“Plane down.”
“He’s bought it.”
“Three planes. Air Force.”
“Get off my back.”
“I think it’s three. That’s what James yelled at Dane.”
“I’d like to yell at Dane. Chum, if I ever yell at Dane.”
“You’ll yell, ‘yessir Chief, yep’, that’s what you’ll yell.”
“How can three planes go down at once?”
“Out of the way, there. Quit tryin’ to explain the Air Force.”
Engines rumble onto the line, dark smoke like a period to an idle sentence pops from the stack and into the wind. The engines settle, the smoke disappears. Yeoman Howard tumbles down the gangway in a splayed run, bumps against the wind like a comma, his watch cap battening his ears, the wind at his face while he crosses to Abner where yeoman Wilson dashes along the main deck to the gangway.
“You, too.”
“Six guys out there.”
“Give me that.” Wilson grabs sailing lists and mail, runs to drop them at the Base. Aboard Adrian, seamen single up on the mooring while Dane stands on the wing with the broad certainty of a tugboat, bellowing. About the decks Conally secures gear, rages. The gangway is shoved clattering toward Howard, to be pulled by him past the lip of the pier. He swings aboard forward of the breast line, turns to see Wilson dashing from the Base in jerky bursts against the wind. On the bridge the high-tuned crackle of the radio, faint in the wind, blanks as James sends the departure message, “Various courses and speeds, maneuvering to assist”; the lines let go, tended by Glass, who leaps aboard as if propelled by the wind; and Adrian, on cold engines, moves slowly into the stream to gather speed evenly as combustion raises engine heat.
“Nine minutes. Log it. Zero nine fifty-two.”
“What took so long?”
“The cook was talkin’.”
Maligned Lamp, appearing on the main deck, watches Adrian’s stern slide past the dark, ugly blot of Hester C. He shakes his head, retreats below to secure the galley as Abner noses from the pier. Decks of both ships seem momentarily peopled with men making up and securing lines. In the channel, Adrian brushes at the heavy chop, presses, vibrates from engines, from shaft; a vibration sensed more than felt, like a football lineman poised instantly, a split second ahead of the count, delicately timed to avoid a penalty. Men off watch, hesitant with the anxiety of a job that offers no current action, drift to the messdeck to wait for news brought by radioman James who drops galleyward like a pale Lord, his coffee mug dangling from one thin hand like a small and forgotten chalice.
“The word. What’s the word?”
Amon, headed forward with coffee for the bridge gang, pauses, listens. Three trainers are out of fuel and down.
“That kind without propellers,” said McClean. “I don’t trust nothing without a propeller.”
Amon pauses, then begins his climb to the main deck. “Jets would splash hard in this weather.”
“In any weather.”
“Headed up to Bangor?”
“Along that line.”
“We won’t find ’em.”
“We’ll take a turn on trying.”
On the occasion of his first visit to water above the shelf, Brace stood as stalwart as a young hound. He listened, seemed thoughtful, then went above to the main deck where he leaned on the rail as if fixed by romance as strong as McClean’s faith in things that churned. The luminous and beckoning engine room, the lost Mona, the harsh words and rage of Dane were doubtless lost in the gray mist and blown spray rising before the lighthouse at Portland Head which for more than a century and a half had stood watch over curious sights and cold survivors of the sea.
Howard, who in lucid moments swore to Lamp that all prayer was directed to the ridiculous, approached.
“You’ll love it in a little while,” he said to Brace. “Wait until we clear the head.”
Brace turned with the vacuous look of total absorption in great matters. He seemed surprised by the intrusion of another consciousness into his arena of sensation. His watch cap fell to his eyebrows, from beneath which his eyes were dark brown and lightly glazed with either romance or memory, or possibly wind. He steadied himself, leaned against the rail, both hands forward and gripping easily like a magician or a strong man who was singly holding together the ancient collection of parts that was the cutter Adrian.
“I like it,” he said. “I’ve been thinking how much this don’t look like Illinois.”
Howard, who in a dim way may have sensed a bond between himself and Brace in some near past, paused, then resumed his task.
“You learn the helm, then practice steaming. Twelve-to-two on the bridge, two-to-four in the engine room.” Then, a man pressed into confidences by the rare occasion of privacy, he said, “It isn’t like Ohio, either.”
“You’re from Ohio?”
“Did you think you invented it?”
The glaze over Brace’s eyes disappeared in favor of intuition and recognition. He pushed himself upright from the rail, looked at Howard.
“I guess I thought I did. Does everybody?”
“I don’t know, but probably I’ll think about it.”
Beyond the Portland Head, the sea rises unfettered in its crush toward the land. Above the widely moving swell which lifts and drops vessels as surely as the faith asked of a philosophic premise, runs a chopping swell that is a creature born of wind. The confused sea delivers shocks against the hulls of the largest ships, and smaller vessels nose the wind like determined and uneasy immigrants to a sometimes violent land. The wind, flavored with salt, picks spray from the bow, to wash decks, house, rails, the unused and unthought-of guns; wind rising from the tops of waves to swirl spume like a dust devil awhirl across a plain. Salt accumulates in the corners of men’s mouths, to be licked away, causing a momentary taste of the sea’s huge proclamation. The wind speaks in the open tones of unmuted instruments. Gales do not howl or scream or screech, as does a storm. They moan, weep, play the blues, are lubricating and liquid over lonesome, tricky waters.
“It’s a tough rap,” Glass said to Brace. “Some say to puke and get it over with. Others say that if you once start pukin’ you can’t get stopped.”
Brace, making a choice, or more likely in the firm grasp of his body’s knowledge, spilled breakfast to leeward in illustration of young wisdom. Then he climbed weak-kneed and pale to the bridge and began to discover some of the things that a helm will not accomplish.
After the first urge of action and compassion, Adrian’s crew settled into the routine of a steaming watch that pointed the vessel toward unknown positions and easily guessed agony. In September in Maine, and with a little fat, a lot of thrashing, and all the luck left to him, a man can sometimes live for twenty minutes in the water. If the crews of the planes had not made it to their life rafts, their books were already closed. If they were on the rafts, jacketed and booted, their paltry scrap of canvas clutched over them against the wind, hypothermia might not spin them from the edge of their circle for fifteen or twenty hours.