Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [161]
Willie had an extra burden to carry. Once the captain’s favorite, he had suddenly become the wardroom goat. The turn seemed to come immediately after the Stanfield episode. Until then Keefer had been Queeg’s main target; but thereafter everyone noticed a marked shift of the captain’s hounding to Lieutenant Keith. One evening at dinner the novelist ceremoniously presented to Willie a large cardboard head of a goat cut from a beer advertisement. The transfer of this Caine heirloom was accompanied with great laughter, in which Willie wryly joined. The summons, “Mr. Keith, report to the captain’s cabin,” boomed over the p.a. system a couple of times each day; and seldom did Willie lie down for a few hours of sleep between watches, without being shaken awake by a mess boy and told, “Cap’n wants to talk to you, suh.”
Queeg’s complaints in these interviews were about the slowness of decoding, or the routing of mail, or the correction of publications, or a smell of coffee coming from the radio shack, or an error of a signalman in copying a message-it did not much matter what. Willie began to develop a deep, dull hate for Queeg. It was nothing like the boyish pique he had felt against Captain de Vriess. It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continuing gloom.
Out of this hate, Willie achieved an unbelievable thoroughness and accuracy in his work. It was his one joy to frustrate the captain by anticipating his complaints and stopping his mouth. But there was a permanent hole in his defenses: Ducely. When the captain, droning nastily in triumph, faced Willie with a mistake or an omission in his department, it nearly always traced back to the assistant communicator. Willie had tried rage, contempt, invective, pleading, and even a bitter interview in the presence of Maryk. At first Ducely, blushing and boyish, had made promises to reform. But he had remained exactly as vague and slovenly as before. In the end he had retreated into petulant assertions that he was no good, and knew it, and never would be any good, and there was nothing for Willie to do but report him to Queeg for court-martial or dismissal. Willie took a belligerent pride in never blaming his assistant to the captain, by word or hint. It gave him perverse pleasure to know that Ducely had received an excellent fitness report.
August dragged, and dragged, and expired into September, with the Caine en route from Kwajalein to Eniwetok in the company of ten green crawling LCI’s.
During the first two weeks of September an increasingly tense, restless expectation spread among the officers. It was now twelve months since Queeg had been ordered to the Caine, and they knew that few captains held their posts longer than a year. Willie took to going to the radio shack and scanning the Fox skeds as they came out of the radiomen’s typewriters, seeking the prayed-for BuPers despatch. Queeg himself showed stirrings of the same eagerness. Several times Willie found him in the shack, glancing through the skeds.
They say the watched pot never boils. It is equally true that the watched Fox sked never contains the captain’s orders. The vigil simply increased the nervous irritation in the ship, spreading down from the officers to the men. Eccentricities, those fungi of loneliness and boredom, began to flourish rankly on the Caine. The men grew queerly shaped beards, and had their hair cut in the shapes of hearts, crosses, and stars. Paynter caught a fiddler crab on the beach at Kwajalein, a thing the size of a pie, with one huge multicolored claw. He brought it aboard, and kept it in his room, walking it every evening on the forecastle at the end of a string like a dog. He called the hideous creature Heifetz. Paynter and Keefer had a falling-out when the crab escaped, walked in on the novelist while he sat naked at his desk, composing, and nipped one of his toes with