A Commodore of Errors

by John Jacobson

  Sylvia opened the door to her cabin and found her husband sprawled on their bunk with pages and pages of telexes all around him. He had his face pressed into one of the telexes and did not notice that Sylvia had entered their cabin. When the phone rang, he didn’t notice that either.

  Sylvia answered the phone.

  “This is the chief. The damned—”

  Sylvia shoved the phone against her husband’s ear.

  “What,” Captain Tannenbaume said.

  “What?” the chief said. “The damn whistle woke me up from my goddamn nooner again, that’s what.”

  “What whistle?”

  “What whistle? The whistle that has been blowing all day every day for the last week. That whistle.”

  Captain Tannenbaume cupped the phone to his hand. “Have they been blowing the whistle on the bridge lately?”

  Sylvia threw her hands up in the air. “Hang up, honey.” She moved a pile of telexes out of the way and sat on the edge of the bunk.

  “Look,” she said after her husband hung up the phone. “Do you mean to tell me you haven’t heard the ship’s whistle blowing nonstop for the past week?”

  Captain Tannenbaume merely stared at Sylvia with an uncomprehending look on his face.

  Sylvia threw up her hands. “What has gotten into you? Your ship is going to pot right before your eyes and you act like you could care less.”

  Captain Tannenbaume could not look his wife in the eye. He gripped a handful of telexes. “I guess I’ve been busy with these.”

  “What is it with these telexes?” Sylvia picked one up off the bunk but Captain Tannenbaume snatched it out of her hand before she could read it.

  “It’s important business from the home office. The company is buying a new ship and they need my help.” Captain Tannenbaume gathered the rest of the telexes up off the bunk and clutched them to his chest. “It’s a complicated transaction.”

  Sylvia took advantage of the clean bunk and curled herself up in the fetal position. She reached out for her husband and tried to pull him down to her.

  “Come here,” she sighed. “Mitzi is running me ragged doing for others all day.”

  “What others?”

  “Oh . . . unfortunate others,” Sylvia said. “Mitzi says the women in Great Neck do for others.”

  “Do what for others?”

  “Whatever it is they need.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. I barely have time to do for myself every day. But Mitzi says in Great Neck you do for yourself and you do for others. I don’t know how they can do so much.”

  Captain Tannenbaume shook his head. “That Mitzi is something, huh?”

  Sylvia did not answer. Her eyes were closed and her head was resting against Captain Tannenbaume’s thigh. Captain Tannenbaume moved her head onto the pillow and put a blanket over her before he slipped off the bunk. Then he stashed the telexes in the top drawer of his bureau and snuck out of his cabin. He was dying to know if Mogie had answered his telex.

  GODSPEED

  Captain Tannenbaume knocked on the door to the radio shack and entered without waiting for permission. Sparks was not at his desk and there was no answer when he rapped on the door of the adjoining cabin, so Captain Tannenbaume eased himself into the chair behind the desk and opened the top left-hand drawer. It was empty.

  He closed the drawer and sat back with a sinking feeling. This was the first day in over a week that Sparks had not received a telex first thing in the morning from Mogie. That wasn’t a good sign.

  Before Captain Tannenbaume had a chance to dwell on this bad news, he heard the telex machine come to life. Perhaps his telex to Mogie was not so bad after all—at least Mogie was writing back.

  Captain Tannenbaume pulled on the corner of the paper coming out of the printer, as if pulling on it would make it print faster. Turns out it wasn’t worth the wait. The telex was not addressed to Mitzi but rather to his mother. It was from the Commodore. As much as he did not want to read his mother’s telex, he could not keep his eyes from running down the page as he walked it over to the drawer. When he spotted his name in the middle of the telex, he stopped and read:

  My dear Mrs. Tannenbaume:

