The Last Ship (40 page)

“Sir?”

“Yes? What is it, Porterfield?”

“About the poker, sir.”

“What, the poker?”

“I was wondering, sir. Wondering if it might be possible that, say, in special circumstances, a captain would have the power to, well, suspend, so to speak, a certain Navy regulation. If he had a good enough reason.”

“Are you undertaking to instruct me in the powers of a ship’s captain, Porterfield?”

“Oh, no, sir. I’d never attempt anything like that, sir. No indeed. I was but speaking theoretically, sir.”

“Anyhow I doubt if we have any cards, considering that regulation.”

I heard a mild cough. “Something curious has happened, sir. A diligent seaman has turned up a half dozen decks or so. I hardly know how they got aboard.”

I waited but a second. “Yes. Quite a mystery, I’d say.”

“Isn’t it, sir?”

I spoke judiciously. “Speaking just
theoretically:
The reason would have to be very special. Did you have any in mind?”

He spoke gravely, in thoughtful reflection. “Well, sir. Very few things relieve a man’s loneliness more, I’ve found, sir. Yes, sir. Nothing takes a man’s mind off things the way poker does.”

I gave Betelgeuse a final look.

“Permission granted,” I said. “Where do you plan to have the game?”

“In the steering-gear room,” the helmsman said promptly.

It was an out-of-the-way place, far aft and rather deep in the ship, just below the waterline; one also the helmsman would know well.

“Not a bad choice,” I said. “Foresighted of you to have selected it before this little chat. Good night, Porterfield.”

“Good night, Captain.”

Yes, a respite, a balm, that conversation was, having to do less with poker than with sanity. I turned, strangely at peace with myself, to go to my cabin and sleep.

To Be Lonely

He was an Old Navy man. And, as I have said, the best pure seaman we had aboard.

“Well, sir, I guess I liked Pacific duty best. Most of these younger ones—now they favor the Med here. I can understand that. Good liberty ports. Tangiers. Villefranche. Naples.” He paused in respectful tribute. “Naples—that may have been the best of them all, the way they saw it. The one place you could always get anything: Aye, that was Naples. Me, I’ve always been partial to the Pacific.”

He stood beside me, a truly immense man, and with it the quiet voice of one who finds it unnecessary to bluster. No one could have been more a son of the sea.

“Not for the liberty ports,” I said. Boatswain’s Mate Preston never liked being far away from the ship. He would seek out the nearest bar. But he did not really approve of the shore.

“No, sir, not for them. Oh, now and then. Yokosuka. Hong Kong: definitely worth a look. But mostly some little spit of island. And them few and far between. Longer at sea. Maybe that was it. The ship had a lot of sea to get around in. Lot of maneuvering space out there.”

I smiled in the dark. “Yes. The Pacific was never short on maneuvering space, Boats.”

I decided to venture it, just barely to touch down on its shores, to open the door a crack. I felt, in his way, he was trying to tell me something; something important.

“Some men found it lonely,” I said.

He seemed to reflect a moment. “Captain, I figure if a man’s a real Navy man . . . Well, sir, probably why he went to sea in the first place was to be lonely. If you want to look at it in a certain way.”

It was a sober thought but I knew what he meant. The sea has no greater gift than that of solitude, which is at once a man’s greatest friend and his greatest enemy. I said something that would make him go on.

“The only reason I can figure for a man going into the Navy,” he said, “is to get away from all those shore people. And the Pacific was the best for that. That’s for sure.”

“You’ve got a point, Boats. You can certainly get away from shore people in the Pacific.”

“That’s what I figure, sir.”

Boatswain’s Mate Preston straightened his huge figure and looked out into the night of the Mediterranean. It looked pretty big itself, and lonely enough, the limitless waters unfolding all around us to far horizons where stars hanging low seemed to reach down fervently to touch the sea.

“Aye, sir,” he said. “It’s even bigger out there.”

He would be the last to proffer an uninvited suggestion to his captain. But then he said: “Lots of islands out there. Probably some they didn’t even get around to.” Waited again, added: “For one reason or another.”

