by Sloan Wilson
“What for?”
“They’re queer, sir. I caught them at it.”
“Oh, God!” Paul rubbed his face with his hand. “Exactly what happened?”
“I went down to the hold to check the depth charges, to see if they’d shifted any. Blake was going down on Guns. They were so busy they didn’t even see me.”
“And you want to bring formal charges?”
“That’s only right, sir, isn’t it? We can’t have the men going queer on us.”
“Let me think about it. I’ll see you in a few minutes, Boats.”
Paul allowed himself a shot of brandy. Then he telephoned the wardroom and asked Nathan to come to his cabin. After hours of working with his radios, Nathan had just gone to sleep and looked haggard.
“Nathan, we got a case of sodomy,” Paul began. After telling him Boats’s story, Paul said, “You seem to be the great champion of the crew around here. What would you do?”
“If you bring formal charges, you’ll get a dishonorable discharge for those guys and maybe twenty years in Portsmouth.”
“Is it really my choice?”
“You’ll lose a damn good gunner’s mate and a fairly good seaman.”
“But I didn’t write the book. Does it really leave me any choice?”
“You want to bring charges?”
“By now Boats will have told everyone about this. Can I do nothing?”
“It seems funny.”
“Damned if I see that,” Paul said.
“Well, you don’t do anything when Guns does it with a dead bear, but when the poor s.o.b. is caught with a human, he goes to prison for twenty years.”
“The book doesn’t mention bears.”
“I suppose it mentions bestiality or some such. What happens if you just do nothing?”
“I suppose the whole goddamn crew could end up queer instead of fighting the war.”
“Hell, you know that wouldn’t happen. Nothing would happen, nothing different from what’s already happening.”
“Something could happen. Boats could press his charges when he gets ashore. Christ, he could write Mowrey about it—they were always pretty close.”
“And what the hell would old Mowrey do about it? Hell, he’s probably dead by this time or locked in a back ward of some stateside hospital.”
“You know, the old bastard could surprise us. He could come back.”
“Paul, you’re obsessed with the guy. You’ve got to forget him. Take it from me—he’s much too far gone to come back—ever.”
“Okay. What would you do with this mess?”
“I’d try to talk Boats into forgetting it.”
“Would that be your idea of justice? If Boats stumbled on an act of sodomy, the book says he should report it.”
“Hell, this is just part of Boats’s feud with Guns. Did he have witnesses?”
“Down in the hold? I doubt it. He didn’t mention any.”
“Hell, if the thing came to court, it would be the word of two against one. All Guns and Blake have to do is swear innocence and maybe bring countercharges. They could say that Boats had been after Blake.”
“You do have an ingenious mind.”
“If you tell Boats what might happen, he might drop the charges.”
“Stay here with me, we’ll talk to him.”
Paul telephoned the forecastle and in a few minutes Boats appeared. He had put on a clean shirt and had combed his hair.
“Boats, you’ve brought some very serious charges here,” Paul began. “If they stuck, Guns and Blake could get a d.d. and twenty years.”
“I didn’t write the law, sir.”
“Do you have witnesses to what you say you saw?” Nathan asked.
“No sir, not down there in the hold.”
“It’s pretty dark down there, isn’t it?” Nathan asked.
“Yes, but I could see enough, sir.”
“Well, just exactly what did you see?”
“They were doing it.”
“How?”
“You know. Blake was kneeling in front of Guns and Guns was making noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
“You know.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know,” Nathan said. “What kind of noises?”
“Sort of moans like.”
“What would you do,” Nathan asked, “if you got these people into court and Guns said he had dropped a crate of rifles on his foot. What if he said that Blake had knelt to see if his toe was broken and he was moaning with pain?”
“Did they say that?” Boats asked with a laugh.
“Not yet, but they might,” Nathan said. “It would be the word of two against one. And Guns would bring out the fact that you two have been feuding for a long time. He could make your charge out to be an act of spite and bring countercharges. Blake might even claim that you’d been propositioning him, trying to break up his friendship with Guns.”
“He wouldn’t dare say that—sir, I’m telling you them two men are queer. The whole crew knows it.”
“Have you been talking about it?”
“Not only me.”
“If you have been talking about it and can’t prove your charges, you could be up for slander.”
“Why are you taking the side of these damn queers?” Boats demanded.
“I’m not taking anybody’s side,” Paul said, breaking a silence that had seemed long. “If you put Guns in jail, this ship loses a good gunner’s mate. If he puts you in jail, we lose a good boatswain’s mate. The ship can’t win if you bring charges.”
“And if we don’t do nothing, those queers will be laughing at all of us.”
“Somehow I doubt if Guns and Blake are fundamentally amused by this,” Nathan said.
“Let’s leave it this way,” Paul concluded. “If you ever have witnesses to a queer act, bring charges and I’ll back you. I don’t like them any more than you do. But this time I can’t do much except advise you that you may be heading into real trouble if you press charges without being able to back them up.”
“Yes sir … well, I guess we better let it go this time. Next time I’ll have witnesses and we can nail them for sure.”
He left hurriedly, and there was a short silence in the cabin.
