Pacific Interlude

by Sloan Wilson

  Syl was jarred from his thoughts by Simpson, who said, “Captain, we’ve got three men who want to go up to the navy sick bay. They think they got the clap.”

  Back to reality. “How did they get the clap out here?”

  “Those native girls who come alongside in canoes have been sneaking into the forecastle. I try to stop ’em, but obviously nobody else does.”

  The native girls had seemed so forlorn to Syl that he at least hadn’t expected this.

  “We getter get ’em up to the sick bay as soon as we can.” Simpson said. “There’s a bulletin out that says this local crud is hard to cure. Mr. Buller has just gone up to get the mail. When he comes back I’ll tell him to hold the truck and run them up.”

  Syl nodded, went back to his cabin and stared at his desk. Painful as it would be, he had to force himself to write to Mostell’s widow—he could send the letter to the personnel officer in Washington with a note asking him to forward it. And so he wrote:

  Dear Mrs. Mostell:

  Frank and I were friends out here, and I thought you might like to know how much his fellow officers respected, admired and, yes, loved him. He had great courage and a kind of cheer we all needed. I saw his ship hit. There was absolutely nothing he could have done about it, and I can assure you that his death was at least mercifully quick. I will remember him for the rest of my life, as will those who served with him. If you and his children knew how well he did a very difficult job out here, and how much he meant to all the people who worked with him, I’m sure you would be even prouder of him than you must already be. I know it does not help much to realize that without such tragedies as Frank’s death this war could never be won and our country could not survive. Please accept my condolences. He often showed me your picture and I know how proud of you he was …”

  Syl paused. He certainly had liked Mostell, but he had been nowhere near as close to him as the letter implied, and had never seen the picture of his wife—Paul Schuman had told him about that. The letter he had just written was at least in small part a lie, but its purpose was to give comfort, and this was the best he could do. He wondered whether Paul Schuman would write a letter like this one to Sally if the Y-18 blew up. No doubt, and then Sally would at least have a good cry, forgetting all the arguments they had had. She’d get a Gold Star to paste in the window, ten thousand dollars of GI insurance, and a small pension until she got remarried. Probably that would be the best out for her. Next time around she could pick a man who really wanted to work in her father’s insurance agency and settle down in the suburbs instead of a character who was restless ashore and didn’t really know, to be truthful, what in hell he wanted.

  Feeling sorry for yourself, captain? Sorry, hell … just scared witless and shitless.

  CHAPTER 22

  AFTER MAILING THE letter, he returned to his cabin to find Buller had dropped off a dozen letters from Sally. After reading quickly her praise of the Stamford garden club and a description of a house she wished they could buy, he felt uneasy, guilty even about his earlier thoughts about her. Her attention was damned nice, and a bit surprising. When he was at home she sometimes didn’t tell him anything about her thoughts for weeks at a time. Maybe she loved him more when he was away, and maybe she had a point. Maybe he was easier to take out of sight than on the premises. The picture of him in uniform she kept on her bedside table did not leave dirty underwear on the bathroom floor and didn’t keep trying to lay her every morning before she was half awake.

  In reply to her last hundred letters, he had managed to scrawl only a few desperate pages over the last few weeks, but what did one write from the Philippines to a girl in Stamford, Connecticut? He could not tell her that his sister ship had just blown up and that one of his good friends had just been incinerated, not only because the naval censors would disapprove but because there was a terrible necessity for wives and husbands to cheer each other up. Certainly he could not tell her that he was scared, didn’t rate his chances high for surviving the war. He could not exactly add that on the bright side he had had two marvelous one-night stands with great women he had met in Australia, memories of whom kept him from going nuts out here. No, such great truths were better kept to himself, in fact any truth about the life he was leading should not be allowed to intrude on the presumed everlasting intimacy of marriage.

  Should he tell her that he had an ensign aboard who was six feet three, a gorilla of a man who kept asking him to sabotage the ship because the whole war was a bunch of horseshit anyway? He could tell her about Simpson, but she would be sore at him if he seemed to disparage religion by admitting that he couldn’t stand the man. If he told her that they had a good old engineer aboard who thought only of leaving his wife in California for a young girl he had met in Australia, she would of course sympathize only with the wife. And Sally definitely would not be amused if he told her that three men in the forecastle had somehow managed to get the clap despite the fact that they never got ashore.

  No, truth was not a fit subject for connubial correspondence, but his hand froze when it tried to concoct lies. So finally he wrote her a page about the natives who had sold them a monkey by letting it escape to their ship and then had sold them bananas to feed it. He left out the part about the monkey dying that same night. Sally was tender-hearted about animals. She would cry over the dead monkey more than she would about Mostell.

  Syl felt quite virtuous as he sealed two pages into an envelope and rapped it with the naval censor stamp, but even before he got a chance to drop it in the box Buller came in and spilled fifty-three more letters from Sally onto his bunk.

  “Boy, your wife is sure the champion letter writer of all time,” he said with a grin.

  Syl arranged the letters in the chronological order of their postmarks and determinedly opened the latest one first to make sure everything was all right at home.

