Sweet Reason (28 page)

In a toneless voice Joyce read the message back again, ending with “Enemy casualties estimated at two hundred fifty-five.” Then it struck him. “But that’s the number of men on board the
Ebersole
!”

“Is it, Mister Joyce?”

“You know it is,” the Poet said. “You’re trying to tell me something.”

“I could never tell you anything,” the Captain said. “You know why? Because I’m professional navy and you’re professional civilian. And professional navy has no language in common with professional civilian. I went to sea when I was seventeen, Mister Joyce. I traded a sea of wheat for a sea of water. You wouldn’t understand when I say I’ve never regretted it.”

“I realize there are pleasures in going to sea,” the Poet conceded. “The sunrises —”

Jones laughed out loud. “Sunrises! I’ve seen the sun rise so many times in my life, Mister Joyce, it’s become an everyday occurrence.”

The Poet was suddenly very moved. “I’m sorry —”

“Don’t be sorry, Mister Joyce. Whatever you do, don’t be sorry. The professional navy doesn’t need sympathy from a professional civilian. I’m telling you the facts of navy life, that’s all. If I had a choice I’d want you to understand rather than not understand, but I don’t hold out much hope for you.”

“I’d like —” the Poet began, but the Captain interrupted.

“I made my friends by the time I was seventeen and spent the rest of my life losing them. The navy ruined my friendships, my family — my wife divorced me twelve years ago
because I couldn’t get a shore assignment. I haven’t seen my sons in three years.”

“But why did you stick it out?”

“Because,” Jones said — his eyes fell on the barbed-wire collection on the bulkhead — ‘because it didn’t seem as if there was anything left after the war except my country and my career.”

“Those are two different things, Captain.”

“That’s a professional civilian point of view, Mister Joyce. I’ve always found them to be the same thing, my country and my career. If I serve one, I serve the other.”

The Poet and the Captain looked at each other for a long moment, looked at each other squarely in the eye. “But you used the number two hundred fifty-five,” Joyce said finally.

The Captain’s gaze fell away now and he began talking in short sentences, as if the conversation was a verbal telegram to be paid for by the word. “Can’t cry over spilt milk.”

“That’s not so, Captain — you can cry over spilt milk,” Joyce said ardently. “You’ve
got to
cry over spilt milk.”

Jones shook his head. “Never. In my book even a lump in the throat is a luxury.”

“My God,” said the Poet emotionally.

“Perhaps,” said Jones as if it fitted into the conversation. He picked up the flashlight on his desk and absentmindedly toyed with it, trying to touch things across the room with the beam. But it was blotted out by the daylight pouring through the porthole.

“Batteries run down,” Jones added thoughtfully, and he fought back the small lump that rose to his throat.

The Poet Gets an Apology

“You mean you sent it!”

“Sure I sent it — it was that or a general court-martial for every one of us.”

“Not for me it wasn’t. Jesus, all I know is I turned around and saw someone laying into you, so I laid into him. That happens to be the truth. They can’t convict you for defending an officer.”

“Now who’s innocent,” the Poet said. “You’re dreaming if you think that’ll stand up in court. My God, when they’re finished with you it’ll look as if you organized the whole thing.” Joyce turned to an imaginary court-martial. “With your permission, Mister President, the prosecution would like to offer in evidence a newspaper clipping marked ‘Exhibit A,’ which shows the defendant” — the Poet leveled an accusing finger at Boeth — “being dragged away from an antiwar demonstration after kicking an officer of the law in the balls.”

“It was the groin.”

“Groin then. Kicking an officer of the law in the groin.”

Sitting on the deck, his back against another bank of computers, Boeth laughed nervously. “Well, the fact is I didn’t have the vaguest idea what was going on. How was I to know you’d pull a stunt like that?” Boeth shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Maybe you’re right. This way we’re off the hook and so is he. If they ever investigated a mutiny, they’d find out all about the junk we sank and the plane we cut in half and how he thought we’d been hit by shore fire when the Plexiglas shattered on the bridge.”

Boeth looked quizzically at Joyce. “To tell you the honest to God truth, Poet, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Joyce smiled self-consciously. “If it’s any consolation to you, neither did I.”

The bo’s’n’s whistle shrilled over the ship’s loudspeaker system, piping down the midday meal.

Boeth nodded and then shrugged. Joyce shrugged back at him and the two smiled at each other.

Boeth asked, “Does he still jerk off his phallus-flashlight?”

“He still plays with it,” the Poet said, “but he’s a lot more complicated than we thought.”

“And Sweet Reason,” Boeth asked, “what do you think of him now that he’s pulled off a mutiny?”

“From what I can see,” the Poet said, “Sweet Reason didn’t have all that much to do with it.”

The XO Makes a Discovery

The Executive Officer made his way through the chow line that snaked aft along the inboard passageway. The white sailors who blocked his path he pushed aside with the back of his hand; the black sailors he said “Excuse me” to and then pushed. They gave ground, or so it seemed to the XO, with a slowness bordering on insolence.

