The two men collapsed, Mahoney broken and unconscious, Pete gasping, weeping…as Shorty, his shipmate of many years, lifted him to his feet.
Mr. Augie Donato came to life suddenly. “Here now! What the devil do you think this is, anyway? A slaughterhouse?” He glared at Shorty Conrad and Sam, who were suddenly facing him. “There’ll be no fighting aboard this ship!”
“Fighting?” Sam’s eyes widened. “Why, Mr. Donato! Has there been a fight?”
For an instant, Mr. Augie Donato’s mouth hung open, then, “Oh, get out of the way!” He started forward, his jaw set. By the Lord Harry they’d find out a thing or two! What the hell kind of ship was this anyway? Was everybody nuts?
Denny McGuire watched him go and turned back to Slug. The big fireman was stretched out on the deck, facedown. He didn’t seem to have moved. Carefully, handling him as if he were a child, Denny picked the big man up under the arms and dragged him into the washroom. Tex emerged from the seaman’s fo’c’sle rubbing his eyes. “What now? What’s all the fuss?”
Denny put the big fireman on the floor. Carefully, dipping a towel in cold water, he began to bathe Slug’s face.
“Well, I wish I’d seen the fight,” Tex said. “But he’s likely not to thank you, no matter what you do.”
Slug opened his eyes, and seeing McGuire, started to get up. “Take it easy,” Denny said. “Mahoney got you into this, now don’t make a sap of yourself.”
* * *
—
Mr. Augie Donato rapped on the chief’s door. It opened abruptly. “Well, what do you want, mister?”
“About that trouble. There was a fight between McGuire, an AB on the eight-to-twelve watch, and Jacobs, the twelve-to-four fireman. Pete Brouwer, another AB, and that damn oiler Mahoney also got into it.”
“A fight?” The chief barged out into the alleyway. “When?”
“Just now.” Mr. Augie Donato was trying to keep cool. “It’s over.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?” the chief shouted.
“Why didn’t I stop it?” Mr. Augie Donato’s face turned purple. “Why don’t you go lay an egg? I shipped on here as an engineer, not a cop! You may be chief engineer on this packet, an’ I may need my rating damned bad, but by the Lord Harry I’m not paid to go stopping any fights on this ship or any other ship. I think the whole bunch of you are crazy anyway!” He wheeled and walked away, his heels clicking on the steel deck, his shoulders stiff with anger.
The chief stared after him in startled amazement, and then went back in his room and closed the door. “The cocky little devil!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t think the little squirt had it in him!”
THE PRIVATE LOG OF JOHN HARLAN, SECOND MATE
March 31st: The sea rolls on. It boils up along rock-strewn coasts and rumbles and growls among the worn boulders. The silent sea, unlimited, unfathomable, unknown. There are barren wastes as large as the continent of Australia that have never known a ship. There are stories of the sea that no man can truly understand, of strange creatures and ghost ships that roam wintry, windswept coasts and vanish into the night and the storm.
Tonight, sitting alone in the soft glow of my reading lamp, I have been thinking of that strange ship Borly Shannon was telling me of, and of the man sitting alone in the stern, holding his empty gun, an actor having played his last and finest scene before an empty sky and barren sea.
And only tonight it has come to me. Only tonight have I realized that here in my hands I hold the threads of many lives, but of three in particular. Today I had a long talk with Pete Brouwer and some of the others about a subject I am officially supposed to know nothing about, the brawl on the afterdeck. To say the man is ashamed over his behavior is to understate the situation entirely. He feels like a Jonah and that he has let down the whole crew.
While he was talking, however, he mentioned to me that Shorty Conrad’s real name was Carmody, and with that in my mind I returned here and fell asleep. When I awakened I realized I had my story. The story that I will tell as a work of fiction.
The Raoul Carmody of which Shannon told, the dying man in the stern of that wave and wind-battered schooner, was almost certainly Shorty’s father. More than that, Shorty is likely the brother of Faustine, Denny’s girlfriend in Hollywood. How easily it all fits when one gathers the threads together and weaves them into a little pattern of life.
Soon Shorty will be coming on watch, and I shall tell him. And I shall tell Denny when he comes to call me tonight. I feel strange now, as though some mysterious power had opened those lives to me. Knowing something of Shorty’s story, I can understand better than ever the motives in the heart of Raoul Carmody when he made his grand gesture, and took his chance at winning financial security once and for all, for his family and for himself. He didn’t abandon his wife and children, not in the end.
When I am settled on a new ship, this is the first story that I will attempt to write and to publish. It is something that I can do in the free hours of my day, a way of reaching out to the world, of telling whoever will read it about the connection between these lives, these men I have known who are connected, by blood or friendship or enmity…or simply by the ships and the cargoes they carry, to us all.
* * *
—
Outside the sea whispers against the hull, whispers of lives like my own, so far unknown, unchronicled. I sit here and run them over in my mind, these men I have met: Pete Brouwer, Tex Worden, Shorty Conrad, Fritz Schumann, Jacobs, Mahoney, Harrell, and all the rest, each going on, remote from his neighbor. Lonely yet still so near.