A profound startlement held me still: the imparted knowledge of how far the crew’s talk, their speculations, had taken them in considering another course; perhaps he was informing me that the Pacific might not arouse all that much opposition, or at least that it also had its adherents, its converts.

I decided it was time to change the subject.

“Hurley,” I said. “Is he about ready?” For his coxswain exams I meant.

“Anytime, sir. He’ll make a good boatswain. A good seaman. He’s a Navy man.”

Than that he could say no more.

Ballet

“In my eighteen years at sea I’ve known Navy people to come from just about any background you can think of. You’re my first ballet officer. Your service record.”

Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, I had always felt, got as much pure enjoyment, contentment if you will, out of her job—anti-submarine warfare officer—and out of the sea and shipboard life itself as any hand aboard.

“Well, it was this way . . .”

She looked up at the stars, back at the long plain of the night sea.

“I knew I was good. But I also came to know at some point that I would never go all the way: prima ballerina in a first-rate company. Pretty close but—if it’s something like ballet, unless you can be at the very top, I decided it was foolish to go on. If there’s any harder work I’ve not heard of it. And a short career. A woman is finished at, oh, age thirty-three. Only the top can justify that. I decided to check out.”

“Was a Navy recruiting officer hanging around the stage door when you did?”

“Not quite. The idea of ‘first’ in
something
had got to be important to me. Silly, but there it was. The Navy—
noblesse oblige
—had just opened up this . . .” She indicated the stretching waters. “. . . to women. I decided to be one of the first to go to sea. And by God, I made it. How about that, Captain?”

“I congratulate the Navy.”

She waited, as if uncertain whether to do so; then, as though impulsively, added something that rather startled me.

“Also I had decided I never wanted to get married. Being at sea was a good way to have that pass you by; no fuss in dodging it all the time like ashore.”

It was not an excessive piece of vanity, the implication that she would have had to stave off a good deal of hassling. In terms of what are called pure feminine good looks, Rollins would probably have won any such contest on the
Nathan James.
To ask her for the reason for that decision would, of course, have been out of the question and I became aware that she would never give it to me voluntarily.

“In a way like myself,” I said. “The sea had all the answers. And so here we are.”

“Aye, sir. Here we are.”

Weather

“They are bearing up rather amazingly well in my view.” He spoke the word quietly: “Fortitude. I’ve never seen more.”

We stood by the lifeline, somewhat forward of the after missile launcher; gazed across an acquiescent sea, manifestly about to change, full of intent. I could hear the first low muttering of the wind through the halyards and see swarthy clouds beginning to pass across the restless stars. Above and beyond us, the faint light thrown out by the masthead and range lights alone broke the ship’s darkness. Near the midwatch, the weather decks deserted, ourselves out of earshot of all, we seemed nonetheless to speak in claustral whispers.

“I expected it of them.” These were essential precursory probings, as we both knew. “But you’re right. Bearing up better than anyone could have expected or had a right to expect.”

As I have recounted elsewhere, we had worked out our own discrete ritual, the chaplain and I. I looked upward. The stars were leaving us fast, scampering for hiding places, abandoning us to the dark and somber vault of the night, the fog-mist beginning to envelop us. We heard the sea commence a low muffled roar as it received the riding ship. I recited the opening chord of the ritual now.

“I think I know real trouble when I see it. I don’t think we are there, in any immediate sense.”

“If we’re talking about how long they will . . . wait.” He stopped there and a silence hung.

I moved at once into an extra state of vigilance. To the multiple intonations of his voice I was attuned as to a complex cipher. In it now was something of presentiment, almost of apprehension, tinged slightly I felt even with fear. Therefore something to be heeded, since he was the least panicky of men, the last to raise false alarms.

“Tom,” he said now, “I would put it this way.” Even his rare, permitted use of my first name served to put me on notice, heighten my own aroused foreboding. “The sooner they know the better. It will only build. The men—I am talking about the spread of a kind of anxiousness. Rooted I believe in a feeling of uncertainty.”

Coming from him, that was a rather major warning. Playing, I think, for time for the purpose of extracting more, even something quite specific, I spoke rather sidelong into it.

