The Caine Mutiny (37 page)

“Harding, I’m not sure,” answered Willie, in a tone involuntarily hushed. “It seems to me I saw a lot less of him than usual. But-hell, you know how Keefer hates the captain.” He dropped his eyes to the code machine.

Harding stood. “That’s great-great.”

“Maybe he’s all wrong.”

“What happens if this ship gets in a jam?” Harding’s lips were tight in vexation and fear. “The purpose of a captain is to get us out of jams, Willie, not to check off due dates on reports and assignments. Christ, this ship’s service audit is ludicrous! I’m a graduate CPA. I’ve done audits for Onondaga Carbide. Christ knows what my boss would say if he saw me in that canteen, counting Oh Henry bars and tubes of toothpaste! ... Well, all that doesn’t matter, see? I volunteered for the Navy, and I’m on the
Caine
, and if it helps the
Caine
for a professional CPA to audit the nickel-and-dime ship’s service, why, I’ll audit it. But in return the Navy’s supposed to give me a ship that goes, and a captain that fights- That’s what all this muck is for, isn’t it?”

“Look, it’s an old story by now. We’re stuck with a lemon. Misfortune of war. We could be in a Jap prison camp. We’ve got to see it through, that’s all-”

“Willie, you’re a good guy,” Harding said, getting up, “but you’re not a married man. We’re different animals. I’m scared for five people, me, my wife, and three kids. One kid in particular. A six-year-old boy with a very nice smile. Remind me to show you his picture sometime.”

Harding hurried up the passageway and disappeared behind the green curtains of his stateroom.

CHAPTER 21

Death and Ice Cream

At dawn next day another entertainment was staged for Ensign Keith by the Northern Attack Force.

The whining bangs of the general alarm brought him, half dressed, scampering up to the bridge, in a misty blue twilight torn by zigzags and parabolas and bursts of red-and-orange fire. The crash of big guns made his ears ring. He hastily chewed up two of the sheets of toilet paper he kept tucked in his life jacket for this purpose, and thrust the wet wads in his ears. At once the explosions dimmed to comfortable thuds. This was his own invention, devised when cotton had once run short during a gunnery exercise.

The
Caine
’s three-inch pop guns had no part to play in the barrage. Queeg kept the crew at battle stations until the sun rose, and then dismissed them. Willie remained on the bridge to enjoy the thumping, blazing show. At half-past eight a long arc of assault boats crept across the quiet waters toward Roi-Namur, main northern fortress of the atoll. The islands were no longer green at all, but sandy gray, spotted here and there with black. Little fires flickered on them, pale in the white sunlight. The foliage had all burned or withered away, leaving splintered, crisscrossed tangles of tree trunks, through which could be seen ruins of squat buildings, and some empty broken walls. Willie watched through binoculars the arrival of the assault boats on the beaches, the swarming forward of the tanks and the marines, the unexpected puffs of white and orange from the inner gray wastes of the islands. He saw some marines fall. The sight was thrilling and a little saddening, like seeing a fighter knocked out.

He turned on the special short-wave radio, the JBD 640, and eavesdropped eagerly on the talk of the embattled men in the tanks ashore. He was surprised to notice that they had dropped the phrases of Navy communications. They spoke to each other, and to the ships trying to protect them with gunfire, in short, angry, vicious sentences. They used fearful obscenity. There was a half-comic contrast between the formal, apologetic tones of the men on the ships and the bitter heat of the men on shore. It was such an interesting novelty that Willie listened for almost two hours. He had the thrill of hearing one man die in the middle of an incredibly foul stream of cursing. At least he surmised the death, because the man was pleading for naval shelling to eliminate a blockhouse that was spraying him with machine-gun fire; and suddenly his words were cut off. Willie had a vague shameful sense that he was storing up anecdotes for future parlor chats while other men were perishing, and that such behavior showed a want of feeling. But he didn’t turn off the radio.

However, he was troubled at lunch, at one particular instant. He was pouring thick chocolate sauce over his ice cream when a shocking explosion, more violent than any he had heard so far, made the silverware and glasses rattle; it felt palpable in the air against his face. He jumped up, with Keefer and Jorgensen, and ran to the starboard scuttle. Jorgensen yanked the tin wind scoop out of the opening, and the officers peered through. A colossal black cloud was climbing skyward over Namur. Long, ugly vermilion flames licked out of its boiling base. “Main ammunition dump, no doubt,” observed Keefer.

“I hope it blew a few thousand Japs to kingdom come,” said Ensign Jorgensen, adjusting his glasses.

