“Easy there, take it easy.”
With no time to brood over his summary relief from a job he detested in the first place, Howard helped swing the stretcher aboard. The flyer was pale, vaguely blue, as though a spectral self rose from beneath his flesh. Wet clothing bunched on either side of the compressing straps, and drops squeezed from the fabric to run across a sheen of deep water that lay like a well of cold in his waterproofs. His legs were held by the straps, but his feet were free to flop with the movement of the ship. He was without control of his lower body, and his puffy eyelids were red with cold and salt. His lips trembled, opened, closed, opened, smiled. The man seemed amused at the cleverness of a satisfactory speech, just delivered from tombs and cast wisely before an ignorant but temporarily interested world. His short hair glistened with water, his fingers clutched.
At the head of the stretcher, and with McClean at the foot, Howard staggered toward the after hatch and the ladder to the messdeck. Dane cursed from his position alongside the ship. Men grunted. The small boat turned away from Adrian and headed back for the raft, where the second pilot lay sloshing in unbailed water. Chief Snow flitted from fiddley to passageway to the ladder leading to the messdeck.
At the head of the ladder Howard turned, took a new grip on the stretcher and braced himself against a bulkhead to regain balance before making a backward descent. He glanced through the hatch leading to the fiddley, that fiddley where Howard had recently been shocked because he thought he had seen Jensen.
Now Amon stood on the grates, staring downward into the engine room; rigid, fixed, Amon’s open mouth trying to search for any sound as he stood frozen in wide-eyed horror.
Chapter 11
In the red-inked business of mercy at sea, a corpse represents failure. Cold eyes stare or are backwardly rolled, white. That flat and toneless stare causes among seamen a pinching sense of harm, of futility. The pinch is as sharp as ice behind your ear. Men feel nebulous guilt and small grief. Corpses are partners to huge but repressed fear. The fear is diamond-backed and sharklike. Corpses are rolled in canvas and stored on the fantail. They are bulky and awkward to wrap. Stiff limbs are rigidly fixed in a hundred antic shapes, the slate gone blank in its arrested scamper, the world dissolved into time that will forgive the most harlequin mimicry. Most fresh corpses exude some blood, and you can predict that the blood will be watery and weak. Stale corpses gush with other secrets. Mouths are always open and newly washed. Jaws dangle, surrounding raw tongues with a small circus ring of teeth. The jaws are not artless. They have spoken final words from a great gulf emptied of all but one fact.
Men carry a corpse to the fantail. They secure it, either by rough handling and slightly restrained violence, or else with a tenderness that its owner could hardly have been lucky enough to know when the thing was still alive. Then the men turn back to the messdeck, or stand in the hatch of the galley, or droop on the fiddley to stare, themselves corpselike, into any source of heat. If the corpse was once male, as the great majority are, conversation will eventually open on the messdeck with a giggle. A man will recall a shore-going episode. The talk will be of women.
“Bad luck,” whispered Lamp. “We don’t get more than three or four deaders a year, and now we’re starting off with one.”
“Keep it shut, cook. That guy is coming around.”
Men avoid the fantail, and, if pressed in that direction by some duty, move quickly, with precision, and with short glances at the humped canvas. Every crew has at least one man who is fascinated, sometimes perverse; or with guilt and fear mixtured in such quantity that he is brought compelled to the boat deck to stand and stare aft, muttering, sometimes drooling.
“Snow had more experience. I maybe wouldn’t have saved the guy.” Yeoman Howard spoke to Abner’s yeoman Wilson when Adrian once more swung against the pier. The rescued flyer was by then removed to an ambulance; the dead man lay enclosed in the back of a paddy wagon, his arms still grasping after his last enemy. On Adrian’s fantail, Racca, obsessed, leaned on a hose as he flushed the deck. The straight-stream nozzle rose against his braced arms like a living creature struggling to snap away—a creature that could become high-bending, a tall snake arching and cracking and wielding sharp and deadly blows.
“We got the guy talking,” Howard said. “His plane dunked first. That meant that the others were somewhere up ahead.”
“We figured we might go back out,” Wilson said.
“We found another raft. Upside down.” Howard seemed to be still looking, staring, absorbing the fact of a buoyant, bouncing, yellow raft, high-riding with futility. “Those were brand new planes. Fitted out with the wrong fuel gauges.”
“So who do you kill?” Wilson’s huge, chalky face seemed dispassionate as he gazed across the pier at Racca who directed the shattering water that knocked salt and the invisible traces of the dead from the decks. Then Wilson seemed to remember whom he was with. He looked at Howard, and he was helpless, angry, momentarily passionate. “So who do you kill, who?” He dropped his eyes, muttered. “I don’t know why we put up with this, don’t know.”
“It was a carnival,” Howard told him. “Amon was like a fruit salad. The new guy was ready to fight. Snow was working on that man in a way that I’d have been embarrassed.”
“Snow talks funny. That guy talks funny.” Wilson was uncomfortable. He looked as though he feared that a deadly but familiar beast was about to come woofing from a cave.
“I don’t mean that,” Howard said. “There wasn’t anything like that.”
“Planes with bad fuel gauges.”
“I was rubbing the guy’s legs,” Howard said. “Snow was putting on hot packs and rubbing his back and belly and crotch arteries.”
“I guess you got to.”
“That Snow just kept whispering.” Howard spoke in a low voice, as though he still heard Snow’s whispers, still stood beside Snow as they worked on the flyer; still attempted to sense meaning from Snow’s broken, husky whispering, and the small, busy hands that moved with the certainty of a pump as the flyer’s circulation was restored. “He just kept whispering, ‘torpedoes, torpedoes, torpedoes,’ just over and over.”
“He got blowed up once. He was just scared.”
“No,” Howard said. “I don’t understand everything I saw, but Snow wasn’t scared.”
“He only loves torpedoes.”
Howard, almost wordless before the suspicious fact of near revelation, seemed resigned to the uselessness of speech. “I’m glad I missed that war.”
“Stick around for the next one, chum. We can’t have you being glad.” Wilson paused, thought about it. “In the next one,” he said, “try not to trust anybody’s gauge but your own.”
Across the pier, on Adrian’s boat deck, Conally appeared from behind the house. He was followed by Brace. Conally began unfolding the boat cover while Brace stood like a lank shadow as he waited to accept instruction on cleaning and securing and making ready the boat.
“Your boy looks okay now,” Wilson said.
“No, he doesn’t. You’d have to know him.” Howard flipped vaguely through the small package of mail collected for him by Wilson. He looked at Wilson, as if they were about to share a secret, and then changed his mind. “He’s kind of jammed up, is all.” Then Howard changed his mind again. “We’ve got a mess going with that kid. It started just after we picked up the first guy.”
The small boat, lap straked and carrying on its bows the placid information that it belonged to cutter Adrian, had seemed like a minor revolutionary battering at the gates of the gray, patriarchal sea. The boat was a small white smear on the water, and it seemed as uncertainly fixed as was Brace on his first search and rescue.