Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  In the messroom after the chicken game was over, Webfoot remarked, “You gotta hand it to those guys. They know how to handle that tin can.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Fatso. “But I don’t like to have them barging in that close. I want to rig something that will stick out a couple of feet on each side and make ‘em stay a little further away from us.”

  “We could put over a couple of our big cane fenders with a few hand grenades secured on the outboard side of them,” suggested Ginsberg, who believed in direct action.

  “No-o-o-o,” said Fatso. “Them fenders are hard to get. But I want something that will leave a mark on them if they bump us.”

  “You mean something sticking out like a destroyer’s propeller guard?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Something like that - except I want a good sharp edge on it.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Scuttlebutt. “Hell of a good idea, Cap’n. I’ll get to work on it right away.”

  Scuttlebutt and a couple of helpers got busy with a welding torch, some steel plates, and husky tie rods. In a couple of hours there was a well-braced one-inch steel plate sticking out about three feet from each side of the ship near the bow. The plates were four feet above the water line, faces parallel to the water, and the outer edges had been ground as sharp as a guillotine blade. When Fatso inspected them he remarked, “If you went alongside a dock and nudged a piling with one of those things, you’d cut the top clean off.”

  “Yup,” agreed Scuttlebutt, “that’s what they’d do, cut the top clean off, all right. You might say they’re sort of a king-sized ‘can opener,’” he added, nodding toward the Russian tin can astern.

  In the messroom after this job was finished, Fatso briefed the boys on his Op Plan for tomorrow. “I’m going to run in a switch on this chicken game,” he said. “If he crowds us again tomorrow, I’m going to nudge him with that - er - paint scraper we just put on and see how he likes it.”

  “You’ll cut him open, sure as hell,” declared Scuttlebutt. “Whaddya think he’ll do?”

  “Well,” said Fatso judiciously, “I dunno. And the only way to find out is to try it and see.”

  Everyone at the table gave sober thought to that statement.

  “He’s a lot bigger than we are, Cap’n,” observed Ginsberg.

  “Sure he is. And that’s why I ain’t gonna nudge him very hard,” said Fatso. “You know - one reason why we never get anywhere with the Russians is that we’re so damn scared of what they might do that we never call their bluff and find out what they will do. The only time we ever did was in Cuba, and they pulled their rockets the hell out of there right away.”

  All heads around the table nodded gravely at this assessment of high-level international policy.

  “I don’t think this guy will do a damn thing tomorrow,” continued Fatso. “He’ll be too surprised. These guys do just as they’re told, and I don’t think his orders cover how to play rough. He’ll have to report what happens and ask for instructions. They’ve been playing this game with our big ships and getting away with it. I think when we change the rules on him, he’ll radio his Admiral and say, ‘what do I do now?’”

  “Hmmmm,” said Scuttlebutt, “maybe you’re right.”

  “As soon as I nudge him,” continued Fatso, “I want to run up the international signal flags saying ‘Do you need assistance?’ And I’ll send him a blinker message saying, ‘Oops - pardon me.’ Meantime, there’s a couple of other angles I want to work on ... I want to make up a canvas dummy and dress it up in a sailor’s suit.”

  “You mean a Charley Noble?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “Except we ain’t gonna throw this one overboard.”

  “Can do, Cap’n,” said Scuttlebutt. “Satchmo - you and Webfoot have just volunteered to help me make Charley.”

  “Now,” said Fatso, addressing Judge Frawley, “what is the proper procedure for hanging a sailor at the yardarm?”

  Judge was a bit taken aback by this demand for a legal opinion. “Well, now,” he said, stalling for time, “we don’t hardly ever do that very much any more. That custom has fallen into disuse in recent years. I don’t think you’ll find anything in the present Regulation Book about it.”

  “I know there’s nothing in the Book about it,” said Fatso. “That’s why I’m asking you. I don’t want to hold a hanging in a lubberly, unseamanlike manner with our Russian friends looking on. You went to law school. You oughta know the right way to hang a guy.”