“I doubt that it did.” Keefer returned to his seat. “They’re all in nice deep holes, what’s left of ’em. Some of our guys went up with it, though, that’s for sure.”

Willie stared at the holocaust for a minute or so, while a warm fragrant breeze fanned his face, and Ensign Jorgensen breathed on his neck, audibly chewing meat. Then Willie sat at his place again, and dug his spoon into the mound of white cream attractively laced with brown. It occurred to him that there was an unsettling contrast between himself, eating ice cream, and marines on Namur a few thousand yards away, being blown up. He was not sufficiently unsettled to stop eating the ice cream, but the thought worked around like grit in his mind. At last he spoke it aloud.

The other officers gave him vexed looks. None of them stopped eating their desserts. But Ducely, who was in the habit of dousing his plate with chocolate sauce in quantities that sickened the others, paused in the act of reaching for the sauce; then he poured only a thin spiral of brown on his ice cream, and put the pitcher down furtively.

Keefer, pushing back his clean-scraped plate, said, “Willie, don’t be an ass. War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn’t them.” He lit a cigarette. “Tomorrow they may have us sweeping mines in the lagoon. The islands will probably be secured. A lot of marines sitting around on their duffs on the beach, eating lunch, may see us all blown sky-high. None of them will skip a bite.”

“At least they’ll be eating K-rations, not ice cream with sauce,” said Willie. “It’s so-so luxurious, somehow.”

“Look, nobody will court-martial you if you don’t eat your ice cream,” said Keefer.

“We ferried a bunch of marines along the coast one night at Guadal,” said Maryk, spooning up his dessert. “Calm night, but they all got sick as dogs. This marine captain was laying over on that couch. He says, ‘I sure as hell don’t like Guadalcanal, but I’d rather stay on it a year than on this bucket a week.’ He said he’d jump ship if he heard we were going to sweep mines. He says, ‘Of all the lousy deals I know of in this war, sweeping mines is the worst. I don’t know how you guys can sleep nights just knowing you’re on a minesweeper.’ ”

“Can this ship really sweep mines?” said Ducely. “It seems so unbelievable, really-”

“You just handed in an assignment,” said Keefer, “explaining in seven pages exactly how we do it.”

“Oh, that. You know I copied it straight out of the
Minesweeping Manual
. I don’t even know what the words mean. What is that paravane thing they keep talking about?”

“Mr. Keith,” said Maryk, with a small groan, “take your assistant by the hand, right after lunch, and show him a goddamn paravane.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Willie, and he squinted over his cigarette like an old sea dog.

The table was still being cleared when a radioman brought Willie an action message. He broke it in a hurry. The
Caine
was ordered to proceed to Funafuti Atoll next day, escorting an LST group. Funafuti was far south, well clear of the battle zone. Willie was regretful at the thought of leaving the attack force.

He stopped at the rail outside the captain’s cabin to see the sights, but the show had tamed down. Sporadic fire-support shelling was still going on, but the mass barrages were over. The fleet in the lagoon was losing its warlike air. Naked sailors were diving off some of the anchored ships, splashing merrily in water which was no longer blue, but yellow-brown and full of garbage. Other ships were airing bedding in ragged white patches along the life lines.

“Funafuti, hey?” The captain, at his desk, was eating ice cream out of a soup plate with one hand, and fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle with the other. “Kay. Tell Maryk to come up here. And tell Whittaker to send me up another big plate of ice cream, and some coffee-”

A knock sounded at the door, the tentative rap of an enlisted man. It was the radioman, Smith, grinning in apologetic fright. “Beg pardon, Captain. They told me Mr. Keith was here- Big day, Mr. Keith. Another action message-”

Queeg said, “Give it here.” The radioman placed the despatch on the captain’s desk and backed out hastily. Queeg glanced at the heading, half started out of his chair, then leaned back, and said very calmly, “What do you know! Bureau of Personnel. Orders for somebody, no doubt-”

Willie’s hand shot forward. “I’ll break it, sir, right now.”

“Good, Willie, do that. Might even be me. I’m somewhat senior for the good old
Caine
.” The captain gave him the paper offhandedly, and as Willie went out the door he added, “And just remember, orders are classified military information.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Willie had hardly set up the coding machine in the wardroom when Queeg came strolling in. The captain poured himself a cup of coffee. “How’re you coming, Willie?”

“Here she goes, sir.”

Queeg stood over him as he ticked off the message. The orders were for Lieutenant (jg) Rabbitt, assigning him to the destroyer-minesweeper
Oaks
, under construction in San Francisco.

