I stooped under number three turret then and began to whistle, forgetting as usual that it was bad luck to whistle on a ship. Sonny slid out from behind a funnel, we fell in step.
“Well,” he said, “we got troubles. Oh my, we surely got troubles now. Ain’t you noticed anything peculiar yet today? You ain’t seen a thing to make you suspicion the ship ain’t exactly right? Well, let me tell you. Somebody is fiddling with the boats. How’s that? Sure as I know you is you I know somebody is fooling around with them lifeboats. That’s bad. But that ain’t all. Somebody else has broke into the small arms locker. Yes sir, somebody has busted into that locker and swiped every last small arms on the ship. Ain’t that just the devil? But you want to know what I think? Here’s what: I think they means to kill all the officers and dump the bodies in the lifeboats! Some kind of devilish thing like that, you wait and see…”
I returned to my cabin and unlocked it, opened the porthole, hung my head out of the porthole where there was nothing to see except the golden water, the paste of foam, the passing schools of bright fish, the shadow of the ship sliding down to the deep. And all the while overhead there was a stealthy clamor around the white lifeboat — I remembered that 33 persons was stenciled on the bow — and I nodded to myself, closed up the port again, because poor faithful Sonny was never wrong. But at least the ocean was calm and I wasn’t sick.
So I spent the day in my damp bunk reading, still trying to catch up with Mac, spent the day in hard meditation and drinking warm clear water from the regulation black Bakelite pitcher which I filled at the tap. Around 1600 hours I went topside briefly to assure myself that Tremlow had not abandoned his interest in the lifeboat. He had not. I saw him stow a wooden box — sea biscuits? ammunition? medical supplies? — under the tarp and then with heavy grace and fierce agility drop down beneath the tarp himself and begin to laugh with someone already secreted in that hot white arc. Standing flat against steel, beautifully hidden, I looked skyward then — the poor pelican was gone — and then I skimmed down below again and poured myself another glass of water.
When I felt the sunset imminent I simply spread open the New Testament over my eyes and fell asleep….
I woke even before Sonny kicked with his old black blucher on my cabin door, woke in time to hear him muttering, grunting under the weight of an axe, flapping and sweating down the companionway toward my cabin door. But the cabin was filled with moonlight and there was no hurry. I ran my fingers over the books in the little shadowy bookcase screwed to the steel plate at the head of my bunk until I found the slot for the New Testament and shoved it home. Then I emptied the remains of the water pitcher into my right hand and rinsed my face, snorted, wiped my face on the rumpled sheet. The moon filled the cabin with its pale nighttime color; my palms and the backs of my hands, I saw, were green. I was covered with green perspiration. But I knew I wasn’t going to be sick this time, had nothing to fear from my ocean nausea now.
And opening the door: “Topside, Sonny,” I said, “the first thing to secure is the pilothouse.”
“Now I want to tell you,” panting, chugging along with the bright fire axe, leading me through the darkness and into the sudden green pools, “now you want to watch yourself. They’s got a ringleader.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, “a ringleader.”
“A ringleader, just like I says. And they been having a party. That’s right! They been having a party on the fantail ever since the dark come down. And they’re full of beans! Hear? You hear it?”
A shot, a tinkle, a scream from somewhere aft, the far-off massed clatter of running men. Hand on iron, foot on a rung, I paused and gave the ship my craning and hasty inspection: a black ship in a bright lunar field, and high above us little steel cups were whirling on the mast and there was smoke in the smokestack. The bow dipped, then recovered itself.
“Now about this party,” pulling me around, pointing upward with the luminous head of the axe, for a moment thrusting his enraged face close to mine, “that devil been the whole show, that’s the devil got them stirred up this way.”
“Tremlow?”
“You got the name on your lips. You ought to know. That’s him. Now this devil thought up a party and worked the whole thing out hisself and I was down there on the fantail too — old nigger spy, that’s Sonny — and I want to tell you I never seen a party like that before. It sure stirred them up. You know how? Hula-hula, that’s how. I tell you, when he done the hula-hula, he had them men in the palm of his hand.”
“Tremlow?” I said, “Tremlow doing some kind of Hawaiian dance?”
“That’s right,” but whispering, drawing me back into the protection of a funnel and pointing firmly, contemptuously, out to a white stretch of the deck where half a dozen of them suddenly raced by dragging burden, victim, spoils of some sort through the green glow of that southern night. “Yes, hula-hula. That’s what I mean and with all the trimmings. He danced that dance hisself. And you know what? He got them full of intoxication, that’s it, downright intoxication, with all that hula-hula stuff, got them cheering and bumping around and dancing themselves, the way he beat around there in the middle of that moonlit fantail with two fellows playing those little tinny stringed instruments and two more beating on galvanized iron pots for drums. He even had a real grass skirt that swooped all the way down to his ankles and a shirt fixed over his head so you couldn’t tell whether he was a chief or one of them hula-hula girls. It did the trick, so I guess it didn’t matter which he was. That devil…”
Another shot, another brief turbulent huddle, the arc and soar of something pushed, tossed, heaved and then sailing overboard. And the deep green velvet night was in my face, the whole ship glistened under its coating of salty moisture, and now there was the moon itself adrift in its own mirrored ocean and the ship was in the sway of the moon, and Tremlow, so Sonny said, had done his dance.
“It must have been amusing, Sonny,” I said, and I was hanging on tightly to the moonlit ship though she was still, flat in the water like a melting iceberg. “But I hope they don’t bother Mac. He’s discouraged enough already, eh, Sonny?”
“That chaplain? That chaplain’s on the skids. We coming to each man for hisself now, you wait and see….”
“Yes. But wait a minute,” I stopped short, caught hold of his sleeve, leaned out over the rail, “there, do you feel it, Sonny? Quick, what’s happening?”
Rigid. Black wet nose in the air. Long black paw held up for silence. And then: “Turning.” And moving his head then until his white hallelujah eyes were again fixed on mine, and looking at me and sighing with the hopelessness of all nigger warnings and prognostications, he repeated the word: “Turning.”
“Changing course, Sonny? Are we? Out with it, is she changing course to starboard?”
“Turning,” he repeated, “turning to port. Now you’re the one wants to secure the pilothouse, now here’s your chance.”
“On the double,” I said, and the axehead lunged, the ship was straining, moving into the tension of a giant curve, leading us into some forbidden circle. And then the PA was coughing, whistling, piping the madness of its call to Battle Stations and suddenly and dead ahead of us, the green moonlight and black shadows assumed a more solid and dangerous shape: lifeboat, bridge wing, pilothouse, it was all there, each piece in its proper place and rising in tiers and frosted together like the sections of some giant wedding cake. Then hand over hand and up the last green frosted rungs and feeling the whole of that starboard bridge wing heeling down slightly under the centrifugal force, strain, of that tight turn, and bringing each other to a standstill at the open door of the pilothouse where he, Tremlow, was clutching the spokes and even yet trying to get another degree out of the locked wheel.