The Sand Pebbles

“Hello, ship,” Jake Holman said under his breath.

The ship was asleep and did not hear him. He lowered his big canvas thirty-year bag to the ground and stood there in the moon shadow of a brick wall and had his long first look at her. She looked stubby and blocky and topheavy down there at the edge of the black, rolling river, and she was all moon-white except for her slender black smokestack that rose very high, high as her two masts. Four guy wires slanted down from the stack like streamers from a maypole. She had a stubby, shielded gun on her open bow and a doubled, man-high hand steering wheel on her open fantail aft, but in between she looked more like a house than a ship. Her square, curtained windows and screened doors opened on a galleried main deck like a long, narrow veranda and on a pipe-railed boat deck under taut white awnings. It was after midnight and they were asleep down there, all but the watch. In a few minutes he’d go aboard and find a bunk and wake up with them in the morning like a strange bird in their nest.

Jake Holman knew he was a strange bird and he was used to going aboard new ships. By the time they realized they were in a struggle Jake Holman would already have made for himself the
place he wanted on their ship and they could never dislodge him. Or wish to. It was going to be the same on the U.S.S.
San Pablo
. He did not know why he was reluctant to go right aboard. This one might be a pretty strange nest, too, he thought.

Since he had gotten his orders a month ago in Manila he had not been able to find anyone who had ever seen the ship or who had even been shipmates with an
ex-San Pablo
sailor. Nobody knew any more about her than Holman already knew himself, after six years on the China Station, and that was more legend than fact. She was one of the ancient gunboats captured from Spain and sent to form the Yangtze Patrol during the Boxer Rebellion, in the year Jake Holman was born. They were all relics now, in June of 1925, and a flotilla of modern gunboats was building in Shanghai to replace them. The others sometimes appeared in Shanghai, but the
San Pablo
never came further downriver than Hankow. They said she was least and ugliest of Comyang’s gunboats and he was ashamed to show the flag on the likes of her down around the glitter of Shanghai. She did not even operate on the Yangtze, but on some nameless tributaries from the south, and on a big lake that was said to expand and contract mysteriously and to have mermaids in it. From the legends, the
San Pablo
spent half her time high and dry on sand bars in the nameless rivers with the crew ashore cultivating gardens and slaughtering their own beef and mining their own coal, while the natives took pot shots at them.

Holman did not believe the legends, but he thought she was still a funny-looking ship. A lighted quarterdeck was inset amidships on the main deck with a short gangplank leading up from the pontoon through a gap in the solid steel bulwark. Two men stood on watch there beside a pulpitlike log desk, one in regulation undress whites and the other in the white shorts and short-sleeved sport shirt that was summer uniform for Yangtze Patrol sailors. At least two more in shorts were patrolling with rifles on the shadowy boat deck. That was a lot of men for the topside watch on a quiet midnight, Holman thought.

He was a sandy-haired, squarely built, powerful man in dress whites and he stood there in the moon shadow thinking and nuzzling
his chin with a fat brown envelope. The envelope held his records and pay accounts and it was wound with red tape sealed in four places with blobs of red wax so that Jake Holman could not examine or tamper with the Navy’s little paper image of himself. Paper Jake Holman, he sometimes called it in his thoughts. When he turned Paper Jake in down on that quarterdeck, he would be aboard officially on paper. He would be in the thick of it again.

Well,
go on down
, he told himself, but he did not go. He sniffed the cool, damp breeze off the river and listened to the lapping, rustling murmur of the moving water and he heard the steady plashing sound of a cooling water overboard discharge. He could not see it along the ship’s steel side. Must be on the port side, he thought. It’s late, he thought, and the first few days are always rough ones.
Go aboard
, you stupid bastard, and get some sleep. He picked up the thirty-year bag and started down the plank walkway to the flat steel pontoon.

“Here I come, ship,” he said softly.

The man in regulation whites ran out on the pontoon to take Holman’s seabag. He was Chinese. Holman stepped aboard and saluted aft, according to regulation. The man in shorts returned the salute, which was not regulation, because he was an enlisted man in a white hat.

“Reckon you’re Holman,” he said. “Was wondering when you’d get here, all the trouble they’re having downriver.”

The man was tall and skinny and heavily tattooed on arms and legs and he had a drooping brown mustache. He wore a holstered pistol. Holman nodded and handed him the brown envelope. The man glanced at the seals and lifted the hinged top of the log desk, like a gaping mouth, dropped in the envelope and let the top fall with a thud.

“Now you’re a Sand Pebble,” he told Holman. “That’s what we call this ship, the U.S.S.
Sand Pebble.”
He had a slow, lazy voice. “Welcome aboard. I’m Frenchy Burgoyne, first-class watertender.” He held out his hand.

“Call me Jake.” They shook hands. “How come an engineer on
watch up here?” Holman asked. “You standing by for somebody?”

“All hands stand topside watches,” Burgoyne said.

That was the first bad thing, but Holman did not let his face show it. The Chinese was standing beside the seabag.

“Might as well unlock your bag and they’ll stow your locker for you,” Burgoyne said. “Won’t need your navy mattress on here. Your bunk’s already made up with ship’s gear.”

