Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Are you sure you don’t mind, Captain?” Diane asked anxiously. “We can do it another time.”

  “Not at all,” replied Mike, intrigued by her obvious desire to leave. “Right this way.”

  Mike showed Diane the stepped gangway up to the deck of the Lucky Bag, and followed her up the ladder, with the Chief of Staff in trail. His heart skipped a beat as he watched her smooth hips rise in front of his face as she went up the three step ladder. Once aboard, he took them down through the forward hatch, showing them the two guest cabins and adjoining bathroom, and then into the main lounge.

  The lounge was surprisingly large, thirty feet long by twenty two, occupying the entire center of the boat below the main deck. There were four large, brass-rimmed, curtained portholes on either side, and both the walls and the overhead were panelled in various grains of dark veneer. There was a large oriental carpet taking up the entire deck, and comfortable leather furniture placed centrally to face a gas-fired fireplace on the starboard side. The port side walls were inset with bookcases, and the after part of the lounge contained a sizeable dining room table and six armchairs, with a brass, ship’s wheel chandelier centered over the table. There were three doors in the after bulkhead, one leading to the galley area, one to the Captain’s cabin, and the third to a companionway leading up to the porch deck aft.

  “Oh, my word, this is quite posh,” said Martinson. “It’s much larger than I expected.”

  “Well,” said Mike, trying not to shiver in the air conditioning, “this was a commercial fishing boat at one time, so there was a lot of empty room below decks for the catch.”

  From a corner of the room, Hooker sounded off with an epithet, startling Diane.

  “A parrot!” she exclaimed, momentarily seeming to forget her discomfort. “This is really too much. Did he just say something?”

  Mike felt his face begin to redden.

  “Don’t pay any attention to what that bird says; his vocabulary isn’t very polite.”

  He desperately hoped that Hooker would not launch into any more profanity. He showed them the galley area, and then let them peek into the Captain’s cabin which took up the entire area under the stern porch.

  The master bedroom was also panelled, containing a large bed, its own bathroom on one side, and rows of drawers built into the bulkheads on the opposite side. There were three portholes on the after bulkhead which allowed bright yellow light from the setting sun to stream into the room.

  The Chief of Staff made appreciative noises about everything, ignoring his wife’s evident desire to be on her way. Standing in the doorway to his bedroom, Mike suddenly became aware of her perfume.

  “This is indeed all quite posh,” Martinson repeated. “I think I can understand its attractions.” He turned to his wife. “Maybe we ought to look into buying a boat, for when I retire, Diane. Do you think you might enjoy something like this? I think it might be fun.”

  Diane raised her eyebrows. “Retire? I presumed that that’s still a few years away, Dear.”

  Martinson frowned again. “Oh, well, yes, of course,” he said, hastily. “I wasn’t implying that I’m ready to retire. It’s —oh, well, forget it. I guess we’d better be on our way.”

  Mike was aware of an undercurrent of conflict in their brief interchange on the subject of retirement. He led them up the narrow companionway steps to the stern porch area, where they could see the entire waterway shimmering before them. The stern porch was screened in on all sides and had a fiberglass roof built on to a tubular steel frame. The deck was covered in rattan carpeting, and the porch furniture was a mixture of wood and rattan armchairs, a table, and some ancient bar stools. There was a gas grill in one corner, set up on a square of bricks. A large fan was suspended from the overhead, and a wooden railing surrounded the porch area inside the screen. They had a panoramic view of the inland waterway in both directions, and the sounds and smells of the water swept over them in tangy contrast to the aseptic air conditioned atmosphere of the cabin below.

  Mike offered to fix them a drink, but Martinson, in belated deference to his wife, now firmly insisted that they had to go. Mike led them through the screen door on the port side of the porch and back up the main deck to the gangway steps. The Chief of Staff apologized for intruding, thanked Mike for the tour, and stepped briskly down the gangway, turning to wait for his wife. Diane stood for a moment at the top of the steps. Mike tried not to stare at her. He could not figure out what it was that made her so attractive—she was not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word, but she had a physical, utterly feminine presence unlike any American woman he had met. He was reminded of the French women he had encountered in his travels, who always seemed to project an almost blatant femininity before he noticed anything else about them. She offered her hand this time, and Mike took it, turpentine and all.

