The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  More silence. And for the six weeks leading up to deployment day, no direct attacks: just this sad silence, exacerbated by his long days on the ship, the pressures of taking over a new department, learning all the new systems, twenty-four-hour duty days every fourth day, the macabre mechanics of the predeployment updating of wills, powers of attorney, briefings on survivor benefits.

  He realized now that he had left San Diego subconsciously harboring some grave reservations, a fear almost, of what changes his wife might have been going through in those frantic final weeks before deployment.

  In their outings with Fox and Tizzy Hudson, Brian had often wondered about the Hudsons’ entirely relaxed attitude toward the upcoming deployment. Both of them seemed to be almost looking forward to the deployment, as if it would provide an interlude for them to resume temporarily their single ways. That was not Brian’s idea of a marriage, but he was uncertain if Maddy shared his opinion of the Hudsons. But now that the pressure cooker was over, the ship finally on her way, and the days counting off toward homecoming, maybe she had leveled off. He read the letter again, especially the last paragraph. Yeah. It was going to be okay. He would write her back tonight, tell her about Sea Dragon. He wasn’t sure whether or not to tell her about the drug problems.

  He’d have to think about that.

  Rocky arranged to run into Bullet up on the boat decks just after sunset. Several other small clumps of men were either inhaling some fresh air or smoking a last cigarette topside before going below, so the sight of two first class lounging by the lifelines, shooting the shit, was unremarkable. Even so, both first class had taken the effort to make their encounter look entirely casual.

  Everyone in the crew was still trading rumors about the Sea Dragon op and what had happened to Berkeley.

  “You believe that asshole Gafiagher?” muttered Rocky.

  “Boy, a dumb ass, what he is.” Bullet looked off into the dark and took a final drag on his cigarette. The brief red glow momentarily illuminated his dark-skinned features, which had begun to dissolve in the darkness.

  He adjusted the heavy electrician’s tool belt around his waist; Bullet was never without his tools, in case GQ went down and he had to scramble to his repair party GQ station.

  “Fucking snipes,” Rocky said. “It’s stunts like that bring the gorillas out. Jackson is going around like he’s ready to arrest the whole crew.

  We don’t need this kind of heat.”

  “You wanna see heat, go catch Louie Jesus. Way I be hearin’ it, that snipe is holed up in Two Firehouse ‘cause LJM say he gonna fuck him up.”

  “He can be my guest. I heard that the admiral sent some four-striper up here to check out the whole deal; word is that they heard there was dope involved. Guy was in with the Old Man for an hour and a half. Next thing you know, there’ll be some kind of fucking investigation.”

  Bullet nodded slowly, pitching the butt out over the side with a flick of his long fingers. Then he turned to look at Rocky.

  “You gotta be cool, Rockheart. This Old Man, he ain’t gonna do nothin’ ‘bout no dope. Be steppin’ in his own shit, he do that. B’sides, he don’t believe in no dope, anyways. Uuh-huh. What we gotta be lookin’ out for’s them chiefs, Jackson and Martinez. One a my ‘sociates, he hear Jackson sayin’ he tired of bustin’ no-count dopers, he wantin’ to find the main man, shut the whole fuckin’ thing down. Thass what we gotta be watchin’ out for, not no admiral’s staff man.”

  “What do you think Jackson actually knows?”

  Bullet was silent for a minute. Rocky often wondered about Bullet. Each had enough on the other to bring him down, so there was a nice balance there, what the wise guys called a lock. But there was always the question of what Bullet would do if he was caught and then offered a deal to finger Rocky. Rocky had been around him long enough to know that Bullet played the dumb street black when he talked to whites, but Rocky had seen the books lining Bullet’s rack and heard him speak to other blacks in an entirely different dialect, one that revealed education and intelligence. Rocky kept his own counsel. The first class were not friends.

  “I doan know what he know. You see the man more’n me. He doan act like he’s onto my game, but there ain’t no way a-tellin’. He do a lot of sneakin’ around, plays the Dick Tracy bit, but maybe he just crazy.”

