Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  Now Cee-Dee started in on the sideburns, raising first one side, then the other, then the first side again, then back to the other until there was nothing resembling sideburns left on the Captain’s face. With a flourish he reserved for officers Cee-Dee whisked the sheet off the Captain’s shoulders, and Jones promptly began fishing with two fingers under his shirt collar for loose hair. “Let me ask you one more thing, Cee-Dee. Someone — I won’t say who — someone mentioned to me that you made some remarks about draft dodging in which you more or less indicated your approval —”

  “Draft dodgers are scum of the earth in my book, Captain,” Cee-Dee interrupted. “I don’t hold with no friggin’ draft dodging.”

  “So irregardless of what he thought he heard, whoever heard you must have been mistaken, eh?”

  “Captain, the only thing I know about draft dodging is what I heard from this sailor in Naples. Like I say, this sailor has an Eye-talian cousin, see, who was drafted into the Eye-talian army. Well, it seems there’s a law in Italy that mutilated soldiers from the war are entitled to the permanent company of an enlisted man, so this guy that was drafted, his father, who runs a brassiere factory, he hires the mutilated veteran and puts him on the payroll and this mutilated guy, see, he puts in for the kid to accompany him all the time. So then the kid is drafted and first thing you know he’s ordered back home to keep this old man company. Some deal, huh?”

  “And the government let him get away with this?”

  “The government didn’t do nothing to stop him, yeah.”

  “Well, if you ask me,” Jones said, “it’s still draft dodging.”

  “With all respect,” said Cee-Dee, “it ain’t draft dodging, it’s just Italy.”

  Captain Jones Gets a Glimpse of Something Larger than Himself

  It was evening penumbra — that space of time when the sun has set but not yet extracted all the light from the day. At sea this is star time — the few moments when the navigator measures the angle between the horizon and the celestial bodies. Any earlier and the stars would not be visible; any later, the horizon would be lost in blackness.

  Sextant in hand, the XO was waiting for the first stars to appear in the sky — Alioth or Dubhe in the Big Dipper; Polaris, the Pole Star, in the Little Dipper; Schedar or Caph in Cassiopeia; Sirius in Canis Major; Procyon in Canis Minor.

  “Nothing yet, eh?”

  “Nothing yet, Skipper.”

  “That was pretty handsome, what he said before the chopper lifted him off, eh?”

  “Goddamn handsome, Captain,” the XO said. “Sounded like he meant every word of it too.”

  “Sure doesn’t hurt a man’s career to have someone like that put in a good word with the Admiral, does it?”

  “Worth its weight in gold,” the XO agreed.

  “See anything yet?”

  Searching the sky as if he were looking for rain, the XO shook his head. “Few minutes more,” he said.

  “What do you think he meant by ‘give credit where credit is due’?” Jones asked. He reached under his shirt collar and rubbed his neck. “Do you think he meant us in particular or the navy in general or what?”

  “Hard to say, Captain. He’s a smart cookie, the Congressman. Hard to say exactly what he meant. But he was pleased, that’s for sure. Even Filmore was tickled pink. Did you see his face when they lifted off the cans of film? If one of them had fallen into the drink he would have dived in after it.”

  “Filmore said he’d get at least twenty seconds on Huntley-Brinkley and Cronkite with the stuff he had.”

  Captain Jones took off his baseball cap and threaded his fingers through his hair. As usual after one of Cee-Dee’s haircuts, it felt as if there was none left. “Do you suppose he heard about, well, about our little problem?” he asked the XO.

  “How could he have, Skipper? One of us was with him almost every moment. I’ll lay a month’s wages he never got a whiff of Sweet Reason on the Ebersole.”

  “I hope you’re right, XO, that’s all I can say. I hope you’re right.”

  Both men were lost in thought for a few minutes.

  Then the XO laughed out loud.

  “What?” the Captain asked.

  “No, I was just thinking what would have happened if the Congressman had been wounded. Christ, we’re lucky, Captain.”

  “Filmore said he wouldn’t have minded a scratch or two. Good for a few minutes of conversation at one of those Washington cocktail parties, eh?” And he and the XO laughed knowingly.