  “Thank you so much, Captain, for the tour,” she said, her face neutral. “I think your boat is marvelous.”

  Still holding her hand, Mike looked directly into her eyes. “It was good to meet you, Diane. Come again.”

  She seemed about to smile, but then let go of his hand abruptly, and stepped down the gangway. He watched them walk across the float pier and up the steps. She walked slightly behind and to one side of the Chief of Staff, as she had done in the Officers Club. At the top of the steps, she turned to look back once, but did not wave. One of the guys in the adjacent boat mimed a fainting spell as she left, swooning in mock despair into the sternsheets of the sloop.

  “I’m in lo-o-o-o-ve,” he moaned theatrically.

  I think I know the feeling, thought Mike, wonderingly.

  ELEVEN

  Mayport, Hampton’s Fish House, Sunday, 13 April; 1900

  Diane put her sunglasses back on to counteract the glare flooding the main dining room. They had a window table. J.W. always insisted on a window table. The evening sun streamed through the tinted plate glass windows overlooking the river junction. The glare was amplified by reflections glinting off the dancing prisms of choppy waves on the waterway. J.W. was looking around the room to see if anyone of importance was there while he sipped a martini. Diane was nursing a glass of chilled white wine. She was thinking about Mike Montgomery.

  She held the picture of him in her mind’s eye, standing straight, muscled and tall on the pier, his undressed, athletic body glistening with perspiration and daubed with paint, and his eyes frankly appraising her from across the piers. She had told J.W. that she would wait at the head of the pier, but J.W. had insisted she come along, wouldn’t be a minute, just a quick word with this fellow. J.W. had gone down the steps, unaware that she was hanging back, conscious of Mike’s stare and her own growing reaction, and then she had been drawn across the floating pontoons to the houseboat like the proverbial moth to the flame, a delicious sense of anticipation flooding her mind, tinged with the knowledge that there was danger in what she was doing. She had been aware of the juvenile antics of the two young men in the sloop, but Michael Montgomery had filled her sights even as he had set some strings in her belly vibrating that had been too long stilled by her husband’s indifference. J.W. has his career and his girlfriend, she mused. I wonder …

  “Diane?” J.W. was looking at her.

  “I’m sorry. My mind was drifting. All this sunlight. You were saying?”

  “I was saying that Commodore and Mrs. Taylor are here. We should probably go over and say hello.”

  “You go ahead,” she replied. “I’ll waggle my fingers at the appropriate moment from here.”

  “That’s not particularly friendly of you.”

  “She’s not a particular friend of mine,” replied Diane stiffly.

  J.W. made a ‘well, excuse me’ expression, pushed back his chair, picked up his martini and threaded his way through the rapidly filling dining room. Diane dutifully waggled her fingers in the Taylors’ direction at the appropriate moment, and returned to her musings, staring out over the inland waterway.

  She w
ondered when, if ever, she would confront J.W. with what she knew. Actually, she didn’t “know” anything —she had only overheard the women talking about the pretty Wave Commander in Norfolk. But it fit. Another notch on J.W.’s image stick. If she really wanted to get even, she would wait until a month or so before the next flag selection board, and then cause an eruption on the base with a messy, noisy, tell the whole world divorce action. But, like her fantasies about snaking some hunk off the beach for some afternoon delight, the “afterwards” scenarios were usually all pretty depressing. What would she do with a divorce? Where would she go? Even a senior Navy Captain didn’t make enough to provide a decent alimony. As J.W. would say, what’s the objective?

