The Circle (19 page)

“Hand it over, man. It won't be near as lonely with somebody to talk to now.”

He was almost to his stateroom, every nerve and muscle yearning for his rack, when he saw a small figure in khaki turn the corner ahead of him. He hesitated, then went on.

Norden was holding the door open, his head inside. “Looking for me, sir?” Dan said.

“The commander wants to see us.”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

“Both of us?”

“Yeah, both of us. Why else would I be here? You just get off?”

“Right.”

“How's Al holding up? Never mind, he'll give me a buzz when he gets tired. Better change that shirt. What is that? Coffee?”

“I'll be right out.”

They knocked at the XO's door. “Come in,” Bryce called. He sounded annoyed.

Lenson followed Norden in. The room was just as he'd seen it the first day he came aboard, except that the desk was bare now, and the silver urn had a shock cord clamping it to the bulkhead. Cigarette smoke hazed the hot air. “Sit down,” said Bryce, nodding to the settee.

“Thank you, sir.”

“So,” said the XO, tilting back in his chair. “Dan, you run into any more trouble out on deck?”

“No, sir.”

“How's everything with First Division, eh?”

“We're keeping them at work,” said Norden, a little shortly, Dan thought.

“Are you?”

No one said anything. At last, Bryce took out another Camel and charred the end with his Zippo. “Cigar, Dan?”

“No thanks, sir, one of those was enough.”

Bryce chuckled, then stopped. “You're keeping them at work. Doin' what? Ship looks like nigger heaven. It's rusty, it's dirty, I find butts in the corners. The forward head makes me sick to go in there.”

“We're above the Arctic Circle, sir,” said Norden, sounding tired. “Have you been topside? We're taking spray on the signal bridge. It's too rough and too cold to paint and preserve.”

“I understand that,
Mr.
Norden. And I
have
been on deck today. I make a tour daily, you know! I'm talking about the internal spaces! What about them?”

Dan cleared his throat. “Sir, we finished the paint-out on the transverse passageway, and cleaned out the flammable stowage locker. We've cleared and inventoried the bos'n's locker and we're catching up on interior maintenance. It's hard to keep things shipshape in weather like this.”

“Nonsense, Ensign. Rich, do you buy this no-can-do song and dance? It's not that hard to keep a destroyer clean and well preserved. I've done it. You all just got to attend to detail, detail, and don't let the men dope off so much. I was on the mess decks a few minutes ago and I counted four deck apes sitting there over coffee, Pettus and Coffey and two others, smoking and joking and scratching their asses, not one of them in the spaces doing a job of work.”

“They just got off watch, sir. They were probably warming up.”

“Sir, you've got a point, but Dan's right, too. I was on a new
Knox
-class my first tour. We managed with about the same number of men we have in First Division now. But you can't keep an old ship in the same shape unless you're pierside twenty-five days a month. Right now it may not look like much is going on. But when we get back into better weather, the men'll be topside again. Believe me, nobody's loafing.”

Bryce leaned back, sucking exhaled smoke back into his nostrils, then breathing it out in a rush. He took a comb from his pocket and drew it through his hair. He patted it down carefully. Then he leaned forward, wedged the cigarette firmly in the shell-base tray, and slid open his desk drawer. He came out with a wrinkled pack of Kools and a penknife. He tapped them out under their eyes. Then he unfolded the penknife and slit one of the cigarettes in half and shook the contents out onto the desk.

Dan leaned forward, examining the brownish green flakes. “What is that there, Mr. Lenson?” Bryce asked him. “What would you say that is, exactly?”

“I'm not sure, sir.”

“Don't play dumb with me! You know what marijuana is!”

“I've never seen any before, sir.”

“Where'd you find this, sir?” asked Norden.

“
I
didn't find it, goddamn it. Jimmy John did. In forward berthing, up in the overhead. I don't know what he was doing in there. My job, to do the messing and berthing inspections—”

“Lots of people bunk there, sir. Not just First Division.” Dan heard anger in his voice, but he couldn't erase it; he was too tired for circumspection. “I don't think it's right just to assume—”

“Don't tell me what to ‘assume,' Mr. Lenson. That highfalutin Canoe Club bullshit don't go with me! Rich, you'd better talk some sense into your bright boy here. Either he's not keeping proper tabs on his division or he's smoking rope right along with them.”

