The Sand Pebbles (2 page)

He heard a shovel scrape out in the fireroom. The engine coolie was probably doping off out there, talking to the stroker coolie. Holman frowned.

The light, quick throbbing came from one of a pair of old reciprocating generators aft on the port side, with a small railed-off switchboard behind them. The black brushes sparked smoothly over the clean copper bars of the commutator; both commutators looked as if they had just had a cut taken on them in the dockyard. An eccentric drive for an oil pump jigged and winked on the end of the armature shaft, and above the steam cylinder a belt-driven flyball governor spun like a little man with his hands on his hips. None of the bearings were hot. Holman got a spot of oil on his dress white jumper sleeve, in finding that out.

Damn it, he thought, where’s that watch coolie? He had no faith in Chinamen looking after machinery. And damned little in some Americans, as far as that goes, he thought.

He made another slow circuit of the engine room, looking at the engine this time. It was triple expansion with the familiar double bar link gear, but very old, dating back to the days when they could not make fine steel and cast iron and made up for it by size. It was a big, heavy engine and it filled the center of the engine room, with the cylinder block rising above the gratings and the crank pits going deep below the floorplates, a three-level engine, but it was probably not very powerful. It was just heavy and old-fashioned and it likely took most of its power just to move itself, Holman thought.

It was massive and it was well and truly made, he saw. The three
pairs of cast-iron columns measured about two feet on a side and the great clumsy shaft couplings were six inches thick. The bearing shells were all heavy, smooth brass and he could not span round the connecting rods with both his hands. All the ordered maze of working parts were cleanly oiled and softly shining under the lights, and that was looksee pidgin, which told nothing about how well it would run, but a warm feeling went out from Holman to the engine and his hands lingered on the sculptured metal. “Hello, engine,” he said softly.

The main condenser was a large white cylinder that lay aft of the engine like the crossbar of a T. The drain well was displaced to port to make room for the shaft to run beneath the condenser and the squat, long thrust bearing rose aft of the condenser. The main circulator and the main air pump snugged into the angles of the T on either side and it made a queer arrangement, but a very neatly balanced one. Forward on the starboard side was the throttle station and a log desk with a metal gauge board up behind it. The clock read two-fifteen. Holman stood for a moment with one hand on the throttle wheel overhead and one on the reversing lever.

“Hey, engine,” he said softly. “Hey, engine!”

He went to the long steel workbench on the starboard side abreast the engine. It had two old vises and at one end a rag barrel and at the other a trash bucket. Up behind it was a tool board with big wrenches on brass clips. The wrenches were scarred and splayed and sprung-jawed and the workbench was marked with a thousand chisel cuts and half-round gasket punch scars, but everything was clean and oiled. Holman sat on the workbench, careless of oil on his dress whites. The spell of the engine was on him.

It was a fine, handsome old engine, much older than Jake Holman himself. He looked at it, massive, dully gleaming brass and steel in columns and rods and links arching above drive rods from twinned eccentrics, great crossheads hung midway, and above them valve spindles and piston rods disappearing into the cylinder block. He knew them all, each part and its place in the whole, and his eye followed the pattern, three times repeated from forward to aft, each one-third of the circle out of phase, and it was all poised and balanced there like
three chunks of frozen music. Under his controlling hands, when they steamed, it was going to become living, speaking music. Under his tending hands, with oil can and grease swab. Under his healing hands, with hammer and wrench and scraper.

“Hello, engine. I’m Jake Holman,” he said under his breath.

Jake Holman loved machinery in the way some other men loved God, women and their country. He loved main engines most of all, because they were the deep heart and power center of any ship and all the rest was trimming, much of it useless. He sat and looked at the engine without thinking, until a wild, yelling argument in the fireroom snapped him out of it.

