The Caine Mutiny (47 page)

There was a long silence. “The son of a bitch kept me from seeing my brother,” Keefer said unsteadily. His eyes glared.

“That’s beside the point, Tom. If the old man’s sick in the head there’s nothing to be sore about.”

“True enough-I’ll-I’m with you, Steve.”

“Okay, Tom.” The exec jumped to the deck and offered his hand, looking up into Keefer’s eyes. The squat barrel-chested fisherman and the slender writer clasped hands. “Better put on a fresh uniform if you’ve got one,” Maryk said.

Keefer looked down at his grease-smeared clothes, and smiled. “That’s what happens when you go wriggling through magazines looking for a nonexistent key.”

Maryk was lathering his face when a radioman brought him a message. “TBS, sir. I knocked at the captain’s door and looked in but he seemed to be fast asleep-”

“I’ll take it.” The despatch read:
All ships Apra Harbor prepare to get under way not later than 1700. Task units will steam southward and maneuver to avoid typhoon Charlie approaching Guam
. Wiping his face wearily with a damp towel, the exec took his phone from the wall bracket and buzzed the captain several times. Queeg answered at last, and sleepily told him to get the ship ready for sea.

Keefer was in his underwear, shining his shoes when the exec came into his room and showed him the message. The novelist laughed and tossed. aside the shoebrush. “Reprieve.”

“Not for long. We do it first thing when we come back-”

“Sure, Steve, sure. I’m with you. But I’m not looking forward to it-”

“Neither am I.”

CHAPTER 28

A Visit to Halsey

For two days the
Caine
steamed through rain, gusty winds, and ugly cross-swelling seas, in a motley company of ships which had bustled out of Apra Harbor. The typhoon blew by, a hundred fifty miles to the north. On the third morning the sea subsided, and a temperate wind blew a gray drizzle over the water. The ships separated into two groups, one returning to Guam, the other proceeding to Ulithi; the
Caine
went in the screen of the Ulithi group.

Merely from the backwash of the storm, the old minesweeper and its crew had taken a miserable beating. The rolling and plunging had smashed dishes, chairs, bottles, and small instruments, had tumbled stores helter-skelter out of shelves in dirty heaps on the deck, had shipped water which sloshed about in the passageways, filthy brown, and had sprung leaks in many places of the rusty hull. Antennas were down, and a boat davit and both depth-charge racks were buckled. There had been no hot food for two days. The unwashed, hairy crew had slept for only minutes at a time in their gyrating bunks. Ulithi, sunny and green, its lagoon an azure mirror, looked like Paradise to the men of the
Caine
-on this particular arrival. They were accustomed to refer to it as a hole, with varying foul modifiers.

“Halsey’s here on the
New Jersey
,” said Maryk in a low voice to Keefer, on the port wing, as the
Caine
steamed into Mugai Channel. “It’s flying Sopus and a four-star flag.”

Keefer peered through binoculars at the new gray battleship riding to a slack anchor chain near the channel entrance. “We’re under Com Fifth, aren’t we?” he whispered. “We missed our chance at Guam. If we go back, well-”

Queeg, on the other wing, was shouting to the helm, “Steady as you go! I said steady, damn it! Don’t run down that channel buoy!”

The exec said, “Halsey’s good enough for me. It’s an emergency. We’ll go over there as soon as we drop the hook-”

“
Mister
Maryk,” called Queeg, “if you’ll be kind enough to give me my anchor bearings-”

The two officers sat in the stern sheets of the gig, staring at the myriad gray jellyfish which pullulated under the shining surface of the lagoon. Keefer smoked. Maryk beat a tattoo on the brown leather portfolio containing the medical log. The gig chugged placidly down-channel toward the imposing
New Jersey
, two miles away. “Sun’s too damn hot. Let’s get under the canopy,” said the novelist, flipping his cigarette into the water. “Just our luck,” he went on in a low voice, when they were settled on the cracked leather cushions, screened from the gig crew by the noise of the motor, “that he’s been so goddamned normal the past week.”

“Well, it’s been that way right along,” said the exec. “Some crazy thing, then a spell when he’s okay, then something even crazier.”

“I know. Steve, d’you suppose there’s a chance we’ll get sent up to Halsey himself?”

“I think maybe so. I don’t think Article 184 comes up every day-”

“I don’t know how I’ll like looking Halsey in the eye and telling him I’ve got a crazy captain.”