Come what may, I shall be glad that I have gone to sea, glad that I have known and worked with men, glad that I have touched their lives, and they have touched mine. I have heard their profanity when it was like a prayer, and their drunken rambling when it was like poetry. I’ve seen them at their best and their worst and, in the end, I’d not like to have missed either. How can, in a world such as this, any man condemn another? Who can say what circumstances of birth or breeding, of work or strife brought him to what he is? Understanding and tolerance, I think, come first. For myself, I only want to understand; for others I shall have no stones to cast, for I myself am not without faults. The laws of nature were old before man in his arrogance began to legislate and regulate the world, but the laws of man are feeble and can mean nothing to the dark tides that flow through humanity. The laws of men can only punish and never prevent, and they can only punish the sins they create themselves.
At this moment, all over the planet ten thousand ships follow an invisible network of tiny lines upon tiny charts, each one moving out to bring home the wealth of the world in its hull. We carry food and explosives, medicine and soldiers, life and death, the materials of exultation and sadness. We connect the stories of everyone on the globe, and so we are the story of everyone, from the lowliest Burmese fisherman to the captains of industry in London or New York. Where do these lines of fate begin and end? The sea alone could make reply, but it does not answer.
* * *
—
McGuire has come and gone, signaling my turn on watch. “All set, Mr. Harlan?” he asked. “It’s a grand night! A night for poetry, or for almost anything but being trapped on a tanker where there aren’t any girls about.”
I poured us each a drink, just a touch to put the taste in our mouths.
“Heard you got in a little trouble today. Sparks said he had to spend some time patching up Jacobs and Mahoney. I’m hoping that’s the last we hear of it.”
“Mr. Harlan, I apologize. But it had to be done. It was Mahoney’s fault. Jacobs is a brute. He’s not a problem if left alone, although he does things on impulse, and seems to have absolutely no sense of right and wrong. Maybe none of us do.”
“Luckily, he’s not my problem,” I said. “You might check up on Pete, however. There’s something about this whole affair that seems to have
damaged his morale.”
I added soda to the glasses, and we stood there by my little table looking at each other. “Well,” he said, “let’s just make it the crew, the ship, and tomorrow!”
We drank. Then he put his glass down. “And now for the lookout again. I feel lonely tonight. Maybe somebody is walking over my grave, or my girl is thinking of me.”
I turned. “That reminds me, Denny. Do you know Shorty Conrad’s real name?”
“Why, no. I don’t.” He looked up curiously. “What about it?”
“His real name is Conrad Carmody, and he tells me he has a sister somewhere. She was raised in England by a family in the theater.”
He stood there staring at me. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said finally. “Shorty, and Faustine? Who would ever have thought it?”
“And that’s not all. I know what happened to her father. Did you ever hear Borly Shannon tell that story about his experience off the Horn?”
“No.”
“It’ll keep for tomorrow. We’ll all get together then. I’m sure Shorty would like to hear it, too.”
“All right, tomorrow it is!”
He left me, and I walked to the port for a glance at the sea. Then I sat down here to complete this entry before I collect my sextant and some papers to go aloft.
I have realized that I have been feeling sorry for myself these days, and fatalistic too. I will continue on with my plans, but I have decided to send this and my other journals to my children. They must know me in my absence. I may find another ship, I may remain in the South Seas or Asia, but I will return whenever I have the opportunity. I cannot allow my hurt feelings or fatalism to keep us apart.
I poured another drink; it seemed fitting somehow, to make another toast.
I lifted my glass, and stood there in the darkness, my feet canted to the roll. “To my children,” I said, “and my wife!”
DENNIS MCGUIRE
Able Seaman
He walked out on the deck, and turned forward, a soft wind stirring about his face. When he reached the bow he leaned on the rail, staring down into the water. To think of it: Shorty was Faustine’s brother! One had enjoyed every advantage that money and shrewd dramatic training could give her, the other had drifted alone across the world; and now, through the merest chance, they were to be united again.
The day in the shipping commissioner’s office returned to him vividly. Shorty had been looking on from the back of the room when he and Faustine had come in with Hazel Ryan. For about thirty minutes the long-lost brother and sister had sat within a dozen feet of each other!
Denny turned and looked toward the bridge, then back at the sea. It was pleasant here, in the last few minutes of his watch, to remember Faustine, to recall their last night together. Sometimes, however, it had all felt like a trap. He couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t come to any conclusions.
His whole life he had been a mover, part of a rootless family that followed the harvests. When people in a small town called you a “mover” they meant you weren’t one of them…and you weren’t ever going to be. And if that’s how they were going to treat you, well, Denny McGuire would make it a word to live by. He didn’t just drift from town to town but from continent to continent, going places and seeing things the little people from those little towns could never imagine.
And he moved from woman to woman. He had told himself that in a way he was doing them a favor by forever moving on. They would have a romantic memory that would never sour because they had seen him one too many times, bleary and unshaven in the morning. In their minds he would remain young and perfect in a way that future husbands could not. He told himself it was almost like a gift.
