“He can’t knock off.”
It was the chief. Captain Tannenbaume spun around and faced him.
“He’s gone too far with this slow bell thing, Maggie,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “I mean, come on, one can at a time?”
“Okay,” the chief said, “maybe he has gone too far but you can’t knock him off. All hands means all hands. If everybody else is working, the man has the right to work. It’s right there in the union contract.”
Captain Tannenbaume saw the electrician’s hand go up to his mouth. He threw his hands up and walked over to the mate. “God almighty it just burns my ass.”
The mate just stood at parade rest with his hands behind his back and watched the slow bell brigade. “It burns my ass, too. They’re going to pay for this though. I’m going to redline the shit out of their overtime sheets the rest of the voyage.”
Sparks joined Captain Tannenbaume, the chief, and the mate to watch the men move the cases of beer. “It’s like, like watching firefight-fight-fight—”
“Try”—air quotes—“’firemen,’ Sparks,” the chief said. “It’s only got two syllables, not three.”
“Fight-fighters retrieve a kitten from up a tree.”
A few minutes later, the second engineer joined the crowd of onlookers. Before long, nearly the entire crew, officers and unlicensed, gathered outside the old purser’s office, listening to the phone ring and ring, and watching the beer moved one six-pack at a time.
“Actually,” Tibby said, “since nearly the entire ship’s crew is present and accounted for, we could figure out who the crank caller is by process of elimination.”
“That’s a good idea.” Sylvia turned to Captain Tannenbaume. “Why didn’t you think of that?”
Captain Tannenbaume seethed. “Tibby, knock off.” The words were not out of his mouth before he regretted saying them.
“All Hands means—”
“I know, Maggie, it’s All Hands.”
“Well if you know it’s All Hands, why do you keep trying to knock the sailors off ?”
Captain Tannenbaume looked at the mate, mostly for commiseration, but the mate remained at parade rest, his attention absorbed by the spectacle before him.
The work continued all morning, right up until coffee time. By then, only a few stacks of beer stood between Captain Tannenbaume and the phone on the bulkhead.
“Don’t let them knock off for coffee now,” he told the mate. “There’s only a couple of more stacks to move and we can get to the phone.”
“Union rules,” the chief said. “Coffee time is”—air quotes—“’coffee time.’”
And so the crew knocked off for coffee, along with the rest of the onlookers, including Captain Tannenbaume, who didn’t want to, but what else was he going to do? When Captain Tannenbaume turned to go, he saw that the mate had not budged from his parade rest.
“You coming?” he asked.
“No.”
When everyone returned from coffee time, the mate was right where everyone left him, still at parade rest, still staring straight ahead, still seething, smoke practically coming out of his ears.
The crew removed the last of the beer from in front of the phone. Captain Tannenbaume went to answer the phone himself but the electrician beat him to it.
“Hello,” the electrician said into the phone. “Purser’s office.”
“Oh, give me that phone.” Captain Tannenbaume tried to take the phone away from the electrician but he turned his back and kept the phone for himself.
“Breakfast in bed?” The electrician rolled his eyes at the crew. “Coming right up.”
The electrician hung up the phone. “The new cadet, Mitzi, wants breakfast in bed.”
“I already told her,” the steward said. “If she wants breakfast, she has to come to the mess like the rest of them.”
“Are you nuts?” the electrician said. “If that redhead wants breakfast in bed, I’m going to give it to her.”
It did not take long for the other sailors to see what he meant by that. They all made a mad dash for the galley. Even the chief jumped at the chance to bring Mitzi her breakfast. Only Captain Tannenbaume, Sylvia, and the mate stayed behind.
“I knew that redhead was going to be trouble the moment I set eyes on her,” the Mate said.
“I didn’t know I could have breakfast in bed,” Sylvia said.
“You can’t, dear,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “This is a ‘tween decker, not a cruise ship. Ms. Paultz will soon find that out. She’s in for quite a surprise if she thinks—”
“Hello! Anybody home? Hello!”
