The Sand Pebbles (23 page)

He didn’t know just what he was going to do about it, and it bothered him. He knew that Bronson and Crosley and quite a few others were keeping the joke up just to needle him. They had found a good way to get under his skin, all right. Increasingly, he grudged the time it took to refit that bearing every few days. He winced every time he heard the joke phrase.

One day at the noon meal the L.P. was thumping worse than usual, enough to rattle mess gear on the tables. Bronson said, “Roundy-
go-thump!”
and they laughed. Crosley said “Roundy-go-bang!” and they were all laughing and coming into it at the other two tables, roundy-go-boom,
crash, pop, thud, bong
, everything they could think of, in time with the slow engine beat, and howling their laughs. It flared up sudden and weird, like fire in dry grass. They were all chanting hoarsely in unison, stomping their feet and slapping the tables in time with the engine beat, with their eyes bulging and their faces red.

Holman did not know how to take it. At his table his messmates were trying to be loyal to him and not join in, but Restorff and Harris were slapping the table softly in the rhythm and it was all they could do to hold off.

“They’re going nuts!” Farren muttered. “Somebody throw a bucket
of water on ’em.” He was embarrassed.

“Maybe I better go below,” Holman said.

Suddenly Red Dog stood up on his chair and began a high, shrill yapping. The Sand Pebbles looked at him, but they did not cease the chant. Red Dog jumped down and went around the table and lifted his leg suggestively behind Bronson. A beatific look came slowly over his pinched-in features and the chant began to hush and grow ragged.

“Arf … arf … arf,” he said comfortably, and lowered his leg.

The chant died away and the Sand Pebbles were all laughing normally and happily at Bronson. He turned around in his chair and he was furious.

“You little redheaded son of a bitch!” he told the yeoman.

“Arf! Arf! Arf!” Red Dog barked delightedly.

The Sand Pebbles laughed all the harder.

After that incident, Holman studied the engine in a kind of desperation. He had to discover what made the L.P. wear so rapidly. It still eluded him, and time was running out. The lake shrank and the
San Pablo
was forced back into the drowned river channels. Vast mud flats emerged, stinking brown and yellow with drying water weeds, and millions of white birds screamed all day harvesting them. The Sand Pebbles began to talk about wintering in at Changsha.

“It’s a big place, a treaty port, Jake,” Farren said. “Nothing like Hankow, but it’s civilized enough to have bars and one good whorehouse.”

Near the end, Holman stopped thinking. He would stand beside the L.P. and strain to hear the myriad tiny voices, trying to empty his mind except for the tiny voices, hoping that the answer would just come to him. He had solved some very tough problems that way.

No answer came. On their last day of steaming they were headed up the Siang River to Changsha, and Holman felt he was whipped. He wandered the topside aimlessly, watching the scenery. It was rather open country, rice stubble yellow on the flats and low hills far back. The Siang was a broad river with a maze of channels through
long white sandbars. Roundy-go-thump! it kept coming up through Jake Holman’s feet and into his bones. He could not enjoy the new scenery.

He went below and stood beside the L.P. Perna and Stawski had the watch. They were talking and did not see Holman. They never looked at the engine. Holman watched the great crank come round and round. He should be able to catch some hint, from the play of the bearing between the crank webs, as to where the misalignment lay. It was no good. It was too dark down in the crankpit. If he could only see it against light, instead of against darkness, he thought.

Before he knew it, he had picked up a ball peen hammer and slipped into the bilges beneath the main condenser. He did not raise a floorplate, because he did not want any light down there. The engine soleplate was in three parts, flanged and bolted together, and also bolted through chocks to the ship’s structure. Each part was like a big, square cast-iron box and the inside of the box was the crankpit. In the cool darkness the oval manhole into the L.P. crankpit was like a huge eye of dim light winking fifty times a minute as the crank swept by it.

Holman lay on his back and prepared to ease his head in through the manhole. The oil-rotted bitumastic stuck to his shirt and there was water all around, but none where he lay. He eased his head and shoulders in very gingerly. He knew he was safe, but something in him did not know it. He kept wanting to jerk his head away as the great crank plunged down at him and the end of his nose tingled and itched. The crank passed about four inches above his nose and he could feel the wind of its passage like fingers stroking his face.

