Джек Кейди - The Jonah Watch

Abner ’s yeoman Wilson was impressed when Howard told the story. “Where did Levere find that one?”

“A small fishing village. A place called Liverpool.”

“Get off my back. I can read a chart.”

“He got busted up and concussed on a Limey can doing escort during the war. It scrambled his brains. They dropped him off here and he liked the place.”

“Look for the woman,” yeoman Wilson advised.

“I always do,” Howard said. “World without end.”

The gray chill was momentarily held in check because of the incident between Snow and Brace. For a while men gossiped, laughed, formed estimates of Snow that they could live with, while thinking little that was new about Brace. Cutter Abner struggled. By the time Abner had Clara in tow, returning to the disabled Ezekiel , the story turned from the main street of the crew’s attention to a back alleyway of disregard. It was a small memory, to be fished from a man’s ditty bag of tales at some future time, on some future messdeck, where youth might need advice.

As the tale moved into shadows, and Abner ’s problems increased, so also increased a cold sense of unease, punctuated by bursts of exasperation because Abner was forced to go it alone.

“That could be us out there,” Glass complained .

“The sea got up,” yeoman Wilson told Howard. “It was seven hours to Clara and twenty coming back. The jury rig on their steering broke twice.”

“We didn’t hear you send for a long time.”

“Those fishing skippers had this crazy idea.”

Clara , outbound, was fully iced.

“They tried to transfer ice,” Wilson said. “Our cap went along with it for awhile, but the sea kept working.”

In a gray dawn, cutter Abner steamed slowly through mist, keeping visual and radar check on its three charges. Clara and Ezekiel wallowed together, fending off, their crews a bucket brigade passing ice above a gray, cold sea. The hard-pitching, smaller Hester C. was streamed to a sea anchor two miles distant.

“And that’s when the guy on Joan of Arc got hit?”

“Who does the first aid on your ship?”

“Me.”

“Me, too,” Wilson said. “Me and our cook. We’d ought to have a corpsman.”

On Joan of Arc , a rusting cable had snapped, tearing away most of a man’s face.

“We steamed at them flank,” Wilson said, “and they were making knots toward us. It only took a couple hours. Couldn’t get a seaplane.”

“I’ve seen them put down on open ocean.”

“Not that open ocean.”

“He was one of those hysterical Spanish guys, and he moaned all the time,” Wilson continued in the clear tones of misery. “He moaned for five days straight an’ all you could do was clean him up. Sulfa and bandages and soup and keep his breathing clear, and a little morph. Bone stickin’ out of his face.”

Abner , receiving the injured fisherman, wheeled back and returned rapidly to its three radar targets.

“I was still holding that guy’s hand,” Wilson said, “so I didn’t see what happened. Our radioman, Diamond, told me.”

Through the mist, Hester C . was a pitching, black and gray dot on a gray sea. As Abner closed, Diamond picked up the 7 x 50s to check the lobsterman’s trim. He gasped, put down the binoculars and picked up the 20-power telescope. The figure of a man was bending over the well of dead lobsters.

“I wish it swamped,” yeoman Wilson said. “That guy fixed his old lady good. Nobody will ever buy that thing.”

“Nobody was aboard.”

“Sure there was,” said yeoman Wilson, and his chalky face contorted with indignation and confusion. “Not when we got there, of course. He just zapped out like if you pulled the plug on a movie.”

“But that was the end of it?”

“That was the end of the scary part,” Wilson said. “We finally got all the tows rigged, and we started off at a red-hot two knots, and that’s when things got miserable. That’s when we started breaking towline.”

Brace’s shaved head was a tribute to amon’s engaged concern, which was not patchy although Brace’s haircut certainly was. In an attempt to save as much fur as possible, Amon snipped, clipped, razored, turned Brace’s head this way and that, and proclaimed the finished job a masterpiece—and so it was, had Brace been a pagan living in Samoa. To the surprise of all hands, Brace took his ordeal with the insensateness of the Buddha. The mirror explained to him that he had a high forehead, above which, and fairly far aft, a low pool of fuzz rose like a spring, to flow forward in a questioning way toward his left ear where it was absorbed back into the water table of his skull an instant before it arrived. The right side of his head was clipped and spotted with patches of baldness, like an aging Marine suffering a twenty-year bout with jungle crud.

“It will grow back,” Amon mourned. “Such is my fate.”

Lamp, as practical as any cook ever gets, suggested that Amon borrow a camera and preserve the record. Amon sniffed with oriental disdain. “I am not a tourist,” he told Lamp, then paused, ”… although I am a very long way from home.”

“You look like you got hit by a flight of seagulls,” Glass told Brace. “Sue the Chinaman.”

“Like bilge scraping,” said Fallon.

“Like shark bait,” said Conally.

“Your envy is ugly,” Amon told them. “You would foul up a free lunch. You would despoil the Last Supper.”

“You are a heathen—yes—heathen.” Lamp slammed the door of the oven, turned. “Now look what you made me do.”

Dane sniffed like a consumer inspecting popcorn at the concession in a seedy theatre. “I liked him better when he was painted,” Dane said to Conally. To Brace he said, “Get up the mast.”

“The view is tremendous,” Conally told Brace.

Dane yelled at the bridge watch. “Secure the transmitter. Man aloft. Acknowledge.”

“I got it off,”… a distant yell.

Starting at the base of the mast and working upward, Brace chipped patches of rust, applied red lead to cleaned steel at the end of each day, climbed above the drying red lead on the next day, like a clam digger gradually following a tide. “If I start him at the top, he’ll get dizzy and fall off,” Conally explained to Howard.

Day followed day. Brace looked like a kite tangled among the wires of a telephone pole. He was perfectly situated to be the first man to see cutter Abner , bulked like a small, white and concentrated dot beside dark cliffs as it towed its string of refugees—but he was not the first. His attention was directed at placing an even coat of paint on the mast.

Lamp was the first to see Abner , or so in later years he claimed. “Boys, I be double-dog-damn,” claiming one more minor miracle in that flat procession of days that saw Adrian hang against the pier impeccably dressed, like a partygoer waiting forever for an undispatched taxi.

Abner looked like a missionary lady leading derelicts to soup and prayer. Ezekiel rode high, directly astern on a shortened tow, its load of fish returned to the mindless Atlantic, that maw of gulls and basking sharks. Behind Ezekiel , Clara seemed to huddle frightened and scorched on the water; smoke and burn like a Puritan brand staining the house where rust already worked beneath blisters of paint. Alongside Abner , on snubbed tow, Hester C . made brief, impelled, black and gray dashes, like a rebellious child trying to escape the determined grasp of a pedestrian aunt.