by Sloan Wilson
“But I’m betting they’ll be overconfident when they see we’re just a trawler.”
Paul wondered whether he too were committing the military sin of overconfidence. No, he knew that the Germans probably had at least one ship bigger than the Arluk waiting up there in the ice, and her armament and fire control undoubtedly were somewhat more sophisticated than a gun barrel lashed on deck. As the northern lights increased the intensity of their throbbing overhead, Paul thought about the Germans mowing down the Nanmak’s boatload of men. He wondered what the captain who had given the order to open fire looked like, and imagined a squat, bald Prussian officer with a monocle. Maybe he wouldn’t look like a movie villain, but someone had given that order to open up the heavy machine guns on helpless men in an open boat. Paul was aware that the Germans stood accused of far worse crimes throughout Europe and Russia, but for him the whole war came into focus with the image of an open boat in a crossfire of machine-gun bullets. The men who had done that were probably only a few hundred miles ahead.
Part III
CHAPTER 31
After having armed and stocked his ship as best he could, Paul felt a kind of exaltation as he sailed toward the battle, but instead of meeting his enemy immediately, he just got stuck in the ice, and all the fierceness drained, leaving him frustrated as a lover whose car stalls on the way to his girl.
As the Arluk approached the end of the fjordlike passage through which she crossed the southern tip of Greenland from the west to the east coast, she encountered more and more ice. Even before she escaped the glittering mountains which appeared to hem her in on all sides, she was forced to push her way through small icebergs that filled the narrow channel. When she finally reached the eastern mouth of the passage it was blocked by rampart after rampart of great ice castles which had been jammed against the coast by an easterly gale and the unrelenting current. Paul finally discovered one narrow lead that twisted around mile-long islands of ice. Before long it petered out. He managed to turn the ship, but he soon discovered that the ice had closed around him, pressing him into a giant trap. Still almost under the shadow of the mountains, he could not budge one damn inch.
The ice is always moving like the hour hand of a clock, he remembered Mowrey saying, and sooner or later the wind will break it up, but now it was September and the danger of being locked in for the winter was real. If the German ship or ships were anywhere near, they too were probably paralyzed, but as long as they could send weather reports, they were still fulfilling their purpose. There was at least a kind of safety in having the enemies locked away from each other, Paul reflected, but there was danger enough in the ice, which could press the Arluk against rocks, as it had the destroyer. Driven by gales at the fringe of the pack, the icebergs could mount each other like great mating beasts, and pile up moving ridges that could crush and bury a ship. Even if a vessel were lucky enough to escape such cataclysms, small icebergs pressed by larger ones in current or wind could crush a hull. Modern icebreakers were built in the shape of an egg to rise above the ice when squeezed, but the trawlers, though strong, were too wall-sided for that.
Such perils were real enough, but now there was little wind and a deathlike peace pervaded the ice pack. Only the clouds above and the birds moved visibly. During this month of September the familiar pattern of nights following days of similar length was reasserted. It was too cold for the men to do much work on deck. After standing their watches, which were hopelessly dull aboard a motionless ship, they listened to radio reports of the battle of Stalingrad, won and lost their meager pay at cards and wrote endless letters, which they dropped in the wardroom mailbox for censoring despite the fact that the mail of course was going nowhere for months.
Every time the plywood mailbox filled up, Paul took it to his cabin and in his capacity of naval censor read it. This minor chore he could have assigned to one of the other officers, but he hoped that the mail would help him to understand the men better. Ever since arriving in Greenland, he had become increasingly aware of a curious fact: although they were all imprisoned together on this tiny ship with few chances to go ashore, the men in the forecastle remained almost strangers to him. One reason, of course, was that enlisted men rarely felt like confiding much to commissioned officers, and especially tried to stay away from the commanding officer as much as possible. Perhaps wisely, the customs of the Coast Guard and navy made the relationship between officers and enlisted men as impersonal as possible. Even the names of the petty officers were rarely heard aboard ship. It was hard for Paul to imagine Guns, Flags, Boats, and Sparks being called anything else. Only in the mail did Guns appear as Ralph D. Higgins, Flags as Patrick Murray, Boats as Maurice Torbot, and Sparks as George Grotsky.
