Pacific Interlude (6 page)

He did not want Muth to be tickled with the result that he would be trapped forever, maybe in the insurance business. Still, there was a look in Sally's eyes which was undeniable.

Leaning over, she put a hand on his knee and caressed it softly, her fingers wandering to his thigh. She had never done that before. The orange blossoms and the other flowers surrounding the terrace smelled very sweet. Bees hummed, a mocking bird called. The works.

She took a sip from her glass and put it down on the table, nervously.

“Come sit on my lap,” he said.

She did, perched there tensely while he undid two more buttons of her blouse and pressed his face between her breasts. Glancing toward the house which stood a hundred yards away on the other side of the orange trees, she said, “I'll do anything you want me to, but not
here
.”

He picked her up, something he'd not tried since their wedding night, and carried her inside.

“You better let me turn the stove off,” she said.

He put her down and she turned the knobs under three steaming pots. Then she slowly unbuttoned the remaining buttons of her blouse and took it off. Looking down thoughtfully, she next took off her bra there in the kitchen, a surprising thing for so shy and reserved a young woman as Sally to do. Standing there in a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, in only her red skirt, she folded her arms over her head, turned toward him and said, “Now, do you think you'll find anyone so much better in the South Sea Islands?”

“
No
,” he said with an exuberant laugh and carried her to the bedroom.

They'd had a great night, the kind he had fantasized when he had first asked her to marry him, but a very bad one for him to remember now a little more than a year later when he was trying to convince himself that it should be easy to be brave because life was not, after all, that much worth living …

In the end maybe everything was more a matter of luck than anything else. She had not gotten pregnant, much as she had tried. If she had, he told himself, he might have tried harder to wangle the shore job she wanted for him. He had, as he had promised her, gone to see the commander, who had encouraged him to talk to the captain in charge of the whole base. This he had never done and in due course he had gotten his orders, first to command the
FS 798
and then the
Y-18
.

Maybe I'm just a jerk … If I hadn't been such a damn fool I'd now be lying with Sally on the beach in St. Augustine or sitting with her on that terrace with a shaker of cold martinis. But that was not being very realistic. In their whole marriage they had only one or two great nights like that. As soon as she found out that she was not pregnant and that he was going overseas after all, she had begun sighing a lot and saying she had a headache. If he ever got home to her and she found that he had plans other than selling insurance in Stamford with her father, life would probably be one long headache for both of them. He had no right to blame her for this—she should marry an insurance man. He himself probably had no right to have any wife at all if he wanted to wander around the world all his life …

Suddenly he felt almost violently restless and kicked off his covers. Did he really have to accept the likely death sentence of being assigned to the
Y-18?
Like a woman who did not want to make love, a man who did not want to fight for life in a war could get constant headaches and backaches. If he complained enough to some doctor here in Brisbane, the word would be sent to the personnel officer in New Guinea and a replacement would arrive. Headquarters didn't want skippers who were chronically ill. No one was forced to command a ship. So why not just beg off this crazy assignment?

He would not do that because he would not do that. Not much of an answer, but it was the truth. He remembered his father telling him that the Grants and his mother's people, the Garricks, had fought in every American war and probably in the wars of England and Germany, where they came from, back through the centuries … “Wars never make much sense if you try to find fancy causes for them,” his father Charles had said. “No country is morally much superior to any other, if you think of history, and the battles over religion and politics always seem ridiculous in retrospect. One fact remains: it's the nature of any human society to expand until it collides with another. It then is repulsed or swallows the other. A nation without enough good fighting men is bound to be swallowed. In time of peace no one likes fighting men—they are a reproach to our morality. But when the bugle blows as it does and will in almost every generation, a nation stands or falls according to the strength of its fighting men. Nowadays industry and science have a lot to do with the fighting of wars, but they would be useless without the cutting edge of fighting men. Never be ashamed that all your people have been fighting men. Your mother's maiden name, Garrick, means ‘mighty warrior' in Teutonic and ‘Grant' means great, as old U. S. Grant, Unconditional Surrender Grant himself, was on the battlefield. He's only a distant, collateral ancestor of ours, but we are of the same stock. We don't panic in time of war. Everyone wonders how he'd act under fire, but I'll tell you right now how you'll feel. Your fear will go when the first shot is fired. The action will all seem to slow down, no matter how fast it is, and your mind will have plenty of time to think. You'll feel something that's more than excitement, a sense that this is the kind of job you were born to do and no man can do it better. I don't mean you'll go charging ahead recklessly—your mind will work out all the advantages for you and your men. You will attack only when you can win and retreat only to fight again.”

“Is that what you did on a subchaser?” Syl as a small boy had asked his father.

“More or less.” His father had smiled when he said it, but he was serious.

Now all that sounded fine and maybe some of it was true, but it would be hard to feel any transporting exhilaration standing on the deck of a gas tanker under fire. There he would be just a big fat explosive target with no chance to fight back …

All right. Enough. I've been elected, whether all that romantic garbage makes sense or not. I can't bug out because I'd feel too bad if I did. It probably helps to think that life wouldn't be too great for me even if I did get home, but meanwhile I've got a few weeks in Australia, maybe a month. I'm not going to waste that mooning about Sally, or touring lonely bars. There must be some way to meet a girl who will give me a good month, but how …?

Syl fell asleep, his erotic dreams full of faceless women, products of his imagination, not memory. Still … when he woke up at eight he felt oddly refreshed. Maybe something had been resolved.