  Rocky stroked his beard before replying. “If Jackson really wants to dig, he’s going to start at the bottom and work his way up the chain by making deals with anyone he catches, just like the narcs. What’s to keep the customers from fingering one of your guys?”

  Bullet grinned, a flash of white teeth in the darkness.

  “Way it is, my fish is all white boys. We let them white boys know, something’ go down and they go runnin’ they mouth, buncha the brothers gonna be on they honky asses, bloods gonna come around, fuck ‘em up.

  They’s s’posed to say they brought the shit with ‘em, thass all.

  Ain’t no way to prove different.”

  “I suppose that oughta do it.”

  “Better’n that,” Bullet continued. “This XO, he doan wanna know nothin’ about no organization. Shit like that gets out, command’s gonna look bad. Uuh-huh. He just send fuckin’ King Kong around, kick some ass and take some names when somebody fucks up.

  S’why Gallagher hidin’ out in the tool crib? Man ain’t gonna take no chances, go runnin’ his mouth when he hidin’ out and they’s nobody asking’.”

  “Yeah, well, I know that’s the way it’s been,” Rocky said, looking around the darkened boat deck to make sure no one had moved near enough to overhear them.

  “But I’m not so sure now. For instance, I hear this new Weapons officer’s making noises like he wants to get into it. Like he thinks there ought to be a full-scale investigation of what’s going down, mast cases, the whole bit.”

  “Thass something’ you know, or something’ you been hearin’?”

  Rocky shrugged. “I saw the chief engineer and Cunt Austin up in Combat after they had to go see this four striper from the staff. Then they called for Holcomb. The other two looked like they were sweating bullets over what the new guy might be saying in the Old Man’s cabin. I heard Austin say he hoped to shit that Holcomb wasn’t going to queer the deal.

  That’s why I thought there might be something new going down.”

  “Shee-it, you just guessin’.”

  “Yeah, shit, it’s just scuttlebutt. The officers talk up in Combat; I hear some things.”

  “Bet you do, you being’ Mr. A-J-Squared Away an’ all,” Bullet said, tapping Rocky’s MAA badge with his fingernail.

  Rocky grinned. “Yeah, well, you gotta admit, it isn’t bad cover. Jackson tells me shit in the MAA office, I gotta work real hard to keep a straight face.”

  “Awright, then. Way I see it, we cool.”

  “And you think Gallagher’s going to keep his mouth shut?”

  “Shee-it. That Injun ain’t lookin’ for that dumb ass for no conversation, man. How’s he gonna talk, Injun’s steel toe boot in his mouth? I gotta boogie. Be cool.”

  Rocky laughed as Bullet sauntered away into the shadows.

  He looked around again and found himself alone on the boat decks. The night sky was moonless and overcast and only the occasional slap of a wave along the ship’s side indicated that they were even under way. The atmosphere remained hot and muggy, the smell of stale air, dirty laundry, cigarette smoke, and steam machinery brought topside by the exhaust vents overpowering the salt-air smell of the sea.

  He had watched with a good many of the crew when the helo came for the Berkeley’s body bags. Fuckin’ shame, the ship getting hit like that. He had heard the scuttlebutt about the crew in Berkeley blaming the crew in Hood for the whole thing, but that was just bullshit.

  Hell, that round had Berkeley’s name on it, that was all.

  This shit with Gallagher had nothing to do with nothing.

  Guy was dumb enough to do dope at GQ, he, Rocky, wouldn’t mind if that
bosun busted him up in little pieces.

  Rocky suddenly wished again for a cigarette, which surprised him. But he had to make sure his own backfield was still clear. He walked over toward the port side to the hatch leading below. Time to talk to Garlic.

  Commissaryman First Class Wolcezjarski, nicknamed

  “Garlic,” surveyed his kingdom from the doorway to the mess decks’ office. He was a very fat man whose huge paunch billowed out from under his apron strings in a doughy mass that clearly proclaimed his cook’s rating.