“Rabbitt, hey? New construction, hey? Mighty nice. I’ll take that message, Willie.” Queeg pulled the decode out of the machine, reaching over Willie’s shoulder. “Get one thing straight, Willie. I and I alone will decide when Mr. Rabbitt is to know about his orders, understand me?”

“But, Captain, aren’t the orders addressed to him?”

“God damn it, Willie, you’re turning into the worst sea lawyer I’ve ever seen! For your information this message is addressed to the
Caine
, of which I am the captain, and I can detach Mr. Rabbitt at my pleasure, now that I know the desires of the Bureau. I haven’t the least confidence in Harding as a relief for Rabbitt, not yet, and until such time as Harding seems to measure up, why, Rabbitt can just ride along on the
Caine
, like the rest of us. Is that clear?”

Willie swallowed, and said, “Quite clear, sir.”

Suppressing the knowledge of Rabbitt’s orders was torture for Willie. He sat opposite the first lieutenant at dinner, stealing glances at the pale, patient, worried face, with its perpetual cowlick of straight brown hair falling over the left eye. He felt like a party to a crime.

The ensign realized now that he had grown fond of Rabbitt. It was into the arms of this man that he had jumped when he first boarded the
Caine
, and he still remembered the drawled welcome, “Ho, don’t be so eager! You don’t know what you’re jumping into.” At first Willie had considered him a dull rustic. But, in time, other qualities of Rabbitt had emerged. He was never late in relieving the deck. He couldn’t refuse to do a favor, and he executed favors as though they were orders of the captain. The sailors snapped to obey his commands, though he issued them in easy, joking tones. He wrote up his logs on time, and often volunteered to help Willie with decoding when traffic piled up. And Willie had never heard him say a derogatory word about anybody, except in the general wardroom banter about Queeg.

But Willie feared the captain too much to whisper the great news to Rabbitt. The first lieutenant stood the midwatch that night and stumbled to his bunk in the misty dawn, unaware that his visa out of misery lay on the captain’s desk; or that it lay on the conscience of the communicator, too, so that Keith could hardly sleep.

Willie was drearily deciphering the day’s traffic in the wardroom after breakfast when Queeg came in, followed by a commander-evidently a newly appointed one, for the leaves on the visor of his cap were bright untarnished yellow. The ensign jumped to his feet.

“Commander Frazer, this is my communicator, Ensign Keith.”

Willie shook hands with a tall tanned man of about thirty, with a long jaw, clear blue eyes, and blond hair cut down to bristles. The commander’s khaki shirt was beautifully ironed. Queeg looked shabby beside him, in grays faded by the
Caine
’s vitriolic laundry.

“Go right ahead with your work, Willie,” said Queeg.

“Aye aye, sir.” He moved his coding material to the far end of the table.

Whittaker came in with a steaming jug, and poured coffee for Queeg and his guest. It developed that Frazer, the captain of a destroyer, had just been ordered back to the States to assume command of a new destroyer-minesweeper, new in the sense that a modern destroyer, not a World War I relic, was being converted for sweeping. He had come aboard, he said, for a look-see, because he knew nothing about minesweeping. “They’re converting a whole squadron of them,” said Frazer. “The boss man of my squadron, Captain Voor, thinks I’m being yanked back to get a div or squad command. I don’t know. I’d sure as hell better bone up on sweeping, that’s for sure.” He began to light a curved brown pipe.

Queeg said, “I’ll be happy to show you around, sir, and tell you whatever little we know, here. What ship did they give you, sir?”

“
Oaks
,” said Frazer.

Willie’s heart bounded. He saw Queeg glance toward him; he bent low over his work to avoid the look. “
Oaks
, hey? Sixteen-fifty-tonner. I had a year on one of those as a jg. Nice ships.”

“Bureau was nice enough to send me a tentative roster of my new wardroom,” said Frazer. He pulled a flimsy sheet out of a breast pocket. “Seems as how I’m kidnapping a man from you. What’s the name? Oh-here. Rabbitt.”

Queeg drank coffee.

“His orders haven’t come through yet to you?” Frazer asked. Queeg took another swallow of coffee, and said, “Oh, yes, we have the orders.”

Frazer smiled. “Well, fine. I rather thought you had. I saw the BuPers despatch to you on the Fox sked and had my boys break it- Well. He’s your first lieutenant, isn’t he? Guess he’s pretty well up on sweeping.”

“Competent officer.”

“Well, maybe I’m in luck then. I can get some pretty high NATS priorities. Maybe Rabbitt can fly back with me and give me a long fill-in on the way.”