The Edge of Honor (27 page)

“And he gives nobody trouble,” Folsom added. “You figure, a deck ape that can’t talk can’t give anybody any lip, either. It’s just that he couldn’t really function very well by himself in the division. He wanders off. Shit, we’d find him wandering all over the ship. Guys’d call us on the phone, tell us to come get our dummy. Still does it. He needed a keeper.”

“Enter Hooper, I suppose,” Brian said.

“Oh, yes indeedy, enter Hooper. Came aboard in the same batch as Coltrane. Like I said, he thinks he’s a wise guy doing a sabbatical in the Navy. Tells all these incredible stories about Guido the Gutter and Manny the Mouth, you know, goombah stuff. Perfect little con man and artful dodger, always on the make for some angle or another, has shirking down to an art form. Total pain in the ass, and headed for an admin discharge.”

“Until we stuck him with Coltrane on side cleanin’,” continued the chief. “See, in port, cause a what they gotta do, side cleaners don’t stand duty, so they get liberty every night. It’s a shitty job, but it comes with this really good deal. Hooper went right for it, until we told him he had to take care of Coltrane, make sure he got fed and cleaned himself up, keep him from wandering away, and work the sides with him.”

“Hooper fight the program?” asked Brian.

Folsom chuckled. “Yeah, he objected, but then we sent him on a tour of the fire rooms as a possible alternative, and he decided Coltrane and side cleaning was better.”

“So now he bosses poor Coltrane around, who loves it, I guess, and the two of them keep the sides cleaned.

Wow.”

“When Hooper ain’t getting’ ‘em into some kind bullshit scam or another,” the chief said. “Coltrane, he goes adrift from time to time, anytime Hooper ain’t with him.

But he’s okay, you know, harmless. Not like that fuckin’ Hooper.

Especially when he gets inta the firewater on the beach.”

Brian now watched the side cleaners disappear down the forecastle hatch, shaking his head at the sight. Martinez nodded his massive head up and down amiably, as if to say that even Coltrane and Hooper had a place.

They stood in silence for a few minutes, absorbing the horizon, the chief waiting to see what it was his department head wanted to talk about.

“Chief,” Brian said finally.

“Yeah, boss?”

“You said a while ago we needed to talk—about this drug stuff. I had a little talk with the chief engineer, and I have to tell you, I’m really not too comfortable with … well, with the way we handle drug problems in this ship.”

The chief looked down at the deck but kept silent, giving Brian time to frame what he wanted to say.

“I guess what I mean is, I understand all the departments have the problem, that the dopers aren’t confined to Engineering. I also understand what happens if we bust each and every guy we find using or carrying or otherwise dirty—that we run out of bodies pretty quick.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But … well, I guess it’s what we’re doing to ‘em when we do catch ‘em. And I’ve heard that you play a big part in that. Like what happened to that guy Gallagher—his hand being broken.”

“That was an accident, way I heard it,” said the chief.

Brian looked sideways at the chief’s impassive face, wondering how far he was going to get with this. Then he looked around. The nearest people were fifty feet away.

He decided to let it all hang out.

“Well, Chief, way
heard it, Gallagher hid out in Two Fire room until the engineer finally threw him out of there, and then he had his accident. And the way I hear that it goes down is that a certain large CPO, namely you, with maybe some help from the Sheriff and a couple of other CPOs, get the nod from the XO to administer some fairly direct justice to any shitbird who gets cocky about using drugs.”p>

The chief remained silent, his black eyes seemingly fixed on the horizon. Brian had to turn his head up to see the chief’s face. A lone seagull glided by, headed aft to search the wake for treasures from the garbage chute.

“Now, I’m not asking you to confirm or deny any of this. And please believe me when I say I can see the justice of it, especially when our hands are somewhat tied by the system. I think a guy who uses drugs aboard ship, or booze for that matter, puts all of his shipmates in danger, not to mention the ship. I’d hate to think of what might happen if the North Vietnamese ever tried us on and some people up in Combat were spaced-out when they came at us. But that’s not what’s bugging me.”

The chief said nothing. Brian, still wondering whether he was making a mistake, continued anyway.

“My problem is twofold: First, when we catch a guy doing the crime, and we aren’t handling the case regulation Navy. We, or you, kick his ass instead, and by doing so, we put ourselves in jeopardy. I mean, we both know it’s illegal for an officer or a CPO to beat up someone junior to him. In other words, we’re getting down on the level of the bad guy by answering a crime with a crime.”

