Pacific Interlude Page 21

  Strange man, Buller … just when you thought you had him tagged in a bottle, he made you change the label …

  Syl had been under so much tension that he almost looked forward to getting back to the shuttle run. In Tacloban harbor there was at least the companionship of Schuman and Mostell. It was, after all, easier to get on with skippers of other ships than with his own officers. Those guys were like friends.

  If he reported the grounding to the major, the Y-18 probably would be told to anchor and wait for a diver. Maybe Schuman and Mostell could come over in a boat while their ships were loading or unloading.

  The ship was late in getting started because good-old-boy Buller had suggested a swimming party. Of course the men loved the idea.

  “The water’s clear here,” Buller said to Syl. “Up on the flying bridge you can see there are no sharks and we can post a man with a rifle just in case.”

  “We need to be getting back soon—”

  “They’ll just put us back on that shuttle run.”

  The men needed a break, Syl realized. He guessed they all did. He gave the okay for the swimming party, and Simpson actually volunteered to stand shark watch on the flying bridge with his pistol. Stripping off their dungarees, the men dove into the sea. Buller figured out a way to nail planks together and make an aquaplane, and they launched the assault boat that skittered in figure eights around the ship. Some of the swimmers who could not find room in the skiff climbed to the forecastle head and flying bridge for high dives, their skinny bodies glistening in the sun. They jostled each other playfully and snapped towels like high school boys in a gymnasium. Syl had forgotten how young most of them were.

  Buller appeared, majestically naked on the tank deck, his genitals as bull-like as his name. The men cheered and surrounded him, shoving him toward the rail. He broke clear and dived, his legs crooked and his arms flailing, making an enormous splash.

  “Come on in,” he called to Syl. “You chicken? The water’s great.”

  Standing on the wing of the bridge, all eyes on him, Syl felt self-conscious as he took off his clothes, climbed to the top of the rail, balanced precariously for a moment with his hand on the top of the pilothouse before knifing cleanly into the sea, his arms outstretched in the swan dive his father had taught him a million years ago.

  “I’ll race you around the ship,” he told Buller as his head rose above water.

  “Five bucks I win,” Buller sputtered.

  The men on deck made side bets as they lined the rail.

  Syl put his face down and began the Australian crawl. While taking a breath he shot a glimpse at Buller, pleased to see him thrashing along with bent arms and legs, making a commotion in a swirl of white water but going nowhere fast. Still, the big man had great strength and endurance, and Syl had all he could do to keep ahead of him as they circled the ship.

  “You cheated,” Buller roared as the men declared Syl the winner. “Hell, this was the first time I ever was in the water.”

  If that was true, it might further explain why Buller was so anxious to get off a tanker, or anything else afloat.

  “You want to try wrastling?” Buller called from the water as Syl climbed the rope ladder.

  “No … I declare you undisputed wrestling champion aboard this ship, unless somebody else wants to try you,” Syl said. Buller could break most men in two in a bear hug. Himself included.

  They weighed anchor and picked their way through the channel they had marked, with the skiff following to retrieve the life preservers that had served as buoys. A tug was now trying to help the grounded navy tanker, but her bow still looked high and dry.

  It was about six in the afternoon when the Y-18 approached the crowded harbor at Tacloban. An unusually large flight of bombers was circling over the airstrip, waiting for a turn to land. Despite the usual blackout they had flashed on their red, green and white running lights to avoid collision, and this display was oddly cheerful, as though peace had just been declared. As the Y-18 entered the channel she passed the Gasoline Alley, which was heading out for a new load, and Syl had Sorrel ask Schuman over that evening while his ship was taking cargo.

  Studying the airstrip through the binoculars, Syl saw the Yankee Yo-Yo moored alongside the fuel barge. Still low in the water, she must have just begun to pump gas, and Mostell would have time to come aboard for a couple of hours. They could have the party alongside the big merchant tanker out in the bay while they were loading. If he reported the grounding and asked for a diver, the army might just tell him to anchor for the night and wait.

