Mrs. Tannenbaume knew they wouldn’t need heat guns if the crew followed her lead. And so far they were.
“Come in, come in!”
A couple of the engineers were sitting on the chart table waiting for their turn with Mitzi when they saw the pirates. They jumped down to defend their ship but Mrs. Tannenbaume held them back.
“Don’t even think about it. These are our guests. They deserve a manicure as much as you do.”
Mitzi told Swifty to make way for the pirates and he complied without complaint. With one hand still clutching the hot cloth to his face, he shimmied out of the captain’s chair into Ski’s waiting arms, which were there to guide his blind shipmate to the stool next to the wheel. When Swifty was seated, he put both hands on the cloth and held it firmly against his face. This display of cowardice disgusted the engineers and they again looked like they were about to make their move against the pirates but this time it was Mitzi who discouraged such a tactic.
“You,” she said, pointing to the second engineer. “Make yourself useful and get another towel from the coffeepot.” She then walked over to the electrician, who was getting his nails done by Sylvia. “Get up. We need to make room for our friends.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume knew that the electrician, who by now had proven to be Mitzi’s best customer, would comply with whatever was asked of him in order to keep his favored status in Mitzi’s appointment book. He stood right up, brushed the seat clean, and held his arm out to welcome the pirates. “Who’s next?” A genuine smile lit up his face. “You guys are gonna love Sylvia’s work. She’s really come a long way.”
The electrician walked toward the pirates with his hands out, palms down, to show off his half-moons. “See?”
The leader spread out his arms to keep his youthful compatriots from getting too close to the half-moons.
Mrs. Tannenbaume could tell from the chief pirate’s reaction that he knew he was in uncharted waters with this ship. His eyes darted around the wheel-house—when he dared to take them off the electrician’s hands, that is—and Mrs. Tannenbaume watched him take in all that he surveyed. He appeared to be particularly curious about the heat gun/paint tray getup. His eyes kept coming back to it while he took in the rest of the bridge—the bookshelves lined with bottles of nail polish, the cheesecloth-draped chart table, the hand-painted wood signs advertising Mitzi’s daily specials. Surely the man had never seen a bridge like this one. And aside from all the nonstandard bridge equipment he saw, he surely had never seen a crew like this one. The normal attire on the bridge of a ship—at least any ship he would have likely pirated—was khakis, not boilersuits. But here he found engineers in boilersuits and stewards and cooks in white smocks, lounging around with wet hair, waiting on a blow-dry and manicure from a stunning redhead and a cute young Thai girl.
When the second engineer—resplendent in his pressed boilersuit, exquisitely coiffed hair, and gleaming nails—walked over with the Pyrex coffee pot in one hand and a pair of channel locks with a steaming hot towel in the other, the chief pirate had evidently seen enough. He spread out both arms to keep the young ones safely behind him and backed his entire team off the bridge wing. When they got to the ladder at the aft end, they backed down it, never taking their eyes off the bizarre crew.
Mrs. Tannenbaume walked out to the edge of the wing and watched the pirates descend all the way to the main deck. When the last of them climbed down into the waiting pirate boat, she called to the bridge, telling Swifty to put in the log that the pirates were away.
The crew let out a whooping holler.
Captain Tannenbaume, down below in his cabin dreaming of milk cows, never even knew pirates had attacked his ship.
NIGHT ORDERS
Mrs. Tannenbaume had been looking forward to this day, a day to herself, a day where she would do absolutely nothing. She’d spent the last week on the bridge navigating 24-7 as the ship made its way through the heavily trafficked waters of the Gulf of Suez, and then the canal, and then the Mediterranean.
