by Meg Wolitzer
The captain suggested we use our week in port to become human beings again. Mills responded that he would commence his rehabilitation with a nice, invigorating fuck. Our chief was carried ashore with dengue fever and instructions to rest up and then to report with a clean bill of health and no nonsense. Despite the direness of our situation those of us on liberty took real showers and shaved our beards on the harbor tender and then escaped to the four corners of the city. I found myself at the Colombo Club, which given the circumstances had been opened to enlisted men. I passed the time strolling about the lawns and staring at the women. I listened to their husbands’ leisurely comments about sporting events. The captain commandeered a deck chair in the mornings, and after a few drinks took to playing something he called bicycle polo, which always left him limping. A lone Hurricane trailing smoke flew over, circled back, and belly-landed on the club green, after which the pilot climbed out and proceeded directly to the bar. Upon drawing any attention I disappeared. Nights I dreamt incessantly and awoke so soaked with sweat I could smell my room from the hall.
I returned to my running, ascending the steep steps to the top of the cable tram, where I’d arrive bathed in sweat and then come right back down while the natives along the way looked on, amazed. They seemed to think Englishmen were prone to this sort of thing.
I went out drinking by myself. One night I happened upon Mills and our stoker petty officer, and the petty officer slipped on some stairs and rolled all the way to the bottom and then vomited. Mills said, “You know what they say: ‘If that’s the navy, all must be well with England.’ ” After I woke in the gutter of a bazaar without my billfold, Mills insisted I go out drinking with them.
We bought rounds for crewmembers of the Snapper celebrating a sunk Jap submarine. The Japs had attacked a Dutch merchant ship and then machine-gunned the survivors in the water, so after the Snapper sank the sub, the crew beat to death with spanners the two Japs they’d fished out. They said that off the west Australian coast they’d been laboring into harbor in heavy seas when an American submarine had surfaced and ripped right by them like they were standing still. They said that in Australia girls welcomed sailors at the gangways with crates of fresh apples and bottles of milk.
We met Mills’s cousin, who’d been left behind in hospital when his ship had fled the port. He’d served as a messcook aboard a destroyer in Manila and loved the Philippines because he’d had multiple girlfriends and Scotch had been seventy-five American cents per bottle. For little more he’d maintained a love shack in the bush, a one-room hut up on stilts. The toilet and shower had emptied below without benefit of pipes and the only running water had been from heaven. All the palm trunks nearby were encircled with steel mesh to keep the rats from stealing the coconuts. In the bar he stripped his shirt to show us his tattoos, including a smiling baby’s face over one side of his chest that was labeled Sweet and another on the other side that was labeled Sour and Twin screws, Keep clear on the small of his back.
He loved the story of the Snapper crew rescuing the Japs to beat them to death. He’d befriended a sampan man in Manila who’d rowed British officers around the harbor to visit the town or to shoot snipe, and for years the man had told anyone who’d listen that soon the Japanese would invade, and he’d been more accurate than any prognosticator in London. And when the Japanese did arrive they’d crucified him on his boat for ferrying the enemy. Mills’s cousin had spied his body as the destroyer fought its way out of the port.
Three more went down with dengue fever before we departed Ceylon: our messcook, which allowed Mills’s cousin to come aboard as his replacement; the junior engine-room rating; and a torpedoman. Mills and I showed the new torpedoman his station, and while he peered with dismay at the hideous and antiquated confusion of corroded pipes and valves and levers, Mills advised him that another way of looking at the situation was that hardly any other crew had been granted our abundance of experience and survived.
A merchantman that staggered into harbor turned out to be carrying a mail packet that included letters for both Mills and myself. Mills had heard from his Red Cross nurse, who’d also sent a photograph. He teared up when he showed me. When he noted my response he protested that just because he was no celibate that didn’t mean he’d forgotten her.
