Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  “Goddamn it, Yale, where are you going?”

  “I’ll see you aboard ship before long.”

  “Damn your eyes, come back here! Are you stealing my girl?”

  “I’m just helping her home.”

  “Christ, she can get home alone. Come here! I want to talk to you.”

  Paul hesitated.

  “Come here!” Mowrey thundered. “Goddamn it, that’s an order!”

  “Better go,” Hilda said. “Maybe tomorrow.” Letting go of Paul, she staggered toward her little house.

  Mowrey waited, taking frequent sips from his bottle. He was swaying as though he were standing on the deck of a ship in a gale, and sat down in the frozen mud suddenly as Paul approached.

  “Give me a hand, goddamn it,” he said. “Lesson one: don’t take the skipper’s girl. Lesson two: don’t fuck no Danish girls. They make trouble. Stick to the Eskies. There will be plenty of them farther north.”

  They staggered toward the ship. Suddenly they were surrounded by sled dogs. Perhaps sensing the weakness of the stumbling men, they pressed close, snapping viciously, and retreated only a few yards when Paul and Mowrey roared at them. Throwing motions and even clumps of frozen mud hurled in their direction did not break up the circle the dogs formed around them. In a rage, Mowrey charged the lead dog, swinging his bottle. Only then did the dogs slink back to the shadows of the warehouse.

  “You can’t let them know you’re scared,” Mowrey said. “Christ, let’s take a breather. They’ll let us alone now.”

  Clambering to the top of a granite knoll, he sat down and took a sip from his bottle before passing it to Paul. The knoll commanded a view of the wharf, the ship and the harbor beyond, which glowed copper in the sun. A crowd of Eskimos and sailors were milling around on the end of the wharf near the ship. There was a lot of shouting and singing, but at the moment that seemed simply logical to Paul on this night of partying. Mowrey did not seem to notice.

  “Christ, I can’t drink the way I used to,” he said. “When I first came up here, I could drink for weeks without passing out.”

  “When did you first come up here?” Paul asked.

  “Christ, I was on a salt banker when I was just a kid. We fished just a few miles off shore here. We had a man bad hurt and we put in to find a doctor.”

  “Things must have been different then,” Paul said, taking a gulp of whiskey. Somehow the stuff seemed to have lost its kick. It tasted like warm water, but his head was spinning.

  “The Eskies were really Eskies then. Not many fucking Danes around. No fucking laws and regulations.” There was a pause while Mowrey drank and stared out over the iridescent harbor. “I was just a lad the first time,” he said. “Then when I was sixteen, I went in the navy. After the war, the first damn war, they didn’t want me, but when the Coast Guard started to fight the Rummies, they wanted me. I fought Rummies for about five years. You’d catch one, turn him in and then the judge would let him go. The Rummies was all driving Cadillacs, and all I had was a broken-down Ford.”

  “It must have been tough,” Paul said, accepting the bottle.

  “It took me five years to figure it out. Then I quit and got me a Rummy ship. Had friends in the right places and did right well till they killed Prohibition. Then I went fishing again. Came up here and bought cod and furs sometimes. Ran arms down to South America. Had all kinds of rackets, but things got tough, I didn’t know what the hell to do, but then the war started back up again …” Mowrey sighed with apparent relief. “I guess we better get back to the ship,” he said.

  The noise of the Eskimos and sailors making merry at the end of the wharf increased as they approached. Groups of people were singing, dancing, shouting and a few were fighting. Almost all were carrying bottles. In the shadows near piles of stores couples were grappling and it was hard to tell whether they were wrestling or making love. As they reached the fringes of this crowd of more than a hundred celebrants, Mowrey and Paul did a kind of double-take.

  “Jesus Christ, they’re all drunk!” Mowrey said, dropping his own bottle. “Where in hell did they get the booze?”

  “I better check the lazaret,” Paul said, and ran to do so.

  The lock of the liquor locker had been broken off, and no sign of the bottles remained except empty cartons. When Paul went to report this to the captain, he couldn’t find him. Suddenly Mowrey burst out on the gun deck from his cabin.

  “Christ, they took every bottle I had!” he shouted. “I’m dry!”

  There was panic as well as rage in his voice. A few of the men on the wharf stared at him, but the writhing crowd continued to celebrate. From the forecastle Cookie staggered, his tall chef’s hat crumpled on his head.

