Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“Well, goddamn it—”

Just then the monkey let out a horrific scream. She squatted on the cross yard and crapped in her hand, then threw the handful at the My in the gold hat. It hit him on the shirtfront.

“Waste that monkey!”

The wide man drew his pistol and shot the monkey out of the crosstrees. She fell heavily onto the deck, still screaming. A tiny bloody monkey head popped out between her legs. The wide man shot her again.

Captain Tho fired the carbine from his hip. His bullet knocked the wide man’s head sideways, and the captain saw the groove it had left along his cheek, blood dripping suddenly from the wide man’s torn ear. The wide man shot him in the face. Then he emptied the pistol into Captain Tho’s head.

The My in the fast boat threw up his hands in exasperation. He threw his hat on deck.

“All right then,” he said. “Waste the fucking lot of them.”

* * *

An hour later, and some twenty miles north of San Lázaro, Curt Hughes saw the smoke from the burning junk pall over the horizon. His dog stood on the cabin roof, growling toward the smoke. Curt wondered what it was. None of his business whatever. He was headed north toward Manila.

“Probably just those nasty pirates, Brillo,” he said to the dog. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.”

Too damned hot around here, he thought. On his chart he circled San Lázaro in red pencil, then wrote beside it, “Bad news.”

The Seamark ran north on the wind toward Manila.

THIRTEEN

In addition to Venganza’s deck log, Miranda kept a personal log of each day’s major developments, along with her ongoing impressions and speculations. She’d developed this habit in her earliest days at sea, when she discovered that if they found her scribbling in a book during her off hours, her hornier shipmates would leave her alone. But journals are addictive, and even when she became master of her own vessel, she kept it up. She wrote in ink so she wouldn’t be tempted by personal historical revisionism at some later date; she struck through her errors or those words she suddenly wanted to amend with a single line, ship’s-log fashion, so that the original remained legible. She wrote in a long, green-covered logbook of the sort used by mariners for ages now, brass-bound at the corners and authoritative in its heft.

An excerpt:

Underway 0620, Honolulu to Philippines, rhumb lines via Majuro in the Marshalls. Trades steady, NE to ENE; seas moderate. Having Effredio aboard is a great boon. Not only cuts the work- and watch-load by a third—more than a third, thanks to his energy—but gives me someone to talk to, a mooring line to my past. Says Curt has left Palawan—friends of Freddie’s saw him briefly in Manila talking to some air force officer, other friends spotted Seamark later in Zamboanga, on Mindanao. Freddie sent his friend Padre Cotinho down there to watch him. Freddie’s sister, who works for Pan Am in Manila, cut him a free ticket to Honolulu, where he knew I must stop to replenish stores. Freddie well connected.

Shot noon sun—made good 48 miles since departure, solid 8½ knots—just before brief squall blew down from N. Reefed main and mizzen. Venganza heeled sharply to first gusts but kicked up her heels when I payed her off a point to leeward. Good seaboat. I love the sound of a wooden boat in a storm. She flexes like a strong man’s dick. Rain felt good—collected 20 gallons in wooden casks from leech of sails. Next time we see one coming must remember to bring dirty wash topside and do some laundry. Hate a smelly seabag.

Dad still fit and clear-eyed following the Rum Bottle Test. Can’t call him Dad anymore. He’s a hand like any other. Will call him Culdee or Boats henceforth. He’s been civil enough to Freddie so far but watches him like a seahawk. Checking him out. Saw him testing knots on Freddie’s reef points when the rain hit, later watching the compass over Freddie’s shoulder while he had the helm. Freddie knows what’s up. Without looking back he said, “She keeks, Boats, don’t she? Leetle beet, anyway.” Culdee just grunted and went forward.

Checked caulking after the squall. No oakum spewed. Rance still hiding for fear of the Stranger. Saw his beady eyes peering at me from sea stores in the lazaret when I went forward to check for leaks. Warned Freddie not to kill him if he shows during his watch.

Shot evening stars—51 mi. made good since noon. At this rate we’ll reach the P.I. in three weeks. (Don’t count your landfalls before you raise them.)

Fresh mahimahi for the evening meal, the fish caught on trolling line by Freddie just as I was about to open a can of beef. A good omen?

Culdee’s ghosts began to surface as they passed the entrance to Pearl Harbor. In the old days, when you cleared the dogleg at the inland end, the first thing you saw was the hulk of the old Arizona rising out of the dirty blue water. Now there was a museum there, he knew, shining white in the sunlight and dwarfing the sunken battlewagon. He didn’t want to see it. Years ago he’d served in a destroyer with a mustang—an ex-gunner’s mate elevated to officer grade by the war—who’d been in the Arizona back then. He’d been part of her company for eight years, since leaving boot camp. He was on leave, heading back to the States, when the Japs attacked on December 7, 1941. The ship that was taking him Stateside turned right around and steamed back.

Dan—that was the mustang’s name—was a qualified navy hard-hat diver. He had to dive into the hull of his own dead ship. There were twelve hundred bodies in there, shipmates. “Some of them I knew when I found their bodies,” Dan said one night on the mid-watch. “Some I didn’t know. Some you really couldn’t tell either way.”

The images came back to Culdee when the Venganza shot past the entrance and broke toward the open sea—the darkness there in the ripped hull, weak light from waterproof lamps, and brighter stabs of light from the acetylene torches cutting through warped bulkheads; fish darting in and out of the light; torn bodies floating, stuck like balloons to the overheads by the gas generated within them by death, some of the faces clear and recognizable—pale, slack-jawed, vaguely surprised by how easily it had taken them—others bitter at the knowledge, and others already eaten by fish; bits of old shipmates drifting here and there, arms sunk by the weight of a wristwatch, a Negro mess boy buried by the spill of blue-rimmed crockery that fell from the wardroom pantry shelves, and enginemen boiled the color of shrimp by the high-pressure steam of burst pipes. Dan had taken him clear through the Arizona that night, stem to stern, main deck to keelson, on the midwatch.

“After a while it wasn’t so bad,” Dan had said. “I’d pull one down off the overhead and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Horns Gearhardt, whose old lady run off with the shoe clerk in Shit City.’ Or, ‘that’s Old Chief Merriman, the practical joker,’ and I’d remember the night we pulled liberty down in Tijuana and let the bulls loose from their pens behind the bullring up there on the hill and they charged down through T-town and chased all the whores ahead of them down the Avenida de la Revolución. But then I found my best buddy’s head—Mike Powers, another gunner. How it got down there from the number one turret where he was a gun captain, don’t ask me. It had rolled into a corner by the ruptured boiler. I couldn’t send it topside with the rest of the body parts, not my best friend. I picked it up and put it into the boiler. As far as I know, it’s down there still.”