Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  Nobody except the pharmacist's mate saw the captain for a week after the arrival of the Ducely despatch; he was plagued with migraine headache, he informed Maryk by phone. The executive officer took over the ship completely.

  26

  A Gallon of Strawberries

  "I got the Yellowstain Blues,

  Old Yellowstain Blues.

  When someone fires a shot,

  It's always there that I'm not,

  I got the Old Yellowstain Blues-"

  Willie Keith, at the battered little piano of the officers' bar on Mogmog Island, was reviving his rusty gift for improvising. He was quite drunk, and so were Keefer, Harding, and Paynter, who clustered around him, highballs in hand, half giggling and half singing. The gunnery officer exclaimed, "I'll do the next stanza!

  "I got the Yellowstain Blues.

  Old Yellowstain Blues.

  You should see strong men quail,

  When he spies a shirttail-

  Oh, Yellowstain, Yellowstain Blues."

  Willie laughed so hard that he fell off the piano stool. When Paynter bent to pick him up, he spilled his highball all over Willie's shirt in a ragged brown stain, and the guffaws of the Caine officers attracted stares from less hilarious groups in the bar.

  Jorgensen came staggering toward them with his arm around. the neck of a tall, pudgy ensign, with protruding teeth, freckles, and the brash expression of a schoolboy. "Fellows, do any of you like strawberries with your ice cream?" Jorgensen said, leering. He was answered with drunken affirmative roars. "Well, that's nice," he said, "because this here is my old room-mate from Abbot Hall, Bobby Pinckney, and what ship do you think he's assistant first lieutenant on but the dear old U.S.S. Bridge, where all the chow is-"

  The Caine officers overwhelmed Ensign Pinckney with handshakes. He grinned toothily and said, "Well, it happens the wardroom mess just brought half a dozen gallons of frozen strawberries up out of the hold, and I know how tight things are for you guys on those old four-pipers. And I'm the ward-room mess treasurer so-any time Jorgy or any one of you wants to stop by in the next day or two-"

  Keefer glanced at his watch and said, "Willie, flag the gig. We're going to get some strawberries."

  "Aye aye, sir." Willie played the closing bars of Anchors Aweigh fortissimo, banged the piano shut, and ran out.

  Back in the wardroom, the officers bolted dinner greedily, impatient for dessert. The steward's mates served the ice cream at last with smiling pomp. Each dish was heaped over with rosy strawberries. The first round was gobbled up, and there were cries for more. Queeg suddenly came into the ward-room, in his bathrobe. The talk and laughter stopped, and in silence the officers stood one by one. "Don't get up, don't get up," the captain said amiably. "Who am I to thank for the strawberries? Whittaker just brought me a dish."

  Maryk said, "Jorgensen got them from the Bridge, sir."

  "Well done, Jorgensen, very well done. How much have we got?"

  "A gallon, sir."

  "A whole gallon? Fine. I'd like to see some more of this en-terprise around here. Tell Whittaker I want another dish, with plenty of strawberries."

  The captain sent down again and again for helpings, the last time at eleven o'clock, when all the officers were sitting around in rare good-fellowship, exchanging sex reminiscences as they smoked and drank coffee. Willie went to bed that night happier than he had been for a long time.

  Shake, shake, shake... "What now?" he murmured, open-ing his eyes in the darkness. Jorgensen stood over him. "I've got no watch-"

  "Meeting of all the officers in the wardroom, right away." Jorgensen reached up and poked at the other bunk. "Come on, Duce, wake up."

  Willie said, peering at his watch, "Jesus Christ, it's three o'clock in the morning. What's the meeting about?"

  "Strawberries," said Jorgensen. "Get Duce up, will you? I've got to rouse the others."

  In the wardroom the officers sat around the table in various stages of undress, hair mussed, faces creased with sleepiness. Queeg was at the head of the table, slouched in his purple robe, glowering straight ahead at nothing, his whole body nod-ding rhythmically as he rolled the steel balls in one hand. He made no sign of recognition when Willie tiptoed in, buttoning his shirt, and dropped into a chair. In the long silent pause that followed Ducely entered, then Jorgensen, followed by Hard-ing, who wore the DOD's gunbelt.

