by Herman Wouk
“After you, sir.” The ensign’s collar-advertisement face was smeared with black, and he grinned half in fright and half in boyish enjoyment.
With the wheel untended, the Caine had meanwhile slewed around broadside to the wind, so that the bridge was rapidly clearing of smoke. The deckhouse fire had been blown apart by the explosions. There was only a dull yellow flickering here and there. The ammunition boxes were smoldering jagged ruins. Willie could see irregular flaring flames aft amid giant billows of white steam.
All at once his vision expanded. He saw the ocean and Okinawa again. There were the green quiet hills and the horizon. The ship was half turned around, so it took him a moment to get his bearings; then he realized that they had hardly moved since being hit. The peak of Yuza Dake still bore 320. The ship wobbled on a gently swelling sea. A trickle of yellow smoke dribbled from number-one stack. Scattered yells from amidships emphasized the calm silence. A couple of sailors in the water, drifted astern, were waving and shouting at the men on the ship. There weren’t many who had jumped, so far as Willie could see, going from wing to wing: fifteen or twenty.
He felt an immense peace and personal power descend on him, wrapping his shoulders like a jacket. “I don’t know but what we can save this bucket,” he said to Farrington.
“Aye aye, sir. Can I help?”
“Can you start the Kohler-that putt-putt on the well deck?”
“Radio boys once showed me how, sir-”
“Light it off on the double. Cut in the p.a. switches. They’re marked.”
Farrington ran down the ladder. Willie scanned the men in the water through binoculars, and saw the captain about forty yards astern floating on his back, clutching the gray sack. The Kohler coughed, backfired, and began to chug like an old Ford. Willie went into the pilothouse. He was a little shocked at the sight of the wheel swinging back and forth, free. He got a power hum, pressing the p.a. lever. His voice blared over the decks:
“Now all hands, this is the executive officer. I ask you not to abandon ship. I’ve had no damage reports from any space but the after fireroom. The noise you heard was some ready ammunition popping on the galley deckhouse. Things looked pretty bad there for a minute. The captain gave permission to abandon but he also gave permission for volunteers to stay aboard and try to save the ship. Let’s put out that fire and get some steam up to the main engines. Gunner’s mates stand by to flood the magazines but don’t do it unless I pass the word. Forward fireroom-if you can’t get suction try shifting to the forward tanks. You probably have ruptured lines aft. Close off your stop valves so you don’t get water backing up into the forward lines. Get the pumps going on this water we’re throwing into the after fireroom. Keep calm. Just remember your drills and do what you’re supposed to do. This ship can still steam into the harbor this morning under its own power. If we abandon it we’ll all get dumped into the personnel pool on Okinawa. If we stick with it we’ll probably pull an overhaul in the States. Stay with the ship.”
Farrington came back to the bridge. Willie told him to take the wheel, and hurried aft. The passageway was empty. On the main deck sputtering red flames were poking up a little above the hole, all but smothered in fizzing gray clouds. Soapy foam and water ran in rivulets between the tangles of fire hose. Sailors and officers were jabbering by the life lines, well clear of the ragged crater. Some of them were smoking cigarettes. Fifteen or so clustered around the hole in the deck, pouring misty streams into the cavern of the fireroom. Some sailors were passing a hose down through the air lock, and from below there issued a stream of vile workmanlike cursing. The gig, charred but no longer afire, was being bailed out in methodical sloshes of greasy water by Meatball, sweating in his life jacket. Nobody was running any more.
On the deck outside the clip shack the pharmacist’s mate was kneeling with two assistants, bandaging men lying on mattresses or in stretchers. Willie went to the injured men and talked with them. Some of them had been on watch in the fireroom. Their burns were swathed in thick yellow-stained bandages. There were men with gashes from the exploded ammunition, and one sailor with a crushed foot, swelled to twice its normal size and mottled green. Chief Budge was one of the burned ones.
“How goes it, Chief?”
“Okay, sir. Guess we got it licked. Lucky I got that main fuel shut off before I climbed out-”
“Did you take a muster? Did all your men get out?”