The chief nodded slowly, still not looking at Brian. An air-driven needle gun began to rattle and buzz behind them.

“The second problem I have with it is that I’m not sure we keep the guy from doing dope again, because all we’ve done is to reinforce what he already knew: You get caught, you’re gonna pay for it. Now I’ll admit, this guy, this snipe, Gallagher, was pretty blatant about it. The ship’s at GQ, and he’s flyin’ in the purple haze. So now he’s had his little ‘accident.’ Is he going to stop doing dope? It seems to me that he’s gonna be a lot more careful about when and where he smokes his next joint.

And maybe from now on, it’ll only be after the midwatch, when he’s got six hours of rack time before his next watch. But if that’s true, the next time GQ goes, say, maybe when the guy’s off watch, we can still get Gallagher the space cadet again when the action goes down.

You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, you want to know, what’s my fix. Well, my fix is you bring ‘em to captain’s mast, throw the book at ‘em, and give them a BCD or one of these new ‘other than honorable’ discharges, and then you throw the bastards out. Yes, it might get shorthanded around here, but at least then you know that the guys who’ve left aren’t gonna show up drugged on duty when you call away GQ in the middle of the night.”

The chief stared down at his boots for a moment. He finished his coffee, crumpled the paper cup into a tight little ball, and pitched it over the side. He turned to put his back to the lifelines and looked sideways and down at Brian.

“No you don’t, Mr. Holcomb.”

“Don’t what, Chief?”

“You don’t know nothin’ about the guys you ain’t caught yet, ‘cept’n you ain’t caught ‘em yet. This engineer, this Gallagher wipe? I’ll tell you what I know about his young ass: I know he knows, we catch him again, he’s gonna get his back broke. He’s gonna have trainin’ wheels for legs and go around in fuckin’ diapers the resta his life. The only hard thing ‘neath his belt he’ll ever know about’ll be the fuckin’ wheelchair they roll his ass around in, sittin’ in a pile his own shit. I see Gallagher every fuckin’ day. Go outta my way to see him, I hafta. I look at him, he gets reminded. An’ the guy who Gallagher buys from, or usta buy from, he goes around to see his old customer, Gallagher, and Gallagher, he gets this white-eye sorta look about him, says, ‘No more, man, no thank you very fuckin’ much. See, I done got me some religion.’ That’s what I know about Gallagher, ‘cause we had this little talk, me’n him. An’ I ain’t worried about doin’ crime, ‘cause the dopers, they started it, see? They don’t do no dope, I don’t hafta stomp their nuts.”

“So you’re telling me that everybody who’s been caught and, uh, talked to is now a born-again Christian?”

The chief grinned. “I don’t know about no Christians, boss. Me, I’m just a three-quarter-breed Injun, remember?

A Christian was something my people staked out over an anthill with a little honey in their eyes and ears.”

He grinned again, as if momentarily relishing a memory.

“But these guys I talk to, they believe. Me, Jackson, and, yeah, some a the other guys in the goat locker, we make sure they believe. Your way, well, it just won’t work, not hi this ship. ‘Cause a two things.”

“But my way gets rid of the dopers, gets ‘em off the ship.”

“And then we jist get some more. Yeah, it takes a little while, but then the Bureau, they send replacements, and you jist end up with more dopers, only now you don’t know who they are. You gotta find the little fucks all over again. Look, these fuckin’ kids nowadays, they do dope like you’n me did cigarettes and beer after school, we wuz growin’ up. I mean, what kid likes ta smoke, huh?

And beer, beer don’t taste no good till you get a taste for the alky in it. You and me, we did it ‘cause it wasn’t legal, ‘cause it was ba-a-a-d, an all the teachers and your momma and poppa said it was ba-a-a-d. Nowadays, beer and cigarettes, that’s pussy stuff. That’s what the fuckin’ girls do, when they ain’t paradin’ their little asses in them miniskirts and then getting’ all pissed-off, some guy sees then-Skivvies. Guys, nowadays, they go get some dope.

Whadda they know: Guy’s onna TV sayin’ it’s no different from cigarettes or booze, the longhair rock’n’roll millionaires doirt’ it on stage, the college kids all doin’ it, it’s all jist some chemical shit, so why not do it? See, it jist cops and robbers; they don’t see nothin’ bad in it.”

