The Sand Pebbles (8 page)

“My cuttee you neck!” he shrilled.

Ellis retreated, to a burst of laughter.

“Every time you goose him, he adds twenty cents to your bill,” Farren told Ellis. “Serves you right.”

“Aw, you reckon he’d do that? You reckon old Clip Clip’d do a thing like that to a shipmate?” Ellis said.

They all laughed some more. After a while Wong, the messcook, started putting out the mess gear for dinner.

Bronson was a fleshy, important-looking first-class quartermaster. He stood stiffly on the quarterdeck and reeled off the watch dope to Holman: ships in port, senior officer present, weather…. Holman
hardly listened. He was hating it already and thinking how you relieved a steaming watch in an engine room. You went down early and checked the machinery and when you knew of your own knowledge how things were, you went to the throttle and told the guy, “Okay, I got it.” He did not understand half of what Bronson was saying. He did not know anything about this topside military crap and he did not want to learn. He was wishing that he had never put his name in for the U.S.S.
San Pablo
.

“That’s the information, up to the moment.” Bronson stood waiting.

“Okay, I guess I got it,” Holman said.

“You’re supposed to salute me and say, ‘I relieve you, sir.’”

Rage rippled over Jake Holman. “It ain’t regulation for enlisted men to salute each other,” he said, trying to control his voice.

“On this quarterdeck we’re both junior officers of the deck,” Bronson said. “It’s how we do it on here, Holman.”

“If you was sitting in God’s own armchair, you’d still be an enlisted man.” Holman’s voice trembled. “I won’t salute you. I never did believe in that kind of crap.”

Bronson turned pale. His lips pinched in and he looked at Holman in silence for almost a minute. Then he saluted and said, “I hereby turn the watch over to you, sir.”

Holman checked his impulse to salute back. He turned his guilt to anger. “Okay, I got it,” he said, more surly still. “Give me that Goddamned peashooter.” His face was burning.

Silently, Bronson unbuckled his pistol belt, and silently Holman buckled it on himself. Bronson went away. The pistol lay heavy and accusing against Holman’s thigh and the Chinese messenger was looking at him curiously. Holman knew he had gone too far. He had long known that his dislike of military crap was like a private disease, which no one else could understand. Other guys hated it and said so, but it did not curdle the inside of their bones. New panic tried to rise in him. He felt like a dog on its hind legs. Like a whore in church. He stood at attention and looked down at his hairy bare legs and saw that his knees touched and his ankles touched and there was a long,
narrow, figure-eight gap between his knees and his ankles. He had never noticed that before. He did not know whether he was knock-kneed or bowlegged. What am I doing here, he thought. Jesus Christ on a crutch, what am I
doing
here?

An old help he had once used came back to him. They could command you what you had to do, he thought, but they could not command you how you had to feel about it, although they tried. So you did things their way and you felt about them your own way, and you did not let them know how you felt. That way you kept the two things separate and you could stand it. Slowly, Holman began getting hold of himself.

He was able to return the salutes when he checked out the liberty party, one of whom was Bronson. Chief Franks was senior OOD, and he came down and stood most of the watch with Holman. He was breaking Holman in, instructing him in the watch duties without seeming to, just passing along information while he talked casually about things. Franks was probably not trying to sound out his attitudes, Holman decided. Franks had a plain, straight manner, and he was not one of the sly, watching kind. It turned out to Holman’s relief that he would not have to know anything about seamanship.

“Pappy Tung looks after all that stuff without anybody telling him,” Franks said. “He’s the best seaman aboard.”

Pappy Tung seemed to have the same position on deck that Chien had in the engine room. He was a short, sturdy old Chinese with a dark face that seemed carved out of wood. Like the other deck coolies, he wore navy undress whites without insignia, but he also wore a black neckerchief to mark his rank.

“That’s good. I sure ain’t no seaman,” Holman said.