Their names, of course, did not give any great clue to the nature of their personalities, and oddly, neither did their letters. Although a high school diploma was necessary for entering the service, the men of the Arluk were, with few exceptions, even more illiterate than Paul’s own wife. Forbidden by censorship regulations to tell where they were or anything about the operations of the ship, and aware that their skipper would read their letters, they obviously faced difficulties when they took pen in hand, but the urge to communicate with wives, mothers and sweethearts drove them to fill, over the months, hundreds of pages. They told jokes, often followed by “ha ha” in parentheses; they marveled at the good food aboard the trawler; they said “I miss you” over and over again, but rarely, “I love you.” These tough men often finished with rows of X’s for kisses. There was a sweetness about most of the letters, which tried primarily to stop the recipients from worrying. The men never complained about anything except boredom. Children at a summer camp might have mailed similar letters, for similar reasons.
Paul couldn’t get over the fact that these gentle outpourings came from the rough, raunchy men who turned the air in the forecastle blue every time they opened their mouths. Only Sparks broke the pattern. His letters were all spelled right, were written in a firm neat hand, and were so unabashedly and imaginatively pornographic that Paul was embarrassed to find himself looking forward to reading them. Obscenity was forbidden by the censorship rules, but when Paul asked Nathan whether they should have a talk with the radioman, Nathan laughed and said that even the United States government shouldn’t have a right to stop a man from talking about sex with his wife or girl.
Guns, whose wife had left him, and who did more sexual boasting than any other man aboard the ship, sent identical letters to a dozen girls in Boston and New York. These notes were short and to the point. They said: “Dearest Sally, (or Betty or Babs or Lilly), I miss you and can hardly wait to see you. I don’t think about nobody but you. I’m saving my pay to blow with you when I get home. Don’t forget me—Ralphie.”
It was impossible for Paul to imagine anyone calling Guns, the man whose greatest boast was that he had fucked a bear, Ralphie. Somehow the mail made the personalities of the enlisted men in the forecastle more mysterious to him than ever. Once he found himself wondering whether his isolation from the men, his inability to think of them as individuals, was in part, at least, a personal problem … even at college he’d had no close personal friends. Nathan, he observed, talked to the men a lot—he had assumed the role of ship’s doctor, and to some degree, ship’s psychiatrist. In Nathan’s deep-set eyes there was always sympathy, a quality that Paul was occasionally aware of lacking. But Nathan, of course, was not the captain. Paul found it convenient to forget that he had been no closer to the men when he was executive officer.
As they stayed stuck in the ice day after day the men became so lethargic that it was hard to get them to keep their quarters clean, and they were increasingly quarrelsome. When Paul lectured the crew and assigned small punishments for small offenses, he felt himself becoming more and more walled off from them. How could one really sympathize with grown men who in the face of great danger fought over the possession of a particularly soft mattress, stole clothes from each other, and kept having fistfights? How c
ould men who endured great hardship and genuine peril month after month, and who were almost invariably skillful at their jobs, be so damned childish? Well, maybe because they didn’t have his private quarters. Possessions became the man …
Often, Paul was aware, the men hated him. When he lined them up on the well deck to lecture them about cleanliness, when he assigned seamen to galley duty, when he punished them for fighting, he sometimes suspected that they would like to kill him. At other times, when he handled the ship well in ice, when he allowed the men to steal whatever they wanted from the wrecked destroyer or arranged a beerbust for them ashore, they almost idolized him. Which also bothered him. Mowrey often had said that a good skipper never gives a damn what the crew thinks about him, but Paul suspected that at heart the ice pilot had considered himself an actor and the crew his audience. He himself, he was embarrassed to find, felt marvelous when the men showed approval of him, and depressed when they showed contempt. One reason he kept to himself a great deal, as almost all commanding officers since the beginning of ships had done, was that he knew the nature of his job would often cause the men to hate him or love him unreasonably, which excess of emotion made him uncomfortable when he was with them.
