Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him blankly for an instant, as if she were trying to fathom the question. He tried again.

  “I’m not a bad cook, and I’ve just decided that I’m starving. Let me fix something, and then we’ll get you home.”

  She nodded quickly.

  “Yes. That would be nice. And thank you—for everything.”

  Her voice wavered, as she understood what he was doing —breaking the tension. They were both very close to being overwhelmed by their separate desires. He looked down at her face for a moment.

  “I think I might be kicking myself in the tailfeathers when you’re gone,” he admitted, smiling. “I’m pure hell on what might have been’s.”

  She looked back at him, the beginnings of a smile playing across her face.

  “Sex without intimacy is usually a disaster, Captain,” she said. “I read that in a book somewhere, so it must be true. The fact that you did not take advantage of me inclines me to think that I don’t—I don’t want to just drop things, if you can understand that. I’d like to build, well, intimacy. Yes. That’s the right word. I think that’s my basic problem, the absence of intimacy. I desperately need a—someone. Can you put up with that idea?”

  He paused for a moment, his face serious.

  “Yes, I think so, but you have to understand that I don’t believe in adult men and women being just friends when there’s sexual desire between them. That’s just an exercise in mutual frustration. I’m all for the intimacy, but only because that makes the loving that much more profound.”

  She nodded her understanding.

  “Yes. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing just now. But I’m going to do something. I can’t just let things keep drifting, now that J.W. has stepped over the line.”

  “Well, you probably already know that I don’t stand very high on your husband’s hit parade, and professionally I don’t think very much of him or his tactics. I hope to hell he doesn’t make Admiral, although I’m finding out that he’s more likely to make flag than I am to make Captain. I guess you’re going to have to decide whether or not you’re a free agent. If you are, I’d love to take up your option.”

  “The ironic thing,” she said with a sigh, “is that I suspect he’s taken up with her as much for her access to the Fleet Commander’s inner sanctum as for any other reason. But maybe I’m just rationalizing. He may actually find her more attractive.”

  “I find that kind of unlikely.”

  “Thank you, kind Sir,” she said with a smile. “You better go make us dinner before we talk ourselves into trouble.”

  She got up from the couch, and went to the porthole, staring out over the inland waterway in the rain. He walked up behind her, aching to put his arms around her, but he stopped himself. He could see the reflections of their faces on the porthole glass, pale blurs in the indistinct light of the cabin.

  “I’m very much attracted to you,” he said in a low voice. “I’d call it falling in love, but it probably isn’t, not yet, anyway. But I think I’d like it to be love, and when it is, I want to hold you and love you and keep you. Until then—”

  She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

  “Until then,” she finished for him, “I want to see you, and get to know you, and maybe sort out in my own mind what’s going on. I know I can’t keep going on like I have been, or I’m going to go crazy.”

  He toyed with the tips of her hair, if only to keep his hands off the rest of her.

  “Good,” he said. “That way we can both make sure this feeling is not just a temporary short circuit between our brains and our groins, as my XO says.”

  She turned all the way around and stared at him for a moment, and then her face began to work, her mouth forming the words short circuit and before she dissolved in helpless laughter.

  “OK, OK, people, it’s chow time in the city,” he announced in a loud voice. He left her standing by the porthole, still laughing.

  “I’ll have you know that I am a chef of some repute,” he called from the galley door. “I will now make you a goor-met dinner. But first, we gotta get some atmosphere in here.”

  He came back in from the galley with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. He motioned for her to return to the couch. Opening the wine with much ceremony at the bar, he filled the glasses, and brought them over to the couch. He put the wine down on the coffee table, went over to the stereo and fired up a Vivaldi tape. Then he went over to the fireplace, turned on the gas log and adjusted the flame. He turned out two of the three table lamps, and returning to the couch, he bowed theatrically as she clapped silently at all the accoutrements of seduction.

  “A little late, but de rigueur,” he said. “Just so you know that I know how; I have my reputation to protect, after all. Now, you just relax, and I will go see what’s available.”

  “Then we have to figure out how you’re going to get me home tonight,” she called, as he went into the galley.

  “No sweat,” he called back.

  Half an hour later he brought back a tray of shrimp sauteed in seasoned butter, hot French bread, and a salad. They ate hungrily, relaxing, finally, to enjoy each other’s company, lingering over dinner until the lights suddenly went out as the power failed. The gas log continued to burn, providing the only light. Vivaldi died with the lights, as did the air conditioners. The sound of the rain grew louder in the sudden silence.

  They ignored the power failure, absorbed in each other’s company. They sat on the couch in the flickering firelight for another hour, talking, exploring each other’s pasts and present. She described her years as a Navy wife, the long separations, the envy she sometimes felt when she saw other Navy wives wrap themselves up in their children while their men were gone to sea, trying as she did to pick her way through the slow desiccation of her own marriage, speculating on precisely when her husband had sought another woman’s companionship, or perhaps even love.