The important thing was the smart appearance of the ship, smart side and boat courtesies and, most of all, exchanging salutes with passing ships. Bugle calls, hand salutes and color dips had to be timed and spaced exactly right. Lt. Collins had a very raw nerve for passing honors, Franks said, and if they did not go off exactly right he would raise hell. Franks handled the ceremony for the several ships
that passed, to show Holman how to do it. They only exchanged salutes with treaty power flags. A few rusty steamers flew the five-barred Chinese flag, but they did not make dips. The big junks did not bother with flags, unless you could call a white cloth with the skipper’s name in Chinese characters a flag.

“That’s the kind of flags most of the warlords down in Hunan use,” Franks said. “The slopeheads just don’t savvy flags, is all.”

Junks did have a kind of passing ceremony, when one junk overhauled another one, and Holman and Franks walked over to port to watch one on the river. The faster junk was trying to cut sharp across the bow of the slower one and they were neck and neck and curving in toward the bank. On the smaller, slower junk the crew was screaming and beating gongs and shooting firecrackers.

Franks chuckled. “That big boy’s trying to unload his devils on the little fellow.”

Holman knew about that. They believed that devils held hands and tailed on behind a junk, more and more of them as time passed, and the only way to get rid of the devils was to cross the bow of another junk. If you could force another junk to cut through your string of devils, your cut-off devils would join his string and you went on your way bobtailed and lucky again.

“We keep a tub of spuds on the bridge to throw at ’em, when they try that stuff on us,” Franks said. “Ignorant bastards, ain’t they?”

“I guess it’s real to them,” Holman said. He could see that the small junk was going to get a new load of devils, for all their noise and trying, and he felt a bit sorry for them.

His other watch duties were to keep the log and carry out inport routine, sweepdowns, sick call and so forth. Most of the things had a bugle call attached and the watch messenger was also the bugler. There were four of them aboard and they were all named Fang.

“So you don’t have to worry about telling ’em apart,” Franks said.

The four Fangs were Lt. Collins’ addition to the ship. He had had Lop Eye Shing hire them away from the warlord army in Changsha. Paying them had raised the squeeze quite a bit and cigarettes and beer had each gone up a dime.

“I had to let ’em squeeze all the canvas I was going to use for new awnings,” Franks said.

“Was the ship as regulation military before Lt. Collins came aboard as it is now?” Holman asked cautiously.

“Just about. It always has been.” Franks looked out over the pontoon. “He’s hot about it, all right. He can get kind of mystical about it and make you feel funny. But he’s just the right skipper for down in Hunan Province.”

By the end of the watch Holman was almost at ease. There was a signal watch on the bridge and a roving sentry and when they reported, on the hour, Holman exchanged smart salutes with them. When Farren relieved him at four o’clock, Holman said all the right things and exchanged salutes with Farren. He had the split set up in himself again, and it was working all right.

From the quarterdeck he went down into the engine room to write up the log there, because he had also been standing the engine room watch officially on paper. It still seemed like a fantastic joke. Chien and his coolies were knocking off and Chien blew the boiler glass just as Holman came down. They exchanged blank looks. Holman checked the plant and everything was all right. He felt slightly like an intruder when he went around to the log desk.

He entered the four o’clock temperature and pressure readings in the various columns of the log sheet. Then he filled them in for the three previous hours, and he felt like a sneak. Faking readings like that was called “radioing,” and it was an engineering sin. He signed his name to the log, and his name was a lie. Because the coolie who had really stood the watch was not even aboard, officially on paper, and he was only represented on the log sheet by tally marks in the margin for the buckets of coal he had burned. Well, that was how they did it on the U.S.S.
San Pablo
. That was what it meant to be a Sand Pebble.

At sunset Franks mustered the duty section on the fantail and they made evening colors. Coolies watched it from the bank, but it was not much of a show. Holman turned in early and the Fang called him
for the watch at midnight by tapping on his bunk frame. The deck coolies were never supposed to touch you. There was nothing to do on the quarterdeck watch at night, except to write up the log. The Fang squatted and went to sleep beside the boat deck ladder and Holman was alone. He looked up the bank to the corner of the brick wall where he had stood and had his first look at the
San Pablo
two nights ago, and he shook his head.

