Dust on the Sea (8 page)

“Rich,” said Joan softly, “you know I knew Jim?”

“Yes.”

“And that I know how terrible you feel about those lifeboats?”

This he could not answer. He had tried to be matter-of-fact, to avoid being defensive, as he described the action. Obviously he had not fooled Joan.

“You had to do it, Rich. There was no other way.”

Curiously, Richardson felt no objection to Joan's probing. She held her drink in her right hand. Her left arm rested on the back of the chair, and now he could feel the tips of her fingers gently touching the back of his neck, gently rubbing behind and below the ear, softly stroking. “Jim used to talk about you some, you know, and little by little I came to know how much he admired you. The last time I saw him, he said you were his best friend.” Rich said nothing.

The tapering fingers on his neck stopped, then resumed their gentle stroking. “You haven't asked me about my job, and please don't, but what the admiral said is true. I knew about Captain Nakame and how much it meant to you to get even for what he did to the
Walrus
and the
Nerka
, and all the others.”

“It wasn't just to get even . . . .” Rich began.

Imperceptibly, the stroking fingers pressed a little harder. “Hush up, Rich, of course not. It was for Pearl Harbor, and the war, and the
Octopus
, too. But some of it was for the
Walrus
and for Jim, and for your old crew. You know that.”

The fingers were doing their work. He felt an ease he had not known for weeks, since that fatal battle with Bungo Pete.

“You're probably thinking about that German submarine in the Indian Ocean that machine-gunned survivors a couple of years ago.
They were merchant seamen, noncombatants. The German skipper did it out of just plain fear for his own skin if they got back to port with the news that a submarine was in that area. Maybe there was some sadism in him, too. With you it was different. The men you ran down were all navy men, combatants, specialists in fighting submarines. You were fighting them, not just their ships. They had not stopped fighting you.”

“Yes,” said Richardson.

His sensuous reaction to Joan's near presence was as great as ever, but a feeling of relaxation was spreading over his body. The tightness in his mind was subsiding.

“Probably I shouldn't tell you this, but we know all about what happened to the
Walrus
. Nakame was riding the submarine that day. His other two ships stayed in port for some reason, so he sent out an old tub of a freighter for bait. It was night, and after Jim sank it, he hove to among the survivors to pick them up. There were only six men on the whole ship, and he had their life raft alongside when the torpedo hit. Everybody on it was killed, too.”

Again the faintly increased pressure of the fingertips, the message of surcease.

Joan said no more, allowed her fingers to speak for her. So this had been Jim's undoing! An errand of mercy, perhaps an expiation of that time so long ago when the blood lust was on him, and Richardson wrestled his gun away!

There had been no quarter at Pearl Harbor. No quarter for the
Yorktown
at Midway. No quarter in two wars for submarines of either side. Nakame had even sacrificed his own men.

The fingers continued their restorative work. He did not need the drink, had not touched it. There was no indignation, no despair, no further sorrow. The silence continued: easy, comfortable, warm, intimate. Blunt's voice broke it. “My God, it's already past curfew!”

Richardson had forgotten about the curfew, but no one seemed much upset. He had heard that in one form or another this situation happened not infrequently. The rule forbade traveling after 10
P.M
. If you were not home by curfew, you simply spent the night where you were.

“I've got a spare bedroom upstairs with two bunks in it for you girls. Rich, you can sleep on the couch down here in the living room. We'll have to make an early reveille, though, and start for Shafter right after daybreak.”

Rich was surprised—perhaps he should not have been—to see that Cordelia had twisted around so that she lay almost in Captain Blunt's
lap. Her arm was around his waist, her skirt hiked up carelessly above her knees, her face flushed. Blunt's mouth and cheek seemed fuller and redder than usual. There had been no attempt to shift back to a more conventional pose. Neither Blunt nor the girl appeared at all disturbed over missing curfew, and suddenly Rich realized that this was not new to them. Indeed, the whole situation might well have been premeditated. Joan appeared not the least disconcerted. Her fingers had not interrupted their soothing massage.

