The Last Ship (5 page)

There was no doubt in my mind that she possessed as something close to an absolute both the desire and the determination to get what she wanted. I had often felt this trait carried to her degree to be the very engine force of those possessing it; further felt it to be the Jekyll-and-Hyde of human personality characteristics: inherent in it, its accompanying drive capable of producing either the greatest good for others or the greatest harm. So far at least we had been beneficiaries of the former. And something else: However little exercised it was to date, I would have been disappointed if my judgment that she had something of the bitch in her was in error. I spoke of presentiments: In our daily sessions of late there had entered, though but now and then, a curious and puzzling tension, inexact as to source, clothed in a penumbra seeming to hang in the air; emerging, faintly disturbing, as if forerunner to . . . yes, I should say, to a testing of wills. Over what? That deeply submerged, unresolved, not yet even spoken, matter of the women? Or something else? I cannot know. It is at these moments—they are hardly more than that, seeming to pass as swiftly as they arise—that I seem to sense the presence of another quality: a considerable willingness for power; a lack of hesitation at outright ruthlessness to acquire it and apply it with maximum force should opportune circumstances present themselves and she in her view find it necessary. And then a thought that startled me: The reason I recognize that secluded strain of ruthlessness in Lieutenant Girard is that I have acquired it myself; we would not be here today had I not.

“Three hundred and ten men’s skivvies,” she finished up crisply, and turned back facing me.

“What’s the drill on issuing these items, Lieutenant?”

“As requested by hands, sir.” She had not missed a beat.

“Well, cease and desist on that. Henceforth I want to see a rationing schedule. A tough one.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

“Some of it isn’t very practical in present latitudes.”

“No, sir. All dress blues. The men would suffocate in them.”

This was the blue woolen uniform worn in cold parallels; from our Barents duty, along with much other heavy-weather gear. “Men,” in this context shipboard, as in others, along with most pronouns and possessives, meant women as well. “Persons” and similar degeneracies in speech, the Navy, with its ancient respect for language, found impossible to assimilate; radarwoman, sonarperson, helmsgirl: wisely the Navy steered away from this nonsense. It might have caused ships to collide, have ended up foundering the fleet. I never heard the women complain about it.

“They scratch,” said Talley.

“Storekeeper Talley puts the matter clearly, sir. Possibly we could alter and adapt it in some way,” Lieutenant Girard said. “Shall I see what I can come up with?”

“By all means, Lieutenant.”

Suddenly, a shot out of nowhere square into the mind, came Selmon’s admonition: the possibility, however remote, of a forced return to cold latitudes. I said nothing of this. I did say, “Put the actual alterations on hold.”

“Aye, sir,” she said without suspicion. “No point in doing them until present clothing runs out. With proper care that shouldn’t be for some while. I’ll recalculate for present latitude.” She waited a moment. “If we’re stopping here.”

I cannot say if the last was a fishing expedition. Knowing Girard, I hardly thought so. In any event I ignored it.

“Yes, do these calculations, if you will.”

“We don’t need to wear much around here,” Storekeeper Talley said. “That’s for sure.”

I looked at Lieutenant Girard. I thought her eyes rolled.

“Until you do,” I said, “cease issuing all clothing. If someone asks for a new pair of pants—or pantyhose—lend him a sewing kit.
Lend.
Get it signed for.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m wearing mended pantyhose right now,” Storekeeper Talley said.

“Belay it, Talley.”

“Aye, ma’m.”

“Can we get on with it?” I said.

Through another door and we were in the ship’s store storeroom containing toiletries and so-called “crew comfort” items. Again on shelves reaching from deck to overhead the stacked cases stood. Again Girard sounded them out.

“Toothpaste . . . Toothbrushes . . . Bath soap . . . Razors . . . Razor blades . . .” A step. “Lipstick . . . Rouge . . . Mascara . . . Tampax . . .”

“Duration time?” I said.

“It’ll be much shorter, sir. First to go will be the soap.”

“Then let’s start. Right now. On all of this. The tightest rations possible.”

“Aye, sir.”

I looked over at the shelves of cigarette cartons. We had gone over that list.

“Starting now,” I said, “the cigarette ration will be one pack a week.”

“One pack, sir?” Lieutenant Girard said.