  She also felt in her heart of hearts that she could not derail J.W.’s Navy career just for the satisfaction of it. He was so entirely a creature of his career that it would destroy the man himself. She should have seen him for what he was from the beginning, that underneath all the glittering uniforms and the sophistication and worldly charm was the sterile soul of a devoted bureaucrat, a mandarin who advanced for the sake of advancement, who played the game with consummate skill, and who wanted to win, not for the sake of achieving power to do something, but because winning showed off how well he played the Navy career game. The “special friend”—that was the term the woman in the bathroom had used—was consistent: another facet of the good life to be added to the collection of successful career, presentable wife, nice cars, the right suits … Navy men were a lot alike in that regard—they often sought the values of upper class English gentlemen in their pursuit of the right things, an expensive ethic born of the Royal Navy’s profound influence on the American Navy. A naval officer, no matter what his social origins, was acceptable in polite society by dint of his commission. The waiter hovered tentatively, but she dismissed him with an order for another white wine.

  And now in what she recognized was a critical juncture in her life, Michael Montgomery had risen above her horizon like a racing powerboat approaching a small sailboat. She was aware of his latent physical power. He apparently lived as he chose to live, and was not above sticking an occasional sharp stick in the eye of the naval establishment, judging from J.W.’s occasional comments. A bit of a rogue male on the political waterfront, and evidently all man from the sight and size of him. At the instant of that collision in the doorway she had felt his hand press against her for just the briefest instant, and she could still feel it down there. An accidental, random touch, but a part of her had wanted to turn around, go back out there on the patio and grab him. She smiled at the thought. Poor man would have gone over the wall in fright. And yet, he had reacted, too; she was certain of it.

  She was used to men reacting to her physically, but this had been spontaneous and uncontrived, a flash of undisguised desire before the necessary social modalities had been dropped back into place like gunports coming back down over a sudden display of cannon by a ship of the line. And again, tonight, on the dock and yet again on the boat, a subliminal channel of sexual energy had existed. And all of it right in front of her oblivious husband. She had wanted to bolt even as J.W. had insisted that she go with him to the boat. It would never cross J.W.’s mind that his dutiful wife could be sexually interested in another man, even as he deftly managed an affair of his own with his peculiar brand of smooth efficiency. He was coming back to their table.

  “Taylor’s an important player in the ship repair world,” he announced as he sat down. “We depend on a good relationship with them to keep these exotic Spruances going. I’m sorry you didn’t come over; she’s not that awful to talk to.”

  “She’s undoubtedly a perfect Navy wife; my problem is choosing what script we’ll act out when we go over pretending to be oh, so glad to see them.”

  “You don’t have to be that way,” he complained. “We need connections like that, people to feel comfortable with, people to do business with when we have to. Here, have a menu; we probably should order. This place is getting crowded.”

  Diane studied the large menu indifferently. The waiter had reappeared. She decided she was hungry.

  “I’ll have the stuffed lobster,” she declared. J.W. raised his eyebrows, and began to reconsider his own choices. She knew that J.W. always fixed in his mind a total amount that he would spend on dinner before going into a restaurant. When she ordered an expensive meal, he perforce selected a lesser entree in order to get back on budget. She watched him squirm out of the corner of her eye as he mentally ran the numbers.

  “And we need a good wine to go with this, I think,” she announced. “Perhaps a Pouilly Fuisse; that goes nicely with lobster, don’t you think, Dear?”

  J.W. swallowed and nodded, trying to figure out what his normally compliant wife was up to. The budget was rapidly going out the window. After the waiter left, he leaned forward in his chair.

  “Are you feeling all right, Diane? You normally don’t indulge yourself at a restaurant this way.”

  “What way, J.W.?” she asked innocently.

  “Well, I mean, lobster, Pouilly Fuisse—are we celebrating something?”

  She laughed out loud, a melodic sound that caused the heads of some of the men who had been looking surreptitiously at her from behind menus and over their wives’ shoulders to turn in her direction.

