Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  Mowrey cursed the manufacturers of the manila line and ordered chain to be rigged. All day it went on. The men were remarkably willing as they rigged heavy chain with bleeding hands, and you had to admire Mowrey’s refusal to give up even when the trawler had strained against the cable for hours without the slightest success.

  “We’re going to get her,” Mowrey croaked, wearily sitting on one of the ready boxes. “If we keep taking a strain on her, something’s got to give sooner or later.”

  Finally something did give. The cable jumped off the forecastle of the destroyer, and when they winched it in, creating a wild tangle on the well deck, they discovered that they had actually torn a poorly welded bollard off the deck of the warship. This evidence of the power of the trawler Mowrey apparently regarded as a triumph. Paul thought he might be content with that, but after more signals had been exchanged, Mowrey ordered the whaleboat to get a line from the destroyer and start the whole operation again.

  The slower the men moved the more Mowrey bawled at them, and perhaps through some divine intervention, he soon began to lose his voice. His hoarse bark gradually subsided to a croak and finally there was no more than a breathy hissing when he moved his lips.

  “Come on, skipper,” Paul said. “You better come in and warm up. The men are worn out. We can try again tomorrow.”

  To Paul’s surprise and relief, the old man nodded weary assent. “Anchor her,” he said. “I’m going to turn in.”

  After making sure that the ship was secure for the night, Paul fell into a sound sleep. He was awakened only a short time later with the sensation of being choked. While trying to shake his shoulder, Mowrey’s hand had blundered to his neck.

  “Get up, goddamn it!” Mowrey was croaking thickly. “Get up!”

  Paul sat up in confusion, reached up and put on the light over his bunk. Mowrey, dressed only in his long woollen underwear, was leaning over him. With his white stubble of beard, his red eyes and his swollen face, he would have looked terrible even if he had not for the first time in Paul’s sight neglected to put in his false teeth.

  “What’s the matter?” Paul gasped.

  “Get up! Got to talk to you. Important, very important!”

  Because of his lack of teeth, Mowrey lisped. A lisping Mowrey!

  Paul climbed out of his bunk and sat at the wardroom table, glad that he had not taken off his rumpled blue uniform. Mowrey sat across from him and picked up a glass of vile-looking orange liqueur. His eyes were wild.

  “I know how to get that ship off the rocks,” he lisped.

  “How?”

  Mowrey’s expression suddenly turned crafty. “You’re such a hot shot. Can’t you figure it out, Yale?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Under those cliffs there’s always a pile of big boulders that kind of slope down into deep water. She was just set up there on a kind of shelf.”

  “Right.”

  “Only her stern is really fast. There’s no chance of towing her off. She’s aground too hard for that, and they’ve lightened ship all they can. If they leave her there long, she’ll be lost for sure. The first westerly will drive the ice right in here. She’ll be ground to bits. So it’s time for emergency procedures.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like something drastic.” Mowrey’s rheumic eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “After all, there’s nothing to lose.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll blow her off!”

  “Blow her off?”

  “With explosives. Just the right amount.”

  “You’d blow her ass off and sink her right there.”

  “Not if we rigged double collision mats. We could place the charges right under her bilge. We could lift her up and throw her out at the same time.”

  Paul’s mind was suddenly possessed by a vision of the destroyer being sort of popped to safety in one highly controlled explosion. It was beautiful, but whether it could actually work or not, he had no idea.

  “There’s a chance it could work,” Mowrey said. “We ought to take it. The ship is lost anyway. It would be raising the dead.”

  “Of course we’d have to ask them.”

  “Go do it. Now! A westerly often follows a norther. They don’t have much time.”

  “I’ll get Nathan to get them on the blinker light.”

  “No! Go talk to them. You’ve got to see the captain himself. Nobody else can make this decision.”

  As Paul climbed into the whaleboat, his mission seemed almost reasonable, but the closer he came to the destroyer, the crazier it sounded. What was he supposed to say: “I request permission, sir, to put explosives under your bottom and blow you off the rocks”?

  The lieutenant who greeted him as he boarded the destroyer said he could not take him directly to his captain and asked him to have a cup of coffee in the wardroom while he awoke the executive officer. The music had stopped, but the whole ship hummed with auxiliary machinery and it was impossible to think of her as a derelict. His coffee was drawn from the silver tureen by a white-coated black mess steward and was served in a handsome cup with a blue stripe. The cream pitcher and sugar bowl were silver and the teaspoon had a monogram which Paul couldn’t decipher. Soon the executive officer appeared, as immaculate and unruffled as ever. He listened without any visible emotion as Paul described Mowrey’s plan.

  “I’ll have to consult our skipper about this,” he said.

  “My captain wants me to see your skipper if I can.”

  “I’ll see if that’s possible.”

  He disappeared and Paul waited a long time. The mess attendant served him more coffee and asked if he would like a bowl of ice cream. It seemed everyone aboard larger ships asked people from a trawler, like poor relations, if they wanted ice cream. Apparently they were very proud of the stuff. It proved their ships were superior.

  “The captain can see you now,” the lieutenant said, and the sleepy executive officer appeared to escort him.