“Do you suppose we ought to give Guns and Blake some sort of warning?” Paul asked.
“The whole crew will be talking about nothing else. How much warning do they need?”
“I don’t know. It seems like I should do something. If we’re not careful, the whole crew will get so goosey they can’t man the guns.”
“Skipper, from what I read, from the beginning of time men confined on ships have done it with each other when there was nothing else.”
“Not all of them, not even most, I bet. Not most Americans.”
“No, not most. But some Portuguese fishing vessels still carry one homosexual to service all hands on long voyages, and Columbus’s men were apparently very kind to each other.”
“Are you in favor of all this?”
“I’m in favor of putting as few men in jail as possible and getting on with fighting the damn war. How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?”
During the next three days the gale from the north continued to howl. In the middle of the third night there was a terrifying booming sound in the distance that brought all hands on deck. The ship trembled and suddenly the ice pack split, leaving a broad river with jagged edges leading toward the sea. Swimming through the clouds, the moon made the ice almost as bright as day. Hurrying to escape before the icepack again closed around them, Paul followed the lead at top speed. Within three hours they felt the roll of the broad Atlantic under them and for once it was welcome.
“Here we go!” Paul heard Guns shout to the deck gang. “Next stop, Ang-my-ass-lick. All aboard for the ping-ping express!”
CHAPTER 32
To get completely clear of the ice, Paul kept to a northeasterly course until the Arluk was fifty miles off
the coast of Greenland. The northerly gale which had freed them from the pack hit the trawler on the port bow, causing her to pitch and roll simultaneously. Heavy-laden with the big gun on deck and her hold full of depth charges, the little ship rose sluggishly to meet the great gray-bearded seas which, row on row, marched against her. White water often broke over her bow and seethed over her well deck, sloshing over the top of her rails.
This time only about a third of the crew was seasick. Although Nathan still had to hurry to the lee rail of the bridge frequently, he gave up his bucket, which did not seem to him to be fitting equipment for the executive officer. Paul was relieved to find that for the first time in a rough sea he felt no nausea and even was tempted to try one of Mowrey’s cigars, an idea he reluctantly discarded when he felt just a touch of dizziness.
Soon after the ship began to roll heavily, Paul began to worry about the depth charges in the hold. Calling Boats to the bridge, he said, “You better check the cargo. I don’t want those depth charges rolling around down there.”
Ever since his accusation of Guns and Blake had been disregarded, Boats had been surly, and now he said, “Sir, when I stow cargo, it don’t roll around.”
“I’m sure that’s true, chief, but it won’t do any harm to check.”
“Captain Mowrey always trusted me,” Boats said under his breath, but he went below. The ship gave a particularly vicious roll and Blake, who was at the helm, vomited, spraying the base of the engineroom telegraph.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Blake said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Paul said. Even the smell didn’t upset him too much. “Quartermaster, get Blake a bucket.”
Soon Boats returned to the pilothouse. Saluting with a touch of exaggerated respect, he said, “I have inspected the cargo and have found it totally secure, sir.”
“Very well,” Paul said, casually returning the salute. “Get a seaman with a mop to clean up this deck before we all go sliding around.” To himself he sounded like Mowrey at his sweet best.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Boats said. “Begging your pardon, sir, but at boot camp we regulars are taught that there are no mops aboard a ship—only swabs, sir. Could my education be wrong, sir?”
There was a moment of silence before Paul gave Boats an extremely sweet smile and said sweetly, “In respect to nautical vocabulary, Boats, you are right and I am wrong. We reserve officers sometimes are not up to the nice points of the nautical language. On the other hand, I as a reserve officer have mastered such fundamentals as celestial navigation and ship handling without any formal training, without costing the government one cent for my education. I’ve also taught myself something about how to handle men and the elements of nautical etiquette. It’s wrong for me to call a swab a mop and more wrong for a chief petty officer to correct the word usage of his commanding officer in front of other men. For this act of discourtesy and insubordination you are hereby given a formal warning. Quartermaster, enter that in the log. Any repetition of this offense, Boats, will get you ten days of restriction, beginning when we next hit port. Now get a man with a swab to clean up this mess. Am I speaking a proper language you understand?”
“Yes sir,” Boats said, and went out the door of the pilothouse. Glancing at Nathan, who was standing just beside him, Paul saw that he was grinning, and so were the other men on the bridge, but suddenly he felt ashamed of a cheap-shot victory. So as captain of the ship he had crushed a boatswain’s mate, and probably made an enemy of him for life. That certainly was no triumph in the art of handling men. Once more he had fucked up, and the sound of Mowrey’s sardonic laughter seemed to ring out louder than ever.
At noon Paul took a latitude sight which indicated that the ship was making only about five knots against the wind and currents. The sextant was beginning to feel familiar to his hands and he had learned to make the mathematical computations rapidly, but he still was unable to feel any great faith in the line of position he drew on the chart. When Nathan appeared on the bridge, Paul handed him the sextant and awaited the results of his computations with interest. He felt something close to panic when Nathan’s line of position turned out to be a good thirty miles from his own. In the wind he could almost hear Mowrey’s contemptuous jeer. “I told you you’d fuck up.”
