“Why the engine room?”
“Snow.”
“He’s the guy who smacked you.”
Brace, having wrestled deeply with philosophic problems while painting the mast, did not realize that his solution was old and unmentionable news. He began a grave summation. “He was tryin’ to tell me what was important.”
“You should be a Philadelphia lawyer, kid.”
“…not much is… important. I can hold out for a while.”
“We get another steward, then maybe you’re off the pick.”
Chagrined, Lamp made the best of a bad case. He turned hotly from the insoluble problem of Amon, to the close and burning problem of personal insult. When Brace’s name disappeared from the watch list, Lamp muttered to Howard about plots. When Dane told Lamp that Brace was to be his new helper, Lamp affected catatonia of his own. His eyes blinked, his lower lip quivered—and, when Dane went back abovedecks, and the constrained landscape of the messdeck seemed unlikely to launch tigers or chief bosuns, Lamp bustled to the ship’s office and threatened in outspoken terms about a transfer. His face flushed, his hips moved in humorous and slightly lewd wiggles of agitation. His honest despair combined with his dishonest threats and he was like pink pie filling oozing through a crust of sorrow.
“Cutter Able needs a cook,” said Howard. “Cutter Able always needs a cook.”
“Don’t smart mouth, sonny.”
“And a crew. And a captain.”
“I can go to any ship in this district.”
“The lightship needs a cook. Easy duty. Ride on those mushroom anchors all year. A lot of vomit, a little soup. Gets so you can’t tell the difference.”
“You’re worse than Glass. Glass is only evil, but you—you…”
Lamp’s revenge was silence. It was like Quaker revenge, or it was oriental, and it carried, naturally, more power than any Protestant dialectic. It was the righteous silence of predestination flogged by ill omen. Or, perhaps, it was the silence of the defeated general, the politician made ludicrous, the embezzling banker caught rifling his mortgages and his plans to seduce widows in advance of foreclosure. Lamp huffed and he puffed, and seemed swollen with air in his attempt to suppress words; like he had gulped a huge wind that he judiciously withheld until the proper moment to blow down the house of cards that life had dealt. Instead of nagging Brace, he gave curt commands about business. Brusque orders made Brace trot, but the quality of Lamp’s cooking improved. The lost Amon no longer seemed to chatter quite so close to Lamp’s ear.
“He won’t be able to hold out,” Glass said.
“I doubt it,” Howard agreed. “He wants the engine room pretty bad, but nobody could put up with that.”
“I mean Lamp. I know that big ox. Once he starts to talking it’s all over.”
As if to prove Glass correct—and suddenly—one morning it was all over. Howard returned from a mail run to the Base in company with yeoman Wilson. Howard heard a voice as he descended the ladder, and the voice was like a heavy-shanked memory of hours and days and weeks and months of gossip, idiocy and small wisdom. Words spilled, flooded, took roundhouse swings at silence. Lamp was telling Brace about riots and low acts in Hong Kong. Howard grinned, chuckled with relief, and headed for the office not yet knowing what Adrian lay athwart that ghastly October.
Chapter 13
Mist that carried its own gray chill blanketed October as it covered the lengthening nights, and shrouded and cloaked the mornings. From across the harbor in Portland, a faint glow occasionally reached toward the man on watch as he stared into the cold blanket of night, and the glow which should have seemed warm, was like phosphorescence. The mist played at becoming fog, made atmospheric transubstantiations, rolled in the center of the harbor even when the land was for a few hours free. The fog looked like a band of dark gray gauze, and it hovered low over the channel so that men on watch during the day occasionally saw a masthead floating above the fog, disconnected, as if it had been freed by an axe of medieval justice. The mist swelled from the mudflats at dusk and moved upward about the broken Hester C. The hulk sat in a cauldron of mist. The mist seemed trying to grasp and lift the thing to a steady keel and to a spirit’s float through the wet gray muff of air that pocketed ships and warmed only by contrast, as men hastened their chores on deck and ducked back through hurriedly undogged hatches into the warmth of the ship. As cold daylight gave over to colder night, the mist turned into ice fog so that about the decks slicks appeared in patches. Ladders from decks to bridges were rimed with ice by their separated exposure. The ice lay in the cleats of ladders like an extra coat of paint. In other pockets of cold the mist accumulated, formed drops larger than tears but smaller than eyes. The drops froze into frosty white pebbles like seed pearls and men flicked them from the rails and chains with forefingers, as though they were shooting a game of marbles with the fog.
Cutter Abner received a proceed-and-assist to aid the venerable fishing vessel Enoch, and Abner’s stern melted whitely into the gray, liquefying mist like an old pilgrim accustomed to his treacherous path. Adrian received a proceed-and-assist on Tinker Bell and found it drifting in the veil of mist with sails still set and stiff with ice, as the mist, unimpressed by the frivolity of names, clustered in a nimbus about Tinker Bell’s running lights while an hysterical yachtsman, his hysterical crew, and his voluptuous and also hysterical companion yelled, hollered, bawled, and pledged fealty, ever after, to the sanctuary of Florida’s waters.
Cutter Abner received a proceed-and-assist to carry a mechanic and repair parts to the coastal tanker Asteroid. Abner delivered, and then stood by during the hours of repair. Abner hovered on the gray sea in a light swell, forefoot meeting the rise of water with the deliberately stepping piety of an old desert father among dunes. Adrian received a proceed-and-assist on fishing vessel Ephraim, then, lengthening the tow while men stood at the rail with a stretcher, picked up a heart attack victim from Orrs Island as Adrian returned to harbor. The heart attack man was old, pale and afraid. His face was gaunt and exact and unconfused with his fear. Beneath the red lights of the wardroom, his face was as certain as an icon—although he gasped. Howard did not know what to do for him, and Snow did not know, either; but, when the heart attack man was taken away in an ambulance at the South Portland pier, he was still alive. Howard and Snow breathed more fully, resolved to find out if somewhere there was a book that discussed hearts; and the rest of Adrian’s crew breathed more fully as well.
“It’s a good sign,” Lamp confided to Howard and Racca. “The signs are all mixed, but that’s a good one.”
“You’re mixed, cook,” said Racca. “The only signs I believe in are beer signs.”
“It’s the weather,” Lamp said to Howard. Lamp tossed his head in a sniffy way that dismissed the rude Racca. “All this fog. There should be more wind. By now it should be howlin’.”
“We ought to be getting more wind,” Howard admitted, “but what’s the big deal about fog?”
“I ain’t a kid,” said Lamp. “I knew a guy did duty on the Bear.”