“Fair enough, suh. Dis place been de bes’ in town a long time. Sure enough want to keep it dat way,” Scipio said. He and the rest of the staff would be judging Willard Sloan as he judged them. The only trouble was, his judgment carried more weight than theirs.
He did start well. When the cooks were unhappy with some of the beef they got, he used the telephone like a deadly weapon. “You bastard, you reckon you can screw me over on account of I ain’t Dover?” he screamed at the butcher. “You reckon I don’t know Chet Byers? You reckon I won’t do business with him from here on out if you ever pull this shit on me again? Make it right in fifteen minutes, or I blacken your name all over town.” New beef-of the proper quality-got there in twelve minutes flat. Jerry Dover couldn’t have done better, and there was no higher praise than that.
XVII
Autumn was when the leaves turned red and gold and then fell off the trees. It was when the weather got crisp, so your cheeks also turned red and tingled after you’d stayed outside a while. If you were a fisherman on the North Atlantic, it was when the ocean started tossing you around, not knowing-or caring-your boat was out there.
George Enos, Jr., was used to the rhythms of the changing year. A Massachusetts man had to be. In the Sandwich Islands, the year didn’t change much. The sun still rode high in the sky, if not quite so high. Days remained warm. Everything stayed green.
Bigger swells did start rolling in out of the north. The Townsend would slide up over a crest and then down into a trough. That didn’t seem enough to get excited about.
When George said so out loud, Fremont Dalby laughed at him. “Christ, Enos, haven’t you had enough excitement for a while?” the gun chief said. “Far as I’m concerned, I can stay at my station and gather dust for a while, because that’ll mean nobody’s trying to strafe the ship or drop a bomb on her or stick a torpedo up our ass.”
“Japs are out there somewhere,” George said.
“I know, I know. You don’t got to remind me,” Dalby said. “But I don’t like thinking about it every goddamn minute, you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Chief.” George didn’t want to get the CPO ticked off at him. Getting any CPO ticked off at you was a bad idea. When the man in question happened to be your boss, it was four times as bad.
They kept station with three other destroyers and with the Trenton. The escort carrier hadn’t taken too much damage in her last brush with the Japanese. Her airplanes had given out more than she’d got. That was the first real naval victory the USA had had in the islands around the Sandwich Islands for quite a while.
U.S. fighters buzzed overhead. They flew a dawn-to-dusk combat air patrol. The Townsend’s Y-ranging antenna went round and round. Y-ranging gear could spot incoming enemy aircraft while they were still well out to sea. The other destroyers and the carrier all had sets, too. Whatever else happened, the Japs wouldn’t be able to get in a sucker punch at the little flotilla. The Trenton would be able to scramble all her fighters. The destroyers would start throwing up as much anti-aircraft as they could. And after that, what could you do but pucker your asshole and hope?
Fritz Gustafson pointed off to starboard. The loader didn’t bother with words when one finger would do. Fremont Dalby wasn’t shy about words, though. “Dolphins!” he said with a smile. “They’re supposed to be good luck. Here’s hoping, anyway.”
George enjoyed the dolphins for their own sake. They were swift and graceful and, as always, they looked as if they were having a good time out there. “I wonder what they make of us,” he said. “Till we got ships like this, they were some of the biggest, toughest things in the ocean.”
“They figure we’re good for a handout, anyway,” Dalby said, which was true. They would follow ships for scraps and garbage. Sometimes, though, they would track ships for what looked like nothing more than the hell of it. Were they skylarking? Did they really have the brains to play? More to the point, did they have the brains not to want to work? For their sake, George hoped so.
Four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew for the twin 40mm mount replaced Dalby’s, George went below, grabbed himself a couple of sandwiches and some coffee, and then found his hammock. He laughed as he climbed up into it. “What’s so funny?” asked another sailor about to grab some shut-eye.
“Used to be I couldn’t sleep for beans in one of these goddamn things,” George answered. “Used to be I couldn’t hardly get into one without falling out on my ear. But now I don’t even think about it.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a real Navy guy now,” the other sailor said, getting up into his hammock as nimbly as a chimp might have. “You know how to do shit. You aren’t a little lost civilian anymore, looking for somebody to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”
Was I really that green? George wondered, wiggling to get comfortable. He supposed he had been. He knew the sea from his fisherman days, but knowing the sea and knowing the Navy weren’t the same thing-not even close. He settled his cap over his eyes. Two minutes later, he was snoring.
Standing watch and watch wore on a man. He felt groggy, almost underwater, when he slid out of the hammock and down to the deck again. He got rid of some of the coffee he’d drunk just after he came off the last watch, then went back to the galley for more. It might help keep him conscious, anyway.
Fremont Dalby was at the gun when he got there. The CPO looked fresh and fit. Maybe Dalby didn’t need to sleep. George yawned. He damn well did, and he hadn’t done enough of it. “All quiet?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dalby answered. “We’re getting up toward Midway, too.”
“Uh-huh.” George looked north and west, as if he expected the atoll to come over the horizon any minute now. He didn’t; they weren’t that close, not by three or four hundred miles. “Anything from the Y-range?”
“Quiet as a mouse, far as I know,” Dalby said. “Way it looks to me is, the Japs haven’t got a carrier operating south of the island.”
“Makes sense,” George agreed. “If they did, they would’ve figured out we’re around by now. Hell, we’re almost close enough for land-based air from Midway to spot us.”
“Almost is the word,” the gun chief said. “And if they don’t have a carrier operating south of Midway, we really have made them pull in their horns. Us coming up here is a lot better than them bombing the crap out of Oahu.”
“You better believe it,” George said. “It’d be good if we could push ’em off Midway, too. Where would they go then?”
“Wake,” Fremont Dalby replied at once. “It’s another pissant little bird turd of an island southwest of Midway. But I’ll be damned if I’d want to hop from island to island across the whole stinking Pacific toward Japan.”
“Oh, good God, no!” George shuddered at the very idea. “You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to be crazy to want to. As long as they get out of the Sandwich Islands and stay away, that’s plenty. This is a big goddamn ocean. There’s room enough for us and them.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Dalby said. “Of course, how it looks to Philadelphia is anybody’s guess. The big brains back there can screw up anything if they put their minds to it. Minds!” He rolled his eyes. “If they had any, we’d all be better off.”
“Treason,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Off with your head.”
Dalby suggested that the loader lose some other organ important for happiness, if not absolutely necessary for personal survival. Gustafson didn’t say another word. He’d got his lick in, and he was content.