“I couldn’t find Horrible, sir-he’s the only one-I don’t know, maybe he’s around somewhere-” The chief tried to sit up. Willie pushed him back.
“Never mind. I’ll find him-”
With a loud rumble number-one and -two stacks poured out a billow of inky smoke, and the ship vibrated. The executive officer and the chief looked at each other with grinning gladness. “Suction on one and two,” said Budge. “We’ll be okay-”
“Well, guess I’ll get under way and pick up the swimming party. Take it easy, Chief-”
“Hope the captain enjoyed his dip,” the chief said in a low voice. “He’s got Queeg beat a mile for fast footwork-”
“Shut up, Budge!” Willie said sharply. He went forward. From the time the Kamikaze hit until suction was regained, seventeen minutes had elapsed.
During the rescue maneuvering in the next hour Willie retained the strangely clear vision and buoyant spirits and slowed calm time sense which he had acquired when Keefer jumped overboard. Nothing seemed hard to do. He made dozens of quick decisions as damage reports poured into the wheelhouse and little emergencies sprang up in the wake of the conquered big one. He nosed the ship slowly among the swimmers, taking care to stop his screws whenever he came near them.
He turned over the conn to Farrington and went to the sea ladder when the captain was hauled aboard. Keefer was unable to climb; so a sailor dived into the water beside him and secured a line around his middle, and the novelist was fished out of the water doubled over, dripping, and clinging to the sopping gray sack. Willie caught him in his arms as he came up to deck level, and helped him to his feet. Keefer’s lips were blue. His hair hung in strings over staring bloodshot eyes. “How the hell did you do it, Willie?” he gasped. “It was a miracle. I’ll recommend you for the Navy Cross-”
“Will you take the conn now, Captain? Do you feel all right?”
“Hell, you’re doing fine. Keep going. Pick ’em all up. I’ll change my clothes-get pharmacist’s mate to fix up this damn arm, it’s killing me- Did you take a muster?”
“Taking it now, sir-”
“Fine-keep going-give me a hand, Winston-” Keefer stumbled toward his cabin, leaning on the boatswain’s mate’s shoulder, leaving a trail of water on the deck. “I’ll be up on the bridge in half an hour, Willie-take a muster-”
The list of missing men shrank as the ship picked up one swimmer after another. Finally-there was only one name without a line through it on Willie’s penciled sheet: Everett Harold Black, water tender third class-Horrible. A search party went wading through the gutted, flooded fireroom in hip boots. They found the missing sailor.
Keefer was on the bridge, his arm in a new white sling, when the report came up. The Caine was lying to in the waters where it had been hit. It was noon, and the sun was hot and dazzling overhead. A stale, sour smell of burning pervaded the sooty ship.
“Okay, that does it, Willie. Everybody’s accounted for. ... Poor Horrible- What’s the course to the channel entrance?”
“Zero eight one, sir.”
“Very well, Helmsman, come to course 081. Quartermaster, make fifteen knots-”
Willie said, “Sir, I request permission to lay below and supervise removal of the body.”
“Sure, Willie. Go ahead.”
The deck sailors were rolling away the hoses, sweeping clanking debris off the deckhouse and main deck, and chattering happily about their own small heroisms. They greeted Willie with shouted jokes about a trip to the States. A cluster of them around the galley were munching crude thick sandwiches or snatching
loaves from the cursing cooks, who were trying to light off the soup vats and get lunch ready. There was a line of sight-seers around the roped-off chasm in the deck. The voices of the search party echoed up from the dark watery fireroom as from a flooded tomb. A couple of the new ensigns who had jumped overboard stood at the rope in fresh khakis, peering down into the hole and laughing. They fell silent when they saw Willie.
