by Jack Finney
A lot of what we did, in fact, was makeshift, improvised, utterly unacceptable by the standards of any navy in the world. The valves of the air compressor, for example—Moreno worked on that—should have been replaced, but that wasn’t possible either. And when Vic and I had the diesels running, and we tested the compressor, it wouldn’t deliver full pressure, so we couldn’t fill our air flasks completely. Several of the air-flask valves leaked, too, and no crew would have sailed, let alone dived, in a submarine with valves in the condition ours were.
Weeks of work, tons of equipment and a not-so-small fortune could have been spent restoring that sub to complete fitness. Yet in ten days of hard work we finished most of all that we were able to do, and if any really major repair job had been vital, it would have been beyond us. We fixed up the sub—patched it up—as well as we could, and that’s all we could do. One afternoon when all of us were lying under the sub grinding valves, we started talking about the countless things that were wrong or half wrong with the ship. Linc started to laugh quietly, and we all burst into sudden laughter. Rosa was there at the time, and she looked at us, shaking her head and smiling sardonically, almost fondly, as though we were a bunch of kids.
All of a sudden one day I was sick of nothing but work. Late in an afternoon, climbing up out of the sub for the hundredth time, to get a tool from the dock, I turned at the top of the ladder and stood staring out at the ocean instead. Below me I could hear the delicate, steady tap of a screw-driver blade on metal—Lauffnauer adjusting a piston on a trim-tank pump—then the sudden clatter of a tool dropped on the metal deck, and Moreno cursing deep inside the sub somewhere. But now, suddenly, I was no longer interested in the sub. I stood staring out at the water and fingering my new beard—I couldn’t get used to the feel of it—and saw Rosa, sitting on the dock, looking up at me.
I acted on impulse. Beckoning to her, I climbed down, jumped over to the dock and walked out, up the path toward the shack and the jeep parked in back of it, Rosa following. I climbed in under the wheel, Rosa watching me questioningly. “Got the keys?” I said. She nodded, and I said, “Get in then,” and held out my hand for the keys.
Driving fast over the two-lane county road, I went into the village, parking on the main street just out of the business district; we always tried to draw no more attention to ourselves than necessary, but Rosa lived in the area, and they knew her long since. I had a little over forty dollars in the wallet in my denims, and I took it out and handed it to her, “Get some liquor,” I said. “Whisky, gin, highball mixes, potato chips, olives, cold cuts and all the rest of it. Get plenty, and get a big sack of ice cubes; I’ll pick you up outside the liquor store.” I grinned at her. “Tonight we’re having a party.”
Her eyes lighted up, and she climbed out, nodding eagerly; then, standing beside the jeep, she frowned. “Do you think we should?”
“Hell, yes. We’re on schedule; ahead of it, in fact. We’ll make May seventeenth with a couple days to spare. Go ahead, get the stuff; we’re having a party.”
We didn’t even eat supper that night. Back at the shack, while Rosa was setting out our supplies on the table. I went down to the dock, and banged on the hull with a wrench. “Come on out,” I yelled, “up to the shack! Everybody out!”
Someone yelled, “What?” but I simply repeated it, and when Vic’s black-bearded face—he no longer looked unshaven; it was beginning to be a beard—rose up out of the tower, I just beckoned and walked on out, up toward the shack, and I heard Vic calling the others.
Moreno didn’t like it. He stood in the kitchen in his dirty tan coveralls, looking down at the table covered with food, liquor, glasses and ice in a big crockery bowl; then he swung to me. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Ten days’ work more’n you can take? You tired or something?”
Suddenly his face flushed, the cords in his neck standing out as he yelled, “We Haven’t got time!”
Lauffnauer touched his arm and, when Moreno’s head swung around, Frank nodded before speaking. “Yes, we have,” he said softly. “And we will work better for this; it is a good idea, Ed.”
Moreno yanked his arm away, his mouth opening to answer; then Linc reached past him, picked up a glass, dropped an ice cube into it and called over to Rosa, who stood leaning against a wall, arms folded on her chest, glaring at Moreno. “What’ll you have, Rosa?” Linc said quietly.
