“Sure you did, an’ I knew Big Foot Tilton.”
“Those old-timers knew fog. There’s bad things happen in fog.”
“There’s bad things happen in bars.”
“Puget Sound weather.”
“I never been west of Peoria,” Racca said with malicious contentment. “I don’t even believe in the Mississippi River.”
Cutter Aaron of Boston laid line aboard the fishing vessel Lydia. Cutter Amos of Portsmouth caught a double, towing the Patty L. and the Joy. The lousy cutter Able, of New Bedford, searched for two boys in a dory that had been carried away by the tide. Able sent breathless, flank speed reports for sixty hours until one of the boys was picked up by trawler Victoria twenty miles from Able’s search pattern.
“Kids. A kid.”
“I hate that box.”
“You hate that box? I’m from Massachusetts where we really know how to hate.” Glass, that easy admirer of grand theft, stood in white-faced and speechless helplessness.
In the third week of October, the mist seemed to exert itself in a great piling-on that saturated the air, so that on deck men felt drops and splatters on faces and jackets as the mist spilled in pats of nearly frozen water. The decks were wicked with thin ice. The very sky demonstrated that only so much water could be held in solution with air, and the drops were not rain, but spilled and overflowing mist.
Adrian, groping dead slow among the islands, searched for the overdue lobsterman Hattie, reversed course and moved on whistle, bell, and local knowledge to check a radar contact a hundred yards astern. The contact was a gallon can that had once held dry milk. As Adrian put back around, yells and a thin whistle sounded from the fog where Hattie rode the pick at two hundred yards and made no image on the radar. The fog muffled the radar, and even the islands did not always give a hard contact. The radar was capricious, unworthy, and men stood in the bow and peered into fog and listened above the slow-breaking whisper of the bow wave. At night in fog, a man could not see beyond his eyelids. Conally swore that he was growing a third ear.
“Like the belly of a whale.”
“Blacked out like a raided cathouse.”
“It’d confuse a cat, boys. Even a ship’s cat.”
“Ship’s cat is just an ordinary cat, cook. They ain’t no cat comes with a label saying this’n is a ship’s cat.”
“You don’t know cats,” Lamp said. “If you don’t know a blamed thing about cats, what do you know?”
“Cook’s right,” said Fallon. “I saw a ordinary cat jump off a fishing boat once. Went aboard for the smell, the boat got underway. Cat committed suicide.”
Adrian groped through October. Men began to swear that even wind was better than the continuing, unnatural fog. Brace was as obscure as the weather. Like Amon before him, Brace spent long days in the midst of the crew’s off-time banter. Like Amon, he walked through that center but found himself always on the periphery. He was segregated by his task, remote, isolated from ship’s routine by the dull round of his soap-slopping job. His work began at 0500 and was constant and dull and filled with Lamp’s chatter and with messdeck gossip until 1900. He lived through a banal succession of days in which he heard about fog and mist, but saw it only when he took coffee to the bridge, or when he dumped garbage and washed the cans. He alternated cook’s watch with Lamp, who was religious about supplying watchstander coffee and sandwiches at sea. Brace bore the tedium, and he always looked a bit soapy, a trifle too well washed. He was moody, subject to carping complaint and short-tempered whimsy. Lamp alternately rode him and appeased him.
“It’s tough for a white man,” Lamp told Howard. “But he could be doing lots worse.”
Howard, who was vaguely democratic, wondered to Lamp if it was not tough for a dark man.
“It’s a chicken job,” Lamp said. “Most white guys have big ideas.”
“Amon didn’t?” Howard asked, then wished he had not.
“Amon had ideas. He just had different ideas.” Lamp seemed momentarily withdrawn into private and raw pain. Then he shrugged to dissolve the past. In sporadic, interrupted conversation during the two days it took to find and tow Hattie, Lamp stated his theory of origins. The liberal Howard nodded his head, thought of immense matters, and did not listen at all. Howard was watching Conally, was testing himself, and was wondering if both of them were not mad.
