I watched his back disappear, and then I slouched against the bulkhead, and Crawley, the gunner’s mate, said, “That rotten louse.”
I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of the mid watch, and now the loss of a week’s liberty, after three weeks of shakedown cruise when we’d all been restricted to the base. The swabbies on the base all got liberty in Havana, but not the poor slobs who came down to play war games, not us. We roamed the base and bought souvenirs for the folks at home, but you can buy only so many souvenirs in three weeks, and after that you don’t even bother going ashore. Sure, Norfolk was a rat town, but it was a town at least, and there were women there — if you weren’t too particular — and Stateside liberty ain’t to be sneezed at, not after three weeks in Guantanamo.
And tomorrow we’d be going out with the cruiser again, and that meant a full day of Battle Stations, the phony General Quarters stuff that was supposed to knit us together into a fighting crew. I didn’t mind that business because it wasn’t too bad, but after a mid watch — even if you went to sleep right after evening chow, which you never did — it was a back breaker. You got off at four in the morning, provided your relief wasn’t goofing, and you hit the sack until reveille. If you averaged two hours sleep, you were good. And then Battle Stations all day.
“He rides everybody,” Crawley said. “Everybody. He’s crazy, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I come off a DE,” Crawley said. “We hit more Pacific islands than I can count. This was in the last war, Peters.”
“Yeah,” I said dully.
“We had a guy like this one, too. So we were coming in on Tarawa the night of the invasion, and three quartermasters got ahold of him, right on the bridge, right in front of the exec and a pile of other officers. They told that boy that he better shape up damn soon or he was gonna be swimmin’ with the sharks. He looked to the exec and the other brass for help, but they didn’t budge an inch. Boy, he read the deep-six in everybody’s eyes.”
“What’d he do?” I asked.
“He gave the conn to the exec, right then and there, and we were never bothered by him again. He transferred off the ship inside a month.”
“He must’ve come onto this tub,” I said.
“No, he couldn’t hold a candle to our old man. Our old man is the worst I ever met in the Navy, and that includes boot camp. He’s a guy who really deserves it.”
“Deserves what?” I asked.
“A hole between the eyes maybe. Or some arsenic in his goddamned commanding officer’s soup. Or a dunk in the drink with his damn barracuda.”
“You land in Portsmouth for that,” I said.
“Not if they don’t catch you, Peters,” Crawley said.
“Fat chance of getting away with it,” I said.
“You think they’d know who did it?” he asked. “Suppose the old man gets a hole in his head from a .45 swiped from the gun locker? Suppose...”
“You better knock that kind of talk off,” I warned. “That’s mutiny, pal.”
“Mutiny, my foot. Suppose the .45 were dumped over the side? How would they prove who did it? You know how many guys are on this ship, Peters?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“You wait and see,” he said. “Someday, somebody’ll have the guts to do it. Goodbye, old man. And good riddance.”
“Yeah, but suppose...”
“The line’s moving, Peters,” Crawley said.
The base sent out a drone that afternoon, and we went out and shot at it. We didn’t get back to the bay until about 1930, and then we had a late chow, and the old man announced that no movies would be shown on the boat deck that night because we’d missed the launch that brought the reels around. Findlay, the Chief Bos’n, asked him if we couldn’t see the same movie we’d seen the night before, but he said, “I don’t like seeing movies twice,” and that was the end of it.
I suppose I should have gone straight to bed because the mid watch was coming up, but instead I hung around abovedecks, trying to get some air. Guys had dumped their mattresses all over the ship, sleeping up there under the stars in their scivvies. There was no breeze, and it was hot as hell, and I’d already taken more salt pills than I should have. The sweat kept coming, that kind of sweat that stuck all your clothes to you and made you want to crawl out of your skin. A poker game was in session near the torpedo tubes amidships on the boatdeck, and I watched it for a while, and then climbed the ladder down to the main deck.
Mr. Gannson was OD, and he slouched against the metal counter and threw the bull with Ferguson, the gunner’s mate who was on with him as messenger. They both wore .45’s strapped to their hips, and I passed them silently, nodding as I went by. I leaned over the rail just aft of the quarterdeck, looking down at the fluorescent sprinkles of water that lapped the sides of the ship. The water looked cool, and it made me feel more uncomfortable. I fired a cigarette and looked out to the lights of the base, and then I heard Mr. Gannson say, “You got a clip in that gun, Ferguson?”
I turned as Ferguson looked up with a puzzled look on his face. “Why, no, sir. You remember the ditty bag thing. We...”
“This is shakedown, Ferguson. The captain catch you with an empty sidearm, and you’re up the creek.”
“But the ditty bag...”
“Never mind that. Get to the gun locker and load up.”
“Yes, sir,” Ferguson said.
The ditty bag he’d referred to had been hanging from one of the stanchions in the forward sleeping compartment. Davis, on fire watch, had gone down to relieve Pietro. The fire watch is just a guy who roams the ship, looking for fires and crap games and making sure all the lights are out in the sleeping compartments after taps. I don’t know why he rates a .45 on his hip, but he does. When you relieve the watch, you’re supposed to check the weapon he gives you, make sure it’s loaded, and all that bull. So Pietro handed Davis the gun, and Davis probably wasn’t too used to .45’s because he’d just made radarman third, and only non-commissioned officers stood fire watch on our ship. He yanked back the slide mechanism, looked into the breach the way he was supposed to, and then squeezed the trigger, and a goddamn big bullet came roaring out of the end of his gun. The bullet went right through the ditty bag, and then started ricocheting all over the compartment, bouncing from one bulkhead to another. It almost killed Klein when it finally lodged in his mattress. It had sounded like a goddamned skirmish down there, and it had attracted the OD.
Well, this was about two months ago, when we were still in Norfolk, and the skipper ordered that any sidearms carried aboard his ship would have no magazines in them from then on. That went for the guys standing gangway watch when we were tied up, too. They’d carry nothing in their rifles and nothing in the cartridge belts around their waists. Nobody gave a damn because there was nothing to shoot in the States anyway.
I watched Ferguson walk away from the quarterdeck and then head for the gun locker right opposite Sick Bay, the key to the heavy lock in his hands. I walked past the quarterdeck, too, and hung around in the midships passageway reading the dope sheet. I saw Ferguson twist the key in the hanging lock, and then undog the hatch. He pulled the hatch open, and stepped into the gun locker, and I left the midships passageway just as he flicked the light on inside.
“Hi,” I said, walking in.
He looked up, startled, and then said, “Oh, hi, Peters.”
The rifles were stacked in a rack alongside one bulkhead, and a dozen or so .45’s hung from their holster belts on a bar welded to another bulkhead. Ferguson rooted around and finally came up with a metal box which he opened quickly. He turned his back to me and pulled out a magazine, and the ship rolled a little and the,45’s on the bar swung a little. He moved closer to the light so he could see what the hell he was doing, his back still turned to me.