The Sand Pebbles (12 page)

“Let’s go see what Big Chew’s fixing to feed us today,” Burgoyne proposed.

He and Holman walked forward. The galley was built in above the
engine room on the port side. Its door opened on a triangular deck space that was the counterpart of the quarterdeck on the starboard side. One or both of the galley helpers, Small Chew and Jack Dusty, usually sat outside the door preparing vegetables. This morning it was Jack Dusty with red cabbage and green peppers. “Smells good, whatever it is,” Holman said.

A swab was propped across the galley door. Holman peered in. It was a long, narrow space with a white tile deck. A sink, a worktable and a black coal range stood along the inboard side. The range had two nickeled oven doors and pots and skillets hung on the bulkhead above it. Big Chew was stirring some pots on the range top. He saw Holman and turned, waving a spoon.

“No can! No can!” he said sharply. “Makee splice!”

Holman stepped back hastily. Big Chew was both fat and muscular under his white apron. He had a shaven bullet head and bold black eyes and a manner that said he knew he was boss in that galley.

“Splice what?” Holman asked Burgoyne. “The mainbrace?”

“He means surprise. We’re going to have a holiday dinner.”

The two men stood back at the rail, sniffing the good smells. They heard the oven door click and slam closed and a hot, spicy smell drifted out to them.

“Wonder what he’s making?” Holman said.

The Sand Pebbles did not have names for Big Chew’s dishes. No two of them were ever quite the same. They were all the best food Holman had ever eaten. He had already noted how the crew respected Big Chew. They would come to the galley and tell him how good the food was, but they would never think of joking with him as they did with Clip Clip.

“Any chow on here’s better than a holiday dinner in the Fleet,” Holman said.

“Ain’t it the truth! She’s a home and a feeder!”

Stawski and Ellis came up, sniffing, and Big Chew drove them off. Holman knew he was not going to feel like a thief when he ate that chow. The other men still did not mention the speech. Holman began to wonder if he was the only one disturbed by the speech.

All but Harris were quiet at dinner. Harris talked more loudly and obscenely than ever. Holman had always disliked foul talk at the mess table, and he had never once eaten a meal aboard any ship without it. The meal was baked ham and roast chicken, with vegetables and sauces, and the surprise was a special cake at the head of each table. The one between Holman and Farren was square, with white frosting, and decorated with a crude U.S. flag in red and blue sugar paste. The stars were a scatter of blue plus marks and below the flag Big Chew had put a Chinese character in red that meant good luck.

“Pass the pronging chicken,” Harris said.

“All we got here’s eating chicken,” Holman said.

Harris scowled and reached a long arm for the chicken.

“You know, just for today, Harris ought to talk clean,” Farren said.

“You want the poor bastard to strangle?” Wilsey said.

“Only way he knows how to talk is dirty,” Burgoyne said.

“Prong you and all your relations, Frenchy.”

“You forgot my ancestors back to George Washington.”

“Prong them three times,” Harris said. “All the way back to Miles Standish.” He had a long, lopsided chin that almost met his sharp nose when he had his false teeth out. He always turned his head sideways to bite at his food.

“Harris learned all them words in his cradle,” Restorff said. “His mother spoke them words over him when he was an innercent little baby.”

It was a long speech for Restorff. Suddenly, like a fire in dry grass, they were all ganging up on Harris. Harris felt it, and his coarse white hair seemed to bristle more wildly.

“Harris never had a mother,” Farren said.

“He wasn’t a baby. He was a pup or cub or something,” Holman said.

“He wasn’t even born,” Wilsey said. “He just crawled up out of the bilges one day and put on a white hat.”

Harris stopped eating. He glared at them and his wide slash mouth
grinned at them like a shark.

“Up all you bastards with a cargo hook,” he growled. “I can talk decent, when there’s any decent people to hear me.”

“How do you know, if you never once tried?” Farren said. “I’ll bet you can’t.”

“What’ll you bet? How much?” Harris thrust his face at Farren.