With her son preoccupied doing who knew what, with Swifty busy with his manicures and pedicures and the other mates with theirs, Mrs. Tannenbaume had become the de facto master of the God is Able. She was certainly the one who made the final call on meeting arrangements with other ships—whether to alter course or hold course and speed, that all-important calculus that keeps ships from colliding with one another. She told the mates that she did not like this business of always being the give-way vessel. She had been giving way her entire life, and she was tired of it. “Let the other guy move,” she told the mates. “Don’t let him—or the Rules of the Road—bully you into changing course.” Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the leviathan ships that plied the world’s oceans as nothing more than bullies scaring the smaller boats into keeping out of their way so that they could pass unimpeded. Well, Mrs. Tannenbaume would not let the bastards intimidate her.
In the odd moments when Mrs. Tannenbaume was not navigating or lending a hand in Mitzi’s salon, not to mention quelling a pirate attack (such as it was), she had her nose in one of the various logbooks she discovered on the bridge—a nod, perhaps, to her thirty-five years in education as a data entry clerk. She read the various logbooks with a critical eye and found herself second-guessing some of the orders her son had given over the years. And since she was the supernumerary, she felt it was her right to make her own log entries. Also, after only a quick perusal of the Captain’s standing orders book, she decided to make a few changes. Captain Tannenbaume’s Standing Orders called for the deck officers to, among other things, keep a one nautical mile Closest Point of Approach with all ship traffic, to call the master if the CPA dropped to less than a mile, and to blow five short and rapid blasts of the whistle if in doubt as to the intentions of the other vessel—in that order. Mrs. Tannenbaume wanted the mates to blow the danger signal first, notify her second, and to forget about keeping the one nautical mile CPA altogether. The mates, however, knew better, which is how it fell upon Mrs. Tannenbaume to do all of the navigating. She made it sound like navigating 24-7 was a burden, but in truth, she preferred to do it all herself—at least that way she knew it would be done to her liking.
By far, Mrs. Tannenbaume’s favorite logbook was the Captain’s Night Orders book, orders issued by the captain on a nightly basis that supplemented his standing orders. They were sometimes explicit orders, such as an order to call the master when the ship came near a known shoal area, or perhaps just a simple reminder to keep an extra special lookout for small fishing vessels if the ship was expected to be in the vicinity of a fishing fleet overnight. Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the Night Orders book differently. She saw it as a way to harp on her pet subject night after night, and since the mates were required to place their initials next to the night orders when they came on watch each night, Mrs. Tannenbaume knew she had a captive audience. “Hold your course and speed” became her nightly entry in the Captain’s Night Orders book. The mates dutifully initialed the new orders, as did the engineers and cooks. In fact, everyone who stepped foot on the bridge placed their initials next to her night orders, something that greatly pleased Mrs. Tannenbaume. She felt like she was putting her stamp on things and everyone treated her like the head honcho.
Everyone except the Suez Canal pilot.
The pilot had presented a distinct problem for Mrs. Tannenbaume. When he first came aboard, she figured him to be some sort of flunky, someone to be coddled but not taken seriously. As far as Mrs. Tannenbaume could tell, the man only seemed to be interested in extracting from the crew a stash of cigarettes. Marlboro reds, evidently, were his brand, because Mrs. Tannenbaume noticed how indignant he became when Swifty offered him a carton of Lucky Strikes. She was mortified when Swifty gave in and coughed up a carton of Reds. She, for one, would not kowtow to the man.
As it turned out, the cigarettes were the least of her worries. Not only did Swifty turn over the cigarettes to the pilot, but to Mrs. Tannenbaume’s utter amazement, he also turned over the ship to him.
“Okay, Mr. Pilot,” Swifty said the morning the pilot came aboard and the flap over the cigarettes had ended. “She’s all yours.”
“What?” Mrs. Tannenbaume pulled Swifty aside. “What the hell is going on here? Who is this guy we just gave the ship to?”
“He’s the pilot,” Swifty said. “He’s in charge of navigation now. We can just sit back and enjoy the view.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume looked out at the scrub desert on either side of the Suez Canal. “You call this a view?”
“Look,” Swifty said, “I have an appointment to get my face wrapped. You do what you want. Just . . . the pilot has the conn now, all right?”