A few of the men Paul regarded as at least equals because of their devotion to their work and their knowledge of their specialties. Cantankerous and obsequious as he was, Cookie almost never stopped working and sweating in his tiny hot galley, and obviously cared as much about preparing good food for the crew as he had for the patrons of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Paul and everyone else aboard regarded him simply as a miracle. Guns and the young seaman Blake had a strange passion for weapons that seemed unhealthy to Paul but a necessity now. Sparks, Flags, Boats, and Chief Banes all knew much more about their specialties than Paul did and had such pride in their work that they never needed supervision, except when they got into arguments with each other.
The days of idleness in the ice, though, increased all Paul’s problems in dealing with the men. The crew soon became so edgy that his chief job appeared to be acting as judge and jury. No seaman who was assigned to help Cookie in the galley lasted more than a few days before being put on report for gross insubordination and every other crime that the fertile imagination of the old chef could invent. A running battle developed between Boats, the red-haired chief boatswain’s mate, and Guns. It started when Boats began complaining about the way Guns lashed the new machine guns to the deck, and broke out again each time the two men met in a narrow passageway or at a ladder. Neither would get out of the way of the other. When Paul settled this by reminding Guns that Boats was, after all, a chief petty officer, Boats insisted that he did not want to pull rank, and that Guns just better learn to stay out of his way if he didn’t want to get flattened. They asked to have it out bare-fisted on the well deck and quieted down only when Paul reminded them that the Germans would be delighted to hear that two of the best men of the Arluk were intent upon demolishing each other.
Paul found it hard to convince the crew that even when the ship was locked in the ice, the men on watch had to remain alert. As the temperature sank below zero, they huddled in the pilothouse or kept ducking into the forecastle for coffee. One cold midnight Paul emerged from his cabin to find no one on deck, and the two men in the pilothouse were dozing so peacefully that they started when he shouted at them. Calling all hands to quarters on the well deck immediately, he gave them a lecture about the possibility of rapid changes in the weather and of discovering the presence of the enemy nearby. Technically the penalty of going to sleep on watch was death, according to the articles of war, he reminded them. Since he did not want to go by the book quite so strictly, he would from now on sentence any man found asleep on watch or away from his station to a milder penalty: finishing his watch in the crow’s nest, no matter how cold it was.
The men listened to this sullenly, their anger visible in increased snorts of steam blown from the noses and mouth. Three days later their hostility increased when Paul told them that the forecastle smelled and that all bedding and clothes must be washed in tubs made out of oil drums in the engineroom, and hung out to air.
“Captain Mowrey didn’t want us to hang nothing out on deck,” Boats said angrily.
“Captain Mowrey is not now in command of this ship,” Paul replied, turned and walked to his cabin with his heels hitting the deck as sharply as those of the old ice pilot. Two hours later he found blankets hung over every gun and had to have them rearranged to enable the ship to remain ready for action.
