Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [41]
“Keith,” he answered.
“Fine. You work for me.”
“You’re Mr. Keefer?”
“Yes.”
The communications officer leaned his back against the bureau and gulped coffee. There was little resemblance to his brother in the long lean face. Tom Keefer was over six feet tall, small-boned and stringy. Deep-set blue eyes with much white showing gave him an intense, wild look. His mouth like Roland’s was wide, but the lips, far from being fleshy, were narrow and pale.
Willie said, “Sir, I know your brother Roland. We were roommates in midshipmen’s school. He’s here in Pearl now at the BOQ.”
“Really? We’ll have to get him down here.” Keefer coolly put down the coffee cup. “Come into my room and tell me about yourself.”
Keefer lived in an iron cubicle crisscrossed with pipes at the head of the passageway. There were two bunks installed against the curving hull, and a desk piled three feet high with books, pamphlets, wire baskets full of papers, and registered publications in a scrambled heap, on top of which was a stack of freshly laundered khakis, socks, and underwear. There was a prone naked figure in the upper bunk.
While the communications officer shaved and dressed, Willie described his days at Furnald Hall with Roland. His eye rambled around the stuffy room. In shelves welded over the desk and along Keefer’s bunk were crammed volumes of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. The collection was impressive; it was like a college list of the Hundred Best Books, somewhat heavy on the modern side with the works of Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Proust, Kafka, Dos Passos, and Freud, with several books on psychoanalysis and a few that bore Catholic publishing house imprints. “You’ve really got the books,” said Willie.
“This life is slow suicide, unless you read.”
“Roland told me you’re a writer.”
“I was trying to be one before the war,” said Keefer, wiping lather off his face with a wet ragged towel.
“Get to do any writing now?”
“Some. Now, about your duties-we’ll make you custodian of registered pubs, and of course there’ll be coding-”
The steward’s mate Whittaker inserted his face through the dusty green curtain. “Chadan,” he said, and withdrew. The mysterious word resurrected the figure in the upper bunk; it rose, thrashed feebly, jumped to the deck, and commenced dressing itself.
“Chadan?” said Willie.
“Chow down, in steward patois-lunch,” said Keefer. “The name of this vegetable with a face is Carmody. Carmody, this is the elusive Mr. Keith.”
“Hello,” said Willie.
“Um,” said the figure, groping for shoes in the bottom of a black closet.
“Come along,” said Keefer, “and break bread with the officers of the Caine. There is no escape, Keith. And the bread itself isn’t too terrible.”
CHAPTER 8
Captain de Vriess
Willie planned to sleep after lunch. He was longing for sleep with every cell of his body. But it was not to be. He and Harding were collared after coffee by the “vegetable with a face,” Ensign Carmody.
“Captain de Vriess says for me to take you two on a tour of the ship. Come along.”
He dragged them for three hours up and down ladders, and across teetering catwalks, and through narrow scuttles. They went from broiling engine spaces to icy clammy bilges. They splashed in water and slipped on grease and scratched themselves on metal projections. Willie saw everything through a reddish haze of fatigue. He retained only a confused memory of innumerable dark holes cluttered with junk or machines or beds, each hole with a novel odor imposed on the pervading smells of mildew, oil, paint, and hot metal. Carmody’s thoroughness was explained when he mentioned that he was an Annapolis man, class of ’43, the only regular officer aboard beside the captain and exec. He had narrow shoulders, pinched cheeks, small foxy eyes, and a tiny mustache. His conversation was spectacularly skimpy. “This is number-one fireroom,” he would say. “Any questions?” Harding seemed