Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [269]
The search party were all of the black gang. He looked from face to face. They all had the expression that makes men equal, however briefly, before a dead body-a mixture of fright, bitterness, sorrow, and embarrassment. “Well, if you’re all game, okay. The thing to do is rig a block and tackle on that crossbeam and get the wreckage off him. I’ll get Winston down here with some canvas. Then you can lift him straight up through the hole in the deck with lines, instead of hauling him up ladders.”
“Aye aye, sir,” they said.
The man with the lantern said, “Want to see the Jap, sir? He’s piled up on the port catwalk-”
“Is there much left of him?”
“Well, not a hell of a lot. It ain’t too appetizing-”
“Sure, lead the way:”
The remains of the Kamikaze pilot were frightful. Willie turned away after a glimpse of bones and charred purple meat, jammed grotesquely in a sitting position in the telescoped cockpit as though the dread thing were still flying; a double row of grinning yellow teeth burned all bare; and most appalling of all, undamaged goggles above the teeth sunk into the ruined face, giving it a live peering look. The smell was like a butcher shop.
“Well, sir, like the marines say, the only good one is a dead one,” the sailor said.
“I-I guess I’ll go and send Winston along-” Willie picked his way rapidly over the tangled rubbish of plane and deck plates and boiler fittings to the escape hatch and hurried up into the delicious streaming salt air.
Keefer slouched in the captain’s chair on the bridge, pale and languid, and allowed Willie to bring the ship into the harbor. He took over the conn to anchor, giving orders in a flat, tired voice. Sailors on nearby ships stopped working to stare at the Caine’s torn-up seared deckhouse and the huge black hole amidships.
Willie went below, discarded his wet, filthy clothes in a heap on the deck of his room, and took a steamy shower. He dressed in his freshest khakis, drew his curtain, and stretched out on the bunk, yawning. And then he began to tremble. It was just his hands at first, but it spread quickly to his whole body. The strange thing was that the sensation was not unpleasant. It sent a warm feeling and slight tingles all along under his skin. He buzzed with a shaking finger for a mess boy.
“Bring me a meat sandwich, Rasselas-anything, so long as it’s meat-and hot coffee, hot-hot as live steam.”
“Yassuh.”
“I’m going to put my thumb in the coffee and if it don’t blister you’re on report.”
“Hot coffee. Yassuh.”
The trembling fit was dying down when the food came: two thick cold lamb sandwiches, and coffee hidden by its own vapors. Willie wolfed the sandwiches. He took from his desk drawer a cigar which he had received from Horrible, two days earlier; the sailor had passed a box around the wardroom upon being promoted to water tender third. He hesitated, feeling odd about smoking a dead man’s cigar; and then he did smoke it, leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk. The usual after-pictures came into his mind. He saw the Kamikaze hitting the bridge instead of the main deck and mashing him. He saw himself ripped open by a flying fragment of the ready box; shot through the head by an AA bullet; burned to a grinning half skeleton like the Jap pilot by the explosion of a magazine. The thoughts were fearful and pleasing at once, like a good horror story; they whetted the extreme luxury of being alive and safe and past the hour of danger.
Then it occurred to him that Horrible’s promotion had been his death sentence. Two days ago he had been transferred from the after engine