The Jonah Watch

Chapter 4

Flashing neon. Tailor-made blues. dragons stitched in Chinese silk. Men and women laughing. Old faces. Young faces. Liberty.

“I want a transfer.”

“You want another beer.”

“Me, too,” said Glass. “I want a transfer. To that Andy cutter down in Florida. I’m her next captain.”

“A zoo. An absolute zoo.” Brace’s unremarkable features were pale. He seemed alarmed at the thought of another beer.

“Make bags of money being captain,” Glass said. “Rake off the duty-free stores. Smuggle them to Cuba.”

“You want to grow up,” Howard told Brace kindly. “You want some sea time. Plus you want another beer.”

“You got it made,” Glass explained to Brace. “Me, I don’t got it made. Not ’till get next to those rich Cubans.”

Red neon. Blue neon. Green neon. Tattoo neon. Light pulsing on the wan faces of bar girls with names that were fabulous: Jungle Judy, Radar the Snipe, Feelie.

“I never did anything to make Dane hate me.”

“You never did nothing to make him love you.”

“And there’s rich Cuban ladies.” Glass traced bountiful lines in the air with his hands. “We shouldn’t never forget the ladies.”

“Those ladies all smoke cigars,” Howard told him.

The bars of Portland and the crusty waterfront, etched stark by sunshine where weathered gray boards of buildings stand like tall slats against the northeast wind; the bars which ruin “livers and lights” are places where crews unhunch from frustration, and drink against the illusion that fear is swept away.

Glass pointed out that if there were no bars there could be no waterfront missions. Unsaved souls would have to wander through mists more terrible than any imagined by the spiritualist Lamp.

Howard agreed. Howard said that bartenders were seminarians.

The crew went ashore and gradually got straight. Cutter Adrian slumbered on repair status. Cutters in Portsmouth, Boston and New Bedford took the duty. Adrian would cross courses with all of them during any year, small ships appearing ghostly from fog or mist, ships seen laboring in gale, and ice-covered from piling seas or from the black and howling mouth of storm; the new and competent 83 boats, the harbor and ocean-going tugs with towing screws to envy.

When the luck was thin, like ice in the knitted wool of a watch cap, the lousy cutter Able, of New Bedford, might be working alongside. Able was the broken strand in the hawser, the frail anchor line in the web of competence reaching from Argentia to Block Island. It was the ship that could not do, would not do, and which no one trusted. Able was sloppy and unhappy, perpetually changing officers and crew in a hopeless search for the combination that would make it a going concern.

In later years, forming one more grand theory of ships, Lamp would claim that when Able’s keel was laid the wives of seamen wept. “Boy, boys… I be double-dog-damn.” According to Lamp, Abner was lucky, Adrian was well sinewed, and Able was jinxed.

“You got it made, chummy,” Glass insisted. “You coulda been sent to Able. It’s a sub.”

“It’s the navy has the submarines,” Brace said wisely into his fourth fresh glass of beer.

“He means,” said Howard, “that every time you see it you’re surprised it’s still afloat.”

“I seen that thing in dry dock,” Glass said. “It rusted the dry dock.”

When you are young, experience seems to be a silk dragon or a cleverly stitched tiger on the sleeve of your tailormades. The ancient, ever-moving and murmuring sea pops small waves onto the beach through the summer calm. At Portland Head, the lighthouse is glazed cake-frosted white with sun, like a building from the Med plucked by Greek gods and transported.

Brace’s instincts were sometimes good about the decks of a vessel on repair status, but they were lacking in other ways. He saw the sea and told Glass of a summer visit he had once made to Lake Michigan. Brace was not going to sea, and he was not going ashore with much success. The crew knew that repair status was more than luxury, it was luck. Brace was missing a bandstand opportunity.

The crew was woman-needful and brash. The men toured the bars, breathing the cool, stale beer smell of the bar that was as much their familiar as the sea. They engaged in territorial movement, like eager dogs wetting boundaries around hydrants. The crew was wary of foreign ships, of fancy and gorgeous uniforms that captured the entranced attention of the only women they knew.

“I hear your queen’s got bow legs.”

“Mate, you can’t say that about our queen.”

“There’s this about your queen….”

The fight, often joyous, with split lips and broken teeth.

“Honest, judge…”

“It was double jeopardy,” Glass said. “I studied this.”

“You missed one Holy Roller of a fight,” Howard told Brace. “You miss just about everything, kid.”

