke in for as long as they could.

“What would you do if you were out, Angry?” asked Jefferson Waterman, a southern black who had been drafted into the navy by an all-white draft board midway through his senior year at a southern Negro college. “I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d be so shit-scared you’d duck right back in — especially when they lay that thick wad of re-up money on the table.”

“Fuck the bread, this time I gonna keep my black ass out, you see.” Angry Pettis dragged on the cigarette, held his breath and exhaled. When Waterman didn’t say anything, he started to get belligerent. “You don’t believe me, man? I want oh-you-tee out. I’m not sure I wanna even live in the U.S. of A. when I get outa this navy, man. When I say out, I mean
far
out. Maybe I’ll even try me another country.”

Waterman thought about that for a moment. “Somebody once told me there are only two countries no matter which country you’re in. There is city country and there is country country.”

“If’n that’s so,” laughed Angry Pettis, “the
po
-litical pricks put them borders in all the wrong places, man.”

A V-wedge of Phantom jets, their twin tail pipes spouting
orange flames, roared low overhead. The sound hammered against the bridge like a thunder clap. The planes were headed for a predawn strike on the mainland, flying at masthead level to keep under the enemy radar screen.

“MOTHERFUCKERS,” screamed Angry Pettis — but his voice was lost in the storm of sound.

“Sons of bitches,” yelled Jefferson Waterman.

“Bastards,” muttered Ensign Joyce, the
Ebersole
’s tall, thin, hollow-eyed communications officer. Joyce had earned a degree in English Literature at Princeton and had set his sights on graduate school. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he had joined the navy (going through Officer Candidate School at Newport) to get off what he called “the academic treadmill.” In his spare time he wrote poems that he kept pressed, like forgotten flowers, between the pages of
The Complete Works of William Blake
. Aboard the
Ebersole
, Joyce was universally known as the Poet. It was a nickname that gave him more pleasure than pain.

“Why bastards?” Lustig asked his junior officer of the deck. “They’re doing what they’re ordered, same as us.”

“Jesus, Larry,” Joyce said, “that’s almost a political remark. You really want to open that bag?”

Lustig laughed. “You know the drill, kid — an officer can talk about anything on a man-o’-war except religion, sex or politics.”

“Which is why the only thing anybody talks about anymore is how True Love clogs the XO’s urinal all the time.”

“Which is why,” agreed Lustig. “What time does reveille go today?”

The Poet took a folded plan of the day out of his pocket. “Reveille’s at o-six-thirty, star time is o-seven-o-one, sunup is o-seven-sixteen. I heard all the shore fire assignments out here are at sunup. Is that true?”

“Most of ’em, yeah. It puts the sun behind us shining right into their eyes that way,” Lustig explained. “Makes it
hard on their gunners if they want to counter fire.”

“That’s the way the Japs used to attack during World War Two — out of the rising sun,” Joyce said, remembering the comic books with the Japanese Zeros silhouetted against a yellow ball. “Funny how we’re brought up to think it’s treacherous to attack out of the rising sun when all the time it’s just good tactics.”

“I guess,” Lustig said noncommittally. The longer he was on the
Ebersole
the more noncommittal he seemed to become. It was his protective coloring. A graduate of the Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, Lustig had only recently decided to make a career out of the regular navy rather than switch to the merchant navy when his three-year hitch was up. He could make more money on merchantmen, true. But money wasn’t everything The regular navy had glamour and status. (During the
Ebersole
’s last few weeks in Norfolk, Lustig had taken to wearing his dress blues, with their tarnished gold lieutenant junior grade stripes, on dates instead of civilian clothes.) The ticket to a successful career in the navy, as far as Lustig was concerned, was to offend as few people as possible. Which was why he turned a noncommittal face to the world and kept his quips, including the few he could think of in time to get them into a conversation, locked up in afterthoughts.

Switching on his flashlight with the red filter, Lustig glanced at his wristwatch. “Half-hour to reveille. Shit, the minutes really drag. What else’s on the plan of the day?”

“The usual note from our erstwhile executive officer about taking coffee cups off the mess deck. He’s escalating. This one says quote personnel failing to comply with the above and who are caught will be held accountable unquote. Then he has a parenthetical note quote this means turned over to the supply officer for two hours’ extra duty unquote. Did you ever notice how every other sentence out of the
XO’s mouth is enclosed in parens. With him, parens are almost a life-style.”

Lustig didn’t have the slightest idea what Joyce was talking about, but he nodded agreeably. “Any other goodies on the plan of the day?” he asked.

“The second-class exam is scheduled for next Wednesday. And here come the parens again. Note colon the careers officer will hold a career information seminar in the after wardroom for all interested hands at sixteen-thirty. Jesus H. Christ,
I’m
the Careers Officer, and I go on watch again at fifteen-forty-five. Doesn’t the XO read the watch bill before he schedules —”

A burst of static came from the squawk box and the red light next to “CIC” winked on and off. Lustig flipped down the lever and yelled: “I can’t make out a word you say on this contraption. Use the voice tube.”

An instant later a voice, metallic and surprisingly clear, came floating up the tube. “Mister Lustig, sir, I think we got land on radar bearing three one zero, range about thirty miles or so.”

Lustig flicked his radar repeater over to a longer scale. On the next sweep the outline of a land mass — thousands of electronic pinpricks that brightened and then faded as the antenna swept past — appeared in the upper-left-hand corner of the scope.

“I guess that’s the enemy,” Lustig said.

The voice tube spoke again. “Mister Lustig, sir, you know the skunk we been tracking on a parallel course all night? Well, it’s changed course now.”

“Changed course? In what direction?”

“As a matter of fact, it seems to be heading straight for us.”

Tevepaugh Wakes the Captain