‘So?’
‘The Old Man told me to put you on the mid watch.’
‘The mid watch? What the hell for? Why...”
‘Nobody likes to drag up here at midnight, Dave,’ Gary said. ‘But don’t be bitter.’
‘What the hell did he do that for?’ I asked.
Gary shook his head. ‘He just don’t like you, chum. Hell, he don’t like any enlisted man on this ship — but you he likes least of all.’
‘The hell with him,’ I said. ‘I’ve stood mid watches before. Ain’t no mid watch going to break me.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Gary said drily. He paused a moment, and then said, ‘But you know something, Dave?’
‘What?’
‘If I had a character like the Old Man riding my tail, you know what I’d do?’
‘No. What would you do?’
‘I’d kill him,’ he said softly. He looked at me steadily, and then turned. ‘Don’t want to interrupt your work, chum,’ he said, and then he was gone.
I thought about that mid watch all morning and, when the chow whistle sounded, I dropped the bucket and rags and headed down for the main deck. I got in line and started talking with one of the guys, Crawley, a gunner’s mate. I had my back to the railing so I naturally couldn’t see what was going on behind me. Nobody yelled, ‘Attention!’ either, so I didn’t know what was happening until I heard the Old Man’s voice say, ‘How about it, Peters?’
I turned slowly, and he was standing there with his hands on his hips and a smile on his face, but the smile didn’t reach those cold blue eyes of his.
‘Sir?’ I said.
‘You know what this leaf on my collar means, Peters?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I was standing at attention now, and the sweat was streaming down my face, and my feet were sweating inside the black socks and black shoes.
‘Do you know that an enlisted man is supposed to come to attention when an officer appears? Do you know that I am the captain of this ship, Peters?’
‘Yes, sir. I know that.’
‘I don’t think I like the tone of your voice, Peters.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Hereafter, Peters, you keep your eyes peeled, understand? And whenever you see me coming, I want you to shout, “Attention!” in case there are any other members of the crew who don’t understand the meaning of respect. Do you understand that, Peters?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. And so you won’t forget it, Peters, perhaps we’ll forgo liberty for a week when we get bade to the States.’
‘Sir, I...’
‘That’ll do, Peters. I’ll discuss this with the Communications Officer, and you’ll be restricted to the ship for a week after we return to Norfolk.’
‘I didn’t even see you, sir,’ I said doggedly. ‘My back was...’
‘It’s your business to see me, Peters. And from now on, you’d damn well better see me.’
‘You’re the boss,’ I said angrily.
‘Yes, Peters,’ the captain said coldly. ‘I am.’
He looked at me steadily for another moment, and then addressed the other guys standing in line. ‘At ease,’ he said, and walked through the passageway near the mess hall.
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 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 wasn’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 doing 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 con 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 can 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 ass. Suppose the .45 was 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. ‘Somebody, 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 Bo’sun 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 skivvies. 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, the 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.