As he moved aft, the XO caught snatches of conversation.

“… with this midget, see, it was like getting laid to a …”

“… pull in eighty dollars a day in tips plus room and board. Shit, man, I know a guy soaked away …”

“… this cop gets sick, right, he asks me to collect for him, right, so I pick up fifty cents here, a buck there, you get it, so when the cop kicks the bucket I don’t tell no one he kicked the bucket, I just keep on collecting …”

The XO was almost at the midship’s passageway when he sensed the change in atmosphere. Men were milling in front of the Doc’s office, gesturing, craning, arguing; everyone seemed to be talking at once.

“Who the fuck he think he is, putting one of those things up just when chow is going down?”

“Lemme see, lemme see.”

“Forget the mother and let’s eat.”

“He’s sure got guts, he has.”

“He’s got his nerve, that’s what he has.”

“Read it a-loud, will you?”

A sailor who felt the XO pushing on the flat of his back turned on him belligerently. “Watch who the fuck you’re —” When he saw who it was, the sailor backed off. “No offense intended, sir.”

“What’s going on here?” the XO demanded. The talking subsided into a sullen silence. Finally Angry Pettis Foreman, a toothpick jutting from his lips, nodded toward the laminated mouth-to-mouth resuscitation chart screwed to the door.

“What the —” exclaimed the XO, and he peeled off the piece of paper taped to the chart the way someone rips off a bandage, in one rapid motion so there will be as little pain as possible.

“I found it taped to the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation chart forward of the midship’s passageway,” the XO told the Captain a few minutes later. “I think I got it before too many of them saw it.”

Jones sat in front of his desk, his shoulders hunched, toying with the food in his tray. The XO offered him the leaflet and when the Captain made no move to take it, the XO asked, “Do you want me to read it?”

Jones nodded grimly.

The XO coughed nervously. “It starts with this darned ‘comrades in arms’ business again,” he said. He expected the
Captain to say something and when he didn’t the XO said, “Bleeding heart Bolshevik expression if I ever heard one.” Still no response from the Captain.

Without looking up between sentences, the Executive Officer began to read the leaflet.

“Today we have demonstrated what men of conscience can accomplish when they listen to reason. The officers and men of the
Eugene Ebersole
refused to obey the racist pig captain when he ordered them to pull the trigger. This morning, the most elerquent sound in the entire world was the silence of men who refused to kill. It is this silence that will drown out the generals and admirals of the Pentagon.

The Voice of Sweet Reason”

For a long time after the XO finished reading Jones didn’t say a word. Finally he spoke in a dead voice. “It’s him —” He brought a palm up to his jaw to stop the quivering. “It’s him or me,” he said. “Do you read me, XO? It’s him or me. The navy’s not big enough for both of us.”

“You told me Proper still had something up his sleeve, Captain — something about some spaces he didn’t search yet. Should I get him up here?”

“No,” Jones said. “Just give him Quinn’s keys. He knows what they’re for. Don’t want to see him again until he’s found this —” Again the Captain racked his brain for an expression he could freight with the contempt he felt for Sweet Reason. “This —” Again he failed to come up with one.

“About the leaflet,” the XO said, holding it toward the Captain. “What do you want me to do with it?”

But Jones had turned back to pick at the cold food in the compartmented tin tray on his desk.

Jones Catches Sight of Another Everyday Occurrence

“Now the Captain is on the bridge,” Ohm growled into the loudspeaker system, but the sound seemed to melt away in the wind whistling past the ship.

Squinting into the sunlight, which was hard and hurt his eyes, Captain Jones shuffled onto the open bridge. He usually wore sunglasses topside but he had forgotten them this time, and there were large white circles under his eyes where the sun hadn’t tanned the skin. He had abandoned his Adlers for green felt bedroom slippers, and the change left him several inches shorter. His khaki trousers were creased in all the wrong places and bagged at the knees. He wore a nonregulation gray sweater with brown leather elbow patches knit by an older sister who lived in Wichita. His eyes seemed to have difficulty focusing, his features still had the blurred quality of melted wax. As he bent over the starboard pelorus peering through the telescopic alidade at the carrier racing into the wind, he looked like an old man fumbling with a key in a lock.

“Congratulations, Captain,” de Bovenkamp called, saluting smartly with one hand and pressing his hat to his head with the other to keep it on in the wind. He had been waiting an hour for the Captain to come up on the bridge. “This is one heck of a red-letter day for you.”

His hair flying, Jones hissed at de Bovenkamp: “Must you chew that goddamn gum all the time?” Without waiting for an answer he shouted: “We’re four degrees off station. Supposed to be broad on the port beam of the carrier for flight operations. Who’s the Officer of the Deck?”

The faint whoosh-thump of the steam catapults echoed across the thousand yards of ocean that separated the giant
aircraft carrier from the
Ebersole
, and four F-4 Phantom jets leapt into the sky for a strike against the mainland.

“I am, Captain,” Lustig yelled.