Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

“Where will we get the money?” he had said.

“Daddy will lend it to us. He says a house would be a good investment.”

“But we can’t be sure we’ll want to live anywhere near here when the war is over. I might get a job anywhere.”

“I wouldn’t think of living anywhere else but Wellesley,” she said. “Paul, don’t you understand that I need a house to keep me busy when you’re gone? I don’t want just to live at home like daddy’s little girl again. I want my own place. If we’re going to have a baby, we’re going to have to have a house, and I might already be pregnant.”

He tried to understand and felt guilty for thinking that she was silly and self-indulgent. On his last night with her she wanted to discuss colors for walls and fabrics for rugs. Her mind was so intent on all this that any other conversation was impossible. For her his ship and the ordeal ahead of him simply did not exist, and she obviously did not want to hear about it. Her own immediate future was all that interested her. Despite all her passionate talk, and her interest in sexual experimentation, he began to suspect that she had not yet grown up enough to love anybody or to think much of anyone else. Which was when he started to get drunk—

But all this was nothing to think about now when memories of the good parts of his life were necessary to get him through the bad ones. Dismissing the memories of that last night with her, he went back to that evening aboard the Valkyrie , when after winning the first wrestling match, she had decided to see just how many times she could make him perform. That had been a childish game perhaps, but he dearly wished he could play it with her again. With startling recall, he could almost smell the sweetness of her sweat in the dark cabin of the Arluk , and hear her little cries.

Lying in his narrow bunk aboard the ship, Paul hardly had to touch himself to spend his solitary passion. At almost exactly that instant the general alarm began to clang, and he heard the boatswain’s pipes shrill call, followed by Boats’s hoarse voice yelling, “General quarters drill! Man and train all guns, and bring ammunition to the breech, but do not load.”

“Oh, my !” Seth exploded as he always did at such times, and Nathan mumbled beneath his breath as he pulled on his pants. Usually Paul was the first from the wardroom during surprise drills, but under the circumstances he waited until the others had gone before changing his underwear and putting on his uniform. It was only a quarter to four in the morning, but when he scrambled to the deck, he found that the Newfoundland dawn was already bright. Mowrey was standing on the gun deck, a glass in his hand and his voice thick when he shouted, “Hurry it up, girls, or we’ll be sunk before you ever get to your guns. Where the hell have you been, Yale, down there jerking off in your bunk?”

When the drill was finally over, Mowrey ordered Paul to the bridge.

Paul found his captain sitting on his stool, holding a glass which by its color and smell appeared to be full of undiluted whiskey.

“I see you playing poker up at the officers’ club,” Mowrey said. “Did I give you permission to go ashore?”

“No sir, but I assumed I could set watches. Both Mr. Farmer and Mr. Green wanted to stay aboard.”

“You better learn to assume nothing and never set foot off this ship without getting my direct permission,” Mowrey said quietly, looking off in the distance over Paul’s shoulder. “See them ships coming in?”

Two big, gray passenger liners were standing into the harbor, their signal masts aflutter with brightly colored flags and pennants.

“They look like troop carriers,” Paul said.

“What flags are they flying?” Mowrey asked sweetly.

“Sir?”

“Just take the white one there and the blue square in it, or the red one with the white stripe. What letters of the alphabet do they signify?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ll start studying signal flags right away.”

“You won’t go ashore until you know them, and if you don’t learn them damn soon, that will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Have you been practicing blinker light with Greenberg, like I told you to?”

“When we were at sea, sir, I’m afraid we were both too sick for that.”

“ That will look good on your fitness report. Practice blinker lights for at least an hour a day with Greenberg — he at least knows Morse code.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And I want you to teach him navigation for at least an hour a day. He don’t even know the book part of it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I want you to take star sights, sun sights and moon sights right here at the wharf and let me see your computations.”

“Do you want us to take actual sights?”

“Well, sweet Jesus, I don’t want you to hold your thumb up to your nose and pretend.”

“I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here. How can we take sights?”

“Is that what you’re going to tell me when we’re in the ice pack? ‘I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here, so how can we take sights?’”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Read up on artificial horizons. Try the bubble sextant. It’s under the chart desk.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“What’s that planet up there in the sky now?”

Paul looked up and studied the morning sky, in which just one planet glowed.

“Venus, isn’t it, sir?”

“Sweet Jesus Christ! If you don’t know, look it up, don’t guess! It’s Mars. Can’t you see that it glows red?”

“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll read up on identifying planets.”

“If you can’t identify any planet I point to inside of twenty-four hours that will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Now get the hell off the bridge. I was in a good mood until I had to look at you. How the hell do they expect me to run a ship with nothing but a farmer, a Yale and a Sheenie?”

“I’m supposed to teach you navigation and we’re supposed to practice blinker lights,” Paul said to Nathan when he returned to the wardroom. “Do you want to try to get some sleep first?”

“I don’t think I can get back to sleep now,” Nathan said, “but let’s have some coffee.”

Cookie had climbed back into his bunk, but he had left a big pot of coffee on the stove and a platter of fresh Danish pastries on the table in the forecastle. To avoid waking the sleeping men in the surrounding bunks, they took their heavy mugs of coffee to the hatch over the well deck and sat on the canvas cover, looking at the big troop ships, which were mooring on the other side of the harbor.

“I suppose they’re going to England,” Nathan said.

“Or Greenland. I hear they’re sending a lot of construction workers up there to build airfields.”

There was a pause before Nathan said, “I wonder how long it will be before this whole goddamn war is over?”

“I always think of four years,” Paul said. “That’s about the length of time most of our wars seem to last.”

“Four years.…” Nathan gave a sigh of profound sorrow.

“Of course we probably will get home way before then,” Paul said. “Have you got a wife waiting for you?”

Slowly Nathan turned his face from the troop ships toward him and Paul was shocked by the look on it.

“I’m married,” Nathan said and seemed about to add more, but took a sip of his coffee instead. “Do you want to start on signaling or navigation?”

They started on the signaling, with Nathan sending Morse code very slowly to Paul, but after only a few minutes Mowrey ordered Paul to his cabin to bring the charts up to date with some Notice to Mariners bulletins he had just discovered. Nathan climbed to the flying bridge, the only place on the ship where he could usually be alone, and stood leaning against the mast. Overhead Mars glowed brightly in a deep blue sky. Nathan knew what planet it was — in his youth astronomy had been one of his passions. When he was about fifteen he had built a three-inch telescope and mounted it on the flat roof of his father’s house in Brooklyn.