The Jonah Watch

Chapter 9

Small craft warnings on a clear day are like a bright exclamation. Beneath slanting sunlight, wind pebbles the water in small runs across the harbor, and the flag is a red tongue that wags, laughs, gossips about the sun, mountains, islands, and wind. Gulls fly straighter, their circles flatten, and they rise or descend on the wind like squawking and feathered yo-yos. Distant in the harbor, dories appear bobbing between splashes, while buoys ride solid, displaying the wind as they separate the lightly running chop. Susurrous murmurs wake between the hull and the pier, and men, not exactly intimidated by the cooling wind, place their hands on sunlit steel of the leeward side where there remains a memory of excellent warmth. The breeze nudges like a sniffing, snuffling dog, nose-bumping indifferent elbows, intent on gaining affection. Men step belowdecks to rifle seabags from which are fetched questionable-looking socks, watch caps, long johns and mittens that have survived the preceding winter. On the messdeck and in the crew’s compartment, foul weather gear is pulled almost apologetically into view. Needles are clumsily threaded and loose buttons tightened, with triangular snags patched and sealed with tar.

“Fit out,” Glass advised Brace.

“Come payday. ”

“Come first liberty. I’ll take you to the credit Greek. I rake off a percentage.”

“So does the Greek,” Howard said. “If you want the perfect crime, open an Army-Navy store.”

“I already got the perfect crime,” Glass told him. “After years of study. I’m going to design perfect crimes and sell them.”

“For a percentage.”

“For a flat fee and a percentage. ”

“It’s warm in the engine room,” Brace said, “and that’s where I’m going.”

“You’re going to the Army-Navy store.”

Brace, in single-minded determination, was, approximately, mentally unsound on the subject of the engine room. He was engrossed with a dream that had been sketchy before his days on the mast. Now, that dream was firmed into the maniac certainty that Levere, Dane and Snow would welcome what Brace’s unbalanced mind called “logic.” While other men walked the chilling decks, watched repair proceed on Abner and cast hesitant glances at the wayward and ugly Hester C., Brace thought only of the engine room.

Hester C. settled into watchful sullenness that forced quartermaster-designate Rodgers, formalistic, Catholic-inclined, skinny, exact, red-haired, and plagued with ceremony, to make the sign of the cross each time he walked the gangway. Sometimes Rodgers crossed himself before saluting the colors, sometimes after. “I try to make it half and half,” he confided to Lamp, “‘cause it’s hard to say which should come first.”

Lamp, believing that the pope was a kind of superannuated rabbi, opted for prayer without ceasing.

“You got to be kidding,” Rodgers said. “Protocol. You ever hear of protocol, cook?”

“Something pulled that tramp to us,” Lamp complained. “It wasn’t protocol.”

“It was Abner.”

“You are simpleminded. Simple.”

“I climbed all over that scow,” Conally told them. “There’s nothing different about that boat from any other boat.”

“It’s plotting mischief, boys, I got a feeling.”

“Pull the plug,” said Howard. “Poof.”

“And have it lay at the end of the pier for always.”

Gunner Majors, ordinarily quiet, as if stilled by his preoccupation with things that explode, claimed that Hester C. would make a wonderful target. The men stood before the galley, or loafed on the messdeck, their heads idle—except for the jaws—their hair still short but now untrimmed; red faces, wan faces, swarthy faces. About them lay clean decks, squared-away gear, and the encroaching idleness that was dulling and insensitive and blunt. The coffee urn steamed. Amon hummed, spoke to himself in Japanese as he scrubbed an immaculate wardroom.

Adrian seemed like a polished piece of antique crystal stored forever behind the closed doors of a buffet. The men hesitated, remained silent, as if finally captured by a grim decree that made them outcasts even from their avowed purpose. Then forward and distantly sounding through steel bulkheads, the blurred resonance of a bell arrived like an echo.

“Calling the engine room.”

“It’s another drill.”

“I told you I had a feeling, boys.”

“Something’s up.”

“We’re starting to get some breeze.”

Gale warnings, which almost never occur on a clear day, are like a dark and hollering mouth of triumph. The sky lowers in the northeast, and against the footings of the million-dollar bridge, gray foam rises like the fingers of the harbor. Yachts, swinging at anchor, seem the focus of attack by fleets of dories as owners hastily arrive, secure sail and loose gear, chug engines into life and move out in search of moorage. Toward the Portland Head, the sea, graying toward the sky, begins to pile and churn, white-maned with the wind; and the dark green islands lie like black smears fronted and circled by rocks that carry surf in their teeth. On the windward side of the pier, Abner is flung in short thumps by crashing water, and to leeward Adrian tugs at its lines, falls backward into the small resulting trough, is surrounded by the rush and sigh and hasten of swift water. At the Base the new signal, twin flags, reports in sharp snaps from the tower, while across the bristling, whitening harbor, above the blown spray, a thin layer of black rises in churning dust from the coal yards to march like a line drawn across the windy face of Portland.