“And no new smokers. At that ration, how long will the cigarettes hold out?”

She flipped through the clipboard. “Four months, sir. More or less. I’ll get you a more precise figure.”

We stepped back into the passageway. Tally opened a locker. Neatly arranged on shelves in battened racks to secure them in high seas was what sports equipment we had: a half dozen footballs, a dozen baseballs, a half dozen baseball bats, a catcher’s mask, three volleyballs and a net and stanchions for it. Only the footballs appeared used.

“When’s the next touch football game, sir?” the storekeeper said brightly.

“We’re all aware you’re the ship’s star, Talley.” Which happened to be the truth.

“That’s for sure.” The smallest pause. “Since you say so, sir.”

We proceeded up to the first deck and the ship’s library. I regarded the shelves for a few moments, in a way I had not extended to the other stores. There it was. There they sat. An assortment of fiction and nonfiction, from a standard list. Some of the names surprised me. I skimmed the authors. We had not done badly.

“The Navy did pretty well by us,” I said.

“They give you a choice,” Girard said. “The Navy can be flexible, sir.”

“Is that a fact, Lieutenant? I’m delighted to learn about the Navy’s flexibility.”

“What I meant, sir,” briskly, “was that they do supply a list. Then they give you what’s called an optional choice. Up to five hundred volumes.”

“You’re saying you picked five hundred of these? I didn’t realize that anything went on aboard this ship involving a figure of five hundred that the captain was unaware of.”

“I felt it was an authority you would have wished delegated, sir.”

“I never had the opportunity to delegate, did I, Lieutenant? Well, I suppose you acted within your authority.”

“I thought so, sir.”

I looked at her. No sarcasm. She never really used that. Merely getting the facts out. Altogether 985 books. Not a bad figure, and the quality quite high. We were very fortunate. I felt consolation. In addition, fifty complete Bibles. One hundred New Testaments, half of these red-letter versions for the words of Christ. Two copies of the Talmud. One hundred copies of the Army and Navy Hymnal and Order of Worship, all about exactly how to do it for Catholics, Protestants, Jews—by, in our case, one chaplain. Then I looked toward the overhead and a light came on in me. Parked on a long upper shelf was a complete set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I riffled it with my fingers, stopped at one—HERMOUP-LALLY.

“These,” I said, touching them. “I want the entire set put under lock and key.”

She looked at me a moment, as though she might ask.

“Will do, sir,” was all she said.

Here also were our music tapes—316 of them, it turned out. Not bad at all. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. We had Handel’s
Messiah.
Rock, jazz, country, folk. The Beatles. Woody Guthrie. Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston. I wondered but did not ask whether a portion of these had also been selected by Lieutenant Girard, or all by the Navy. Also 500 videocassettes of American movies. Also our stores of paper and pens were here and my eyes drilled in on these with a special intensity, mind thoughtful, waiting in the stillness. Five dozen reams of 20-pound bond. Thirty thousand sheets of paper. One hundred dozen-sized boxes of ballpoints.

“Cease at once issuing paper and pens,” I said, for some reason a bit sharply, to Girard. “To anyone. For any purpose.”

“Aye, sir.”

Six spare typewriters; 192 typewriter ribbons.

“What’s the shelf life of these, would you say, Talley?”

“For a guess, sir, five years.”

Five years: I made a mental note. We had finished.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said. “Talley.” And added, meaning it: “In particular, for the anticipation you’ve shown.”

“I’ll get with the projections,” the lieutenant said smartly. “More accurate ones. How long each specific item will last. Now that we’re here. You should have them by zero eight hundred tomorrow. Will that do, Captain?”

“That’ll do just fine, Lieutenant.”

“Come along, Talley. We’ve got work.”

“Aye, ma’m. That’s for sure.”

 *  *  * 

Just lately the first fringes of gray had begun to appear on the doctor’s temples, rather suddenly. He lit a cigarette.

“That’s it, Skipper,” he said, handing it over. “Complete. Not exactly Bethesda Naval. But we’re pretty well fixed.”

Now I studied the list I had told him to have ready. Penicillin. Tetracycline. Aspirin. Maybe sixty other medicines. Shots for every disease conquered by man. Typhus, tetanus, typhoid. Plague. The narcotics, resident in a combination safe I could see on the bulkhead beyond him. The sick-bay medicines suffused the air around us in an odor of antisepsis. I had shut the door.