He regarded them for a moment bleakly. They were buddies from a Western midshipmen school. They habitually whined and procrastinated about the officers’ qualification course-didn’t see any point to it. They grumbled about lack of sleep. Their carelessness in handling despatches and letters was unendurable. Moreover, they never ceased commiserating each other for the wretched fate of having been assigned to the Caine. He wanted to ask them sarcastically to write up a qualification assignment if they had nothing better to do than sightsee; but he turned away without a word and climbed down the air lock. He heard them tittering behind him.
The stink of burning and something worse than burning made him gag, as he backed down the narrow ladder of the shaft. He put a handkerchief over his nose and stepped into the fireroom. He slipped and stumbled on the wet, greasy catwalks. It was amazingly queer, it was like a nightmare, to see vertical white sunlight in the fireroom, and water sloshing in and out of the furnaces. The search party was far on the port side. Willie descended the last ladder; the water came up cold arid slimy inside his trouser legs. He waded across the fireroom in water that fell to his ankles and then rose to his waist as the ship rolled. The sailors of the search party stepped aside and one of them directed a powerful electric lantern at the water.
“Wait till it rolls away, Mr. Keith. You’ll see him pretty good.”
Willie wasn’t used to the sight of dead people. He had seen a few relatives laid out in plush-lined boxes in the amber gloom of funeral chapels, with an organ mourning sweetly through loudspeakers and a heavy smell of flowers filling the air. No undertaker had intervened, however, to prettify the death of Horrible. The water washed away for a few seconds, and the lantern beam showed the sailor clearly, pinned down and crushed by the battered engine of the Jap plane, his face and his dungarees black with grease. The sight reminded Willie of the mashed squirrels he had often seen lying on the roads of Manhasset on autumn mornings. It was shocking to soak in, all in an instant, the fact that people are as soft and destructible as squirrels. The dark waters sloshed back over the body. Willie fought down the tears and the nausea, and said, “This is a job for volunteers. Any one of you who can’t stand it is excused-”
The search party were all of the black gang. He looked from face to face. They all had the expression that makes men equal, however briefly, before a dead body-a mixture of fright, bitterness, sorrow, and embarrassment. “Well, if you’re all game, okay. The thing to do is rig a block and tackle on that crossbeam and get the wreckage off him. I’ll get Winston down here with some canvas. Then you can lift him straight up through the hole in the deck with lines, instead of hauling him up ladders.”
“Aye aye, sir,” they said.
The man with the lantern said, “Want to see the Jap, sir? He’s piled up on the port catwalk-”
“Is there much left of him?”
“Well, not a hell of a lot. It ain’t too appetizing-”
“Sure, lead the way:”
The remains of the Kamikaze pilot were frightful. Willie turned away after a glimpse of bones and charred purple meat, jammed grotesquely in a sitting position in the telescoped cockpit as though the dread thing were still flying; a double row of grinning yellow teeth burned all bare; and most appalling of all, undamaged goggles above the teeth sunk into the ruined face, giving it a live peering look. The smell was like a butcher shop.
“Well, sir, like the marines say, the only good one is a dead one,” the sailor said.
“I-I guess I’ll go and send Winston along-” Willie picked his way rapidly over the tangled rubbish of plane and deck plates and boiler fittings to the escape hatch and hurried up into the delicious streaming salt air.
Keefer slouched in the captain’s chair on the bridge, pale and languid, and allowed Willie to bring the ship into the harbor. He took over the conn to anchor, giving orders in a flat, tired voice. Sailors on nearby ships stopped working to stare at the Caine’s torn-up seared deckhouse and the huge black hole amidships.
Willie went below, discarded his wet, filthy clothes in a heap on the deck of his room, and took a steamy shower. He dressed in his freshest khakis, drew his curtain, and stretched out on the bunk, yawning. And then he began to tremble. It was just his hands at first, but it spread quickly to his whole body. The strange thing was that the sensation was not unpleasant. It sent a warm feeling and slight tingles all along under his skin. He buzzed with a shaking finger for a mess boy.
“Bring me a meat sandwich, Rasselas-anything, so long as it’s meat-and hot coffee, hot-hot as live steam.”
“Yassuh.”
“I’m going to put my thumb in the coffee and if it don’t blister you’re on report.”