CHAPTER 4

I
NSTEAD OF THE
hangover he had expected, he had a throbbing erection and was damned annoyed about having failed to find a woman the night before. At sea or in places like New Guinea, masturbation was a natural release for sailors, but in this city swarming with pretty girls, it seemed an unholy waste. Now was not the time to go on dreaming about sex. He should get back to his ship, but the very thought of the
Y-18
made him want to lie down and again escape into sleep. After all, the tanker was a damn wreck and her crew could do little until she was cleared of gas and repaired by the yard. There would not be much point in just wandering through that rusty hull or sitting in his cabin talking with his roommate, that holy man, Simpson. All he really had to do was check in once a day and stay ashore until the workmen had rebuilt the pilothouse and painted the ship.

That was not really true. He was still in command of a crew. Men deserved attention. He had no right to let his gloomy premonitions of doom for the
Y-18
to become self-fulfilling. He should be studying the ship's blueprints and inspecting every inch of her battered hull. There would be damage reports and work orders to review.

As he climbed out of bed he remembered that he had checked into the hotel without luggage and now could not even shave or brush his teeth. He was lucky to be able to take a bath—the showers on the ship were shut off on the ways. His erection would not die even when he followed a steamy tub with a cold one, but he would not kill it with his hand, not, by damn, in Australia. Tonight he would find a girl, even if he had to advertise for one. He had a brief mental image of himself walking the streets as a sandwich man with big signs, front and rear, saying GIRL WANTED! He hoped no such stunt would be necessary. Any woman who was interested could guess his needs from his uniform, his age and his face. Last night he had just been looking in all the wrong places. He should not have been surprised to find that drunks, not eager young women, inhabited most bars.

When he drew on his undershorts and dirty pants, buttoned up his soiled shirt with distaste, he was able to walk down to the dining room of the hotel with dignity if not cleanliness. Breakfast was a delight. He had forgotten how good fresh fried eggs looked and tasted. They quivered like a woman's breasts when an aging but buxom waitress put them down in front of him, and the rich yellow yolk had a flavor that seemed just invented. Juicy sausages and buttered toast with strawberry jam he washed down with cold fresh milk and coffee, not the instant kind but a brew with incredible fragrance. Fresh sweet oranges he ate not as an appetizer but as dessert. The trouble with shore food was that it made a man never want to go back to a ship, never want to die.

He went back anyway, telling himself he had a job to do, the privileges of a commanding officer had to be earned, and so forth. When a taxi let him off at the yard, he walked in past the workmen with a cocky strut which was not entirely an act. He was Lieutenant Sylvester G. Grant, the captain of the
Y-18
, nobody to fuck around with.

The smell of gas hit him when he was still fifty yards from the ship, and the blunt-ended old hull on the ways suddenly looked at him like a 180-foot coffin, the kind made for cremating corpses. But that was no way to think. If nothing else, she was a
ship
, and if anybody could whip her into shape, well, he could. (He'd better.) The tall ladder leading to her decks was at least new and safe—one small success.

He climbed the ladder briskly and saluted the quarterdeck in defiance of a ship which seemed to make all military customs ridiculous. Catching his mood, Cramer, the chief boatswain's mate, saluted him too and Syl crisply returned the salute.

“Good morning, skipper,” Cramer said. “They pumped out the gas last night. The tanks are empty, but not steamed out yet.”

“That was quick.”

“I think Mr. Buller had it all set up. They're getting ready to steam the tanks now.”

“Good.”

“Mr. Simpson is in your cabin, sir. He asked me to tell you that he would like to see you as soon as you get aboard.”

There was a contradiction in Simpson's behavior—he was excessively humble but somehow he often acted as though he really were in command of the ship. He found Simpson sitting at the desk in their cabin writing up the rough log.

“Good morning, Mr. Simpson,” Syl said briskly.

Simpson turned toward him, his face severe with steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Good morning, captain. There's a lot I have to talk to you about.”

Syl sat down on the port bunk, the one that did not have the picture of Jesus and the photograph of Simpson's wife hanging over it, or maybe it was Simpson's mother—she looked astonishingly like Simpson himself. He wanted to smoke his pipe but with the whole ship still reeking of gas, that would not be a good idea.

“Shoot, Mr. Simpson,” he said.

“Some tank trucks arrived last night and took the gas. I did not stop them. I know you gave permission, but how do I log this transaction?”

“Just say the remaining cargo was condemned and unloaded. You don't have to say how.”

“Sir, that won't wash if there's a board of investigation.”

“If there's a board of investigation, this whole ship won't wash—she should be condemned. That's one reason why there won't be a board of investigation.”

“But sir—”

“I don't want to discuss this anymore. The decision has been made. The gas is gone. As soon as the tanks are steamed out, the rebuilding can begin. That, Mr. Simpson, is called progress and I think that's what I'm here to get.”

“Yes sir. I have important papers for you to sign here. I tried to get you last night before you left but—”

“What have you got?”

“There are the papers which formally transfer command of the ship from me to you. I was temporary commanding officer …”

Maybe that was what was really bugging him. Maybe he wanted command of this ship for himself and had been disappointed to see a superior arrive.

“I'll need to attach a description of the ship's deficiencies as I found them,” Syl said.

“I have a detailed list ready, sir. I drew it up when Captain Munger took over.”

“Was he the one who was killed?”

“No sir. Captain Carlson was killed. Captain Munger took over as soon as we got here, two weeks ago.”

“What happened to him?”

“He didn't like this ship too much, sir. He got himself transferred.”

“How?”

“He looked over the damage reports and the work orders and reported that unless much more rebuilding were done, this ship would not be ready for sea. He said he'd refuse to sail her unless she was in what he called apple-pie order, so they got rid of him.”

Syl said nothing but he thought this explained a lot. Probably he had been sent here because he had already refused to sail a ship after declaring her unseaworthy and could probably be counted on to avoid getting another such incident on his record and finding himself back in the transient officers' camp. Nobody wanted that … The devil you knew was better than the unknown …