“…B-race…”
“Get crackin’, get crackin’.”
Brass ports gleamed and glowed and smouldered like fixed halos, showing here and there a white streak of unwiped polish. Bronze nozzles, straight-stream and fog, were shadowed in the sun between the bleached white layers of new firehose packed above smooth, gray-painted decks where blisters and bubbles of rust, scraped away, would not bleed hints of mortality until December. The rust lay waiting in its coffers, as imminent as ice, immoral as a government.
“Follow through. Follow through. Follow through, you—cow milker.”
On the pier Brace heaved the line, the arc high and slanting at upright orange life ring targets staggered to a distance of a hundred feet. The targets were like small, round mouths of scorn. Brace heaved the line for a full working day.
“I got no wrists left.”
“Nor ever will,” Glass told him, “as long as you keep turnin’ em.”
While Howard watched, Dane nagged and chafed and sent the wrestler-shaped, Indian-blooded third class bosun Conally to stand behind Brace like a vulture.
“Like boxing,” Conally told Brace. “Start from your toes, not your knees.” Conally heaved a line into the mouth of the far target. “Lay your coil smooth—smooth.” He turned his back to the targets and flipped the line over his shoulder to strike the center of the nearest one.
“It’s a circus act,” Brace said.
“He stinks,” Conally told Dane.
“Clean him up.”
“No liberty,” Conally told Brace. “Until you can heave the line.”
“That’s restriction. You got no authority to do that.”
“See our man on the bridge. See Levere. Take your lawyer with you.”
Brace heaved the line. In a week the arc flattened and the monkey fist was hitting the sides of the rings. Half the throws were getting through.
“Another week,” Conally told Dane.
“Is he tryin’?”
“He’s tryin’.”
“Give him a little run ashore.”
“Go do whatever you do,” Conally told Brace. “Don’t bump your arm.”
Brace went ashore, returned sober, to heave the line.
“I ain’t the only guy on this deck gang,” Brace complained to Howard.
Howard laid a coil and snaked the line toward the far target. The monkey fist hit two feet short and bounced against the target base. Howard laid a second coil and snaked the line through the target.
“It don’t pay to forget.”
“You hit it the second time,” Brace said.
“From solid decks. This pier’s not moving.” Howard laid another coil and began to practice. Radioman James, looking meager and remote and pale, with nearly whitened hair and washed gray eyes, was passing from the Base back to the ship. He stopped, watched, silently picked up a line. He made a throw, bounced the line from the edge of a target, turned to Brace. “Your coil’s got no spring. Lay it like this…”
“Don’t teach him nothing fancy,” Howard said. “Let him learn the plain way first.”
If, from New Bedford, the lousy cutter Able could not tow the plug from a bathtub, that was all the more reason why deck seamen aboard Adrian and Abner learned to stand backup to a fireman’s steaming watch. Firemen learned the helm, and how to make ready the decks to get underway. Yeoman Howard was third quartermaster, while senior quartermaster Chappel could type. Gunner’s mate Majors, less than blessed to belong to a crew that could not, with the three-inch-fifty gun, hit the broad side of a continent at five hundred yards, acted as third bosun to Dane and Conally. Equipment was hard to come by. A less awful tradition said, “Patch it up and make it do,” but even a frugal Treasury Department was generous in the matter of towline.
It came aboard in the first week of August. A new, enormous coil, spiky with small fibers poking through the lay like the remaining bristles on a balding brush. The line was stiff, hard, dry, waxy, unsalted, unbleached, unstained with rust, unmarked by chafing gear, and perhaps, even to Brace, it was beautiful.
Lamp appeared on the fantail like a priest investing a new house or enterprise. He tsked and worried, sat in the sun like a great, sweating slab of ham. The huge bundle was broken and the line laid the length of the port main deck, around the house, down the starboard side, and back up to port. Seamen walked the line, hand-rolling away fistlike loops, sweating and grunting, backs strained against the weight.
“The luck is turnin’, boys.”
“Which-a-way, cook, which-a-way?”
“Don’t scorn luck, boys.”
“Which way, cook?” Levere, hawk-faced, French-faced, and taciturn as a Scot, appeared on the boat deck to watch the investiture.
“How easy it works,” Lamp exclaimed. “It’s stiff but willin’, cap.”
“It’s just well packed.”
“Don’t scorn luck, Cap.”
“Nobody does,” Levere told him. “You ought to give a good deal of thought to that, cook.”
Howard, watching from the pier, his badge of office the immaculate white hat rolled and bleached over dark, brief waves of hair, stood beside the short, bear-shaped second engineman, Fallon, who had a reputation for smart hands; an instinct for machinery that Lamp could somehow explain by talking of Peter the Great. Fallon conversed with pumps, complained to sweat joints, held arterial arguments with webs of piping. He stood like a keg, parting the light breeze that blew down the pier between Adrian and Abner—heavy-browed, round-faced, and with grease-stained hands—perturbed to hear the unnatural squawk of gulls and the alien-whispering wind.
“We got orders for Jensen’s replacement,” Howard told him. “From cutter Aaron. A chief engineman name of Snow.”
“He won’t beat Jensen, chum. What kinda foolish name is Snow?”
“An easy-to-spell name,” Howard told him. “You on top of it down there?”
“We just waitin’ to get reported on the line.”
“Snow shows up next week.”
“We’ll wait,” Fallon said. “Belowdecks is clean. Be a shame to mess it up by usin’ it.” He sniffed suspiciously at the breeze, like a man divining for oil while suspecting he will strike water. “If we got a week, let’s spend it. I want that new kid broken in.”
“I’ll mention it to Dane.”
“Snow? What’s his first name?”
“Edward.”
“A Limey. We went for years without a chief in that engine room—an’ without a Limey, neither.”
“He’ll spend his time in the wardroom.”
“Not a chance,” Fallon said morosely. “We waited this long. You can just bet your uppers that Levere has found hisself a hotrock.”
Across the pier, the crew of Abner did its devotions before a new bundle of line. Seamen walked loops, snipes came blinking from below, or from the messdeck. Some of the men carried coffee mugs. They gabbled, slurped, chewed on sandwiches. The bridge gang clustered on the boat deck like a makeshift choir at a Sunday school picnic, a choir ambiguous in the face of hot dogs, pie, and amazing grace.
“It starts again,” said Fallon.
“Abner takes the duty Monday,” Howard told him. “Us, we still got a little over a week.”
Howard spoke to Dane, who spoke to Fallon, who passed the word to Brace. When Brace understood that he was ordered to stand cold-iron watch and take instruction on steaming, he went to Dane, complaining bitterly, his mouth running hot with adolescent vigor. He was shocked to find his words probing beneath Dane’s professional cussedness, to enter the true cussedness of a land where no grown man would ever want to visit.