The crew of a ship is as fickle as any woman, Paul realized as he received nothing but stony glances during the next week. He spent most of his time alone in his cabin devising complex strategies for beating the Germans if he ever got near them. Soon his plans for dodging behind icebergs, sowing his wake with depth charges rigged as mines if the Germans pursued him, or luring the enemy close by pretending to give up began to seem like boyhood dreams of glory. Probably they would be locked in the ice until spring, and if they ever did encounter a German, they probably would be sunk long before they got close enough to use a five-inch gun that couldn’t even be trained or pointed. Since this version of reality was too painful to contemplate for long, Paul, like most of the other men aboard the ship, lay for hours thinking of the good times with his wife and the few other women he had known. It was horrifying to realize that he could not really remember anymore how a woman’s body felt. He dreamed of spending weeks in bed with Sylvia when and if he ever got home, but he was uneasily aware that it wouldn’t work out that way. Months of celibacy were simply slices of life that were lost, and there never would be any way he could make up for them. Thoughts of the nights his brother must be spending after training pilots in South Carolina plagued him. The soft Southern air would be full of the fragrance of blossoms. Debonair in the uniform of an army air force pilot, Bill would tour the bars of the nearest town, and as he had written in his letter, the girls in their eagerness would almost knock him down. Big-bosomed girls in tight white sweaters, girls with low necklines that showed a gold locket nestling between their tanned breasts, willow-waisted girls would smile at Bill and open their sweet mouths the first time they kissed. Where would Bill take them? The back seat of a car or a drab hotel room was not his style. Somewhere he would have rented an apartment, even if he were required to maintain nominal residence in a barracks. The apartment would have a huge bed, a bathtub and an icebox full of cold beer and wine. Even as a college boy, Bill’s affairs had been more earthy than romantic. Often he had made fun of Paul for his obsession with Sylvia and had recounted tales of gymnastic nights spent with nightclub dancers, shopgirls and “nice little debs who aren’t really as ladylike as you think.” There was probably no sexual act or position at which Bill was not proficient. In his dormitory tales, the girls had always been gasping with pleasure and begging for more. Surrounded by admiring women in South Carolina, good old Bill was probably taking them on two and three at a time. Lying in his Spartan, ice-bound cabin, Paul had a clear image of an apartment swarming with naked women, of his brother lying at the bottom of a pile of beautiful girls competing with each other to press their breasts into his face and to win possession of his cock.
Shaking his head to clear it, Paul went on deck. The sun was setting, turning the jumbled city of the surrounding ice pack to gold. Directly overhead there was a huge vermilion cloud which was almost in the shape of a woman. As he stared at it he could make out the shape of the great swelling breasts, the narrow waist and the dark groin. Looking away almost guiltily, he stared out over the ice pack and was startled to see how many icebergs had been molded by the wind into the shape of swelling breasts, some complete with nipples, and great glittering golden buttocks. My God, he thought, when a damn iceberg gives me an erection, it’s time to go home, but there was of course no way to go home or anywhere else.
During those weeks Nathan was the only man aboard the ship who appeared to keep both busy and happy. In addition to bringing r
adar and guns from the wrecked destroyer, he and Sparks had taken possession of quantities of radio equipment. To assemble this Nathan worked night and day. When every inch of the radio shack had been used, his intricate black and gray metal boxes spread to the wardroom, which soon became another communications center.
“Why do you need all this stuff?” Paul asked.
“I got to thinking,” Nathan said. “The Nanmak never really did preserve radio silence. She had to keep acknowledging all those messages and sending reports to GreenPat. The Krauts always must have known just where she was, and they got her right after she sent that long message to the base doctor.”
“Can you figure a way to do it better?”
“Ideally we should just shut up, but of course they want weather reports from us and all the rest. So I’m setting up a system that will give any radio direction finder fits.”
“How?”
“We’ll be able to change frequencies so damned fast and irregularly that no one without our prearranged schedule could get a bearing on us. And we’ll use frequencies that ordinary ships don’t have.”
“When will it all be working?”
“Most of it’s working now. I’ll soon be able to monitor every conceivable frequency and take bearings on it damn fast. This is one department where we’re going to be better than the Krauts.”
Paul grinned. “Maybe that’s just the edge we need.”
Except for brief naps, Nathan spent both his nights and days off watch hunched over his black boxes, turning dials. Although he used earphones, he kept a dozen loudspeakers tuned to various frequencies. Both the radio shack and the wardroom were full of hums, sharp rasps of static and the stutter of distant stations transmitting code. Seth slept with his head buried in his pillows and Sparks, who had been enthusiastic about the new equipment, complained that Nathan kept him almost continuously on watch.