The Chinese, whose name was Fang, went away with the seabag. Burgoyne was copying Holman’s orders into the log book. He held the pencil awkwardly and squinted and wrote from the shoulders down. The quarterdeck was a triangle with the inner point opening into a passageway that led through to the port side. Sounds and smells from a lighted doorway in the passage told Holman it led to the engine room, and machinery sounds came up through the teak planking under his feet. Pumps clanked and groaned down there, and something throbbed lightly and quickly.

“’Spect you’re about ready to flake out, ain’t you?” Burgoyne asked. “How’d you get here? How was the trip?”

“Commercial from Shanghai. Steamer named
Loong Wo,”
Holman said. “I had hell’s own time finding out where you was and getting a taxicab to come all the way down here.”

It was a dockyard about five miles downriver from Hankow.

“We just finished overhaul. Every two years we come here for overhaul,” Burgoyne said.

“Ought to be in good shape down below, then,” Holman said. “How’s the chief engineer?”

“Ain’t got one, less’n you figure it’s Lynch, the chief machinist’s mate. We only got two commissioned officers, skipper and exec.” He smoothed his mustache with a knuckle. “Lynch is all right. Drinks right much, but he’s maskee. Right now he’s all fouled up with a Russky he found in Mumm’s.” Burgoyne chuckled. “No sir, won’t see much of that old boy till we go south again.”

“When’s that?”

“Week or so. We start summer cruising.”

Fang came back and spoke in pidgin to Burgoyne.

“Your gear’s stowed and your bunk’s ready, if you want to turn in now,” Burgoyne told Holman.

“Not right now. That’s service, though. I always heard you guys had it good on the river gunboats.”

“You don’t know the half of it yet. We got them main river boats beat hollow.” Burgoyne stood up straight. He was proud of his ship. “If you ain’t sleepy, we got coffee in the galley. I can have Fang fetch us a cup.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll go down and have a cup in the engine room and shoot the breeze with the watch a minute,” Holman said. “I want to look around, see what I’m getting into.”

“Ain’t no coffee down there. I got the engine room watch.”

Holman looked at him, shocked, and Burgoyne grinned.

“Oh, I got a bilge coolie helper down there handling the routine,” he said. “He’ll call me if something’s wrong. I’ll go down at four o’clock and write up the log.”

Holman thought that was very bad. He did not let his face show what he thought.

“How many black gang on here, all told?”

“Five. Eight, you count Lynch and Waxer and Harris.”

“That all? You can steam with only that many?”

“We got a dozen bilge coolies. They stoke, help out on watch, clean up and all. Hell, we got it good.”

Holman shook his head. Burgoyne took a can of Copenhagen out of the log desk and packed his lower lip. His bulging lip made his gaunt cheeks look even more hollow.

“Who pays the coolies?” Holman asked.

“Welfare fund, what’s in it. Mostly, they squeeze.”

“Do they do repair work?”

“No-count jobs, packing rods and stuff, they do. We supervise ’em on the big jobs.”

“So that’s howcome the black gang has time to stand topside watches?” Holman was trying not to show his dismay. “I don’t know anything about this topside military crap,” he said. “I started forgetting that crap the minute I left boot camp.”

“I never used to favor it my own self, till I come on here,” Burgoyne said. “It’s different on here. The old
Sand Pebble’s
a home, boy!” He worked his lip and walked to the side and spat. “It sure God beats sweat and dirt and heaving around down on them floor plates!”

“I guess,” Holman said. “I’m going below and look around, anyway.”

Four things were important on a ship: bunk, locker, place at the mess table and the engine room. The engine room was most important, because it was always Jake Holman’s sanctuary from the saluting and standing at attention and saying
sir
that went with life on the topside. Monkey-on-a-stick life, he called that in his thoughts.

“Go right ahead. Help yourself, boy,” Burgoyne said. He was a bit angry.

Holman stepped through the door onto the gratings and into the smell and noise. All live engine rooms had the same smell of burnt rubber and hot oil and steam and sometimes coffee and a whiff of bilge. This one smelled clean. The engine cylinder block rose waist high above the gratings like a black flatiron twenty feet long. Beyond its tapered nose a door led into the fireroom uptakes, and insulated steam piping came through the white bulkhead like fat white snakes to branch and loop down to the machinery on the lower level. Above the engine a skylight opened to the boat deck and cool air came down. He was already beginning to sweat. A grating walkway with polished steel handrails ran all around the engine and at the forward end ladders on either side led down to the floorplates. Through the gratings he could not see anyone on watch down there, but the lower level was wider and extended further aft than the narrow grating space, and he could not see it all from above.

He went down to the floorplates and walked slowly around the engine room, taking it all in. It was very clean, painted white, bare metal polished and oiled, and the corrugations on the old, old floorplates were worn almost smooth, but the floorplates were clean and shiny and oiled. The pumps, erect like men, and the hot well and
feed heater and auxiliary condenser stood along the sides, with a clear space between them and the big central engine, and the skin of the ship behind the pumps was bulged in oddly here and there, like dents in a tin can. The pumps were all old Davidsons and Camerons and Worthingtons. The running ones clanked and ran jerkily. When Holman shook the valve gear on the idle pumps, he found too much play in all the bushings. But the pumps were clean and shined and oiled. He bit his lip and nodded. There was a lot of looksee pidgin in this engine room.