  "All present now, sir," said Jorgensen, in the quiet unctuous tone of an undertaker. Queeg made no response. Roll, roll, went the balls. Minutes of dead silence passed. The door opened, and Whittaker, the chief officer's steward, came in, carrying a tin can. When he set it on the table Willie saw that it brimmed with sand. The Negro's eyes were rounded in fright; perspiration rolled down his long, narrow cheeks, and his tongue flickered across his lips.

  "You're sure that's a gallon can, now," spoke Queeg.

  "Yes, suh. Lard can, suh. Got it offen Ochiltree, suh, in de galley-"

  "Very well. Pencil and paper, please," said the captain to nobody. Jorgensen sprang up and offered Queeg his pen and pocket notebook. "Mr. Maryk, how many helpings of ice cream did you have this evening?"

  "Two, sir."

  "Mr. Keefer?"

  "Three, Captain."

  Queeg polled all the officers, noting down their answers. "Now, Whittaker, did your men have any strawberries?"

  "Yes, suh. One helpin' each, suh. Mr. Jorgensen, he said okay, suh."

  "I did, sir," said Jorgensen.

  "Just one helping each. You're sure, now," said Queeg, squinting at the Negro. "This is an official investigation, Whittaker. The penalty for lying is a dishonorable discharge, and maybe years in the brig."

  "Hope to die, suh. I served 'em myself, Cap'n, and lock away de rest. One helpin', suh, I swear-"

  "Very well. That's three more. And I had four." The cap-tain murmured to himself, adding the total. "Whittaker, bring a soup tureen, here, and the spoon with which you ladled out the strawberries."

  "Aye aye, sub." The Negro went into the pantry and re-turned in a moment with the implements.

  "Now-dole into that tureen an amount of sand equal to the amount of strawberries you put on one dish of ice cream."

  Whittaker stared at the can of sand, and spoon, and tureen, as though they were elements of a bomb which, brought to-gether, might blow him up. "Suh, I dunno exactly-"

  "Be as generous as you please."

  Reluctantly the Negro dumped a high-heaped spoonful of sand from the can into the tureen. "Pass the tureen around the table. Inspect it, gentlemen.... Now then. Do you gentle-men agree that that is approximately the amount of straw-berries you had on each dish of ice cream? Very well. Whittaker, do that again, twenty-four times." Sand diminished in the can and piled in the tureen. Willie tried to rub the blinking sleepiness out of his eyes. "Kay. Now, for good meas-ure, do it three more times.... Kay. Mr. Maryk, take that gallon can and tell me how much sand is left."

  Maryk looked into the can and said, "Maybe a quart, or a little less, sir."

  "Kay." The captain deliberately lit a cigarette. "Gentlemen, ten minutes before I called this meeting, I sent down for some ice cream and strawberries. Whittaker brought me the ice cream and said `They ain't no mo' strawberries,' Has any of you gentlemen an explanation of the missing quart of straw-berries?" The officers glanced covertly at each other; none spoke. "Kay." The captain rose. "I have a pretty good idea of what happened to them. However, you gentlemen are sup-posed to keep order on this ship and prevent such crimes as robbing of wardroom stores. You are all appointed a board of investigation as of now, with Maryk as chairman, to find out what happened to the strawberries."

  "You mean in the morning, sir?" said Maryk.

  "I said now, Mr. Maryk. Now, according to my watch, is not the morning, but forty-seven minutes past three. If you get no results by eight o'clock this morning I shall solve the mystery myself-noting duly for future fitness reports the fail-ure of the board to carry out its assignment."