“I don’t like the idea of it much myself.”

“Fact is, Steve, Old Yellowstain handled the ship fairly well in the storm, you must admit that. Far be it from me to defend him, but what’s true is true-”

“Listen, for a sick man he did fine,” said the exec. “Only thing is, I never sleep good, waiting for him to go off his rocker again.”

“It’s amazing,” Keefer said, lighting another cigarette, “how cleverly these paranoids walk the narrow dividing line between outright lunacy and acts which can be logically explained. It’s their distinguishing characteristic. In fact, once grant their basic premise, which may only be out of phase with reality by thirty degrees or so-not necessarily a hundred eighty degrees-and everything they do becomes justifiable. Take Old Yellowstain. What is his basic premise? That everyone on the
Caine
is a liar, a traitor, and a funk-off, so that the ship can only function if he constantly nags and spies and threatens and screeches and hands out draconic punishments. Now, how do you go about proving that his premise is wrong?”

“You couldn’t ever prove it to him,” said Maryk. “That’s his sickness, isn’t it? But any outsider
knows
that there’s no ship with such a thoroughly no-good complement.”

“Well, let’s hope an outsider named Halsey figures it that way.”

After a while Keefer said, “Take that log of yours. Individually, every one of those items could be justified by Queeg. Stopping the movies for six months? Why not? Contempt of the CO is one of the worst offenses in the Navy book. Raising hell about shirttails? Commendable strictness regarding uniforms, unusual in a minesweeper captain. The water famine? Wise prudence, perhaps a bit too conservative, but right within doctrine, to avoid a shortage. How do you prove he was really taking revenge on the crew for Rabbitt’s escape? Luckily, when you add everything up, it becomes crystal-clear, but still-”

Clang, clang! The gig slowed, and Meatball shouted, “Coming alongside
New Jersey
gangway, Mr. Maryk!”

The two officers scrambled out on the gunwale. The vast flat steel wall of the battleship’s side confronted them. It towered like a skyscraper and stretched away, seemingly for blocks, on either side, hiding the atoll. Maryk leaped to the landing platform, a small square wooden grille bleached by salt water at the bottom of the steep gangway ladder. Keefer followed. “Lie off and wait for us,” the exec shouted to Meatball. They mounted the ladder, jingling the guys chains. The OOD was a short, round-faced lieutenant commander, gray at the temples, wearing a very clean, very starched khakis. Maryk asked for the location of the flag office. The OOD briskly gave him directions. The
Caine
officers left the quarterdeck and walked slowly aft, looking around at the majestic main deck of the
New Jersey
.

It was another world; and yet, somehow, the same world as the
Caine
, transfigured. They were on a forecastle, with anchor chains, wildcat, pelican hooks, and bitts, with ventilators and life lines. But the
New Jersey
’s pelican hook was as big as the
Caine
’s main guns; one link of the battleship’s anchor chain would have stretched across the minesweeper’s entire bow; and the main battery, the long, long cannons with their turrets, seemed bigger than the whole
Caine
. There were sailors and officers everywhere, the same crowd of blue and sprinkling of khaki, but the sailors were clean as Sunday-school boys, and the officers looked like their teachers, grown up and fussily neat. The great central citadel of bridge and stacks jutted out of the deck skyward, a pyramid of metal, nervous with anti-aircraft batteries and radars; the deck dwindled aft beyond it for hundreds of feet. The
New Jersey
was awesome. “I guess we go in here,” said Maryk. “Third door, starboard side, under the twin five-inch-”

“Okay,” said Keefer, with a glance upward at the towering bridge in the brilliant sunlight.

They threaded through cool dim immaculate passageways. “Here we are,” said Maryk. The black plastic plate on the green door read
Flag Lieutenant
. He put his hand on the knob.

Keefer said, “Steve, maybe this isn’t the right place to start-”

“Well, they’ll give us a steer, here, anyhow.” He opened the door. There was nobody in the long, narrow, desk-filled room but a lone sailor in whites, reading a rainbow-colored comic magazine under the fluorescent lamp of a desk at the far end. “Where’s the flag lieutenant, sailor?” Maryk called.

“Chow,” said the sailor, not looking up.

“When will he be back?”

“Dunno.”

“What’s his room number?”

The yeoman glanced up with languid curiosity. He was white-faced, like most yeomen, and he could yawn as widely as a tiger, like most yeomen. He demonstrated this accomplishment for the benefit of the
Caine
officers, and then said grumpily, “What’s it about?”