  “Maybe I know more about it than the Judge,” said the Professor. “When I was a kid, I read a lot of books about sailing ships. A hanging used to be an all-hands drill. When the Captain decided to hang somebody, they would call all hands aft in their dress blues, and they would put a rope leading up to the yardarm around the guy’s neck with a hangman’s knot in it - seven turns around the standing part with the bitter end tucked in, pointing up. They’d put about eight guys on the hauling part of the rope, and when everything was all set, the Boatswain’s Mate would blow on his pipe and holler, ‘Set taut. Hoist away.’ They would run down the deck and swing the guy right up to the yardarm. Enlisted men got hung from the port yardarm - officers from the starboard.”

  “Didn’t they hafta have a trial?” demanded the Judge.

  “Sure. It took a General Court Martial to hang a guy. But that was just a formality. The court always did what the skipper wanted - otherwise, they would of got hung themselves.”

  “What else did they do?” asked Fatso.

  “Well - lemme see ... When everybody was on deck in their dress blues they would bring up the guy they wanted to hang, stand him, under the yardarm, and read off the sentence to him. He had a right to say some last words, if he wanted to, and then they put a black hood over his head and ran him up. They left him there till sundown and buried him during the night ... Oh, yeah, one other thing. When you hang a guy that way it doesn’t break his neck like dropping off a trap in the gallows. He strangles to death. So to prevent him from flopping around at the yardarm they used to tie his hands behind his back, and they had a rope from his feet secured to the taffrail.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Fatso. “I think we know enough about it now to put on a pretty good show for our Russian friends tomorrow.”

  “Who you gonna hang, Cap’n?” asked Jughaid deferentially.

  “Charley Noble,” said Fatso. “Scuttlebutt, you and your helpers get busy now and make us a good one.”

  Scuttlebutt broke out a bolt of canvas, a couple of sailmaker’s palms and needles, and a pair of heavy shears. He had Jughaid lie down, spread-eagled, on the canvas and carefully cut around him, thus getting a reasonable facsimile of the outside of a man. Meanwhile, Satchmo was pulling the kapok out of a dozen old life jackets to provide the insides for Charley.

  As they finished cutting out the second half of the dummy, Jughaid remarked, “I always thought Charley Noble was the name for the galley smoke pipe.”

  “It is,” said Scuttlebutt.

  “Why?”

  “Search me,” said Scuttlebutt. “It’s like a lot of other things. Why is the anchor windlass called a wildcat? Nobody knows.”

  The Professor, who was watching the making of Charley with interest, said “I’ve read some things about Charley Noble, too. It seems there was an old sailing ship skipper whose name was Charles Noble. He got tired of looking at his crummy sooty galley smoke pipe, so he sheathed it in brass and made the cooks keep it shined. Ever since then, the galley smoke pipe has been called the Charley Noble. I read somewhere that this Charles Noble was one of Admiral Nelson’s Captains and that he never did anything else that anybody knows about. But nobody can tell you the name of any of Nelson’s other Captains. Just goes to show that there’s all kinds of ways of making a name for yourself in history.”

  “Then how come we call this here dummy a Charley Noble?” demanded Satchmo.

  “I can tell you all about that,” said Scuttlebutt, getting a gleam in his eye the way old sailors
do when they feel a tale about to unfold. “I was on the Salem about three years ago when it happened. You know,” he said, “on most ships the man-overboard dummy is just a sort of a scarecrow that floats and looks a little bit like a man. But the Salem was a crack ship, and our skipper was on the make for Admiral. Everything on that ship had to be something special, including even the man-overboard dummy. So our sailmaker sewed up a real fancy one. We dressed it up in a regulation uniform, put shoes on it, sewed a white hat to its head, and painted a face with a big grin on it. When we got it finished, it looked more like a real sailor than Jughaid does. We stenciled ‘Charley Noble’ on his chest, and Charley got dunked and rescued every time we had a man-overboard drill ...

  “Now, Jughaid,” said Scuttlebutt, putting one canvas profile on top of the other, “You sew up one side of this leg, I’ll sew up the other, and Satchmo, you keep stuffing it as we go along.”

  Resuming the narrative, he said, “Pretty soon, along comes dependents’ day, when they take the wives and kiddies of the crew out for a day at sea so they can see where their daddy lives and works, and what kind of chow he eats.

