“Far as I’m concerned, the damn limeys were welcome to keep the Sandwich Islands,” he muttered under his breath as he swabbed a stretch of the Dakota’s deck. He chuckled wryly. “Somehow, though, folks who outrank me don’t give a damn that I sunburn if you look at me cross-eyed. Wonder why that is?”
“Wonder why what is?” asked Vic Crosetti, who was sanitizing the deck not far away and who slept in the bunk above Carsten’s. “Wonder why people who outrank a Seaman First don’t give a damn about him, or wonder why you look like a piece of meat the galley didn’t get done enough?”
“Ahh, shut up, you damn lucky dago,” Sam said, more jealousy than rancor in his voice. Crosetti had been born swarthy. All the sun did to him was turn him a color just this side of Negro brown.
“Hey, bein’ dark oughta do me some good,” Crosetti said. No matter what color he was, nobody would ever mistake him for a Negro, not with his nose and thick beard and arms thatched with enough black hair to make him look like a monkey.
Sam dipped his mop in the galvanized bucket and got another stretch of deck clean. He’d been a sailor for six years now, and had mastered the skill of staying busy enough to satisfy officers and even more demanding chief petty officers without really doing anything too closely resembling work. Crosetti wasn’t going at it any harder than he was; if the skinny little Italian hadn’t been born knowing how to shirk, he’d sure picked up the fundamentals in a hurry after he joined the Navy.
Carsten stared off to port. The destroyer Jarvis was frisking through the light chop maybe half a mile away, quick and graceful as a dolphin. Its wake trailed creamy behind it. The Jarvis could steam rings around the big, stolid Dakota. That was the idea: the destroyer could keep torpedo boats and submersibles away from the battlewagon. That the idea still had some holes in it was attested by the repairs just completed on the Dakota.
Crosetti looked out over the water, too. “Might as well relax,” he said to Carsten. “Nobody in the Navy’s seen hide nor hair of the Japs or the limeys since we got bushwhacked the last time. Stands to reason they’re mounting patrols to make sure we ain’t goin’ near the Philippines or Singapore, same as we’re doing here.”
“Stood to reason last time, too,” Sam answered. “Only thing is, the Japs weren’t being reasonable.”
Crosetti cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, that’s so,” he said. “You got a cockeyed way of looking at things that makes a lot of sense sometimes, you know what I’m saying?”
“Maybe,” Carsten said. “I’ve had one or two guys tell me that before, anyway. Now if there was some gal who’d tell me something like that, I’d have something. But hell, gals here, they ain’t gonna look past the raw meat.” He ran a sunburned hand down an equally sunburned arm.
“If that’s the way you think, that’s what’ll happen to you, yeah,” Crosetti said. “It’s all in the way you go after ’em, you know what I’m saying? I mean, look at me. I ain’t pretty, I ain’t rich, but I ain’t lonesome, neither, not when I’m on shore. You gotta show ’em they’re what you’re after, and you gotta make ’em think you’re what they’re after, too. All how you go about it, and that’s a fact.”
“Maybe,” Sam said again. “But the ones you really want to hook onto, they’re the ones who won’t bite for a line like that, too.”
“Who says?” Crosetti demanded indignantly. Then he paused. “Wait a minute. You’re talkin’ about gettin’ married, for God’s sake. What’s the point to even worrying about that? You’re in the Navy, Sam. No matter what kind of broad you marry, you ain’t gonna be home often enough to enjoy it.”
Carsten would have argued that, the only difficulty being that he couldn’t. So he and Crosetti talked about women for a while instead, no subject being better calculated to help pass time of a morning. Sam didn’t really know how much his bunkmate was making up and how much he’d really done, but he’d been blessed with either a hell of a good time or a hell of an imagination.
An aeroplane buzzed by. Sam looked at it anxiously: following a Japanese aeroplane had got the Dakota torpedoed. But this one bore the American eagle. It had been out looking for enemy ships. Carsten guessed it hadn’t found any. Had it sent back a message by wireless telegraph, the fleet would have changed course toward any vessels presumptuous enough to challenge the USA in these waters.
“You really think the English and the Japanese are just sitting back, waiting for us to come to them?” Sam asked Crosetti. “They could cause a lot of trouble if they took the Sandwich Islands back from us.”
“Yeah, they could, but they won’t,” Crosetti said. “When the president declared war on England, I don’t figure he waited five minutes before he sent us sailing for Pearl Harbor. We caught the damn limeys with their drawers down. They hadn’t reinforced the place yet, and they couldn’t hold it against everything we threw at ’em. But we got more men, more ships there than you can shake a stick at. They want it back, they’re gonna hafta pay one hell of a bill.”
“That’s all true,” Carsten said. “But now that we’ve got all those men there and we’ve got all those ships there, what are the limeys and the Japs going to think we’ll do with ’em? Sit there and hang on tight? Does that sound like Teddy Roosevelt to you? They’re going to figure we’re heading out toward Singapore and Manila sooner or later unless they do something about it. Even if they don’t land on Oahu, they’re going to do their damnedest to smash up the fleet, right?”
Vic Crosetti scratched at one cheek while he thought. If Sam had done anything like that, he probably would have drawn blood from his poor, sunbaked skin. After a bit, Crosetti gave him a thoughtful nod. “Makes pretty good sense, I guess. How come the only stripe you got on your sleeve is a service mark? Way you talk, you oughta be a captain, maybe an admiral in one of those damnfool hats they wear.”
Carsten laughed out loud. “All I got to say is, if they’re so hard up they make me an admiral, the USA is in a hell of a lot more trouble than the Japs are.”
The grin that stretched across Crosetti’s face was altogether impudent. “I ain’t gonna argue with you about that,” he said, whereupon Sam made as if to wallop him over the head with his mop. They both laughed. Crosetti grew serious, though, unwontedly fast. “You do talk like an officer a lot of the time, you know that?”
“Do I?” Carsten said. His fellow swabbie-at the moment, in the most literal sense of the word-nodded. Sam thought about it. “Can’t worry about chasing women all the damned time. You got to keep your eyes open. You look around, you start seeing things.”
“I see a couple of lazy lugs, is what I see,” a deep voice behind them said. Sam turned his head. There stood Hiram Kidde, gunner’s mate on the five-inch cannon Carsten helped serve. He had plenty of service stripes on his sleeve, having been in the Navy for more than twenty years. He went on, “Go ahead, try and tell me you were workin’ hard.”
“Have a heart, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten said, using Kidde’s universal nickname. “Can’t expect us to be busy every second.”
“Who says I can’t?” Kidde retorted. He was broad-faced and stocky, thick through the middle but not soft. He looked like a man you wouldn’t want to run into in a barroom brawl. From what Sam had seen of him in action, his looks weren’t deceiving.
“Petty officers never remember what it was like when they were seamen,” Crosetti said. He looked sly. “’Course, it is kind of hard remembering back to when Buchanan was president.”
Kidde glared at him. Then he shrugged. “Hell, I figured you were gonna say, when Jefferson was president.” Shaking his head, he walked on.