  Syl decided to take the skiff in to report to the major and while he was in there he could go aboard the Yankee Yo-Yo and see Mostell. While the skiff was being launched Syl sat on a stool on the wing of the bridge, watching the brightly colored lights of the bombers circling over the airstrip. The red and green glow in the sky made him think of Christmas, which would come before long now, a melancholy holiday in time of war but still a meaningful one. He saw more planes fly over the crest of the nearest hill, but they too showed running lights and he thought nothing of them until there was an explosion on the airstrip, followed by many more in quick succession.

  Suddenly the whole place went up in flames. Air raid sirens ashore and general alarms on the surrounding ships almost drowned out the repeated crump of bombs. The fires spread faster than they had the first time this airstrip had been hit.

  Buller ran to the bridge. “They followed our planes right in …”

  Syl raised the binoculars and studied the blunt profile of the Yankee Yo-Yo, which was now silhouetted against the flames. He could make out few details but could clearly imagine men running over her decks, trying to disconnect the cargo hose and cast off the lines. He could imagine Mostell’s deep voice calling from the bridge. He could almost see the scramble to start the engine and run out hoses. But it was too late. The fuel barge had already been hit and flames were reaching toward the ship, licking over the pilothouse, enveloping the tank deck, and suddenly there was a white blast bigger than the bombs had made and he saw a broken lifeboat arch into the air, do a lazy somersault before falling into the inferno which roared over the spot where the Yankee Yo-Yo had been.

  The men of the Y-18 stood speechless.

  “No,” Buller suddenly roared. “No, goddamn it, no!” And he slammed the side of the pilothouse with his big fist.

  “We better get out of here, skipper,” Simpson said, “or the same thing could happen to us. It’s too crowded for a tanker here.”

  Syl swallowed, blinked his eyes. A strange humming in his ears seemed louder than anything around him, and all the voices appeared to come from a far distance.

  “Captain,” Hathaway said, “I’ve got the base on the radio. The Japs are dropping paratroopers now. The army’s already caught two of them.”

  “Very well,” Syl said, fully aware that this sounded idiotic.

  “Can I take in the anchor?” Simpson said.

  “Take in the anchor.”

  Syl felt as though he were in a trance as he conned the ship through the crowded harbor to the outer bay. As the big storage tanks and an ammunition dump exploded ashore, the waters of the harbor appeared to blaze as brightly as the buildings around the airstrip. He felt like a moth flying through flames. He had already blown up, felt disembodied, a ghost. Fire couldn’t touch a ghost. It was already dead …

  As he was letting go the anchor Schuman’s boat came alongside. Schuman jumped to the deck of th Y-18.

  “Did Mostell get out?” he shouted to the bridge.

  “No,” Syl said tonelessly.

  Schuman climbed to the wing of the bridge, and they stared together at the inferno around the inner harbor.

  “I guess it had to be one of us,” Schuman said.

  The words, “One down, two to go,” popped into Syl’s head. He did not speak them. How much of his shock, he wondered, at the death of the Yankee Yo-Yo was on account of Mostell, whom he had genuinely liked, and how much
was for himself. Mostell no longer existed, not even as a dead body. Mostell was just air now, fire and air, rolling up to the clouds with all that smoke. Jesus …

  “Captain,” Hathaway said, “the navy is warning all ships against possible attack by motor torpedo boats. They think they might be working with the paratroopers.”

  “Keep the machine guns manned. Double the lookouts.”

  “I got to be getting back to my ship,” Schuman said. “Do you mind if I come back when we get the all-clear?”

  “No,” Syl said. “Come back. Please.”

  He went to his cabin and lay down, but he could not stop one of the stupid verses he’d once written from sounding in his brain, the words booming in the basso profundo as Mostell would have sung it …

  They say that the gas drives us crazy—

  A tanker’s not good for our heads,

  But we rarely complain when we fly like a plane

  Without getting out of our beds …

  Six hours later Hathaway told Syl the paratroopers had been killed and the all-clear signal given. The inner harbor was still ringed by fire, Syl saw from the bridges.

  “There were only about twenty paratroopers,” Hathaway said. “If twenty stinking Japs can do that, I wonder what it’s going to be like to finish off seventy million of ’em?”

  “You got a point, Hathaway.”