“Official business.”

“Well, whatever it is, you can leave it with me. I’ll take care of it.”

“No, thanks. What’s his room number?”

“Three eighty-four,” said the yeoman, with another huge red yawn, and turned back to the comic magazine, adding, “But he don’t like nobody bothering him in his room. You won’t get no favors that way.”

“Thanks for the tip,” said Maryk, closing the door. He looked up and down the passageway and began to walk aft. “Which way do you suppose is 384?”

“Steve.”

“Yes?”

“I think we ought to talk a little bit.”

Maryk stopped, and looked back at Keefer. The novelist was not following him. He was leaning with his back against the flag lieutenant’s door.

“What about?”

“Let’s go out on deck.”

“We don’t have a lot of time-”

“Come on. I see daylight down at the other end there.” Keefer hurried along the passageway and Maryk trudged after him. Rounding a comer into a shaft of sunlight, the novelist almost ran into a marine in full-dress uniform guarding a green-curtained doorway. The marine executed a salute with his rifle, and stared ahead glassily. Over the doorway the nameplate, decorated with four silver stars, read,
Admiral William F. Halsey, USN
.

Maryk grabbed Keefer’s elbow. “Flag quarters! How about barging in and taking our chances? The hell with the chain of command. If he’s here he’ll listen to us-”

Keefer pulled his arm free. “Come on outside a minute.” He led the exec to the rail. They stood in the shadow of the citadel, looking out over the blue crowded lagoon. The breeze, blowing aft from the sunbaked forecastle, was hot and damp. “Steve,” said the novelist, “I’m getting cold on this deal.”

Maryk stared at him.

“You would be, too, if you had any imagination. Can’t you feel the difference between the
New Jersey
and the
Caine
? This is the Navy, here, the real Navy. Our ship is a floating booby hatch. Everybody’s Asiatic on the
Caine
, and you and I must be the worst of all, to think we could get away with pulling Article 184 on Queeg. Steve, they’ll ruin us. We haven’t got a chance. Let’s get out of here-”

“What the hell, Tom! I don’t understand you. What’s the
New Jersey
got to do with it? Is the captain nuts or isn’t he?”

“He’s nuts, of course he is, but-”

“Then what the hell is there to be afraid of? We’ve
got
to tell the highest available authority-”

“It won’t stick, Steve. We haven’t got enough on him. When this damn war is over I’m going to be a scribbler again, same as before. But you want to stay in the Navy, don’t you? You’ll smash yourself, Steve, against a stone wall. You’ll be finished in the Navy forever. And Queeg will go right on commanding the
Caine
-”

“Tom, you said yourself my log on Queeg nailed him down-”

“Sure, I thought so-on the
Caine
. It does, too. It would, for a competent psychiatrist. But we’ve got to tell it to the Navy, not a psychiatrist. That’s what I’m waking up to. Don’t you know the state of mind of these benighted bastards by now? Sure, they can conn ships, and fight, but their minds are back in the feudal system! What the hell does Halsey know or care about paranoia? He’ll think we’re a couple of goddamn mutinous reserves. Have you read those articles carefully? ‘Action under this article involves the most serious possibilities ...’
Mutiny
, that’s what it involves-”

Maryk, squinting and scratching his head, said, “Well, I’m willing to take the chance. I can’t go on steaming around with a skipper who I think is crazy-”

“That’s by your standards. By Navy standards, for all you know, he’s still a commendable disciplinarian-”

“Oh, Jesus, Tom. Turning the ship upside down for a key that never existed-cutting off the water for days at the equator-running away from shore batteries-”

“All those things can be taken two ways. Steve, for Christ’s sake listen to me and wait. Maybe in a week or two he’ll go absolutely ga-ga. If he starts galloping around the decks naked or seeing ghosts or something we’ve really got him-and it can happen any time-”

“I think we’ve got him now-”

“I don’t. I’ve changed my mind, Steve. If you think I’m crawfishing, I’m sorry. I’m really doing you the greatest favor of your life.”

“Tom, let’s go and try to see Halsey-”

“I won’t go with you, Steve. You’ll have to do it alone.”

Maryk wet his lips, and grimaced at Keefer for a long moment. The novelist faced him, his jaw muscles trembling slightly. “Tom,” said Maryk, “you’re scared, aren’t you?”