Stripped to his undershorts, Richardson lay under only a sheet. With lights out he had dared to open a window at the foot of the day bed, but this did little good in the sultry subtropical climate. His body tingled where Joan had last touched him. He knew what must happen, what was going to happen. There was no hurry. He could hardly wait, and yet he could wait. It was her move. There had been no words exchanged, but she would come. He would not rush her. Time did not matter. He could wait for her. She would come when she was ready.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had also lain sleepless, in the narrow bunk of his stateroom in the
Eel
, reliving the battle with the lifeboats. A combination Bungo Pete and Sammy Sams, cursing, had fired a machine gun at him. Tonight Bungo Pete was gone. Again he was sleepless and uneasy, tingling, acutely conscious of his hands and his feet, and the tiny nipples of his chest where the sheet touched them.

But his uneasiness was for an entirely different reason. He could remember solitude, camping in the mountains. Youthful plans formed by a dominant father, suddenly diverted into a new and more exciting world, still disciplined, but beset with bigger priorities. Until Laura, girls were not a serious thing. But Laura was forever unattainable. . . .

It was a warm night. No breeze, but perfumed. The distant murmur of never-ceasing industry, barely miles away, presided over by the Pearl Harbor odor: crude fuel oil mixed with water and earth. Flowers outside the window vainly sending their fragile aroma into an unheeding world. Ozone from the ever-flashing electric arcs. Hard flux burning, flowing off the welding rods, carbonizing, melting steel plates, joining them, urgently forming them into new and unexpected shapes. Tortured machines, dismantled, revitalized, restored for future torture. Joan's lingering, subtle fragrance. The gentle pressure of her fingers, that spoke so many words.

The crew of the
Eel
. The workers in the Navy Yard and Submarine Base shops. The driven—and the common drive that drove them. Reek of old sweat burned into uniforms and work clothes. . . .

The only life he had known. Ultimately, he would follow Jim,
Stocker, even Tateo Nakame. This was what everything had aimed him for. He had expected to lose himself in the intense concentration of it all. The huge machine covered half the earth. It had not been made for the parts to have anything for themselves. That was not what it was for. The parts were intended only for the whole machine to work better. . . .

Soft footsteps on the floor above. Sound of a door opening, then shutting. Sound of another door softly clicking shut.

He waited. The door again. Soft footsteps on the stairs. Slow, a little hesitant. “Shy” was a better word, for they did not hesitate.

She came down the steps barefooted, on tiptoe, heels high above the floor. Her luxuriant black hair hung down on the left side of her face. She wore a light cotton bathrobe several sizes too large for her.

He was trembling, holding himself quiet under the sheet. Easy, said the inner voice. Take it easy. She is doing something she has to do. Don't rush her.

He closed his arms about her. Her lips parted softly when his touched them. Her quivering mouth was a refuge. He felt himself disappearing into it. All other motion in the world stopped. Beneath the cotton robe was only Joan.

-
  
3
  
-

T
he ride from Fort Shafter to the submarine base after leaving off Joan and Cordy would have been pleasant, Richardson decided, if only old Blunt had not been so talkative.

The first phase of the morning's excursion, in the early light—the hour after sunrise was always the loveliest—had been quiet, but it, too, in its own way, had been unusual, vaguely uncomfortable. Richardson's pulse was no longer leaping. Everything was matter-of-fact. From the look on Joan's face one would have thought nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing had.

He was unable to guess what was going on in her mind. Had she any conception of the turmoil, the emotional crisis in his which she had helped assuage? His extra self, that part of his brain which seemed to function of its own, more objectively, more cool than he was himself, was telling him that everyone, Admiral Small and Captain Blunt included, had been conspiring to help. Keith and Buck and Al Dugan—all the crew of the
Eel
, in fact—had done so too. Each in his own way, as it came to each to understand. Even the admiral's driver had tried—how did he know? Was the story of the lifeboats all over the base?

