Sweet Reason (3 page)

Tevepaugh took the steps two at a time and knocked softly at the Captain’s cabin, one deck below the bridge.

“Enter.”

Tevepaugh opened the door, stepped inside and spoke into the darkness. “The Officer of the Deck sends his respects, Captain, sir. He got the Commie coast on radar at thirty miles.”

“Thirty miles, eh? What bearing?”

“What bearing?” Tevepaugh repeated.

“That is correct. On what bearing, which is to say in what direction, has the enemy coastline appeared at thirty miles?”

“Mister Lustig didn’t tell me nothin’ ’bout bearing, Captain.”

“Mister Lustig didn’t tell you, eh?”

“No sir, Mister Lustig didn’t say no word ’bout bearing. He jus’ told me to tell you the Officer of the Deck sends his respects ’n’ says he got the Commie coast at thirty miles.”

Captain Jones switched on his night reading lamp and propped himself up on an elbow. Directly over his head was a framed motto on the bulkhead that read: “Give me a fast ship for I intend to go in harm’s way.” Under the motto was the signature: “John Paul Jones.” “That’s all he said — the Commie coastline on radar at thirty miles?”

“Also that there was a skunk on a parallel course which ain’t on a parallel course no more but’s heading straight for us.”

“How far away is this skunk?”

“Mister Lustig didn’t tell me that either, Captain,” Tevepaugh said in a low voice.

“Very well, son. Now hightail it back to the bridge and
tell Mister Lustig that the Captain sends
his
respects. Tell him to call the ship to General Quarters if the skunk is less than ten miles from us. You got that?”

“Yes sir, GQ if the skunk is under ten miles.”

As Tevepaugh turned to go, the Captain added: “I know you — you’re Taylor, the guitarist.”

“No sir, Captain, I’m Tevepaugh the guitarist.”

“Ah yes. Tevepaugh. Well, on your horse Tevepaugh the guitarist.”

The
Ebersole
Sounds General Quarters

Ten minutes later Lustig strode across the pilot house to the three color-coded alarms on the bulkhead (red for general, yellow for chemical, green for collision) and pushed down the red handle. Instantly an electrifyingly persistent
DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG
reverberated through the
Ebersole
. As it faded Ohm put his mouth so close to the microphone of the public address system it looked as if he intended to bite into it, and yelled: “This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Now all hands, man your battle stations. Now set condition one Able throughout the ship.”

The
Eugene F. Ebersole
, a relic of another era and another war, emerged from its stupor. Men grabbed their shoes and dungarees and raced off toward their battle stations. Doors, some of them presumably still watertight after more than two decades of sea duty, clanged shut, their teeth biting into the bulkhead like some medieval portcullis. In the wardroom, Doc Shapley, a hospital corpsman second class who tended to become faint at the sight of blood, laid out packets of surgical instruments and tapes on the green
felt dining table, then stretched out on the couch and dozed. Chaplain Rodgers came into the wardroom, pushed aside the surgical instruments and began playing solitaire. At each of the five-inch mounts sailors in battle dress — helmet on, dungarees tucked into socks, shirt collar buttoned — depressed the guns and took out the tampions that were screwed, like corks, into the tips of the barrels to keep out seawater. On the bridge Lustig passed the watch over to the ship’s engineering officer, a thin-lipped, nasal Naval Academy graduate named Moore. “We’re on course two nine zero, speed ten knots, all four boilers with superheats on the line, but since you put them on the line you know more about that than I do.” Lustig smiled at his own joke. “You got it, John?”

“Got it, Larry,” said Lieutenant junior grade Moore, who didn’t like bridge watches and wasn’t supposed to be up there during general quarters except the
Ebersole
was so shorthanded there was nobody else free to do the job. In a loud, formal voice, Moore went through the ritual of taking over the watch. “Very well, sir, I relieve you,” he intoned.

Helmsman Carr and Bo’s’n Mate Ohm raced off down the port ladder as soon as they saw their reliefs coming. Angry Pettis, the signalman, waited around long enough to soul-slap the palm of his black relief as if he were passing the baton in a relay race. Then he started down the ladder — just as a white sailor started up. The two stopped short and glared wordlessly at each other; then the white had second thoughts and backed slowly down. Angry Pettis coyly cocked his head and continued on his merry way.

Four minutes after GQ sounded Captain Jones stepped onto the bridge. His nonregulation Adler elevators were spit-shined to a mirror finish. His khaki trousers and khaki shirt were creased in all the authorized places. The silver oak leaves on his collar and the gold braid on his blue baseball cap (with the “Swift and Sure” emblem on it) gleamed.
Even his double chins, freshly shaven and pink, glistened. Except for a small patch of toilet paper clotting the blood on a shaving nick, J. P. Horatio Jones looked like a figment of his own military imagination.

“Now the Captain is on the bridge,” Tevepaugh yelled into the ship’s loud speaker system.

For an instant Jones stood on the threshold of the pilot house savoring the moment. For thirty years he had dreamed of commanding a ship. Now the dream had come true. Jones pressed his eyes shut and saw himself standing next to the helm of a full-rigged fifty-gun ship-o’-the-line, saw himself casting an experienced eye on the trim of the sails, saw himself demanding a slight alteration in the mizzen topgallant staysail from the XO, who barked at Lustig, who put a megaphone to his lips and sent the half-naked seamen scurrying up the halyards.

It was the XO who snapped the Captain out of his reverie. “Six minutes twenty seconds,” he said, punching a stopwatch when the Officer of the Deck slammed the inboard door to the pilot house and drove home the teeth with a whirl of the wheel. “Not bad, Skipper.” Holding his stopwatch and smiling broadly, the XO could have passed for an astronaut — clean-cut, crew-cut and crisp. He was wearing work khakis now, but in his starched white uniform he looked like a sail waiting to see which way the wind would blow.

