I began to laugh, too. We sat there in the midst of hell, laughing until the tears rolled down our cheeks and we were gasping for breath.
“What are we laughing for?” Maley managed to get out, and, laughing, I tried to say, “We’re so goddamn silly-looking, sitting here…”
Then silence. Painfully I got to my feet and back at the sound gear. I heard the retreating screws, fainter and fainter. Had we scared him away?
Captain Warder plopped down into his chair outside the sound shack. “Where’s he now?” he asked. “What’s he up to now?”
For the next hour there wasn’t a sound in the boat except the Captain’s voice asking for bearings. Finally I could report, “He’s gone, sir.”
Captain Warder rose heavily from his chair. “Good!” he said, and walked slowly away. We never knew why he fled.
“I’m going to hit the sack, Eck,” Maley said. I buried my face in my hands and fought to keep awake.
It was many days now since we had tasted fresh air and felt the sun. When I finally got to my own bunk, I was so keyed up I couldn’t fall asleep. We were working near a bad mine field. Anti-sub patrol boats were all over the place. We’d never know when we might surface in the night and have a battery of Jap guns blow us out of the water. We were absolutely alone.
We had attacked and attacked—and failed.
I couldn’t keep Marjorie out of my mind now. I lay in my bunk and looked up at the photographs. Something told me she needed me. When I did fall asleep, I slept badly.
Call it telepathy or what you want. That night, nearly halfway around the world, Marjorie did need me. She was near death with pneumonia. The physicians had nearly given up hope. They told her mother so. That night Marjorie repeated over and over again: “I must live for Spike. I must live for Spike.” And one time, in the early hours of the morning, she sat up in bed and called in a clear, loud voice: “Mel, Mel, come in here! What are you standing out there for? Mother, go over and tell him to come in here!” She stared into the darkness and then lay back and fell asleep.
When we checked the date, it was the same day, almost to the hour, that the Jap ship was dropping the pattern of depth charges that nearly finished the Wolf. Marjorie always said she could have sworn I was standing outside her room that morning, staring in at her with a strange, helpless smile.
The next day I felt better. A load seemed lifted from my shoulders. Word came through that we were ending this patrol soon. We’d be heading for Australia again. The crew became light-hearted. Zerk, Eddie Sousa, and Swede came into the control room in the afternoon and began shooting the breeze. Zerk had his pipe under full draft and said he would fight the first man that tried to put it out.
“That damn thing kills a bug at ten feet, Zerk,” Swede told him. “Someday it’ll kill all of us.”
Zerk just looked at him.
Someone brought up the last depth-charge attack.
“It’s that jinx, that’s what it is,” Swede said, pounding his big fist on his knee.
Zerk nodded in a cloud of smoke. “That damn observer we’re carrying,” he said. “Without him, we’d have knocked off every one of those bastards.”
We tuned in on the radio to see what our old friend, Tokyo Rose, had to say. She was in her usual good form. She put an old Rudy Vallee record on this time, and we listened to that. Somewhere she found a Benny Goodman record, and we thought that was a nice touch.
“American submarines have been detected and have been vigorously dealt with by the Imperial Fleet,” she announced triumphantly. “Several of the large undersea raiders are known to have been sunk.”
We laughed. Out at Christmas Island we’d been a “nest of Allied submarines.” We were doing all right, we decided.
The auxiliary crew spent some time now going over the Wolf with a fine-tooth comb. Zerk summed up the damage. “Just a couple of pipes sprung a leak,” he said. “She’s not hurt bad. I understand that one of Gus’s Silex coffeepots was smashed, though.”
We all groaned. One less coffeepot was a major calamity.
Gus later broke the news to us that from now on our menu would consist of dehydrated potatoes, rice, and bread. There’d be canned meat, but no butter. What we had left had turned bad. Most of the meat we took on at Australian ports was mutton and Australian hare, both of which were too gamey for us. We were beef and pork eaters, and we didn’t like Australian meat. I found that I was eating less than usual. My throat was beginning to hurt. For two or three days at a time, it hurt every time I swallowed. Doc Loaiza fixed up a gargle, but it didn’t help much.
The new diet wasn’t anything to write home about, bad throat or no bad throat. The potatoes tasted like balls of cotton. The meat was Spam, which is fine if you like it. Most of us lost our appetites. If it hadn’t been for Gus Wright’s fresh bread, I don’t know what we would have done. It was delicious, soft, with a nice even brown crust that melted in your mouth.
Our washing machine was going full blast now with most of the boys getting ready for liberty, pushing each other aside trying to monopolize the mirror in the washroom. Sousa battled with the black gang in the engine room about messing Baby up with their oil-drenched clothes.
“All they do,” he complained to me, “is throw their stuff in the machine and don’t give a damn how she looks when they leave her. I’ll knock the bastards’ heads off if I catch them.”
Swede was the only man who refused to use Baby. “The hell with her,” he said. “I’ll never wash my own clothes. It ain’t American.”
It was a nightly joke to see Swede pull out his “locker stick”—a long piece of wood used to pick soiled clothes out of a locker—and look through soiled shorts, shirts, and dungarees for a clean change. His locker was bursting, and yet he’d invariably dig out a new pair of shorts or a clean shirt.
“What did I tell you?” he’d chuckle. “Always one more.”
Captain Warder read and relaxed in his room. His desk was piled high with magazines and best sellers. Behind the green monk’s-cloth curtain his little stateroom was a model of neatness and efficiency, with a picture of his family—his wife and four youngsters—on the desk, his logs and papers neatly piled in place. He was finishing Van Loon’s Geography, reading the Naval Institute Proceedings, a navy magazine popular among officers, and The Army and Navy Register. He also had a copy of Wuthering Heights in his room. At night he’d join his officers—Deragon, Mercer, Syverson, and Holden—in a game of hearts in the wardroom. We always knew when he slipped the queen to one of his men. His booming, ringing laugh—he laughed infrequently, but it was loud and contagious when he did—would fill the tiny wardroom and echo in the passageway.
This routine, easy, without strain, went on for a week. We were sticking our nose into every cove, and inlet, and bay. The Captain was still ship-hungry. He wanted to come back with something. We’d just had too much bad luck so far.
On the fifth day we were proceeding submerged when the conning-tower officer spotted a patch of smoke. He called the Skipper, and both agreed it would be a race between the Wolf and darkness if we wanted to plunk her. Captain Warder had to be very cautious now. We were near the lower Philippines and had to watch for possible aircraft attack. He upped periscope now and then. Once he said:
“Damn it, there’s two of them. They’re both coal-burning tramps, merchantmen, high masts, high stacks, probably jumping from one island to another. They are not zigzagging. Both are old Marus… Battle stations!”