The Jonah Watch

Chapter 20

These are the bars of scollay square, adrift with crud, busted wine bottles, trash, garbage, and huddled lumps of decaying clothing which swaddle passed-out flesh that dries and dies in doorways beneath the benison of those Irish idealists, worn with cocky servitude into creatures of fists: the police.

Streets wind downhill to the moorings where masts cluster like burned forests, and where museum ships bearing proud names and bold history endure fossilized protection; as schoolchildren—and less able tourists—stick chewing gum beneath the rails as they touristly gossip with proprietary smugness of revolutions made by others.

Cutter Able lies burned and scorched in dry dock. Cutter Adrian hangs at the pier, aflash with the quick, hot torches of welders; as workmen rapidly cut, add, patch, and get the thing ready in all respects to return to sea. Cutter Abner, en route to stand by for Able in New Bedford, is apprised that the overdue Seascamp was never lost. A change of plans, unreported, took it to New York where, it is rumored, politely ladled measures of gin and scotch cloud all thought of possible error, even through the longest and darkest hours of night.

“F’I had a deed to all the real estate in this town that I’ve puked on, I’d be a rich an’ happy man.”

These bars of Scollay Square. Men take their first drinks and vow to proceed to the yid district where seaman Glass has “connections.” The men drink one, drink another against the journey. Through frosted windows they watch dull streets. Yellow stains of nicotine cover the panes to slump with running drops of thaw in spots where hot blasts from chugging ceiling furnaces loosen filth that runs like the yellow track of a portentous, sniffing, leg-raising hound. Women, on their last downhill leg—women born unlucky, or charmed, and certainly born unto ignorance, that one true mark of Cain—the women laugh, go haw-haw; pretend that at some time during their lives they have been happy for longer than fifteen consecutive minutes. Young sailors look at the ham-handed, billy-club-packing bartenders. The sailors rub the lips of beer glasses with the palms of their hands. They pretend to be thinking, as they superstitiously rub beer on the glass in hope of killing germs that pack rare disease.

“Don’t get cranked up here,” Glass told Brace. “They’ll roll you for your socks.”

“Why’d we come here, then?”

“It’s in every guidebook,” Howard told him. “Always visit the Chamber of Commerce first.”

“You used to be a funny guy.”

“I don’t feel funny anymore.”

The men drink a third beer, then a fourth, in preparation for the cold trip crosstown.

“I wish I could meet a decent woman.”

Howard, who has learned the great secret, and who, after beer, is generous: “Go to a library.”

“You yeomen is all alike.”

“It’s true,” said Howard. “Two thirds of all sailors who marry meet their wives in libraries”—a statistical exaggeration by Howard, who, doing correct calculation, would have arrived at only half that figure.

“Makes sense, sorta. Where else can a decent woman be seen talkin’ to you?”

The men drink a fifth beer, a sixth.

Brace looked through the windows at the cold streets. He was reluctant to move into that darkness, and the reluctance showed on the once bland face that was now creased here and there with a light wrinkle. He looked around the seamy, grungy, spit-ridden bar. His movements, once quick and inaccurate, were now deliberate. He whirled his flat hat on one finger.

“It’s either about something,” he said, “or it isn’t. I’m going back to the ship.”

Howard stood. “I’ll come with.”

Glass stood. “Me, too. If I did go over that way, I’d probably just run into my folks.”

“Because things are changing,” said Brace. “Everything is changing.”

Some change was abrupt. Racca and Masters left the ship, Racca on a stretcher and Masters escorted by Majors. Three days later, as the first heavy snow swirled between buildings and danced in a northeast declamation along the pier, Racca returned with his arm in a cast. The snow slopped along brick streets where traffic churned dirt, mixing the snow into a cold custard of filth. As the wind increased, and the snow increased, ships along the pier faded. The white bows melted into wind and snow, and the ships became spectral blots of white on white.

Racca smiled, gossiped, grinned. He clowned. He was a juggler of his emotions, a bare adept who managed not to weep. McClean helped pack Racca’s gear. Men who did not even like Racca, much, pretended that he would soon return to limited duty, but it was clear that Racca was ashore to stay.

Masters pretended madness, and was believed. The first storm died. The second storm moved in with an immense burden of snow, as if the storm attempted to cloud and hide the shame of the dirty streets. Masters talked and talked and talked; to doctors, and to a legal officer. He accepted a general discharge.

“He got off easy,” said Glass. “They could of hung him high.”

“This way causes less stink,” Howard told him. “Plus, it’s cheaper.”

“Of course, if he’s really crazy…”

Wysczknowski, dealing a perennial hand of solitaire, shifted uncomfortably. The messdeck, where Brace mopped, was constantly damp with melted snow. The ship was vaguely cold, and frosted breath combined with melted snow to cover bulkheads with a thin glaze of moisture that was not cold enough to freeze, not warm enough to evaporate. “Everybody was crazy,” said Wysczknowski. “Masters yellowed out. The crazy part don’t matter.”

