The Sand Pebbles (13 page)

“It’s only a
toofay
salute,” Restorff told Holman.

He was not excited. Bells jangled below and the fire doors clanged and the engine thud slowed. Ellis slipped a clip into a rifle and stood up.

“I’ll try for a potshot from the galley windows,” he said.

He left. Machine-gun fire crackled sharply from the bridge and then stopped. Pappy Tung and all the deck coolies had crowded into cover aft of the quarterdeck.

“What’s
toojay?
Who the hell’s shooting at us?” Holman asked.

“Toojay
. Bandits,” Restorff grunted.

The machine gun on the bridge cut loose again briefly and Ellis fired rapidly from the galley. After a long pause, the
San Pablo’s
whistle sounded. The little gunboat had a deep, hoarse whistle that would better have suited an ocean liner, and Burgoyne said it dropped the steam ten pounds every time they blasted it. Bells jangled again and the engine thud picked up and the deck coolies scattered back to their painting and scrubbing. Ellis came back with his rifle and a pot of steaming water.

“Damn it, now I got to scald it out,” he said. “Thought I saw something move in them bushes, but likely I didn’t.”

The
San Pablo
exchanged salutes with the
toofay
about once a week. Every town and district of Hunan was controlled by different groups of armed men. If they obeyed the treaties and did not interfere with treaty people, they were warlord troops. If they shot at gunboats and robbed such palefaces as they could catch, they were bandits. They all treated the civilian Chinese about the same, and that was not very well. Some of the minor warlords were supposed to be subordinate to the big warlord in Changsha, but for the most part each one was king in his own area. A great part of Lt. Collins’ job was dealing with warlords.

Each steaming day Holman spent four hours on throttle watch, with Burgoyne tending water. He liked that, he and Burgoyne in dungarees and stripped to the waist, hand rags dangling from hip pockets and sweat towels around their necks, and the main-drive machinery talking and moving all around them. They steamed an easy five or six knots in the rivers and three or four knots in the lake and it was easy steaming. Too easy, Holman learned on his first watch.

He kept the log and handled the throttle and Chien had charge of everything else. The old man moved all day between engine room and fireroom watching his coolies stoke furnaces and feel bearings and oil down and swab rods. When the low-pressure crank bearing ran hot it was Chien who gave it the emergency treatment with brown soap and water and came to the throttle station and told Holman he would have to slow the engine by ten revolutions. Chien had the only authority that counted, the authority to make decisions about the machinery and to carry them out. But Holman signed the log and he had the official responsibility. Old Chien could not have that, because he had no legal existence for the navy. Holman went to see Lynch.

“I want a real steaming watch,” he said. “I know they got to be Chinamen, but I want the same ones each watch and I want to know who they are and I want to train ’em and know I can trust ’em.”

“You can trust Chien. You see anything wrong before Chien does,
you just tell him,” Lynch said. “Hell, Jake, it’s easy as driving a car, way it is now. Why look for trouble?”

“Because I feel like a dummy down there,” Holman said.

The throttle was the honor point. No Chinese was permitted to touch the throttle. But in effect they had everything else, and it was a stupid honor. Holman wrangled carefully with Lynch, not revealing all that he felt.

“All right, I’ll settle for one man, to be my oiler on the main engine,” he said at last. “That coolie, Po-han. Reckon that’d hurt old Chien’s feelings too much?”

“I’ll talk to Chien,” Lynch said.

Chien gave in on Po-han, but he didn’t like it. It was all unofficial, of course. Chien called Holman “Mastah” when they spoke, which was seldom. Scuttlebutt sprang up that Holman and Chien were feuding. That was probably Perna’s work, Holman thought. Perna was a sly bird. He and Wilsey and Stawski stood their watches in the old way, often one man tending both throttle and feed checks while the other was cooling off topside. Perna pretty well led Stawski, the big, stupid fireman, on a leash. There was one other fireman, a kid named Waxer, who did not stand steaming watches. He was a striker to Harris and also to Waldhorn, the radioman. One of Chien’s coolies named Chiu-pa seemed to do all the electrical work.