  “Goddamn shame about McTigue, huh, Captain?” the XO said.

  “Goddamn shame is right,” agreed Jones. “Which one was he?”

  “Lustig’s chief — tall, tough, regular navy. Looked like one of those actors you see all the time in those old westerns. He ran Mount Fifty-one. Lustig says he heard the jets spotted the helicopter outside of the town. It was a burnt-out wreck.”

  “McTigue,” Jones said thoughtfully. “I remember him now. He’s the one who came back from the dentist with all the gaps between his teeth.”

  “That’s him, Skipper. Lustig talked him into taking all the tartar out.”

  “Do I write his next of kin now?” Jones asked. “Christ Almighty, how I hate this drill.”

  “I got some missing-in-action forms in a BuPers pamphlet somewheres,” the XO said. “It’s got a lot of great phrases in it about how you knew the guy personally and respected him and stuff like that. With your permission, Captain, I’ll work up a draft for your signature.”

  “Thanks, XO, you’re a lifesaver. Hey, there, there, over there, see it — the first star, eh?”

  The XO raised his sextant to his eye and, through a system of mirrors, brought the light of the star down so that it rested on the horizon. “Mark,” he called, and read off the angle to the yeoman who was standing, stopwatch in hand, in the pilot house door.

  The star was Betelgeuse, a giant red that is so vast you could fit the sun, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars and all the space between them into it and still have room to spare.

  Yankee Station

  THE THIRD DAY

  Proper Hears an Ominous Echo

  AN HOUR into the midwatch Sonarman Third Dwight Proper put the sonar on automatic scan and settled back in his imitation leather swivel chair with a paperback detective novel. He was up to the part where the beautiful young heiress answers the doorbell wearing a gold bracelet around her left ankle and nothing else. “ ‘Yes, I’m Cynthia Crespin,’ she told Mullins in a throaty, almost hoarse, half-whisper. She brushed her long blond hair away from her breasts with a snap of her head. ‘Won’t you come on up:’ ‘Baby, I already have,’ he answered and followed her into the house.”

  Proper crossed his legs over his own erection and started to turn the page when he heard the first “brrrrrrrrp-brp.” “Je-sus,” he said and snapped off the overhead light to cut the glare on the sonar scope.

  From a small dome attached to the keel of the ship pulses of sound shot into the surrounding water at the rate of one a second. If the sound waves struck nothing all you heard was the “brrrrrrrrp” of the outgoing beams. This time, however, there was a short, sharp echo to indicate that the sound waves were bouncing off something. Proper adjusted the electronic bug and measured the range and bearing to the echo, which registered as a white blip on the sonar scope. Then he flipped the 21MC on the bulkhead to “bridge” and yelled: “Bridge, this is sonar. I have a sonar contact bearing 180, range 1200 yards.”

  “A what!” the Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant junior grade Moore, called back. “You have a what?”

  “A sonar contact,” Proper said excitedly. “I’m in the sonar shack looking at the scope and there’s a contact bearing one eight zero at twelve hundred yards.”

  “My God,” Moore shouted down, “what do you think it is?”

  Proper bent his head and concentrated on the sound. “Brrrrrrrrp-brp. Brrrrrrrp-brp. Brrrrrrrrp-brp.” The echo had a distinct down doppler — a slightly lower pitch than the
outgoing sound beams — indicating that the target was heading away from the Ebersole. “Well,” Proper yelled back up to the bridge, “it sounds suspiciously like the ass end of a submarine to me.”

  Concentrating on the steady “Brrrrrrrrp-brp” that filled the small sonar shack, Proper hardly heard the tingling ripple of the general alarm peeling through the ship. He didn’t look up when Ensign de Bovenkamp, the sonar officer, came charging into the shack.

  “Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp. He was wearing silk pajamas and chewing away rhythmically on a stick of gum. “Hot gawddamn.”

  Ensign de Bovenkamp’s Curriculum Vitae

  “Give me a Y.”

  “Y.”

  “Give me an A.”

  “A.”

  “Give me an L.”

  “L.”

  “Give me an E.”