  He wore soiled white cotton trousers, a white T-shirt, and a stained white apron. The front of his T-shirt was sweat-soaked, revealing a coiled mass of black hair on his large belly. His thinning gray hair lay in flat, sweaty strands on his large head. He had tiny ears and a flushed, heavily larded face with multiple chins, and his close-set dark gray eyes, framed in fat rolls, completed a piggish expression of contemptuous suspicion, accentuated by a cigarette butt dangling perpetually from the right side of his mouth. The rest of him, the huge forearms, massive shoulders, and pawlike hands, revealed that Garlic was also a very powerful man.

  Garlic was forty-two, a permanent petty officer first class who would never make chief. He had acquired his nickname from his propensity to put garlic into very nearly everything he cooked. When he had first reported aboard, he had made a small reputation for improving the desperately bland cooking of the chief commissaryman he replaced. But when garlic began to show up in the morning’s scrambled eggs and hash browns, in the freshly baked bread, on the toast, and in almost every entree item served for lunch and supper, a muttering chorus of complaints had begun. Garlic-flavored ice cream from the ship’s ice cream machine precipitated a full-scale revolt, causing the exec to have a word with Lieutenant Hatcher, the Supply officer, who told Wplcezjarski to eighty-six the garlic, at least until the noise died down. Mr. Hatcher happened to enjoy garlic in his food, so there had been no hint of a real ass-chewing.

  But the nickname stuck, mostly because it was easier to pronounce Garlic than Wolcezjarski.

  Garlic scowled at two mess cooks who were completing the sweep-down after the noon meal. His glower produced a perceptible increase in broom movement.

  Garlic was both the senior cook in John Bell Hood and also the mess decks master-at-arms. This latter role meant he was king of the twenty-one mess cooks, all junior enlisted men, required to spend their first ninety days in the ship doing the Navy’s version of KP. Mess cooks lived in fear of Garlic because he had the power to keep them on past their normal ninety-day tours if they did not perform to his expectations, and it was made clear to each of them that Garlic was a man who enjoyed this power. Under the outward guise of high standards of cleanliness and sanitation, Garlic made their lives miserable in a variety of ways, and there were a few mess cooks who were now going on four months.

  While the officers and the chiefs had separate messes in the wardroom and the chiefs’ quarters, respectively, the rest of the crew, from the first class on down, ate on the mess decks. The largest open compartment in the ship, the mess decks seated up to seventy-two men at closely spaced four-man tables. The chow line, on the port side, was a combination stainless-steel serving bar and steam line that separated the mess decks from the galley proper. At one end of the chow line were the twenty-five-gallon coffee urns from which everyone in the ship could draw coffee twenty-four hours a day. In addition to serving four meals a day to 300 men, the mess decks doubled as a training area during the day between meal hours, served as the crew’s movie theater after the evening meal, and was a place for the night owls to congregate after taps to write letters or just hang out. The fact that the entire enlisted crew gathered there at least three times a day made the mess decks the focal point for the daily supply of rumors generated in the ship. It was a standing joke in the wardroom that any really good rumor had to originate with the port butter-cutter on the mess decks. If that was the source, it had to be true.

  Since the space was in use for all but the wee hours of the morning, the mess cooks had a continuous cleaning job on their hands, and it was Garlic’s job to crack the whip. After every meal, the tables had to be cleaned with hot soapy water and the tiled deck swept, swabbed, and then buffed up with a floor polisher. The executive officer conducted a formal inspection of the galley and mess decks every day. If they were not spotless, he would share his thinking with Mr. Hatcher, who in turn would generously share the experience with Garlic. This was a hassle Garlic did not need, and thus the mess cooks were subject to a great deal of encouragement and exhortation.

  “Bronspn! Refoe!” Garlic yelled. “Do that area again, only this time get all that shit out from under them tables!

  You can’t buff fuckin’ tiles with dry cereal on the fuckin’ deck, you fuckin’ idiots. Goddamnit, you want permanent assignment to mess-crankin’? Hanh?”

  Rocky walked into the mess decks from the main after passageway as the two mess cooks scrambled to retrace their sweeping paths, banging the push brooms noisily against the support columns of the steel tables to show their sincerity. Garlic shook his head in disgust at their total lack of energy, initiative, and professionalism.