  Syl returned to his cabin. A half hour later Schuman walked in. He put a bottle of White Horse Scotch on the table.

  “I was going to bring this over tonight anyway. It was his favorite brand.”

  Syl got two glasses from the head. Schuman poured the Scotch.

  “I don’t suppose we should—”

  “I won’t get drunk,” Syl said, but he did and so did Schuman. They sat there emptying the bottle while the porthole glowed red in the light of the dying fires ashore.

  “He had a wife and two kids,” Schuman said. “He showed me their picture once.”

  “Do you think we should write her?”

  “Don’t know what to say,” Schuman said.

  “Say we loved him. I guess we did.”

  “He was a lot less crazy than the rest of us.”

  “I wonder where we’d get her address,” Schuman said.

  “Somebody aboard his ship must have it,” Syl said, and then they both realized that the ship no longer existed.

  Simpson came in, saw the drunken officers, retreated.

  “Mind if I bunk here tonight?” Schuman said. “We got no place to deliver gas to anyway.”

  “Sure.”

  Schuman stretched out on Simpson’s bunk under the picture of “the bearded lady.”

  There was a long silence, and Syl thought Schuman had gone to sleep.

  “He was a good man,” Schuman mumbled. “A damn good man …”

  Maybe not such a bad epitaph, Syl thought as he poured himself another drink.

  CHAPTER 21

  EVEN BEFORE THE ashes and charred skeletons of aircraft and storage tanks at the Tacloban airstrip had stopped smoking, bulldozers began snorting around the field, shoving away wreckage and filling the craters left by bombs. So little was left of the fuel barges and the Yankee Yo-Yo that no demolition men were needed to clear away the wreckage they left. Tugs shoved new barges against the clay banks of the shore and moored them with steel cables. A new major, Lovejoy, replaced Harris and Williams. There was always a new major, and he always talked the same way … “We’re about ready for planes to land,” he said when he rode a small landing craft out to the Y-18 the next morning. “I need gas. I want you and the other tanker to keep moving until the barges are full. You’ll have to keep hustling to keep them filled until we get more storage tanks built …”

  “Yeah … sure …” Syl rubbed his eyes, feeling and looking bleary. “Look, major, we touched bottom trying to get out of Guiuan night before last. It probably was coral and it could have done some damage. Can you get a diver to go down and take a look?”

  “Are you taking water?”

  “No more than usual, but the plates are thin. I just want to check.”

  “We got no divers here and no time to monkey with that. I got planes coming and I’ve got to get ’em out. We’ve got big operations coming up. As long as you’re not sinking, keep moving.”

  Cramer heard this and, with apparent relish, stuck his head into the forecastle, where many of the men were still sleeping. “It’s anchors aweigh, me lads, anchors aweigh, so drop your cocks and grab your socks …”

  While the anchor winch was grinding up the chain Schuman came from Syl’s cabin, also looking bleary-eyed. Syl got him a cup of coffee before he got into a boat and with a tired wave returned to his own ship.

  As Syl approached the new fuel barge he saw that planes were already landing on the airstrip. Whatever fragments of the Yankee Yo-Yo were left lay just about under his keel now, but the rest of the world remained unchanged. A few hours after leaving Guiuan Rhinehart read a prayer over the frozen monkey before dropping it over board in a weighted ditty bag, but there was no service for Mostell and his men whose grave was this muddy harbor. Maybe they could have found some flowers in Tacloban to make a wreath to cast on these waters and Simpson could have read a burial service from his Bible, and they could have sung a few hymns, but this hardly seemed the right time for such proceedings. Cramer was cursing because the connections on the new barge were not right for the Y-18’s cargo hose and Wydanski was trying to fit an adapter, which required the contriving of new gaskets to stop a steady leak of gasoline. Simpson was having hoses run out to wash off the residue, and the constant roar of planes overhead was no good accompaniment to prayers or hymns.

  Syl returned to his cabin and lay down in his bunk. Despite all the whiskey he had drunk he felt more light-headed than hung over. His mind seemed to be racing like a movie projector gone wild, providing flickering, unconnected images. He thought of his father as he had looked shortly before he died, his face as yellow from illness as his own was now from the atabrine pills.

