Conversation on Deck

It happened on a troop ship, but it didn’t have anything to do with the war. It could have happened anywhere. There is the other point of view, that maybe nothing happened. Take your choice.

We were on an AP, a General class ship — three thousand army passengers and a navy crow. We wore in convoy, headed for Ulithi, nothing combat, just of bunch of guys riding around in the hot Pacific. It was crowded so they let us sleep on the deck. We officers were presented with a steel plated, hand engraved section of the top deck as our beauty rest.

After you float around for more than a couple of weeks you fall into little habits. A bunch of us, not well acquainted when the trip started, got into the habit of sleeping on top of hatch five, a little job about twelve by twelve. It held eight of us stretched out. Once in a while a “stranger” would get one of the places before we filled it up, but usually it was the same eight. Because sleeping or even just sitting below decks was like trying to live in a steam bath, we usually hit the hatch cover early in the evening with our makeshift bedding. Then there was nothing to do but talk. Hatch five became one of the conversation centers. The whole boat was covered with clusters of conversation in the evening and I suppose the topics were pretty much alike in each group. All I am sure about is our group.

There is no point in giving you a description of our whole group. Only two fellows figure in this incident.

One was Major Ike Neal. He was a peashooter driver who hoped to tranship at Ulithi for stateside on a war weary basis. He looked like he had Indian blood in him. Red bronze color with high cheekbones and heavy brows. He had a wonderfully strong body, heavy shouldered with knots of muscle whenever he moved. In spite of his twenty-five years, those heavy brows gave him the look of a movie villain — not the drawing room type, but more the sort of guy who always robs the stage coach and shoots the peaceful settler. He had a glib line of chatter, but his conversation was one hundred percent composed of the telling of incidents in the life of Major Neal. Most of his incidents concerned his love life, but every once in a while he would hand us a tale of his exploits in the world of sports. I gathered that he had played every kind of rugged game known to man.

Sometimes if a guy like that selects the more inter sting incidents and if you only have to spend one evening with him, he is okay. But to listen to variations on a theme week after week gets tiresome.

Whenever any of us got into an argument or a discussion on anything from postwar oars to what kind of insurance you should carry, Ike would listen restlessly until he could find a little hole in the talk into which he could insert his, “Now that reminds me of the time...”

We were getting fed with him, but since he had a sharp tongue, a hot temper and a set of capable fists, we suffered in silence.

Another fellow in the group was a tall, quiet man of about forty. He was a major also. None of us became very well acquainted with him. He had sort of a veiled expression — you had no idea what he was thinking to look at him. We gathered from a couple of his infrequent remarks that he had been an artist before the war, had gone into camouflage and then had drifted over into Air Corps intelligence. When he wasn’t around, some of us use to play the game of trying to guess things about him, like what kind of an artist he had been, whether he was married, and things like that. But he had the kind of manner that discourages personal questions. His name was Wendell Howity.

That gives you all you need to know about the two people most closely involved in the business that happened on the top of hatch five. It was all that we knew.

We had been laying on the hatch cover arguing about Australian boomerangs and what made them come back to the thrower. None of us knew anything about them, but that didn’t stop us from talking. With our usual bad luck, we gave Ike an opening to tell us all about the evening he had with a girl in Perth. It was a long and juicy evening. By the time he had gotten himself out of her house and weaving back to the boat, the quick dusk had gone, the P.A. system had told us to stop smoking on the weather decks and the thick rich blanket of tropical stars had spread itself over us. We lay patiently on our backs and I think we all breathed a sigh of relief that his story was over. He told them well, but we had gotten so sick of the guy that he could have told them like Ted Husing and we still wouldn’t have liked it.

For a little while we all lay quietly, waiting for somebody else to go back to the boomerang subject, or open up something new. Major Howity happened to be laying next to Ike that night. All you could hear was the mumbling conversations of the groups near us, the drone of the quiet ship’s engines and the whispering of the sea against the hull.

“Major Neal!” The voice rang out with such resonance and such a tone of controlled fury that it startled us. Then we realized that it was Howity.

“Huh?” Ike was thrown completely off balance. He sounded as bewildered as we felt.

Howity’s voice continued, “You pride yourself on being quite a teller of stories, don’t you Neal?” He had a very nasty ton© in his voice.

