But such men as McNulty and Radioman Kerensky wasted no time on victory girls. McNulty and Kerensky forayed forth in search of wickedness. After their years in the Navy, they knew the special bar or inn in any port town, and they hit that place like homing pigeons, happy and expansive in its familiar atmosphere.
In Boston, in Scollay Square, the Hotel Regal waited for them, a wonderful, self-contained haven, where a man could disappear for a seventy-two-hour liberty and never see the light of day until he dragged back to the ship like a beat-up tomcat. In the Hotel Regal any woman whose charms brought a man back more than once was referred to as his "old lady."
"Meet my old lady," McNulty said, in one of the crowded social rooms on the first floor of the Hotel Regal. And, "How do you do, Mrs. McNulty?" Tyler Williams said, incorrigibly civilian, thereby casting a pall of embarrassment over the happy group. But the awkwardness was resolved when Kerensky hit a passing French sailor and laid him out cold on the floor, the blood from his nose matching the scarlet pompon on his hat.
"Now why did you do that?" McNulty asked, in the sorrowful tone of patient exasperation one uses with an old friend who is sometimes rather difficult, as the French sailor was removed by the hospital corpsmen assigned to the Navy ambulance standing by outside.
"He looked at my woman," Kerensky said, glaring fiercely at the painted little mask beside him.
It was at places like the Hotel Regal that the men were separated from the boys. If the boys were intrepid enough to enter, they were permitted at the front bar, and occasionally, but only occasionally, they were invited to join the men at a table with their women. But they dared not stay there too long, not until they had learned how to manage a woman.
Mornings in Boston were hideous. When the crew divisions mustered at eight o'clock on the deck in the sharp breeze that blew across the fish pier, their bilious faces turned to shades of deeper green. But after an hour or so, after coffee and a little brisk work in the open air, the crew would begin to revive, the color return to cheeks, the eyes brighten, the steps lighten, the voices rise, and by late afternoon, as liberty time approached, every man would be ready to do it all over again.
Williams suffered mornings along with the rest, his discomfort only partially alleviated by McNulty's Cure. He had retreated to the sick bay one morning to make himself some coffee after a night of doing the rounds ashore. He was angry and disgusted with himself as he looked at his gray, tired face in the mirror over the sink. McNulty found him there, and, after taking one look at Williams' shaking hands and sweat-beaded brow, he closed the door and locked it. "Now," he said, "you take two aspirin and a benzedrine, and you wash it down with a jigger of spirits of ammonia. A pill pusher at Pearl taught me that, and it's best to lie down on the deck when you take it," he added, "or at least stand clear of the bulkhead, so you won't shake the sick bay to pieces."
Williams didn't know what Bullitt did on his liberties. The chief went ashore alone every evening, and presumably he came back late, and presumably he was drunk, but the demands of his tradition forbade him to show any of the effects of excess. After morning sick call he would begin again on his expressed program of making the Ajax the best-equipped ship in the squadron. He would have his requisition form complete, carefully made out the day before, tirelessly and stubbornly repeating on it the items which, because of short supply, he had not been given the day before. Williams would be sent with this to Doctor Claremont's cabin, for his approval and signature, and then the two of them, Bullitt and Williams, would set out to do battle again at the medical-stores warehouse.
Prior to its commissioning, of course, the Ajax had been fitted out with medical supplies and equipment according to the orders of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. It was customary procedure to replace medicines and supplies used in the normal course of events by submitting requisition order forms to supply depots. Here the officer in charge might delete items or cut the amount, according to what he thought the Ajax required. But since Chief Bullitt was not content to have his ship merely adequately equipped, he waged a constant warfare with the officers of supply depots.
Doctor Claremont, aside from signing the requisitions, took no part in this activity, content to leave it to Bullitt. In Boston Claremont seemed even more withdrawn and removed from his surroundings. His wife was unable to join him there; she was too far advanced in pregnancy to attempt the trip. His own request for leave, like all other requests submitted, had not been granted. The Ajax was on stand-by orders. She had to be ready to shove off on a few hours' notice if necessary.
The medical-treatment and first-aid stations of any Navy ship are an extremely complicated system, designed for the best and most immediate treatment at any part of the ship during action. The sick bay was only the central base, the nerve center of this system. During action it would not even be used as a place of treatment. For this purpose the officers' wardroom, a larger space, would serve. The long dining table there had been designed for use also as an operating table. A standard hospital operating light had been installed overhead, and the wardroom had its own separate electric generator and tank of fresh water. Along the bulkheads there were large medical-supply cabinets, and it was these cabinets, as well as the many smaller ones everywhere aboard ship, that Bullitt was fighting to supply.
Every major compartment below deck and every gun mount above deck had its own first-aid cabinet. In addition, the captain's gig and the whaleboat each held its own supply of first-aid equipment, in the event of the abandonment of ship, and every life raft was similarly equipped; in action. Doctor Claremont, Chief Bullitt and Williams would carry large shoulder cases filled with emergency supplies.
It was Bullitt's ambition to create an independent treatment unit at every possible first-aid location, each complete with its own instruments for minor surgery, and with bandages, blood plasma, morphine and sterile operating packs, so that, no matter what part of the ship was disabled by enemy guns, there would always be some equipped location where the medical department could function. This was the goal — even, so it sometimes seemed to Williams, the obsession — of Chief Bullitt.
For the wartime emergency a medical-stores warehouse had been set up on the Navy Pier at Boston, in an old loft building. Here, every morning, Bullitt would take his requisition form into an inner office on the main floor for the daily battle with the officer in charge. While he argued this through, Williams would wait in the outer office, where a chief pharmacist's mate sat at a desk, going over endless forms, with a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth. Chief Durkin, as the name plate on his desk proclaimed him to be, was a heavy, dark, scowling man, but he was not unpleasant, and Williams sensed after a while that the brusque way in which he spoke to him about Bullitt covered an essential respect. Apparently the two chiefs had known each other for years.
"How do you get along with Bullitt?" Chief Durkin asked Williams one morning, bluntly, scowling over his cigar.
Williams shrugged. It was not one of his best mornings. McNulty's Cure was still ringing in his ears like the sound of distant sirens, and he was careful not to move his head too quickly because, when he did, swarms of small black beetles invaded the horizons of his vision. "We get along," Williams said.
Chief Durkin looked at him sharply, as if he feared some failure on Williams' part to appreciate Bullitt's real quality, and his tone and manner when he spoke again were rather aggressive.