  “Them sonsabitches are gonna be mess-crankin’ until we get back to fuckin’ Dago, they keep fuckin’ off like this,” he grumbled to Rockheart, who had stopped to fill his coffee mug.

  “Sounds fair to me,” Rocky replied, eyeing the coffee suspiciously. He thought he had seen a lump.

  Garlic grinned. “Fuck fair; I may keep ‘em here, anyway.” He swept his eyes around the mess decks to make sure there were no ears nearby. “So,”

  he said, lowering his voice even though the mess cooks had moved their sweeping effort to the other side of the mess decks, “you all set for the first hump?”

  Rocky nodded, stirring sugar into the coffee with a wooden stir stick while he took his own look around the space before examining the coffee again. Not only a lump but a moving lump. A large bald man known to everyone in the ship as Poppa Steiner ambled through the space and headed into the galley. Steiner, an elderly commissaryman, was a Pennsylvania Dutchman with a strong accent. He was the night baker, who, as the name implied, stayed up most of the night making bread, rolls, and pies for the following day. He would then sleep for most of the day, resurrecting himself around midafter noon to do it all again. Rocky snapped the stir stick in two.

  “Got plenty of product and no lack of demand,” he said. “We ought to do all right this cruise.”

  “That’s what I wanta hear. Between you dealin’ and me sharkin’, we’ll make all that bread rise a coupla times.”

  Rocky looked around again before replying. There was no one but the mess cooks on the mess decks and the galley was empty except for Steiner, who had begun to rattle pans.

  “I’m a little worried about some of the snipes,” Rocky said. “Some of those bozos don’t use much sense as to when they blow their weed,” he added, throwing the stir stick’s pieces into a large GI can at the end of the chow line.

  “If they had a fuckin’ brain, they wouldn’t be snipes in the first place—or doin’ dope. You say something’ to Bullet?”

  “Yeah, but he isn’t going to get any closer to ‘em than he has to. It isn’t like he can go playing career counselor to the customers, you know? Calls ‘em fish.” Rocky shook his head. “It’s just that it would be so fuckin’ easy if they just were a little more discreet.”

  “Discreet, my ass. There’s a reason they call it dope, remember?”

  Rocky grinned. Garlic fulfilled the role of banker.

  Rocky and Bullet invested their individual cash hoards with Garlic, who was the ship’s loan shark. Garlic loaned cash to the ship’s liberty hounds, gamblers, and cardplayers at straight six-for-five interest, payable on the next payday. Paydays came every two weeks, so if there was a problem, Garlic had time to work on it, which was a facet of life he enjoyed as much as he enjoyed tormenting the mess cooks. But he rarely had real trouble; his regulars
knew better than to mess with him, and besides, they needed his services.

  Everyone knew that the loan-sharking aboard ship was, of course, illegal, but in the pantheon of shipboard crime nowhere near as dangerous or odious as drug dealing. Every ship had at least one loan shark, who usually operated with the tacit permission of the chiefs.

  The chiefs let him ride because sometimes even chiefs needed some spare cash, the difference being that the chiefs did not pay interest, in return for letting the loan shark operate. The connection between the loan shark and any drug money going around the ship was not generally known.

  “You resupply in Subic?” Garlic asked.

  “No. I’m pretty well stocked, and there was no liberty, anyway. Be too dangerous to put a chit in to go see the people I have to see. First port visit, I’ll go see some mamasans out in Olongapo, refill my stash.

  It’s no big deal.”

  ” ‘No biggee in the PI,’ ” intoned Garlic in a singsong parody of Filipino pidgin.

  Rocky looked around again. “Yeah, but that fucking Chief Jackson, he’s starting to take the drug scene here personally.”

  “Shit, Jackson suspects everybody,” Garlic said.

  “Guy’s a fuckin’ paranoid. Black guy tryin’ to be a white guy. I keep waitin’ to see him with a magnifying glass and one a them funny hats.

  But I’ll tell ya who is startin’ to be a problem, and that’s that fuckin’ Martinez. After this Gallagher shit, I heard he put the word out that he’s gonna start kickin’ some serious ass, and I don’t mean just a fall down a ladder. He gets close to our organization, we might have to do something’ about that.”