“Look, Doc. You sound upset. If you don’t like ray conversation I’ll withdraw my personal invitation to you to listen to me, but don’t use that tone of voice to me.”

“You are a sporting man, aren’t you Neal?” The tone was still there.

“Why sure!” Again Howity had him buffaloed, and the rest of us too. We were afraid that Howity might push him too far, and if he did Ike might lean over and take a whack at him. Howity seemed like a nice guy, but apparently he was banking on that natural reluctance of any officer to involve himself in any kind of activity that might lead to a courts martial. Sometimes it isn’t fair.

“Then I have a proposition for you, Neal. I am going to do it for your own good. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel you had some intelligence. Now, wait a minute, don’t get huffy. I meant that as a back handed compliment. Here is my proposition. You start one of your stories, pick any one. After you have finished about two minutes or ten seconds of story telling — when you come to a convenient stopping place, you will pause. At that point I will present you with one hand wrapped, ready me thought. It won’t take me long for each thought. Then, as you can see, our small audience here will have two distinct thought trains to follow. I won’t be attempting to tell a story, and you will. We will see which conversation, yours or mine, occupies their mind when we have both finished. It will be easy to conduct a poll. Is that okay with you?”

Ike thought quietly for a few moments. “It’s okay with me, professor. You are going to try to hold these guys spellbound with a bunch of thoughts, and I am going to tell them a story — then we see who has the box office appeal. Right?”

“Perfectly right. Go ahead.” Howity sounded calm, and Ike had been growing more sneeringly confident each moment.

So Ike started, “Well, as I’ve told you guys, I was a lieutenant when I was waiting on the west coast to go overseas. For some screwy reason they were shipping air corps guys by boat, and we were waiting for the boat. It must have been about a week before I left, another guy and I got passes to come down to L.A. about sixty miles away. We needed some way to get around, so we rented a little car out in the town near the staging area camp and headed for the big city at about two o'clock. As soon as we got there we headed for the cocktail lounge of one of those hotels out of Wiltshire. They are crowded with babes in the late afternoon, and we were going to take plenty of time to pick out the ones we wanted. You know the old deal — we didn’t want a couple that were too coy to make the first night, our only night, and yet we didn’t want a couple of tramps. So we stood near the bar and started to look them over. Okay, doc, shoot.”

Howity waited at least a full minute before he started. It gave us a chance to get our minds away from Ike’s story and begin to wonder what kind of an abstract thought he was going to hand us.

“Look into the sky, Neal, and pick out a faint star. Look hard at it.” Of course we all looked too and we each picked ourselves a star. It’s hared to describe the soft power of Howity’s voice. It was one of those voices that sometimes give you a chill feeling in the back of your neck.

“In all probability, the light which you see left that star two hundred years ago. The star is not now where you appear to see it. In two hundred years that star has moved. The path of light from that star to your eye is a long curved path reaching out countless miles into frozen space. Give your eyes the power of a lease at a great observatory and you could detect the glimmer of light from stars so distant that the rays you see started toward this earth long before recorded history. Procede, Neal.” We all felt a slight sense of dizziness as we stared up at the stars and imagined the long curved paths of light between our eyes and the stars. We had a sense of our own puniness in the gigantic plan of stars and constellations.

Ike hesitated for a moment, and I like to think that it was in that moment that he had the first inkling of his defeat. He continued, “When I stopped we were in that cocktail lounge looking them over. I finally decided that I could use a drink so we turned to the bar. The customers were about three deep. I was standing there waiting when this hand holding a dollar reaches in front of my face and this voice asks me to please buy her a rum and coke and she would be waiting over at that table in the corner. I look at her, fearing the worst, but it seems she is a nice looking chic. When she loaves, I tell the guy I am with what had happened, buy her the drink and then coast over to the table. She sure is a swell dresser. In a little black outfit and one of those screwy hats that look cute somehow. I could tell from her talk she wasn't from L.A. so I started to guess where she was from. I hit it right in the first guess — Texas. While she was telling me that she was working as a receptionist in some sort of a hospital outfit I was worrying about our arrangements. She didn't look like a doll that would push over too easy and there was my friend without a doll yet and the car to split and everything. I was half listening to her while I was worrying. I wanted it to be a good evening. Your turn, professor.”