“Hot coffee. Yassuh.”
The trembling fit was dying down when the food came: two thick cold lamb sandwiches, and coffee hidden by its own vapors. Willie wolfed the sandwiches. He took from his desk drawer a cigar which he had received from Horrible, two days earlier; the sailor had passed a box around the wardroom upon being promoted to water tender third. He hesitated, feeling odd about smoking a dead man’s cigar; and then he did smoke it, leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk. The usual after-pictures came into his mind. He saw the Kamikaze hitting the bridge instead of the main deck and mashing him. He saw himself ripped open by a flying fragment of the ready box; shot through the head by an AA bullet; burned to a grinning half skeleton like the Jap pilot by the explosion of a magazine. The thoughts were fearful and pleasing at once, like a good horror story; they whetted the extreme luxury of being alive and safe and past the hour of danger.
Then it occurred to him that Horrible’s promotion had been his death sentence. Two days ago he had been transferred from the after engine room, which was now entirely undamaged, to the watch in the fireroom where he had died.
With the smoke of the dead sailor’s cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts-not the words, the realities-break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime. Willie Keith crushing the stub in the ashtray was not the Willie who had lit the cigar. That boy was gone for good.
He began writing in longhand the draft of a letter to Horrible’s parents. The phone buzzer rang. It was Keefer, speaking in a quiet, decidedly cordial tone: “Willie, if you’re all squared away would you mind coming up here for a moment?”
“Aye aye, Captain. Right now.”
On the well deck many sailors were perched along the rails in the afternoon breeze, and there was a lively hum of chatter. Willie heard the words “Mr. Keith” repeated several times. The conversation died down when he stepped out of the hatchway. Some of the sailors jumped off the rail. They all regarded him with a look he had not seen on their faces before-directed at him. Long ago he had noticed them looking that way at Captain de Vriess after some neat ship handling. It was a wonderful look. “Hello, Mr. Keith,” several of them said, quite pointlessly, since Willie went in and out of the hatchway twenty times every day without being greeted.
“Hi.” Willie grinned at them, and went to Keefer’s cabin. The novelist was on his bunk in a red bathrobe, resting against a pile of pillows. The sling hung empty around his neck, and the bandaged arm lay along the side of the bunk. He was drinking something dark brown in a water glass. He waved the glass at Willie, slopping the contents over the rim. “Medicinal brandy. Specific for loss of blood, prescribed by the pharmacist’s mate-Also I dare s
ay for nerves tried by a day of of heroism. Have some.”
“I will, thanks, Captain. Where is it?”
“Locker under the bunk. Use the glass on the washbowl. Good stuff. Help yourself, and have a seat.”
The brandy ran down Willie’s throat like warm water, without the slightest sting. He rocked back in the swivel chair, enjoying the glow. Keefer said suddenly, “Ever read Lord Jim?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve read it.”
“Good yarn.”
“His best, I’d say.”
“Curiously apropos to today’s events.” The novelist swung his head around heavily and stared at Willie, who kept his face politely blank. “Don’t you think?”
“How, sir?”
“Well, guy jumps overboard when he shouldn’t-commits this one act of impulsive cowardice-and it haunts his whole life-” Keefer drank off his glass. “Pass me the brandy. I just got this by visual. Read it.”
He took the bottle and gave Willie a despatch. CO Caine report Commodore Wharton aboard Pluto 1700.
“Can you go, sir? Is your arm all right?”
“Hell, it’s just stiff, Willie. A few muscles torn. Nothing. No excuse whatever. I’m afraid I’ll have to go. Will you come with me, please?”
“Certainly, Captain, if you think I’m needed-”
“Well, you know a little more about what went on than I do. Seeing as how I was safely in the drink all the time you were saving my ship-”
“Captain, your decision to abandon ship wasn’t an act of cowardice, there’s no point in your stewing over it. With the whole deckhouse blowing up and men jumping overboard and the flame and smoke and the general obscure picture, any prudent officer might have done the same-”