The Jonah Watch

Chapter 24

Pneumonia, which is not humble, and which cynics call the enemy of youth and the friend of the aged, attended Adrian as the ship beat north at flank speed, homeward bound. Pneumonia, unlike fire and ice, is not worth talking about by sailors and poets. While fire is spectacular, and ice is occult, pneumonia is a cheap theatrical trick that waits in the wings. When a man is exhausted, cold, or injured, pneumonia steps toward the final chorus. Young men often manage to drive it away, old men almost never do.

Adrian jolted and fled across the winter sea, as Snow and Howard traveled like foolish birds of passage between the dying man who lay in the chief’s quarters, and the two men who were making their own fights in the crew’s compartment. Majors was gussied up and fanciful with codeine, murmuring of miraculous guns. Brace had his own taste of pneumonia. Since neither Howard nor Snow knew if sedation would drop Brace’s defense against disease, they sedated him very little; and Brace, on the thrusting, rocking, jolting bunk, no doubt suffered. Howard spoke to him, but Brace was mostly mute. He confided to Howard that he was “figuring something out.”

Lamp held together the after part of the ship by talk and food—Lamp rendering a state of grace on the messdeck to match the same business which Levere attended to on the bridge.

The Indian Conally, in spite of the weather, stalked the boat deck in the wind, a man engaged in an act of communion, perhaps; perhaps in a sacrifice, or a demonstration of faith. Perhaps Conally was only confused.

Glass and James were not talking, not even to each other; and they sat on the messdeck in a sort of stunned silence, as they slurped coffee, and stared into the depths of their mugs like men freshly reacquainted with concepts of infinity. Even the loudmouth cracker Bascomb walked hushed.

Howard, as helpless as a revivalist facing reality, and with dull wits, watched the ancient and vibrating decks. Howard did not understand what he saw, and while Lamp bustled, and—may any stray forces of light, if they are worthy, protect and preserve the soul of Reeser Lamp—actually made chicken soup which Dane refused and so did Glass, Howard turned to Snow; for Howard had catalogued more facts than he could handle.

Snow stood beside Dane. Dane lay drawn, old. His thin hair was white across his pink and dying skull. He breathed in gulps and chokes. His thin lips pulled tight, like a circle of wire around his gulping mouth. He muttered to a woman, called a woman, unnamed here and forever unnamed. Sometimes he cursed. Sometimes he gave orders.

“Why do we put up with this,” asked Howard, and he spoke as if he was the youngest man alive. “You’ve been around, Chief. Why do you put up with this?”

“I am a seaman,” said Snow. “Do you truly want to know?” Snow stood beside Dane’s bunk. Snow braced himself against the sharp pitch of Adrian as the ship crashed forward on strained engines; and it was clear that Snow then neither thought nor cared about engines. His small face was creased. His mouth was tight when Dane rambled coherently. Snow’s mouth relaxed only a little when Dane was incoherent.

“I want to know,” Howard said. “All of this means something. I used to be able to figure anything out. I used to know everything.”

“As did I,” said Snow. “A Scots lad gave me my instruction. He struck me in the mouth at a time when our destroyer was machine-gunning survivors from a submarine. They were swimming toward us. I recall that I was laughing.” Snow leaned against a bulkhead, a small brown bird at rest, peering either at half a minute or half a century. “In the war,” he said, “we were glad to indulge in madness. When the war was finished, we were still glad to indulge in madness. The reason I put up with this is that it is not madness.”

Howard, discovering that he might not yet be a seaman, was awed. “It’s embarrassing, what I’m going to do.”

“Do you believe,” said Snow, and he spoke with absolute wonderment, “you Yanks are a curious people, and with strangely vivid explanations. I am about to use one. Do you actually believe that there is a free lunch?”