  “Don’t blame me, captain!” he said. “I tried to stop them. They just broke in and handed out bottles to everyone.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone! They all stole and gave to everyone else. They’re all guilty, every last son of a bitch.”

  “Who has the deck here?” Mowrey roared. “Where’s Farmer and Greenberg?”

  “I think they’re asleep, sir. They tried to stop it, but there wasn’t nothing they could do.”

  “Yale, get those bastards up here,” Mowrey said, his voice suddenly turning dangerously sweet. “Greenberg was the senior officer present. I’ll have to figure out whether to nail that Sheenie’s balls to the mast or send him to Portsmouth for twenty years.”

  Paul hurried to the wardroom. He found Seth and Nathan in their bunks. Seth had his eyes closed, but Nathan was reading a book.

  “The skipper wants you,” Paul said to Nathan. “He’s mad as hell. What in Christ’s name happened?”

  Nathan put down his book and sighed. “After you left with the case of whiskey, I went to sleep and so did Seth. When all the yelling woke us up, they had already broken into the booze and the party was already going full blast. We tried to stop them. No one would even listen. Have you ever tried to stop a crowd of about a hundred drunken Eskimos and sailors?”

  “Why didn’t you call the skipper or me?”

  “He told us not to go ashore,” Seth said, opening one eye. “I figured it was an emergency, so I went up there. The skipper was asleep with a bottle in his hand and you were rolling around on the floor with a fat woman. I said to hell with it and came back to the ship. You were having your fun, so why couldn’t the boys raise a little hell too? There was no way to get the booze away from them anyway except to shoot them. So I figured that we might as well let the thing run its course.”

  “There really wasn’t much we could do,” Nathan said. “As soon as they got their hands on the booze, they were completely out of control.”

  “You better try to explain that to the skipper,” Paul said. “God help you.”

  “I’ll go too,” Seth said. “By God, if he takes me to court, I’ll tell them I figured that what’s good for the captain must be good for the men.”

  Nathan was obviously nervous as he put on his coat to go to the captain, but Seth for the first time looked indignant. Paul followed them to the well deck, where Mowrey was standing, steadying himself with his hand on the cargo boom.

  “Do you call yourselves officers?” he bellowed. “Where the hell were you when all this started?”

  “We was asleep when it started,” Seth said. “And after it started, we couldn’t stop it.”

  “Farmer, you couldn’t make a baby take its thumb out of its mouth. What have you got to say, Mr. Greenberg? You were legally in charge of this ship.”

  “Mr. Farmer told it right,” Nathan said, his voice little above a whisper.

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t stop them? If they disobeyed direct orders, that was mutiny. Did you give direct orders?”

  “I asked them to cut the noise and put the liquor back,” Nathan said. “Most of them didn’t hear me.”

  “To what individuals did you give a direct order?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Nathan replied softly. “It was
a very confused situation.”

  “You don’t know! Obviously you collaborated with this gross breach of discipline.”

  Mowrey slurred these words, but he was beginning to act surprisingly sober.

  “He’s no more guilty than I am,” Seth said. “I figured it was an emergency, captain, so I went up to get you. I found you. You weren’t in no shape to do nothing about it yourself. Bring us to court and that’s what will come out.”

  There was an instant of silence during which Mowrey suddenly smiled, his best sweet smile, and his voice was sweetly reasonable when he finally replied.

  “So, Mr. Farmer, you are something of a sea lawyer,” he almost cooed.

  “Facts is facts, sir. If you’re smart you’ll just let this thing run its course and forget it.”

  “How thoughtful of you to give me advice. Thank you, Mr. Farmer. I know you want to help me to run this ship efficiently. Now, Mr. Greenberg, do you have any advice for me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Schuman, I want you to log what I have to say now. Mr. Farmer and Mr. Greenberg are herewith charged with gross dereliction of duty, negligence, incompetence and insubordination. They are also charged with cooperating with enlisted men, names presently unknown, who breached our cargo and committed grand theft. They are also charged with aiding and abetting a mutiny. Both officers are hereby relieved of all duties. They are ordered to remain in their cabin until our return to a base where they can be transferred ashore for a court martial. Yale, I want that written up in the log right away. Then show it to me … Now Greenberg and Farmer, listen and listen well,” Mowrey said.

