"Big deal," said Jim.
"Yeah I know."
Then we heard the faint clacking of a solenoid and another big steel door began rolling upward in the brick building. A lift truck whispered out, holding crates aloft on its pincers. A man in a yellow helmet was driving it. The crates said Ocean Spray on the sides.
"This is so exciting I can't stand it."
"Let's swing by close, then go into town and get some bait."
We crawled right up to the big pier and watched the few figures moving back and forth along it, We were close enough for me to glimpse a grisly relic strung up alongside the Cyclone fence that marked the terminus of the big dock. I hadn't noticed it on my previous visit; It was a codfish head, cut off right behind the gills, suspended on the fence with a stevedore's hook. It was as big as a bushel basket. Flies swarmed over it.
"Will you look at that. Must've been a five-footer," said Jim. "Why do you suppose they've done that with it?"
He shrugged and spun the wheel lazily in his big hands. He eased the sticks forward and the engine whined.
"Dunno. Trophy maybe. Or else it's a warning to stay out of the yards when the gate's shut."
It was a grim reminder, and I thought of Angel's face staring at me from the oven rack. We picked up speed and soon landed at the main marina, where I bought Jim an early supper (apparently the entire trip, not just the fuel, was to be courtesy of Yours Truly) and we fueled the Whimsea's tanks and bought an ample supply of quahogs. These would be affixed to heavy hooks and dragged slowly (or simply rested) on the mollusk beds around the James Longstreet, a tempting treat for tautogs and other fish. While we waited for dusk prepared the bait, shucking it from the shells and cutting it into convenient-sized nuggets. We sucked down some of the St. Pauli Girl beer we'd brought along and listened to the radio. I was hunkered down in the cockpit out of the breeze so I removed my shirt, soaking up the last precious bit of sun,-even though it was thoroughly filtered by clouds. Jim pored over the charts of Cape Cod Bay.
Dusk came, and we left Plymouth Harbor.
We rolled out past the big break water again. A line of herring gulls stood on it, beaks to the breeze, most with one foot tucked up in their tummy feathers. They said skirl, skirl, skirl…
When we got to the James Longstreet the sun had been down forty minutes. It was growing dark fast. The old wreck looked more ominous than I'd ever seen it. Its bridge looked like a giant hunk of brown Swiss cheese. The hull was partially collapsed in the middle, where a lot of the steel reinforcing rods were visible, entwined in the concrete hull. The fly-boys from Otis were pretty good shots, I guessed. They'd nailed the old Liberty Ship right in the belly. In fact the midsection of the old hull was so full of holes and cave-ins that occasionally you could see clear through it to the dark bluish purple of the water on the other side. We crept in close; I DeGroot had his eyes glued to the fathometer fastened above the helm. It was a black box with a dial in the center, marked in feet and meters. A blip showed on the dial at zero feet, which was where the sound signal was emitted from Whimsea via a metal sounder in her hull. Another blip was appearing on the dial opposite the sixteen-foot mark. Whimsea rolled and lurched forward; the wreck loomed bigger and bigger. Suddenly the blip jumped back and forth, and settled up toward its mate at the zero end of the dial.
"Shit!" said Jim as he reversed and throttled up. But it was too late. There was a thump and a shudder, and then a slow heavy scraping sound. Whimsea stopped. It was falling tide; if we didn't get moving soon, we'd be there for the duration. Jim and I ran a flashlight all around the inside of the hull. Nothing. That was good at least. We had been going slow enough and reacted soon enough so that the boat was sill in one piece.
"What was it?"
"Dunno. But it was dumb to come in here. Why the hell do I listen to you? I suppose this place is full of shoals and rocks that aren't marked. Maybe they're big hunks of the James Longstreet, who knows? Of course it's not supposed to matter because we're not supposed to be here. And if the CG has to haul us off, we're going to look mighty silly and get fined to boot."
He gunned the engine once more, making the needle on the tachometer approach the red line. There was a grinding shudder as the propwash worked the boat loose. We shot backward and Jim cut the twin engines back.
"I'm not going back in there. It's a labyrinth of obstacles around that hulk."
So I talked him into letting me use the life raft. We inflated it with the compressed air bottle and soon I was in it, bobbing and rowing along to the old Liberty Ship. I got there quickly; the little rubber boat flipped right along over the nasty stuff that projected up from the sandy bottom. It wasn't hard to figure out how the Penelope tore a gash in her steel skin. Up close, the topsides of the ship loomed over me like a three-story apartment building. I paddled along toward the series of big holes in her beam. I looked back at the Whimsea. Jim hadn't set the hook, but was purring along in a semi-stall two hundred yards off the Longstreet's port quarter. The boat's shape was faint, and growing fainter in the darkness and light fog. I could see her running lights clearly, that was about all.
I reached out and touched the Longstreet. I felt the rough concrete with my hand, and grabbed a projecting steel reinforcing rod and pulled the rubber raft along to the first big hole. The seawater poured through this, and I glided into the bowels of the ship. It was like being in an old wrecked cathedral. The superstructure of the bridge towered above me, black and ragged against the dark purple sky. All the portholes were devoid of glass, which had no doubt been blown out long ago by the concussion of. the bombs. It was like a giant corpse with all its eyes poked out. Generally, it wasn't inviting, and the cold and the dark, and the sound of sloshing water, did not improve it either.
I took the waterproof spotlight and swept it around. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to hide anything your heart desired inside the old hulk of the Longstreet. There were bent railings, blown-away doors, exposed corridors, old hatchways, smashed and twisted bulkheads, Ventilating ducts, stanchions, wells, supporting members-it was a maze of pulverized concrete and twisted, rusty steel. I shined a flashbeam all around me. I saw nothing out of place though. No crates, plastic-wrapped bundles, or anything else that caught my eye. I heard two quick beeps. Jim was telling me he wanted to split. I rowed out through the big hole and started back to the Whimsea, which was now almost totally invisible. The chop had picked up, and the tiny raft pitched around uncomfortably. I heard another boat and saw a set of running lights sweep past out behind the Whimsea.
"See anything?" asked Jim as he helped me back aboard. I told him, and he told me another boat had been snaking around in the prohibited zone.
"Maybe they thought Whimsea was in trouble."
"They didn't say anything. Just cut around me in a wide circle and left. Blue hull, white topsides. About our size. Let's get on back while we can still see our hands in front of our faces."
We slid and rolled a bit all the way back to Plymouth in the following sea. We used the compass and RDF a lot because of the poor visibility. We passed the outer light at the end of the breakwater and turned to port when we approached Bug Light in the harbor's middle, then made our way slowly back toward the marina. During my visit to the target ship, Jim had caught a tautog, which we cleaned and wrapped in foil. We got a slip at the yacht club's pier; at this time of year there were plenty available. We had a nightcap and turned in. It was one-thirty in the morning. After ten minutes DeGroot was sawing logs. I lay in the upper bunk, my head inches from the wooden cabin top. I heard the very faint patter of light drizzle begin on the roof. I tossed and turned. I rolled on my side and looked down at Jim. He was sleeping like a baby, that big Dutch head immobile on the foam rubber pillow covered with a canvas print of code flags and buoys.