Sylvia rolled her eyes when she heard Mrs. Tannenbaume’s gravelly voice. Mrs. Tannenbaume came around the corner of the passageway and stopped when she saw her son.
“Oh, there you are. Beat-me-Daddy-eight-to-the-bar,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said. “Is there a fire on board?”
“No, Mother,” Captain Tannenbaume said, “the crew wants to bring Mitzi breakfast in bed.”
“Breakfast in bed? You told me this wasn’t a cruise ship. Why does she get breakfast in bed? She’s only the cadet. I’m the supernumerary. Why can’t I have breakfast in bed?”
“Yeah,” Sylvia said, “why can’t she have breakfast in bed? She’s the supernumerary.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume looked at Sylvia, held her gaze for a moment, and nodded.
Captain Tannenbaume read his mother’s mind. She felt she just won their first power struggle—Sylvia had acknowledged Mrs. Tannenbaume’s position on board the God is Able. Captain Tannenbaume looked around at the cases of beer in the passageway and smiled. If that’s what it took to get his mother and Sylvia talking, then so be it.
He put one arm around his wife and one around his mother. “Let’s go to the officer’s lounge and talk about it.”
The only one remaining at the scene of that morning’s events was the mate. He was still at parade rest. Finally, he, too, left.
“God almighty,” he said aloud to himself as he walked away, “it just burns my ass.”
That evening, Captain Tannenbaume gathered his officers on the bridge at sunset so that he could reacquaint them all with the art of celestial navigation. There was no way he was going to let the chief think that his deck officers didn’t know how to handle a sextant—not to mention, of course, the matter of it being the ship’s only means of navigation at the present time. The truth was, Captain Tannenbaume cared about what the chief thought of his mates, but he could care less what the chief thought of him. Actually, he already knew where he stood with the engineers. The engineers, the chief included, thought he was a buffoon, but then again, every engineer on every ship in the merchant fleet thought the captain was a know-nothing. That’s how engineers were. It was a jealousy thing, of course, how could it not be? The engineers were stuck down in that inferno of an engine room while the captain sat on his high horse on a sunlit bridge deck all day. Who wouldn’t be jealous?
When he got to the bridge, Captain Tannenbaume saw Swifty fiddling with the ship’s old but reconditioned Cassens & Plath. It was clear Swifty didn’t know how to handle a sextant.
“You’re a kings Pointer, aren’t you Swifty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They teach celestial at that school?”
“Sort of.” Swifty looked at the sextant inquisitively. “We spent part of one class on it. We passed a sextant around the room. It was a plastic thing, made in Japan. It didn’t look anything like this heavy German one. Our professor told us what all the parts were for, but he never really showed us how to use it. All we did was practice the computations so that we could pass our Third Mates exam.”
“So you know how to use the sight reduction tables? H.O. 229? Or do you guys go with H.O. 249, the air almanac?”
The mates just stared at him.
“Does any of this sound familiar?” Captain Tannenbaume looked around at the second mate and the chief mate when he said it. The mates nodded their heads. “Yeah,” they said. “229
. We used H.O. 229 on our license exams.”
Well maybe they weren’t as useless as he thought. And when he began showing them the different parts of the sextant, it looked to him like they were picking it all up pretty readily. The academy must have taught them something about what it is to be a ship’s officer, after all. The place could not be all about marching in straight lines, could it? he thought. Captain Tannenbaume remembered what old Captain Holmes—the man who taught him everything he knew about celestial, and everything else about ships for that matter—used to say. Captain Holmes was a hawse piper himself, who’d learned everything he knew from an old salt as well. He said the idea was to pass down the stuff that mattered—such as how to navigate by the heavenly bodies. Or how to tie a stopper on a hawser that was under a heavy strain, or sweep a lee for the pilot. He used to say that the United States Merchant Marine Academy ought to teach its students less about marching a straight line and more about following a rhumb line. Captain Tannenbaume could not agree more, although, he had to admit, he had been teaching the new kids less and less in recent years. They just weren’t interested in learning. By the time they got out of the academy, they figured they knew it all. And how could he argue? With GPS, and Automatic Radar Plotting Aids, Chart Plotters, and Moving Maps, what did they need with an old sextant?
