Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [149]
“No.”
“I am. Got married I guess during the next class after the one you were in. You were the December ’42 bunch, weren’t you? It’s all getting hazy. Well, anyway, I met this girl, blonde, she was a secretary in the English Department at Columbia. Got married in three weeks.” Acres grinned, and sighed, and noisily sucked up his cup of coffee and poured more. “Well, you know, we instructors had a pretty good deal, Keith. What we put in for, we got. I always had figured that when my year of teaching was up I’d put in for subs. Had read up all the submarine doctrine-well. That was before I married. I studied all the ships in the fleet roster, Keith, and put in for destroyer tender. Smart. The mail comes here mighty regularly, and I live for it, Keith. Got a baby two months old I’ve never seen. Girl. ... I’m the communicator on this bucket. I should have asked you before, is there something I can do for you?”
Acres took Willie to the communication office, a spacious room on the main deck furnished with new chairs and desks of green-enameled metal, bubbling coffee makers, and several sleek scrubbed yeomen in fresh blue dungarees. At a word from Acres the yeomen sprang up, and out of clean cabinets and flawlessly regular files they produced in a few minutes all the decodes Willie wanted, and a series of new fleet letters. Weeks of piled-up work melted away for the Caine’s communicator. He looked around at the shelves of books in alphabetical order, at the wire baskets almost clear of correspondence, at the handsome plexiglass file boards of Fox skeds and decodes, and wondered at this weird antiseptic efficiency. His gaze rested on Acres, whose belly bulged in two khaki rolls above and below his belt. The Pluto’s communicator, flipping through a sheaf of AlNavs, glanced up at Willie’s collar pin. “Is that gold or silver?”
“Gold.”
“Should be silver, Keith. You make jg on the new AlNav. Class of February. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Willie, shaking hands, “but my skipper still has to approve.”
“Oh, hell, that’s automatic. Buy yourself some collar pins while you’re here. Come on, I’ll show you where. Got everything?”
When Willie left Acres at the gangway, the communicator said, “Come on over and eat with me any time. Lunch. Dinner. We’ll shoot the breeze some more. We have strawberries and cream all the time.”
“Sure,” Willie said. “Thanks a million.”
He crossed the nest to the Caine. As he came over the gangplank and set foot on the rusty, littered quarterdeck, he straightened like a German and threw Harding a salute which brought a smile of mournful amusement to the ensign’s face. “I report my return aboard, sir!”
“Got the jerks, Willie? A salute like that can break your arm.”
Willie walked forward. He smiled at the dirty, ragged Apaches of the crew, passing here and there on the deck in their accustomed tasks. Mackenzie, Jellybelly, Langhorne of the long bony jaw, Horrible with his pimples, Urban, Stilwell, Chief Budge, one after the other they went by and Willie realized that he had never had relatives or friends whom he knew as well and could estimate as clearly as any second-class seaman of the Caine. “Jellybelly,” he called, “six fat sacks of mail for us on the tender-four official, two personal-”
“Aye aye, sir. Get ’em right away.”
On the well deck a group of deck hands were dividing and devouring an immense round yellow cheese, plunder from the Pluto, with the shrill chattering of blue jays. Crumbs of the cheese were scattered on the deck. Willie accepted a broken, fingerprinted yellow morsel from the redheaded Jew, Kapilian, and crammed it in his mouth.
In his room Willie stuck the lieutenant