Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

“Sounds like — no offense intended, Captain — sounds like a crock of shit, if you get my drift. Even if it’s true he still had nine other fingers he could have tried.”

  “And ten toes,” the Captain chimed in. “Don’t forget the ten toes. Did Wallowitch tell this to Lustig over the sound-powered phone? — tell him about the finger not contracting?”

  “He sure did, Captain.”

  Jones slowly lifted his body off the toilet seat, shuffled over to his desk chair and carefully lowered himself into it. The XO and Proper turned their chairs around to face the Captain. The XO’s chair scraped against the deck and the noise sent a shiver up the Captain’s spine.

  Jones chewed away on a particularly stubborn cuticle for a few moments, then thoughtfullly shifted to another finger. Finally he said: “So when Lustig told me the firing circuit was on the fritz he was covering for Wallowitch?”

  “Right as rain, Captain. Wallowitch — I mean Mister Wallowitch told Mister Lustig he couldn’t shoot because he couldn’t contract his trigger finger, and Mister Lustig told you the firing circuit was out of order. Which adds up to an open and shut case of knowingly falsifying a verbal report if I ever saw one. We can nail him to the cross on this.”

  Jones nodded enthusiastically. “All right, now McTigue — what happened in Mount Fifty-one?”

  “McTigue claims that the local control firing mechanism contacts burned out. I checked out his alibi personally, Captain. The contacts were burned out just like he says, but they were still warm — and so was a soldering iron I found stashed behind the port hoist in the gun mount. When we examine the iron for fingerprints I’m pretty sure we’ll find McTigue’s all over the handle.”

  “A warm soldering iron, eh?”

  “Right, Captain. I can show it to you if you want, but naturally it isn’t warm anymore.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Proper. Now about Fifty-two — how about that man” — Jones unaccountably smiled —“Quinn?”

  “Quinn swears on a stack of Bibles he pushed the firing button when you ordered him to, Captain. He says the reason the guns didn’t go off” — Proper checked his notes— “is because something called the electro servo coupler burned out, making the mount inoperative. I looked at the index of the maintenance handbook on a five-inch, .38 caliber gun mount and couldn’t find anything that sounded like” — Proper glanced again at his notes — “electro servo coupler. Apparently there is no such animal.” The Captain stole a look at the XO, but he was staring out the porthole as if he were lost in thought. “Besides that,” Proper went on, “I got a signed statement from the hot-case man in Fifty-two. He says that Quinn said, ‘Shit, if nobody shoots, they can’t lay a fucking finger on me,’ or words to that effect. Sorry about the profanity, Captain.”

  “We’ll see if we can’t lay a finger on him, eh?” Jones said. “What about Mister de Bovenkamp? What the hell was he doing in Fifty-three in the first place?”

  “You assigned Mister de Bovenkamp to Mount Fifty-three two weeks ago, Captain, because he’s supposed to take over from Mister Lustig as gunnery officer eventually and has to qualify as a mount captain first. When you ordered him to open fire, he passed the command on to the two powder men and two projectile men whose job it was to load the guns. Now you’ll be interested to know, Captain, that all four of these men are colored.” Proper glanced quickly at his notes. “Two of them are the signalmen you suspected of having raised the flag upside-down — Pettis Foreman and Jefferson Waterman. The third is the night baker, Seldon Saler. The fourth is Truman Love —”

  “He’s the dumb steward who keeps clogging my urinal,” the XO reminded Jones.

  “Waterman seemed to be the ringleader, Captain. When Mister de Bovenkamp ordered them to load, Waterman said they wouldn’t follow the orders of a racist officer, or words to that effect.”

  “Did he mean me or Mister de Bovenkamp?” Jones asked.

  “That’s a good question, Captain. I’ll have to interrogate him again and check that out. Anyhow, it’s my feeling that their refusal to load notwithstanding, it was Mister de Bovenkamp’s job as mount captain to shoot one way or another. And his failure to do so constitutes, according to a strict construction of the appropriate statutes, dereliction of duty.”

  “… think you can …”

  “Beg pardon, Captain?” Proper said, cocking an ear.

  “I said, do you think you can make it stick?”