Each night Dane sat in a booth in the aft end of the bar, cool in khaki among the white uniforms or optional blue uniforms of his deck gang. Dane with his shack job, Florence, or “Flossy,” drinking beer after beer as he spoke easily and with humor to the not unattractive, spoiled woman who drove expensive automobiles and enjoyed slumming. Outdrinking his deck gang, Dane seemed to be saying, was just one more boring part of his job.

“He won’t leave us alone,” Bruce said. “Even ashore.”

“He leaves me alone.”

“You can always go to another bar.”

“I got drunk once, really drunk,” Brace said with deep and awful meaning. “If he keeps it up, I’m going to do it again.”

Seaman Glass, recognizing a statement of experience that yeoman Howard at first missed, pursued the matter during the shore-going, and hot, and too short summer.

“He’s deep,” Glass told Lamp.

Lamp tsked to Amon. Amon’s flat, Hawaiian face, which was principally Japanese, became studious in that way that happened when Lamp talked of mysteries. Amon may have thought Lamp in touch with old gods, or with living dragons wise with centuries; or, lighted by his name, thought him the one glow of sanity in Amon’s otherwise closeted and lonely life. Amon, with an unease not otherwise known in New England, refused to wrestle with the source of revelation. He went to Howard instead.

“Brace is deep,” Amon told Howard.

Brace was deep. Jensen was dead. Jensen’s story, it was believed, was told. Brace’s tale was only beginning, and Glass, responding to the unlined forehead and occasional petulance of Brace, was shocked and morally twinged to learn that Brace had even a meager kind of history.

Lamp, in contrast, clucked to the crew over Brace’s virtue. He hinted boldly to Dane that Brace would make a fine apprentice cook.

The crew eased mentally sideways, commented, judged and forgot. Brace’s life story was not a sea story, but a small tale of the messdeck where Joyce, Majors and Conally sat to starboard, hunched and chomping, left thumbs—through habit—anchoring trays to table, forks stabbing from right hands with the delicate precision of men accustomed to eating rapidly below wildly skidding decks. The black gang—McClean, Masters, Wysczknowski, Racca and Fallon—chomped to port. At a small table near the ship’s office the bridge gang of Rodgers, Chappel, James and Howard were a coffee-muzzling crew. The seamen, firemen, and Adrian’s young pigeon, Brace, sat midships. Lamp stood like a wide-butted archangel wielding the hot sword of his galley fires. Amon was a constantly running thread tying all to the wardroom where Levere and Dane sat solitary.

The tale, transcribed from the beer-drinking confidences of Brace, through the twinge of Glass, and arranged into a morality play by Lamp, was not human drama until after a great deal of thought.

Brace had an older cousin—Jim or John, it makes no matter—and perhaps his last name was Smith; but as surely as old ships are reengined between wars, young men must have heroes.

“A jerk,” Glass confided to Lamp. “He’d last five minutes in Boston.”

This Jim or John was a midwestern miracle of a type so common in those parts that the miraculous is the standard of Rotarians. He raised 4-H cattle that won prizes, played basketball for a state university, and was healthy and blond and tanned and modest. He was, in sum, decent; a moral and right-thinking body, who, in the distance of time and miles translated through Brace’s memory, was the ideal creature of conduct that Lamp applauded. On the surface, Brace’s hero was sinless and guileless, and, if presented with his actual shape, Lamp would not have known what to do with him.

Brace was not a minister’s son, except as all sons of southern Illinois in those days were spiritually sired by ministers. Brace was a son of dusty town squares, gravel roads, fields of corn and pumpkins, soybeans, tomatoes, sugar cane, hay, oats, rye, wheat, and the thin gleaning of daft certainty held by men who own clean barns, bulging red silos, sleek herds, chores, and pitchfork morality. Practically, Brace was the son of the high school bandmaster, a man who breathed the better quality of air, and who produced music that was mechanically sound. The father had a voice like the horns of Joshua. After a night in the bars, Brace claimed that if his old man had not done so much yelling it would have been easier to handle the big, fat, loud mouth of Dane.

“My pop wanted to be a doctor,” Glass said, “but he’s a yid. Works in a drugstore. Make a lot of money with a drugstore.”

“At least he don’t yell. Right?”

“He hates drugstores.”

“Mine’s a lawyer,” a seaman said.

“A crook. I like you better, now,” Glass told him.

“If you chase enough ambulances, you’ll catch a few.”

