The Med (11 page)

The essential thing,
he thought,
is never to make a mistake.

5

Naples, Italy

When word came down at last to secure main engines something relaxed inside Kelly Wronowicz's chest. It was as if the dying whine of
Ault
's turbines, spinning down for the first time in two weeks, was a part of himself shutting down.

He watched the throttleman spin the worn wheel with one finger, cutting the invisible bloodstream of steam that kept the old destroyer alive. The pressure gauge above his head spun down to zero.

“Closed tight?”

“Yeah, Chief.”

“Stewie, remember the jacking gear. We don't need no bowed shafts. And I want lube oil temps below ninety before you wrap up the watch down here.”

“Aye.”

“And take that leftover coffee. Dump it on the deckplates with some scouring powder and get Blaney to kaieye it down before he secures.”

“Right, Chief.”

When the jacking gear had been engaged and tested, Wronowicz left the throttle board and walked aft through the engineroom. To either side they loomed up, his evaporators, his pumps, generators and reduction gears, the steel-shining complexity of steam and cooling lines, reach rods, wiring. He hardly noticed the hundred-degree heat, the dank smell compounded of steam, lube oil, hot steel, and baked insulation. The walkway rang under his boots, slippery with condensation and oil, and his ear tuned without conscious thought from the slight off-pitch of number-one ship's service generator, to the hiss of steam through the gland exhausts of the air ejector (he would have to repack it soon, but not today, not today), to the gay shout of one of the watchstanders as he threw his log board onto its peg. Absently wiping his fingers, black with grease and soot, on a rag from his back pocket, he rubbed them over the casing of the low-pressure turbine. Around him, for the length of the engineroom, the grease-softened light of the fluorescents glowed off piping and ductwork, off hose reels, colored bottles of compressed gas and firefighting chemicals; off coils of emergency cable as thick as his hairy wrists. He paused at the ladder, looking back toward the throttle board. The top watch was making the last entries in the log, the lower level men were stowing their tools, oiling cans, rags, wrenches.

Machinist's Mate Chief Kelly Wronowicz looked over his kingdom, breathed one deep sigh, and went up the ladder toward the main deck.

By the time the mooring lines were fast, the ratguards rigged, “A” gang busy on the pier connecting water and telephone lines, Wronowicz was exhausted. Although he did not show it. He never showed weakness or exhaustion to the thirty roughnecks he bossed in
Ault
's “M” Division, and especially not to the main propulsion assistant, Ensign Callin.

The chiefs' quarters was noisy with men showering and dressing, readying themselves for the first wild night in Naples. He peeled off his coveralls, noticing for the first time in days their smell, the grease and soot ground in so deep the ship's laundry had long ago given up on them, and sagged two hundred and twenty hairy pounds into his rack with a grunt. The mattress was soft, welcoming, and he felt that part of him that had relaxed with the shutdown ebb toward sleep. He wanted nothing more in the world. The last two weeks at sea—with materiel inspection, replacing a dozen failed flexitallic gaskets because Foster forgot he was driving a ship as old as he was, landing exercises, underway replenishment—had been hell. And Callin on him every minute, ignorant as a tick … he pulled his mind away from work. They were in port at last, and the machinery could cool into immobile metal, cool and shrink and rest. He rested too, and the whine of electric razors faded into a long-awaited unconsciousness.

“Hey, Kelly,” said a voice. “Lieutenant Jay wants to see you out in the passageway.”

Wronowicz turned over heavily in his bunk. “Whatever it is, tell him to grease it good and cram it up his ass.

“All right,” he added, after a moment of silence. “I'm coming.” Three deep breaths later he got up, pulled a pair of pants over his belly, centered the buckle, and went up into the chief's lounge.

The engineering officer was small and finely built. He was fresh off the bridge, in tailored trop whites, and gold glittered at his shoulders and on the cap he held under one arm. Wronowicz felt his glance at his gut, at the dark circles of sweat under the armpits of his T-shirt, but he knew Jay didn't really mind. If a snipe was clean he wasn't doing his job, and the lieutenant, despite his crispness on watch, got just as filthy when something needed doing down in the hole.

“You wanted me, sir?”

