“Steel hull. A hundred thirty feet.” Radioman James spoke to a small group on the messdeck. James was below for a quick sip of coffee before Adrian, crashing ahead slow on steadily warming engines, reached the approach to the head.
“Can we tow? Think of the draft on that thing.”
“Don’t know, chum. Maybe tow from the stern.”
“Where’s Abner?” Brace asked.
“Still playing pattycake down south. Still riding herd on Able.”
Brace’s eyes were bright with excitement. They held no fear. He had seen some weather, doubtless thought it was awful weather, doubtless believed he had seen the worst. He was filled with ignorant enthusiasm, excused, perhaps, because any kind of action no doubt seemed better than the dull promise of stewardship.
“Take a turn, sonny,” Lamp told him. “When you get done whoopin’, secure the wardroom.”
Ships, following the romance of the sea with their grace and their resemblance to a womb, are said to embody a female principle; and the sea, itself, is called mistress, harlot, lover, mother.
Maine winters carry a different message. The ship is not soft, warm, loving or safe. The sea is what it is—the sea. Adrian was neither male nor female, but under the circumstances was something more important. Adrian was a ship. Designed by an architect long dead, twice redesigned by a tight-fisted Treasury… a Treasury that perhaps understood that experience teaches what a ship will take, but would never understand that only final experience teaches what it will not take.
McClean crept backward down the steps leading to the messdeck. He was spraddled flat as a starfish. The steps surged forward as McClean’s arms stretched between rails, and for long moments he lay flat on his face as Adrian dove, took green water over the bridge, raised its stern, lay head down and shuddering beneath the heavy thunder of the sea. Lights flickered, flicked, from a generator where Wysczknowski stood by, lashed to the generator’s cage. The ship slowly shrugged away water and sluggishly rose. McClean was pressed upright, nearly thrown backward, and an oily spot on his shirt made him look curiously like a man freshly shot. The lights steadied. From forward the thunder rumbled, decreased as the ship topped a swell, then rushed downward to another crack of thunder. McClean held on, again went forward on his face, wedging knees against the ladder, his forehead pressed down as if he was kowtowing to the sea, while his rear end struggled to get on the same level with his face. He starfished to the messdeck, turned and held on, waited in the boom and crash for the top of a swell. He dashed forward and hugged the coffee urn like a man in love.
Brace, white-faced, sat on a bench behind a table. He clutched the table. He was colorless except for his growing shock of hair. His face was bleached, then dim, then steadily bleached as from forward Wysczknowski temporarily settled matters with the generator.
McClean, his mulatto face not a whit darker than Brace’s, looked frozen in an eternal scream like a masterwork of medieval fresco. Words that were faint, covered with thunder, “engine room… where’s… yeoman—”
Brace clutched the table, stared at familiar, scrubbed bulkheads which always before had stood like planes of boredom. Now the bulkheads rose above his eyes like downrushing plates of steel. He seemed mesmerized, a man sillily gazing at his opposable thumbs in a universe that required tentacles.
McClean was sobbing, or else gasping for breath. He was certainly burning his arms on the coffee urn. A faraway crash of thunder was followed by a nearly present crack that was no louder, but more instantly threatening than the thumping, thundering, drumming sea. The crack came from directly above deck, the fantail.
Brace blinked, fought to stay erect against a downward surging crunch, stood blinking and grasping and no doubt wondering if it was time to drown.
“Gear locker,” McClean yelled as Adrian reached the top of a swell. For three seconds his voice could be heard. “Engine room. Get there. Yeoman.”
Howard appeared from his small sanctuary like a jumping jack not thrown by its spring, but thrown box and all by the hand of a petulant child. He grabbed the frame of the hatchway, leaned forward to stand spraddle-legged. He locked his hands onto that frame, as enamored of that frame as McClean was of the coffee urn. The men waited for the top of another swell.
“Busted arm… still on the plates—”
McClean turned, dived for a rail, began his slow, starfish ascent. Adrian hesitated, the dark, piling sea offering a cross swell to trick the helm. The ship was caught, twisted, skidded in a long slide; then fell like a tin safe dropped from the roof of a high building. It tipped to port, lay like a sick and dying fish; twisted feebly beneath the crash, the slow ascent. The world reversed. The ship skidded down, crashing, rolling, and the coffee urn like a gleaming inclinometer went horizontal. From beneath its clamped lid, coffee spurted like a small, round, laughing mouth. Brace stood spread against the table top, standing in desperation as Howard clung like a monkey on a stick to that rising and hovering frame. He lay on his back in the air and waited for the final, awful dictate. The shaft whipped, roared, the rudder caught, and the ship turned once more into the sea. The thunder began again, and Howard, who could not spare the luxury of relaxing any muscle, gulped air and wept and belched and choked up bile. He motioned to Brace. Brace, having frozen so hard to the table during his dance with the ship that he now lay on top of the table, dismounted and followed Howard, spraddling and starfishing up the ladder.
Racca, his smart mouth moaning, his shirt torn away, was held against the lightly oiled plates by men who kept him from flopping. Snow had Racca’s broken arm extended. Howard crawled forward with the aid kit, off balance, bumping against a protecting rail beside the engine. Brace, off balance and crawling, bumped Howard from behind as Brace attempted to pass splints that were not yet needed. Racca’s eyes were bright with fear and pain, and with the sharp hurt of helplessness as Adrian slid, thumped, and the voices of the engines were blanked even as he lay beside them; blanked by thunder from forward and the drum of the sea against the hull. Howard eased forward with a styrette of morphine, got the needle into the skin and crushed the small glass tube. Racca was looking at him or beyond him, talking, talking. Howard bent forward. Racca was saying, “Jonah, Jonah, Jonah,” and Howard, who was not without guilts of his own, wondered if Racca was talking about him.
Chapter 16
That word, jonah, that name—sparked in the minds and affrighted hearts of men, but the spark was dull and obscure during those first desperate night hours required for the wind to drop. The sea piled, ran as high as most men could ever remember having seen it run. As the wind dropped, the sea built. Adrian made heavy, tortured way. It buried its bows. Green water still reached the bridge, but water no longer swamped the flying bridge. On the flying bridge, the new shoring had disappeared from beneath light, stout cable. Speculation said that the entire bridge had been twisted, for the quick-release gear on the cable was still fastened. The flag locker was dented. The main deck was missing all but a single locker, but the winch was intact. The boat still hung in the davits like a small, white miracle. The 20-mm guns were wet beneath their waxed canvas covers. When Conally broke into the line locker, belowdecks and aft, he found an inch of water shipped through the seal of the watertight hatch. Conally swore to Howard that the inch of water was more scary than any ghost. That inch of water, although Conally did not say as much, was an insult to intelligence, like finding that the laws of gravity and flotation were repealed. Gunner Majors, who looked like a halfback ought to look, behaved like a halfback as he bounced about the boat deck. Majors was in definite hazard as he attempted to dry and oil those useless and silly guns. In the bow, the three-inch fifty had been stripped of its waterproof shroud. The muzzle plug was knocked out. Water filled the barrel. Water crashed and swept the gun as the water tumbled high to the bridge, and there was nothing Majors could do about that.