Sweet Reason (9781590209011)
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Jones was instantly tentative; he began to select his words the way you choose footfalls in a mine field. “Your being colored has nothing whatsoever to do with your being under suspicion,” he said, bringing his fingernails to his teeth. “I’ve dealt fairly and plainly with members of your race my whole career. There isn’t a man aboard that doesn’t know that, eh? I’m simply trying to get the facts in the case.”
But Jones let the line of questioning drop.
Another Word from Sweet Reason
“I think it was Sweet Reason,” Captain Jones told the XO when he and Proper turned up a few minutes later.
“I know it was Sweet Reason,” the XO said, and he handed the Captain a carbon (an original and four more carbons were eventually discovered) of Sweet Reason’s latest leaflet. It had been found taped to the bronze “swift and sure” plaque in the midship’s passageway.
Comrades in arms
(“He must be a goddamn Commie, the way he keeps throwing that ‘comrades in arms’ crap up in our faces all the time,” the skipper said when he and the XO went over the leaflet again later.)
For a while this morning, thanks to me, the Ebersole showed her real colors — an upside-down Amerikan flag. The Ebersole is a ship in distress. Yesterday morning we drew our first innocent blood, sinking a junk without warning and killing who knows how many innocent men, women and children. (Even Nazi subs let their victims get into lifeboats first.) Now our great Commanding Officer, who risked this ship and the lives of all the men on board at Iskenderun (the tanker could easily have blown up when we were alongside) so he could advance his career, is ready to risk our lives again, is ready to kill again. And for what?
I ask you again, I beg you: Don’t make war on innocent men, women and children. Don’t let them make killers out of us! ! ! Let’s put a stop to murder.
Next time the pig captain of the Ebersole yells open fire, let him hear not the boom of cannon but the SILENCE of men who REFUSE TO KILL.
Remember, nobody can force you to pull a trigger!
The Voice of Sweet Reason
“By sweet Jesus, this time he’s gone too far,” Captain Jones said, crumpling the leaflet into a ball and flinging it into the wastebasket, a brass five-inch powder case with “DD722” engraved on it.
The reference to Iskenderun — which J. P. Jones considered, next to the action with the “patrol boat,” his finest hour — stung. “Enough of this pussyfooting around, Proper. I don’t care if you turn this ship inside out, I want Sweet Reason’s scalp and I want it before the day is out. Do you read me, Proper, before the day is out.”
The Captain was still shaking with anger after Proper left. “Except for Quinn’s finger,” Jones told the XO, “not a living soul from the Ebersole was scratched at Iskenderun. Risking the ship, he says. I calculated the odds. That’s my job. They ordered me to render all possible assistance — those were the exact words, weren’t they, XO? — all possible assistance. Well, I rendered all possible assistance and I put the fire out.”
Jones clamped his eyes shut and lowered his voice to a tired whisper. “God, how I detest Sweet Reason,” he said.
“Leave it to Proper,” the XO said reassuringly. “He’ll bring home the bacon.”
More about the Incident at Iskenderun
With the help of a Turkish tug, the Ebersole had tied up alongside the burning tanker (the maneuver that cost Quinn the joint of a finger), and the crew had gone storming aboard to fight the blaze and keep it from spreading to the jet fuel bunkers. For a long while it was touch and go. Sailors had to hose down the tanker’s deck plates, which were red hot in places, so that other crewmen could get close enough to hose down the flames. Working in relays they fought the blaze, which was confined to the tanker’s engine spaces aft and the aftermost bunker, for fourteen hours. All the while the Ebersole’s searchlights, playing off the smoke and steam and flames and sheets of seawater and foam, gave to the scene the appearance of an erupting volcano.