  Letting go of the cargo boom, he forced himself to stand very straight. His voice thickened. “You may think you got me by the balls because I went ashore and got drunk. That’s not as bad as letting the whole crew go crazy. When this thing comes to trial, the judge is going to pay attention to just one thing. They don’t have many ice pilots. They got plenty of deadheads like you two. If it’s a question of hanging you two or hanging me, you guess what they’re going to do. Now go to your quarters and stay there till I say to come out. Your food will be brought to you. Dismissed!”

  The two walked silently aft. Mowrey, followed by Paul, climbed to the bridge. Mowrey stood staring at the men ashore, many of whom were still singing and shouting, though others had seen his return and were gathering into subdued little groups.

  “Yale, see if you can find me a member of the black gang sober enough to run the engine. Find Boats and send him to me. If he’s too drunk, get any boatswain’s mate.”

  Among the crowd of people who were sobering up and staring at the ship, Paul found both the chief machinist’s mate and Boats. They ran to the captain. A few moments later the shrill sound of the boatswain’s pipe cut the still air. “Mooring stations,” the boatswain’s mate shouted. “All hands to mooring stations.”

  Perhaps a third of the men on the wharf hurried back to the ship. A third kept on with the drunken singing and shouting and about a third lay in the shadows, passed out or busy with the Eskimo women. Going out on a wing of the bridge with a megaphone, Mowrey said to Paul, “Give one blast of the whistle.”

  The unexpected shriek of the air horn produced instant silence on the wharf.

  “Now hear this,” Mowrey bellowed through the megaphone. “This vessel is going under way and leaving this wharf immediately. All who do not come aboard now will be abandoned here and reported missing without leave. The Danes will lock you up in a warehouse. Garry your mates aboard if you give a damn about them. You’ve got exactly two minutes. Boats, single up the lines.”

  About half the sailors on the wharf ran to leap aboard the ship while the others carried limp bodies to the gangway. The Eskimos suddenly ran. When the entire crew appeared to be aboard, Mowrey said, “Yale, check out every corner of that wharf and see if anybody is left.”

  Paul found one unconscious seaman hidden between two crates of canned goods and had him carried aboard. The last of the Eskimos had fled, and the dock was deserted.

  “All hands seem to be aboard, sir.”

  “Bring the men to quarters and call the muster. Have the men sound off for friends that can’t.”

  This was done. The entire crew was present and accounted for.

  “Yale, do we still have any cargo for this port aboard?” Mowrey asked.

  “It’s all been unloaded, sir,” Paul said after checking with Boats.

  Mowrey spat in the water to observe the direction of the current. “Take in all lines but number two,” he said. He waited impassively on the wing of the bridge while the lines were brought aboard. “Let full rudder. Ahead slow.”

  When the stern swung away from the wharf he said, “Shift your rudder. Stop the engine. Back slow.”

  A crowd of Eskimos now came back to the wharf to watch the departure of the ship. Mowrey gave them three blasts of the whistle and a few clapped their mittened hands.

  Paul had guessed that Mowrey would anchor in the middle of the harbor, but instead he began to thread the intricate channel that led to the sea and the ice pack. Disdaining a broad lead that paralleled the shore, he slowly followed a narrowing channel into the ice floe. Gently he wedged the ship between two icebergs which were slightly larger than the vessel.

  “Finished with the engine,” he said. “Set the morning watch, and everyone else can turn in. Yale, send Cookie to my cabin.”

  Almost immediately Cookie appeared. He had put on a clean apron and a freshly starched hat. Mowrey ushered him into his cabin and shut the door.

  “Cookie,” he said, “I need a drink. They took all of mine. Do you have any left?”

  “Only two bottles, sir.”

  “Bring me one. I’ll pay you back. We’ll get more before long.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Paul did not hear this exchange, but he guessed at its nature when Cookie dashed out and almost immediately reappeared with an awkward package wrapped in newspaper. Mowrey took it and shut the door of his cabin.

  Paul went to the washroom. Seth had gone back to sleep, but Nathan was sitting at the table, writing a letter.

  “Don’t worry,” Paul said with patently false cheer. “This thing will blow over one way or another. I haven’t logged it and I won’t unless he remembers and gives me a direct order.”

  “At least it might get me off this ship. They need ice pilots. Maybe they’ll come to realize that they also need radar specialists. Aboard a ship with radar, I hope.”

  “They’re sure to realize that,” Paul said, and wished he felt as sure as he sounded. If Mowrey wanted to do harm to Seth and Nathan, he probably would succeed. The game, after all, was being played in his ballpark. Paul’s head ached and he felt violently ill. After rushing to the head, he lay down in his bunk, feeling as dizzy as though the ship were in a violent storm. His last thought before sleeping was that he should feel lucky, that probably any man aboard the Nanmak would be glad to change places with him. Or would they …?