Mrs. Tannenbaume would have none of it. She walked over and stood beside the pilot, a smallish man in rumpled linen pants and shirt, with dark sweaty hair that he wore matted down over his head. When he didn’t acknowledge her, Mrs. Tannenbaume nudged the pilot’s forearm.
“Give it back,” she said.
The pilot looked past Mrs. Tannenbaume to Swifty, but Swifty was already in the chair with a hot cloth on his face.
“Give me back the ship,” Mrs. Tannenbaume repeated.
“Who are you?”
“The supernumerary, that’s who.”
“Well I’m the pilot. I answer to no one, not even the captain.” The pilot lit up a Marlboro and blew smoke rings. “I certainly do not answer to any supernumerary.”
“Well I’m not just any supernumerary. I’m the captain’s mother and I’m making the decisions up here, not you. And the first decision I’m making is no smoking on the bridge.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume yanked the dangling cigarette from the pilot’s mouth and handed it to Ski at the wheel. Ski, who was smoking himself, extinguished the pilot’s cigarette in the remains of his coffee.
In a voice far stronger than anyone imagined the little man might possess, the pilot thundered, “I want to see the captain on the bridge right now!”
No one else on the bridge wanted to see the captain right then, judging by the way they all sprung into action to isolate the pilot from Mrs. Tannenbaume. Swifty threw off his hot towel and escorted Mrs. Tannenbaume to the wing while the second engineer showed the pilot to the captain’s chair. Mitzi had the pilot’s shoes off before he knew what was happening and she went to work on his feet like nobody’s business. Ski, meanwhile, got another hot towel out of the spare Pyrex coffeepot and placed it over the pilot’s face. Ski told the pilot that he had been driving ships through the canal for twenty years and that all that he, the pilot, had to do was relax in the chair while they took care of things. Ski knew that pilots, as a rule, enjoy a little pampering, and this pilot was no different. After a minute with the soothing hot towel on his face, the pilot was sleeping peacefully. Mrs. Tannenbaume was not altogether pleased with having to navigate from the wing, but Swifty convinced her that if she wanted to keep Captain Tannenbaume off the bridge doing who knew what, then she’d have to make the adjustment this one time.
The trip through the canal went smoothly after that, with Ski doing most of the driving. Mrs. Tannenbaume took an occasional turn at the wheel, almost nodding off from time to time from the sheer boredom of steering a dead straight course through the dead straight ditch. She tried to get the pilot’s goat by asking him to tell her, again, why they even needed a pilot in the Suez Canal, but Swifty and Ski were there to hurry her off to the wing. With the last of the dreary ditch behind them, the God is Able dropped off the pilot just outside the entrance. The pilot, it turns out, was sad to go, seeing as he looked and felt a whole lot better than when he first came aboard. Mitzi had primped-up his matted-down hair, trimmed the profusion of bristling hairs sprouting from his nose and ears, and had given him a gleaming manicure. He had never had a better transit, he told Swifty, as he admired the fresh gloss on his fingernails. Swifty made sure to repay the compliment with a couple more cartons of Marlboro Reds.
Mrs. Tannenbaume noticed the additional cartons of Marlboros in the pilot’s arms as they bid each other farewell but she had bigger fish to fry. She had never seen so many ships in all her life. She felt like she was coming out of an overcrowded elevator and that there was an even bigger crowd waiting to get in as soon as the doors opened. Mrs. Tannenbaume took it personally. Couldn’t they at least let her get out first? She steered the ship until it pointed at the center of the mass of ships hovering outside the canal, told Ski to steady her up there, ordered the engines ahead full, told the lookout on the bow he might as well knock off, then held her thumb down on the whistle and blasted right through the ships until the God is Able was in the clear. Once they got past the ships in the immediate vicinity of the canal, they came upon another set of ships, and then another. Mrs. Tannenbaume discovered she needed to blow the danger signal more than ever in the crowded shipping lanes of the Med.