The Indian Conally came from bow watch on the first day of the search for Hattie. He drew coffee, sat on the messdeck, and he looked like an upright burial. Conally seemed to be listening to the faraway whistle of Adrian that echoed from forward like a vibration instead of a sound. Dane tromped to the messdeck. Adrian rode on an even keel over flat, inshore water as it poked about the islands while the bridge gang peered into the radar and mistrusted the rapid, busy clicking of the fathometer. Under conditions of smooth water, ship’s work could be done. Dane tipped his chief’s hat to the back of his head. He flipped mist from his upper lip with the back of his hand, rubbed at his nose with passing enjoyment. Dane stood as squat and certain as a hymn book. Conally sat like a parable.
“You sprain another ankle?”
“No.”
“Messin’ with that Peak’s Island girl?”
“I ain’t caught nothin’.” Conally’s black hair was double-colored with black. Where his watch cap had covered, the dry and stringy hair seemed nearly dull. Where the watch cap did not cover, his hair was glossy and slick with mist.
“If you ain’t got a busted leg, and you ain’t got a dose, then why are you loafin’?” Dane was a man for whom all things were certain. He no more expected moodiness from Conally than he expected a hippopotamus to come strolling across the messdeck.
Conally sipped at the coffee instead of slurping. He did not stand, and he did not move, and he did not give the impression that he was in any hurry to do either. “Caught a chill.” The lie was so clumsy that even Conally did not buy it. Adrian’s whistle vibrated from forward. Conally flushed, high color on his cheeks that denied the rest of his dark face which seemed washed and sick and untribal.
“Old ladies get chills. Poodles get chills.”
“I ain’t a poodle, and not an old lady. Give it a rest.”
Dane, stunned by rebellion from his star bosun, gasped like he had been hit with a dead fish. Then his eyes became squinty and he recognized that Conally really did look unnerved. Dane seemed ready to sit beside Conally, question him. It was not Dane’s nature. Dane grumped. He looked like a troll. “When you get done enjoyin’ your chill, set the gang to cleanup forward.” Dane turned, began to move away, turned back. “I’ll be on the bridge.” It was large sympathy cloaked in small words, and it was the best that Dane could do.
Four hours later Howard returned from bow watch to the messdeck, drew coffee, sipped instead of slurping, and watched his hand tremble so that the heavy mug made a delicate tattoo, a chatter, against his teeth. In the galley Lamp told a long story about the hard-luck icebreaker Eastwind. Brace sat at a messdeck table trying out baseball grips on an onion. He gave dull responses of reluctant admiration on the subject of icebreakers. Wysczknowski laid out a hand of solitaire. From forward the whistle vibrated.
A man who sits and counts pennies in a YMCA room on Saturday night is not as lonely as a man standing watch in mist. Voices of horns, sirens and surf are remote because of the mist. Sounds are velvetly enclosed, obstructed. The ears feel plugged with velvet. Experienced men open their mouths to gather sound, and suffer mist on their tongues, feel absurd with jaws a-dangle, feel vulnerable in their throats as if soft and small and rancid creatures are flying in the mist searching to make a cold nest. The ship’s whistle, making fog signals, intermittently squalls like a prehistoric animal. To say that a man is shrouded is to suggest the easy comfort of the grave, where, after all, there are no questions. In mist the questions assail, whisper, lightly touch the perceptions like fingernails of a frigid lover greeting warm intent with small protest. The shushing, hissing bow wave seems timid with the threat of impotence. Those terms of the sea which cleave and interpenetrate are plain silly in mist, for when the fathometer gives a readout of six feet the readout is only more or less. Winters on the coast of Maine are startling. The previous year’s winter will have caused the chart to become an approximation, even with Notices to Mariners; a partly informed but hopeful opinion. Hulks have shifted position. Rocks have tumbled. Underwater chasms have accumulated the debris of error, and they twist currents with the force of a revised doctrine. In short: mist, and watchstanding in mist, along that rocky coast, are not a shroud of finality. It is the broad and fey fabric of awful possibility.