  “Do I think I can make it stick? Jesus, coming against the background of this Sweet Reason business it’ll look as if we’re handling him with kid gloves, if you get my meaning, Captain.”

  Jones nodded twice. On the second nod his head stayed down, lost in his cuticles.

  Proper waited until he saw that Jones wasn’t coming up for air. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but do you want to hear what happened in Main Plot? The Poet was in Main Plot.” When Jones hesitated, Proper added: “He was the one with all those subversive pictures on the bulkhead.”

  “What was the Poet doing in Main Plot?” the Captain asked. “He’s supposed to be my Communications Officer.”

  It was the Executive Officer who answered. “The Rules of Engagement specify we’ve got to have an officer in Main Plot during General Quarters, and Joyce was the only officer we could spare, so I assigned him there, Captain. Course Seaman Boeth actually runs the show down there — Boeth’s been to navy fire control school, you remember — so we put Mister Joyce on the sound-powered phones where he couldn’t do any harm.” The XO chuckled at his own ingenuity.

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Jones.

  “Like I was saying, Captain, it seems that Mister Joyce more or less followed what was going on over the sound-powered phones, so when Mister Lustig called down to him thinking to get Boeth to shoot, Mister Joyce yanked the phone jack out of its socket. You remember Mister Lustig wasn’t able to raise anybody on the phone? Well, that’s why the line went dead.”

  “I remember,” Jones said bitterly.

  “Now here’s where the plot thickens. When Mister Joyce pulled the plug, so to speak, Gunner’s Mate Third Melvin Ohm —”

  “Ohm’s the one who organizes the betting pools,” the XO reminded the Captain.

  “That’s the man,” Proper said. “Ohm tried to plug the phone jack back in, and in so doing wrestled Ensign Joyce to the deck —”

  “He attacked an officer?” the Captain asked incredulously.

  “Don’t forget he attacked an officer to prevent him from committing mutiny, Captain.”

  “I suppose you could look at it that way,” agreed Jones. “Well, at least there’s one man on board who was loyal to his Captain and his country.”

  “Now all the while he had Mister Joyce pinned to the deck,” Proper continued, “Ohm kept shouting, ‘You fuck, I’ll have to give back all the —’ or words to that effect.”

  “Give back all the what?” asked the XO.

  “Don’t know, XO. He never got to finish the sentence. Just at that precise exact instant he was struck on or about the right eye with the Rules of Engagement thrown by Seaman Boeth, who then landed on Ohm and pummeled — begging your pardon, Captain — the beJesus out of him.”

  “But that means we can file mutiny charges against Boeth too!” exclaimed Jones.

  “With all respect, not so fast, Captain. I told you before that Boeth’s case was complicated. On the one hand we could get him for assault with a deadly weapon, the deadly weapon in question being the Ebersole’s copy of the Rules of Engagement, which tips the scales at eight and eight-tenths pounds — it’s bound, as you remember, with metal covers so we can jettison it in case the ship falls into enemy hands.”

  “Deadly weapon, eh?”

  “The trouble is,” Proper went on, “that Boeth’s defense would probably stand up in court. Boeth says he heard a commotion and spun around to find an enlisted man attacking an officer, so he instinctively came to the assistance of the officer in question, unaware — this is Boeth talking, mind you �
� unaware that the said officer was in the act of committing mutiny.”

  “So that’s it, eh?” Jones reached down and began lacing his Adlers, which were covered with scuff marks. Both the XO and Proper noticed that the Captain’s cuticles were bleeding and that his hands were shaking.

  “Yes, sir, that’s about the size of it. You can see for yourself we got every one of them, with the possible exception of Boeth, right where we want them. And when we get our hands on this Sweet Reason character, we’ll have more on him than unlawful posting of personal messages or inciting — we’ll get him for mutiny.”