In the early hours of the morning Ensign de Bovenkamp literally stumbled across the body of one of the tanker’s crewmen killed in the original explosion. Shrunken to the size of a child’s corpse by the flames, it was lying awash in oil and foam and seawater in a corner of the tanker’s main deck. Only the penis, which was erect, seemed to belong to an adult. Glancing enviously at the erect penis, de Bovenkamp took two sticks and put them on the body in the form of a crucifix, then covered the dead man with a tarpaulin.
There was a bad moment at noon as the fire was beginning to come under control. De Bovenkamp was leading a crew into what had been the tanker’s engine room. The smoke was still so thick that it was impossible to see the deck even with powerful hand-held lanterns. De Bovenkamp took a pole and began tapping like a blind man to find out if there was any deck left to walk on. For a few feet he could hear and feel the “tap-tap” of the pole; then suddenly he was hitting out at air. The deck grating had melted completely away. Just feet ahead was a sixty-foot drop into flames and molten metal. As de Bovenkamp shouted a warning he thought he saw one of the men on the hose lunge sideways and disappear into the smoke.
When word got back to the Captain he was furious — and frightened. He might have to account for his actions if someone had been killed in fighting the fire, and the second-guessers at the Pentagon could wreck a career on the strength of a lapse like that. Jones ordered an immediate head count. Fifteen minutes later the XO returned with the grim news that there were sixteen men missing. Almost catatonic with terror, Jones sent the XO back to count heads again. This time the Executive Officer found eight sailors and Chaplain Rodgers asleep in various bottom bunks around the ship, which brought the number of missing men down to seven.
“Jesus,” said the Captain. He was in agony now, pacing the cabin and sweating even though the air-conditioning unit in the bulkhead was on full blast. “Pull everyone back from the tanker, muster them at abandon-ship stations and count again.” This time the XO came back with good news: all 255 officers and men on the Ebersole were present and accounted for.
No one ever did find out what de Bovenkamp had seen out of the corner of his eye.
With the fire reduced to embers, another destroyer joined the Ebersole in Iskenderun and started pumping all the seawater out of the tanker that the Ebersole had pumped in. Amid a deluge of congratulatory telegrams, the Ebersole weighed anchor for the war zone. Later the crew learned that a seaman from the other destroyer had died of asphyxiation while showing a Lloyds of London man through the burnt-out fuel bunker in the tanker’s hull. The second destroyer was relieved by a Turkish salvage vessel that came down from Istanbul. Two days after that, with the salvage ship tied up precisely where the Ebersole had been, the tanker blew sky high. The Turkish press, which printed some remarkable action photos of the tanker in midair, reported that the explosion sank both ships and killed sixty-two men. The Turkish government explained that somebody had apparently struck a match in the wrong place and awarded twenty-seven dollars to each of the new widows.
Until Sweet Reason brought the subject up again the last word on the episode at Iskenderun had been supplied, as usual, by Wallowitch. “What the hell a twenty-two-hundred-ton destroyer crammed with ammunition was doing alongside a burning tanker full of aviation fuel I’ll never know,” he told some of the junior officers in the privacy of the after wardroom. “If she had blown when we were alongside, all the P.R. guys in the Pentagon wouldn’t have been able to put the Captain’s career, not to mention his body, back together again.”
Proper Comes Up with a Rain Check
A quarter to the hour had come and gone and the reliefs were still nowhere in sight.
“Shit, fuck, fart, piss and corruption,” shouted “Striker” DeFrank, a stringy, nineteen-year-old apprentice boilerman whose main regret in life seemed to be that he only had to shave once a month. Stimulating the sparse stubble with the back of his hand DeFrank added: “Shoot, how much longer they gonna keep us roasting down here?”
“Well, balls on Sweet friggin’ Reason for causin’ all this trouble,” DeFrank yelled, but the sting had gone out of his voice and he smiled the ear-to-ear grin that always flashed on, like a neon sign, when the going got rough.
