Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [284]
“Well, I don’t blame you for wanting to get home. We all do. But I’m afraid-”
“Sir, how does the admiral feel about the Giles, laying up there on Tsuken Shima on her side? It’s not going to be any credit to MinePac to have another major vessel wrecked. The Caine is in no shape to stay. The safe course is to send us out of this typhoon area. I have a crew to think about.”
“And suppose you break down in mid-ocean?”
“Send Keggs along, sir. We’re all up for decommissioning. The high-speed sweeps are finished. Anyway, I won’t break down. My crew will hold her together with chewing gum and bailing wire, I swear, so long as the bow is pointing to the States.”
Ramsbeck stirred his coffee, and regarded Willie with wry appreciation. “I’m hanged if you don’t make out a case. We’re up to our ears here, we can’t think of everything- I’ll talk to the admiral.”
Two days later, to the tremendous rejoicing of both crews, the Caine and the Moulton received orders to proceed to the Naval Supply Depot in Bayonne, New Jersey, via Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal, for decommissioning.
It cost Willie Keith an unexpected pang to steam away from Okinawa. He stood on the bridge looking back at the massive island until the last green hump sank into the sea. At that moment he really sensed the end of the war. He had left his home three years ago and come half around the globe; he had pushed as far as this strange, unknown place; and now he was going back.
He couldn’t get used to steaming at night with lights showing. Every time he glanced at the Moulton and saw the yellow flare from the portholes, the red and green running lights, and the blazing white masthead light, he was startled. Instinctively he still observed all the blackout regulations; crushed his cigarette before emerging from his cabin, slid through the curtains of the charthouse so as not to leak any rays, and held his fingers over the lens of his flashlight. It was uncanny, too, to be on the bridge at night and not hear the gurgling pings of the sound search. The sight of all his guns untended, trained in, and covered with canvas made him uneasy. For him the sea and the Japanese had been one enemy. He had to keep reminding himself that the vast ocean did not spawn submarines of itself as it did flying fish.
He spent long night hours on the bridge when there was no need of it. The stars and the sea and the ship were slipping from his life. In a couple of years he would no longer be able to tell time to the quarter hour by the angle of the Big Dipper in the heavens. He would forget the exact number of degrees of offset that held the Caine on course in a cross sea. All the patterns fixed in his muscles, like the ability to find the speed indicator buttons in utter blackness, would fade. This very wheelhouse itself, familiar to him as his own body, would soon cease to exist. It was a little death toward which he was steaming.
When they tied up in Pearl Harbor, the first thing Willie did was to go to the Navy Yard’s telephone exchange and put a call through to the candy store in the Bronx. He waited for two hours, slouching on a battered couch and leafing through several tattered picture magazines (one of them had a detailed forecast of how Japan would be invaded, and predicted that the war would end in the spring of 1948). The operator beckoned him to her desk at last and told him that May Wynn was no longer at that number; and the man on the other end didn’t know where she could be reached.
“I’ll talk to him.”
The candy-store proprietor was spluttering. “You really calling from Pearl Harbor? Pearl Harbor? It isn’t a joke?”
“Look, Mr. Fine, I’m May’s old friend Willie Keith who used to call her all the time. Where is she? Where’s her family?”
“Moved away. Moved away, Mr. Keith. Don’t know where. Five-six months ago. Long time- Shaddup, you kids, I’m talking to Pearl Harbor-”
“Didn’t she leave a number?”
“No number. Nothing, Mr. Keith. Moved away.”
“Thanks. Good-by.” Willie hung up, and paid the operator eleven dollars.
Back at the ship his desk was