Some of the changes looked good. Fireman Schmidt transferred in from a weather cutter. Schmidt’s square kraut head, with its regulation dress blue weather-cutter haircut, bent like a lover in the engine room, and it was clear that Schmidt was going to be okay.

Third engineman Bascomb, with a Georgia accent, transferred in from a buoy snatcher. Bascomb was a lanky, cracker-looking yahoo with a loud mouth who—according to scuttlebutt—got that loud mouth because, where he was raised, it was a far piece between the house and the barn. Men idly worried, watched Bascomb and McClean; were relieved when the two went ashore drinking, to return in a maudlin, foul-mouthed state, because bartenders were prejudiced against southerners.

Other change was subtle, and perhaps it was not change at all. Howard knew that Levere spent too much time in operations. Howard counseled himself with a dozen troubled speculations, chief among them the cold suspicion that either Abner or Adrian would be permanently assigned to New Bedford. Howard kept his silence against the awful day when the news would arrive, but the news did not arrive; and Howard, for two days, was otherwise occupied. When he could finally contrive no good official reason for calling Abner, he dug in his own pockets and looked for a pay phone. He hunched in his peacoat, shivering, frozen because he was ashore in a regulation, dress blues town. He dialed.

“Nobody here is talking,” he said to radioman Diamond.

“It happened so fast,” Diamond told Howard. “It’s snowing hard here.”

“We already have it here. Radio says they have it deep up home.”

“I know,” said Diamond. “I’m the radioman.”

Yeoman Wilson, climbing from Abner’s small boat to the deck of Able while carrying a medical kit, had grabbed a chain. The chain gave way. Wilson fell backward, struck his head on the gunnel of the boat, and was dead.

“The hook had rusted,” Diamond said. “Somebody tied that thing in place with marlin.”

“A bosun’s mate, then, or a seaman.”

“Try to find out—you can’t. Our guys already been that route.”

“There’s a board of investigation.”

“They’ll hang the captain,” Diamond said, “and probably the chief bosun.”

“But who really did it?”

“Try to find out—because no one knows. Maybe not even the guy who did it.”

Some change only threatened.

“I want out of this,” said Brace. “Where is that guy, Iris?”

Lamp, surrounded by the enormous port of Boston, thus with a surfeit of sinners, stayed aboard. His excellent cooking improved. While the rest of the crew forgot Jensen, and as Racca and Masters vanished more surely than spirits from their places on the messdeck, Lamp attacked the invisible. This time his attack was subtle, in the form of constant small surprises. Men peered suspiciously at silly desserts, at pink cupcakes—at creampuffs—which they licked experimentally, then wolfed. On the cold ship the only warm place was the galley, and steam from Lamp’s fires spilled from the galley and clouded the messdeck. Brace mopped, squeegeed, swabbed, could not get rid of water.

“Iris is at the base in South Portland,” Howard told Brace. “Waiting for us to get in.”

“Quit complaining, sonny,” Lamp told Brace. “We got November off. You want to be steaming in that mess out there?”

“Nobody’s steaming, anyway.”

Which was nearly true. During November, cutter Aaron, of Boston, towed fishing vessel Pearl. Cutter Abner, standby in New Bedford, towed fishing vessel Stella. Two men were reported in the surf at Hampton Beach. Dune pounders searched, recovered no one. As storms swept off the North Atlantic, traffic dropped. Fishermen doubled up their moorings, mended nets.

Brace complained, but his work improved. For the first time, Brace seemed to listen to his own complaint, hear his own voice. The tenor of complaint and voice changed. Brace seemed nearly reasonable; stoic, the victim trapped in a dentist’s chair from which, sooner or later, he could step away drilled and patched and forgetful.

“A guy gets tired,” he told Howard. “I don’t mean the work, I mean the kind of work.”

“You’ll be out of it soon.”

“I want to talk to you,” Brace said covertly. “But not on the ship. You can’t scratch your own can aboard this ship without it gets logged.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Maybe not,” Brace said with a sincere attempt to speak justly, “but I want to talk off the ship.”

The matter being perhaps serious, and Howard nosy, the two men met over five-cent cups of coffee in a run-down cafeteria where old men chewed, burped, scratched their crotches and looked at walls decorated with fading murals of sea battles between tall ships. Dim battle flags flew above washed-out spouts of cannon smoke that fumed beneath gray bulges of burning sails. A portrait purporting to be Nelson, or Farragut, or possibly the man who originally opened the cafeteria, hung above the cash register.

“I’ve been to this town four different times,” Howard said. “I still haven’t seen an admiral.”

“You have to guess they’re around somewhere.” Brace leaned forward, elbows on the table, and the two white stripes of his apprenticeship seemed the only part of himself or his outfit that glowed. His regrown shock of undistinguished hair rode like an insipid layer of paint above a face that, to Howard, seemed mightily changed. Howard, himself nearly stilled by loss, and the awfulness of chance, and by fear, could only guess that Brace still thought of a dark, entrapping compartment where water reached toward his mouth.

“Is that true about libraries?”

“It’s true.”

