McNulty pushed his hat back on his head with an air of bafflement. "But it's more than that. Doc," he said, his voice rising again. "We're at war, Doc! We're all on this ship together! A guy like that is a jinx. He could foul us all up. Don't you see that?"
"No, I don't," Williams said. "And even if I did want to get rid of him, I couldn't do it by casting doubt on his sanity. Anyway, he does his job well. How could he foul us up?"
McNulty lighted a cigarette. He took his hat off and ran his calloused hand over his short, frayed hair.
"I don't know, Doc," he said. "It's hard to tell you. I've watched him with the others. He just doesn't really give a damn, Doc, about anything or anybody, except himself."
"But that doesn't mean he's insane," Williams said.
McNulty pulled at his ear. "He is a little Asiatic, Doc," he said, using again that familiar Navy term to describe what long periods of duty and physical excess in the Orient can do to a man. "You wouldn't have to say anything definite. Doc," he went on, with both pleading and exasperation in his voice. "I believe we're headed for Boston, and if Bullitt went ashore there to the hospital for an examination, say, why we'd probably pull out before he could get back to the ship."
"You've never seen a psychiatric ward, have you?" Williams asked.
"No, Doc," McNulty said.
And how could Williams describe that to anyone who had never seen it? Psychiatry in the hands of inadequately trained hospital personnel could become a one-way road to destruction. He would never forget the lock wards in the hospital where he had served, with the long row of beds, where the patients could read their own diagnoses, printed on cards clipped to the footboards of the beds, words such as "moron" and "paranoia" and "schizophrenia." Oh, the long, gray, ill-smelling wards, where too often the diagnosis undetermined became the diagnosis determined.
Williams took a tray of filled capsules and shook them, to free them of the dust of the compound. He put down the tray and turned to face McNulty. "I can't do it, Boats," he said. "I just can't do it."
McNulty grasped his arm. "I'm not very good at words. Doc," he said, "but what I'm trying to tell you is that we've just got to get this man off the ship. And if he won't do it himself, we've got to find some way to do it for him."
"But I don't think personalities should enter into this at all," Williams said. "What else matters as long as he does his job?"
Both their faces were solemn, set in expressions of stubborn determination. But not antagonism. They were like two men trying to convey an important idea to each other in a second language, not possessing a common language in which they could surely make themselves understood.
"In war. Doc," McNulty said, dropping his voice to a quiet but emphatic tone, "in war you got to be able to count on every man as if he was a part of you. You can't think in action. There's no time. The man beside you has got to be just like your own arm. If you had to stop to wonder what he was going to do. Doc, you'd be dead!"
"But wouldn't Bullitt know what to do?" Williams asked. "He's been in the Navy for nineteen years!"
McNulty dropped Williams' arm and turned away. Williams went back to his capsules, and they were both silent for a moment.
Finally McNulty spoke. "I just can't seem to make you see it. Doc," he said. "It's something he hasn't got, Doc. I don't know how else to explain it. It's just something he hasn't got."
Again they were both silent, and again it was McNulty who finally spoke. But this time his tone was different, with a half-bantering attempt at lightness. "I think I like you, Doc," he said, "even if you are so damned one-way. I'll try to make you see this, before we leave Boston. Because Boston is our last chance, Doc. We got to get rid of Bullitt. I got to make you see it my way." He shook his head, and tried again. "There isn't anybody on board to give him the word, for one thing," he said. "Claremont's too young, and he isn't really Navy, anyway. And the skipper isn't a medical man. Some guys just get out of hand when there isn't anybody over them tough enough to give them the word."
Chapter 3
IN Boston, however, there were many occupations for the men of the Ajax other than the plot to rid the ship of Chief Bullitt. There was the requisitioning and the loading of supplies, there was paint to be chipped and paint to be applied, to repair the weathering effects of salt water, and there was every man's duty - to see that the girls ashore knew that the Ajax was in port. It was a program which kept everyone busy day and night.
The average age of the crew members of the Ajax was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. When Billy Becker celebrated his twenty-first birthday on board there was a general feeling of satisfaction and achievement shared by all, in an atmosphere of much hilarity and manly humor. "Mother, there's a man in the house!" his friends called, assuming falsetto voices, when Billy appeared with his tray at lunch. Billy himself celebrated the happy day by smoking a cigar on the fantail after chow, regarding the lengthening ash with quiet and solemn pride.
No embarrassment marred this occasion as it did on the nineteenth birthday of young Stanley, of the engine-room or black gang, whose unfortunate mother made the mistake of sending him a cake in care of the Red Cross. It was carried aboard at Norfolk by an aggressively pretty member of the Junior League, wearing her Red Cross volunteer uniform. This admirable young woman knew exactly how to deal with enlisted men. She talked to them more loudly than to her friends, enunciating very clearly, and she smiled constantly, never relaxing either process for a single moment. In the sacrosanct crew's quarters, where, in the old days, the presence of a woman would have been considered an omen of doom, she ceremoniously opened the box, revealing the cake with its pink frosting and the separate packages of birthday candles. After she had blessedly gone, Stanley's friends helped him out as well as they could. "Scotty" MacDougal hacked the cake up with his sheath knife, and they stood around in a circle and shoved the hunks into their mouths in gloomy silence. When captain's boy Stewart Brown began to sing "Happy Birthday to You," in a high-pitched, mincing voice, Stud Clancy told him to knock it off, in no uncertain terms. After the cake was eaten, Stanley went back to the engine room and got himself thoroughly covered with grease.
Somebody ought to have given Stanley's mother the word. In every man's thoughts his mother was often present, and in liberty ports she was remembered with gifts of green or pink embroidered silk pillow covers, but the general feeling was that she ought to sever that silver cord, or at least to step out of the foreground long enough for a guy to pick out a girl.
Although the crew of the Ajax went ashore on liberty two by two, the institution of old hand and boy stopped at the gangway. On liberty a man instinctively sought the company of one whose experience paralleled his own. The older, sophisticated men, men way past twenty, such as McNulty, Sullivan and Kerensky, went ashore with quite definite ideas in mind, but the young boys went ashore breathless with excitement, with no plans in mind, but prepared for anything.
These younger men could wander the ancient streets of Boston, as other good patriots in the service of their country had done before them. They could go to the Old Howard and see the famous Tassel Dancer, a marvel of beauty and muscle control, who not only kept five tassels, attached to various strategic parts of her anatomy, spinning simultaneously, but also climaxed her act by waving an American flag at the same time. They could prowl the Common, making catcalls in the dark, or crying the Rebel yell, just from an excess of good spirits. In the back rows of movie houses, they could pet with the bold little victory girls, spawned by the war, who traveled, like the sailors, in pairs; and then, after the varied excesses of the night, they could restore their tissues with a hamburger and a glass of milk at a white-tiled lunch counter, glaringly bright, echoing, echoing with the music of the juke box.