The Sand Pebbles (38 page)

“Tell Po-han to give up. He’s gonna bust,” Burgoyne said.

“I’d give a year of my life if I could get it across to him,” Holman said. He meant what he said.

“I swear, he’ll bust his head wide open,” Burgoyne prophesied.

Po-han’s illumination came without warning. He was staring at the engine and he began bridling and jogging his elbows and prancing like a horse marking time.

“Whoa, there!” Burgoyne said, laughing.

“White hoss! Too much white hoss!” Po-han yelled.

Then he was off, galloping down the port side of the engine room and back again, unable to stop. “White hoss! White hoss!” he kept exclaiming. Burgoyne looked disturbed.

“What the hell, Jake?” he asked.

“He’s all right. He’s breaking through,” Holman said.

He felt very good about it. It was not something that Burgoyne could understand. Po-han bent with his hands on the thrust block and kicked his heels aft like a frisky colt. “White hoss! White hoss!” Finally he calmed a bit and came back to the throttle platform. His face was shining.

“I sabby hosspowah, Jehk,” he said solemnly.

Holman nodded. “You sabby, Po-han.”

“I swear, I never seen it turn a guy into a horse before,” Burgoyne said. “You sure you’re all right, Po-han?”

Po-han wanted to talk about it. He was still so excited that his
pidgin English poured out of him like unbroken horses and Burgoyne could scarcely follow. But Po-han had it, all right. He had the pure notion of energy, and his world would never be the same again.

The steam came aft through the main steam line like wild white horses. The throttle and the slide valves were gates and the horses ran invisibly down the connecting rods and out along the whitely spinning shaft. Only their pale ghosts went to the condenser. When there were too many horses in the boilers they kicked open the safety valves and charged off into the sky in a great, white, trumpeting host of horses. If the horses could not escape that way, they would kick the boiler apart and sink the ship.

“He beats hell, don’t he?” Burgoyne marveled.

The most wonderful thing of all was that the horses could not die. They ran aft and kicked themselves free off the screw, and they became the motion of the ship and the turbulence of the wake, but they did not die.

“Nevah make finish!” Po-han said. “White hoss nevah die!”

“Never die,” Holman confirmed.

Their eyes shared that knowledge and they loved each other in that moment. Burgoyne was left out of the deeper part of it. But there was not a scrap of jealousy in Frenchy Burgoyne. He was a rare, fine shipmate, Holman thought.

After that it was not the same on watch. There were tricks with tools that Holman could still teach Po-han, but otherwise he had taken Po-han as far as he could go himself. Once he saw Po-han with a lump of coal in his hand, staring at it. Po-han had the strained, aching look on his face. He was trying to understand how wild white horses could be locked up so cool and safely in a black stone. Jake Holman could not tell him. He had often looked at a lump of coal like that himself. “Coal burns” was no answer. It was just words. How did the wild white horses from the sun ever get into the coal? But it was still very good on watch. It was just pleasant, steady steaming.

Well, it was pleasant. They would stand on the throttle platform, Burgoyne chewing snuff and hanging leanly from an overhead valve
wheel, and Holman standing erect and balanced on spread legs, in the way he had, and they would just be there. Over on the port side Po-han would be standing balanced and ready also, although he had never been on a sea-going ship that might roll and pitch him into the machinery, and he would have his eyes closed. He was listening.

It was the hushed rubbing sound of oil sliding through oil on a score of bearing surfaces. The slide valves and piston rings made a drier, muffled whispering. Steam blowing through ports and receivers roared hollowly far off, like a million hoofs drumming a distant prairie. The scores of valve gear bushings made a lisping, oil-muted chatter. All the sounds sang together. The quick, light throb of the circulator rustled cooling water through the condenser tubes like a woman walking in silk. The air pump plunged and all its bucket valves clanked shut and it rose straining and gasping to sluice the condensed steam to the hot well for the groaning feed pumps. Air wheezed out of the hot well vent with the wet smell of steam and the wet hay smell of oily loofa sponges, and it mixed with the burnt rubber smell of hot packing and hot swabbing oil. From the fireroom came the hiss and the sulfur smell of coal smoke and water on hot ashes, the scrape of shovels and the clang of fire doors, and the shrill voices of the stoker coolies calling each other lazy turtles. All the voices sang with the engine. And then, standing with eyes open, to stride with the rods and plunge with the crossheads and jog with the valve gear and catch the intricate play of light and shadow as the wild horses spun whitely aft into the dimness of the shaft alley. And to take in through feet and fingertips the same white horses, transmuted by screw thresh, spreading from the thrust block to join the slower, smoother engine vibration feeding down through the soleplate chocks. To have knowing in their bones the same vibration that trembled water in glasses topside, and rattled loose windows, and worked rivets and stringers and frames minutely rubbing and creaking and whispering the old ship’s secret life through all its structure, there knowing and controlling and almost being the source of the ship’s life—that was how it was.