I received three letters posted over a span of eleven months from my stepfather and the prelate’s daughter and my cousin. My stepfather had attached to his note a newspaper clipping of the bomb damage on our street. He wrote that my mother had discovered the neighbors’ cat dead in the rubble of the back garden gate, that she had been keenly hurt by my refusal to write, and that she dispatched her regards nonetheless, along with the news of an old classmate of mine also in the navy whose wife had just given birth. He added that when it came to me he often wondered if I would ever reach the top of fool hill.
The prelate’s daughter had sent a photograph of herself, too, and confided that she’d shared with her father what we now meant to one another and that he’d asked her to leave his house. She wanted to know what she should now do. She was referring to a night I’d been on leave from the Resolution and had encountered her outside a tearoom in Harwich. It had transpired that she was bereft from another sailor failing to meet her as promised, and I had offered to walk her to the navy yard in consolation. She’d dried her eyes and put an arm around my waist and cheered herself with my stories of my own haplessness. We necked next to others in the darkness under the Halfpenny Pier and she opened her skirt to my hands. She whispered how much we liked one another, and it sounded so piteous that I stopped, and she seemed to think we’d gone far enough in any event. She’d saved her chewing gum in her palm and she signaled we were finished by returning it to her mouth. Before we separated on King’s Head Street she’d written down my name and posting and her address, and handed me the latter.
Margery wrote that she hoped I was well, and that she now at her family’s insistence languished in a remote place where nothing momentous was likely to happen. She wrote that previously her nights in London had been long periods of enforced inactivity in her building’s shelter, waiting for the all-clear, and that after one bombing she’d emerged to find a woman’s body covered in soot and dust and had stooped to uncover its face. She wrote that in the middle of a memorial service for one of her mother’s best friends she’d retired to a dressing room and wept at her own cowardice. She said her family often inquired if she had any word of how I was getting on, and that her little niece had asked her if I sank all of the bad people could I then swim home. She said she recognized our relationship had been at times an unconventional one but she hoped that I wouldn’t hold this against her, and that with whomever I chose to share my life I would be happy. She also enclosed a photograph of herself, in a sundress, almost lost in the dappled light and shadow of a willow tree. I began any number of responses to her letter, all of which I kept as insufficient.
When rumors started circulating about our impending patrol I spent mornings looking for myself in the mirror, as if I’d fallen down a well. In the days before our departure a senior medical officer gave us each the once-over. “Here’s an interesting phenomenon,” he remarked. “Let’s have a look at your fingernails.” I held out my hand and he indicated the concentric ridges. “Each ridge is a patrol,” he said. “The gaps between correspond to the lengths of your leaves ashore.” I looked at him. “Purely psychological,” he said.
On our last night in Ceylon all the offshore watch returned in various states of intoxication, and the captain sentenced them, somewhat wryly, to ninety days on our own ship in the loathsome heat and overcrowding. “Very good, sir,” one of the drunken mates said in reply, and the captain answered that the mate could now make it one hundred and twenty days.
After two weeks in the Bay of Bengal everyone is feeling lethargic and suffering from headaches. Some of the crew haven’t shaved during the entire patrol and resemble figures from another century. Running on the surface at night we slip pa
st sleepy whales bobbing like waterlogged hulks. Our medical officer taps out on a tiny typewriter a new edition of his Health in the Tropics newsletter, which he titles “Good Morning.” This week’s tip is: “If you have been sweating a lot, wash it off, or at least wipe it off with a hand towel, since the salt that your sweat has pushed out of your pores will irritate the skin.” The only ship traffic we’ve encountered has been trawlers and junks, and the captain has decided that in such cases we’ll just lie doggo and watch them move past. We find our new torpedoman all over the ship, his eyes around our feet, looking for dog-ends. When we’re off duty Mills can instantly sleep and I lie awake. Sometimes when I can no longer stand my own company I go to the wardroom. There I find the captain or the chief alone at the table with binoculars slung round his neck and his head on his arms.
Mostly we’re immersed in a haze of inactivity. We dove to evade a flying boat sighted by our starboard lookout. A heavy bomber swept directly overhead on a northerly course but did not appear to have noticed us. The 0400 watch reported that three small vessels he couldn’t identify had altered course toward our location, then turned in a complete circle for no apparent reason before continuing on their transit.