  I do hope you are in receipt of the missive I sent to you by post. The agent for the God is Able has informed me that the ship picked up its mail in Suez, so I presume you have received it. If, in fact, you are not in receipt of said missive, please do notify me by telex, as some very important and time-critical information is contained therein. My epistolary to you neglected to inquire about the progress of our two students. Will Sylvia make a good Jewish wife, after all? And what of Captain Tannenbaume? Have we, at least, gotten him to refrain from eating pork? And what of this notion of furnishing him with a Yiddisha kop? Has Mitzi been able to impart a thing or two about the arcane machinations of the business world? Mr. Mogelefsky possesses an uncanny horse sense when it comes to the murky realm of commerce and I dare say he will rather easily detect any lapses in Captain Tannenbaume’s critical thinking along such lines. (He informs me he can spot a dumb Goy from across the room (Mr. Mogelefsky’s words).) Now, I am cognizant that one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but, nevertheless, I would like to know that you are making an effort. You do know that, at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, it is the effort that counts, never the results, so just do the very best you can.

  I wish you God Speed for the remainder of your voyage, my dear.

  Submitted respectfully,

  Commodore Robert Dickey

  Captain Tannenbaume threw the telex into the drawer and slammed it shut. So Mitzi and his mother were trying to change him. The “stop eating bacon, the cholesterol is killing you” thing was just a ruse to get him to stop eating pork. All of his mother’s talk about wanting him to use his Yiddisha kop—it was obvious now that the Commodore was the one behind it all.

  Well, if the Commodore thought he was changing for him, he had another thing coming. He was about to get the telex out of the drawer again so that he could throw it in his mother’s face when Sparks walked into the radio shack.

  “No telexes this morning, Sparks,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “Well, not from Mogie anyway.”

  Sparks did not respond. Captain Tannenbaume could see Sparks’s leg rustling under the desk, a nervous tic of his that usually meant he was trying to get up the courage to speak his mind.

  “You ruined it for us,” Sparks finally said.

  “I ruined wh—”

  “We were so cl-close and you ruined it.”

  Captain Tannenbaume’s heart leapt. “So Mogie wrote back? What did he say?”

  Sparks glared at Captain Tannenbaume. “M-m-my little m-m-milk cow? You really think M-Mitzi calls M-Mogie her little m-milk cow?”

  “It was as good a guess as any!”

  “It was st-stupid.” Sparks reached under his desk saver, pulled out the telex from Mogie, and threw it across the desk. Captain Tannenbaume read it in a flash.

  “Who wrote this?” was all the telex from Mogie read.

  Captain Tannenbaume threw the telex back onto the desk. “Shit.”

  “He’ll never r-r-write again,” Sparks said. “You sc-sc-scared him off.”

  “Well, you were being too damned timid. We were never going to find out what the stool was for with you in charge.”

  “You have to be p-p-patient.”

  “I don’t have time to be patient. I’ve got a ship to run. I haven’t been on my own bridge in over a week because of your incompetence.”

  “My incomp—”

  “You couldn’t get the simplest little thing out of Mogie! I had to take matters into my own hands!”

  Sparks’s leg banged uncontrollably against the side of the desk. “G-g-get out.”

  “I will not get out! This is my ship and I’ll be anywhere I damn well please.”

  “F-fine then. I’ll g-g-go to the bridge. That’s one place I know I won’t f-find you.”


  “Go to the bridge for all I c-c-c-c-care.”

  He knew he shouldn’t have said it the moment the words were out of his mouth. He wished he could take the words back right then and there. God, how could he be so stupid—he knew how sensitive Sparks was about his stutter.

  Sparks went silent and turned his attention back to the telex machine. To Captain Tannenbaume’s surprise, a calmness seemed to come over Sparks—his leg stopped shaking, his breathing slowed down. He just stared intently at the telex machine, so intently that it began to make Captain Tannenbaume nervous. He had seen this look before from Sparks.

  It was the same sereneness that had come over Sparks after he had flung the GPS against the bulkhead.

  “No!”

  Captain Tannenbaume bum-rushed him and tried to get his arms around Sparks, but he was too late. Sparks had already sprung, lithe as a cat, and pounced on the telex machine. He picked it up and raised it over his head, yanking the electric cord out of the socket as he did, and ran headlong with it straight into the bulkhead. The telex machine cracked in two, then the two pieces split in half again when they hit the deck. Sparks was not even breathing hard after the exertion, surprisingly, and his back was to Captain Tannenbaume when he grabbed Sparks around the throat with both hands.

