“You see, how it is absorbed almost at once. Now a little more, so, and a new dressing.” He turned to Wharton.
“I want this done three times a day. Keep the aloe vera leaf in a refrigerator or an icebox here in the hotel. Take his temperature each time you dress the wound. If he runs more than one degree above normal, call me. If he feels nauseous call me.” He went to the sink in the room and washed his hands.
“For you, patient,” he said to Booth, “no alcohol. Lots of rest. No anesthetic like you used yesterday. It could raise your blood pressure, make your other ear drop off.” He left the room followed by the two Chiefs.
“Let’s have a little more of that excellent coffee in your hotel dining room, and then I must go back to the ship and lecture Navy officers on the treatment of sailors who must be considered to be human beings and not enlisted men.” Seated at the table he grinned at Wharton.
“A creditable job of suturing, my friend. What I taught you must have taken hold. But if I have to criticize, and I must, the suturing at the top of the ear is not as neat as at the bottom part of the area. You didn’t have to go as far away from the cut at the top to find tissue strong enough to hold the sutures.”
“That part was done after he had seen Booth, ah, sir, sucking on his girl’s breast,” Flanagan said.
Dr. Silver shook his head. “You have to learn never to let all your emotions show. You can show sympathy, empathy, joy. Never distress or sorrow. It upsets the patients. Worse, it upsets their relatives. Patients should never have relatives. It is unfortunate they do. They get in the way of the healing process. They expect miracles. The patient hopes for a miracle but he’ll settle for less. I’ll come back tomorrow at lunch, my friends.” He left, walking with swift strides on his short legs.
“He’s one hell of a man,” Wharton said. “He fights with the Navy brass all the time. He knows more about medicine than all of the doctors on the tender put together, and he lets them know that every day. Those who listen to him learn. Those who don’t listen don’t get over it for a long while. He works a lot at the Australian military hospital on his off time. Sort of a consultant. Most of the medical people in the hospital think he’s God Himself.”
“Well,” Flanagan said, “he’s the right race, isn’t he?”
CHAPTER 12
The crew of the Eelfish piled their sea bags and ditty bags around the forward deck gun and fell into line for quarters on the afterdeck. Some of them looked refreshed and fit after the two weeks of rest and relaxation. Others looked totally exhausted.
“Looks like the relief crew is running behind schedule,” John LaMark said to Jim Rice. “They ain’t painted the topside yet.”
At quarters John Olsen gave the crew the bad news. They would have to do their own refit because they had to wait for the torpedo-tube outer door. After the groans had died down Olsen pointed out that they’d have at least three more weeks of liberty.
“Thing that pisses me off,” Fred Nelson said to Chief Flanagan two weeks after the crew had returned to the ship, “the thing that really pisses me off is that they keep us outboard of all the submarines alongside. Every damned thing I’ve had to bring aboard I’ve had to carry it over the decks of five other boats. The least the bastards coulda done is to leave us inboard.”
“Two ways to do things,” Flanagan said. “The right way and the Navy way. You know that. When you going to be through painting your room?”
“Tomorrow. We finished scrubbin’ it down today. We’ll be done by fifteen hundred tomorrow. All the rest of the work is done. We reshimmed the rollers in the tubes and on the skids. We worked on damned near everything that could be worked on in that fuckin’ room. People back there been workin’ their asses off. Me too.”
Flanagan took a small notebook out of his shirt pocket and made some notes on a page. “Same thing all over the ship. There ain’t a piece of gear on this ship that hasn’t been taken apart, cleaned, adjusted, and put back together again. Everything is working so good you’d think we just came out of the Navy Yard.”
“It’s workin’ better than it would if we’d been in the Yard,” Nelson growled. “What’s the word on the new door?”
“Last word I get is that it’s in Pearl now and it’ll be here a week from Friday. That’s in ten days. We can’t go in the dry dock on Saturday so we’ll probably go in on the following Monday. Then they got to hang the door. They didn’t send any hinge pins for the door, but the shop on the tender had the machine shop make up some bronze pins from blueprints. I figure they’ll fuck around with them for half a day, honing them to fit.
“The Squadron wanted ship’s company to scrape and wire-brush the bottom and paint it, but the Old Man screamed so loud that the relief crew is going to do that. That will probably take three, four days. Once that’s done we’ll go alongside and take fish aboard and stores and get the hell out of here.”
“I ain’t mindin’ it too much here,” Nelson said. “Found me a woman who likes big noses.”
“She must like the hell out of you!” Flanagan said.
“She even wanted to cut my toenails,” Nelson said with a grin. “How about you, you make out?”
“Chief on the tender wanted to fix me up with his girl’s cousin, but I backed off. Every time I look at a broad I start thinking about the one I was married to once, and it turns me off.”
“Didn’t know you were ever married,” Nelson said.
“Did it when I was second class. Made first class and all she did was bitch about why didn’t I make Chief, why didn’t I try for Warrant. Spent so much money that I was working as a bartender when I had the liberty so I could pay the bills.
“We went out to sea for a month on maneuvers, and when I got back I found that she’d taken about half of the furniture and moved in with some damned civilian. Then she ran up about fifteen hundred clams worth of bills in Sears and Sawbucks. Took me two years to get that paid off.”
“Where was that?” Nelson said.
“Key West,” Flanagan said.
“She marry the civilian?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Flanagan said. “All’s I know is he paid for her divorce.” He studied his notebook and then put it back in his pocket. “Old Man’s due aboard. I got to see him.”
Nelson watched Flanagan’s slope-shouldered figure walk up the length of the deck, thinking that he had learned more about his Chief of the Boat in the last ten minutes than he had known in the two years they had served together.
Eelfish came out of the dry dock and was moved directly to the tender to an inboard position. The torpedo loading hatches were opened, and in the two torpedo rooms the men were preparing to take aboard their torpedoes. On deck Chief Flanagan and two seamen were greasing the loading skids down which the torpedoes would be slid. Captain Brannon walked up and stood watching the preparations.
“We put the finals on the fish ourselves,” Flanagan said to Mike Brannon. “Did that yesterday, up in the shop. I stopped liberty for all hands in both rooms until we get the fish aboard and stowed. Cook told me he’s taking stores aboard tomorrow, and I want all hands available for that.”
Brannon felt a shadow block out the sunshine. He looked upward and saw a torpedo hanging from the crane right over his head. He moved hastily to one side and then went over to the tender and out on the dock where John Olsen was waiting for him with Admiral Christie’s car and driver.