Dane turned toward Conally. Glass stepped back to tread heavy on Howard’s feet. Dane began to bulge, swell, prepare his blast. Joyce faltered. Joyce stepped backward, trod heavily on Howard’s feet.
“You are a bunch of punks,” Dane said kindly. “You are ladies at a garden party… and now, ladies, if you have finished sippin’ at your tea…” The blast arrived:
Tuck up your skirts—ladies—tuck ’em up and get crackin’.
Dane wheeled, like a man trying to take first advantage in some dark contest. He was first off the bridge, first onto the main deck, and he moved aft as certainly as an army tank. He did not bother to slam his feet into the angle formed by house and deck.
“Stand by for a moment,” Snow said to Brace, as Conally, Joyce and Glass fled as if pulled by strings. Snow’s small face, in the light shadow of the sunlit bridge, was not elfish. It looked not exactly old, yet it was creased, weathered, strangely and suddenly thin-lipped. “I do not break promises,” said Snow, “and I do not value your silly accusations.”
Brace seemed ready to faint. He no longer blushed. His face was pale.
“Your apology will not be accepted this time,” Snow told him. “Acceptance must be earned. As Chief Dane has just remarked, I suggest that you get cracking.”
Snow turned back to the radio, preparatory to seeking more information from Islander. Brace stood, puffed, panted, zipped at his foul weather jacket. He staggered from the bridge, and he rocked from blows that were clearly delivered by the heavy hammers of shame.
Levere turned to Howard. “Stand by.” He walked to the hatch, undogged it, and he stood on the wing looking aft. Ice swelled and built in the bow, and the spray was extending the ice further along the decks. The fantail was slick with a thin layer of it, but the fantail was not deadly, as the bow was deadly. Levere watched the action as men began laying out hawser to form a yoke. Levere’s face, slightly swollen, dark, hawklike, French, Yankee; seemed for a moment ready to mutate into a mask of tears. Then he muttered something incomprehensible. From the bow, spray rose. Light feathers of ice hit Levere’s jacket and lodged in his hair. He turned to enter the bridge.
“The eighty-three boat from Kennebunkport is underway,” he told Howard. “It won’t arrive in time, but it may arrive in time to do something.”
“If we only had Abner—”
“We don’t,” Levere said. “We have towing line and alternatives. I want to give you instructions.” Levere paused, watching Howard critically, wondering, no doubt, if he had the right man for the job.
“Sometimes,” said Levere, “if you can’t pull, you can still push. Now, that is not a tugboat helm. It will seem to react a good deal more quickly. The hull will skid.”
Howard, suppressing thoughts of those whispering bow plates, creaking, strung weak with age, listened to instructions on how to steer a tugboat.
Chapter 23
Two vessels dancing. A slow dance between ill-matched partners; Islander, thick, fat, hollow. Adrian a wisp, a sliver, like a small, objecting white blade prancing before the loud mouth of the land; before the white line of frozen water marking the high point where white surf ran, rumbled, threw ice and ice-coated debris toward the land. Adrian circled the iceberg hulk of Islander, which in the darkness of early evening was aglow with light. The car deck glistened, a sheet of ice, across which ran thinly etched lines, the shadows of lifelines.
Islander pivoted broadside to the surf at Adrian’s approach. Figures of men on the car deck hauled the thin line of the sea anchor, and from the crossing stern of Adrian the etching of a heaving line curved flatly into the wind. It hit a man in his raised hands, and he looked like an outfielder shagging a fly.
“I did it,” Brace yelled. “Me.”
“Get it down next time, you cow milker. Get it lower.” Yeoman Howard, running like a skein of snoopiness through memory, conversation, and through the log, would someday “get the picture.”
Both vessels straightened. They angled directly seaward as hawser came taut on short tow; the hawser with its tons shaking flakes of ice as Adrian sat its stern into the sea. The stern rose slowly, the ship clawed toward the sea. The engines churned at three-quarters, then rose nearly to full.
“If we can get a little sea room.”
“We’re getting some.”
“Where’s that rock?”
“Ain’t your business, chummy. Let the cap worry.”
“I reckon it’s my business.”
On the glazed fantail, beneath floodlights that turned the iced decks into wan sheets of treachery, men stood, retreated backward; waited to lengthen the tow. Men crouched behind iced gear lockers, and wind pebbled the lockers with an increasing assault of ice as inshore water smacked the hull, rose, was blown across the fantail.
“I hate this part. I hate this worst of all.”
“Maybe it’ll hold.”
“Stand back, there, clowns, stand back. The line is goin’ thin.”
Adrian dashed forward, hesitated, ran quickly seaward as the hawser parted; one length rising in a whipping, arcing, snake-like, boldly-moving line above the fantail. The other length fell atrail of Islander and sagged toward the surf where it indifferently streamed like a web waiting to foul the propellers of anybody’s ship.
“You hurt, chum?”
“It’s moving. I can move it. I don’t think it’s broke.” Gunner Majors rose, fell back toward the scupper, rose slowly. He grabbed a chain, fell forward, twisting, like a man tackled.
“Help him below.”
“Get Lamp.”
“Get hauling on that line, get haulin’.”
“My gut hurts. That’s mostly what it is.”
“Get him below.”
“I do it,” said Majors. “I do it by myself.” He once more hauled himself erect. He stood trembling. He bent sideways, on a slaunch, panting as he accommodated a couple of broken ribs. He moved slow and crablike from the deck, and he braced himself against stanchions and chains.
The short line came in, hauled by hands that came away sticky from the hawser as ice rapidly formed and seemed attempting to steal mittens. The line was short and did not need to be walked. Across the fantail men skidded, to ride, to slide to their knees as they attempted to set up a new rig. Adrian crashed forward in the building inshore water. Blown ice, no larger than mist, was like a thin cloud about the ship. Dane stood above the men, watched them scrabble and claw, watched Islander.
“Belay that. They’re dropping line.”
Aboard Islander, men hung desperately to lifelines, tied themselves to lifelines, and attempted to recover the broken hawser.
“Not a chance. They don’t have a winch. Offshore without a winch.”
“They got nothing,” said Dane, and he was disgusted. “No winch, no hawser, no spare parts. Nothin’.”
Aboard Islander one side of the yoke was freed, then, moments later, the other side. The towline slid toward the surf like a dying snake.
“It’s all they could do. I reckon it is.”
“Where’s that rock?”
“If we double up on one bitt…”
“Can’t tow that way, can’t tow on a slaunch.”
“Dear Jesus, Jesus dear, it’s cold.”
On those northern shores, when the wind sets north-north-east above that line where land and water meet, the surf holds claws, steeples of rock, the discarded tops of mountains—and to be spit onto those shores through that rocky surf is a certain warrant that a man has misplaced his faith in something—towline, perhaps.