“Not bad,” the Captain agreed.

“Not bad at all,” Lustig chimed in from the other side of the open bridge where he had taken up his general quarters post as gunnery officer. (“You could have timed this with a calendar,” he came up with later.)

Suddenly there was a loud knock on the bulkhead door leading from the inboard ladder to the pilot house.

“My god, what in Christ’s name is that?” asked the XO.

“It would appear, XO, that the ship is not cleared for
action after all,” the Captain said dryly. “I suggest that somebody open it.”

Tevepaugh, who was the messenger of the watch during general quarters also, sprang to the door and spun the wheel, disengaging the teeth from the bulkhead. Then he pulled open the heavy door.

In stumbled Wally (The Shrink) Wallowitch. He was dressed in cowboy boots, skivvy shorts and a tennis sweater and wore a sword strapped to his waist. Mumbling about how it was “impossible to get any sleep in this hotel,” Wallowitch made his way past the Captain and climbed up to his battle station in the main director.

Wallowitch’s Curriculum Vitae

“I swear to God I thought she said ‘pecker,’ ” exclaimed the Shrink, whose nickname came, albeit illogically, from the fact that almost anytime he wasn’t on watch he could be found stretched out on the wardroom couch.

“Bullshit,” said the Poet.

“No, no, I swear, really. Listen, it was a natural mistake. There we were on the back porch of the sorority house. Sort of cuddling together to keep warm, right? And she, being a political science major, is holding forth on the single most important thing that Capitalism and Communism have in common. ‘They both have a
pecker
order,’ says she. Well, I naturally thought it was one of those newfangled sexual theories, but just to make sure I says ‘pecker as in prick?’ ‘Not pecker,’ she says, red in the face, ‘p-e-c-k-i-n-g order.’ Like I said, it was a natural mistake. And anyhow, it broke the ice.”

The Poet laughed appreciatively. “Shrink, you are a man without a conscience.”

Wallowitch flailed his arms over his head. “Conscience is crap,” he said excitedly. “You know what Mencken said about conscience. Conscience is that little old inner voice that warns you somebody is looking. Only me, I give ’em something to look at.” Here Wallowitch went into the spastic routine that he swore almost got him out of NROTC — bending his wrists back as far as they would go to make it look as if his hands were deformed, craning his neck, twitching one ear, letting his lower lip hang slack until saliva ran down his chin.

Stretched out on the wardroom couch, his cowboy boots propped up on some books to keep the blood rushing to his head (one of his medical theories was that this increased potency), Wallowitch cut a ridiculous figure. He had a large, bulbous nose, a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed when he talked, body odor, shaggy hair and a loose fitting uniform that looked like a hand-me-down from another war. Only much later, when the Poet pointed it out, did everyone become aware that the constant flow of jokes formed a moat around Wallowitch, keeping everyone at arm’s length. Nobody could say for sure what the Shrink thought about anything or anyone; he was the wardroom clown who lived in terror of being caught in the act of holding a serious conversation.

From the moment he reported aboard the
Ebersole
(at which time, according to legend, he took one turn around the rusting deck and put in a formal request for transfer to a “ship”), the Shrink kept dipping into a seemingly inexhaustible well of humor. Very early on he started making up the names of knots; “take a turn on that bollard,” he’d order some seaman, “with a double crossover sheepshank half-hitch double-bitch, okay?” In one of his milder escapades, egged on by a klatch of junior officers, he honed his
ceremonial sword to a razor’s edge and shaved with it on the fantail in full view of half the Atlantic destroyer force. Another time he suckered Chaplain Rodgers into a theological discussion.

“Does God have sperm?” the Shrink asked innocently.

“I’d imagine so,” the Chaplain said thoughtfully.

“And if he has sperm, do you think he jerks off?” Wallowitch pursued.

“Now come off it, Shrink, that’s not one single bit funny.”

“But Chaplain, the question has serious implications. If he has sperm and a sex drive and jerks off, we have nothing to worry about. But if he doesn’t relieve the tension somehow, it’ll build up until we have another immaculate conception. And we all know how much trouble the last one caused.”

Then there was the time Keys Quinn lost the tip of his middle finger at Iskenderun; it was sliced cleanly off when a mooring line whipped taut while the
Ebersole
was tying up alongside the burning tanker. With everyone around staring in wide-eyed horror, Quinn casually strolled away to find the Doc. At which point Wallowitch scooped up the digit and went racing down the deck after him. “Hey, Keys,” he yelled, “let’s not leave personal belongings lying around the deck.”

Now and then one of the Shrink’s sallies got him into hot water with the Captain. The first time that happened was when Otto Rummler was riding the
Ebersole
on an antisubmarine exercise in the Caribbean. Rummler, a former German U-boat skipper who was about to become captain of a destroyer that the Americans had donated to the West German Navy, was extremely well liked by J. P. Jones, who considered him a thoroughgoing professional, “the kind of man a country can count on when the chips are down.”

One night in the wardroom Rummler was politely discoursing on “ze great American poze — zat you dizlike vaws und
fight zem mit reluctance.” “On ze ozzer hand,” Rummler went on, “vee Chermans come across az eager beafers, a reputation vee hardly dezerve conzidering ze reluctance of ze Cherman Staff to follow Hitler into Czechoslovakia in zirty-nine. Ach, mein friends, ze world it haz a miztaken notion of uz Chermans; vee are not vaw criminals but careerists, pure und zimple careerists. Zat is ze joke.”