She smiled, pushing herself from the wall to step over to the table. “Whisky,” she said, “with ginger ale,” and stood waiting while Linc began mixing her drink, and Moreno swung around and walked out the door.
I went after him. I caught up with him on the path and said, “Wait a second, Ed.” He turned swiftly, jaw muscles working, eyes narrowed, and I said, “You’re wrong. You’re a good commander; you’ve bulled this through in ten days, and we’re nearly done. You’ve organized the work, done a beautiful job, forgot nothing. A good commander, but still a mustang. Put stripes on your sleeve and you’re tougher than any officer ever was before you; drive, drive, drive, to prove you can command.” I grinned at him. “But leave’s important, too, and that’s what this is—leave in port just before the fight. And tonight that’s as important as the work; you’ll have a better crew for it. That’s something a commander ought to know too. Now, come on back and have a drink.”
He stood looking at me, jaw muscles still working, eyes-narrowed, but he made himself weigh what I’d said. It must have been hard for a man like him; all his life, I suppose, he’d simply lashed out when opposed. Then he said it—sullenly, reluctantly—but saying it. “All right; I made a mistake. It’s time to knock off for a night”—he was thinking aloud. “It’s true; we got to be a good crew; damn good. And this’ll help.” He nodded shortly, not wanting to, but doing it. “O.K., lieutenant, let’s go back.”
We had a good time. We drank a toast first, standing around the kitchen table holding our first drinks. “To the U-nineteen,” Vic said, standing there black-bearded and grinning in his grease-streaked blue denims. “May she have a lot better hunting her second trip out.”
The party was started. Like a bunch of office workers at a party, we talked at first only about the work we did together, lounging on the cots, wandering back to the table for food or drinks. Then all of us had sub stories to tell, and we might have spent the evening that way, just talking and relaxing with our drinks.
But Rosa got bored after a while, and she walked over to the radio, turned it on and found some dance music. Then she stood swaying beside the radio, softly snapping her fingers in time to the music, looking very graceful in her black slacks and sweater. Lounging on a cot, Vic watched her for a few moments, then asked her to dance, and they did.
We all danced with her then, except Moreno. He didn’t know how to dance, he muttered, and when Rosa offered to teach him, he just shook his head and got up to mix another drink, his face tight and sullen. “It’s eleven-thirty,” Moreno said then. “Let’s knock it off now; we got work to do in the morning.” And the rest of us looked up surprised; no one else had been watching the time.
I don’t blame myself for what happened then. Our little party was over, and Rosa, smiling at something Linc was saying, stood shrugging into her red jacket with the peg buttons. Then she pulled the jeep keys from her pocket and stood with them dangling from her fingers as Linc finished, Rosa had gone home every night by herself, in the jeep. But watching Rosa get ready to leave, I thought someone should see her home tonight. We’d had a party, she was a girl going home and tonight it seemed inappropriate to let her just walk out the door by herself. I looked over at Moreno, who was walking toward his cot, trying to catch his eye and suggest with a nod that he ought to drive Rosa home, But he sat down and began untying his shoelace, and I got mad. I walked around the table and touched Rosa’s arm. “I’ll see you home,” I said. “You were the belle of the ball and deserve an escort.”
She smiled, bowing her head in acknowledgment, but I saw her glance at Moreno from the corner or he
r eye before replying. He wouldn’t look at her; still unknotting his shoelace, he wouldn’t glance up or acknowledge that he’d heard, but I saw the muscles bunch at the corners of his mouth. “Thank you,” Rosa said to me then, handing me the keys. She turned to call a general good night to the others; they answered, and we walked out.
In the jeep we crawled along our own rut road for a quarter mile. Then, turning onto the asphalt county highway, I shoved down the accelerator till we touched sixty-five and held it there. But only two or three minutes later we were slowing, pulling into the dirt driveway beside Rosa’s house, and I hated to stop, unwilling to end the evening, go home and to bed, and back to the submarine in the morning. And when Rosa turned to me, eyes still sparkling from the drive, to ask if I’d like coffee, I was glad to accept.