Last night Joan had seemed intuitively to understand more than anyone. She had been wanton, had deliberately given herself. It had been a deeply generous, totally personal effort to lift him from the purgatory into which he was drifting. And yet—of this he was sure—there had been something driving her, too. But could the explosion of feeling with which he had responded be called a cure? Or was it merely a compound of too much to drink—that, too, kindly intended by his friends—and the natural reaction of the sailor, just ashore?

The warm sensuousness of night was gone. During day, one retreated into convention, into formality. Maybe this was the barrier. Last night he thought he knew her. Today he was not so sure.

The
Eel
—complicated, intense, an example of man's genius, pound for pound the most complex instrument modern technocracy and cleverness could devise—was simple by comparison. With the
Eel
he felt safe. Once you had mastered her, learned her needs and capabilities,
Eel
was always predictable. You could use her, play upon her, exploit her strengths and protect her from the consequences of her weaknesses. She was a comfort, because she was always the same. But why had sailors, from time immemorial, always personified their ships as female?
Ships were not enigmas. Women by contrast were. He had no idea what Joan was thinking, or even if she was thinking at all, behind the restraint imposed by the morning.

They kept conversation alive because it was what you did. It meant nothing, had no sequence. Whatever the sentry at the entrance to the Shafter compound may have thought, his expression betrayed nothing. Richardson climbed into the front seat of the jeep beside Blunt. They set out for Pearl Harbor, driving a little faster than before.

Blunt's mood had changed, or it might only have been suppressed earlier. He was ebullient, talkative, almost effervescent. Mired in his own thoughts, Richardson at first paid only enough attention to respond when response was necessary. He wished Blunt would stop, or at least shift to professional matters.

“You sure are a lucky man, Rich,” Blunt was saying, slapping the steering wheel of the jeep for jovial emphasis. “Half the guys I know would have given a year's ration of tax-free booze to be in your shoes last night!”

Startled, Richardson could think of no answer appropriate to the remark. Something unknown, unexpected, had grated across his consciousness. This was, at the very least, out of character for the Captain Blunt he had known! Uncertainly, he gave him a searching look, did not reply.

Blunt took no notice. “She's supposed to be the best piece on the island, but nobody knows who's getting any of it. They say there's some airdale in Lahaina—and then you come along, and your first night ashore . . .”

Maybe if he pretended not to hear what Blunt was saying he would get off this kick. A deep uneasiness clutching at him, Richardson managed to find something of interest in a rocky field off to the right. There was something strange, a different quality, almost a babbling note, to the incisive familiar tones. It was the last thing he would ever have expected to hear in that voice!

“When this story gets out, Rich, you'll be more famous around here than if you sank two Bungo Petes!”

This could not be allowed! A burst of rage flooded to Richardson's brain. In growing unease at the trend of Blunt's conversation, he had been about to make another spare, noncommittal comment. A depth of anger which startled even himself boiled to the surface instead. “Commodore, if I hear one word about last night from anybody, I will punch you in the nose! Publicly!”

Blunt, about to say something more, stopped, took a long look at Richardson. The fury in his junior's eyes was all too evident. He surrendered.

“Oh, hell, Rich, you didn't think I'd go around telling about this little soiree we just had, do you? After all, I was in on it too, remember. That Cordy Wood, now, she's really something. You know she's a damn good wrestler. Slippery as an eel, and quick as greased lightning . . .”

But Richardson had found something else of interest in the area of sand and scrub bushes the jeep was now passing. His disquietude was complete. Surely Blunt had not intended to imply that he might boast about the previous evening! Yet he had done exactly that. And the balance of his remarks had been equally uncalled for. This was a side of his character which Richardson had never seen and could not, even having seen and heard, bring himself to believe was a part of the man he had so admired for so many years.