Holman began to like Burgoyne. He was mild and easy-going, willing to let Chien run the fireroom, where Burgoyne was in charge on paper, but he sympathized with Holman’s desire for more control in the engine room. The throttle station was a brightly lighted angle formed by the log desk, with the gauge board up behind it, and the forward part of the engine. It was like a quarterdeck for the engine room. Burgoyne would stand there, drooping his lean, tattooed weight by one hand from an overhead valve wheel, legs crossed, smoothing his drooping mustache with his free hand, under lip bulging with the Copenhagen which he spat at intervals into the trash bucket beside the log desk. He was a simple, pleasant, unhurried man and a good watchmate. Sometimes he would sit on an upended bucket, elbows on knees. Holman invariably stood balanced
easy and ready on both feet, watching the many-formed motions of the engine and listening to all the machinery sounds, even as he talked. Po-han ranged along the engine and back into the shaft alley on his oiling duties, and he was always coming to the throttle station to ask questions. Po-han was afire to learn.

“I swear, Jake, Po-han’s the little image of you,” Burgoyne said one day. “Same square build and all the muscles, only his skin’s darker.” Burgoyne looked from Holman to the cheerful, grinning coolie. “I
do
swear it! Stands like you and cocks his head the same—Jake, he’s studying to ape you.”

“Let him,” Holman said. “He’ll be a good engineer.”

Po-han’s English got better every day. He was still linking up all the little magics into the big magic and he wanted to learn names.
May … stim … stah … wowel!
he would say, for
main steam stop valve
, his eyes shining with joy in a new name learned. He was fitting what he learned into a very weird scheme of his own that Holman drew out of him one afternoon on watch. Po-han spoke as much of it as he could and acted out the rest. They laughed, watching him, and Po-han laughed too, because they were all friends. To Po-han, the engine was a metal dragon. The dragon ate steam and excreted exhaust steam to the condenser. The air pump and feed pumps were metal coolies and boatmen who returned the digested steam to the fields. The boilers were the fields and the stoker coolies out there were farmers who had captive suns in their furnaces. They were continuously raising a crop of steam which Holman, as throttleman, continuously harvested and fed to the dragon. It was honorable to be a steam farmer, but the greatest honor was to attend the dragon and massage his limbs and oil his joints. Po-han was very pleased and excited by his scheme.

“Who’d ever guess he was thinking like that, watching him work? Pure wonders you, don’t it?” Burgoyne shook his head. “Steam farm. The sun in a cage.” He laughed. “You could sure God get sunburned by them suns, all right.”

“It ain’t just funny,” Holman said. “He’s got to make it hang together best way he can. Don’t you, Po-han?” He slapped the coolie’s
shoulder and grinned at him. “You know, Frenchy, coal was moss and ferns a million years ago, and it took sun to grow it. When you burn coal, it’s like turning that sunlight loose again. When you blister your arm on a steam valve, you really are sunburned, in a way of figuring.”

“A funny way of figuring. I’ll have to study that.”

“It is, Frenchy, you think it through.” The notion was exciting Holman. He pointed to the electric light above them. “That’s million-year-old sunlight,” he said.

“You’re bad as Po-han,” Burgoyne said. “How do you guys think up stuff like that?” He grinned and spat in the trash bucket. “Steam farms. I’ll have to tell Perna that.”

“No. Perna’d make a nasty joke out of it,” Holman said. “Po-han trusts us, to tell us things like that.”

“You’re right. I won’t tell Perna.”

Through all their steaming watches Chien’s coolies worked on cleaning and minor repairs and old Chien drifted around watching everything. He always wore his shiny black, close-buttoned jacket and he never had sweat on his bony face. Holman seldom spoke to him and he often felt the old man’s hostile eyes on the back of his neck. It would be no use to ask old Chien what scheme he had to hang the plant together. Probably he did not have a scheme, Holman thought, and he did not want to see Po-han gain one. Whatever the reason, Chien neither liked nor trusted Holman and Po-han.

Holman found some eighth-inch copper tubing and wound it into a steam coil and hooked it into the back pressure line to the feed heater. He got a gray enamel pitcher and some mess cups from Wong and began making engine room coffee. The smell of the coffee, added to the odors of hot oil, hot metal and scorched rubber packing, made the engine room smell right to him for the first time. You always put a big pinch of salt into a pot of engine room coffee before you boiled it, to make up for the salt you lost in sweating. It gave the coffee a special flat, oily kind of taste.