Rosa put coffee on to boil immediately, then took off her coat and hung it on a nail in the back of the door. I sat down at the table, and she got out cream, sugar, cups and spoons, then sat down across from me, and I took out cigarettes, gave her one and lighted them. She smiled happily. “I had a wonderful time dancing,” she said. “I was almost forgetting I was a woman till tonight.”
“Well you are that,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded slowly. “And being escorted home—that completes it. You make me feel very good tonight, Hugh.”
I just nodded, smiling pleasantly: I wasn’t trying to start anything. But Rosa sat staring at me. She hadn’t had a lot to drink tonight, but she’d had some; and it was also the first really good time, I think, that she’d had in months. Now her eyes were happy, exuberant, and she smiled at me mischievously. “Would you like to kiss me?” she said. Her eyes laughing at me, she added, “You made me feel like a woman again, with your party tonight; it is your fault.”
I looked at her, sitting there across from me in that high-necked black sweater, ripe and desirable, her oliveskinned face still Hushed at the cheekbones from the wind. “Sure,” I said carefully, “any man would.”
“Oh?” Her brows rose, and she nodded. “I see.” She was still laughing at me, teasing me, “So it is any man, and you are simply no different from any other; you do not commit yourself personally. Well, then”—she leaned toward me suddenly, across the table top—“go ahead, Mr. Anyman; kiss me.”
I leaned forward till our lips met, our hands on the table top supporting us as we leaned far over it, not touching in any other way. Then I kissed her, feeling the soft fullness of her lips, our mouths pressing hard together, our heads moving. Then I yanked my face away, knowing I had to if I were ever going to stop.
Rosa—a magnificently handsome, full-figured woman sitting across from me—folded her arms on the table top and smiled. “So,” she said. “That is better. I did not wish to be taken home by Mr. Anyman just because I am any woman,” She picked up her cigarette from the saucer in which she’d laid it and stood up. “Now we will have our coffee.”
We just sat talking then, drinking our coffee. This, I realized, was still a girl from a little Italian fishing village, alone and widowed in a foreign country, courageous and self-reliant; and, sitting there, I felt very fond of her.
I finished my coffee and stood up, thanking Rosa for it, and she walked to the door with me. At the doors he thanked me again for taking her home. Standing in the doorway, I put an arm around her waist, drew her to me and kissed her again. But she responded only slightly, her mind somewhere else, and I let her go; the party was over, and I set out to walk home.
I’d been there twenty minutes, I suppose; it took me another twenty to walk home; and the drive to Rosa’s house couldn’t have taken more than five minutes. So when I turned off the road to walk the quarter mile down to the shack, I’d been gone about forty-five minutes. The shack was dark, I saw, walking toward it; then I saw a cigarette glow on the little stoop, and I knew Moreno was waiting for me.
He stood up when I was a hundred yards from the shack and walked toward me. When we met on the path, we stopped, facing each other. “Well?” I said.
“Where you been?” he said quietly.
“You know where I’ve been; taking Rosa home.”
“Take you this long to walk back?”
I was about to explain that we’d had coffee, but I stopped myself; I owed Moreno no explanations. “What’s it to you,” I said, “how long I take?”
He was silent for a moment or two, and I knew he was keeping a grip on himself, forcing himself to reply quietly. “You know damn well what it is to me,” he said then. “I’m going to marry Rosa, and you or nobody else is going to start hanging around her.”
“Why, sure,” I said pleasantly. “Of course, I won’t spend another second alone with Rosa. Or say any more than hello, good-by and how are you——”
“See that you don’t.”
“——from the moment she tells me what you’ve said. Just have your fiancée tell me, Moreno, that she’s going to marry you. And from then on I won’t even look sideways at her.”
“She doesn’t have to tell you; I’m telling——”
“Oh, yes, she does.” I leaned down a little to stare into his eyes. “She has to tell me. You’ve been talking about marrying Rosa for a long time now, but I haven’t heard her say a word about it. You just have your fiancée say so, Moreno, next time I ask to take her home. Because there’s sure going to be a next time now.”