  CHAPTER 18

  When Paul woke up, the endless sunlight of an Arctic spring was flooding the wardroom. His watch said it was a little after eight o’clock, and with that oddly continuing disorientation concerning time, he wasn’t sure whether it was morning or evening. Of one thing he was certain: he had the great-grandmother of all hangovers, the symptoms of which included a throbbing headache and a strong sense of impending doom. After the sunlight stabbed his eyes once, he closed them again. Slowly the dismal events of the preceding night came back to him.

  Some of it was still mercifully obscure to him, but the two worst results were clear. Nathan and Seth were “in hack,” confined to their quarters pending a court-martial, and he had been ordered to write the charges against them in the log, a seemingly trivial task which could have dreadful effect, for once an event had been written in the log it could never be forgotten. Feeling sicker and sicker, Paul reviewed what he had learned about logs. There were two of them, a rough log written in penci
l as events took place and signed by each officer of the watch, and a smooth log, a cleaned-up copy of the rough log, which he himself wrote in ink every night. Both were official documents, but the rough log, he had read, was considered the more important when investigations were held. It was against the law to make erasures in the rough log or to delete passages in any way. Every few months both logs were sent to Washington, where they were apparently preserved forever, like the final scrolls of the recording angel himself.

  For these reasons Paul had written nothing in the log about Nathan and Seth, thus disobeying a direct order from his commanding officer. The idea of disobeying Mowrey had never before really occurred seriously to him, and the thought of the old man’s wrath when he reviewed the log, as he did every day, now frankly terrified Paul. Soon, no doubt, he would find himself joining the others in hack, awaiting court-martial. Paul started to sweat, but he suddenly realized that there might be some safety for all of them in numbers. If Mowrey asked Headquarters to court-martial all three of his officers, he himself would look crazy, wouldn’t he?

  And there was more to it than that. A board of investigation would discover that every officer and man aboard the ship had been drunk on that ill-starred, sunny night, except for Nathan and Seth, the only two who were presently being punished. If they were to be disgraced, wouldn’t some action have to be taken against all the enlisted men and petty officers who had broken into the liquor locker and stolen part of the cargo? And Mowrey himself had been drunk when he had taken such drastic action against Nathan and Seth. Was an executive officer wrong in refusing to carry out an order given by a commanding officer who was obviously drunk? How would the fact that he had been drunk himself affect a legal decision?

  Obviously the best thing that Mowrey could do would be to forget the whole episode, wake up and laugh it off. Paul had been counting on him to do that when he neglected to make the entry in the log, but perhaps he had underestimated the vengeful aspect of Mowrey’s character, the unreasoning hatred he had for Nathan and the curious contempt he seemed to have for Seth. If “Mad Mowrey” was really going mad, as he sometimes appeared to be doing, because of his vast consumption of alcohol or the growth of lifelong diseases of the spirit, a board of investigation should in normal circumstances pin most of the blame, at least, on him, but there was nothing exactly normal about this first year of the war. The Coast Guard, Paul realized, was an old-boy network, like the other services. As a mustang, Mowrey had not ranked high in it, but he certainly ranked far above the thousands of incompetent reserve officers whom the old boys were trying to sort out. As Mowrey well knew, the acute shortage of ice pilots gave men who knew the Arctic well a kind of immunity to ordinary rules and regulations. In time of war, anything which worked fast had to be done. The commander of GreenPat probably would not bother to undertake a long investigation of the doings of a trawler’s drunken night in a tiny Greenland village, and he was unlikely to waste the time of his senior officers on the endless procedures of a court-martial which could end only by making everybody look bad. The practical, pragmatic course of action for “Commander GreenPat” was simply to forget all legal charges and transfer the officers whom Mowrey didn’t like to some other unit. If it was necessary to find some rotten assignment for the reserve officers to keep the old ice pilot happy, that could easily be arranged. It might be wise to make an example of reserve officers who made trouble with the old hands, who couldn’t fit into a military organization smoothly. If Nathan and Seth were transferred to some tiny supply depot or weather station deep in the Arctic wastes, they would have no opportunity to complain or to make recriminations. Even in peacetime, any member of the service was by honor and law bound to accept any assignment given to him, wasn’t he?