Captain Tannenbaume showed the mates how to use the sextant. He shot six stars in six minutes, an unheard-of feat. And then he reduced each sight to an LOP, a line of position, and plotted them on the chart. His plot was a perfect pinwheel, the sign of a real pro.
“And, look.” He pointed at the horizon. “You can still see the horizon. A good mate ought to be able to plot his position before darkness falls.”
The mates’ heads just bobbed. Captain Tannenbaume thought he detected a slackness in their jaws, along with their head bobbing. He knew that only an absolute expert could get his position charted as fast as he just had.
He hoped he hadn’t intimidated the poor fellows.
While Captain Tannenbaume was on the bridge shooting stars, Sparks was in the radio shack reading the evening telexes. The telexes came out in one long ream of paper that folded up on itself when it hit the floor, and Sparks sat in front of the machine holding the scroll-like paper between his legs while he read. Sparks knew that the God is Able would have to pass close aboard the Somali coast on the way to the Red Sea so he was not the least bit surprised to read telex after telex from the state department warning ships in the area to keep a sharp lookout for pirates. When the redundant telexes finally stopped coming, Sparks tore the long ream of paper off and stuffed it in the metal filing cabinet across from his desk.
BREAKFAST IN BED
A crowd of sailors stood outside of Mitzi’s stateroom with plates of runny eggs and untoasted white bread, jostling for position. The electrician declared that he was the one who was going to serve Mitzi in bed. He’d answered the phone, not them, and they could all just kiss his ass. Before entering her room, he took a moment to balance the plate of eggs with one hand so that he could fix his ponytail with the other.
It was the steward who knocked the plate out of the electrician’s hand, sending the runny yolk down his pant leg and on to his boots.
The sight of yellow egg yolk on the electrician’s nubuck leather workboots sent him into a dither, and he spun on the crowd behind him, demanding to know who did it. Ski stepped in front of the steward and said he was the one who did it. “What are you planning on doing about it?” he asked.
Somewhere during his response, the electrician made the unfortunate mistake of calling Ski a dumb Pollack, and it went downhill from there. The mate, writing up the scene later in the deck log, described what he saw taking place outside Mitzi’s stateroom as “pell-mell.”
Mitzi got out of bed when she heard the plates smashing on the deck. She opened her door to find a full-blown food fight right outside her stateroom.
“Hey!”
The sound of Mitzi’s voice silenced the crew. They all turned and stared at her. The deck was a mess with broken plates and egg yolks and not one sailor had anything to offer Mitzi for breakfast.
“You call this room service?” Mitzi said.
“Yes, as matter of fact, I do.”
The voice came from behind them. Mitzi saw that it was the big Swede, the guy they called the chief. The sailors all turned to see him walking up with a breakfast tray of fresh fruit, yogurt, a bagel, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and one of those tin metal covers over a plate. When the chief stopped in front of Mitzi, he lifted the cover to reveal an impressive display of steaming eggs Benedict smothered in Hollandaise sauce. And it wasn’t just the breakfast that was impressive. The chief was in a brand-new white boilersuit, with an ascot wrapped around his neck.
Mitzi took the polyester ascot in her fingers and pulled it slowly off the chief ‘s neck. “You look like Elvis in this getup.”
Mitzi then wrapped the ascot around her own neck and led the chief into her stateroom. The chief gave a big wink to the crew, who moaned as the door closed.
Inside, the chief set the tray on the metal side table attached to the metal bunk, and lowered the shade over the porthole to keep out the white-hot Indian Ocean sun. Mitzi got in bed and sat up against the bulkhead. She pulled the covers up to her waist.
“I’m ready,” Mitzi said.
That afternoon, at coffee time, the chief regaled the others with the story of his breakfast with Mitzi.
“She’s something else,” he said. “Something else altogether. She did things to me I’ve never even read about. It was the eggs Benedict, is what did it. Mitzi loves eggs Benedict. And the Hollandaise sauce? The things that woman does with Hollandaise sauce. I’m having”—air quotes—“’breakfast’ with Mitzi every day.”