He forced himself to stand it. His hair was a mess of oil, but if he raised his head the crank would tear his face off. I’d really lose face, he thought. The grim humor steadied him, and he began to observe. The crank slapped back and forth between the webs, all right, and he could see its complicated sequence more clearly than he ever had, but it told him nothing. The tiny, whispering voices were all around him, almost in his ear. He emptied his mind again, waiting patiently. He did not know how long he waited….

It was a bead of oil that came and went and came again. In the tail of his eye. One of the tiny voices. He cut his eyes to focus on it. It was at the joint between the soleplate and one of the chocks. It meant movement, where there should be no movement, movement so tiny that only magnification of it by the oil droplet made it possible to be seen at all. He searched for other oil droplets and found them. All the tiny voices began to talk sense.

They had a big thing to say. Easing out of the crankpit, listening, Holman scarcely heard the thunder of running feet on the floorplates above his head. The voices spoke of a long-ago grounding that had bent the soft wrought-iron structure of the ship itself. It had skewed out of plane and parallel the two channel beams to which the soleplate was bolted. It was not much, and all the bolts had drawn and yielded just enough among them all to accommodate and permit the engine still to turn.

“God almighty!” Holman said softly, crouching outside the crankpit. He was very happy and excited.

No wonder they could not find any misalignment in the dockyard. They lined each cylinder on its soleplate section. They took it for granted that the rigid soleplate was as true as the keel beneath it. But the soleplate was not rigid and the keel was not true. There was a shifting, twisty hump beneath the L.P., distributed across all the loose bolts and chocks that complained in their tiny voices, and that was what made the L.P. wear. It was what had killed old Chien.

Holman took his hammer and began sounding bolts, to verify what he already knew. They all gave him back the dull thud of a bolt loose and working rather than the sharp
ping
of a tight one. He heard feet above him again, and cursing, and someone lifted a floorplate. Holman looked up, blinking in the sudden light. A pistol was pointed at him. Lynch’s face behind the pistol looked popeyed and terrible.

Holman stood up, alarmed. Lynch lowered the pistol. Stawski, his face pale and small eyes bulging, was twirling a crowbar as if it were a bamboo stick. Lynch was working his lips silently, as he put away his pistol with shaking hands.

“Jake! Jesus Christ, Jake!” he managed to say. Then angrily,
“Come out of them bilges, you God damned fool! I almost shot you!” Then tremulous, shaking his head, “Jake. Jesus Christ. We thought you was old Chien’s ghost.”

Holman climbed out. Stawski replaced the floorplate and went sheepishly back to the throttle. Chiu-pa had seen Holman’s face in the shadowy crankpit, Lynch explained. Perna and Stawski would not believe it, but when they saw for themselves they panicked. All of the Chinese had followed them topside and the plant had steamed unattended for almost ten minutes.

“You’d think they’d recognize my face,” Holman said.

“Not down there under that crank,” Lynch said. “Under a horse’s tail, maybe yes.”

He was shaking with reaction and beginning to be angry again. Suddenly it tickled Holman. He found himself laughing uncontrollably.

“Shoot a ghost! Ho ho ho, shoot holes in a ghost!” he laughed. “What good would that do, with a ghost?”

“Well, what the hell would you do with a ghost?” Lynch said.

“Jesus, I don’t know, Chief. I hope I never have to find out.” Holman could not stop laughing. “I guess I’d just pretend he wasn’t there.”

‘Ah, you’re crazy with the heat!’

Lynch went up, feeling insulted. Holman tried to calm himself down and stop laughing. He was starting to shake, and he was just realizing how very near he had been to death.

The Siang River was wide and shallow at Changsha. Across the river a mountain rose up, yellowy-orange around the base with autumn leaves, and the sun always set behind that mountain. The river had many long, white sandbars and across the main channel from the city was a very big sandbar where the important treaty people had their houses. The big houses were behind dikes and walls and surrounded by trees. Changsha had a higher and longer wall than Paoshan but you could not see it as well, because the bund was built up with tin-roofed godowns and foreign brick buildings. One hotel on the bund was always lit up at night and music came from it. The river bank was a sheer wall of masonry with stone steps inset here and there and slanting down to the sand uncovered by the receding water. The Chinese dumped rubbish and garbage down on the sand and it would build up and stink all winter until the spring flood swept it away, Burgoyne told Holman. Junks and sampans of brown-yellowy, bare oiled wood crowded three and four deep all along the river bank except where there were pontoons for the commercial steamers. Much of the city was outside the walls. To the south rose the tall smokestacks of an antimony smelter and to the north there was much missionary
property. The Japanese Consulate was outside the city to the north, with the Japanese gunboat anchored offshore.

