The Sand Pebbles (67 page)

“Holman, you sombish, you done thish to me!” he blurted.

He waved an accusing finger. His face was all slubbered loose and sagging. The men at the mess tables stopped talking.

“You jinksh whole Goddamn ship day you come aboard!” Lynch shouted. “Fiddle with engine! Get me married! You’re a sombishin Jonah!”

The word struck hard into Holman’s secret guilt feeling. He could feel the crowd pick it up. It jolted him.

“Jonah! Sombishin Jonah!” Lynch howled at Holman.

Holman felt real alarm. He felt that they were singling him out. He sat unmoving. Crosley’s devotion to his new joke headed them off.

“Valentine Shitevitski!” Crosley yelled. “Three cheers for good old Shitevitski!”

They all yelled it and laughed. Lynch turned and squalled and slobbered at them. They laughed all the harder. Franks and Welbeck came down and took Lynch away. The Sand Pebbles went right on yelling.

“He’s all right!”

“Who’s all right?”

“S
HITEVITSKI!”

They could get carried away like that, unable to stop. They were like schoolgirls in a giggling fit. Holman remembered the first time he had seen them do it. That had been one of Crosley’s jokes, too: roundy-go-thump! After a few minutes Harris snapped out of it and
made them stop. Through it all, Holman sat unmoving. He knew he had had a very close call on being singled out.

The next morning Lynch came down to the engine room red-eyed and roaring. He was wearing a pistol. He found the engineers lounging around the workbench.

“I’m dealin’ you birds a new deal down here!” he told them. “Get off your asses and get to work, God damn you!”

Holman felt all the men’s eyes on him. He was senior petty officer and they expected him to tell Lynch to go to hell. If he did not, Harris would. Holman slid off the workbench.

“Sure, Chief. We’ll clean the place up,” he said.

“Damn right you will, or I’ll bust you to fireman!” Lynch raked his eyes around the rusty, cluttered engine room. “Clean floorplates!” he ordered.

Holman pried one up with a screwdriver. “We’ll all get on it, soon as they hoist ashes,” he told Lynch.

Krebs took the cue. “Come on, guys, let’s hoist out ashes,” he said.

All of them but Harris went with Krebs. Harris sat on the rag barrel with a mocking look on his face, bristly with gray whiskers. Lynch blustered some more at Holman. “I’m coming back to inspect!” he warned, when he went up.

Holman stopped scraping the floorplate. He felt uneasy under Harris’ sardonic stare.

“Lynch was drunk,” he said defensively. “You got to humor a guy when he’s like that.”

Harris did not answer. No one did any work. Lynch did not come back down. In the afternoon Franks asked Holman what had happened. Holman told him.

“Becky and me got his brandy locked up now,” Franks said. “We won’t let him get that drunk again.” He looked calculatingly at Holman, as if debating how much to say. “We’re worried about Lynch,” he went on. “Can you keep something under your hat?” Holman nodded. “I took the powder out of his cartridges and put the slugs back in. I wouldn’t want Lynch or anybody else to know that,” Franks
said. “You might need to know it sometime, down below. But don’t talk.”

Holman nodded again. His eyes went, despite himself, to the pistol Franks was wearing. Franks smiled grimly.

“No blanks in this one!” he said, patting the holster.

In the days that followed, Holman noticed that Bordelles and Welbeck also went constantly armed. When Lynch came to the engine room, Holman always stood forward to take his abuse and prevent an explosion. That action was separating him from the rest of the black gang, but he did not know what else to do.

Harris was becoming leader of the black gang. Two other gangs formed, one based in the cordage locker and one in the ship’s office. They became increasingly jealous and suspicious of each other. They spent less time in the compartment and more in their separate hangouts. The black gang stole corned beef and rice and they would cook it in the fireroom, on a shovel of coals from the furnace. They made coffee in a tin bucket, boiling it on coals and putting salt in it. They had all stopped shaving. Their whiskers made their eyes look glary and white and their teeth seemed whiter than before.

Bordelles and the chiefs made a fourth gang. Jennings was part of it. He had begun living in the sickbay and eating with the chiefs. The boat deck gang stayed shaven and in clean uniforms and they made a kind of screen around Lt. Collins.