We are perpetually in one another’s way, tormented by septic heat sores, bodies that stink, and endless small breakdowns on the ship. The only clean-off available is a little torpedo alcohol applied to the rankest spots. Wet clothes never dry. Condensation is everywhere. Shoes are furred with mold and our woolens smell worse than the head. The batteries have begun to fume and refuse to charge. The periscope gland leaks. In the night we passed one of our own bombed-out merchant ships, listing miserably. The tinned mutton when opened is now often slimed over, and even the roaches won’t touch it. Mills claims he can’t imagine this going on much longer, but his cousin says that if this has to be done it’s better that we should do it, since we know what we’re about, and newcomers would likely cost their friends their lives.
I’m jolted from my bunk by a tremendous blast, and then a second and a third, and when I reach the wardroom everyone is celebrating and I’m told that our target was an ammunition ship. The captain is permitting the crew to go up to the bridge three at a time to enjoy the spectacle, and upon my turn explosions are still sending flame and debris high into the sky. All who’ve been bellyaching for days and begrudging each other a civil word are suddenly thick as thieves and best of friends, since with one solitary success all the clouds are dispelled. But soon after that come the sub hunters, and we hang still for twelve hours at one hundred and eighty feet while they thresh around above us like terriers at a rabbit hole. Off-duty crew lie in their bunks trying to read thrillers or magazines. Those working sit right on the deck at their stations to ensure they make as little noise as possible. The chief pores over a technical journal. The captain draws the green curtains round his berth. With the first depth charge a few lights are put out and a roach falls stunned to my chest. The second cracks a glass gauge before me and the welding on a starboard casing. The third knocks me to the floor and the remaining lights go dark and water spritzes from a joint. Pocket torches flash before the emergency lamps come on. More detonations reverberate, farther away and closer, farther away and closer.
The hunters persist until the humidity coalesces into an actual mist and the thinning air plagues everyone with crushing headaches and nausea, and then our hydrophone operators finally report our pursuers moving away.
When we’re running on the surface again I find Mills contemplating his photo of the Red Cross nurse, his chin on his filthy mattress. I ask her name and he responds only that one of the last things she requested was that he take the time to consider what she might want, and what she might like, but that instead he gave her the sailor’s lament, that he’d soon be shipping out and that they’d perhaps never see one another again, and so she allowed him the kiss and some of the other liberties he’d been desiring. Before his train departed she told him through the carriage window that he was the sort of man who was always at the last second catching his ride in triumph or missing it and not caring. “I think she meant I was selfish,” he finally adds, and then turns to me to discover I have nothing to contribute. “What do you think of selfishness, eh, Fisher?” he asks, and some of the torpedomen laugh. “So here we are,” he concludes. “Sweating and grease-covered and alone and miserable and sorry for ourselves.” And a memory I banished from my time with Margery surfaces: We stood on her front step after our kisses, and she waited for me to respond to what she had confided about the stillness we made together. While she waited she explained that she was trying to ascertain where she could place her trust, and where more supervision would be needed. And when she received no response to that either, she said that if I wanted to swan around the world pretending I didn’t understand things, that was my affair, but that I should know that it did cause other people pain.
Another long stretch of empty ocean, which the captain announces as an opportunity for resuming the paper war, and everywhere those of us off duty get busy with pencils writing our patrol reports or toting up stores expended and remaining. Our boat continues to break down. Each day something or other gets jiggered up and someone puts it right. The chief initiates a tournament of Sea Battle, a game he plays on graph paper in which each contestant arranges his hidden fleet, consisting of a battleship, two cruisers, three destroyers, and four submarines and occupying respectively four, three, two, and one square each, while his opponent attempts to destroy them by guesswork, each correct guess on the grid counting as a hit. I’m drawn to the competitions but decline to participate. “That’s the way he is on leave, as well,” Mills tells everyone. “The Monk likes to watch.”