“It’s a good thing to know,” said Brace, “but it’s not what I want to talk about.” He fumbled in his jumper, apologetically drew out a pack of smokes. Lit one. Offered one. “I don’t want to go to the engine room. I don’t want Levere to know that.”

“Why tell me?”

“You’re the guy does watch lists.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Okay,” said Brace, “it doesn’t. You’re the guy who watches everything.”

“You got cured of engine rooms?”

“I was scared,” said Brace. “I can go belowdecks, but I don’t like it any more. I don’t like Dane all that much, but I don’t like belowdecks.”

“Dane’s okay.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Brace said. “He’s different now. He’s actually the one who got me loose.”

“And he smacked you around.”

Brace looked like a man who remembers the tenderness of romance long after the troublesome lover has departed. “Yeah, he smacked me.”

“Last fall Snow smacked you. Does a guy have to hit you before you like him?”

“I didn’t say I liked him. I just say this was different. A lot different. I was going to drown.” Brace looked into his cup as if he read messages there. “There’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Still,” said Howard, “you have to admit that it makes you sound like a pervert.”

“I can’t help how it sounds.” Brace looked up, directly at a portrayal of a bursting gun. He gazed unflinchingly at the blast. “Dane was different coming back on that scow. Told me things. Off the ship he’s at least a little different.”

Howard supposed to Brace that even crocodiles mellowed.

“That ain’t it,” said Brace. “I have to find out if I can trust him. I don’t want the engine room, but if I can’t trust him, I don’t want the deck. I’ll have to have a transfer.” His eyes, for only a moment, shifted from the dusky paintings on the wall. His eyes showed a trace of fear.

“I don’t get it.”

“These guys owe me something.”

“Nothing.”

“They do,” Brace said. “I have to find out. Do they keep their promises.” He butted the cigarette, lit another. “If I went to the engine room, it would leave one man short on deck. I want to know do they keep their promise, even if it shorts the deck.”

“So why do you need me?”

“You’ve been around,” said Brace. “I wanta know, is it fair what I’m doing, or am I setting them up?”

“You could be setting your own self up,” Howard told him, “but, yes, it’s fair.”

“I wanted to know,” Brace said with smoke-puffing sincerity, “‘cause I’m never going to pull hard for anybody, ever again, ever, unless they don’t lie to me.”

Howard opined that Brace was going to lead a lonely life.

“If that’s the way it’s got to be.”

“It’s a good ship.”

“It’s a ship,” Brace said. “These guys have to be as good with their mouths as they are at sea.” He leaned back in the chair, and the intensity that crowded him seemed to concentrate. “Dane rigged that patch. I don’t know everything, but I know what I saw.”

“You saw a bosun rig a patch,” said Howard.

“That’s a way of not lying. When you can do that.”

“I guess,” Howard told him, “that you have to be from Illinois.” Howard slurped the last of his coffee, a man eager to make a quick departure.

“Nope,” said Brace. “Every time I try to understand this, you, or somebody, wiggles away. Now quit wigglin’ and talk.”

“What am I supposed to say? We do what we do. It must be worth doing. Otherwise we wouldn’t.”

“That’s what all the liars say.” Brace’s barely lined face seemed concentrated on memories of thousands of hundreds of liars. “I don’t mean you. That’s what my old man used to say about trombones. He could make a trombone sound exactly like a flat tire.”

“Every time you guys talk about your fathers, I’m glad I didn’t have one.”

“But Dane isn’t a flat tire. Snow isn’t. Or not if they keep their promise…” and Brace faltered.

“Okay,” said Howard. “We do what we do because dopes can’t take care of themselves. The world is mostly dopes and pimps. The pimps can take care of themselves.” He rubbed at his empty coffee cup as though it were a crystal ball. He looked into the cup, looked at Brace. “I just lost a friend,” he said apologetically. “A dope killed him.”

“Only dopes and pimps?”

“I don’t know,” said Howard. “Scavengers. We’re the scavengers, and we pick up the leftovers. We’re crows, magpies, basking sharks, gulls…”

“Ohio must be worse than I thought.”

“It’s not Ohio,” said Howard. “It’s every place. You asked for this. You enlisted.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“Yes, you are. But you can’t think that Levere and the rest can waste time worrying about what some punk seaman deuce does.”

“They better,” said Brace, “or else they better start learning to play the trombone.”

“If I see an admiral, I’ll mention your name.” Howard made motion to stand. “I get so sick of drinking. I’m going to a movie.”

“One thing.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t believe that about ghosts and Jonahs?”

“I believe it about the ghost,” Howard said, and he was grim. “That ghost and I have been around and around—three times.”

Howard stood, fished for his money, counted. “I have enough for two, if you have our bus fare back.” He looked at Brace, who seemed fascinated by a flaming, crashing mast.

“A Jonah’s just another name for bad luck,” Howard said. “Maybe it’s just another name for weather. We get tore up every year, we break at least one arm every year….” He paused, because his catalog suddenly foundered on a reality. “A guy doesn’t get lost every year,” he said.

“Is it going to be a funny movie?”

“Comedy,” Howard told him. “You call them comedies.”