Pozericki's eyes were glazed now with morphine, and he ran his tongue over dry lips. "I'm sorry, Boats," he said. "It was all my fault, Boats."
At lunch time, Pozericki was persuaded to drink some canned grapefruit juice and to sip a little soup from a mug. Williams was explaining that he must drink all he could to offset the dangers of shock when he suddenly heard the word "Attention!" spoken loudly and firmly behind him, and he turned to see Stewart Brown and Captain Thompson coming down the ladder stairs of the compartment, followed by Doctor Claremont. The off-duty boys, writing letters, or reading in their bunks, silent with sympathy, sprang to their feet and stood at attention, with their hands at their sides. Even Pozericki became rigid and still in the stretcher.
Captain Thompson placed one hand on his arm, and his pleasant, authoritative voice was filled with genuine warmth and concern. "Are you all right, boy? Are they taking good care of you?"
"Yes, sir," Pozericki said, moistening his lips, staring straight up at the bunk over his head.
"You are going to be all right," Captain Thompson said. "We will get you to a hospital as soon as we can."
Doctor Claremont checked the splinting and the bandage. He gently pulled the dressings aside here and there to see how much edema there was, what tissue damage was revealed, to look for capillary hemorrhage. He explained to Captain Thompson what had been done. He did not speak to Pozericki.
During an endless afternoon and night, Williams did what he could for the comfort of Pozericki, restless and half-drugged, sweating under the blankets in the warm compartment. In the morning he filled a washbasin with warm water m the sick bay and took it back to the after crew's quarters. The night hours had marked a great change in Pozericki. He was numbed and dazed with pain. He looked unseeingly at Williams with bloodshot eyes, set in a gray unshaven face. Williams gave him a codeine tablet, with a mug of fresh water. He brought Pozericki's washcloth and towel and soap and shaving gear from his locker, and cleaned him up. Pozericki was in an agony of discomfort from the rigidity of his enforced position in the Stokes stretcher. Williams had put a folded blanket under him, between him and the metal frame of the stretcher, but he was afraid to move him now, to massage him or try to ease his discomfort.
Williams went up to the galley, drew a mug of coffee and took it back to Pozericki. He waited with him until he had drunk what he could, and until he could see that the codeine had begun to take its merciful effect. Then he went out on deck.
Ahead of them, luminous under the sea haze, was the outline of land, the low hills of Cuba. Williams walked to the bow and stood at the rail. Any land, when approached from the sea, seems to rise from it, and to be cleansed and purged as it does. No matter how disappointing it may prove to be on arrival, how squalid, or untidy, or uninviting, from the sea the rise of land seems to hold fresh promise, the hope of new beginnings.
Bullitt had gone to the bow also, and when he saw Williams he beckoned to him and swept out his arm in a wide gesture toward the approaching land. "Do join me," he said, "for the grand entry into Guantanamo Bay."
Chapter 6
AGAIN, as at Argentia, there was not dock space enough for the L. Ajax to tie up. They were to drop anchor in the wide harbor. Other ships had preceded them there, and they were to be followed by still more, but there was a feeling of isolation and loneliness in the vast expanse of tropical blue water under the brilliant sky, with the spare vegetation ashore, where the few buildings of the Marine Base sat in an empty paradise, like toy houses in a child's landscape of cardboard and sponge-rubber trees.
The first order of the day was to remove Pozericki to the hospital. The whaleboat had been lowered on the starboard side, and when this had been done it was remembered, too late, that McNulty had not yet rigged the lines to lower the Stokes stretcher by winch. Usually above reproach in his duty, McNulty had postponed this task, possibly because Bullitt had asked him so many times to do it. Lines were to have been secured at either end and at the sides of the stretcher, and bound to a center ring, so that the stretcher could be lowered skillfully by a single line, without tilting at either end. Since this had not been done, it was necessary to lower the stretcher by hand. It was difficult for the boys handling the lines to coordinate their movements, and the result was that Pozericki, even though he was cared for by loving hands, had a rather bumpy and painful descent to the whaleboat. He endured this with the same pale and rigid stoicism that he had exhibited from the first.
McNulty sat beside him in the boat, Clancy held the tiller, Mac-Dougal was the engineer. Williams, last to come down the accommodation ladder, carried Pozericki's health record and ditty bag, in which he had packed his shaving gear. He had also put in the bag the picture of Pozericki's girl, which he had taken from inside his locker, a high-school graduation picture of a pretty, placid girl in white cap and gown, holding a diploma, standing against a background of a flight of school steps, with a sculptured figure of Abraham Lincoln off in the middle distance.
The whaleboat wheeled about and started off toward the shore. McNulty leaned over Pozericki, talking to him in a quiet, earnest tone, and Williams could see that there were rebellious tears in Pozericki's eyes, dark-circled in his set face. "Sure you'll come back," McNulty was saying. "If you aren't well by the time we shove off, we'll pick you up at somewhere else. Maybe at N.O.B. Maybe at Charleston. But we'll get you, boy," he said. "We couldn't get along without you, boy."
"I should have listened to you, Boats," Pozericki said. "It was all my fault, Boats." He drew his forearm across his eyes, an arm of firm white flesh, covered with coarse black hair.
The hospital at the Marine Base was a large white bungalow, covered with flowering purple bougainvillaea and filled with sunshine and quietness. Pozericki, the Stokes stretcher placed on a wheel stretcher, waited in the admitting room to be received. It was likely that after his leg had been X-rayed, the bone reset if necessary and properly cast, he would be flown to a hospital on the mainland for recovery. McNulty, Clancy and MacDougal said good-by to him awkwardly there, standing on either side of the stretcher, their roughened hands on his arms. "We'll pick you up somewhere, boy," McNulty said again, trying to put into his voice the conviction he did not feel. This time Pozericki said nothing. He closed his eyes, and his friends filed quietly outside.
While they waited there for Williams they learned, in conversation with the ambulance driver, that there would be no liberty beyond the base for them while they were at Guantanamo Bay. The nearest village had been placed out of bounds the week before. As in so many communities disrupted by the conditions of war, venereal disease there had run rampant; it had reached epidemic proportions. One third of the crew of an entire ship had become infected, which incapacitated that ship as effectively as if it had been torpedoed.
A disconsolate silence fell on the group as they thought of this inaccessible sink of iniquity. To substitute for these illicit pleasures, the ambulance driver explained in a voice devoid of enthusiasm, motion pictures were flown down from the mainland and distributed, in turn, to the ships, and USO shows were sent down to perform in the recreation hall ashore.
From the beginning, it seemed destined that nothing should go right at Guantanamo Bay. That afternoon, at their first scheduled antiaircraft-gunnery practice, the gun crews of the Ajax were so inept that the target plane trailing the sleeve above them requested them to desist, and the Ajax was ordered to return to its mooring.