The deck log was a lot different from the engine room log. You had to put in the deck log what ships were in port and what kinds of clouds were in what parts of the sky and the direction and force of the wind. Holman had to search for the north star, finding the Big Dipper first, and he had not looked at the stars in years. The high, strung-out clouds drifted among the bright stars as if a strong wind blew up there, but there was only a light breeze on the river. The river was black and it whispered and chuckled. It was a big river, already a mile wide six hundred miles from the sea. A few lights bobbed on it and there were more lights on the far bank. There was a pagoda over there, and an old walled city named Wuchang, but at night they blended with the dark, humpy hills.

“High, scattered, moving clouds all over the sky,” he wrote in the deck log.

He logged the air temperature and pressure from the barometer and also the river temperature and depth. Those were temperatures and pressures and water levels, just as you logged them in the engine room, he thought, but up here you could not adjust them if they were wrong. You could not know when they were wrong. Down below even the illiterate coolies knew that much, from red limit marks on the pressure gauge dials and pieces of string around water-level glasses. It was much better down below. You did not care which way was north; you went by port and starboard, fore and aft. You did not care whether it was day or night or what the weather was, unless it got rough enough to pitch the screw out of the water or ship a sea down the skylight. In the engine room you had control of things.

Holman paced across to the port side and back again, several angry times.

Well, with the bugle you controlled a lot of what people did from
the quarterdeck, he thought. What the ship did as a ship, as in rendering passing honors. The gangplank was there. It was a kind of gate or threshold, the place where the ship officially touched the world. The gap in the bulwark was flanked by two big wooden slabs with eagles carved on them. Lots of ships in China had those slabs; they were made cheaply ashore in the same shops that made chests and coffins. There was another eagle slab fastened to the bulkhead above the log desk and a long, narrow slab slung from the overhead just inboard of the light. It had a carved dragon and the ship’s name in block letters. There were a brass clock and a name board mounted on the slab above the log desk. Something made the quarterdeck sacred, so that anyone coming on it always had to salute. But the Chinese did not have to salute the quarterdeck.

The thing is to act like it’s sacred but not believe it, Holman reminded himself.

Because after all it was only a small, triangular area of deck where the midship passageway met the starboard main deck gallery. Its only furniture was the arms locker under the boat deck ladder and on the other side the varnished log desk up against the white wooden bulkhead that enclosed the crew’s compartment. Almost all of the ship’s superstructure was wooden, and it had been built on the
San Pablo’s
wrought-iron hull after she had come to the river. She was much too topheavy ever to go to sea again. The log desk stood on high legs and you wrote standing up. The slanting top lifted up and inside were spare pencils, a pair of binoculars, a box for liberty cards and boxes of sanitubes and condoms for the men going on liberty. That was all there was to the quarterdeck.

There was no machinery. Well, that brass clock is a kind of time-chopping-up machine, Holman thought. The pistol on his hip was a kill-people machine. But the pistol was more like a power tool and so were all the other guns in the arms locker, and the cutlasses in there were hand tools. The name board beside the clock was like a status board in a big engine room, with pegs or tags to tell you at a glance what pumps were on and what important valves were closed or open.

The name board had twenty-four names, each on a separate little
stick that slid in a groove. There were parallel columns for “Aboard” and “Ashore” and you slid the sticks from one to the other as the people came and went. The top name was Lt. William Collins, USN, Commanding, and he was ashore. So was P. A. Lynch, CMM, ashore. They said Lynch was gone on a Russian cabaret girl. One of the names was C. J. Pitocki, MM1/c, and he was aboard. They had all been telling him what a fine old guy old Pitocki was, Holman thought. They didn’t want Jake Holman on their ship. They wanted some nameless, faceless raw material that they could nudge and pinch and shape into another Pitocki. It was a weird, lonely night notion, and it bothered Holman. He tried to scratch out Pitocki’s name and broke his pencil point on the transparent tape guarding it. Pitocki was unscratched. Sure, old Pitocki’s aboard, Holman thought. You don’t get rid of a twelve-year plankowner just by killing the bastard.