  “E.”

  “What does it spell?”

  “Yale.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “YALE.”

  “I still can’t hear you.”

  “Y-A-L-E.”

  Bedlam broke out in the gymnasium. The coach laughed and waved to two trustees and then bent back into the huddle. Instantly the expression on his face changed. “Awright now, here we go,” he yelled, dealing out sticks of gum. “I told you men once, I told you a thousand times, the trick is you got to think of ’em as enemy.”

  “We’ll kill ’em,” said the right guard.

  “We’ll murder ’em,” said the center.

  “We’ll maim them,” said de Bovenkamp, working the gum around in his mouth and nodding in anticipation.

  “Awright, awright,” the coach yelled. He glanced at the other team with pure hate in his eyes. “They’re not opposition, get that straight, they’re enemy, see, and you guys are gonna mop up the court with them as a matter of self-defense. Awright, you got the message, what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation? Now what I want you to do is I want you to get on out there and fight — for yourself, for your school, for your coach.”

  “Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp, and he slapped his hands onto the coach’s hands and other hands slapped down on top of his. With the cheers ringing in his ears, de Bovenkamp burst from the huddle and led the team to victory.

  As far back as he could remember de Bovenkamp had been a winner. From the age of eight, when he walked away with a spoon and egg race, he knew what all winners know: everybody hates a winner. Or more precisely, everybody hates a winner who wins the way de Bovenkamp won — easily, casually, with a “Look Ma, no hands!” expression on his face.

  There was only one flaw in this picture of the supersuccessful American: for the life of him, de Bovenkamp couldn’t score. Sexually, that is. Oh, he could get it up all right, but he couldn’t keep it up; at what is commonly called “the crucial moment” he always wilted. Various female acquaintances, turned on by the challenge long after they had been turned off by de Bovenkamp himself, had tried any number of “cures,” but he had never been able to rise to the occasion and achieve actual penetration. “Gawd, I’d consider premature ejaculation a triumph!” he confided to the psychiatrist he finally took his troubles to.

  De Bovenkamp talked guardedly at first, then opened up and they made some progress; the doctor traced the problem to de Bovenkamp’s Caspar Milquetoast of a father and his soaring eagle of a mother. Armed with a fistful of sixty-dollar-an-hour insights, de Bovenkamp went out and fell in love with the first girl he could find who didn’t remind him of his mother.

  Her name was Evangeline and she taught chemistry in a high school. She was soft and womanly and walked around with bare feet indoors. What really attracted him to her was that she had a very low opinion of herself, a brilliant flash of a smile and stunning Irish eyes. But when the romance reached the point where coitus un-interruptus was the next dish on the menu, de Bovenkamp panicked. Without a word he packed his matched Gucci duffel bags and hightailed it to Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. Desperate, she wrote him: “I love my family, I love teaching, I love my godchild Jennifer I still love them now but I love you more than all of them. All you have to do is say you want me with you and I’ll be there in less than two hours. Nothing else matters to me.”

  De Bovenkamp wired back: “Think of this separation as a test.”

  She answered with a post card: “Dummy — the real test is being together, not apart.”

  Much to his relief he never heard from her again.

  From the start of his navy career de Bovenkamp seemed destined for great things. No matter that he wound up eighth from the bottom of his class at Officer Candidate School; more to the point, his contemporaries voted him the man who looked most like an officer.

  After graduation a computer in Washington assigned him to the Eugene Ebersole out of Norfolk. Standing on a long pier in the destroyer base in Norfolk on a bright Monday morning, de Bovenkamp caught sight of the sun glinting off rust. It was the Ebersole. His heart sinking, he lugged his matched Guccis across the gangway to the quarterdeck, drew himself up to his full height and snapped off the salute he had perfected in Newport. “Request permission to come on board?” said de Bovenkamp.

  Tevepaugh, all blackheads where his dirty white sailor hat met his forehead, lazily returned the salute. “Why not,” he said. “You must be the new George, right?”

  “George?”

  “George is what we call the junior ensign on the ship,” Tevepaugh explained.

  “Who’s the Officer of the Deck?” de Bovenkamp demanded.