  Jones shook his head regretfully. “This is the last thing in the world —” he began, “— the last thing in the world I wanted, XO. You know that. Dealing with a mutiny inevitably taints all the officers in the same command no matter how loyal they are. Wherever we go after this, they’ll be whispering, ‘He was on the Ebersole.’ But painful as it may be, I’ve got to do my duty.” A smile inched its way onto the Captain’s face. “Of course,” he added, “there will be compensations,” and he closed his eyes and saw himself on the quarterdeck of a man-o’-war, saw the mutineers spreadeagled on the shrouds below him, saw himself nod once, saw Proper raise the cat behind his ear and bring it down with a “phhhhit” across the bare vertebrae of Ensign Joyce. Seeing it all, the smile spread across the Captain’s face in all its glory now.

  “Yes, compensations,” Jones said, opening his eyes.

  Once he saw which way the wind was blowing, the XO normally would have run before it. Instead he turned to Proper. “Would you mind,” he said, indicating the door with his head. “I want a word with the Captain.”

  When the door clicked closed, the XO turned back to Jones. “Captain, I think you know that I share your dedication to duty one hundred percent. But the question, as I see it, is, what is duty in this case? Of course, we can draw up charges and specifications against these men —”

  “I’m not sure I understand —”

  “Captain, you and I are professionals. With us duty has always come before everything — before our families, before our personal likes and dislikes, before you name it — even when doing our duty would hurt our own chances for promotion. Neither of us, it goes without saying, would shrink from doing our duty for personal motives. But I think there is another duty, a larger duty —”

  Jones leaned forward. “Stop beating around the bush, XO.”

  The Executive Officer took a gulp of air. “Captain, you know as well as I do that when the balloon goes up, the United States is obligated by treaty to come to the assistance of forty-two separate nations around the face of the globe. And we have strong moral obligations to another two dozen or so. What’s the key to fulfilling these obligations? I’ll tell you what the key is, Captain. The key is seapower. To get down to the nitty gritty, what I’m saying is that we can’t report this mutiny because it will undermine confidence in the U.S. Navy and, ultimately, in the United States itself. My god, if it becomes common knowledge that one of the greyhounds of the sea failed to do its duty — more than failed, but mutinied in the face of the enemy — the Ruskies will start poking their bows right smack into our sea lanes, right smack into Norfolk Harbor maybe.” Having planted the bait, the XO tugged gently at the line. “I know what I’m asking is the harder course to follow, Captain —”

  “You’re asking the impossible, XO — you’re asking me to let these” — Jones racked his brain for the right word — “these — ” He couldn’t find it.

  “I’m asking you to weigh which is more important, Captain — the fate of a few bleeding-heart yellowbellies or the credibility of the United States of America.”

  Jones’s teeth gnawed on a nail. “I have to hand it to you, XO — you think of all the angles,” he said. “But I don’t see how we can simply ignore what’s happened. What the hell would I put in my action report to Admiral Haydens?”

  The XO pondered the problem. “I suppose,” he said finally, “you could always tell him what he wants to hear.”

  The Captain’s Batteries Run Down

  The Poet expected the worst when he learned the Captain wanted to see him.

  “About what?” Joyce asked Tevepaugh, who brought the summons.

  “Search me,” said Tevepaugh. “He just said for you to bring your message blanks.”

  “Tevepaugh says you want to see me,” the Poet said a few minutes later.

  The Captain was sitting with his back to the door, hunched over his desk, writing. He was wearing a dark blue terrycloth bathrobe with the letters “CO” stenciled on the back and a “Swift and Sure” emblem under the letters. “With you in a second,” he said. For the next few minutes the only sound in the cabin came from the Captain’s felt-tip pen — soft brush strokes underlining sentences. Finally Jones turned around.

  “Come in — close the door behind you. I see you have your message pad, eh? Good. Good. I want you to encode this and send it off to Admiral Haydens. You’ll have trouble making out my handwriting so I’ll read it to you.” Jones scanned what he had written, reached for his pen and changed another word, looked at it for a moment and then restored the original. Again the Poet heard the brushing of the felt tip.

  “All right, here we go. ‘From Commander Eugene Ebersole. Action report follows. Complying with Op Order three seven charlie romeo, fired one hundred eighty-six rounds of VT frag at —— —— ——. Damaged pilings and roadway of bridge straddling —— —— River. Destroyed four armored personnel carriers, twelve trucks, a barrack compound and a fuel oil storage facility. Enemy casualties estimated at two hundred fifty-five.’ ” Jones looked up. “You have that, Mister Joyce?”

