Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [268]
“Will you take the conn now, Captain? Do you feel all right?”
“Hell, you’re doing fine. Keep going. Pick ’em all up. I’ll change my clothes-get pharmacist’s mate to fix up this damn arm, it’s killing me- Did you take a muster?”
“Taking it now, sir-”
“Fine-keep going-give me a hand, Winston-” Keefer stumbled toward his cabin, leaning on the boatswain’s mate’s shoulder, leaving a trail of water on the deck. “I’ll be up on the bridge in half an hour, Willie-take a muster-”
The list of missing men shrank as the ship picked up one swimmer after another. Finally-there was only one name without a line through it on Willie’s penciled sheet: Everett Harold Black, water tender third class-Horrible. A search party went wading through the gutted, flooded fireroom in hip boots. They found the missing sailor.
Keefer was on the bridge, his arm in a new white sling, when the report came up. The Caine was lying to in the waters where it had been hit. It was noon, and the sun was hot and dazzling overhead. A stale, sour smell of burning pervaded the sooty ship.
“Okay, that does it, Willie. Everybody’s accounted for. ... Poor Horrible- What’s the course to the channel entrance?”
“Zero eight one, sir.”
“Very well, Helmsman, come to course 081. Quartermaster, make fifteen knots-”
Willie said, “Sir, I request permission to lay below and supervise removal of the body.”
“Sure, Willie. Go ahead.”
The deck sailors were rolling away the hoses, sweeping clanking debris off the deckhouse and main deck, and chattering happily about their own small heroisms. They greeted Willie with shouted jokes about a trip to the States. A cluster of them around the galley were munching crude thick sandwiches or snatching loaves from the cursing cooks, who were trying to light off the soup vats and get lunch ready. There was a line of sight-seers around the roped-off chasm in the deck. The voices of the search party echoed up from the dark watery fireroom as from a flooded tomb. A couple of the new ensigns who had jumped overboard stood at the rope in fresh khakis, peering down into the hole and laughing. They fell silent when they saw Willie.
He regarded them for a moment bleakly. They were buddies from a Western midshipmen school. They habitually whined and procrastinated about the officers’ qualification course-didn’t see any point to it. They grumbled about lack of sleep. Their carelessness in handling despatches and letters was unendurable. Moreover, they never ceased commiserating each other for the wretched fate of having been assigned to the Caine. He wanted to ask them sarcastically to write up a qualification assignment if they had nothing better to do than sightsee; but he turned away without a word and climbed down the air lock. He heard them tittering behind him.
The stink of burning and something worse than burning made him gag, as he backed down the narrow ladder of the shaft. He put a handkerchief over his nose and stepped into the fireroom. He slipped and stumbled on the wet, greasy catwalks. It was amazingly queer, it was like a nightmare, to see vertical white sunlight in the fireroom, and water sloshing in and out of the furnaces. The search party was far on the port side. Willie descended the last ladder; the water came up cold arid slimy inside his trouser legs. He waded across the fireroom in water that fell to his ankles and then rose to his waist as the ship rolled. The sailors of the search party stepped aside and one of them directed a powerful electric lantern at the water.
“Wait till it rolls away, Mr. Keith. You’ll see him pretty good.”
Willie wasn’t used to the sight of dead people. He had seen a few relatives laid out in plush-lined boxes in the amber gloom of funeral chapels, with an organ mourning sweetly through loudspeakers and a heavy smell of flowers filling the air. No undertaker had intervened, however, to prettify the death of Horrible. The water washed away for a few seconds, and the lantern beam showed the sailor clearly, pinned down and crushed by