  The captain’s stateroom was on a higher deck and appeared to Paul to be as luxurious as a penthouse apartment. Acutally, it was a suite, not a stateroom. The captain sat behind a huge metal desk with a lot of chromium trim. It looked to Paul like a Buick. Paul was not sure what he had expected, but this was a very small man, short, thin and almost birdlike. The three gold stripes on his sleeves looked disproportionately large. It was hard to tell his age. His thin, angular face was unlined, but the deep-set eyes were exhausted. He was about half bald. His bushy eyebrows and what hair he had were dark red. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly deep and he had a slight Southern accent. It was also very flat, unnaturally calm, the way actors talk in Western movies.

  “Glad to have you aboard,” he said. “I wish I could welcome you in better circumstances.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  There was a short, somehow embarrassing silence during which the executive officer cleared his throat. The captain certainly did not appear drunk, and there was no odor of booze, but he seemed dazed. Paul wondered what it must be like to have a proud command like this turned suddenly into a disaster.

  “Do you have a plan?” the executive officer said.

  “We think explosives might work,” Paul said, and started to describe Mowrey’s scheme, but the more he got into it, the crazier it sounded.

  There was another long silence during which the captain stared down at his desk so woodenly that Paul wondered whether he had heard.

  “My judgment is that the situation is not yet hopeless enough for such desperate action,” the executive officer, Peckham, said, “and if we did decide to try it I think we should get permission from Washington first.”

  The captain said nothing, gave no indication that he had heard. A tic in his right cheek twitched. After another long silence the executive officer coughed and added, “My recommendation is that we make no decision on this until the salvage tugs get here.”

  “Yes,” the captain finally said without moving his e
yes from his desk. “But I’d like the trawler to stand by. It might help to keep a strain on the towline. We might get an especially high tide. I can’t predict anything around here.”

  The thought of engaging in an apparently eternal and hopeless tow job did not appeal to Paul much, but he said he would bring the captain’s request to his skipper.

  “Thank you,” the captain said with apparent strain. “Thank your captain for all his efforts. I appreciate them very much.”

  The executive officer escorted Paul to the gangway.

  “Would you like some ice cream?” he asked. “Would you like to bring some ice cream to your men?”

  After a moment of hesitation, Paul accepted six gallons of ice cream for his crew, two of chocolate, two vanilla and two strawberry. The navy was certainly the world’s most generous soda fountain.

  Mowrey was waiting for him on the well deck when Paul returned to the Arluk. “Do they go for the idea?” he lisped.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Mowrey said. “The crazy bastards! I could get her off, I know I could!”

  “They won’t let us try, not until the salvage tugs get here, at least.”

  “Jesus, they’ll never make it in time! Haven’t you noticed the wind?”

  Paul had not, but now he saw that while heading into the wind at her anchor, the ship’s bow was heading straight for the mouth of the fjord. The wind was from the west.

  “That will bring the ice in here damn soon,” Mowrey said. “It will grind her to bits.”

  Paul did not believe that the wind would bring the ice in all that fast, but Mowrey was too caught up in his plan of salvation in the face of acute disorder to listen to him.

  “Did you talk to the captain himself?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “But you didn’t explain to him about the wind. Damn it, I’m going in to see him myself! Bring that boat around here.”

  Mowrey, Paul noticed, was wearing nothing but his long woolen underwear under his parka. His teeth were still missing, and he was clutching a square bottle of triple sec in his right hand. The question of how this apparition would be greeted by the formal officers aboard that destroyer defied his imagination.

  “Captain,” he said, “you can’t go over there like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You ought at least to put on some pants, and you better leave the bottle behind.”

  “So I’ve been drinking! But it isn’t my ship that’s on the rocks. I’ve never beached a ship in my life. What the hell do I care what they think?”

  “Your argument might have more … force if you wore pants.”

  “All right, damn it.”

  Mowrey wove across the deck toward his cabin and soon reappeared in uniform and climbed into the boat, almost falling. Boats caught him by the shoulders and helped him. Still holding the bottle, Mowrey sat down heavily. “Now take me to that tin can!”

  “I’ll go with you,” Paul said.

  “You stay here, damn it! I can handle this alone. I don’t need no Yale to hold my hand.”

  The boat was gone for more than an hour. Sitting in the wardroom drinking coffee while he waited, Paul thought he understood the intensity with which Mowrey ached for his dream of “raising the dead” to come true. Undoubtedly the old man knew or sensed that his alcoholism was catching up with him at last and that he had nowhere to go but down. The best he could realistically hope for was to be carried off the ship to a base where there was a good hospital before he got a chance to injure himself or his ship. But now there was this possibility of ending his career literally with a bang. If by ingenuity, skill and daring he saved a five-million-dollar destroyer that had been given up as a total loss, he could return to the base in triumph. No one would criticize him for being a falling-down drunk then. Instead of admonitions, he would recieve letters of commendation, a promotion and orders for some dignified “rest cure” before some cushy assignment at home. With such a climax, his whole checkered career would appear to make sense.