“Yeah, Chief. I can't find Mr. Callin. Some things have to be done before the department goes ashore.” Jay glanced around the lounge; Wronowicz shrugged. That meant, in the shorthand of men who worked together every day, that Jay didn't want to say anything critical in front of the other chiefs, and that the machinist's mate didn't mind.

“What's that, sir?”

“Thing is, after the fueling, they didn't clean up right. There's oil on the deck and handprints all over the bulkhead. The exec brought it to my attention.”

“Yessir, I know about that. I figured the duty section could get it, sir,” said Wronowicz. He wiped what remained of his hair back with one hand. “I hate to keep the snipes turned to when everybody else is walking off the brow, after the hours they've put in this last couple weeks.”

“I do too,” said Jay. “But we've been through this before, Chief. If they'd clean up after a job we wouldn't take this flak. I want the same people to clean it who were on station when it happened. And I want it done now.”

“Aye aye, sir,” he said, rubbing his belly sadly. Jay left.

“You look terrible, Kelly,” said Chief Sullivan, coming out of the pantry with a cinnamon bun. He was already dressed for liberty in a loud Hawaiian shirt and seersucker slacks. “You said to stop by before we left … you sure you want to hit the beach tonight?”

“Yeah, I'll hit it,” snapped Wronowicz. His sleep was wrecked now. “Just give me a couple minutes. I'll meet you on the pier.”

“We'll be there.”

He made it to a chair before his legs gave way. Two shots of Chief's Mess coffee, as much darker and more virulent than regular Navy coffee as that is to the weak stuff civilians brew, put strength back into his limbs. His heart began to beat. He felt mean again, as a chief should, and the lights got a little brighter.

One more cup, black, and then he went down to engineering berthing and collared Roberts and Smee, chewed them out, and sent them up to the refueling station. He took a quick shower and put on a fresh set of whites, cocking his cap in the mirror. He started out into the corridor; Callin was there, talking to one of the men. Wronowicz left by the other door, going through sick bay. He made sure that his men were at work; they were scrubbing away in their liberty clothes, their backs to the town, cursing him.

He sighed and walked on. Sullivan was waiting beside the after five-inch mount. They saluted the quarterdeck watch and clattered down the gangway; and then he was ashore, the wind cool with evening and the familiar strange scent of land, and all responsibility, all worry dropped away from him, and he was on liberty.

*   *   *

“Yeah,” grunted Chief Wronowicz, stretching backward in the cramped front seat of the cab till his cap bent against the soiled roof. “Naples again, the asshole of the Mediterranean.”

A molehill beside the chief's mountain, the little swarthy driver slid his eyes sideways. “Better put a lid on that,” said “Unc” Blood, the quartermaster, wiggling his goatee from the backseat. “Remember, we're what's passing through.”

Wronowicz grunted, then remembered a joke himself. “Yeah … reminds me of this guy, he can't get it up, right? His snake's on a Swiss vacation.”

“Like your mind.”

“Like your morals. Shut him up back there, bo's'n.”

“Tell the joke,” said Chief Sullivan mildly. “You half-Irish son of a bitch, tell the joke.”

“So he goes to a doc, and the pill-pusher says to him, ‘Mister, it sounds like what you need is more variety in your sex life.' ‘Yeah?' says the guy. ‘Like what do you mean? Another woman?'”

“The chief snipe makes these up as he goes along,” Blood muttered to Sullivan. “That's why they take so long.”

“Shut up, you turd.… ‘Naw,' says the doctor, ‘What you do is the same thing, but you do it different.'

“‘Like how?' says the guy.

“‘Well, you ever see two dogs goin' at it in the yard?' says the doc. ‘Try it like that. See if it makes things more interesting.'

“‘I don't think my wife would go for that,' says the guy.

“‘Ah, give her a couple of drinks, I'll bet she would,' says the doc. So the guy says he'll go home and try it.”

“I think I heard this before, back in Sunday school,” said Blood.

Wronowicz ignored him. “Anyway, the next day he comes back to the office. ‘Did it work?' ‘Not real good, Doc,' says the guy. ‘She got drunk as hell, but she still wouldn't take her clothes off on the lawn.'”

