Robert Mason - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“Hey!” I yelled. I was standing inside with my head out the hatch. “I found the fucking problem!”

“No shit?” John said.

“What’s it ees, Ali?” Ireland said.

“We got an air leak in a coupling. C’mon.” I waved. “C’mon, I’ll show you.” I was practically giggling. John crawled in with me, and Ireland squatted on the cabin deck. “Watch,” I said, pumping the fuel pump.

“Son of a bitch!” John yelled. “That’s it! That little fucking leak is all it takes!”

“Right. All we have to do is epoxy the joint, seal it up. That’ll fix it. At least well enough to get us cruising again.”

“Right,” John said, laughing. “We can put on a new fitting in Saint Thomas.”

We had lots of epoxy resin. It’s used to make repairs on fiberglass boats. John mixed up a few ounces of the stuff and smeared the goo all around the fitting. Nothing would ever leak in that coupling again. I put the fuel pump back on the right way and we went on deck to wait for the epoxy to cure.

John was beside himself with happiness. He drank two beers in quick succession. We were due in Saint Thomas in a week. He’d had a radio message on the single-sideband that we would be met there by the scam master himself, who’d bring us money. The transmission was encoded as usual: it sounded like a transmission between a home office and a freighter. The conversation was mumbo-jumbo about cargo, spare parts we needed, part numbers, and consignment numbers. Lots of numbers. The numbers were the message. John read some part numbers he said we needed that gave the scam master our position. The scam master sent changes to shipping order numbers that included the date and time he was going to meet us in Saint Thomas. So if this fuel-line patch worked, we would be on our way, and maybe even on time.

Near sunset, we figured the epoxy was set. We went below and pecked at the stuff with a screwdriver. Hard as a rock. I primed the fuel pump.

“Okay,” John said to Ireland, “give it a crank.”

Groan. Kapock. Sigh. The batteries were too weak to turn the engine.

“Goddammy!” Ireland yelled. “It’s always fucking something!”

John nodded, and slid out the tool drawer under the chart counter. He dumped a bunch of tools—Snap-On sockets, Vise-Grips, screwdrivers, torque wrenches—on the deck and fished out a long metal rod, bent in two places, with a socket at one end. He fit the socket onto the end of the engine’s crankshaft. “Okay. We can start this thing manually. I’ve done it before.”

He held the crank handle steady with his left hand and cranked with his right. He could turn the engine over, but, as strong as John was, it was too slow. A diesel builds up much more compression in its cylinders than does a regular gasoline engine. I grabbed the crank from the other side and together we tried again. Yank, push. Kathunk, kathunk, pow! We were puffing at the effort. It was like trying to spin a top in sand: there’s no momentum to it; it’s all brute force. Kathunk. Kathunk. Pow! Growl!

John yanked the cranking rod free of the engine and everybody cheered.

After four hours of listening to every little click, clack, pop, belch, and whirr that came out of the engine compartment, we began to relax. The engine ran perfectly. The Namaste was under way.

We celebrated that night by breaking out one of the freeze-dried dinners we’d brought. We only had a dozen of them. We got out the pork chops. They looked like cardboard disks, but when you soaked them and boiled them, damned if they didn’t turn into genuine pork loin chops. We served up freeze-dried peas and about a gallon of egg noodles. This sailing life is fine.

Ireland woke me up at eight a.m. I blinked at him in the dim morning light coming through the clear hatch in the roof of the cabin. “Where’s John?” I asked. He was out of cycle. Bob wakes John; John wakes me; it’s the cycle. Ireland shook his head. “John wouldn’t wake up.” He smiled. “Too much fun, eh?”

“Yeah, but that means you took his watch, Ramon.”

He nodded and crawled into his bunk across the cabin.

I sat at the tiller angry as hell. The captain of a boat should never miss his watch. I was looking for perfection here. I was remembering how if one guy in the team fucks up, the team gets wasted. We had assholes like that in the Cav. We had a captain in our company, a guy we called Daisy, who’d always go into the fetal position in his seat during the assaults. He’d hear the pilots yelling on the radios about taking hits, see the tracer bullets, and then he’d squinch down in the seat, pull up his feet, and try to hide behind his chicken-plate (what we called the bulletproof chest armor). You can’t fly while you’re cowering in the seat. If the other pilot got wounded or killed, nobody would be on the controls. When you let go of the controls of a helicopter, it goes eight directions at once, apeshit wild. That captain didn’t seem to understand that if the ship went, he went. He was too overcome with fear to think.

Somehow, I equated that captain’s dereliction of duty with John’s, and it made me mad. The two men got mixed in my mind until John’s missing his watch became a fuckup with life-or-death consequences.

When John came on deck at lunchtime, I told him what I thought.

“John, do you know that Bob had to stand your watch last night?”

John looked at me, suddenly angry. “What about it?”

“What about it? That means he’s up eight hours. It means he’s likely to fall asleep on watch and we’d never know if we were going to hit a freighter, go off course, or something. That’s what.”

John glared—probably thinking, you should never hire friends. I turned and went below, sat on my bunk, and got out the Air Almanac and started reading.

John came down, staggering. He’d already put down a couple of six-packs. He was madder than I’d ever seen him before. He leaned up close to my face and said, “Look, Mason. I’m the captain here. You’re the dinger. Don’t you ever call me down again.” He glared. “You do, and I’ll set you straight. Get it?”

I’m not the fighting type. At least not physically—especially not when it comes to getting into it with a guy that can tie me in knots. I’d need a gun to make it even. I looked back at John’s face, watched the anger pouring out of him. Part of the anger was from his drinking. I knew about that from my own life as a boozer. Part of it was just embarrassment. I nodded. “Okay, John. I get it.” I looked down at my book and saw him turn and climb back up on deck.

I couldn’t read what I was looking at. I was mad, getting really jumpy. I needed to know the team knew what the fuck they were doing. I didn’t want to trust my life to fucking amateurs. I simmered for a while. I considered jumping ship at Saint Thomas.

Two days later, the wind came back. We saw a huge black wall in the sky approaching us all day. On the radio, the Coast Guard talked about a huge storm, and this was it. We had hours to prepare. As the breeze picked up, we shut down the engine and rigged the sails for the approaching tempest.

When it hit, we were ready. The Namaste heeled way over. Huge waves crashed over us. But we had been through this drill before. We pitched, wallowed, creaked, and groaned, but the Namaste was up to the task and forged ahead. I was beginning to love this boat. She was stalwart.

“What does Namaste mean, anyway?” I asked while we huddled under the dodger sharing a can of cold Del Monte beef stew. Rosalinda was back on the job, holding our course to within a degree or two.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea,” John said. He was friendly, the argument forgotten. He had not missed a watch since.

“Maybe it means Pot Smugglers,’ “ Ireland said. “Coast Guard probably sold this boat to Ray.” We laughed.