  “The Captain decided it would be a good idea to have a man-overboard drill to show everybody what good care the Navy takes of their daddy and how safe he is even if he is dumb enough to fall overboard. So they got all the wives and kiddies together, and the skipper got up and explained to them everything that we do in case a man falls overboard. When he got through, they heaved Charley over the side and passed the word, ‘Man overboard.’

  “At first everything went exactly the way the skipper said it would. They let go the Franklin life buoy, stopped the engines, and swung the stern over so Charley wouldn’t get caught in the screws. They manned the whale boat on the double, all hands fell in for muster, and as soon as the ship slowed down enough, they started lowering the boat.

  “Then, with all the wives and kiddies watching, the guy on the after fall goofed. He let the fall get away from him, slip off the cleat, and hang the boat straight up and down by the forward fall, dumping the whole boat’s crew in the water.”

  “Lawdamercy,” said Satchmo. “I’m glad it wasn’t me on that after fall.”

  “So instead of just having a dummy in the water, we had five real men! It must of took about fifteen minutes to fish those guys out of the water, get the boat hooked on again, lower it, and pick up all the life buoys and stuff that had been thrown overboard for the guys in the water. Meantime, Charley Noble, who floated kind of high in the water, had sailed away down wind and was out of sight. Of course, all this time the skipper’s safety valve was stuck wide open, and he damn near blew his main gasket. When they got the boat hoisted in again, he wasn’t about to fool around any more looking for Charley. We got the hell out of there and headed back in for Ville France, leaving old Charley adrift.

  “Go easy with that kapok, Satchmo,” said Scuttlebutt. “If you make Charley too fat, we’ll have to ask the skipper for a uniform to fit him.”

  “So what became of Charley,” asked the Professor. “Did you ever hear of him again?”

  “Yeah,” said Scuttlebutt. “I’m comin’ to that. He didn’t stay adrift very long. A big French yacht called the Jeanne d’Arc, belonging to a duke, picked him up about sunset that day. A couple of weeks later, our skipper gets a letter from Paris on fancy stationery, with a big coat of arms on it. It says, ‘Dear Captain: After you sailed off and abandoned me a month ago, I was picked up by the Duke of Richelieu’s yacht. The Duke took me down to the cabin, dried me out, and he and his friends were very kind to me. The Duke liked me so much he decided to adopt me as an abandoned urchin. I am now living in his guesthouse on his estate outside Paris. Two good-looking French maids bring me breakfast in bed each morning, with champagne, and are very friendly. Please tell my shipmates on the Salem that if they really need me - I shall return. If they don’t, I would just as soon stay here ... signed, Charley Noble.’”

  All hands were delighted with this yarn, although several frustrated comments were made upon the fact that it had happened to a canvas dummy.

  “I can paint a face on this guy if you want it,” said Jughaid, as they finished the stuffing and sewing job.

  “We don’t need no face, because he’ll be wearing a black hood when the Russians see him,” said Scuttlebutt. “All we gotta do now is put a uniform and shoes on him.”

  “I’d like to have seen your skipper’s face when he got that letter,” observed the Professor.

  “The skipper was a pretty good guy,” said Scuttlebutt. “He thought it was funnier than hell and published it in the ship’s paper.”

  “Didja ever hear from him again?” asked Jughaid.

  “Yeah. A month later, when we were in Palermo, the Jeanne d’Arc came in and anchored, and the Duke invited the skipper over to have a drink. He told the skipper that Charley was a damn liar. He wasn’t living in the guesthouse with two good-looking French maids. He was behind the bar in the chateau’s recreation room, with one Bunny bartender.”

  As they were finishing Charley, the Armed Forces Radio news came on.

  “Jerusalem: Arab resistance is collapsing on all fronts. Israeli armies have paused to regroup on the east bank of the Suez Canal. Jerusalem has been liberated and our armies have swept on to the west bank of the Jordan. In the north, our tanks scaled almost vertical cliffs and smashed the Syrian Army, which is now fleeing toward Damascus.”

  Ginsberg grinned from ear to ear like a Halloween punkin.

  “Go on and say ‘I told you so,’” said Fatso. “You gotta right to.”

