Adrian climbed the seas, rode the tops of swells, and then dropped with alarming speed into the troughs. The small boat hung like a white shiver of Joyce’s fear as he took charge of the deck. To lower the boat at the bottom of the trough would splash it, rising faster than the ship. To lower at the top would allow the ship to run faster than the boat. Either maneuver could haul it beneath the swell, or throw it upward crashing into the davits. Joyce waited for the front side of a swell.
“Now.”
“Unhooked forward.”
“Unhooked aft.”
“Hump it. Hump it.”
Adrian rolled, seemed to devour the boat in shadow, and then the white flash of the thing escaped to stern, oars flailing like arms of the drowning.
Howard ran up the ladder, aft, watching the boat. He saw shapes of men leaving the boat deck. He nearly tripped over Joyce who half knelt against a chain.
“You did good,” Howard told him.
“Just lea’ me alone.” Joyce made sounds in his throat, his belly. He leaned forward on hands and knees, vomiting.
“You need a hand?”
“I’ll hose it down,” Joyce said. “Only don’t never tell nobody, will ya.”
Adrian worked to starboard as Levere came nearly cross sea to make a lee. The roll returned in a head-snapping shuffle down the swells that made the mast sing like a stringed instrument. The boat appeared, disappeared, appeared. The oars were steady. If Brace was pulling like supercargo, it could only be because he was intent on not crabbing his oar. Above the crash of water, Dane’s voice set the stroke and made comments about potlickers.
Howard dusted at himself, like a man on the plains and not at sea. He had a watch list that needed revamping. He made his way to the bridge.
Chappel stood, horse-headed and silent. Levere stood on the port wing, while Majors spun the helm. Chappel looked at Howard. “I should not have spoken as I did, earlier. We’ll discuss it later.”
Radioman James looked at Howard, looked miserable. He motioned Howard to the wing.
“They got casualties,” he said. “Two on Able and one on Abner. I don’t hardly know what to say.”
Howard stood, someplace between wonderment and fear.
“A’ course, they won’t say much on the box,” James said. “Except—you know how you can read that Diamond?”
Howard nodded, dumb, and now truly in fear.
“Because he’s a dago, probably,” James explained. “Emotional.” He paused. Helpless. “Two of them got bad burns on Able. Your friend Wilson… don’t give it any hope, no hope a’tall. I read that Diamond’s voice.”
Chapter 18
That first, that original jonah, sitting beneath wilted leaves in a drying wind and wondering what in the empty world to do next, could hardly have been more heartsick and confused than Howard who crept like a wounded man to the small sanctuary of his office. On his way across the messdeck he drew a mug of coffee, tasted the stuff, gagged. He emptied the mug and placed it in a rack.
Something definite had happened with the small boat. Adrian now ran head to sea, treading the high swell in a series of monotonous, crashing, engine-rumbling actions that seemed less sensible than the bobber on a fishline, no more sensible than empty rafts on an ocean. A few men clustered on the messdeck, sleepy from the long night, but huddling in the bright lights there rather than making the journey forward to the darkened crew’s compartment. Howard made movement to unlash a chair, thought better of it, and sat on his small desk. He propped his back against a file cabinet and braced his feet against a bulkhead. He sat fore-and-aft in the dark office, easy with the pitch, defenseless against a roll.
Bastions of belief—as old men remember—are tough walled. A man trots easily through zoonomias of belieflessness. Though he may have the most demanding and silly faith, he is sound for as long as the bastion stays unbreached. Howard gagged, pushed at the bulkhead as if he tried to shove the ship apart. Lamp appeared in the hatchway bearing a steaming mug. Lamp seemed somehow old and foolish, a man who carried a mug but who projected no illusion.
“This is fresh,” Lamp said. “I got a little teapot in the galley. Make a couple cups at a time.” He passed it to Howard.
Howard, grateful, and unerringly knowing that he was in no shape to express it, sipped at the coffee and stared past the bulking, shadowed form of Lamp. He looked from the darkened office onto the brilliantly lighted messdeck.
“Wilson wasn’t nosy enough to get killed,” Howard said. “He wasn’t even nosy enough to be a yeoman.”
“This is the worst winter, this is the baddest winter I ever remember.”
“It isn’t even winter. It’s October.”
“November,” Lamp told him. “We’ve passed over to November.” He hesitated, was apologetic. “Did their radioman say how it happened?”
“They’d never allow that on the radio, ever.” Howard sipped at the coffee, burned his mouth. “It’s a carnival. That kid is right.”
Lamp seemed ready to tell a story, to hark back to some miserable winter peopled with Chinamen, or to tales of wooden-hulled icebreakers parting the mists of Puget Sound. Then he thought better of it, standing in the hatchway with his back to the messdeck. He stared past Howard into the darkened wardroom. Lamp did not simply seem old. Lamp was old. The shock of that fact pressed Howard against the file cabinet in a sort of spasm of disbelief as his legs pressured the bulkhead. Lamp was not as old as Dane, but he was certainly older than Snow. Without the mug, and without the hasty solicitude, Lamp no longer looked foolish. He was not the man that any other man would choose for a father, if a man could choose a father; yet the sireless Howard watched him and perhaps felt—if only a little—that a few foundations were untumbled.
Lamp seemed to be peering into a long tunnel of night. He stared into the wardroom, and his heavy bulk was supported against the pitch by outspread arms. Like an overweight crucifix, a stretched Buddha, he hovered on ancient steel plates entombed between sea and sky.
“We’ve had enough, Jensen,” Lamp said. “If you had a job to do, you’ve done it.”
Lamp touched Howard’s knee. Pointed. Howard moved from his position, lost balance against the sea, regained his balance. He peered into the dark wardroom, and his eyes adjusted slowly after having looked at Lamp’s dark silhouette against the bright lights of the messdeck.
The apparition, the dark dungarees in the small black vault of the wardroom, slumped headless, handless. Legs disappeared beneath the table where feet, if there were any, might extend through steel and be planted against the hull itself. The darkness of the apparition was a faint illumination on the deeper darkness of the wardroom. The figure sat, leaned forward as though it placed an invisible head on dungaree-covered arms lying crossed on the table. It sat motionless, like an exhausted man sleeping.
“The boys can’t take no more,” Lamp said. “This is your crew, chum.”
Shoulders of the dungaree shirt raised, hunched, relaxed, raised, and it was clear that the figure wept. Sounds of weeping, or perhaps only sounds of the wash of the sea, echoed in the black chamber of the wardroom. Then fading, darkening, black merging into black—Jensen disappeared.
From behind Lamp, footsteps sounded in a hard pounding rush. The elfish, and frightened, and certainly guilty face of Masters appeared like a hiss of hysteria.