Snipes, which is what the engineering people are called, were like that — patient, plodding, not normally given to griping. They had become more or less used to conditions that made duty in any other part of the ship seem like a seaside vacation; temperatures that seldom dipped below 130 degrees even when the huge blower system that was the last word in air conditioning in 1945 was working; a noise level (when the boilers were not “down” for repairs) that forced them to yell directly into someone’s ear to be heard; a workload that had them standing four hours on, four hours off, round the clock; and a water shortage that made it practically impossible to wash off the grime and grease and sweat that crusted on the skin like a scab.
But there was one thing that could set off a snipe. That was when the reliefs failed to show up on time. For four hours the most important thing in the boiler room to the men on duty was the large-faced electric clock on the bulkhead. The men made the time pass as best they could, baking potatoes stolen from the spud locker on the main deck in the water drum casing (where the temperature reaches 489 degrees) and wolfing them down with warm Cokes, taking a turn around the boiler room to check levels and temperatures and pressures. All the while their eyes kept darting back to the electric clock — to the hour hand and finally to the minute hand inching toward the moment when the hatch two decks up would be flung open and feet would show at the top of the ladder. Psychologically speaking, the high point of the watch was the end point of the watch.
Today, of course, there was no relief in sight. Soon after the eight-to-twelve people trooped on deck, Ohm’s voice had come grinding over the loudspeaker. “Now all hands will” he said — breaking the sentence in the wrong places — “remain at their stations due to a” — break — “search of the ship being” — break — “conducted to turn up the” — gulp of air — “person or persons unknown responsible” — break — “for the seditious” — break — “leaflet.”
Relief time, not to mention chow time, had come and gone, then noon, then 12:15. Finally at 12:25, a foot swung over the lip of the hatch and Proper started down the ladder. He had already worked his way through the after spaces — after steering, the after crew’s quarters, the after magazines and storage spaces, Mount 53 and its handling room, the after head, the first-class lounge, the barber shop, the after wardroom, the post office, the damage control office and half-a-dozen other compartments that had no names but only letter and number designations. As the search progressed, Proper seemed to grow more confident. He knew the typewriter was out there somewhere; it was merely a question of narrowing down the area to be searched. In his mind’s eye he saw himself, not as the uniformed cop directing schoolchildren at rush hour, but as a plainclothes detective, a faint “I’ve seen it all” smile playing on his lips, a forty-four-and-a-halfounce Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum in his spring-assisted shoulder holster, telling a suspect in a slightly bored monotone: “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miranda versus Arizona, we’re required to advise you of your rights, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“The Captain ordered me to search the ship and that’s what I’m doing,” Proper said matter-of-factly when his foot touched bottom in the boiler room.
“You’ll have to speak louder,” Duffy called back, funneling his words directly into Proper’s ear with cupped hands.
“I said, the Captain ordered me to search the ship and that’s what I’m doing,” Proper yelled. “I want to start at one end —”
“One what?”
“One end — E as in echo, N as in November, D as in delta — one end, and work my way systematically through to the other. I want to check every space where someone could stash a typewriter.”
“Help yourself,” Duffy yelled, and turned back to study the dozen or so dials that told anybody who understood them how ridiculously inefficient the boilers really were.
“I’ll start here,” Proper yelled, pointing to a wooden footlocker wedged behind the access ladder. “Who has the key?”
“It’s hanging on the hook over your head,” shouted Striker DeFrank.
“If the key is right out here in the open, why do you lock it?” yelled Proper.
“Why shoot, so them’s that don’t know where the key is won’t get into the box,” DeFrank explained as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Crisply, professionally, Proper unlocked the box and threw back the lid. Inside were the boiler room’s mess stores — forty or fifty spuds, a dozen or so onions (a boilerman on the midwatch made a fantastic onion soup), a few half-rotten stalks of celery, two jars of instant coffee and a coffee pot, seven cans of anchovies, a small plastic bag of truffles, a jar of chives, another of peanut butter, assorted knives and spoons and can openers and a well-thumbed copy of The New York Times Cookbook.