That was what they had that Frenchy Burgoyne could not share
with them. Burgoyne liked to joke about it. He would blow the glass on one of the boilers. Steam would roar under the floorplates and feather up through the cracks.

“How many horses in the bilges, Po-han?”

“I tink one dog powah,” Po-han would say scornfully.

They would all laugh. But Po-han shared with Burgoyne something in the memory of the courtyard in Changsha that Jake Holman could not fathom.

“If we was in Changsha, I’d be getting home about now,” Burgoyne said one day. “If it was Saturday, I’d have all day tomorrow at home.”

“You got it bad, Frenchy,” Holman said.

“I got it bad, Jake. I don’t care who knows it.”

“What you like number one, Po-han?” Holman asked. “Stop homeside? Run engine?”

“I likee stop homeside!”

“That’s the boy!” Burgoyne slapped Po-han’s shoulder. “You and me both, Po-han!”

Po-han knew Holman’s feelings were hurt. “Suppose have got home, any man mus’ wanchee stop homeside,” he tried to explain. He said a lot of other things and made sleeping and eating gestures, but it all boiled down to that. He was trying very hard to make Holman understand. Burgoyne understood, all right. Well, Po-han knew about the engine too, and he was the one to judge, Holman thought. He grinned at the two men.

“You’re just a pair of bloody homeguards,” he said.

“That’s all we want to be,” Burgoyne assured him.

Homeguards or not, they were still the two finest men Jake Holman had ever known. It was very pleasant on the steaming watch.

Holman liked almost everyone that summer. He strolled the topside like the other Sand Pebbles and he began feeling curiously detached from the engine room. Po-han down there was so much like himself with the machinery that it was like being in two places at once. Holman would stroll the boat deck and look in on Waldhorn
in the radio shack, shoot the breeze with the chiefs in their wicker armchairs under the awning, and move on aft to the sick bay to talk with Jennings about chlorinating water. On the main deck he would stop to joke with Red Dog and Duckbutt Randall in the ship’s office, hunch down to watch Restorff and his helpers clean guns, drink coffee and wait for his shave in the crew’s compartment. He met everyone squarely and talked easily.

He knew most of the Chinese by name and he would nod and grin at them. On the first meeting of the day he would exchange slight bows and a few words with the important Chinese. Lop Eye Shing was always very pleasant. Nearly every day Holman drank a bowl of tea in the galley with Big Chew. He liked and respected the bold and burly cook. Except possibly for Clip Clip and Oh Joy, he respected all the Chinese. They treated him with a seriousness that they did not show to the other Sand Pebbles, and it made him feel solid.

Holman was trying to be a good topside sailor. He was hoping that Lt. Collins would forget about transferring him. He got back on fair terms with Lynch and Bordelles. Lt. Collins remained very formal and military with Holman, as he was with everyone, but several times he had commented favorably on the engine. None of them could deny the engine. It could hold ten knots all day with only a smooth vibration, and one time they caught up with and passed the Japanese gunboat, crossing her bow delicately, and gaining much face thereby. There was quite a saving in coal, too, but Ping-wen took that in extra squeeze. Holman did not want to leave the
San Pablo
. When the thought worried him, he would look fondly at his bunk and locker. He would experience anew the pleasure of his real chair at the solid table and order a dozen fried eggs for breakfast, as if to remind himself of all that he had to lose.