It was the whang, yang, high, wailing screech of angry Chinese. Holman went over to the head of the engine, where two steps led down to the narrow passageway between the boilers, and then stopped. They wouldn’t know him. Burgoyne must hear it up there; he’d come and break it up. The noise got worse and Burgoyne did not come down. The circular sterns of the two boilers stuck through the light bulkhead into the engine room like huge pop eyes, one on either side of the engine. The feed checks and water columns were in the engine room. The glass tube on the steaming boiler was so dirty-brown inside from scale that Holman had to move his finger slantwise behind it to be sure where the water level was. It was all right. The screeching in the fireroom was becoming frantic. Sometimes scale lodged in a valve and the glass showed a false level. You might think you were riding along easy with plenty of water and all the time your crown sheets were melting and when they let go it could blow the ship apart like a busted cigar. You had to blow the glass down every hour and let the column reform, to be sure. “God damn it!” Holman said.

He opened the blowdown cock. The glass emptied with a roar and steam billowed under the floorplates. One of the ball checks stuck and it kept on blowing, so he closed the cock. A half-naked Chinese came running from the fireroom and Burgoyne clattered down the ladder behind Holman.

“What the Willy Jesus?” Burgoyne said, frowning.

“I blew the glass,” Holman said. “One of your checks leaks.”

“It don’t leak bad. We only blow down once a watch on this ship,” Burgoyne said. “I blew the glass when I came on watch.” “I blow ’em once an hour,” Holman said.

“Maskee. You blow ’em every half hour if you want, when you got the watch. Right now I got it.”

He was angry. He had a right to be. You did not interfere with another man’s watch. But if he turned it over to a coolie, and the coolie was not standing it but out fighting …

“I’m sorry,” Holman said slowly. “I been down here twenty minutes, maybe more, and your coolie ain’t been in the engine room once to check the plant. Hellfire, you must’ve heard ’em fighting out there—”

He broke off at Burgoyne’s sudden grin. The good-humor crinkles at the corners of his eyes replaced the frown between them.

“They ain’t but one coolie down here for both places,” he said. “What you heard was Po-han singing.” He looked at the coolie at Holman’s left. “You sing song, Po-han, he tinkee you, othah man, makee fight fight.” Burgoyne chuckled and milled his fists and grinned at the coolie.

“My no sabby any man stop this side,” the coolie said. He was grinning, but embarrassed.

“The laugh’s on me,” Holman said. “I sure thought two of ’em was about to take the shovels to each other.”

“Po-han’ll sure enough get into the Chinee opera yet,” Burgoyne said. “He’s all the time singing down here by himself.” He looked hard at Holman. “Po-han’s a good man. Anything ain’t right, he’ll find it and tell you. You can trust Po-han.”

“Sure. I feel like a jackass,” Holman said. “I’m sorry I blew that glass, Frenchy.”

“It’s all right, Jake. Well, I better go back up.” Burgoyne started up the ladder. “Ain’t supposed to leave the quarterdeck except for emergencies,” he said from the gratings.

A white hat on a swab handle could stand that quarterdeck watch this time of night, Holman thought. There was no day or night in
the engine room. The coolie was standing by and Holman did not know what to say to him or how to treat him. He saw that the water column had reformed in the same place. It had been all right, but now he knew. The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.

“All thing plopah,” the coolie said. “You makee looksee, Mastah. Any side plopah.”

He was grinning and looking Holman right in the eye and Holman had to recognize him. The coolie had short black hair above his head rag and a smooth, squarish face with very Chinese eyes and a strong chin. Except for the eyes and low nose, it was the same-model face as Jake Holman’s, and that added to Holman’s unease. Holman had gray eyes and bushy eyebrows and short, sandy hair.

“My takee looksee, Joe,” he said, to break the encounter.

He walked around the engine, glancing at things, and sat again on the workbench. This business of coolies, he thought. He was used to them hired by the hour to muck out bilges or clean firesides. He knew the gunboats stationed permanently in China kept coolies living aboard to do all the hard and dirty work, bilges, passing coal, garbage detail, that stuff. But coolies tending machinery: he could not see that. He just could not see that, and it was going to make things unexpectedly complicated for Jake Holman aboard the U.S.S.
San Pablo
.