The beer was gone. Then the onions ran out. A few days later Restorff smelled onions on Crosley’s breath. He consulted with Harris, and their two gangs combined to raid the ship’s office. Farren and Holman went along. Farren was not going over the edge, any more than Holman, but they both had to live on the main deck and it was safer to go along. The raiders crowded into the ship’s office.

“Where you got ’em hid?” Harris shouted. “Where you thieving bastards got ’em hid?”

He was pulling open desk drawers. The men were all milling and screaming and waving arms except Crosley. He sat quietly on one desk. Stawski batted him off it and pulled open the drawer he had
been guarding. The drawer was full of onions.

A great shout went up. A free-for-all fight seemed about to start. Then Ellis snatched one of the onions and began eating it like an apple. That turned the stampede in another direction. They all snatched onions and crawnched them, brown, papery skins and all, while tears streamed down their bearded cheeks. No one spoke a word. Each man was trying to eat faster than all the other men. They ate every last onion, and then they did not feel like fighting.

They never talked about Plan Red any more. They had a new story. No one knew who had started it, but they all believed it. With the spring flood the
San Pablo
would go all the way to Shanghai and there she would be scrapped. As a reward for their winter of suffering, the Sand Pebbles would all get a thirty-day leave in Shanghai. Then they would commission one of the sleek, powerful new gunboats being built there. They talked endlessly about the chow and drinks and girls they would have in Shanghai.

They talked almost desperately about the girls they would have. Their hands would curl with pleasure and their bearded lips roll back. Girls were much more important to a crew’s health than beer or onions. Girls helped to keep in its cage a certain Beast that was always trying to get loose in a ship.

The Beast was trying to get loose in the
San Pablo
. There were many little signs. The customary skylarking and horseplay began going a bit too far for comfort. Harris began talking openly about the cruiser U.S.S.
Pittsburgh
. The Beast was notoriously loose in the
Pittsburgh
.

“I’d sooner have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother on the
Pittsburgh,”
Farren said one day at dinner. That was the saying in the Fleet, about that ship.

“I wish you had a sister on the
San Pablo,”
Harris said. “But I’d settle for your brother.”

Holman tensed himself to help Farren, if it came to a fight. But Farren let it go.

The next morning when lights came on there was a small square of
canvas, with a handful of damp sand heaped upon it, in Harris’ place at the mess table. Harris had the watch in the engine room. Everyone saw the sand and canvas and no one spoke about it. It was an old, old seagoing warning.

When Harris came off watch he stood and looked down at the sand and canvas. Everyone else looked at Harris. His beard was spiky gray, like his hair. Hair thrust out of his nostrils and ears. It was like quills. He grinned his wolf-trap grin around the compartment and he was wearing the very face of the Beast.

He did not see what he was looking for in any of the other faces. Without a word, he picked up the sand and canvas and carried it outside and dropped it into the river. After that there was no more talk about the
Pittsburgh
.

Holman did not believe the Shanghai story. He found comfort in a private dream. He could only dream it when he was alone in the engine room on a night watch.

Without being clear about how he had gotten there, he would be mission engineer at China Light. He would work with vaguely-imaged machinery in various buildings. It would have to do with the food and comfort and convenience of everybody. It was always spring or early summer outside the buildings, with trees and green things. He would have to walk from one job to another, under trees and past flower beds. People would be all around and he would stop and talk a few minutes with some of them.

He would live in a Chinese house and not in one room of it, either, but in the whole house. It would have a courtyard with trees and so many flowering bushes that it would be almost a garden. It was a very pleasant place. But it was just there that the dream became muddied and unclear.

He would have a wife. He could not really get her into the dream. She would be something like Mei-yu and something like Maily and something like all the scores of Japanese and Chinese girls he had been with. She would be very pretty and sweet and happy there with him, but he could not quite see her or believe her.

One night in the engine room he faced very frankly the fact that he loved Shirley Eckert. It was not much like what he had sometimes thought it might be. It could be a giving up just as well as a reaching out. He thought carefully over all his memories of her in Hankow and he believed it would be possible for her to love him. But it could not be.