The three chiefs grabbed suddenly for handholds as the driver braked, sending the taxi slewing. He leaned on the horn, his narrow face ferocious, cursing out the open window as traffic roared by, missing the cab by clearances that made his passengers flinch back.

“Jesus Christ,” said Sullivan, rubbing his bald spot. “This bastard is going to kill us all.” They shouted at the man, ordered him to drive on, but he ignored them, screaming at the driver ahead, who was looking back at them, making an occasional small gesture with his thumb. The other Neapolitan, a much younger man, looked cool and self-possessed.

Their driver became frenzied. Spittle flew onto the windshield. A truck rumbled by, missing their fender by inches, the horn loud but absurdly high. The cab surged forward, the driver jerked the wheel, screaming unintelligible maledictions, and the two men in back yelled at Wronowicz, “Grab the wheel! He's trying to ram the bastard!”

“Be damned if he isn't,” said Wronowicz, regarding the little man with more favor. He put his big hand gently on the cabbie's chest and took the wheel, but before he could straighten, the Neapolitan released it with both hands and began to crawl out the window, screaming. The man in the car ahead looked back, grinning, and screwed his finger into his cheek. Before any of them could react, their driver was in the street, running, and they saw him reach into his pants and flick out a knife. The car ahead sped up and turned, and they heard him scream a last malevolent blasphemy as he doubled into a side street after it. The taxi slowed, jolting as someone behind hit it, and after his first astonishment Wronowicz hauled himself over into the vacant seat, where he huddled with his knees up to his face.

“Where the hell did he go?”

“Down one of those alleys.”

“Well,” said Wronowicz, “I guess we got ourselves a taxi. Where you birds want to go? Anyplace in town, two thousand lire.” He winced as the gears ground, and clutched and threw it in again, his head cocked for the meshing; and then concentrated on the traffic, bending to peer out at the twisting streets, the churches, the pizzerias where sailors and marines sat, not together. The sky broke blue and strangely gay above the puce and pink apartments, new but shabby, the old women in black observing it all from their balconies like saints from a painted heaven. The stream of traffic came to a roundabout and he gunned the taxi rocking in tight circles around a crumbling fountain. The others cursed as, infected with the game, he cut suddenly across traffic toward an exit, scraping the fender of a Lancia. Wronowicz tossed his scraggy-bearded, wide-boned, madly blue-eyed face back and let out a shout of pleasure. His cap fell off and his thinning black hair sprang free. “Where to?” he roared again, the deep bass of his voice, the gaiety in it and release, filling the car; and the men behind him grinned, too.

“Let's get something to eat first,” suggested Sullivan. “I'm going nuts for some linguine. That's the only good thing about this goddamn country.”

“Wine,” Blood said.

“Well, that's good too, yeah.”

“Place up here I been to … there it is,” said Wronowicz, slowing. “This look okay?”

“Sure.”

“I been here before, too.”

The three chiefs ordered and ate together with the complacence of old friends, though they had, in fact, not known each other long. Wronowicz was the longest aboard
Ault,
nearly three years; this was his second tour after picking up his anchors, which had come slow. Blood, the Mephistophelian quartermaster chief, had come aboard later, replacing a first-class who had displayed the poor judgment of smoking a bone while shooting evening stars one night.

Sullivan, the nearly bald boatswain, was brand-new this cruise. Things were not going well for him with the deck force. He was reputed not to be stern enough, unwilling or unable to kick ass the way a classic chief BM did; he looked in fact like someone's henpecked dad. Wronowicz, glancing at him, saw his hands shake as he lit a cigar after the gelati. Kelly Wronowicz was not insensitive, but before some human situations he was at a loss. A fractured piston ring in a compressor, loss of vacuum in a main condenser—yeah. Those he could handle. A man who slacked off, who was inefficient or ignorant, that he could handle.

Problems like Sullivan had, though … he rubbed at his beard, and his mind moved on. He had drunk almost a liter of wine with the linguine. Perhaps because of that, or the three cups of joe, he felt unwontedly keen about this night's liberty. Almost the way he had felt as a fireman deuce, so many years before it did not bear thinking about.

“How's things down in the hole, Kelly?” said Blood, breaking into his thoughts.