“This is right good,” Burgoyne said, tasting his first cup of it. “I like to forgot how black gang coffee tasted.”

At first the other watch would not make any coffee. They kept on sending to the galley for it. Po-han did not drink any of it, because Chinese did not like coffee and because it was strictly against old custom for them to use crew’s mess gear. Even when Wong and Clip Clip ate leftovers from the crew’s mess, they always used chopsticks and tin pieplates. One morning Lynch sniffed the coffee smell from above and came down for a cup.

“Ain’t smelled that for years,” he said. “Makes me hungry for a cup.” He sipped at it. “Ain’t no coffee like shaft alley coffee,” he said.

On other ships all the engineers believed that. After a week or so Perna and Wilsey and Stawski also began brewing and drinking engine room coffee.

The summer cruising shook Holman down to the ship’s routine. There were the daily drills and musters. Every Friday there was lower-deck inspection. Lt. Collins and Bordelles and the chiefs, all in white, walked through the engine room and fireroom with old Chien hovering along in their wake to take their praise of how clean and shipshape it all was. They never asked how well it ran. Saturdays they had personnel inspection and Holman hated that as much as he always had. It was really no strain. The compartment coolies shined shoes the night before and laid out clean uniforms in the morning and Oh Joy always made a great chattering fuss about each man looking just right before he went out. It was the simple standing there and being looked at like a thing that Holman hated. After personnel inspection came inspection of topside and living spaces. It was a royal progress of Lt. Collins through the ship, accompanied by Bordelles and the chiefs, the Red Dog to take notes, Farren bearing a flashlight, one Fang in the lead to bugle
attention
when they came to a place, and another Fang in the rear to bugle
carry on
when they left it. Holman had to stand by the quarterdeck arms locker for topside inspection. They never inspected the Chinese living quarters, in the old iron hull of the ship, below the main deck.

About every ten steaming days they coaled ship, usually from Chinese barges. Chanting coolies streamed aboard with the coal in
flat baskets on top of their heads and dumped it down the deck scuttles. Other coolies below in the bunkers leveled and trimmed and the work went fast. The
San Pablo
had one thwartship and two wing bunkers, boxing in the fireroom, and they held about ninety tons. Lynch always took Chien’s word for tonnage and quality.

“Chien’s the guy that’s got to burn it, he’ll look out for slate,” Lynch told Holman. “Don’t worry about it.”

Bordelles would pay whatever Lynch said to pay, and coal was one of the big sources of the squeeze that paid all the coolies. Bordelles always paid in silver Mex dollars because they did not trust paper money in Western Hunan. There were no banks there, and Bordelles had to carry enough silver for the whole summer. They said he always left Hankow with his bathtub so full of silver dollars he could not take a bath until the Fourth of July. As soon as the coal was aboard, Pappy Tung and his deck coolies would go after the coal dust with hoses, scrubbers and rags, and in an hour or two the
San Pablo
would be as brass-gleaming white as ever.

Payday was every other week and it involved more of the things Jake Holman did not like. Bordelles knew every man in the crew, yet he had to countersign each pay receipt as witness of the man’s signature and then watch each man put his fingerprints on the back of his pay receipt to prove that he was really the man he was pretending to be. They had to file past the mess table to draw their money with their hats clamped under their arms, and the only other place you had to carry your hat that way was in officers’ country. Welbeck and Bordelles, wearing pistols, sat in Burgoyne’s and Harris’ places at the mess table, and behind them Duckbutt Randall, also armed, guarded a dishpan full of reserve Mex dollars in brown paper rolls. Lop Eye Shing sat next to Bordelles, in Farren’s place, to collect each man’s coolie bill.

The first payday was Holman’s first sight of Lop Eye Shing. He was tall and robust, with a big nose for a Chinese, and he did not look as old as he must have been. His paralysis gave his face a sad, sinister look, the left eyelid drooping—that was why they called him Lop Eye—and the left corner of his mouth drooped. The right side of his face was firm and bold. He talked good English, slurring some
words, and when he talked little flickers of life ran through the left side of his face, but they never quite caught. He had a deep voice for a Chinese and he always wore a black skull cap and a gray gown and he walked with a gold-mounted cane. It was very plain that the other coolies were afraid of him.