  He described to her the years following the loss of his own spouse, his own absorption with career, and the subconscious decision to shut any permanent relationships with women out of his life, and how that decision, which he had always termed “for a while,” had solidified over time into years. She mused about the parallels, how they both had defined their personal existences in terms of careers and what was missing from their lives, consciously at first and then, as with much of life, by sheer force of habit.

  Mike listened avidly, content to watch her face and to be with her. It seemed to him that they were communicating on two levels at the same time: the first filled with the medley of necessary but superficial things two people ought to know about one another, and the second a thrumming reinforcement of desire, the small, vital moves of body language and nuance of expression, the touching without touching that creates the delectable prelude to joining. He was surprised to find himself beginning to experience an exquisite anticipation of love in a way he had not felt for years. They were both careful not to look directly at each other for very long, as if both were aware that even a long look would be a sufficiently volatile conduit, once established, to allow passion to flare in defiance of their careful approach to each other’s feelings.

  They talked about the Navy, and how it had both surprised and occasionally disappointed them. He told her of his years in Vietnam operations, first as skipper of a gunboat on the rivers, and then later on the shore bombardment gunline and in the Tonkin Gulf, and how he had thought that building a combat record was the most important thing he could do to further his career. But then you found out, she said, that the clever young men who had positioned themselves close to rising Admirals and not necessarily the sea-going operators were the ones who snapped up the early promotions and the elegant assignments close to the seats of power in the Navy. It’s just the system, he told her; once I had figured it out I could have gone along. I chose not to, stayed at sea, and now other guys have the big new ships and go out on deployment
s.

  She asked if he was going to stick it out in the Navy for a full thirty years. Mike shook his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. All my Navy career I worked to get command, and now that I have it, I’m finding out that I may have aimed a bit too low.”

  “But lots of officers never get command,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, but the truth is that command isn’t at all what I thought it would be. My image of it was formed as a junior officer: the Captain this, the Captain that, the Captain God Almighty in his cabin and on the bridge. They ring the bells on the quarterdeck when you come and go, and they all stand up when you come into the room. For the first few days after I assumed command I kept mentally looking behind me to see if the Captain was behind me when everybody got up, and then it finally sank in. And then you read the Navy Regs, what the Captain is personally and finally and ultimately and irrevocably responsible for, and it curls your hair. I started out by lying awake nights wondering what I would do if this situation or that situation arose; I had dreams about getting into maneuvering situations, and having the whole bridge watch freeze as they waited for me to give the magic order that would keep us from colliding or going aground or hitting the pier. I got over it, but it took awhile and the responsibility took the bloom off the rose of command at sea, let me tell you.”

  She smiled sympathetically. “Sounds like some romantic notions just being worn off by reality. And maybe just a bit of an overactive imagination.”

  He laughed. “I keep forgetting you’re a Navy wife; you must have heard all this before.”

  “No, not directly. J.W. took his first command tour all in stride, as if it were his natural due. He is a vain man, I finally figured out. He never let command worry him very much, but, then, he also short-toured. He told me that his mentors told him to “limit his exposure in command,” as they put it. I think in retrospect that he lacked the imagination to be particularly apprehensive about the burdens of command.”

  Mike began to feel uncomfortable with this talk of her husband; that first voice was back. He got up and went over to Hooker’s perch, put the parrot on his left hand, and came back to sit down again on the couch. He began to scratch the bird’s head while he talked.

  “Well, Goldsborough is all work and very little fun. I mean fun in the professional sense—all we do is churn through the peacetime drill of training, replacing personnel, doing maintenance and mostly boring operations. It’d be different if we got to go overseas with the deployed fleets, to go out and do something real, but Goldsborough is too old. Everybody knows she’s going out of commission next year, so nobody cares too much about the ship. We end up going through the motions of maintaining readiness, but the whole crew knows it’s a drill. You can’t fool them, and I’m no longer inclined to even try. I wish that I had gotten a better command, a deploying ship instead of the Oldy Goldy.”

  “Why did you get Goldsborough,” she asked, remembering J.W.’s revelations about putting non-conformists in special boxes. “All those decorations you wear usually mean better things than a training ship.”

  He nodded and sighed.

  “Because on my third ship I fucked up—excuse me— because I made a significant professional error one night, and there was a collision. The Bureau told me when I got command that the only reason I was being given a ship was because of my war record. Goldsborough wasn’t the greatest assignment, naturally, but you know how it is with a command: you can take it or leave it, but if you ever decline one, you’ll never get another offer. So I took it.”

  “I’m curious about this collision incident,” she said quietly. She was leaning back on the couch, her face obscured in the darkness. “Frankly, you don’t strike me as the type who makes mistakes like that.”

  He stared down at the parrot’s shiny feathers, his eyes becoming unfocused as he thought back to that night years ago. Then he stood up from the couch, and walked over to one of the portholes.