He stared over at two men who had stopped working, precipitating instant industry.

“That’s the first thing. So our way, we find out who the dopers are and we squeeze ‘em a little. They keep it up, we squeeze ‘em some more, only harder. Shit, I tell ‘em, I let ‘em hear me sayin’ it, guy can fall over the side real easy, he ain’t careful, an’ it’s a bitch to swim with broke arms. They get the fuckin’ message. Our way, we know what’s what and who’s who. And we hafta do it this way, ‘cause a the second thing.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, this command ain’t gonna let you bring a buncha guys up to mast and run up a buncha admin discharges. Makes the ship look bad, makes the command look bad.”

“Yeah, I know, and we end up standing watches port and report.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t it; the main bang is that the word gets around, Hood’s got a real bad drug problem, they’ll yank this CO off a here, send in some hotshot whose sweat pumps are runnin’ on max, and life in the ole Hood-mam turns to shit.”

Brian thought about that for a moment. “Okay, I can see that, but it seems to me like we’re betting on the come here, big time. Long as nothing happens, no big deal in the middle of the night, no sneak attack, no local Pearl Harbors, we might pull it off, keep a lid on it.

Seems to me the captain ought to be thinking about the chances he’s taking.”

The chief shook his head. “I ain’t gonna argue that, Mr. Holcomb. Yer talkin’ the way it oughta be done, regular Navy, like the regs say. But me, the resta the chiefs, we been going’ to sea long enough to know that you take the captains as they come. You gotta make do with what you get, and we got an Old Man now who don’t bust chops, who don’t dump on the crew with a buncha mickey mouse. Hell, he’s an old guy, served in Korea, okay? Wears a Navy Cross for saving a ship when he deep-sixed some kinda bomb or something’. Way I hear it, he don’t even believe this dope shit’s really going’ on.

Yeah, maybe he don’t wanna know; maybe he’s got other reasons. But that’s what we got. And we got an XO who wants maybe to do it the right way, maybe not, but you know how it is, it ain’t his ship. So we all do the best we can. You think you can go in, siddown with this Old Man, make him see what’s going’ on, shit, you go do it. Chiefs’d love it.”

“You think that would do some good, Chief?”

“No, sir.”

“Terrific.”

It was Brian’s turn to stare silently over the lifelines.

He felt that the chief’s logic was simplistic but probably realistic.

The subtleties of what was legal and illegal and all the theories on what constituted professional good order and discipline were irrelevant to the likes of Chief Martinez. Brian understood that military discipline ultimately depended on the willingness of subordinates, from admirals to seamen recruits, to be disciplined in the first place. The drug culture disavowed that notion.

And yet, he still didn’t buy it entirely. He tried another tack. “If your way works so well, how come we had an incident like the other day, when one shithead, this guy—what’s his name—Gallagher brought the whole ship dead in the water?”

“That’s what’s really bad about the dope, Mr. Hoi comb. Unless you got some kinda antidope program going’, the only way you usually catch these assholes is when they fuck up something’ really important. And there’s another thing: We chiefs got this kinda code here—you don’t go really stompin’ in a guy’s shit for dope less’n you catch his ass us in’ or carryin’. I mean, suspicion don’t cut it, see? Hell, we’d hafta kick all their asses, we did it on suspicion. The chief BT, and Mr. Ames, too, he’s the B divvo, they kinda thought Gallagher was dirty. But nobody could catch his ass till he fucked up public like. Now, everybody gets the message, see? You go fuckin’ up big time like that, something’ bad’s gonna happen. Not no admin discharge, not some piece a paper, but something’ bad, like a bad broke hand. Even the wardroom knows. Now, maybe some guys thinkin’ about buyin’ a little reefer, maybe now they thinkin’ they better not.”

Brian finished his own coffee and pitched the paper cup over the side.

He wasn’t sure where to go from here.

He wanted. the chief’s respect and did not want to sound like some kind of liberal do-gooder or by-the-book pussy.

He also wanted to be part of the ‘good guy’ element in the ship, to be on the inside, since there was obviously an insiders’ operation going on here with respect to the dopers. The chiefs could not get away with their vigilante system unless they were protected and even encouraged by at least the executive officer, if not by the captain himself. But he sensed the flaw in the Hood’s system.

They ought not to be just sitting around, waiting for a drug user to show himself; they ought to be in hot pursuit of the whole druggie organization—there had to be one.