  “It was your idea that we go out,” she replied, airily. “I’m just going to enjoy myself and not worry about the budget for a change. With all that per diem you’ve been accumulating on your trips to Norfolk, we should be able to afford it. Where do you stay up there, by the way—that awful B.O.Q.?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Although it’s not so awful. They’ve spruced it up quite a bit. The only drawback is that the dining room’s closed at night, so one has to make, ah, other arrangements to go for dinner.”

  She almost gave it away as she looked at him over her wine glass, but he had turned his face to stare out the windows, missing the glittering look in her dark eyes. Other arrangements.

  “Odd fellow, that Montgomery,” he mused, still looking out the window.

  “How so?” asked Diane; it was her turn to look away.

  “Well, living the way he does. What must his JO’s think? All the other CO’s are on the base in quarters, and he lives like some bohemian down here in this dirty little village.”

  “Well, perhaps he likes it. And that boat was no bohemian’s nest; it looked more like a living room out of Country Life. What’s his background?” she asked, staring down at the table and toying with her wine glass.

  J.W. shrugged. “Well, nothing too exotic. NROTC commission, of course; he’s hardly the Academy type. Spent a lot of time in the Vietnam theater, gunboats, destroyers, that sort of thing, as I recall. I looked his record up after we had that first spot of trouble from him. He sent out a message to God and the world saying how bad the repair work was at one of our local civilian shipyards. Caused quite a flap. I had to spend several hours soothing ruffled feathers amongst the repair world.”

  “Was he correct—did they do inferior work?”

  “Well, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it. So subjective. But the point is that in peacetime we need these civilian shipyards possibly more than they need our work, so we have to be temperate in our criticisms. Some constructive criticism would have been more useful than many of things he said. And of course he made it info to the destroyer Type Commander back in Norfolk, so we had to placate them as well. He’s sent out one or two other messages of the same ilk. Comes from having no Washington shore duty, I think. Spent all his time at sea, with only one shore tour in Norfolk on the Type Commander’s staff. Has zero political sense, in my opinion. I’m frankly not quite sure how he got command, although all those years in Vietnam probably helped; he does wear a lot of ribbons. But, the ship’s on its last legs, going to be decommissioned next year, I think, so he’s been given just about the right kind of command. All in all, however, a bit of a pain in the arse.”

  Diane digested J.W.�
��s description while the waiter brought their salads.

  “He seemed pleasant enough when we toured his boat,” she continued. “I didn’t get the impression of a fire-brand.”

  “Well,” smiled her husband, indulgently. “I suppose women would find him attractive. He’s young and fit, and probably very popular with his crew—they can identify with someone who so obviously doesn’t fit into the establishment mold very well. But he’ll never get to full Captain that way—the troops don’t sit on selection boards, do they.”

  “Pity,” she murmured.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Well, I think the Navy might benefit from having one or two, I’m not sure of the word I’m looking for, unconventional, I suppose, Captains in its ranks. If all the Navy’s Captains are cut from the same cloth, an enemy in wartime would have a pretty easy time of it. From what I’ve read, they certainly weren’t all the same in World War II.”

  “Once it got going, that was probably true, but at the beginning of the war they were very much alike.”

  “Maybe that’s why we had Pearl Harbor,” she countered.

  He laughed. “Touché, I suppose. But nowadays the Navy’s influence is felt on a much wider spectrum of our foreign affairs, which means that what we do bears close scrutiny at the highest levels of government. Our ships carry more firepower now; in some cases, more firepower than was expended in all of World War n. So it becomes very important that our Commanding Officers are indeed predictable, and also sensitive to the politics, Navy or otherwise, of what they do and say. And I’m never quite sure of what Commander Montgomery is going to do or say next, so I’m uneasy with him or people like him in command. We limit the potential damage he can do by taking his ship off the overseas deployment list, ostensibly for other reasons, and generally confining the ship to odd jobs, like this silly submarine business. I’m sure he thinks that the Group staff has it in for him; but we really don’t have time for that sort of thing. We get the occasional lone wolf, the non team player, and we just put them in a box. Like the Sicilians say, it’s not personal, just business.”