• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4601 0

of rough seas and lowering skies; of rolling and pitching, cold winds, and cold damp eating into bones softened by tropic warmth; of a treadmill of watches in a wheelhouse dank and gloomy by day and danker and gloomier by night; of sullen silent sailors and pale dog-tired officers, of meals in the wardroom eaten in silence, with the captain at the head of the table ceaselessly rolling the balls in his fingers and saying nothing except an infrequent grumpy sentence about the progress of the work requests. Willie lost track of time. He stumbled from the bridge to his coding, from coding to correcting publications, from corrections back up to the bridge, from the bridge to the table for an unappetizing bolted meal, from the table to the clipping shack for sleep which never went uninterrupted for more than a couple of hours. The world became narrowed to a wobbling iron shell on a waste of foamy gray, and the business of the world was staring out at empty water or making red-ink insertions in the devil’s own endless library of mildewed unintelligible volumes.

One morning Willie stirred in his bunk, opened his eyes, and felt a strange and delicious sensation: the bunk was neither rolling nor pitching, but remaining level. He bounded out of the clipping shack in his underwear. The ship was gliding between the green banks of a channel about a mile wide. The sky was blue, the air cool and mild. The Caine moved as steadily as a ferryboat. Willie craned his neck out over the life lines and peered forward. Above the green round bulge of a hill he saw the piers of the Golden Gate Bridge, misty red, far inland. His eyes filled with tears; he dived back into the clipping shack.

He was on the bridge when the Caine steamed under the vaulting crimson span. But his poetic thoughts were jangled by a colloquy between the captain and Gorton, standing behind him.

“Kay, when we pass Alcatraz we’ll head over to Oakland. Give me a course, Burt.”

“Sir, Pier 91 isn’t in Oakland-”

“I know. We’re going to lie off Oakland for a while before we tie up at the pier.”

“But sir-”

“What the hell is all this arguing for, Burt? I want a course to Oakland!”

“Sir, I just wanted to say there’s a rugged tide current at Pier 91, five knots or better. It’s slack water now, we can make our landing easy. If we delay for an hour it’ll be a damn tough approach-”

“Let me worry about landing this ship. You give me a course to Oakland.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Mister Keith. Are you doing anything besides sight-seeing?” Willie shriveled away from the bulkhead and faced the captain. Queeg, strangely dapper in a blue-and-gold bridge coat, white hat, and white silk scarf, was scanning the widening bay through binoculars. “No, sir-”

“Kay. That crate in my cabin-get yourself a working party and load it into the gig. You’ll be boat officer.”

At the expense of sundry mashed fingers, splinters under fingernails, crushed toes, and a spectacular fireworks of obscenity, the working party lodged the captain’s stone-heavy crate in the boat. Willie’s contribution was to stand well clear of the murderous box as it teetered in the air, and to make occasional mild suggestions which were totally ignored.

The Caine lay to near the Oakland shore, and the gig went puttering toward a concrete landing at the foot of a deserted street. Queeg sat in the stern sheets, his feet on the crate, rolling the balls and squinting around at the bay. Willie marveled at the crew of the gig. Horrible, Meatball, and Mackenzie were unrecognizable; washed, combed, shaved, powdered, dressed in starched whites, they seemed to be of a different race of man than the dismal savages who had first brought Willie to the Caine. He knew the reason for the Cinderella change, of course; the sailors wanted their leave, and were afraid of Queeg.

Once the motor died. The captain snapped irritably, after the sailors had fussed with the engine for a couple of minutes, “If this gig isn’t under way in thirty seconds someone’s going to be goddamn sorry.” Agonized thrashing of arms, and banging of wrenches, and sulphurous cursing