  “Dearest Syl,” Sally wrote in small, slanting letters. “Last night I went to a movie with mom and dad. We saw “Casablanca,” and although I’d seen it before I really enjoyed it. I think you look a little like Humphrey Bogart, although he’s much older and you don’t have such a mean face, and mom told me that I look a little like Ingrid Bergman. What were the two of us doing over there in North Africa anyway?

  “I felt a little blue when I got home and dad told me a very comforting thing. He said that when he was in the First World War he thought it would last forever and change everything completely, including him, but when he got home he found he hadn’t changed at all and neither had anything else. The war was just an interlude, he said, and looking back, it didn’t seem long at all.

  “At first I wondered how this war could ever seem short to us, but when I look back those two years you spent on the North Atlantic and the Greenland Patrol seem like nothing, even though they felt endless at the time. They were just an interlude too, and I’m sure that as soon as you get home these years you’re spending in the Pacific will seem like just another interlude, sort of like your years at college. They’ll change nothing and we’ll go on, just as though the war never happened …”

  Syl stopped there and put the letter down. If this bloody war was just an interlude that would change nothing, why the hell was he in it? Could he really accept that? Get the little house in Connecticut, which meant selling insurance, instead of finishing his doctor’s degree. Have children right away. Forget about becoming another Samuel Eliot Morison and sailing in the wakes of great voyagers to write their histories … He hadn’t thought of that in a long while and was surprised to find that he hadn’t seen enough of the sea to be tired of it. Weary of this war, sick of this tanker, he had a sudden image of himself sailing a red-sailed little cutter with a girl as crew who looked like Angel with Teddy’s brains in the wake of the Vikings, out from Norway through the Mediterranean and up the Volga clear into Russia. A man needed some vision like that to help him stay alive through the war. Better than the prospect of PTA meetings and Rotary Club lunches. That hybrid perfect coadve
nturer would be sitting half-naked at the wheel while he stood in the cockpit taking his noon sights, and of course their boat would have a dragon’s head on the bow, just like the old Vikings did. Dream on, captain …

  Syl forced himself to return to his wife’s letter, and he, in his fashion, felt guiltier than ever when she ended it with declarations of undying love and X’s for kisses. What the hell, he thought, life’s an interlude too. Who could blame him for wanting to make the most of it? Or blame Sally for wanting to do the same, according to her dreams—?

  “The pump is sucking air,” Simpson said. “Shall I call mooring stations to go out for a new load?”

  “Are the men back from the sick bay yet?”

  “No, sir. Mr. Buller went with them. I ain’t making no charges but it wouldn’t surprise me none if he had the same complaint.”

  “Leave a message to wait for us here when we get back about thirteen hundred. You can start disconnecting the cargo hose.”

  Five minutes later Syl heard the shrill call of Cramer’s boatswain’s whistle followed by the chiefs old song: “Mooring stations, mooring stations, so move it, move it, move it right along …”

  They were back on the shuttle run. God knew how long it would last. Which in a way was a kind of blessing.

  Less than two weeks later, on December 17, the Y-18 received orders to join a convoy sailing to reinforce the invasion of the island of Mindoro, which had just begun two days earlier.

  “They must have already taken an airstrip,” Schuman said. “I hear they’re not running into too much opposition. The Japs ought to be saving everything they’ve got to try to save Manila.”

  To his surprise, Schuman found that he was to remain on the shuttle run in Tacloban. “Hell, I wish I were going along with you,” he said to Syl, “but this one looks like it’s going to be a piece of cake.”

  Optimistic predictions always made Syl nervous. He reminded himself that he had often had dire premonitions before voyages which turned out to be safe and had felt no tinge of warning before recent disasters. Maybe this kind of foreboding was a good luck sign. Mindoro was only a little more than three hundred miles away on the route chosen for them, but because it was right next to the island of Luzon, where the Japs still had many airfields, the commodore of the convoy apparently shared Syl’s belief that this trip was not going to be easy and told all the ships to be on the alert for suicide attacks by both planes and motorboats.

  Buller appeared unusually glum when he came onto the bridge that morning soon after they sailed out of Leyte Gulf.

  “You hear the latest?” he said to Syl. “The Krauts are counterattacking. I thought the bastards were all done.”

  The Battle of the Bulge had started, and Hathaway brought frequent bulletins from the radio shack. “Damned if it doesn’t look like this war could go on forever,” he said.

  “No,” Buller told him, “the Krauts can’t do much with the Russkies at their back, but I’d hoped they’d quit before Christmas and we all could be home before summer.”

  The course they followed led them around the island of Samar, through San Bernardino Strait, where the Japanese fleet had so recently surprised the Americans before being turned back, and through a whole series of inland seas surrounded by mountainous islands. Each one of these was a potential danger because the Americans had occupied few of them. Any one could turn into a giant wasp’s nest, pouring out suicide planes, but for the moment at least the spectacular panorama of Alp-like mountains rising steeply from the calm sea was eerily peaceful.