“Mine’s a taxi-driving pimp.”

“Mine’s a dope.”

“We didn’t have one in our family,” Howard admitted. “We were too poor.”

“They’re all crooks,” Brace said knowledgeably into his beer. “I used to didn’t know that.”

Your seaman cynic, carrying in his heart that awful tradition that is not a myth, but true, is born of offenses rendered in the invisible world. One must go out, but the tradition does not require you to haul spurious cargo. The tradition is a jealous god. Your seaman cynic, that voluntary Jonah, may be forever offended by all other things, and that suits the tradition, just fine.

Brace’s hero was three years his senior, experienced (as was Brace) at trumpeting in the band. Brace’s hero did other and greater things: firing plinking rifles, grappling with dates, breeding cattle, driving at high speeds and shooting basketballs. He was blond and beautiful and, when Brace was not overcome with awe of his hero, Brace loved him. Brace, a son of copper-throated music and copper-fitted morals, looked up to a creature who lived comfortably with copper while having a wonderful time. Following the local ethic of seeking a profitable education, Brace arrived at the cow college where his hero was a star basketball player engaged in shaving points.

“A gorgeous con,” Glass told Lamp. “Nobody got hurt. The team won and the gamblers won. You got to admire the set.”

“Is that what they teach you in those fancy synagogues?”

“They teach delicatessen management,” Glass said thoughtfully. “It just occurs, cook… this ship ain’t kosher.”

Texture fooled Brace. After years of being quietly followed as a hero, the man finally took an interest in Brace. There were motives, of course, but Brace did not even dream of such things. It seemed to him that he was magically launched into the deep meaning and pleasures of adulthood. Lovely young women talked to him. Young men, sensing him an important satellite to the charging and dribbling star, wished to be his friend. Without understanding the seediness of the situation, and without knowing how or why, Brace found himself in the role of an intermediary. Men visited his room and said they were alumni. The men left envelopes for the basketball player. Brace, stricken with uncritical worship, did not at first even try to understand.

“It’s the drop man gets the trouble,” Glass confided to Lamp. “Don’t never get conned into taking the drop.”

Lamp groaned and prophesied.

Understanding came slow. Through most of the season Brace cooperated, while running his small but increasing fund of knowledge through his conscience. He balked at the harm his mind was trying to discover; for heroes, after all, are not easy to come by, and young love suffers not from its lack of truth but from its lack of discrimination. He walked nighttime streets, stood in shadows before his hero’s fraternity house, and, it may be, wept. When he finally understood the message of his conscience, he took that message back to the wise, older men who had given the conscience to him in the first place.

Brace talked to his father. His father spoke in broad and certain tones like the voice of a trombone. His father said that Brace was doing the right thing. His father said that Brace made him proud. His father told Brace to take his information to the minister.

The minister blinked with emotion, as if struck in a mortal place by a beatitude. He shot his cuffs, adjusted his tie, fondled a hymn book, gave a brief prayer of thanks. The minister said that Brace was doing the right thing. God was glad. The minister said he would speak to the basketball coach.

The basketball coach towered above Brace. He laid manly hands the size of hoops on Brace’s shoulders. The coach thanked Brace for doing the right thing in the name of clean sportsmanship.

Brace’s hero disdained him. When Brace phoned the lovely young women, with the lovely, tight-fitting angora sweaters, their roommates said that they were not in. His new men friends greeted him coldly, or not at all. Alumni stopped visiting. Through the rest of the season Brace attended the games, watched wins by narrow margins flash triumphantly on the glowing scoreboard. In the spring, his hero graduated and was hired at a high salary by a professional team.

Brace’s father, this time in a voice like a tuba, decided that in the following year Brace would attend a smaller college nearer to his home.

It would take nearly another year, a year of loneliness that accumulated through silences and avoidance and summary conversations, before Brace understood that every man he knew detested him. His womenfolk could not help. They knew nothing of the affair. Brace’s instincts told him that it was best left that way.

He felt that the world had stumbled. Even the fields, the cropland, the certainty of green and growing things seemed frail and dying. The fields looked like gigantic boxes or crates, heavy with vegetables that were already packed and were for sale.

It is “as rough as a cob” to admit that you no longer have a home. Regret combines with fear when you know you must leave. With some men there is only one way to get the job done. Brace got drunk, truly drunk, really drunk. He puked, passed out, slept, woke, showered, drank coffee and enlisted.