“We’re splitting crew,” Conally said. “Double watches. You take the four-to-mid.”
“What can I do now?”
“Pretend we’re steaming,” Conally told him. “Sack out until your watch. Let your hair grow.”
Once again, the gray chill moved down the pier, insinuating between the ships, concentrating at the end of the pier where Hester C. rode on its mooring, unclaimed, certainly unloved, and absolutely feared. By the time Brace relieved the watch at 1600, the local newspaper was on the streets carrying an ignorant, journalistic account, together with a ten-year-old photograph of Abner’s captain taken when he was exec on the snatcher Bluebell. Various deities, all of whom could be accused of inventing the sea, and of instigating the notion of things that float, were flagrantly thanked in Portland’s missions and churches.
Brace relieved the watch, checked the phone, entered weather observations in the log, turned up the radio, looked to the mooring, and made himself acquainted with the current traffic in Portland harbor. As the dusk gathered, he surveyed the lights of Portland where, it might be, lonely young women of worth waited with hope for the friendship of some man who did not wear a white hat. As dusk accumulated, and the tide fell, Hester C. dropped below the end of the pier until only the mast was visible.
With Dane and Snow aboard Abner, Conally found himself serving as OD, and it was Conally, shaken from sleep sometime after 2300, who looked into the pale, terrified features of Brace, who, although not yet drooling, was idiot-eyed. Conally was on his feet and starting to dress before Brace could speak.
“It’s adrift.”
“What?”
“That lobster boat is adrift.”
Conally relaxed. “Things drift,” he said, preparing himself almost optimistically for an eventual return to sleep. “We’ll call the Base. Let them pick it off with a small boat.”
“Things don’t drift against the tide,” Brace chattered.
Hester C., like a small blot of self-destruction, faced the tide in a drift toward the mudflats.
Conally, shaken to the denied roots of his Indian-raised soul, swore later that his hair stood straight. He raced to the bridge, called the Base, watched a picket boat pick up the tow and return it to the pier. Conally checked the lines, found them sound, and made up the mooring himself.
“Sometimes the tide pools up,” he told Brace. “It gets to working in circles.” He checked his watch. “Time to call your relief.”
Brace, withdrawn to silence, and with shame over his fear, returned to the bridge. Conally went belowdecks like a confused bear retreating to a cave—only to be wakened an hour and a half later by Glass, who was resolute and in control, and perfectly articulating a language that Conally thought was either Arabic or Armenian.
“Speak English.”
“It’s doing it again,” Glass said.
Chapter 9
Small craft warnings on a clear day are like a bright exclamation. Beneath slanting sunlight, wind pebbles the water in small runs across the harbor, and the flag is a red tongue that wags, laughs, gossips about the sun, mountains, islands, and wind. Gulls fly straighter, their circles flatten, and they rise or descend on the wind like squawking and feathered yo-yos. Distant in the harbor, dories appear bobbing between splashes, while buoys ride solid, displaying the wind as they separate the lightly running chop. Susurrous murmurs wake between the hull and the pier, and men, not exactly intimidated by the cooling wind, place their hands on sunlit steel of the leeward side where there remains a memory of excellent warmth. The breeze nudges like a sniffing, snuffling dog, nose-bumping indifferent elbows, intent on gaining affection. Men step belowdecks to rifle seabags from which are fetched questionable-looking socks, watch caps, long johns and mittens that have survived the preceding winter. On the messdeck and in the crew’s compartment, foul weather gear is pulled almost apologetically into view. Needles are clumsily threaded and loose buttons tightened, with triangular snags patched and sealed with tar.
“Fit out,” Glass advised Brace.
“Come payday. ”
“Come first liberty. I’ll take you to the credit Greek. I rake off a percentage.”
“So does the Greek,” Howard said. “If you want the perfect crime, open an Army-Navy store.”
“I already got the perfect crime,” Glass told him. “After years of study. I’m going to design perfect crimes and sell them.”
“For a percentage.”
“For a flat fee and a percentage. ”
“It’s warm in the engine room,” Brace said, “and that’s where I’m going.”
“You’re going to the Army-Navy store.”
Brace, in single-minded determination, was, approximately, mentally unsound on the subject of the engine room. He was engrossed with a dream that had been sketchy before his days on the mast. Now, that dream was firmed into the maniac certainty that Levere, Dane and Snow would welcome what Brace’s unbalanced mind called “logic.” While other men walked the chilling decks, watched repair proceed on Abner and cast hesitant glances at the wayward and ugly Hester C., Brace thought only of the engine room.
Hester C. settled into watchful sullenness that forced quartermaster-designate Rodgers, formalistic, Catholic-inclined, skinny, exact, red-haired, and plagued with ceremony, to make the sign of the cross each time he walked the gangway. Sometimes Rodgers crossed himself before saluting the colors, sometimes after. “I try to make it half and half,” he confided to Lamp, “‘cause it’s hard to say which should come first.”
Lamp, believing that the pope was a kind of superannuated rabbi, opted for prayer without ceasing.
“You got to be kidding,” Rodgers said. “Protocol. You ever hear of protocol, cook?”
“Something pulled that tramp to us,” Lamp complained. “It wasn’t protocol.”
“It was Abner.”
“You are simpleminded. Simple.”
“I climbed all over that scow,” Conally told them. “There’s nothing different about that boat from any other boat.”
“It’s plotting mischief, boys, I got a feeling.”
“Pull the plug,” said Howard. “Poof.”
“And have it lay at the end of the pier for always.”
Gunner Majors, ordinarily quiet, as if stilled by his preoccupation with things that explode, claimed that Hester C. would make a wonderful target. The men stood before the galley, or loafed on the messdeck, their heads idle—except for the jaws—their hair still short but now untrimmed; red faces, wan faces, swarthy faces. About them lay clean decks, squared-away gear, and the encroaching idleness that was dulling and insensitive and blunt. The coffee urn steamed. Amon hummed, spoke to himself in Japanese as he scrubbed an immaculate wardroom.
Adrian seemed like a polished piece of antique crystal stored forever behind the closed doors of a buffet. The men hesitated, remained silent, as if finally captured by a grim decree that made them outcasts even from their avowed purpose. Then forward and distantly sounding through steel bulkheads, the blurred resonance of a bell arrived like an echo.
“Calling the engine room.”
“It’s another drill.”
“I told you I had a feeling, boys.”
“Something’s up.”
“We’re starting to get some breeze.”
Gale warnings, which almost never occur on a clear day, are like a dark and hollering mouth of triumph. The sky lowers in the northeast, and against the footings of the million-dollar bridge, gray foam rises like the fingers of the harbor. Yachts, swinging at anchor, seem the focus of attack by fleets of dories as owners hastily arrive, secure sail and loose gear, chug engines into life and move out in search of moorage. Toward the Portland Head, the sea, graying toward the sky, begins to pile and churn, white-maned with the wind; and the dark green islands lie like black smears fronted and circled by rocks that carry surf in their teeth. On the windward side of the pier, Abner is flung in short thumps by crashing water, and to leeward Adrian tugs at its lines, falls backward into the small resulting trough, is surrounded by the rush and sigh and hasten of swift water. At the Base the new signal, twin flags, reports in sharp snaps from the tower, while across the bristling, whitening harbor, above the blown spray, a thin layer of black rises in churning dust from the coal yards to march like a line drawn across the windy face of Portland.