He kept her deliberately on the edge of his dream. He would get books from her and read them and later they would talk about them. They would be friends, but she would still be just a teacher.

After a fashion, they kept things going. When the filth and litter in the living spaces became intolerable, someone would say, “God damn it, we got to do something!” Then a few men would work feverishly for several hours, sweeping and scrubbing without soap, profanely superior to the slothful others. But the next time they would be the slothful ones.

It had to be spontaneous. Farren and Holman, as the leading petty officers, were the only ones who could not initiate one of the fitful work spells. The Sand Pebbles seemed to find pleasure in defiling all their old authority symbols. They did it with foul language and contemptuous behavior and a watchful eye for any of their number who did not go along. They seemed to want a chance to rage at someone who would defend authority. Holman and Farren did not give them a chance.

On one midwatch Farren, who had the quarterdeck, deserted his post to come down and drink coffee with Holman in the engine room. Farren talked about conditions. Holman did not know how frank he dared to be.

“If it was one man acting that way, instead of a whole crew, I might figure he was smokestacking,” Holman said.

They discussed the idea. The deckforce called it “gundecking.” It was a thing kids did. They came off liberty pretending to be drunker than they really were. Down in their living compartments they would flop and stomp and cry and curse the navy and the officers and all the petty officers they didn’t like. They could get away with it because they were drunk. After a reasonable time, long enough for the kid to get most of it out of his system, one of the seasoned older men would slap him and tell him to knock it off. The kid would quiet right down.

“They ain’t drunk and they ain’t kids,” Farren objected.

“I mean, some of it’s put on.”

“No it ain’t. They really lost their military fear.” Farren slurped coffee. “So’ve I. I hate to think it, sitting here now. But if Bordelles and the chiefs came down to the main deck to kick us into line, I’m scared I’d go hermentile right along with the rest of ’em.”

Holman pondered that. He was afraid to ask questions.

“It’s a hellish bad kind of being scared,” Farren said. “The guys figure you ain’t with ’em. Not that way.”

“I hope it never comes to anything like that.”

Farren brightened. “I don’t think it will,” he said. “I think the skipper’s got something up his sleeve. He knows what he’s doing.”

That might be true. The men seldom sneered about Lt. Collins. They saw him very seldom, but when they did they still saluted. They kept the quarterdeck fairly clean. They were not letting go altogether.

“We just got to hang on till high water,” Farren said, leaving.

Hell or high water, Holman thought. He wondered whether Farren had been sounding him out, and on which side. It was just that continuing respect for Lt. Collins that made him hope the crew was only smokestacking. On a destroyer the kids waited until they were across the quarterdeck and aft of number four stack before they let themselves go. That was why it was called smokestacking.

Harris was clearly leader of the black gang. He would have them hoist out ashes when they got knee deep, and that was about all. The machinery was foul with rust and dust and grease. The bilges were usually
awash with stinking black water. Lynch came down every day or so to bluster. Holman let himself be Lynch’s target. It was almost like a game, he thought. Lynch had a grudge at the world and he was smokestacking it off on Holman, because he knew it was safe. Then one day that turned out not to be so.

The men were all sitting on or around the workbench. Lynch came down, bag-eyed and bloat-bellied and fruit-smelling of brandy. He squinted angrily around the engine room and began, as usual, on Holman. “God damn you, Holman—” Then he shifted his gaze to Harris, who was seated between Perna and Stawski on the workbench. “Harris, get that look off your face!” Lynch ordered.

Harris curled his lips back to show two rows of big white false teeth.

“I’m telling you, Harris!” Lynch’s voice rose. “That’s silent contempt! I’ll run you up for it!”

He turned to face Harris directly. Only a commissioned officer could run a man up for silent contempt. Harris continued to look at Lynch with silent contempt. Lynch snapped his own teeth.

“All right, by God, we’ll clean bilges!” he said. “Harris, get in the bilges. Right now!”

Holman saw it coming. “I’ll pump the water out first,” he said. “Come over to the bilge pump, Chief. I want to check with you about the valve action.” He wanted to draw Lynch off.