He was taking pleasure in the simple flow of things: eggs and meat and vegetables across the quarterdeck, into the galley, to the mess tables, and the bantering talk there. Coal down the bunker scuttles, heaped on the floorplates, blazing on the grate bars, ashes whipped up and over the lee side to stain the wind and water. Clothing from locker to body to wash-wash coolie and back clean and fresh in the
locker. The flow of activity: Restorff’s weekly round of the guns; the drills and inspections; Pappy Tung’s coolies holystoning, scrubbing, painting, shining; Oh Joy and Wong shining shoes, making up bunks, changing linen, waxing and polishing the red linoleum; Ping-wen’s coolies up on the stack every morning shining the whistle and siren and the flaring copper mouth of the safety valve blow-off. It was a sense of the ship constantly renewing itself. The flow of the ship through the brown water: bow wave curling off like the point of an arrow; cream-coffee wake stretching aft like the shaft of the arrow; black smoke rolling out the stack and the flag fluttering in the breeze of motion; engine vibration thrumming the rigging and the stack guys; catching and passing junks and sampans, rocking them with the bow wave, and now and then the whistle
oonging
monstrously at junks and timber rafts up ahead hogging the fairway. That was part of how it felt to be a Sand Pebble.

It felt meaningful and important. Boatmen and fishermen turned to watch their passing; brown, stooping farmers straightened to stare; white birds flew up screaming and buffaloes snorted off in terror across green fields. At the cities and market towns the people came down to the bund to stare. Lt. Collins dealt directly with the warlords of life and death in those cities. If the ship was to stay for several days, as was usual, they would charter two sedan chairs for official calls. The ship had special curtains with eagles embroidered in gold to replace the regular curtains on the chartered chairs. It made face for all the Sand Pebbles when Lt. Collins rode up the bund in one of those chairs behind an honor guard of warlord soldiers. Underway or at anchor, the Sand Pebbles ran slashingly through their drills, and they strolled and lounged along the clean teak decks, themselves neat and clean in white shorts, barbered and well-fed and rested, watching the swarming Chinese life all around them on land and water with a comfortable feeling of being in control of things. That was another part of how it felt to be a Sand Pebble.

Holman was learning to see the ungainly white upperworks and tall stack and the puny three-pounder in the bow without the urge to laugh. His memory of the ocean and of the lean, low destroyers was fading back. The trick was to see the
San Pablo
as the Hunanese saw
her, who had never seen other kinds of warships. The trick was to forget about the world outside Hunan. Then you were a Sand Pebble in your heart. But sometimes without warning the absurdity of the fat, waddling gunboat and its extremes of military ceremony would flood Jake Holman like sudden sickness, and he would know that he was not quite yet a Sand Pebble in his heart.

The bridge was the ship’s high and holy place underway, as the quarterdeck was at anchor. The ship’s bell hung there, so often polished that the Spanish words on it were half worn away. They struck the bells every half hour, day and night, on that ship. Holman began going up into the bridge, when Farren had the watch, to see how they did things.

The bridge was thirty feet from wing to wing, where canvas-covered machine guns were mounted on universal joints, and about ten feet fore and aft. The deck was teak. The flying bridge made an overhead, and a steel bulwark ran waist-high along front and sides. Doors on either side led through the after bulkhead to the boat deck and two inboard doors led one to Lt. Collins’ quarters and the other to a small chartroom. There was not much gear: the high, brass-mounted mahogany wheel amidships; the bank of brass voice tubes and the engine order telegraph stumpily on one side of it; the magnetic compass like a little man with fists on the other side; against the after bulkhead a varnished wooden arms chest and a signal flag locker. Beside the flag locker a ladder and a trapdoor led to the flying bridge, where signals were made.

It was a high place, open on three sides to the world. It was all space and sunlight and natural air blowing, unlike the stuffed and cluttered engine room.

What was on the bridge, primarily, was people. Bordelles or Franks always had charge underway, with Farren or Bronson as junior watch officer. There were seamen for relief helmsman and lookout and a signal watch. But the Chinese really stood the watch. The Chinese pilot stood beside the wheel and gave orders to the coolie helmsman, and if the water was tricky he would have two more of Pappy Tung’s men in the bow sounding with bamboo poles and singsonging up to
him in Chinese. The pilots came aboard on contract and they changed from time to time. They had their own cabin just forward of the CPO quarters. There was always a duty Fang on the bridge, with his bugle, and another Fang for messenger.