Джек Кейди - The Jonah Watch

Brace went to the engine room, to the sweet, slightly rotten and clammy odor of the bilges where red lead never completely dried, to the sure and perfectly cutting scent of ozone rising hot in the nose, to air layered with the thin and oily taste of diesel, and the smartly grabbing stench of wet valve packing. His thin nose wrinkled, but he discovered that belowdecks he was never bothered by Dane. Brace was loading a cargo of auxiliary information. The engine spaces were in good order. The enginemen could afford to go easy.

“I like it down there,” Brace confided to the sweating and bustling Lamp. “They got a different attitude.”

“Because of Jensen. He was good.” In anticipation of Adrian ’s return to duty, Lamp was heavy shouldered about the galley, mixing meringue, as though a special treat of lemon pie was a ritual end to summer.

“Snipes is always late getting the word,” Glass said in passing.

“You are a bad man,” Lamp groaned. “Bad.”

“Jensen made a mistake,” Howard said from his position by the coffee urn. “And Glass, you just now almost made one.”

“Be careful with your mouth,” Lamp said. “I feel it, boys. The luck is skiddy.”

Things (as if they were endorsing Lamp’s bleak guess) began to disappear. The key to an ammunition locker checked out missing, to be found two days later by gunner Majors in a pocket he had delved into a dozen times. Majors ran his inventory and it was intact. Amon, always precise, could not locate twenty pounds of coffee; to find it, after chattering bursts of frenzy, nestled for no scrutable reason in a locker in the wardroom. Howard searched desperately for a lost requisition which, the following week, appeared like a flick of sorcery between unused pages of the ship’s log.

In later years while cooking at the Base, Lamp would vow that nothing had been exactly unusual, nothing exactly wrong. There had been only the feeling that gravity had slipped and time was laughing. Events, normal enough when isolated, had piled up, jumbled and tumbled together, swept back and forth like a lost net washed onto a rocky, pooling beach.

As Lamp revealed that Pluto was conjuncting in some dismal way with Venus and the local newspaper spoke of sunspots—while reporting that the nation’s president had lost another golf ball in a sand trap—Brace received a “Dear John” letter from a teenager named Mona. Glass gossiped to Howard that while on midwatch he saw Brace walk silently to the rail and drop a flat object which plunked into the dark water.

A piece of waste materialized in a rebuilt check valve. There was a revolution in Chile. Engineman-designate Racca, with luck as bad as his bad mouth, and ashore with a deep thirst, encountered a young person named Peak’s Island Sally and a subsequent dose of penicillin, both for the very first time.

“Boys, boys. Boys, boys.”

Chief engineman Edward Snow reported aboard a day early to the consternation of a black gang still smarting with a plugged valve; the same day that Brace left the engine room, and the day when the phone on-shore connection failed for two hours, only to be discovered when a messenger arrived from the Base with a testy TWX message from First District saying that Operations was trying to make a routine call to Levere.

“Skiddy, boys. I be double-dog-damn if it’s good nor bad. Just backwards.”

The ordinarily smart-moving Indian Conally sprained an ankle and hobbled in tape like a wounded racehorse. An admiring senator spoke of proud traditions and of cutting the service’s budget. The commandant sent an all-units memorandum to express the hope that each man would do his best; and cutter Abner , showing its stern, steamed toward a mess that would soon work out to be one of the biggest flukes in the history of line breaking.

Chief engineman Edward Snow was small and quick, and only a little effeminate. He leered displeasure from a raised left eyebrow instead of hollering; and he took a tough and competent black gang and made it better.

“We’ll not do it that way, lads.”

Snow moved as accurately as a dipper gull, but he looked like a trim, khaki-colored towhee. By many pounds, and two or three inches, he was easily the shortest and lightest man aboard. Even the compact Amon seemed like a lumbering two-decker bus in comparison. Snow’s feet never tapped with impatience, but he caused others’ feet to tap as they pondered his administration. Fallon swore that Snow had typical brown English hair and was a socialist. When Howard pointed out that Fallon had never met a brown Englishman, socialist or not, Fallon muttered curses.

“He took down Jensen’s watchstanding orders.”

“The Ark of the Covenant,” Glass said. “Yids understand these things.”

“Don’t make jokes. ”

Snow pulled piping and wiring diagrams from the files. In league with Fallon and electrician Wysczknowski, he traced the systems and altered the diagrams. Cutter Adrian had been replumbed and rewired so many times that the diagrams were a cat’s-paw of revision. Quartermaster Chappel and yeoman Howard knew less about a drafting board than they knew about an abacus, but they began learning to draft. Revised schematics slowly began to stack up in the ship’s office, and even more slowly to appear in freshly redrawn form. Chappel and Howard struggled and cursed. Adrian ’s twin, cutter Abner , was at sea and equally struggling. Seaman apprentice Brace was tilted slaunchways from another encounter with Dane and—because of the lost Mona, or made lonely by the dying summer—was constructing a new hero.

“All hands belowdecks must memorize these diagrams,” Snow told Howard. “Work with great care.”

“It’s the only way you can work, when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You are receiving a large favor,” Snow told him. “Few quill-drivers ever learn how to draft.”

With Adrian on standby, the crew found itself testy after a summer of inaction. Men grumbled that since they could not go ashore it was foolish to hang against the pier. They muttered against the judgment of First District Operations as they followed the steadily increasing troubles of cutter Abner .

“Levere already asked,” radioman James told an assembly on the messdeck. “Operations won’t give us a proceed-and-assist.” To Lamp he said, “I thought Abner was supposed to be lucky.”

“The sea’s not running hard, boys.”

“That’s blamed small luck.”

“It’s touchy, boys. It’s touchy. Don’t think bad thoughts.”

Across the pier, and on the seaward side, where the familiar shape of Abner had seemed rooted during the summer, there now lay only the long perspective of distance.

The harbor still sparkled with sunlight, the inner islands were black, tree-covered and faraway humps, while clean-lined and freshly painted Norwegian freighters stood at the docks beside rusty Panamanian buckets, scarred coastal tankers, trim Britons, Canadians and a small white-and-green Irishman sparkling with pride and polish. Spectral French and Italian death ships mouldered against the docks like ghosts suffering extreme unction through the sacramental wine in their scuppers, rust in their bilges, and the oil that enclosed their hulls. Gray and white American tankers flew snapping corporation colors from their masts like small testimonials to efficiency; and, hanging like spiders in great clusters of drying nets, the ever present trawlers were aromatic with sweat and sun and fish as men forked the catch from the holds like farmers pitching hay—while, in the channel, yachts and lobster boats moved like a swirl of gnats above the face of a drowsing absolute.