Through the engine, Holman watched the coolie tending the pumps on the port side. He took up neatly on a blowing gland, then swabbed the rod, then wiped up the spattered grease and water. He took a little make-up feed into the hot well. He moved quickly and surely and he seemed to know what he was doing. He wore old leather steaming shoes and the kind of thin black coolie pants that were tight at the ankle and so loose at the waist that the extra material had to be folded and lapped, and they were held up by a white sash that went around two or three times. The seats always sagged slaunchwise and the sailors laughed and called them “droopy drawers.”

Suddenly, Holman saw the sense of it. Air went through the thin cloth and they did not bind in the crotch or even touch, and the
cloth in the sash soaked up the sweat that rolled down. It beat hell out of skintight dungarees and leather belts. But no sailor would ever wear coolie pants. They would rather go on doctoring the spick itch in their crotches and the prickly heat across their hip bones. Besides, coolie pants would be nonregulation. What about that, Holman thought.

The coolie was adjusting the boiler feed. He was shorter and lighter than Holman but built to the same plan, stocky and well padded with muscles that held their shape like a washboard down his stomach and worked together rounded and smoothly on his arms and across his chest. He did not look like a coolie. Coolies were scrawny and corded, ribs showing, and they had ugly purple calluses the size of cantaloupes on their humped shoulders. Squeeze merchants ashore were fat as Buddha. This coolie was what a Chinaman could look like when he had enough to eat and still had to work.

What the hell, Holman thought. That coolie’s all right. Machinery only cared about what a man knew and what he could do with his hands, whether he was a coolie or an admiral, and that was the secret, very good thing about machinery. The coolie was an engineer; well then, he was not a coolie, he was another engineer like Jake Holman. Po-han turned and caught Holman’s gaze and came over grinning.

“All thing plopah, Mastah?” he asked. He knew it was, and he was proud.

“Ding hao!”
Holman made the double thumbs-up sign and grinned back. “You no moh speakee my name
Mastah,”
he said. “You speakee me
Jake … Holman.”
He pronounced it very distinctly.

“Jeh-ki,” Po-han said. “Ho-mang.”

“Jehk.”

“Jehk. Jehk.”

Holman slid off the workbench. There was no more strain in the encounter. “I’m going up and turn in,” he said, dropping the pidgin. “I’m glad to be shipmates with you, Po-han.” He held out his hand.

Po-han was embarrassed, because shaking hands was not old custom in China, but he shook hands. Both men had hard, square hands and a powerful grip.

“Keep her steaming, Po-han,” Holman said, and headed for the ladder. He had seen the engine room and he could go to sleep now.

He did not go right to bed. He needed time to appreciate his new bunk. It was against the port side forward, just aft of the door, and it was half again as wide and much softer than the thin horsehair mattress he was used to. The crew’s compartment was big enough for a hundred bunks, by navy standards, and there were only about twenty in it, as far as he could judge by the dim blue night lights. Holman was used to sleeping on narrow pipe-and-wire shelves stacked four high on either side of pipe stanchions. You were practically in a double bed with the guy across from you. Somebody’s rump sagged in your face and someone else’s feet were next to your pillow. The air was always thick with bad smells and strangled snoring. Bunking like that was supposed to work you out of any private and personal notions you had about yourself. When you learned to like living that way, you were a good bluejacket and Uncle Sam loved you.

He undressed and sat on his bunk. A huge upright locker at either end made a little alcove of it. Above it a fresh breeze off the river fluttered curtains in the two square windows.
Curtains!
The place smelled airy and clean, of wax and soap and metal polish. Suddenly he stretched out his legs and waved them and raised his arms and waved them and no matter where he stretched and reached, he was still in his own space. It was his body catching up, starting to believe it, taking possession.

He sprawled luxuriously on the edge of sleep, believing and enjoying it. A sailor without his own ship was like a hermit crab without a shell. It was good to have a shell again. This bunk was no better than the one he had had on the commercial steamer up from Shanghai. But a paid-for bunk was like a whore. Your own bunk on your own ship was what a wife was probably like. You could really rest, in your own bunk.

His mind moved to the missionary girl on the commercial steamer. She was new in China, going to her first mission job. She did not know the score and she did not know the rules. That first morning
in the lower Yangtze she had even thought he was part of the steamer crew. She had stopped where he was standing by the saloon deck rail.