It wasn’t until the ship had passed Tunisia that the traffic abated. Mrs. Tannenbaume scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars and did not detect a single ship. She handed the binoculars to Swifty, slumped into the chair, and asked Mitzi for a back rub.
“I need a day off,” she told Mitzi.
“Somehow, I don’t think the crew will mind,” Mitzi said.
Mrs. Tannenbaume was too tired to argue. She got up from the chair after Mitzi finished her back rub and said she was going down below to her cabin for the rest of the day and that if they had any questions about traffic they were to blow the danger signal before interrupting her.
Shortly after Mrs. Tannenbaume left, the chief called the bridge to ask why everything was so quiet. He was in the middle of his nooner, lying in his bunk, staring at the overhead, waiting for the whistle to go off. Swifty told him that Mrs. Tannenbaume had left the bridge and that, hopefully, the whistle would not be going off anytime soon. That was not the answer the chief wanted to hear. The chief had gotten used to the sound of the whistle—it had become white noise for him—and he told Swifty to go ahead and blow the damn whistle so that he could get some sleep.
Mrs. Tannenbaume was already stretched out in the easy chair in her cabin with her shoes kicked off when she heard the whistle. It made her feel like things were going smoothly on the bridge and she began to relax. She thought she might take a nap—she certainly could use the rest—but she also needed to catch up on her mail. The agent in Suez had dropped off the ship’s mail and Mrs. Tannenbaume had two letters to open, one with the return address of the Great Neck Martinizing Dry Cleaners and the other the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Mrs. Tannenbaume picked up the letters from the side table next to the easy chair, opened the one from the academy, and saw that it was from the Commodore:
Dear Mrs. Tannenbaume,
It pains me to inform you that as of this instant the regiment of midshipmen is in a state of upheaval. My boys have been unruly and I know that they are merely acting up out of boredom. Ennui prevails for no reason other than a lack of leadership, of course. The board accepted Admiral Johnson’s resignation, as you know, but they have steadfastly refused to appoint an interim superintendent. I have proffered my services more than once and have even suggested that I would be amenable to retaining my present rank and pay, but still the board has refused my entreaties. They can be a stubborn lot, that cabal of widows.
Now that Johnson is gone, his cronies have gone missing in action—it should come as no surprise. The commandant does not even bother to keep up the pretense of performing his job. He takes Mondays and Fridays off, and the remainder of the workweek he spends in the gymnasium. His trapezoids are bulging while the regiment’s spirit atrophies. For my part, I am doing all that I have always done—comporting myself in such a manner as to inspire others. My carriage is erect as I walk the campus even as my own spirit sags. It pains me to see my boys suffer even one more day.
To wit, my dear, I entreat that you make great haste in bringing Captain Tannenbaume to the academy. The dedication of the Mariners Monument is fast approaching and I want your son to be present and to make a respectable impression on Ma
yor Mogelefsky and the board. The bronze likeness of Edwin J. O’Hara is now complete. The sculptor captured perfectly the imperious gaze, the Roman nose, and the square chin of our young hero. I was overcome with emotion when I faced Edwin for the first time. I looked into his intelligent eyes and felt him staring back at me. I dare say I felt naked in the presence of such greatness. The workers have affixed the statue to the pedestal and the monument is now in place on the lawn facing the Sound. They tried to place a protective plastic wrap around Edwin to keep him out of the elements until his unveiling on dedication day, but, fortunately for Edwin, I intervened. The thought of wrapping dear Edwin in plastic was anathema to me, and I prevailed upon the workers to cover him in a cotton sheet (300 thread count) followed by a canvas tarp. So Edwin is comfortably under wraps until his big day. All that is needed is for the MV God is Able to deliver Captain Tannenbaume on time for the unveiling.
And so, Mrs. Tannenbaume, I implore you to do everything in your power to see that the ship makes its best speed for New York. I reiterate my desire for your son to make the biggest impression possible in front of the most people as possible.
A Commodore of Errors Page 26