I tipped back in my chair. “The men, Doc. Would they be okay working here? Just a professional opinion. Any medical land mines I’m missing that you picked up?”

On my instruction he had been on the island starting at first light, applying his keen eye to it.

“Too early to tell completely, of course. I’d say we could have come out on far worse places. Fresh water. Not many colds, bronchial problems, on this parallel. We’re well stocked. We’ve got enough penicillin to wipe out syphilis and clap in the Seventh Fleet. Of course we had in mind Alexandria, Port Lyautey, and
bella Napoli.
It’s one plague we shouldn’t have to worry about here. I should have specialized in tropical diseases. Not that the surroundings don’t look healthy enough,” he added quickly. “Nothing I saw that seemed to attack health directly—given the usual precautions. I suppose it depends on whether we’re talking long-term or short-term.”

Yes. Well, not even the doc was going to get it out of me. “It isn’t just the usual hard work,” I said. “In that sun. Stoop labor. That’s the operable phrase. You know about it?”

“Well, I’m a city boy, of course. I may have seen a farm once flying over it. But yes, I comprehend.”

“So?”

“Equator sun,” he said. “It can fry a man and bake his brains. But we can protect against that. To a degree. It’s more, well, enervation at one end of that spectrum; at the other, dizzy spells, prostration, maybe worse. Especially the shape these men are in. They’ve been on low rations too long. Go easy as you can at first, Skipper.”

I looked hard at him. “Understood, Doc.”

I looked around at the four sick-bay beds, consolingly empty, at the operating table. I looked over at the medical stores in their cabinets.

“I won’t ask a stupid question such as how long will that stuff last. Depends on sick bay traffic, of course. How is that lately?”

“It’s leveled off.”

“Leveled off?”

“To what it was before. Situation normal.”

“Real versus imaginary ailments?”

“Back to normal on that, too. More aspirin than anything.”

“No serious malingering?”

“Again just the usual. Minimal. I’d feel disappointed if I didn’t see an occasional one deciding this just isn’t the particular day he feels like working.”

I looked at him. Lieutenant Commander Samuel Cozzens, MC, USN. He was a lean and angular man, tall and floppy, his body narrow and sinewy to the point of frailty. One had the feeling that he needed to see a doctor. His head was adorned with thinning reddish hair, matched both by furry eyebrows and a benign oversized moustache, carroty growths on skin of an almost feminine whiteness, and with large eyes of a ridiculously light and childlike blue. They had always seemed to me slightly weary. Nothing in the behavior of men, they seemed to say, should be considered surprising, and therefore nothing was more a waste of time than to judge them or to be upset by their idiosyncrasies. If men were meant to be angels, they would have wings and fly about. Far from being cynical, this came out as the only sensible, even compassionate view of life, intellectually leaps beyond cynicism, which after all is such an effortless thing. I had never seen those eyes show shock or even wonder, only a kind of stolid and imperturbable appraisal. With them he could virtually look at a man and tell what was wrong with him. And of especial worth to a ship’s captain, they were peculiarly acute at knowing quickly that nothing was. The men knew they couldn’t fool him; some had to try now and then, otherwise it wouldn’t be the Navy. Johns Hopkins, residency at Columbia Presbyterian, Ochsner Clinic, board internist, research at Rockefeller University—all matters I knew from his service record. His speech was in mensural tones, tinged with wryness, a declaration that life-was above all a faintly comic thing, and was not that realization the only way to get through it? Everything about him was muted, as if to say that agitation of manner was the true enemy and that the secret to almost anything was to keep the noise down.

Though still Navy, the doctor rightly conceived it his peculiar function not to let excessive formalities stand in the way with the captain. He knew the captain wouldn’t like that. Aboard ship, two only, doctor and chaplain, are permitted a latitude of frankness not generally granted others of ship’s company.

“Aspirin will go first,” he said. “We’ve got more of it than anything but then it’s the treatment of choice, as we medical people like to say to impress the lay folks, for anything the doctors can’t figure out. We never say that part. But the fact is, aspirin is the single best medicine man ever came up with. Of course all my remarks are directed to physical ailments.”