Off Little Andaman Island we pass a jungle of chattering monkeys that cascades right down to the shore. For safety we stay close to the coast in the darkness, and the oily-looking water is filled with sea snakes and jellyfish so that when we surface at nightfall horrid things get stuck in our conning tower gratings and crunch and slide underfoot. The captain takes a bearing on the black hills in the starlight and those of us on watch can hear nothing but the water lapping against our hull and the fans quietly expelling the battery gases. Every so often a rock becomes visible. A little vacant jetty. In the morning we dive in rain like sheets flapping in the wind.
The mattresses grew so foul the captain had them rolled and hauled up through the conning tower and thrown over the side. The coarse pads left on our bunks rub open blisters and sores and our medical officer recommends cornmeal and baking soda to dry the mess. Our new torpedoman had the fingernails and top joints of his first three fingers crushed in a bulkhead door in a crash dive. I helped the medical officer with the bandaging and afterward was surprised at his annoyance. “You could have answered a few of the boy’s questions,” he complained. “He’s new on the ship and looking for a friend.”
Mills has begun agitating quietly with other members of the crew to petition the captain to head home, wherever “home” now remains, before it’s too late. He explains that his philosophy is to be neither reckless nor overly gun-shy, but to evaluate the situation in light of whether we have any chance at all to make a successful attack and survive to report it. He claims that while the miracle of encountering a lone ammunition ship is all well and good, it’s only a matter of time before we confront an entire convoy. He asks for my help to rally support for his position and I agree, and he says we can start with the torpedo officer since his shifts and mine align for the next few days. Each night when I return from duty Mills asks if I’ve talked to the TO yet and I tell him I haven’t.
The next night the watch reports a debris field and the captain goes up to have a look. When he descends to the wardroom the wireless operator says, “It seems that we’ve finally given them a dose of what they’ve been giving us, eh, sir?” and the captain answers that it’s British wreckage we’re sailing through.
At breakfast there are complaints about the mutton, and to provide perspecti
ve Mills’s cousin tells of having eaten in a mess so rancid they’d had to inspect each mouthful on the fork to ensure there was nothing crawling in it.
Twelve bleary hours later I’m seven minutes late for the dawn watch. The captain is on the conning tower, too, and the enraged mate I’m relieving shoulders past me and heads below. The fresh air smells of seaweed and shellfish. In the heat the sea is so calm it looks like metal. Mist moves across our bow in the early sun. I apologize and the captain remarks that as a midshipman he was flogged for “wasting three minutes of a thousand men’s time” by piping a battle cruiser’s crew tardy to its first shift. I tell him that when I’m sleepless for long periods I sometimes don’t properly attend to things, and after a silence he answers that he had a great uncle who always claimed about himself that he didn’t attend to things, and that this great uncle went off to the Crimean War, where as Lord Raglan’s aide-de-camp he was more or less responsible for the Charge of the Light Brigade.
He stays on the bridge with me, evidently enjoying the air. “Did you know that Telemachus in Greek means ‘far from battle’?” he asks. I tell him I didn’t.
In the face of the blank sky and still water I return to the problem of how to respond to my cousin’s letter. I imagine describing for her all these dawns I’ve collected on watch: gold over the Norway Deep, scarlet off Singapore, silvery pink in the China Sea. I imagine recounting the morning the sun was behind us and a spray from the bow was arching across the deck so that we carried with us our own rainbow. In my last attempt I wrote that there wasn’t much I could say about my position, but that things were presently quiet and I was in excellent health and she shouldn’t worry, and then I stopped, since every other man in the crew had the same fatuous and unfinished letter in his locker, as well. I imagine telling her how vividly I could see her face as we left Harwich, the dockyard walls slipping past us like sliding doors, opening up vistas of the harbor, our stem coming round as docile as an old horse. I imagine telling her how some part of me anticipated the Pacific as if a way to discover my father’s fate. The sadness of my final glimpse of our escort vessel as it signaled its goodbye and dropped back to its station on our port beam.