Majors flipped the cigarette to the deck, towards Masters’s legs.
“We got a fire,” Majors said. “You see it there.” He spoke in calm tones of disgust. He pointed at the cigarette. Then he stripped the seal of the extinguisher and pulled the pin. He pointed the extinguisher at the deck. Gas exploded with a roar. It boiled, foamed, expanded; even the sea crashing against the hull was cloaked and silenced by the roar. The gas coiled from the deck no more than six feet from Masters’s crotch. Frost formed on Masters’s boots. Oxygen disappeared. Men put their arms over their faces, sucked hard to breathe.
Majors stopped. He waited for the cold ice mist to dissipate. He viewed his handiwork.
Masters sat up. He held his hands over cold testicles.
“There’s just one word for you, Majors,” said Masters. “You’re a bastard.” The elf face was contorted with indignation.
“Bastard,” echoed Racca. “Bastard—bastard—bastard—come to save us—”
Majors squeezed the trigger of the fire extinguisher. A burst of gas choked its way toward Masters. Masters flipped over on his face. Then he scrambled to his feet.
“Bastard,” Racca moaned. “Oh, save us, bastard, save us.”
“Shut up,” Masters told Racca. “Before I bust your other arm.” He stood beneath the red lights, and, like McClean and Fallon who had stood on the plates, Masters was unmasked. He was only himself, trembling, perhaps doing his best to control compulsions of fear or guilt.
“If I don’t get some sleep, I’m gonna die.” Majors checked the pressure gauge on the extinguisher, thinking, perhaps, that he would have to alibi to get it recharged.
“Climb into your sack,” Majors told Masters, “or do I get the handcuffs?”
“He was acting.” Wysczknowski shook his head in pure wonderment. “It was an act.”
“We’ll know when we get to Boston.” Howard turned to Majors. “He really under arrest?”
“I’m master at arms, and I need sleep—so, yeah, he’s under arrest.” He turned back to Masters. “Get out of that sack for any reason, any, and you get locked in with the hawser.”
“You want me to log it?”
“I’ll be up there in a minute,” Majors said. He turned back to Masters. “If we got us a Jonah, boy, then I know who.”
When Howard arrived on the bridge, radioman James leaned against the set like a wisp of paleness and fatigue. His frailty, no matter his protests, would always sooner or later hunt him to ground.
“I’ll take it for awhile,” said Howard. “I’ll call you for important traffic.”
“The generator burned on Able,” James told him. “That’s the only thing we’ve heard that’s new.”
“It’s history. Lay below.”
“I’m okay.”
“Nobody said you weren’t. Lamp said there was going to be fresh coffee.”
“Just the trick. That’s just the trick.” James read the routine for turning over the watch. He looked out at the flaring lights of Aphrodite.
“If we don’t get wind.”
“Dane’s there.”
“Fresh coffee. Just the trick.” James disappeared down the ladder like a puff of mist.
Howard checked the radar screen, flicked between ranges, adjusted the set. If a storm was batting around, it was still not on the screen.
The radio blanked as a transmitter opened nearby. The sillysounding voice of a man hollered: “How soon? When? Hurry up. How soon?”
“The guy who owns the boat,” said Chappel. “He keeps doing that. Wants to be taken off.”
“Remind him of procedure,” said Levere. “This time tell him we have the power of arrest.”
“I didn’t know that, Cap.”
“We don’t,” said Levere. “When we get done with this, you must read up on the law.”
The radio blanked, as the transmitter again opened aboard Aphrodite. “Get outta the way,” said Glass, “or you get a knuckle sandwich.” Glass’s voice was tense, either with situation or with the intent to back up a promise. “Cap,” said Glass, “we got him loose and he ain’t hurt.”
Levere sat immobile. Silent and silhouetted like a man finishing a prayer. “Tell Glass to follow procedure,” he said. “I want to speak to Aphrodite’s master.” He slouched in the captain’s chair, and his fatigue, which never showed, now seemed to be pressing him toward the deck. He waited until the radio spoke with the voice of his friend.
“Can you steam, Tom?”
“We can. Slowly.”
“I’ll leave two men aboard you,” said Levere. “Let’s head for the barn.”
Dane stayed aboard Aphrodite, and Dane kept Brace with him. Aphrodite and Adrian went to Boston, at three knots, where upon arriving, Aphrodite’s owner fired Aphrodite’s captain and attempted to pick up his master’s papers with a charge of incompetency. A carbon of a complaint arrived for Levere. It charged Levere with hazarding life at sea, and it charged Adrian’s crew with the theft of a piece of canvas; and, yeoman Howard, with a hard-mouthed determination to track down injustice, discovered that history is rigged so that you can never find out who to kill.
Chapter 20
These are the bars of scollay square, adrift with crud, busted wine bottles, trash, garbage, and huddled lumps of decaying clothing which swaddle passed-out flesh that dries and dies in doorways beneath the benison of those Irish idealists, worn with cocky servitude into creatures of fists: the police.
Streets wind downhill to the moorings where masts cluster like burned forests, and where museum ships bearing proud names and bold history endure fossilized protection; as schoolchildren—and less able tourists—stick chewing gum beneath the rails as they touristly gossip with proprietary smugness of revolutions made by others.
Cutter Able lies burned and scorched in dry dock. Cutter Adrian hangs at the pier, aflash with the quick, hot torches of welders; as workmen rapidly cut, add, patch, and get the thing ready in all respects to return to sea. Cutter Abner, en route to stand by for Able in New Bedford, is apprised that the overdue Seascamp was never lost. A change of plans, unreported, took it to New York where, it is rumored, politely ladled measures of gin and scotch cloud all thought of possible error, even through the longest and darkest hours of night.
“F’I had a deed to all the real estate in this town that I’ve puked on, I’d be a rich an’ happy man.”
These bars of Scollay Square. Men take their first drinks and vow to proceed to the yid district where seaman Glass has “connections.” The men drink one, drink another against the journey. Through frosted windows they watch dull streets. Yellow stains of nicotine cover the panes to slump with running drops of thaw in spots where hot blasts from chugging ceiling furnaces loosen filth that runs like the yellow track of a portentous, sniffing, leg-raising hound. Women, on their last downhill leg—women born unlucky, or charmed, and certainly born unto ignorance, that one true mark of Cain—the women laugh, go haw-haw; pretend that at some time during their lives they have been happy for longer than fifteen consecutive minutes. Young sailors look at the ham-handed, billy-club-packing bartenders. The sailors rub the lips of beer glasses with the palms of their hands. They pretend to be thinking, as they superstitiously rub beer on the glass in hope of killing germs that pack rare disease.