“I’ll bet you my ration of that cake.”

“Bet money, you cheap bastard.”

“We’ll all bet you our cake rations,” Wilsey said. “How about it, guys?” They all nodded. “How about it, Harris?” Wilsey said. “That’s five to one odds for you. That’s how sure we are you can’t do it.”

“Tell us a nice, clean sea story,” Burgoyne said.

Harris slapped the table. “Maskee, I’ll do that! I’ll show you God
… blessed sailors!”
he said through his teeth. “Some of you maybe heard this story, but I was there and saw it happen. It was years ago, on the old …
South Dakota.”

They all grinned, as Harris narrowly avoided the obscene nickname they all used for that ship.

“I had a kid striker in the electric gang, name of Arthur Lake,” Harris said. “Arthur was a very clean kid. He wouldn’t say … honey … if he had a mouthful. He had rosy cheeks and he wrote letters home and he kept his mother’s picture inside his locker door. He went ashore to the Y to swim and sing songs. He was always cleaning his fingernails and he stoled our battery water to brush his teeth when water hours was on. When he scrubbed his clothes he wouldn’t hang ’em in the uptakes, like the rest of the black gang. Oh, my no! He hung ’em topside with clothes stops, like the deck apes had to, because he said the sunlight made ’em smell clean and fresh. When he took a—I mean when he went to the head—he always used nine fathoms of … of …
toilet paper!”

“Watch him sweat for them clean words,” Wilsey said.

“Gettin’ ’em, ain’t I?” Harris was eating again, chewing and talking and glaring at each of his messmates in turn.

“One day in Shanghai Arthur and me and two watertenders was waiting for a sampan to come alongside so we could go ashore. Arthur
kept looking down to where his skivvy shirt crossed the V of his dress white jumper and he would pull his jumper out with his finger and sniff. I guess he liked the clean smell of himself. Well, we got a sampan, and the old woman sculling it wanted a dollar to put us ashore. The tide was running out very strong and we drifted a long way downriver before we could make her take forty cents. Then she landed us on the outboard side of a whole mess of barges and she was clear before we found out all the inboard boats was loaded honey barges. Of course the old … lady … done it on purpose.”

“Jesus!” Holman said.

“Watch it, Holman! You got to talk clean too,” Harris said.

“I’m sorry,” Holman said. “Go on.”

“Well, it’s easy to walk a honey barge gunwale most times,” Harris resumed. “Only these all had dried mud dikes built up a foot high along the gunwales so they’d hold more. And they was level full, all greenish-brown and covered with flies and bubbles rising and breaking in the hot sun. Me and the watertenders went across, but Arthur was afraid. We joshed him about it, and the slopeheads was all watching and laughing, like they always are, and finally Arthur started across.” Harris closed his eyes and threw back his head. “I can see him now. He come slow and careful and on his right that … stuff … was even with his shoe soles. It stunk so bad you could almost
hear
it stink and, I swear, it
drew
him. He had his arms out sideways and a awful look on his face and he’d sway out over the stuff and then right himself and sway out over the water, and he was like a drunk man in slow motion. Once he froze, and his face was as white as his jumper. Then he started coming again and halfway across he fell into the stuff. He went clear out of sight under it. Then he come up all dripping and in one smooth motion, like a porpoise jumping, he went over the side into the river. We waved money and yelled Joe Min and the slopeheads hollered and looked all around, but them tide currents had Arthur, and nobody ever seen him again.”

Harris opened his eyes and grinned sharkishly along the table.

“There, by God! I guess I proved to you bastards I can talk clean.”

“You son of a bitch!” Farren said. “You everlasting son of a
bitch! You win, all right!” He shoved the cake down in front of Harris.

“We’re sorry we doubted you, Harris. We learned our lesson,” Wilsey said. “Now how about being a good shipmate and sharing that cake with us? You’ll get a bellyache if you eat it all”

“Prong you hungry bastards.” Harris plunged his fork into the cake and lifted a chunk to his mouth. The cake was reddish-brown under the white frosting. “I’ll eat it all myself,” Harris said, chewing. “What I can’t eat, I’ll spit on.”