  “That’d be Mister Lustig.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well what sir!”

  “You don’t have to call me sir,” Tevepaugh said. “Me, I’m not the Officer of the Deck, Mister Lustig is the Officer of the Deck.”

  There were tears of frustration behind de Bovenkamp’s mask of imperturbability. “Where is this Mister Lustig?” he asked.

  “Taking a crap, where else?” Tevepaugh said.

  De Bovenkamp never did get to see Lustig until after dark when the free-for-all broke out on the mess deck over which channel to watch on the single television set. It seemed that the white sailors wanted one program and the blacks another. De Bovenkamp discovered Lustig kneeling at the top of the ladder leading to the mess deck (he was, he later admitted, afraid to descend into the pit) screaming, with no visible effect, for everyone to stand at attention. De Bovenkamp took the practical step of commandeering another television and setting it up on the other side of the mess deck. And that’s how he came to meet the man who was to have such a great impact on his life, Captain J. P. Horatio Jones.

  “If you ask me it was a clear case of high spirits,” Jones told Lustig the next morning when he muttered something about a race riot. Jones turned to de Bovenkamp. “But you certainly used your head, my boy. Keep it up and I’ll write up a fitness report on you that’ll knock your eye out, eh?”

  Spurred on by this early success de Bovenkamp set out to endear himself to the Captain. He organized an Ebersole basketball team (with himself as player-coach), exhorted it to victory with phrases borrowed from his coach (“think of them as enemy”) and in short order picked up a gold basketball from the Commander Destroyers Atlantic. Much to the Captain’s delight, a photograph of the Admiral congratulating Jones and the Ebersole team made the Norfolk papers, and that was followed by a personal letter from the Commander Destroyers Atlantic, Jones’s ultimate boss, complimenting the Captain of the Ebersole on coping with the problem of morale in an active and thoughtful manner. “In this day and age of drugs and long-haired pansies,” the Admiral wrote, “it is a pleasure to see a destroyer Captain who can draw inspiration from American basics such as basketball.”

  In the months that followed de Bovenkamp turned out to be the Captain’s staunchest ally on the ship. At Iskenderun it was de Bovenkamp who, alone of all the officers, supported Jones’s decision to go alongside the burning tanker and fight the blaze. Later, duri
ng the first war council after the Ebersole arrived on Yankee Station, it was de Bovenkamp again who responded wholeheartedly to the Captain’s pep talk. And it was de Bovenkamp who came up with the idea of using Proper, the ex-cop, to catch Sweet Reason. “My God,” Jones told the XO, “if all my officers were like young de Bovenkamp, I could put my career on automatic and retire to my sea cabin.”

  If de Bovenkamp was Jones’s favorite, Jones in turn filled an important need for the young ensign — he became his surrogate father. De Bovenkamp had never really seen a man give orders before and it affected him profoundly. He began to feel that he had a lot in common with the Captain — the one isolated (as Jones never tired of telling him) by the loneliness of command, the other isolated (as de Bovenkamp explained when he got to know the Captain better) by the loneliness of being a winner.

  Gradually de Bovenkamp began to think of himself as something more than a winner. He was, as he confided to Jones late one night, “a captain too — the captain of my fate.” De Bovenkamp in fact began to sense the sap rising within himself. He actually managed a premature ejaculation in the Black Cat Inn in Piraeus — a sequence, incidentally, which anyone on the Ebersole could see, for five dollars ahead, on Cee-Dee’s late, late show. Sexually speaking de Bovenkamp still tended to wilt at crucial moments, but he felt that in time, given the inspiration of working for Captain Jones, he could hold up, if not his member, at least his head.

  De Bovenkamp Sights Sub, Sinks Same

  De Bovenkamp peered over Proper’s shoulder at the sonar contact. Three other sonarmen had joined them in the shack. They stretched and craned, peering over de Bovenkamp’s shoulders. Proper turned up the volume — the “Brrrrrrrrp-brp” filled the small room — and pointed to the small blip on the scope.

  “Hot damn,” said de Bovenkamp, chewing away on a stick of gum. “You think it’s a you-know-what?”