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By Root 4702 0

you are pretty new to the Caine. It’s a broken-down obsolete ship. It steamed through four years of war. It has no unit citation and it achieved nothing spectacular. It was supposed to be a minesweeper, but in the whole war it swept six mines. It did every kind of menial fleet duty, mostly several hundred thousand miles of dull escorting. Now it’s a damaged hulk and will probably be broken up. Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don’t think so now you will later on, more and more. We were all doing part of what had to be done to keep our country existing, not any better than before, just the same old country that we love. We’re all landlubbers who pitted our lives and brains against the sea and the enemy, and did what we were told to do. The hours we spent on the Caine were hours of glory. They are all over. We’ll scatter into the trains and busses now and most of us will go home. But we will remember the Caine, the old ship in which we helped to win the war. Caine duty is the kind of duty that counts. The high-powered stuff just sets the date and place of the victory won by the Caines.

“Lower the flag.”

The exec brought him the ragged remnant of the commission pennant. Willie rolled up the narrow bunting and stuffed it in his pocket. He said, “I want the jack, too. Have it wrapped for mailing and bring it to my cabin.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Dismiss the men from quarters.”

The chief of the decommissioning detail was waiting at his cabin door. While Willie was handing over the keys and records the yeoman brought him the last logs to sign. Steward’s mates came in and out, taking his bags to the dock. A sailor entered with the wrapped union jack. Willie addressed it to Horrible’s parents, and told the sailor to mail it. At length his chores were done. He went down the abandoned gangplank, not saluting. There were no colors to salute and no officer of the deck. The Caine was junk.

A yard jeep drove him to the gate, where his mother was waiting in a new tan Cadillac. Mrs. Keith had been driving to Bayonne every day since the arrival of the Caine. It was natural and inevitable now that she take him home. But Willie didn’t like it. “She drove me to the Navy’s gates,” he thought. “Now she’s driving me back home. The little boy is through with the sailor game.”

He had been utterly unsuccessful in his efforts to track down May. She seemed to have vanished from the world. He had called Marty Rubin’s office, a dozen times, but the agent was out of town. His mother had uttered not a word about May, and that irritated him, too; he interpreted it as a bland assumption that she had won the fight once for all.

He was quite wrong. Mrs. Keith was avoiding the subject out of fear. Her son made her uneasy. Even since his visit in February he appeared to have aged; the change was in his eyes, his gestures, his bearing, and the very timbre of his voice. From the ruddy careless boy of three years ago he had evolved into a peculiarly gray-toned, nondescript adult. All she wanted was that he come back to live with her in the big empty house. Once he came home, she thought, he might thaw and become more himself again. She was terribly afraid of saying anything that would give him the cue to declare his independence.

“It must be sad to leave your old ship after all these years,” she greeted him.

“Happiest moment of my life,” he growled, aware that he was echoing words of De Vriess spoken two years ago. He slumped glumly beside her, and they drove in silence almost an hour. When they were crossing the Triborough Bridge Willie suddenly said, “I’ve been trying to locate May. She seems to have disappeared. You haven’t heard from her by any chance, have you?”

“No, Willie. I haven’t.”

“I wrote to her in June, asking her to marry me. She never answered.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Keith kept her eyes on the road.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Not very much. You spent your last night with her, you know, in February.”

“It surprised me. I did break with her. I didn’t write for five months after that. Then one day I wrote.” He watched