  It was a nice fantasy, but there was little chance it could happen. What navy commander would listen to a raving drunk who wanted to blow up his ship? The only question was whether Mowrey would get back to the Arluk without making enough of a commotion to be reported to Green-Pat.

  Paul was not to discover the answer to this question that night. When the boat finally returned, Mowrey was fast asleep in the bottom of it.

  “What happened?” Paul asked Boats.

  “I don’t know, sir. There was some kind of an argument, and the skipper cussed out all that navy brass but good. He was still yelling at them when we pulled away. Then he sat down and just passed out”

  At least he had left the ship of his own accord. With the help of Boats and Nathan, Paul carried Mowrey to his bunk. The old ice pilot muttered, “Thank you,” as they sat him on his mattress. That was all.

  Paul went to the wardroom to catch a little sleep before going on watch. When he relieved Nathan at four in the morning on the bridge, Nathan stood by the wheel sipping coffee instead of going below.

  “The skipper’s really in trouble,” he said suddenly.

  “What happened?”

  “He woke up about an hour ago and walked out on the wing of the bridge. ‘Ring general quarters,’ he said. When I asked why, he didn’t answer. He just stood there staring at me, and then went back to his cabin. A few minutes later he started singing. ‘One-Eyed Riley.’ I think we really should do something … It would be irresponsible to start off on a long voyage with him. I’m really afraid he’s heading into the last stages—”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Get him to see a doctor. Once the base doctor sees him, he’ll be transferred to a hospital.”

  “I don’t think we could ever get him to go see a doctor. He knows what would happen.”

  “Maybe we could figure out some reason to call a doctor down to the ship.”

  “Maybe … There’s a chance they’d make me skipper, Nathan. Could you live with that?”

  “Sure,” Nathan said. “It would be a hell of a lot better than getting somebody else to yell all the time.”

  “You want to be exec?”

  “I’d like to think about that.”

  There was a thump in the cabin and the voice of Mowrey could be heard croaking, “One-Eyed Riley, One-Eyed Riley!”

  Paul felt a jab in his stomach.

  “The man’s dying,” Nathan said. “I don’t know why people think drunks are funny. If he doesn’t get into a hospital, I doubt if he lasts a month.”

  “I’ll have a doctor come down to the ship to see him as soon as we get back to the base,” Paul said. The only question was how he could get Mowrey to let a doctor see him. The old man would lock himself into his cabin, he was sure, the moment he knew a medical man was aboard.

  CHAPTER 24

  Before the men had finished breakfast aboard the trawler, the destroyer signaled a request that she resume towing, “to keep a strain on the line.” When Paul reported this to Mowrey, the captain groaned. “Tell him to go fuck himself,” he whispered.

  “Captain, I think we have to remember that a navy board of investigation will be looking for scapegoats. We were ordered to give all possible assistance—”

  “I don’t give a shit, I feel awful. Christ, help me up. I got to go to the head.”

  Paul almost had to carry him. When Mowrey crawled back into his bunk, he said, “I don’t know what the hell is happening to me. I’m pissing and shitting fire.”

  “When we get into the base, you can get some help. They have medicines—”

  “I can’t even walk straight anymore. My whole body hurts.”

  “We can get you help.”

  There was a pause before Mowrey said, “You don’t suppose it’s the booze that’s doing it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If the medics say it’s the booze, they’ll cashier me.”

&
nbsp; “You’ve got to get help one way or another.”

  “I don’t care what the hell they do with me, but I hate to leave the ship.”

  Paul’s silence spoke for him.

  “Look, Yale, don’t kid yourself. You’re a smart kid, but you’re no captain. You don’t know enough and you don’t have the balls.”

  “Then I guess they’ll assign another captain.”

  “Hell, they don’t have no more ice pilots. Not for a trawler, anyway …”

  “Captain, do you want the truth from me?”

  “What the hell are you going to say?” Mowrey looked scared.

  “If you don’t get medical help, I think you’re going to die, and I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Shit, I’ve been drinking all my life. It’s that damn sweet booze that did me in. If I had some honest whiskey … Do you think you could find me some …?”

  “I will if you’ll see a doctor.”

  “Well, maybe.…” Mowrey’s expression suddenly turned crafty. “You wouldn’t turn me in, would you? You wouldn’t want your own command bad enough to do that?”

  “I don’t want you to get the DT’s when we’re out in the ice beyond help.”

  “You leave that up to me. I’ve never had the DT’s yet and I never will. You only get them when you quit drinking.”

  “I won’t get you more booze unless you see a doctor.”

  “You think you’re smart, you know a doctor would turn me in—”

  “Maybe he could just give you some medicine.”

  “Listen, no Yale outsmarts me … I know I gave you a good fitness report, but if you turn me in, I’ll turn you in.”

  Paul looked surprised.

  “I’ll report that you stole the ship’s boat, falsely reported it lost, and traded it for booze. They could still find the boat. They wouldn’t get me for it because I’ll say I just found out about it.”

  “I guess we can screw each other if we want,” Paul said.

  “Just don’t get out of line,” Mowrey said.

  Paul returned his stare silently.