Even so, Rhoda Smith would never know that her lover was dead, unless she made an effort to trace him through the Bureau of Personnel. Lieutenant Palazzo had postponed the unpleasant task of writing to her, while he decided on one of the devices that had got him out of so many tight squeezes before. Rhoda's letter to him had gone down to the laundry in his pocket, where Pawling, in his indifferent way, had failed to find it before it went into the washing machine. It was an illegible mass when it came out again, and Pawling had thrown it away.
Williams waited while Doctor Claremont finished closing the records. Then he took them, along with the lists of possessions, to Sullivan, in the ship's office. They did not speak, either, and after that Williams came out and stood on the deck as the Ajax came alongside the dock at Norfolk.
The liberty list was posted for the off-duty members of the crew. The men whose names were on the list dressed in silence, averting their eyes from one another, to go ashore. They were checked off at the gangway, and they saluted the ensign and crossed to the dock, tugging at their jumpers self-consciously; they walked away separately, as if it was somehow wrong to share liberty together in the absence of remembered friends.
Williams dressed for liberty, too. He shaved and showered mechanically, and put on his blues, but when he started out toward the gangway he stopped abruptly and stepped back inside the passageway. Bullitt was just leaving the ship; he caught a glimpse of the back of his head. He waited a few moments before he followed him.
But when he had crossed the gangway he discovered that he did not know what to do with himself at all. The installation at Norfolk was so old that it had an air of permanence even greater than that of most Navy bases, and it was so large that it was a city, a community in itself. The warehouses, the storerooms and repair shops, of frame or of aged, weathered stone, were largely deserted now, at the close of the day. With closed doors and windows, blind in the setting sun, they lined the paved and tree-shaded streets with a look of timeless brooding, an atmosphere of the changeless past so strong that it evoked in Williams the image of a frame in which he would be protected; nothing could touch or enter here.
Williams had not permitted himself to think since the accident, the tragedy in which —but oh, carefully, please —it was possible that he was the central figure. It was not his custom to avoid issues or responsibilities, but something more seemed involved here. He would allow himself to think tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, he told himself. Not only did it seem necessary to defer thought or reflection for the sake of his reason; it seemed necessary, also, in some involuntary way, to suspend judgment or reaction, as a spectator does in a theater, waiting for the climax, the resolution of the conflict in a tragedy. What was he waiting for? He did not know. He only knew, as his feet carried him reluctantly toward the Navy gate, that he had no real desire to leave.
And so, at the gate, he turned back. He paced the ancient streets again. Above the buildings, darkening in the twilight, a high, light wind stirred the treetops with whispers and memories, and at last he went down to a street's end and sat on the sea wall, feeling anonymous, grateful to be faceless in the dark.
When he went back to the Ajax, finally, he knew he could not sleep if he went below. There were always small tasks to be found, if one wished to find them, in the sick bay. He polished the few surgical instruments that were kept at hand for emergency treatment. He sharpened the needles for injection. He cleared the shelves of the pharmacy bottles, and washed the shelves, and polished the bottles, and put them back again. He was still there, in the sick bay, when Bullitt was brought back to the ship, and it was then he understood what climax it w^as he had been waiting for.
Bullitt was brought on board by two men of the Shore Patrol, and it was difficult to say whether they helped him or restrained him. He was mad, or drunk, or both, and he had fallen, apparently against a curbstone. The gold-filled teeth were broken in; his mouth seemed to be nothing but a great, bloody wound.
His appearance so astonished Ensign Cripps and Billy Becker, the gangway watch, that, for a moment after the Shore Patrol had gone, they could only stare at him in silence. But then Bullitt turned to the astonished, frightened Billy Becker, and, with a shout of rage, caught him off guard and threw him to the deck, where he began to kick him about the face and head.
Next to Stud Clancy, Billy Becker was the most popular member of the crew, and when the men relieved from watch, idling at the rail, saw what was happening they came running.
McNulty, who was below, heard the sounds, and he came running too, as Williams did from the sick bay. It was McNulty, of course, rather than the ineffectual Ensign Cripps, who took charge. He held Bullitt, wild with the strength of the possessed, pinning his arms to his sides, and when Bullitt, his foam-flecked, broken mouth shouting obscenities, raised his knee quickly to McNulty's groin, McNulty, that successful veteran of so many street fights, twisted nimbly to one side, and threw him on his back on the deck.
"Now, Doc," McNulty said, breathing hard, holding Bullitt down, his eyes searching for and finding Williams, standing stunned at the edge of the crowd, "now we need that strait jacket."
And so it was Bullitt himself who was laced into the restraining jacket. He lay on the deck afterward, suddenly passive, like a grotesque papoose. McNulty and Ensign Cripps dispersed the crowd. Billy Becker was sent below to nurse his wounds, and MacDougal, who relieved him, went to the dock, as instructed, to telephone for an ambulance.
In the unshaded glare of the lights above the gangway, Williams knelt beside Bullitt and bathed his face. He stared up at Williams, his head supported by a first-aid bag that Williams had brought from the sick bay with the washbasin, and, even though his eyes held a deceptively rational look, Williams knew that Bullitt did not know who he was.
"I went to the office," Bullitt said, "but they wouldn't give me my orders." His words were blurred and almost incomprehensible as they came from the swollen mouth. Williams, bathing his face, leaned closer to hear.
"I want you to go and get them for me," Bullitt said. "Do you hear that?"
"Yes, Chief," Williams said. "I hear you."
"Go to Doctor Brainard, and tell him I'm ready," Bullitt said. "But they won't give me my orders."
"Yes, Chief," Williams said,
"They've hidden them, or burned them," Bullitt said. "I know that. They're jealous of me."
"Yes, Chief," Williams said.
"I've had trouble with my orders before," Bullitt said. "It's because they hate me."
Williams could say nothing.
"They know I'm better than they are," Bullitt said. "That's why they hate me."
Again Williams could not answer.
"Go to the office," Bullitt said. "Tell Doctor Brainard that I'm ready ..."
And then, siren screaming, the ambulance came. Its driver, a hospital corpsman, came on board with a stretcher, and he and Williams lifted Bullitt into it, in the hammock strait jacket, and carried their burden, the monstrous papoose, across the gangway.
A chief pharmacist's mate stood waiting at the rear of the ambulance, beside the open door. He was an old Navy hand, healthy and relaxed, with a bland, sun-bronzed face; a stable, unemotional man, but when he saw the figure on the stretcher he started, and came forward. "My God, it's Bullitt," he said. "Put him down, boys."