Dan leaned forward, his mouth open to speak, but suddenly the curtain came down. He was two people, one enraged, the other empty, a cold, detached onlooker. He pressed his trembling hands down on his legs. The silence endured, broken only by the hissing boom of a sea on the far side of a quarter inch of steel, a clicking scrape as the penknife skittered along the desktop, scattering grains over the gray-green carpet.

“You boys better find out who belongs to this. Hear me? Get me somebody to hang. Or else get real used to your rank, because after your next fitness report, you'll be in it till you retire. Remember, when push comes to shove, I got a jack in my pocket.” Bryce patted his flushed scalp again. “That understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said Norden. “I'll have Mr. Lenson begin the investigation immediately.” He stood, and after a moment, Dan did, too. Part of him didn't want to. It wanted to punch the grinning mouth across from him. But that part didn't have control. He couldn't afford to let it have control.

“Thanks, Rich.” A sneer edged Bryce's drawl. “Glad you're seeing this my way.”

As the door swung closed, the last thing he saw was the executive officer, smiling down at the evidence with secretive delight.

9

OH-FIVE hundred. He lay with one arm wrapped around an angle iron, the other dangling over the bunk edge. Against his cheek, the pillow was damp and hot.

The sea and wind had risen steadily all night. Around him, the steel body born before his flesh screamed and banged as the sea racked it. The groans of twisting stringers and the pistol shots of riveted joints working mingled with the roar of water against thin plating.

There's something bad on its way, he thought, staring at the motionless hands of his clock, mysteriously luminous, like cats' eyes closed to slits.

During the midwatch, he'd pulled the
Sailing Directions for the Arctic Ocean
off the chart-room shelf. His mind was so accustomed to memorization that now he could recall it. “The navigable waters of the Denmark Strait, the east Greenland, Norwegian and southern Barents sea are subjected to a barrage of NE-moving extratropical storms with their attendant problems of strong winds, high seas, poor visibilities and frequent precipitation.… Winter's arrival is heralded by increasing darkness, frequent and intense storms, and ice-choked waters … the Icelandic lows … raging, migratory storms that roam the periphery of the arctic regions.”

Yet how many waves, how many storms had
Ryan
endured? This was no easy weather, but he understood a hurricane, from a combination of Nathaniel Bowditch and Herman Wouk, to be much worse; and she must have lived through them, in the Western Pacific.

How many men had she carried away from their loved ones, and after long voyaging brought home again? Time had swept her sisters from the seas. Grounded, capsized, lost to enemy action. But
Ryan
had come through it all. She'd go quietly, as ships went, though her end in a wrecker's yard would be as noisy as her birth.

That end could not now be so many years off.

The old destroyer rolled like a stout woman doing the polka, then slammed so heavily the clock jumped free and clattered away into the dark. He slid sideways, fetching up against the line he'd rigged to hold himself in. How much margin had those wartime builders allowed in her frames and longitudinals? More to the point, how much was left after thirty years of rust, sandblasting, rust again? In the hot dark, a thread of light showed where the doorjamb had warped away from the bulkhead. His hand plucked restlessly across his chest through hair and sweat. He couldn't sleep, so he lay listening, and his mind moved relentlessly on.

He'd started his investigation the evening before in the berthing space. The men watched him sullenly from their racks as he prowled about with Chief Hopper,
Ryan
's slow old master-at-arms. The beam in the overhead where the exec had found the marijuana was bare. He interviewed the men whose bunks were nearest it, fire controlmen from G Division. They shrugged and looked away as he questioned them. He checked the rest of the overhead, scrambling from top bunk to top bunk, probing cable runs and sheet-metal ductwork with a flashlight. He found dust, dead insects, and fuck books, curled yellow pages worn translucent by dozens of readers. He talked to the compartment cleaners, Higgins and Roseman. They were ignorant of where the grass had come from or whose it was. Or so they swore, and though there was no way to be sure, he believed them.