He grinned a little in the faint starlight—mean and nasty. “You want trouble, pretty boy?” he said softly. “You’ll get it; a lot more than you want.” Then he turned and walked back to the shack. I followed, and inside the shack we got undressed in the darkness without another word and went to bed.
First thing in the morning we hoisted the torpedoes out of the ship through the torpedo hatch, using the chain hoist in the dock—an awkward, but not very hard job. There were four spares plus two in the tubes, and we hauled all six of them out and lowered them to the dock along one side of the sub, and Moreno began working on one of them.
This was his field, his specialty, and, though I watched him from time to time, as we all did, I didn’t even try to understand what he was doing. But his job was to convert at least one torpedo to a dummy; to take off the war head, remove the TNT and replace it with a small flash charge. We’d often used dummies in the Navy for practice firings; they go off with a flash and a lot of smoke, for easy sighting, but with no force to speak of.
Actually a practice head is different from a war head, but Moreno said he could make these do, and I knew he could. Just the same, I’ll admit it made me a little nervous, standing on the dock with Vic. Lauffnauer and Linc, watching him get ready to remove that blunt and deadly red-painted war head from the first of the torpedoes. He grinned up at me nastily, so I made a point of standing there watching, even after the others left. I stood watching him remove the detonator in the war nose first, then unscrew the war head, and open up the compartment which held the TNT. These were small, short-range torpedoes—only a thousand yards—but each of them held more than four hundred pounds of TNT, a terrible and devastating force when exploded. Presently Linc brought our rowboat into the dock, and Moreno laid the big sticks in the bottom; then Linc rowed far out to dump them overboard.
Moreno had bought whatever he needed for the harmless flash charge; the difference in weight between it and the big charge he’d removed would be made up, he’d said, with sea water, Once the TNT was out of the war head, I didn’t hang around; Moreno and I weren’t speaking any more than necessary, and the rest of us were to begin testing the sub.
We weren’t finished working on her; not quite. There were still odds and ends to finish up yet. But the engines and motors were working—beautifully, and in perfect adjustment. The compressor worked as well as it ever would, and the tanks held air. All valves and vents were in reasonably good working order; and all fuel, air, water and electrical lines were in excellent condition. The periscope worked smoothly; all we’d had to do was clean and oil it. And my switchboard worked perfectly the f
irst time I’d tried it. All outside parts were free and moving again, though they were terribly eroded and pitted and worked loosely.
But though it wasn’t a lot, we’d done just about all we could. Lauffnauer had stripped off the sodden deck gratings and was going to knock together a new set. We had two inflatable rafts to buy, Linc had a radio to buy, and I had to get chargers. But essentially we were finished; now we had to test what we’d done.
Inside the submarine we blew the tanks, and the sub rose to float high in the dock, gently nudging the old tires nailed to the sides. This much we’d known would happen; we knew we could blow the tanks. Then we opened the dock doors, and Lauffnauer, in the tower, searched the water with a pair of Navy binoculars that belonged to Moreno—stolen. I imagined. There was nothing in sight, and the rest of us shoved the sub out with poles; there was a fresh breeze, and the water was choppy today, but we didn’t want to test her under only ideal conditions anyway. I climbed down inside to the engines, Linc coming along to take the rudder wheel; Vic stayed on deck with his poles to fend her off if necessary. Lauffnauer hadn’t replaced the old deck gratings yet, and Vic had a job staying on deck. Then I started the diesels. Linc swung the rudder wheel, and we curved out to sea. Vic came down then, Lauffnauer still in the tower. We went a mile out, cruising back and forth along the coast for half a mile in either direction, testing the engines at various speeds. Linc and Vic getting used to the way the rudder responded. We had all our batteries, and we’d bought them charged, and after a time I ran the motors with them. We’d used up some of the battery charge, and not all of them had been charged to capacity in the first place. So I used the batteries for only a minute; they worked fine.