  It wasn’t very long at all before Sparks went limp, out of fear more than anything else, which was a good thing because Captain Tannenbaume was so mad he probably was not going to stop choking him. In contrast to Sparks, Captain Tannenbaume was breathing hard and needed a moment to catch his breath before he looked closely at Sparks to see if he could detect the rise and fall of his chest.

  When he saw that Sparks was “resting comfortably,” Captain Tannenbaume stepped over the wreckage that was the telex machine and headed back to his cabin with absolutely no idea what he was going to do next, now that there would be no more telexes to read.

  When Captain Tannenbaume entered his cabin, he found Sylvia fast asleep, so he climbed onto the bunk and snuggled up next to her. The soft rhythm of his young wife’s breathing put him into a deep sleep in no time flat, and he dreamed of milk cows getting milked in a green foamy pasture that rolled on a long ocean swell.

  SHALOM!

  The telexes that Sparks kept receiving, not the ones from Mogie but the reams of telexes that warned of pirates in the area—the ones Captain Tannenbaume had called “cookie-cutter”—weren’t so cookie-cutter after all. The pirates finally showed up and the ship, as the chief had warned, was caught unawares.

  The steward was the first one to lay eyes on them. He had been dumping a load of trash over the side when he spotted the pirates hauling themselves up over the gunwhale on the port quarter. There must have been a dozen of them, he figured, and before any of them had seen him, he was able to duck into the slopchest on the main deck, the place where he should have been dumping the trash in the first place. Stew was deathly afraid that the pirates would find him and he silently cursed the chief mate for not having fixed the deadbolt on the slopchest door like he had asked him to do umpteen times. From his vantage point, Stew was able to see the pirates as they huddled on the deck and looked around for the crew. He was happy the deck gang had never laid out the fire hoses because he would have been compelled to use them now to defend the ship, but then what sort of trouble would the chief make about that? Surely the chief would point out that only the deck gang was allowed to work the deck and that the steward had no business fighting off pirates with gear belonging to the deck gang. So Stew was thankful there were no hoses on deck and he wouldn’t have to deal with the chief over the damned union rules.

  The pirates looked surprised, Stew said later, that the crew was nowhere to be seen. One of them left his comrades to go around the corner for a peek, and when he came back, he was shaking his head with a bewildered look on his face. The steward knew why. It was broad daylight and the ship’s crew should have seen them approaching in their wooden dugout canoe with the two outboard engines slung off the back, but instead of finding an angry crew laying in wait to defend their ship, the pirates had the entire deck to themselves.

  When the pirates made it down to the engine room they looked even more surprised to find that there was no one to fight off there as well. The only one down there was the chief.

  “Well, well, well,” the chief said when he looked up from his girlie magazine and saw a bunch of pirates entering the air-conditioned control room. “I’ve been expecting a visit from you guys.”

  The pirates rushed into the control room. Two of them grabbed the chief while the others spun around with their rifles looking for the engineers.

  The oldest one, the one with the unkempt beard, shouted in the chief ‘s face. “Where is everybody? Where are the engineers?”

  “The engineers?” The chief scoffed. “If you’re looking for engineers you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  A few of the pirates who had gone back out into the engine room were coming back through the door into the control room now. The old pirate—no doubt the leader—looked at them but they shook their heads.

  The leader stood in front of the chief. “Where is everybody?”

  “They’re all on the bridge. Ever since Mitzi started up her salon, I can’t keep my engineers down here. They’re . . . ”

  The chief saw one of the younger pirates take a piece of rope out of his pocket. It looked like a piece of old polypropylene.

  “Oh, don’t use that old stuff to tie me up. Poly’s too sharp on the skin. Look over on the control panel there, you’ll find some cut-up T-shirts the engineers have been using to clean their hands. It’s the only thing that doesn’t scuff up the shine on their nails.”