  Standing on the flying bridge all day, Syl experienced a sense of exaltation, almost an epiphany in which the beauty of the jagged jungle-clad cliffs which rose up to the clouds seemed an affirmation. Nothing so glorious was meant to be bad, damn it. The water around him glowed a deep indigo blue and mirrored the towering peaks. He had heard that Eskimos sometimes went crazy while paddling their kayaks through seas which mirrored the icebergs all around them and seemed to turn their whole world upside down. Steaming through these reflected images of hills and cliffs, he felt a little dizzy, but it was more like being pleasurably drunk than going crazy.

  A hard rain squall briefly erased the mountains above and below him. When it passed, the dense green foliage on the hillsides glittered in the sun as though it had been sheathed in ice. The fragrance of jungle plants was strong and sweet. In late afternoon clouds of mist descended and drifted low over the sea. They appeared to whisk some of the mountains away and then suddenly bring them back in a gigantic magic act. Syl was so fascinated that he had to keep reminding himself that these were ideal conditions for suicide planes and motor torpedo boats.

  Still no attack came. A lopsided moon rose and cast a silver path on the sea that miraculously stayed abeam of the ship, as though it were skimming along over the water at eight knots to keep them company. It was bright enough to show the silhouettes of the surrounding islands, their beaches glowing yellow with white fringes where a ground swell came creaming in. In a few bays the fires and lamps of native villages flickered. If he were out here on his own boat in peacetime sipping cold beer with that perfect girl in the cockpit, they would stop to explore all those places and feast with the natives ashore. These Philippine islands were much more spectacular than he had expected. What about the rest of the world … he’d be crazy to let himself die before taking in as much of it as he could. Which thoughts heightened his anxiety about what lay ahead.

  At noon the next day they approached Mindoro, where Mt. Halcon rose eight-and-a-half thousand feet in the air, miniaturizing the fleet of ships that huddled around the beaches they were invading. Here nature made even the greatest warships look like innocent toys.

  Even when they grew near, the scene was surprisingly peaceful. Few sounds of battle could be heard and little seen except some soldiers unloading six big landing craft on the beaches. Some straw-hatted native fishermen in dugout canoes nearby were towing the ends of a big seine to make a circle around a school of fish that jumped and roiled the quiet water. They looked as though they had never heard of the war.

  “It says in the pilot book that there are ‘major crocodile grounds’ here,” Buller said. “I guess this is no place for a swimming party.”

  Crocodiles appeared to be the worst danger as they followed orders blinked from a signal tower on the beach and discharged their cargo into a fuel barge moored in a quiet cove.

  When their tanks were empty they were ordered to go alongside a big tanker named the Merchant Prince, which was anchored in the lee of the land about a thousand yards offshore. As their lines were put out and their cargo hose connected to take a new load Rhinehart saw a man on the bridge with a monkey on his shoulder. As he watched, the man gave a banana to the monkey, which delicately peeled it with its tiny black hands.

  “Look how tame that monkey is,” Rhinehart said. “I’d like to go up and ask where he got it.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Syl said, and Rhinehart scampered up a rope ladder that swung on the high side of the big vessel.

  Syl watched as the mate of the tanker, who owned the monkey, let Rhinehart take it into his arms, cradle it as he had his own dead pet.

  “I hope that bastard don’t try to sell him the damn thing,” Cramer said. “Old Rhinehart would give him his ass.”

  A few minutes later Rhinehart returned to the Y-18. “That’s just a regular monkey that he bought from the natives,” he said. “He tamed it himself—he said it didn’t take long.”

  “How much does he want for it?” Cramer asked.

  “He won’t sell, but he said he’d show me how to train one and he’ll let me be around it as long as I want. Can I stay here while you go in and come back for another load?”

  Syl said yes, and Rhinehart happily climbed to the bridge of the tanker again. As soon as the Y-18 was full of gasoline, he pulled away from the big ship and returned to the barge in the cove. This might be just another shuttle run, but the scenery was surely prettier than Tacloban and
there was nothing like the noise. While they were unloading, the men fished over the side, but minnows nibbled away the Spam they used as bait before they could get bigger bites. There was a flurry when Sorrel thought he saw a huge crocodile nosing toward the stern, but it proved to be only the end of a half-sunken log drifting with the slow current. It stuck under the fantail and Cramer pushed it away with a boathook before it could get into the propeller.

  Floating logs were the only danger Syl was thinking about when he started to go back to the Merchant Prince for another load. The big tanker was quietly lying at her anchor and had lowered some staging to allow men to paint some streaks of rust under the anchor, which remained in her port hawsepipe. Syl was watching this, admiring it—when, without warning, a Jap plane that at first looked no larger than an insect, darted around the peak of the island and dived into the bridge of the Merchant Prince. Syl knew it must have carried a bomb because the whole superstructure of the Prince erupted with a roar terrifyingly familiar to the men of the Y-18 only some five hundred yards away. The fire blazed, obviously beyond control.

  “Take off the men,” Buller was shouting, echoing Syl’s own unspoken first-thought. Yes, they’d have to go alongside, if they had time—