Captain Tannenbaume watched as the others hung on every word of the chief ‘s story. Captain Tannenbaume shook his head. He’d already heard Mitzi’s side of the story from Mitzi herself. She said the chief had acted like a perfect gentleman, served her breakfast in bed, and waited on her hand and foot. Mitzi thought the big Swede looked pretty sexy in his Elvis getup, and she gave him an obvious green light to make a move, but he never did. He seemed a little nervous, she told Captain Tannenbaume. And now here was the chief talking shit about Mitzi. That’s why Captain Tannenbaume didn’t like to attend coffee time. He’d realized long ago that, when sailors are aboard ship, all they do is talk about women, but when a ship arrives in port and they’re surrounded by women in the dockside bars, all they do is talk about the ship.
He grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down on the brand-new couch across from the chief. The officer’s lounge, unlike the crew lounge, was neat and clean at all times. “So is she a real redhead, Maggie?”
Captain Tannenbaume’s question caught the chief off guard. He did not respond.
The others in the officer’s lounge waited for an answer.
“What do you mean?” the chief said, looking at his feet.
The second engineer jumped in. “Come on, Chief, you know what he means.” The second looked around at the others. “Is she, you know, a real redhead?”
The chief, of course, had no way of knowing, and Captain Tannenbaume got more satisfaction than he probably should have watching the chief squirm. But it served the bastard right. The guy held court every day at coffee time as if he was God’s gift to women, and Captain Tannenbaume knew damn well that most of it was bullshit. The chief was fifty-five years old and still living with his mother back home in Minnesota. How much of a Casanova could he be?
“So?” he said, “What color is she below decks, Maggie?”
The chief ‘s eyes glazed over.
Captain Tannenbaume was enjoying this interrogation far too much, but then he remembered the cute little trick with the air-conditioning on the bridge. Not to mention the sextant. He looked around the lounge and saw the others looking at the chief, as well, and Captain Tannenbaume knew that he would finally get his revenge.
Ironically, it was Mitzi herself who saved him.
“So how’s my big Swede?” Mitzi said it as she breezed into the lounge. The whole room turned to see Mitzi at the coffee urn in her red miniskirt with the red pumps and the frilly white socks. Mitzi poured herself a cup of coffee and then went over and sat on the chief ‘s lap. She wore the ascot around her neck and playfully took it off and placed it around the chief ‘s neck.
“You left your scarf in my cabin,” she said.
The chief beamed—the lucky bastard. Captain Tannenbaume knew that Mitzi was playing him for the fool, but to the others, it sure looked like the chief had scored big time. He had seen enough. He drained his coffee and rinsed out his cup—the cup that had “Master” printed on it—and placed the cup on the rack. He walked over to Mitzi and held out his hand. “Come with me, young lady. Coffee time is over.”
Captain Tannenbaume heard the entire lounge groan, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought.
“Aw,” Mitzi said. “I just got here.”
“Now, now Mitzi,” he said. “You’ve been assigned to this ship as a cadet and cadets work aboard ship. My wife is very eager to learn how to be a good Great Neck wife and you are here to teach her. At least that’s what I’ve been told by Commodore what’s-his-name.”
Mitzi got down off the chief ‘s lap. She held the chief ‘s face in both hands and then pinched his cheek. “See you tomorrow at breakfast time, Chief.”
The others in the lounge groaned again, this time louder than before. When Captain Tannenbaume and Mitzi were at the doorway, the chief called after Captain Tannenbaume.
“Hey, Cap, I heard from Sparks we’ve got pirates along our route of travel. Want me to fire up the Fire Main?”
It was the first Captain Tannenbaume had heard about pirates this trip but he didn’t let on. “I’m on top of it, Maggie,” Captain Tannenbaume said over his shoulder as he guided Mitzi out of the lounge. “You just worry about keeping the plant turning and let me worry about the pirates.”
A Commodore of Errors Page 21