  In a toneless voice Joyce read the message back again, ending with “Enemy casualties estimated at two hundred fifty-five.” Then it struck him. “But that’s the number of men on board the Ebersole!”

  “Is it, Mister Joyce?”

  “You know it is,” the Poet said. “You’re trying to tell me something.”

  “I could never tell you anything,” the Captain said. “You know why? Because I’m professional navy and you’re professional civilian. And professional navy has no language in common with professional civilian. I went to sea when I was seventeen, Mister Joyce. I traded a sea of wheat for a sea of water. You wouldn’t understand when I say I’ve never regretted it.”

  “I realize there are pleasures in going to sea,” the Poet conceded. “The sunrises —”

  Jones laughed out loud. “Sunrises! I’ve seen the sun rise so many times in my life, Mister Joyce, it’s become an everyday occurrence.”

  The Poet was suddenly very moved. “I’m sorry —”

  “Don’t be sorry, Mister Joyce. Whatever you do, don’t be sorry. The professional navy doesn’t need sympathy from a professional civilian. I’m telling you the facts of navy life, that’s all. If I had a choice I’d want you to understand rather than not understand, but I don’t hold out much hope for you.”

  “I’d like —” the Poet began, but the Captain interrupted.

  “I made my friends by the time I was seventeen and spent the rest of my life losing them. The navy ruined my friendships, my family — my wife divorced me twelve years ago because I couldn’t get a shore assignment. I haven’t seen my sons in three years.”

  “But why did you stick it out?”

  “Because,” Jones said — his eyes fell on the barbed-wire collection on the bulkhead — ‘because it didn’t seem as if there was anything left after the war except my country and my career.”

  “Those are two different things, Captain.”

  “That’s a professional civilian point of view, Mister Joyce. I’ve always found them to be the same thing, my country and my career. If I serve one, I serve the other.”

  The Poet and the Captain looked at each other for a long moment, looked at each other squarely in the eye. “But you used the number two hundred fifty-five,” Joyce said finally.

  The Captain’s gaze fell away now and
he began talking in short sentences, as if the conversation was a verbal telegram to be paid for by the word. “Can’t cry over spilt milk.”

  “That’s not so, Captain — you can cry over spilt milk,” Joyce said ardently. “You’ve got to cry over spilt milk.”

  Jones shook his head. “Never. In my book even a lump in the throat is a luxury.”

  “My God,” said the Poet emotionally.

  “Perhaps,” said Jones as if it fitted into the conversation. He picked up the flashlight on his desk and absentmindedly toyed with it, trying to touch things across the room with the beam. But it was blotted out by the daylight pouring through the porthole.

  “Batteries run down,” Jones added thoughtfully, and he fought back the small lump that rose to his throat.

  The Poet Gets an Apology

  “You mean you sent it!”

  “Sure I sent it — it was that or a general court-martial for every one of us.”

  “Not for me it wasn’t. Jesus, all I know is I turned around and saw someone laying into you, so I laid into him. That happens to be the truth. They can’t convict you for defending an officer.”

  “Now who’s innocent,” the Poet said. “You’re dreaming if you think that’ll stand up in court. My God, when they’re finished with you it’ll look as if you organized the whole thing.” Joyce turned to an imaginary court-martial. “With your permission, Mister President, the prosecution would like to offer in evidence a newspaper clipping marked ‘Exhibit A,’ which shows the defendant” — the Poet leveled an accusing finger at Boeth — “being dragged away from an antiwar demonstration after kicking an officer of the law in the balls.”

  “It was the groin.”

  “Groin then. Kicking an officer of the law in the groin.”

  Sitting on the deck, his back against another bank of computers, Boeth laughed nervously. “Well, the fact is I didn’t have the vaguest idea what was going on. How was I to know you’d pull a stunt like that?” Boeth shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Maybe you’re right. This way we’re off the hook and so is he. If they ever investigated a mutiny, they’d find out all about the junk we sank and the plane we cut in half and how he thought we’d been hit by shore fire when the Plexiglas shattered on the bridge.”