“Plane down.”

“He’s bought it.”

“Three planes. Air Force.”

“Get off my back.”

“I think it’s three. That’s what James yelled at Dane.”

“I’d like to yell at Dane. Chum, if I ever yell at Dane.”

“You’ll yell, ‘yessir Chief, yep’, that’s what you’ll yell.”

“How can three planes go down at once?”

“Out of the way, there. Quit tryin’ to explain the Air Force.”

Engines rumble onto the line, dark smoke like a period to an idle sentence pops from the stack and into the wind. The engines settle, the smoke disappears. Yeoman Howard tumbles down the gangway in a splayed run, bumps against the wind like a comma, his watch cap battening his ears, the wind at his face while he crosses to Abner where yeoman Wilson dashes along the main deck to the gangway.

“You, too.”

“Six guys out there.”

“Give me that.” Wilson grabs sailing lists and mail, runs to drop them at the Base. Aboard Adrian, seamen single up on the mooring while Dane stands on the wing with the broad certainty of a tugboat, bellowing. About the decks Conally secures gear, rages. The gangway is shoved clattering toward Howard, to be pulled by him past the lip of the pier. He swings aboard forward of the breast line, turns to see Wilson dashing from the Base in jerky bursts against the wind. On the bridge the high-tuned crackle of the radio, faint in the wind, blanks as James sends the departure message, “Various courses and speeds, maneuvering to assist”; the lines let go, tended by Glass, who leaps aboard as if propelled by the wind; and Adrian, on cold engines, moves slowly into the stream to gather speed evenly as combustion raises engine heat.

“Nine minutes. Log it. Zero nine fifty-two.”

“What took so long?”

“The cook was talkin’.”

Maligned Lamp, appearing on the main deck, watches Adrian’s stern slide past the dark, ugly blot of Hester C. He shakes his head, retreats below to secure the galley as Abner noses from the pier. Decks of both ships seem momentarily peopled with men making up and securing lines. In the channel, Adrian brushes at the heavy chop, presses, vibrates from engines, from shaft; a vibration sensed more than felt, like a football lineman poised instantly, a split second ahead of the count, delicately timed to avoid a penalty. Men off watch, hesitant with the anxiety of a job that offers no current action, drift to the messdeck to wait for news brought by radioman James who drops galleyward like a pale Lord, his coffee mug dangling from one thin hand like a small and forgotten chalice.

“The word. What’s the word?”

Amon, headed forward with coffee for the bridge gang, pauses, listens. Three trainers are out of fuel and down.

“That kind without propellers,” said McClean. “I don’t trust nothing without a propeller.”

Amon pauses, then begins his climb to the main deck. “Jets would splash hard in this weather.”

“In any weather.”

“Headed up to Bangor?”

“Along that line.”

“We won’t find ’em.”

“We’ll take a turn on trying.”

On the occasion of his first visit to water above the shelf, Brace stood as stalwart as a young hound. He listened, seemed thoughtful, then went above to the main deck where he leaned on the rail as if fixed by romance as strong as McClean’s faith in things that churned. The luminous and beckoning engine room, the lost Mona, the harsh words and rage of Dane were doubtless lost in the gray mist and blown spray rising before the lighthouse at Portland Head which for more than a century and a half had stood watch over curious sights and cold survivors of the sea.

Howard, who in lucid moments swore to Lamp that all prayer was directed to the ridiculous, approached.

“You’ll love it in a little while,” he said to Brace. “Wait until we clear the head.”

Brace turned with the vacuous look of total absorption in great matters. He seemed surprised by the intrusion of another consciousness into his arena of sensation. His watch cap fell to his eyebrows, from beneath which his eyes were dark brown and lightly glazed with either romance or memory, or possibly wind. He steadied himself, leaned against the rail, both hands forward and gripping easily like a magician or a strong man who was singly holding together the ancient collection of parts that was the cutter Adrian.

“I like it,” he said. “I’ve been thinking how much this don’t look like Illinois.”

Howard, who in a dim way may have sensed a bond between himself and Brace in some near past, paused, then resumed his task.

“You learn the helm, then practice steaming. Twelve-to-two on the bridge, two-to-four in the engine room.” Then, a man pressed into confidences by the rare occasion of privacy, he said, “It isn’t like Ohio, either.”

“You’re from Ohio?”

“Did you think you invented it?”