The river ran north. It seemed backward to Holman. He always thought of north as being uphill. North was a high place.

When the river was full, an eddy kept a deep pool scoured out near the north end of the city. At low water the pool stayed full, but it had only a very slow eddy current in it. It was the
San Pablo’s
anchorage. Trash and turds from the head would drift very slowly two or three times around the ship in a kind of continuous moving wreath before it got into the sluggish current of the main channel. The Sand Pebbles called their anchorage the goldfish bowl. H.M.S.
Woodcock’s
berth was upriver and across the channel, abreast His Majesty’s Consulate on the big sandbar.

All day every day blue-clad coolies swarmed in the junks and along the bund, pushing wheelbarrows and pulling carts, five or six men leaning and straining along ahead of the heaped carts like hitched horses. Changsha had electricity but no running water, and lines of water coolies slopped along all day between the river and the city. They had five-gallon kerosene tins at each end of their shoulder poles, instead of wooden buckets, as at Paoshan, and that was as near as Changsha had gotten to civilizing its water supply. The coolies sang their work chant all day,
hay ho, hay ho
, and it made a happy sound in the crisp, smoky autumn air.

Changsha was a treaty port and foreign businesses could own property there. Their buildings were all along the bund—oil companies, steamship companies, export and import agencies. Each company had its own house flag which flew all day above each building and on the many honking launches which took the businessmen back and forth between the city and their homes on the big sandbar. They flew the company flags on their homes, too. On Sundays they replaced all the company flags with national flags. But the consulates and missions and gunboats flew the national flags all through the week.

From the first, there was a drop in military tension on the
San Pablo
. Only one Fang at a time made bugle calls. Franks shortened the calisthenics and they only held battle drills every other morning.
Liberty started every day at one o’clock. Restorff, Harris, Vincent and Haythorn were shacked up in the city, but the other Sand Pebbles made their liberties in the Red Candle Happiness Garden. It was in a cluster of Chinese buildings outside the wall, where the liberty men could hear the ship’s siren sounding the recall, if trouble broke. One petty officer always went along on shore patrol and he had to stay sober and keep order and be ready to get the drunks back to the ship in a hurry. Jennings examined the girls every week and kept a pro station stocked in the head and nobody ever got set up in the Red Candle. They could not get trapped inside the walls by sudden trouble, and it was a very convenient arrangement.

A Portygee half-caste named Victor Shu owned the Red Candle. He was seldom there, and a Chinese woman ran it for him. The Sand Pebbles called her Mother Chunk. Shu had a ship chandlery business in the city and he was in with the warlord. He was supposed to have a tie with the river gangsters who levied toll on Chinese cargoes and pirated junks that would not pay, and he was said to be a good friend of Lop Eye Shing. Every year some of the local missionaries tried to make the Red Candle close down, and every year Victor Shu outmaneuvered them.

A favorite story on the
San Pablo
was about the time the missionaries had a project to win the Sand Pebbles away from the Red Candle. They were supposed to come to another place and play tennis and croquet and drink lemonade and cocoa and meet some nice girls. The project fell through when Jennings showed up ahead of time to examine the girls.

Holman went ashore with Burgoyne on the first liberty of the season in the Red Candle.

“This is the garden, hey?” Holman said.

“Might could call it that,” Burgoyne said. “The bar’s over here.”

The small stone-paved courtyard had some dusty shrubs in green boxes. They crossed the courtyard and went into a large square room with half a dozen round wooden tables. Sand Pebbles in white uniforms sat already at several of the tables, drinking the first whisky they had had for months, and heavily made-up Chinese girls sat with
them. The first drunk in the Red Candle was always a wild one, Burgoyne told Holman.