Lamp, the magic man, the spiritualist, who immediately understood—after the fact—why Jensen wanted Brace on deck and not in the engine room, behaved like a creative demon of food. He worked through the night, through the morning, and when Adrian put lines on the pier and Dane and Brace and Majors were taken ashore, Lamp sagged against a chain, and he was exhausted. He looked over the familiar home harbor of Portland where the channel was a black and narrow river running between ledges of ice. He looked to the mudflats, attempting to discover the ugly form of Hester C.; saw only the wreckage of a beat-up work boat scattered by storm along the tide line. Belowdecks, in warm spaces, men shook themselves like dogs ruffling out wet fur. They belched, burped, like old Romans waiting to get on with the feast. They returned to the messdeck where food lay steaming in glorious redundancy. The men muttered, were not hopeful, but began to feel that they might soon feel that way.

Yeoman Howard, headed to the Base where he would not pick up mail for yeoman Wilson, or for Abner, but only mail for Adrian, picked up an unusual creature instead. The creature’s name was Iris.

“A real winner,” the OD at the Base told Howard. “I’m glad you’ve got the punk.”

Steward apprentice Iris, it developed, was a man who had been so gorgeously conned that no argument, no set of reasons, could convince him that the entire world was not in a state of error. During the short walk between Base and ship, Iris managed to explain three times that a recruiter in Hawaii had promised him a change in rate the minute he hit the States. Iris managed to explain four times that he had an engineering degree from a great and powerful university, and that the recruiter had promised that a man with such qualifications would immediately be sent to officer’s candidate school. Steward apprentice Iris—who did not have a Chinaman’s chance in a Turkish harem of getting a change in rate (being Hawaiian), leave alone O.C.S., and who doubtless had his sheepskin with him—was tall and spectacled and mildly oriental, if one discounted the indignant and confused expression on his face. Yeoman Howard, who was busy mistrusting all experience, kept his big mouth shut. He took Iris aboard and introduced him to bosun striker Joyce.

“What’d I do with him?”

“Square him away,” said Howard. “I’ll log it. See you below in a minute.”

The minute stretched to five, because of the pickiness of the horse-headed Chappel. Chappel hunched above Iris’s service record which lay glistening in stiff, new, undented covers. Chappel tsked and pursed his mouth and made worry noises. Chappel did not have an engineering degree. Adrian did not have a chief bosun. All that Howard had was a thick envelope from Personnel which he feared to open.

The logging-in ceremony completed to Chappel’s scrupulous satisfaction, Howard laid below; where, with engineering certitude, steward apprentice Iris was hogging the whole show. He had gathered quite a crowd.

“You are a punk,” Joyce was telling Iris. “We don’t need your flak.”

“You must not speak to me in that manner. I have an engineering degree.”

“You are a punk with an engineering degree.”

“This is the cutter Adrian,” said Glass. “The captain is Phil Levere, mustang. The man on deck is Jim Conally. The cook is Reeser Lamp. You are steward apprentice Iris.”

“You dislike me because am Hawaiian.”

“True,” said Wysczknowski, “but yids are worse. And admirals.”

“You slant-eyes is all alike,” Joyce advised Iris. “We’d ought to pack up the lot of you and send you back to Philadelphia.”

“And Polacks,” Glass told him. “There ain’t nothin’ worse than a Polack. I had a long weekend with a Polack lady once… by mistake… you can take my word.”

“Niggers,” said McClean. ”… now know something about this.”

“What are you saying? What in the world are you trying to say?”

“We are saying,” said Wysczknowski with considerable ease, “that there is an old, tired guy back aft, and he has been up all night and cooking. So unpack that sloppity seabag…”

“And get crackin’.”

The fat envelope, when Howard opened it, contained orders:

The dying Dane was ordered to take command, not of Able, but Aaron in Boston. Levere had Able. The captain of Aaron was to take Adrian, a grand swapping around that Howard did not then recognize as a rejuvenating and reaffirming principle. All Howard knew was that the auxiliary orders allowed Levere to take some men with him to subdue the jinx ship. Levere had been scrupulous in his requisitions. He had not wanted to short Adrian.

Fallon stayed, but Snow was transferred with Levere. Chappel went with Levere, as did Joyce and Wysczknowski, Glass and James. Howard, not knowing whether it was a compliment, a disgrace, or neither, was not included.