The glaze over Brace’s eyes disappeared in favor of intuition and recognition. He pushed himself upright from the rail, looked at Howard.

“I guess I thought I did. Does everybody?”

“I don’t know, but probably I’ll think about it.”

Beyond the Portland Head, the sea rises unfettered in its crush toward the land. Above the widely moving swell which lifts and drops vessels as surely as the faith asked of a philosophic premise, runs a chopping swell that is a creature born of wind. The confused sea delivers shocks against the hulls of the largest ships, and smaller vessels nose the wind like determined and uneasy immigrants to a sometimes violent land. The wind, flavored with salt, picks spray from the bow, to wash decks, house, rails, the unused and unthought-of guns; wind rising from the tops of waves to swirl spume like a dust devil awhirl across a plain. Salt accumulates in the corners of men’s mouths, to be licked away, causing a momentary taste of the sea’s huge proclamation. The wind speaks in the open tones of unmuted instruments. Gales do not howl or scream or screech, as does a storm. They moan, weep, play the blues, are lubricating and liquid over lonesome, tricky waters.

“It’s a tough rap,” Glass said to Brace. “Some say to puke and get it over with. Others say that if you once start pukin’ you can’t get stopped.”

Brace, making a choice, or more likely in the firm grasp of his body’s knowledge, spilled breakfast to leeward in illustration of young wisdom. Then he climbed weak-kneed and pale to the bridge and began to discover some of the things that a helm will not accomplish.

After the first urge of action and compassion, Adrian’s crew settled into the routine of a steaming watch that pointed the vessel toward unknown positions and easily guessed agony. In September in Maine, and with a little fat, a lot of thrashing, and all the luck left to him, a man can sometimes live for twenty minutes in the water. If the crews of the planes had not made it to their life rafts, their books were already closed. If they were on the rafts, jacketed and booted, their paltry scrap of canvas clutched over them against the wind, hypothermia might not spin them from the edge of their circle for fifteen or twenty hours.

On small ships, as watch follows watch, and as the sea continues through shocks to search for loose gear, and, finding none, seeks to loosen gear to fling it, daily work on the ship ceases. Men who are not yet reduced to walking on bulkheads are still unable to trust their tools, their sustained balance, even their intent.

Amon, who suffers in the first hours of large movement, lies huddled beneath a table of the messdeck in Asiatic contemplation, from which, like Lazarus, he will in a few hours rise wide-eyed and knowledgeable from the explored depths of a great mystery.

“If he’d just quit fighting it and puke, he’d be all right. I keep telling him.” Lamp, who is smart about the galley in his heavy-shanked way, builds, constructs, fusses over half-filled vats of soup and regiments of sandwiches, the most that can be claimed from this kind of sea.

Men off watch sit on the messdeck, or sack out in jerkily plunging bunks. The Indian Conally roams the slick upper decks in communion with wind and water, ostensibly checking against things adrift that may crash or vanish. Heat swirls through the grates of the fiddley, where Howard, in time, passing forward to the bridge, sniffs, as if he expects sulphur to rise from the hot depths in which Snow, like a small brown bird, perches beside the engine-order-telegraph and before the great bank of dully gleaming gauges, dials and valves that look like waving, plunging sculpture.

Howard stands arrested, silenced, emptied, in foreboding, in heart-shocking horror; watching a stance he has seen so often in excursions across this fiddley—the wide-legged, hunch-shouldered concentration of the drowned Cecil Jensen standing on oily plates beside the port engine; a wiping rag dangling from a hip pocket, another rag dangling from one hand. The stance is a collection of tallness compacted to bulk, only a little less unique than a thumbprint.

Howard shudders, reduces a yell, a scream, back into his instinctive interior, and stands in dispraise of his eyes which have fooled him.

It is only Brace standing there, timid, alert, entranced among the heavy voices of the engines.

On the bridge, Dane stands like a brick mortared between loran and radio. He looks seaward, squinty-eyed and thin-mouthed, unimpressed by the hook of Rodgers’s body that dangles headless from the rubber mask over the radar scope. Glass twirls the helm to meet the sea, twirls back, the gyro repeater dances, swings. Levere mutters over the plot. James fiddles with log sheets, waits.

“How’s the set?”

“Sea return, Cap. We could miss a freight train.” Rodgers backs from the radar mask, blinking, a man reconnected.

“Eyes, chief. Call watchstanders.”

The radio pops, blanks.

“Abner calling.”

“We’ll take the seaward leg.”

The ships drop their mutual course; Abner climbs the chart to the northwest while Adrian, advancing under the spinning, kicky helm in the hands of the watchful Glass, beats to the southeast.