  “I was the Evaluator in CIC, the senior officer on the watch team. We were in a night carrier screen formation, a little after one in the morning. The OOD lost the bubble and got confused over a change of station tactical signal. While he was trying to sort it out with the Junior Officer of the Deck, the Officer in Tactical Command on the carrier signalled to execute the maneuver. The OOD called the Captain, told him he was in trouble, and then, finally, and much too late, he called me. I came out onto the bridge to help him sort it out; the Captain came out on the bridge about a minute after I did. He was angry at being called, and even more pissed off when he found out his whole bridge watch team had lost the picture.”

  “He was a screamer, so, naturally, he started yelling, without really knowing what the tactical maneuvering situation was, and chewing everybody’s ass in the process. The OOD went into the parrot mode: tell me what to say, Boss, and I’ll parrot those orders. I was pissed off at getting yelled at, especially because I hadn’t done anything wrong, and was actually trying to help. So I clammed up and said nothing. While all of this was going on, ships were going everywhere. It was pitch dark and windy, so everything was being done by radar. If it had been daylight, if we could have seen the other ships, it would probably never have happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Captain finally started issuing maneuvering orders, which, by the book, meant that he had assumed the conn. The rest of us were now legally superfluous. He told the OOD to come left; I knew in my guts that that was the wrong order. They hammer it into you in maneuvering and emergency shiphandling school: never turn left in a situation where there’s risk of collision. But. Because I’d been part of the initial problem, and was now too afraid or too pissed off to speak up, I held my silence. The next thing I knew there was a big shape fine on our starboard bow showing a red running light and a hell of a crash and everybody and everything went flying. Three of our sailors in a forward berthing compartment were crunched into dogmeat by the bow of a cruiser.”

  Mike stared off into space for a long minute. Not for the first time did he see again the darkened pilothouse, the faces of the watch officers, pale green in the illumination from the dim radar screens, their eyes wide with apprehension as the Captain shouted questions and curses, and then gave the fatal order. Not left. Tell him, don’t just stand there. You don’t ever turn left. Tell him. Tell him!

  “And they blamed you for this?” she asked, bringing him back to the present. He was silent for a few moments before going on.

  “Not exactly. The investigation, and then the eventual court martial, officially blamed the OOD and the Captain. The OOD for not calling the Captain sooner, when he first got into trouble, and the Captain for turning the wrong way when he was in extremis. The Captain was relieved for cause. I was a made a “party” to the investigation—that’s what a Board of Investigation calls accessories to the crime. In one sense, I was exonerated: the original maneuvering recommendation we had sent out from CIC had been the correct interpretation of the signal, and both the OOD and the Captain had ignored it. But. The investigation board took a swipe at me in their official report for not speaking up when I thought that the Captain’s final maneuvering order was wrong. They said that I had, and that I probably knew that I had, a better picture of the maneuvering situation than the Captain did. The President of the Board gave me a lecture about an officer’s responsibility to speak up regardless of the possible consequences to himself. Because the Captain legally had the conn, they couldn’t legally blame anything on me. But as you’ve probably heard, the system neither forgets nor forgives. It was never put into a fitness report or anything, but the taint of having participated in a disaster tends to linger in the Navy for a long time.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “And you’re convinced to this day that you did own a piece of it.”

  “Yup,” he said, looking down at the floor. “For a while, I tried to rationalize it, say I tried and all that, but I remember, all too vividly and all too often, a little voice inside me on the
bridge that night telling me to do something, just don’t stand there because you just got your tail bit …”

  “But what would have happened if you had spoken up—would the Captain have countermanded his order?”

  “Probably not. He was always more of a transmitter than a receiver. But there was always the chance that he might have hesitated, and then maybe we might have had a near miss instead of a bang in the night and three body bags. So that’s the part I own.”

  She was silent for a few minutes. He came back to the couch, pitched Hooker up on his shoulder, and reached for his wine.

  “And now you’re the proud owner of Goldsborough?”

  “For my sins, yes. I mean, hell, they could have told me no for command altogether, so I guess half a loaf, et cetera. But a lot of the professional satisfaction that ought to come from destroyer command is missing from this old girl. Like this stupid submarine thing.”

  “I’ve heard J.W. talking about that. He acted like it was some kind of joke. A joke on you, if you must know.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he sighed. “The Commodore tells me that the Chief of Staff disapproves of me and my life style.”

  He paused for an instant as the irony of the Chief of Staffs wife sitting here in the darkness with him sank in. He wondered if she caught it, too. He quickly continued.

  “And it’s a typical mission for Goldsborough. Some fishermen reported seeing a ‘U-boat’; that’s what they called it. Made it sound like they actually saw a surfaced German submarine from World War II out in the fleet operating areas. Gimme a break. So we get sent out to have a look, and, of course, find absolutely nothing. The chances that a foreign conventional sub would be operating off the coast of Florida is almost zero. Maybe in wartime, but these days? Bullshit. Nobody would have any reason to do that. Then last week one of the local fishing boats went missing; we were told to conduct a search, and we find an oil slick and a name board. The Coast Guard found the boat on the bottom using a robotic TV system. No damage, no holes, signs of fire or anything. Big mystery. But certainly no plausible connection to a submarine.”