Screw this, he thought at last. Dirty, disgusted, he wondered for a moment whether Bryce had put the grass there himself. Then he scowled. That made a lot of sense, all right.

When he'd gotten back to the bridge at midnight, Silver told him the southerly swell was building and the barometer was dropping fast. The wind had veered easterly and was gusting to fifty knots, and twice the dark sky had opened for driving sleet that stuck to the wiper blades and did not melt. Packer had adjusted the racetrack, but even two miles downwind felt like forever. The breaking rollers battered at the ship like karate experts breaking bricks. The southwest leg was getting rougher, too, as the southerly swells rose, and the two patterns merged at times to create seas Dan no longer enjoyed watching. At 0230, after steering reported taking water through the overhead, not serious, but not good news. Talliaferro had called the bridge at 0300 to report one of the bilge pumps out, but the machinists had gotten it back on-line before Dan went off at four.

And now it was 0500. Reveille in an hour, and it'd start all over again. Christ, he thought, if only I could sleep. But each time his consciousness began to unravel the ship slammed him into the bulkhead, or hung him, restrained only by the safety line, above a twelve-foot drop to the deck.

He hugged his pillow to the hot skin of his chest and imagined it was her. Without wanting to, he remembered her delicate yielding, a half-reluctant turning away of the head as he moved, delighting in the way her hips followed his, unable to resist.…

He struggled briefly with temptation, then yielded. He tried to call back her memory, her presence, her scent, as his hand moved beneath the sweaty sheet.

They'd left the Yard late on Friday, escaping on the weekend he'd earned from a cross-country second against Virginia Tech. The instant her scarab green VW left the gate, he tore off his cap, threw it in back, and started unbuttoning his clothes.

“What are you doing?”

“Civvies! I'm a civilian!”

“Took you long enough.” But he was already pulling a knit shirt over his head, struggling to get his pants over his ankles. Shorts. Sandals! Miller time! He threw the sweaty uniform into the back, clawed an icy can out of the cooler, and dipped his head below the dashboard to drain half of it in one gulp.

“Let me have a sip. So, what's the surprise? Where are we going?”

“New Carrollton, on the Beltway. Keep going out this road, then we'll take Route Fifty. I got a reservation.”

“A motel? Dan—”

“Where'd you think we were going?” He stared at her. She drove with her lips pressed together, hair curled round her neck. He flipped it up and laid the bottom of the can against her nape.

“Jesus! Dan, stop it!” She pulled the car back onto the road.

“Sorry.” He kissed her shoulder blade. “It'll be okay. As long as I'm out of uniform, they can't tell I'm a mid.”

“I'm not worried about that. Is it downtown? What if one of my teachers sees us?”

“Come off it, Betts. Moira knew what we were doing when you snuck me into your dorm.”

“Maybe I shouldn't have.”

“Well, what do you want? Separate rooms?”

She didn't answer, and he sighed, playing with her hair. Some instinct warned him to leave it alone. He hadn't known her long, but he suspected that under what he thought of as her Chinese-American submissiveness there lurked a temper.

After several miles of silence, she began talking about her physical anthropology class. She wanted to be an archaeologist. That disturbed him a little, at some level he could not articulate, but he said nothing. There was plenty of time.

When they reached New Carrollton, he went into the lobby while she parked. The man behind the counter wore a flesh-toned hearing aid clipped to his glasses.

“Hi. I reserved a double.”

“Name?”

“Lenson, Daniel.”

“Lenson with an
L.
Yep, got you right here. Mr. and Mrs.?”

He'd anticipated the question, and thought about what he'd answer. The problem was the honor code. This close to the end, two months before graduation, he wasn't taking any chances. “No,” he said.

The old man examined him, gaze lingering around the ears. But he said only, “Military rate?”

“No … well … okay, I guess so.”

“Here's your key. Pool's through the gate there, ice on the second floor. Checkout's at twelve.”

He was in, free and clear. He grinned at himself in a mirror when the clerk turned away. You monster, he told his reflection. You despoiler of women.