“One of us must have made a mistake,” Paul said, handing his notebook to Nathan. “You better check my figures and I’ll check yours.”
Neither of them had made a mathematical error. “The big variable,” Paul said, “is the damn horizon. With this sea it looks lumpy as hell, and with the ship jumping all around, I can’t see how we can be sure of it. When you bring the image of the sun down in the mirrors of the sextant, do you just kiss the tops of the waves with it, or do you try to guess where the horizon would be in a dead calm?”
“I’ve just been kissing the tops of the waves with it.”
“I’ve been taking it a little below that. Hell, it’s all guesswork and practice—there’s really nothing precise about this damn navigation at all. Let’s try it again and see how close we can come to each other.”
For most of the afternoon Nathan and Paul took sights. Finally their lines of position came to within ten miles of each other fairly regularly, and as Paul said, if a man knew his position within ten miles, he ought to be able to make a proper landfall.
Still Paul worried as the ship slogged five hundred miles northward. In gathering clouds the tall mountains of Greenland and the ice pack disappeared and there was nothing but slate-gray sea and a sky hardly different in color. According to the charts and the pilotbook, the mountains around Angmagssalik Fjord did not look much different from any other part of the Greenland coast. During the four days it took to reach a dead reckoning position forty miles at sea in the latitude of the fjord, Paul had nightmares of finding nothing but mountains, of searching endlessly without discovering any entrance to a fjord. Standing on the bridge, he glanced at the door to the captain’s cabin and almost wished that Mowrey would suddenly walk from it. Drunk or sober, abusive or sweetly reasonable, Mowrey at least had always known where he was.
Shortly after making his turn to close with the ice pack, Paul was able to get a moon sight which crossed reasonably with his lines of position from the sun. The sky was still too overcast to permit a glimpse of the stars or planets, and he could get no simultaneous lines of position that would give him a precise little triangle such as he saw in the books, but he still guessed that his estimated position probably was not more than ten miles off. If he closed with the coast and found no fjord, should he steam north or south? If he guessed wrong, he could work his way through the ice for days without really knowing where the hell he was. How would he send position reports to GreenPat and how would he explain his wanderings to the crew?
“Let’s face it, men,” he imagined himself saying. “We’re lost. Got to be honest about it …” And to GreenPat he could radio a message such as this: “U.S. Coast Guard cutter Arluk is now blundering around in the ice within sight of some unknown part of Greenland, we think.”
Then, of course, GreenPat would send Mowrey back aboard at the first opportunity.
Paul started to sweat, despite the icy wind. Glancing at his chart, he found that they were approaching a tiny circle he had drawn to mark the spot where the Nanmak had sunk, or at least where her boatful of corpses had been found. According to her last radio report, the Nanmak had been caught in heavy ice, but now the wind had scattered the pack and only a half dozen huge bergs surrounded the empty sea where their sister ship had disappeared. Paul wondered whether he should stop to say a few reverent words over her grave, but no ship should present a stationary target in waters where the enemy might still be lurking. How had the Nanmak been lost, anyway? Had a huge German icebreaker suddenly steamed from behind one of those icebergs, perhaps the one that lay vaguely in the shape of a great crouched lion on the sea? Or had a Kraut submarine been patrolling the edge of the ice pack? A long-range German plane could suddenly have appeared flying
low, just above the ice peaks, or an enemy trawler hardly bigger than the Nanmak and the Arluk might have demonstrated bigger guns, better fire control. There was of course no way to know. The great combers from the Atlantic rolled on, serenely erasing all tragedies only moments after they happened. Paul decided not to tell the crew when they passed the grave of the Nanmak.
The north wind had scattered the ice pack closer to shore than Paul had expected, and though they had to zigzag a lot, they were able to maintain full speed as they closed with the mountains. Climbing to the crow’s nest with his binoculars, Paul studied every inch of the coast, trying to find the entrance to the fjord. Rust-red mountain slopes, icebergs—he might as well be approaching the west coast. Sometimes nightmares can come true, but it was necessary to press very close to this forbidding shore even to make sure that he was lost. In the mist to his left the coast seemed to fall away in what might be a bay, a fjord or just a valley between mountains. To his right there was a high point of land which seemed to extend many miles to sea, with more points vaguely outlined in the mist beyond.
“Come left slowly,” Paul shouted to the bridge, glad to hear that his voice at least sounded confident. “Steady now. Steady as she goes!”
For about half an hour they twisted through the ice in the general direction Paul had indicated. The bay ahead kept deepening, perhaps to end only in a dry valley or in glaciers, but there was a glint of water between the mountains. Holding a folded chart, Paul stood in the crow’s nest comparing peaks and points to the outlines on paper. Gradually everything seemed to fall into place, and as they rounded a great granite peninsula, the entrance to the fjord clearly opened ahead. Holding the folded chart in his teeth, Paul slid down the rigging and hurried to the bridge. He kept his voice casual when he said, “Angmagssalik is dead ahead.”
“I can’t help feeling it’s a damn miracle,” Nathan said.
“Just natural sea sense,” Paul said with a straight face.