George’s watch passed quietly. No warning shouts of approaching Japanese airplanes came from the loudspeakers. The hydrophones didn’t pick up telltale noises from lurking Japanese submersibles. No torpedoes from lurking submersibles the hydrophone hadn’t picked up arrowed through the water toward the Townsend.
When the other crew took over the gun, George went down to the galley for more sandwiches and coffee. He felt as if he’d done the same thing just a few hours earlier. Of course, he had done the same thing, so no wonder he felt that way. These sandwiches were ham on wheat, not corned beef on rye. Other than that, he might have been running the film over again. Standing watch and watch made time blur. George tried to come up with the name of the artist who’d painted the pocket watch sagging and melting as if it were left out in the rain. It was something foreign, that was all he could remember.
Yawning, he headed for his hammock. “Here we go again,” he said as he climbed up into it.
The sailor he’d talked with the last time he sacked out laughed. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will get suspicious.”
George laughed, too, a little nervously. Was that just a joke, or did something faggoty hide underneath it? Aboard ship, you always wondered. The Townsend went back to Oahu often enough to let the crew get their ashes hauled on Hotel Street, but you wondered anyway. Some guys were flat-out queers, no two ways about it, and they couldn’t have cared less about the floozies on Hotel Street.
But you couldn’t call somebody on what was probably nothing but a harmless joke. If the other guy didn’t make another like it, George figured he would forget about this one. If he did… I’ll worry about that later. With another yawn, an enormous one, George decided to worry about everything later, and went to sleep.
Night had fallen when he came back up on deck with another mug of coffee. It was cool and quiet: no CAP after dark. Fremont Dalby got to the 40mm mount with a mug of his own. He nodded to George and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Him, too? “Uh, yeah,” George said. He could imagine a lot of things, but the gun chief as a homo? Never in a million years.
“Should be a little easier this time through,” Dalby said. “We don’t have airplanes coming at us with bombs or torpedoes during the night.”
“Or trying to crash into us, either,” George put in.
“Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Dalby said. Fun wasn’t the word George would have used. He didn’t know which one he would have used, but it wasn’t one he would see in any family newspaper.
“All we gotta worry about now is submarines,” Fritz Gustafson said. As usual, the loader didn’t talk much. Also as usual, he got a lot of mileage out of what he did say.
Fremont Dalby’s suggestion about what submarines could do was illegal, immoral, and impossible. George stared out over the black waters of the Pacific. Starlight glittered off the sea, but the moon was down. A dozen submersibles could have been playing ring around the rosy half a mile from the Townsend and he never would have known it. Out in the tropical Atlantic, a Confederate boat had sneaked up on his father’s destroyer and sunk it in the middle of the night. The same thing could happen to him. At times like this, he knew it much too well.
Then Dalby said, “Those bastards have as much trouble finding us at night as we do finding them.”
That was true enough, and reassuring to boot. Besides, what would a Jap sub be doing out here in the middle of the night? George wished he hadn’t asked the question, because he saw an obvious answer: looking for American ships. If a submersible could, it would probably go after the Trenton ahead of the Townsend, but it might take whatever it could get.
He kept his nerves to himself. He didn’t want his buddies to know he’d got the wind up. Odds were he was flabbling over nothing. He understood that, which didn’t make not doing it any easier.
The watch passed quietly. No airplanes. No submarines. No nothing. Just the wide Pacific and, somewhere not far away, the rest of the flotilla. The other crew took over the gun. George went below for food and coffee and sleep. Coffee had trouble keeping him awake through watch and watch.
He came back on at four in the morning, and watched the sun rise out of the sea. The flotilla turned away from Midway during his watch, and started back towards Oahu. Now the United States were doing the poking. He hoped Japan liked getting poked.
“Hey, Mistuh Guard, suh.”
Hipolito Rodriguez swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the Negro who’d spoken to him. The motion was automatic and not particularly hostile. He just didn’t believe in taking chances. “What you want?” he asked.
“What I want?” The skinny black man laughed. “Mistuh Guard, suh, I got me a list long as your arm, but gettin’ let outa here do the job all by its ownself.” Rodriguez waited stonily. That wouldn’t happen, and the Negro had to know it. He did; the laughter leaked out of his face as he went on, “What I wants to ask you, suh, is where them niggers from Jackson is at now. They come through here, but they don’t hardly stop for nothin’.”
“Some go to Lubbock,” Rodriguez answered. “Some go to El Paso.” He was stubborn about sticking to the story the guards told the Negroes in Camp Determination. Not all the mallates believed it. But they weren’t sure what really had happened, which was all to the good.
This prisoner looked sly. “That a really fo’-true fac’, suh?”
“Of course it is.” Rodriguez lied without hesitation. He had as much of an interest in keeping the Negroes quiet as Jefferson Pinkard did himself.
“Ain’t how I hear it,” the fellow said.
“What you hear, then?” Rodriguez asked. “Tell me what you hear. Tell me who you hear it from, too.”
“Well…” The Negro suddenly realized he might have talked more than was good for him. “I ain’t so sure I recollects now.”
“No, eh?” Now the muzzle of Rodriguez’s submachine gun pointed toward the man’s midsection in a businesslike way. “Maybe we take you back. Maybe we ask some questions. We find out who telling lies here, si?”
The black man couldn’t turn pale. If he could have, he would have. If he could have, he would have disappeared. Since he couldn’t, he said, “You don’ need to do nothin’ like that, Mistuh Guard, suh. My memory, it’s much better all sudden-like.”
“Bueno. Glad to hear it,” Rodriguez said dryly. “Tell me, then-what you hear?”
“Well…” the Negro repeated. He licked his lips. “I don’t say this or nothin’-not me. I jus’ hear it.” Rodriguez gestured impatiently with the submachine gun. A weapon that could cut a man in half in the blink of an eye made a hell of a persuader. The black man spoke up in a hurry: “Some folks say them niggers didn’t go nowheres. Some folks say they was kilt.”
Some folks were right-dead right. “Who say stupid things like this?” Rodriguez asked. The Negro hesitated. He didn’t want to squeal on his friends, even with the threat from the submachine gun. Rodriguez asked a different question, one that seemed safer on the outside: “What barracks you live in?”
“I’s in Barracks Twenty-seven, suh,” the Negro said.
“Twenty-seven.” Rodriguez turned to the guards with him. “Remember that.”
“Will do, Troop Leader,” the three of them said as if they were one man. Rodriguez had discovered he liked wearing three stripes on his sleeve. He gave more orders than he took these days. In orders as in many other things, it was better to give than to receive.
He turned back to the Negro. “I find you lie to me about where you at, mallate, this camp ain’t big enough for you to hide. You understand?”