  When the cap
tain was gone Maryk began a weary cross--examination of Whittaker. After a while he sent for the other steward's mates. The three Negro boys stood side by side, respectfully answering questions shot at them by different offi-cers. The story, painfully extracted from them, was that the container, when locked away for the night at eleven-thirty--they didn't remember who had placed it in the icebox-had contained some strawberries-they didn't know how many. Whittaker had been called by the OOD at three in the morn-ing to bring the captain another sundae, and had found the container empty except for a scraping of red juice at the bot-tom. The officers badgered the Negroes until dawn without upsetting this account. Maryk wearily dismissed the stewards at last.

  "It's a dead end," said the exec. "Maybe they ate the stuff up. We'll never know."

  "I wouldn't blame them if they did. There wasn't enough for another meal," said Harding.

  "Thou shalt not muzzle thy mess boy," yawned Willie, "when he treadeth out the strawberries."

  "Steve and I have no worries about fitness reports," said Keefer, laying his head on his arms. "Just you small fry. Either one of us could be Queeg's relief. We're outstanding officers, no matter what. I could call him a dirty name to his face-I practically have. I still drew a 4.0 on the last report."

  Ducely, his head slumped on his chest, emitted a blubbering snore. With a disgusted glance at him Maryk said, "Tom, sup-pose you bat out a report before you turn in, and I'll adjourn the meeting now."

  "It will be on your desk," murmured the novelist, "in about a hundred twenty seconds." He staggered to his room, and the typewriter began clacking.

  The wardroom telephone buzzer rang promptly at eight o'clock; it was Queeg, summoning the executive officer to his room. Maryk unhappily put down a forkful of griddlecake, drank off his coffee, and left the breakfast table. He was cheered on his way by these remarks:

  "Operation Strawberries, phase two."

  "Stand by to make smoke."

  "How are your saddle sores, Steve?"

  "If things get tough, throw over a dye marker."

  "Who's your next of kin?"

  Queeg was at his desk, dressed in fresh clothes, his puffy face shaved and powdered. This struck Maryk as ominous. He handed the captain the investigation report, headed: Straw-berries, disappearance of-Report of board of investigation. Queeg, rolling the balls, read the two typewritten sheets care-fully. He shoved them away with the back of his hand. "Un-satisfactory."

  "Sorry, Captain. The boys may be lying, but it's a dead end. The story hangs together-"

  "Did your board investigate the possibility that they might be telling the truth?"

  Maryk scratched his head, and shuffled his feet, and said, "Sir, that would mean someone broke into the wardroom ice-box. For one thing, Whittaker made no claim that the padlock had been tampered with-"

  "Did it occur to you that someone on the ship might have a duplicate key to the icebox?"

  "No, sir."

  "Well, why didn't it?"

  Maryk stammered, "Why-well, the thing is, sir, I bought that lock myself. There were only two keys. I have one, Whittaker has the other-"

  "How about the possibility that someone once stole Whittaker's key, when he was asleep, and made himself a du-plicate-did you look into that?"

  "Sir, I-Whittaker would have to be an exceptionally heavy sleeper for that, and I don't think-"

  "You don't think, hey? Do you know that he's not an ex-ceptionally heavy sleeper? Did you ask him?"

  "No, sir-"

  "Well, why didn't you?"

  The executive officer looked out of the small porthole. He could see in a nearby anchor berth the bow of the light cruiser Kalamazoo, which had been hit by a suicide plane at Leyte. The bow was buckled and twisted to one side so that Maryk was looking at jagged blackened deck plates, from which a torn ventilator dangled crazily. "Sir, I guess there are an in-finite number of remote possibilities, but there wasn't time to go into all of them last night-"

  "There wasn't, hey? Did you sit in continuous session until just now?"

  "I believe the report states that I adjourned the meeting at ten minutes past five, sir."

  "Well, you might have found out a hell of a lot in the three hours you spent in your sacks. And since nobody appears to have dreamed of any adequate solution, I shall take over the investigation, as I said I would. If I solve the mystery, and I'm pretty sure I will, the board will have to suffer the penalty for making the commanding officer do its work for them.... Send Whittaker up to me."