Again the minute of silence. “Now feel of the blanket on which you are lying. It is wool. It is the treated woven fleece of an animal. But as you fell of it, think of the atoms and elements in that wool.” We all obediently felt of our blankets. It was as though we were hypnotized by that steady somber voice. But the shift from stars to blankets seemed a little abrupt.

“Consider the particles of matter that go to make up that blanket. Once that wool was life itself, the warm outer hair of a sheep. That sheep nourished itself on the grass which sprung from the fertility of dust. The dust itself was composed of the remains of other grasses and of the remains of a hundred thousand years of living things on the earth. All matter is used and reused. That blanket itself will return to the dust and appear in some future eon as some other form of life or form of matter to eventually be turned to the use of life. The dust of the earth is the residue of the living.” Again that cold chill on the back of my neck.

“Now return your mind to the stars. Where were the atoms and particles of that blanket when the light which you now see left that star? And where will the atoms and elements of your body be when the light which is now leaving that star reaches the earth — that body of which you are so proud. Go ahead, Major Neal.” In the silence I gripped my own thigh tightly, comforted by the mere sensation of warmth and bulk, the feeling of living.

Ike was game. He tried. “Well... ah... where was I? Oh, yeah. I was worried about our making arrangements so we could both get fixed up. Well my friend finally got a girl... ah... can't remember what she looked like. Well it was one of those evenings that go along okay. And, well, we... ah... pretty soon we went to another joint to dance and drink and... er... go ahead, Doc.” We could sense that Ike was as eager as we were to see what additional frightening thought Howity would throw at us. So eager, in fact, that he was thinking of it when he should have had his mind on his own story. We were all lying tense in the tropical night on the swaying deck, and it was a time for talk of stars and eons.

“And so, considering the blanket and considering the stars, the life of a man is as long as the flicker of a match in comparison with long cold glare of a planet. Billions of forms of billions of lives have cluttered up this planet, countless generations of grasses and insects and animals and men, formed of dust and returning to dust. Inside this sphere of bone called a skull is a brain and a spirit. The fact that you live is meaningless. You are dust returning to dust in the flicker of one second in the expanse of time. If you sit before a mirror singing songs in praise of yourself, you are casting away that precious second allotted to you. It is that brain and that spirit that can give you a meaning superior to the meaning of the sheep and the blanket. In you is the spirit which can encompass the stars and interpret an eon. The silences of life, silences which can come on this little boat cruising a blue puddle of an ocean, are times for thought and for the speaking of thoughts — not times for empty boasting of the accomplishments of the body — the actions of the dust.” His voice had risen until he had silenced several surrounding groups. Then in a quiet, and infinitely kindly tone, he asked, “Do you wish to continue your story, Major Neal?”

Ike said, “But Howity, how can a guy think of things like the stars without feeling so small and silly that he...” Then he stopped, realizing what had happened to him. I heard him fumble in the darkness, and then he stood up, his bulky shape silhouetted against the stars. He spoke again, his voice hoarse, “Okay you guys, so the end of my story is that I took her home and layed her and so what.” He went off, feeling his way toward the ladderway to the lower decks. He didn’t come back that night.

We all lay in the black silence. A few guys whispered together, but there wasn’t another word from Howity. I felt as exhausted as I would have if I had been swimming beside that tub instead of riding on it.

When I woke up the next morning, stiff as usual from the hard deck, the talk of the previous night seemed strange — seemed unreal. Howity was getting up at the same time. I looked at him, half expecting him to say something about the night before. But he was as quiet and distant as usual. It didn’t seem possible that he was the guy who had done all of the talking. I didn’t feel like mentioning it to him.

We were on that tub for another week, Ike rejoined the group the following night, but there were no stories from him. He was just as quiet as Howity. During that week I saw Howity and Ike together a couple of times, leaning on their all and talking.

During the last two nights we were on the boat Ike joined into a couple of the arguments, but we didn’t have to listen to any more chapters of the book of Neal. It was a relief.

Every once in a while I think of that night. I never can quite get it out of my head, but I still can’t quite put my finger on what happened — if anything.