“You could run hot water pipe,” Conally said. “Right under the deck. Like a great big heater.”
“Cost a lot. Cost more than this thing’s worth.”
“I only saying what you could do.”
The boat deck was free of ice, but in the scuppers lay small wind pockets of snowy ice wrung from the air. The easy passage of Adrian was not fast enough to bring stack fumes to the boat deck. Above the men’s heads the warmth flowed like an insulating blanket that mostly obscured the sun and not the cold. Lamp huddled against the stack which was nearly as cold as the surrounding rails and stanchions and deck. Lamp looked at Conally with no surprise or resentment. Lamp looked at Howard. “He’s in on it?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
“No,” said Lamp. “Everybody isn’t. Most of the boys have forgot.”
“They loaded it off with Masters.”
“That’s what they did,” said Lamp. Lamp leaned against the stack as if he were trying to hold it up. His hooded foul weather jacket enclosed his face so that he seemed only a red mouth, a red nose existing in a cavern. He had pulled on no foul weather pants. The thin cotton of his cook’s whites stretched across heavy shanks, and his legs were on the road to frostbite. “I’ve studied it and studied it,” said Lamp. “Only I just now got it figured out.”
“You sure picked a pretty day.”
“I just now figured it out.” Lamp looked at Conally, and Lamp’s red nose twitched with suspicion. “You ain’t going to believe this, boys.”
“If I’m not going to believe it,” said Howard, “let’s go where I can disbelieve it in comfort.”
“We had two ghosts,” Lamp said earnestly to Conally. “That guy on Hester C. was tellin’ us about Wilson. Jensen’s been telling us about Dane.”
Sunlight glanced and flashed from a patch of ice on the fantail. The wake foamed. The cover on the small boat was white with frost that had been distilled from the canvas. A thin line of frost lay on top of the boom that ran above the small boat. The stack purred, colored the clear air with layers of fumes. Conally shifted his weight, looked upward to the flying bridge as if he expected to see spies.
“You’re right,” said Howard. “I don’t believe it.”
Conally shifted his weight, hesitated, seemed trying to decide whether to stay or go.
“I kinda do,” he said. “Tell me what you figure.”
Lamp’s figuring, less fulsome than it would have been on a warm messdeck, figured that Jensen would not return. “I told him his job was done. You remember.”
“Yes,” said Howard.
Lamp’s figuring, as intense as any sinner-priest’s theology, had followed a predictable course. He “thought ‘n thought” and got nowhere. Then, on a day that was not remarkably different from other days, he saw Levere and Dane sitting in the wardroom.
“That’s when it hit me. When we saw Jensen, Jensen was sitting in Dane’s chair.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Conally. “Jensen said to look out for ice. Now we got ice.”
“We’re talking about the best seaman in the world.”
“I don’t know all the seamen in the world.”
“The lines are all rigged,” Conally said helplessly. “Hawser’s ready to go. Back-up hawser’s ready.” Conally looked at the ship, turned and looked all around, as if he searched for an enemy.
“Do we have a Jonah? Did we have one?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Lamp. “I’ve thought an’ thought about this.”
“Who?”
“I got to get inside,” said Lamp. “My legs are freezing.” He smacked his thighs, the front of his legs. “A Jonah ain’t who, it’s what,” said Lamp. “A green kid, a yellow snipe…” Lamp faltered before his spectrum of color.
“Sure,” said Conally. “I can see that.” Conally looked like he had been searching arduously for the right tool and had found it. “There is something a guy can do,” he said. “Just keep the kid away from Dane.”
Lamp was clearly beginning to suffer from cold, was stiff from leaning against the stack. He stood away from the stack, took a hobbled step, bounced to shake his legs alive. He looked at his feet, and he regretted the bounce. At Lamp’s back the stack rumbled, seemed to hesitate, and then the deepening rumble opened like the low notes of a pipe organ. The men listened, sensed the shaft increasing its whip, saw the stem set slightly lower as Adrian put on speed.
“Goin’ somewhere,” said Conally. “I hope it ain’t about anything.”
“That’s a good kid,” Lamp said. “Don’t lean.”
“Didn’t say anything about leanin’,” said Conally. “And I got nothing against the punk.” He turned to face forward into the needling wind. He looked at the sea. “Twelve knots,” he said. “We’re full, not flank. Maybe Snow’s just blowing coke from the engines.” He turned back to Howard and Lamp. “You guys got anything else?” A rain of ice vibrated from the lip of the stack, and the ice was black with diesel exhaust. It shattered, scattered, scampered across the deck like black rain.
“Nothing,” said Howard. “Except a chill.”
“I still think Dane’s gonna take mustang grade,” said Conally. “All last month he’s been telling me things. Been telling me stuff that’s going to need doing next spring.”
Chapter 22
Dane did not die in the tunnel of ice aboard Islander, he died because of that tunnel; in a hospital, and he died with dry feet—perhaps the only surprise life ever presented him for which he was not fully prepared.
Ice—be it ever so humble, and as those few know who have raised their eyes beyond the horizons of cocktail glasses—is worth talking about by sailors and poets. While fire at sea is spectacular and fast, ice gives a man time to think. Ice is not whimsical, as fire is sometimes whimsical. Ice is occult, abstract, yet persevering. It requires only the smallest amount of commitment from the sufferer. It is generous in its reward to that commitment.
Dying in company with ice is almost as nice as dying of morphine. A man gets to lie down, give away his busyness, and forget in that permanent haze of fading mortality all of those pranks and sideshows of a world where dealers in death appear as regularly as rows of cabbages at the greengrocer’s. Death, dealing a pat hand of ice, seems to understand such calms. If death did not understand, death would not be so certain, so banal.
Cutter Adrian punched its screws into the sea and pressed north. On the bridge, Levere and Chappel and Dane planned the best way to accomplish the impossible.
—Three hundred feet—yes, chum, but draft like a ping pong ball—think of the freeboard, that thing’s like a sail—have to harness—towing yoke—only way to go—I seen them things, bitts are offset—yoke it then, chief, yoke it. We’ll get on radio, try to get a set up—
Howard, summoned to the bridge, stood silent and waited. Dane turned to him, and Dane was imitating Gibraltar. He hunched his shoulders in a clear effort to loosen them, or else in anticipation of finding that handle he needed to pick up and hoist the world. “Fix your watch list. I want Conally, Joyce, Glass and the punk to the bridge. I want them now.”
“Technically,” said Howard, who engaged in a courageous act, “the kid is still with Lamp.”
“Don’t give me no technically.” Dane’s chief’s hat was pushed to the back of his head. His forehead seemed to bulge, and it was covered with sweat although the bridge was chilled. His forehead glistened in imitation of an ornamental light bulb. White strands of hair poked from beneath the hat. He flexed his hands. Salt water stains on his foul weather jacket were white pools on the green fabric, like an abstraction of surf.