Show-the-flag cruising was very pleasant. They did not get underway until after quarters in the morning and they anchored before supper at night. Whenever he could, Lt. Collins anchored near a village or town and he would always spend several days at the walled cities. Hunan Province was hilly and green. There was the pale, feathery green of bamboo groves beside white farm compounds and the flat jade green of young rice fields and the glossy dark green of camphor and pomelo trees. In some places whole hillsides were pink and white with flowers and the breeze off those hills came fresh and pleasant across the decks of the
San Pablo
. Rocks and cliffs were olive green with moss and ferns and the bare earth of landslips was red.

Tungting Lake was like a huge pond with green, rocky islands in some places, and vast mudbank shallows and reed marshes in others, and clouds of white water birds that flew up screaming as the
San Pablo
thumped by their feeding grounds. In most places the lake had no definite shore, instead grading off into reed marsh, but near the Chien River the hills came right down to the lake, very steeply. They said the lake was really a big overflow basin for the rivers and it almost dried up in winter. The currents ran brown along the drowned
river beds but in the shallows the mud settled out and the water was blue or green, depending on how the sunlight hit it. Breezes could roughen the water in little skipping dark spots here and there and a wind could roughen the whole surface and pick up a million glints from the sun, but there were no waves. It was very different from cruising on the ocean. The ocean was serious. The Chinese thought there were mermaids in Tungting Lake, but Franks said he had seen them and they were white porpoises. No one knew what porpoises were doing there, so far from the ocean. Probably the fresh water had bleached them. It was supposed to be bad luck to sight a white porpoise.

The
San Pablo
passed many junks in the rivers and on the lake and swarms of sampans with men fishing or shrimp trapping, and there were mat huts and fishtraps all along the shores. Sometimes they passed long timber rafts with matshed villages on top of them and children playing around the huts. Occasionally they would meet H.M.S.
Woodcock
or the Japanese gunboat
Hiro
and then they would man the rail and exchange formal passing honors. They carried a Chinese pilot and much of the time in the lake he kept two deck coolies in the bow sounding with bamboo poles and singsonging water depths in high Chinese voices that blended with the bird screams. The lake was tricky. Sometimes they would see long-beaked herons wading and fishing only a hundred feet from the ship and that would be the only way they could know there was a mudbank there.

Everywhere they went the Chinese looked at them with a special unwinking, jaw-hanging kind of look. They gaped from junks and sampans on the lake and from their fields along the river banks, faces shadowed under conical bamboo hats, and from their creaking treadmill pumps that lifted river water to the fields. The treadmill coolies would turn facing the river, five or six abreast with their shoulders against the wooden bar, never breaking the rhythm of their creaking, endless climb. They would watch the
San Pablo
thump and waddle past them, high and white and blocky, smoke trailing from her single tall stack, and it was not possible to tell from their faces what they were thinking. People would come out of the walled cities to stand and watch or to move slowly along the stone-faced river bank, with
the same dumb looks. They would watch the Sand Pebbles at their musters and drills and calisthenics. For show-the-flag cruising, the bugling for drills and ship’s routine was done by all four Fangs at once, and it made a hellish racket, because they were not good enough to stay together on the calls. But loud bugling made military face in China and warlord armies in the walled cities seemed to bugle day and night. The
San Pablo
had to outbugle the warlords. It was not possible to guess from their faces what the Chinese thought about it all.

There were some who watched without showing their faces. On the second day in the lake, passing a bluff headland, Holman heard Franks roar from the bridge: “All hands, take cover! Clear port side!” and a scatter of distant pops and the close-up hum of rifle bullets sent Holman running to the quarterdeck with his heart jumping. Stumpy Restorff was there beside the open arms locker, cleaning and oiling guns on a greasy hammock spread on deck. Ellis, the scarfaced seaman, was helping him.