“I have never had more difficulty determining what is in their minds.” He could be that much of a confessor. I waited, then said it. “I need to have them with me.”

He seemed much surprised. “Oh, I think they are.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean with me whatever I decide.”

Another reason for caution being that mentioned matter, the lethalness of words aboard ship, actually able to abet what one fears; to speak of certain things aboard ship can be the first step toward bringing them into being. He was silent for a moment, gazing at the stalking sea, which we were beginning to feel under our feet in the rise and fall of the weather deck. Both of us, with the instinct of sailors, looked up and saw the swarming clouds commencing to coalesce to form one black mass, sullen and huge, the last star extinguished; both anchoring ourselves more to the deck, feet reflexively spreading, planted, a bit more . . . “With me whatever I decide,” I had said.

“Yes, I see the difference.” I could feel in the dark his careful seriousness, his actual change of tone, a distant, almost delicate hint of reproach. “Naturally you will explain everything to them. When the time comes. The course . . . whatever it shall be . . . They peculiarly need a considerable measure of . . . explanation.”

“Explanation?” A strange impatience flared through me. “The Frenchman? That Russian sub commander? Our own failures—nothing whatever received?”

With a twist of the shoulder I indicated our communications antennas, the wind now singing through the arrays under aroused seas.

“What remains to be explained, for God’s sake?”

I felt from him a kind of intellectual shrug, as before things as they are as opposed to what one wished them to be.

“It may be a case of the unconvincible. They may have to see the nailprints, the wound in the side. Not strange, considering.”

“We can’t afford that kind of indulgence.” A certain hardness came abruptly into my voice. Speaking more softly I said a vain thing. “Whatever it takes, I think I stand well with them there . . . in areas of persuasion . . .”

I was really not looking for confirmation of that self-ascribed attribute and he would know that I was not. His silence on the matter—neither of us was disposed to waste time affirming the other’s vanities, either might mildly dispute a declared one if he so felt—was proof enough of that. One wanted to say outright, What if the decision should be to turn our backs on it forever . . . ? One could not. It would be to let predicted results dictate the decision; an abdication of everything a ship’s captain was; cowardly, in fact. Still I knew that they were waters I had to test, as a ship on trial runs, a shakedown cruise. A captain must not back away from such matters; his only course is to seize them. I decided the time had come to put it as plainly as I dared.

“I need to have them
want
it that way. My choice to be their choice.”

His eyes ranged from the high and coursing black clouds, now moved along more insistently by a freshening wind, to the dark sea which was beginning to respond in kind, its great mass sending waves surging to meet the oncoming heavens. Through their sound came from that voice a cautionary chord, softly spoken, in its way as bold as anything it had ever said to me as captain, its importance being a clear conveyance that what I had just spoken of as desirable was by no means to be taken for granted; there came a condition, distinct and unforgiving; rather hard in the way it fell on the air, his voice shading off into a tone close to insistence.

“It follows—it presumes—that your choice be the right one. Beyond any mistake. They must feel, know to an absolute, there is no other.”

As if to temper this implicit admonition—it had in it even a touch of the threat—to balance it with comfort, he spoke again, the words falling soft but penetrating on the night.

“Some of them look to the Lord. But they all look to you, Captain.”

I felt, along with a touch of wryness, a distant, perhaps hasty balm at that simple declaration. He had spoken to heal, to fortify. While making clear the remorseless fact that nothing was unconditional in our circumstances, he had as much as said he would go a very long way with me, to every possible limit be on my side, actively so, with ship’s company. Help. Perhaps he had perceived more than had I that that was what I was asking for all along. Now, without the asking, he had offered it to me, a gift, freely given.

“Chaplain, I hope the Lord understands the respective weights you assign to the two of us—Him and this poor mortal sailor—in these matters.”

His reply came in that same wry tone: “He has a tendency to understand. Especially, I sometimes think, all poor mortal sailors.”

“I want them with me. But a sea captain: He cannot simply go with the majority. Even now. I would say especially now. I am not here for that.”