But it was all beginning to sound like the tired rumblings of his own ego. A boy never needed to care if he’d amount to anything—a man, a real man, had to be different. He thought of himself as a boxer, and he had been very good, but his brief career was barely enough to justify the term. He’d had no good reason for leaving Los Angeles—he had some money, he had a girl. He didn’t want to be an actor, but the two movies he had worked on after the talent scout discovered him at the Main Street Gym had introduced him to the business of the stuntman. It was a careful balance of intellect and risk. There just might be a career in that…a career that wouldn’t make him feel like he was sponging off of Faustine; the working-class boyfriend she would soon be tired of.
He had his memories. The first sight of that old dhow on the beach near Aden, the camels in the desert coming up to Taudeni, the volcanic loneliness of the Tibesti. There had been the excitement of seeing the lights along the Bund in Shanghai for the first time, and the sound of far-off thunder in the misty mountains of Java. He would also remember the soul-crushing effort of walking through the night along the UP tracks, walking farther than he thought humanly possible and of boxing twenty-six rounds in the sweltering heat of a Borneo oil camp for just enough money to eat for two more days.
He would carry the fear with him too. The unrelenting heat and flies of those three days behind the sandbag parapet before the attack finally broke and a few of them, Spanish soldiers and foolish sailors, limped their bloody way back to the Mediterranean coast and freedom. His future wouldn’t be the life, the adventuring life he had lived, but it wouldn’t include the ugly compromises, the moments that returned to you in the middle of a sleepless night. It wouldn’t include bleeding to death in some filthy, freezing alley surrounded by people whose language you couldn’t understand.
And it wouldn’t include the women…but how many had really cared for him at all? How many wouldn’t have turned their backs if it was Dennis McGuire who needed something.
Why had he left Los Angeles? Habit? A pattern so old he couldn’t break it? He was a mover. The shark who, if he stopped swimming, would drown. He’d had a sense of something wrong, an impending loss of…freedom? He didn’t know.
Denny walked across to the starb’rd rail and let his eyes search the sea. His mind wandered content with its own thoughts, while his eyes remained alert. After a while one became attuned to anything wrong about the picture, and noticed the slightest glimmer in the darkness. But there were no ships in sight, and the sea was deep here, very, very deep.
Faustine, that last night, had been different…or maybe it was he who was different. Something had changed between them. And that something was going to require a change in him. Was that it? Well, a reminder of one’s mortality could change any number of things.
* * *
—
It had been dark when he came down the gangway clad in his shore-going clothes. Dark and still. There was a light at the bottom of the ramp, and the man on watch loafing contentedly. When he stopped on the dock he could see a faint glow from a fo’c’stle port, and could hear the low gulp and gurgle around the piles under the wharf. He had turned away, walking slowly up to the gate, where he let himself out.
The tank farm crowded down close to the waterfront, throwing long shadows across the narrow street. Farther up were some warehouses, and a material yard. Denny had taken no more than a half dozen steps when something moved in the shadows ahead. His eyes held on the spot as he walked toward it. There was only one reason why a man would be waiting there. Would he have a gun? Denny decided it was unlikely, and walked on. Probably a strong-arm job. Not a bad spot for it either. Still, he didn’t have much time. His eyes, accustomed to the dim light of the street, glimpsed something in the road. Two more steps and he dropped his handkerchief. When he picked it up he also held a good-sized rock. Easing it into the center of the silk square, he gathered the ends together. He was going to have to make this good.
There was no further movement as he stepped abreast of the spot. Nothing happened. Denny walked on, frowning. This wasn’t right. It had been a well-chosen place for a mugging—the guy should have tried whatever he had in mind when Denny passed him. Denny checked his watc
h, and took the opportunity to glance backward. A man was following him.
He walked faster and had made two blocks when he looked again. The man was a big fellow, heavyset, and now considerably closer. Denny turned the corner by the old power station just as Faustine’s car pulled to a stop. He walked rapidly up to the car, hearing the gravel crunch behind him. Then he put his left hand on the door and turned sideways, swinging the rock backhand as he turned. The movement caught the man entirely by surprise and the rock thudded against his jawbone with terrific force.
The man staggered, blood streaming down the side of his face. The rock had slipped from the handkerchief, so Denny followed his momentary advantage by hooking both hands, one and then the other, to the man’s chin. He went down in a heap. Denny caught him by the collar and jerked him to his knees. It was Fitzpatrick, the bully from the pool hall. The man who’d picked a fight with him weeks ago.
“Denny! What’s going on?” Faustine had turned half around in her seat.
“Put the car in gear, honey. We’re going to need to get out of here.”
McGuire looked around. All he could see was empty streets and mist. He could hear the horn from the navigation light at Angel’s Gate, the rumble of the car, and nothing more. The man was still conscious, but the side of his face carried a fearful cut from the rock, and there was a swelling over one eye where Denny’s fist had landed. Denny slugged him again, and then dropped him, stooping to pick up the weapon the man had carried. Denny got into the car. “Let’s go,” he said.
He sized up the weapon. It was six inches of inch-and-one-half gas-pipe plugged in both ends, and filled with sand. The plug in one end was long and had been whittled to form a handle. Altogether it was enough to fell an ox if properly used.
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