  The radio continued:

  “There is a news blackout in Cairo. However, the government radio has been blasting the imperialist warmongers in England and the United States who have been helping the Jews and who plan to establish colonies in Africa. Cairo says our gallant Russian allies will soon come to the aid of the freedom-loving Arabs.”

  “Too late,” said Ginsberg, smugly. “The Russians will help Nasser the same way they helped Castro, when we called their bluff in Cuba. This war is just about over, now - maybe we can visit Israel after all, Cap’n,” he said to Fatso. “There will be big doings there about this time next week!”

  “Could be,” said Fatso.

  Chapter Eight

  Storm Gathers Some More

  While these events were transpiring in the Med, utter confusion rained in Washington, almost as bad as the deluge of it that came down in Cairo. When the Israelis finally pulled the plug, the only ones left more flat-footed than the Arabs were our own Joint Chiefs of Staff (and the Kremlin). All top-level officials in Washington and Moscow were caught with their pants down, and there was a mad scramble to get them up.

  Everybody went into condition FRANTIC for the next few days. Generals, Admirals, and Cabinet officers rushed from one top-secret briefing to another all day long, learning things at each briefing that they had read about in the morning paper. Lights burned all night in the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. Perle Mesta threw a big cocktail party for high government officials at which nobody showed up but the gate crashers.

  The hot line to the Kremlin was activated in earnest for the first time. The President and Kosygin held several guarded exchanges assuring each other that they knew exactly what was happening on all fronts and there was no cause for alarm. Both had their fists poised over the panic button while they were doing this, ready to sound the Red Alert if the other had said “Boo!” Luckily, these conversations were via teletype, because the air was so tense that neither could have talked on the phone without audible chattering of teeth.

  The morning of the fourth day, the Joint Chiefs met early in their inner sanctum of the Pentagon. Red-faced Colonels and four-stripe Captains were briefing their bosses on the “reasons” for the Arab debacle. Most of the briefers expected to have hew jobs in Vietnam by the time the Israelis got to Cairo.

  All the chiefs except the Air Force Chief of Staff listened in stony silence with
poker faces. The airman grinned happily throughout the briefing and at the end said, “I told you so! ... Remember, I warned you that whoever got control of the air would overwhelm the other.”

  The CNO leaned toward the Commandant of the Marines seated next to him and said, out of the corner of his mouth, “What was it you said about the General’s aunt, Marine?”

  “Balls! ... Sir,” replied the Marine.

  “That’s what I thought,” said the Admiral.

  Later that morning the Security Council and Joint Chiefs met in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Everyone was in a serious mood trying to look like a global strategist except the Air Force Chief of Staff. He had a ball, going from one long-faced group to another reminding them how this war proved the effectiveness of air power when properly used.

  The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense had their heads together over in a corner when he got around to them. The Secretary of Defense saying, “This is a deadly dangerous business no matter what happens. The possibility of an eyeball to eyeball confrontation between the two great nuclear powers hangs over every move we make. A few days ago it looked like the confrontation might come from us trying to save Israel from being wiped out. That crisis didn’t last long. But now, things have changed a hundred and eighty degrees, and the confrontation may come over the Russians trying to stop the Israelis from capturing too much Arab territory. So the situation is still dynamite. I’ve got all my best people watching it constantly, and I keep telling them we’ve got to he very, very careful.”

  The SecState nodded approvingly, and the General cleared his throat and said, “Speaking of being careful reminds me of the time right after the war when I was bringing a B-36 into a field down in Texas. They had just put WAACs in the control tower, and a young southern gal was standing her first watch as final approach controller. I heard a B-29 coming in from the east call in for landing instructions. The little gal rattled off all the dope and wound up with ‘cleared to land runway 27.’ Then I called in for landing instructions, coming in from the west. She ran through the dope again, for me, and said ‘cleared to land, runway 9. Runway 9 is 27 in the other direction.’ So I called back and said, ‘Hey, what’s coming off here? I just heard you clear a B-29 in on the same runway in the opposite direction.’ She thought that one over for a moment, and then she came back on the air and said, ‘Y’all be careful!’ “