  “In the end, accomplishment is all that matters in life for people like us,” his father had said. “I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. I’ve forgotten every pleasure I’ve ever had in life except the joy of my few accomplishments. I wish there were more.”

  If he were about to die, what accomplishments would he remember with pleasure? Syl’s mind drew a blank. If he knew he had only a few hours to live, he would remember only the women he had loved, and he would wish that there were more, or at least that he had had more good nights with one. It occurred to him for the first time that except for the few women he had known, most of his life had been either terrifying or boring.

  He had not—he hoped—made a habit of feeling sorry for himself, but it seemed now that most of his early youth had been a process of learning to jump through flaming hoops like a circus tiger, with his mother or teacher or wife or some superior officer cracking a whip in his face. Stand up straight. Keep your elbows off the table. Learn the multiplication tables. Translate Caesar. Go to church, don’t think about girls too much, love is beautiful, don’t confuse it with lust … marriage meant above all being a husband who could earn money to support the wife, no matter how suffocating a job he had to take to do it. Commanding a ship was maybe a step up, but like everything else it was a burden … the only exception was love, and it seemed to him now that he had seen only enough of that to know how much of it he had missed.

  Mostly for him … on account of his background he’d never quite shaken loose from … love had been something to feel guilty about … He remembered running with Sally in a field of uncut hay back when they were about sixteen years old, not long after he had first met her. Her family had rented a cottage that summer on a farm by Trout Brook in the Adirondacks. They had gone fishing, caught nothing, but on the way home they had run across this field where uncut hay waved in the wind like ocean swells. Sally had tripped in a woodchuck hole and had fallen with a sharp cry, disappearing in t
he tall grass as though she were sinking in water. He had thrown himself down beside her, and after finding that she was not really hurt, they had lain there, looking up at white clouds sailing overhead. He could still remember the sweet smell of the crushed grass under them and the hum of insects everywhere, the chirping of the katydids, the call of red-winged blackbirds swooping over them. He had kissed her for the first time and, shivering with guilt as much as with desire, had run his hand up under her shirt, feeling the astonishing swell of her breasts under taut cotton. She had even helped him to take her skirt off, releasing her full softness and he had seen her for the first time. That was the first time he had seen any girl, and he had been so awed by her beauty that he had kept thinking he didn’t care what happened to him, this sin was worth any punishment.

  That time they had not made love fully but they had gone far enough to make her cry and claim he would never respect her, which seemed to him crazy … he’d have to be blind not to respect those breasts, but she had kept on crying, saying now he would never want to marry her, nobody would marry her because he’d tell and she’d be disgraced. He promised on the spot to marry her as soon as he got out of college, which wouldn’t be too long because he was two years ahead of himself and was starting Columbia in the fall. She had stopped crying, and he … with stars and those breasts in his eyes … had been full of gratitude for her beauty and understanding and generosity. It never occurred to him he was making a commitment to live the way she wanted them to for the rest of their lives, and when it finally dawned on him he’d accepted it as somehow fair punishment, and payment for the ultimate joy she gave him. Once a Calvinist, always a Calvinist. Sometimes he wondered if she hadn’t deliberately trapped him, but that seemed pretty ridiculous. They’d done it to each other, for each other’s needs. They weren’t so special, after all … sex had gotten them together, but there had never been a meeting of the minds … He was still grateful for the good days with Sally, in spite of their price, but it was his brief affairs with Angel and Teddy that had opened his eyes … yes, he was a retard in some ways … to the fact that love could be free of guilt and duty and the rest of the things he was taught as gospel. No matter how long he lived, he was sure he would never forget Angel’s rippling back as she walked into that stuffy restaurant in her wonderfully outrageous dress or the delicious, uninhibited way they had played footsie while spooning up flaming Cherries Jubilee. And Teddy … her intense, high-cheek-boned face … her ironic mind, her sardonic but joyful spirit … they had been in their fashion as exciting as her lovemaking. She was in his memory like a good book he had lost before finishing. Angel and Teddy … they’d made him realize there was a world out there that was too mysteriously beautiful to leave unexplored—