“What’s this?” yelled Proper, fingering a small package of what looked like herbs and tobacco mixed together.
“Herbs and pipe tobacco mixed together,” said DeFrank with a straight face. Duffy kept his back turned, oblivious to everything but the dials in front of him.
Proper had his orders about “tobacco.” So far he had turned up at least a dozen satchels that the owners described as tobacco or snuff or “a kind of Italian sugar.” Proper had also uncovered three revolvers, at least a dozen containers filled with whiskey or vodka or brandy, a small box of Spanish fly, a life-sized inflatable female doll, a seven-foot African spear and a shopping bag full of assorted women’s underwear. He had come across his biggest haul — film shot through a peephole in a Piraeus bar called the “Black Cat Inn” showing a number of the Ebersole’s officers in compromising positions — hidden in a hollowed-out fire extinguisher in the barber shop.
“Whatcha gonna do wit them?” asked Cee-Dee, who had arranged for the films to be shot and was showing them at five dollars a head whenever he could get his hands on the crew’s movie projector.
“I’m gonna come see them — gratis — as soon as you send me an engraved invitation,” Proper had said pointedly.
“Sure, anytime, anytime at all,” Cee-Dee had said, smiling broadly. “Take a rain check. Whatcha doin’ tonight?”
Proper knew what he was after and he covered every inch of the boiler room searching for it. He looked behind the generators and made DeFrank unscrew the casing on the reduction gear. He poked into obscure corners over the steam pipes and dragged a stick through the bilges to make sure there was nothing there but water. Then he had Duffy shut down the blower system and crawled into the main duct to make sure there was nothing there but air.
Twenty minutes later — soaked in sweat, his face and hands and clothes grease-streaked, his head splitting from the unaccustomed heat and noise — Proper emerged from the boiler room to tell the XO: “That space is clean.” And he plunged into the after engine room with another “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision” look on his face to continue the hunt.
McTigue Puts a Word in for Quinn
The XO looked up from his desk at McTigue. “What can I do for you, Chief?”
“It’s about Keys Quinn, XO. I promised him I’d —”
The phone rang and the Executive Officer snatched it off the bulkhead bracket. He listened for a second. “Who’s this Haverhill?” He listened again. “And who’s Filmore?” The XO nodded. “Okay, I’m on my way.”
Grabbing his hat, the XO brushed past McTigue and raced from the cabin.
“About Quinn —” McTigue called after him.
“The answer is no.”
“But —”
But the XO had disappeared.
The XO Thinks of All the Angles
At long last the chickens were coming home to roost, J. P. Horatio Jones thought, and he took the steps three at a time and burst straight into the radio shack — breaking one of his cardinal rules about giving warning so he would not be confronted with the sweet smell of pot.
“Well, what they say, eh?” the Captain asked. Is he coming? How long have we got? Did they say why us? Did he pick us himself? Or were we assigned? Goddamn it, XO, fill me in, will you.”
“From what I gather from Commander Filmore, who is the Pentagon P.R. guy handling the whole thing —”
“You spoke with this Filmore fellow?” Jones interrupted.
“Not actually, Skipper. But I spoke to his aide, a Lieutenant Commander Haverhill, on the single sideband here. He says that Filmore says that the Congressman specifically asked to include us in the itinerary when he heard about the business with the Commie patrol boat yesterday.”
“Wow!” said Jones, his enthusiasm bubbling to the surface. “All I can say, XO, is it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, eh?”
A few minutes later, in the privacy of the Captain’s cabin, the two began making plans.
“How do we get him?” the CO asked. “Helicopter?”
“Haverhill says Filmore says he wants to be highlined over. It’ll give them some good film footage.”
“When? When do we pick him up?”
“They want us in approach position at thirteen-fifteen. They’re recovering a strike group at thirteen-hundred and as soon as that’s out of the way, we’re to haul ass in and get him. They want to get off another strike at thirteen-thirty.”