  The pirate ignored him and began to tie him up.

  “No, no,” the chief said, getting up from the chair. “Use the other chair. This one lost its swivel. I need to be able to swing around to see the gauges.”

  The young pirate looked to the leader, who just pointed at the chair the chief had been sitting on.

  “Oh, come on,” the chief whined. “How am I supposed to see all the gauges from this chair?”

  The leader stepped closer to the chief, now tied up in the swivel-less chair with the rough polypro cutting into his wrists. “Where is everybody?” the leader said. “This must be a trick.”

  “Yeah, right.” The chief laughed. “I wish it was a trick. No, my men are all up on the bridge, getting their nails done instead of slinging wrenches. Go on up there, you’ll see.”

  The chief could tell that the pirates did not believe him, that they really thought the crew was playing some kind of trick on them. He watched the pirates file out of the control room, looking over their shoulders.

  “Don’t expect to cut the line!” the chief called after them. “You’ll have to wait your turn like everyone else.”

  The leader put a halt to the procession out of the control room when he stopped to turn back to the chief. “What line? What are you talking about?”

  The chief just laughed. “You’ll find out. Go on. Just go on up to the bridge.

  Mrs. Tannenbaume was the first one on the bridge to see the pirates. They were standing outside on the wing looking a little unsure of themselves.

  She signaled to Mitzi, who was working on Swifty in the chair, to have a look outside. Mitzi, who, Mrs. Tannenbaume knew, was a bit squeamish about pirates, went white when she laid eyes on them. Mrs. Tannenbaume walked calmly over to her and said, “Just follow my lead. Don’t look nervous.”

  When Mitzi’s face took on an even more alarmed look, she said, “Trust me. If you get nervous, who knows what Captain Courageous here will do.” Mrs. Tannenbaume was talking about Swifty, who was beginning to stir now that Mitzi had stopped pulling on his toes. “Look,” Mrs. Tannenbaume whispered, keeping one eye on the pirates still hovering uncertainly on the other side of the bridge wing door. “We’re surrounded by nothing but followers up here. So trust me, if we stay calm, the crew’ll follow our lead.”


  Swifty’s hand went up to the hot cloth on his face but Mrs. Tannenbaume grabbed it and placed it back on his lap. “We’ve got some visitors,” she said quietly, bending down to Swifty’s ear. “Stay under that cloth and everything’ll be alright.”

  Swifty must’ve known who the visitors might be because Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the blanket covering his body go taut. She knew there was no way he’d move a muscle now.

  “Well look here,” Mrs. Tannenbaume announced in a voice loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear. “Looks like we’ve got visitors.”

  The pirates made their move at the sound of her voice but then stopped suddenly—piling into one another—when Mrs. Tannenbaume swung open the sliding door to the wheelhouse.

  “Shalom!”

  She knew she had them at “hello.”

  The pirates were a ragtag bunch, that’s for sure. Most of them were shoeless and their black feet were callused and knobby from so many protruding, ugly corns. And skinny! The way their bony legs stuck out from their baggy and tattered shorts, Mrs. Tannenbaume wondered what they spent all their ill-gotten booty on. They sure weren’t spending it on food. One of them had a gray scrubby beard, but most of them looked like they could be teenagers, their faces were so smooth and clean. All of them wore clothes that were soiled and stained and ill-fitting for the most part, and most had big sunglasses covering their faces and bandanas covering their heads. The rest were bareheaded and squinting in the sun. There was nothing particularly menacing about them—they merely looked “third world,” as far as Mrs. Tannenbaume was concerned. The only thing giving them away as “bad guys” was their weapons. They all carried rifles, one or two slung over their backs and one that each carried in his arms. The rifles looked cheap and ill-made, even the ones that weren’t rusted and held together with duct tape. Aside from the beat-up weaponry they carried, they didn’t look all that evil. But, they were pirates, after all, and they were armed to the teeth. The crew didn’t stand a chance fighting them off. What were they going to use for weapons, their heat guns?