  The steward's mates followed each other into the captain's cabin all morning, at intervals of about an hour. Willie, who had the deck, kept the mournful procession moving. At ten o'clock he was distracted from the strawberry crisis by the arrival of the two new ensigns, Farrington and Voles, in a landing craft from the beach. The OOD inspected the uneasy recruits as they stood on the quarterdeck, waiting for the sailors to pass up their gear from the boat, and decided he liked Far-rington and didn't like Voles. The latter was round-shouldered, and had a greenish complexion and a high voice. He seemed several years older than Farrington, who looked like an ensign in a cigarette advertisement, ruddy, handsome, and blue-eyed. The muss and fatigue of travel, and a certain mischievous humor with which he looked around at the dirty old ship, re-lieved his good looks. Willie liked him for his soiled gray shirt and his impish smile. Voles's shirt was stiffly starched. "Wait here, gentlemen," he said. He went forward and knocked at the captain's door.

  "What is it?" called Queeg irritably. The captain sat in his swivel chair, the balls rolling swiftly in one hand hung over the back. The Negro Rasselas stood against the bulkhead, his hands behind him, showing all his gums in a smile, sweat dripping off his nose.

  "Pardon me, Captain," said Willie. "Voles and Farrington are here."

  "Who?"

  "The new officers, sir-"

  "Well. About time, too. Kay. I have no time to see them now. Send `em to Maryk. Tell him to quarter them and so forth."

  "Aye aye, sir." As Willie turned to go his eyes met Rasselas'. The Negro gave him the beseeching dumb look of a calf being led down the road on a rope. Willie shrugged and went out.

  At noon the captain sent for Maryk. "Kay, Steve," he said-he was reclining on his bunk-"everything's going exactly as I figured, so far. The steward's mates are telling the truth. I know how to handle those black apes, I've done plenty of it in my mess-treasurer days. You can rule them out as suspects."

  "That's fine, sir."

  "Scared the living hell out of them, I'm afraid, but that's good for their souls every now and then." The captain chuck-led. Scaring the steward's mates had put him in a pleasant humor. "So far as anyone taking Whittaker's key goes we can rule that out, too. He slept in his clothes, and it was chained to his belt. And he's a light sleeper. I found that out." Queeg glanced at the exec with sly triumph. "Now then. That nar-rows the case to where we can begin working on it, hey?"

  Maryk kept his eyes respectfully on the captain's face, and stood at attention-resolved not to utter a word unless forced to.

  "Tell you a little story, Steve. Dates back quite a ways to peacetime. Had a little mystery like this aboard a destroyer, the Barzun, back in '37, when I was a lowly ensign, in charge of general mess. Matter of a discrepancy of five pounds of cheese in the cook's accounts. Cheese wasn't in the refrigerator, and it hadn't been cooked, or served in sandwiches, or any-thing. I proved that. Just vanished in thin air, like these straw-berries. Well, the exec pooh-poohed it, and said, `Forget it, Queeg,' but as you know, I'm kind of a stubborn cuss. Through devious inquiry and bribes and one thing and another I found out that a big sloppy chowhound named Wagner, a snipe, had made himself a wax impression of the cook's key one night while he slept, and got himself a duplicate key, and was chow-ing up in the wee hours of the morning every chance he got. Made him confess, and he pulled a BCD at a summary court- I got myself a nice little letter of commendation in my promotion jacket, too, but that's neither here nor there, though for an
ensign in those years that meant plenty in the way of promotion credit- Well. Get my point?"

  Maryk smiled vaguely.

  "All we have to do now," said Queeg, "is find out which bright boy on the Caine has made himself a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox. That shouldn't be hard."

  Maryk said, after a long pause, "You assume, sir, that that's what happened?"

  "I am not assuming a goddamned thing," snapped the cap-tain in sudden irritation. "You can't assume anything in the Navy! I know someone's made a duplicate key. All other pos-sibilities have been eliminated, haven't they? What do you say-that the strawberries just melted into thin air?"

  "Well, I'm not sure what to think, sir-"