Voyage to Somewhere (25 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
HE NEXT DAY
we finished loading a thousand white crosses and as many crates marked “Burial Supplies.” We pulled out from the dock and sailed through the broken breakwater to join a convoy that was making up in the bay to sail to Okinawa. The sky was heavily overcast. A thin rain fell constantly. There were fifty-two merchant ships which were going with us, and six destroyers. In single file we sailed past Corregidor and Bataan. When we reached the open sea the ships fell into a rectangular formation. We were the last ship in the middle column. On our starboard side there was a deep laden Liberty ship, and on our port side was a huge gasoline tanker named the
Rocky Point
. The
Rocky Point
was so low in the water that the gray seas slopped over her decks amidships and broke against her housing aft. We set our speed at eight knots and forged ahead toward the misty horizon.

Mr. Warren came on deck to take the four to eight watch. I was sitting on the bridge watching the afternoon light fade. The coming of darkness brought a vague feeling of dread. The rain was falling harder, and I knew we had ahead of us a long night of pitch blackness in which we would have to maintain our position between the Liberty ship and the
Rocky Point
. For so long we had been making short, easy runs or lying safely at anchor that I had become used to security. Nervously I checked the compass and returned to my stool. Mr. Warren stood near me and stared ahead. His face looked thin, and his eyes were sunken. Something about the way he stared at the horizon made me think I could wave my hand in front of his eyes without making him blink. A signal hoist fluttered from the mast of the commodore. Mr. Warren did not budge. I picked up the binoculars and read the letters.

“The commodore is changing course, Mr. Warren,” I said. “Try to stay in position when they change. It's not going to be daylight much longer.”

“Yes, sir” replied Mr. Warren. Slowly he picked up the binoculars and stared at the signal flags. The commodore gave a deep whistle blast and started to turn. The lead ships turned with him. When we got to the point at which we were supposed to turn, Mr. Warren said nothing to the helmsman. I glanced at Mr. Warren and saw that he was sitting on a stool by the rail staring down into the water. I gave the order to the helmsman to turn, but Mr. Warren did not even look up.

“If you're not feeling well, Mr. Warren, I'll take your watch,” I said.

He turned his head. For a moment his eyes met mine. He had not had time to compose his face. His features were so contorted that I thought he must be suffering from some physical pain.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I glanced at the other ships in the convoy to see if we were still in position. The ships on either side of us were slowly turning too, and everything was all right.

“You better go below, Mr. Warren,” I said over my shoulder. “You go below and rest up for a few days.”

There was no answer. I turned and found that Mr. Warren had already gone below. I sent Flags down to recover the binoculars he had absent-mindedly taken with him.

At eight o'clock Mr. Crane came up and relieved me. The ships were ploughing along through total darkness. The rain was getting heavier. As I stared out into the streaked night to show Mr. Crane where the other ships were, it seemed as though we were sailing alone. Sometimes one of the ships sailed across a patch of sky that was a little lighter than the surrounding clouds, and we could just make out a blur in the darkness; then the blur melted back into the night. All around there was nothing but rain and the sound of water slipping by the hull. Mr. Crane rubbed his eyes.

“I can't see a damn thing,” he said.

“Neither can I,” I replied. “Make sure your helmsman keeps on course.”

Feeling my way down the wet steel ladder, I went below and entered the wardroom. Mr. Rudd and Mr. Warren were there. They had been talking. When I came in they stopped. I poured myself a cup of coffee and started to sit down, but somehow I felt that I was intruding. Taking my coffee with me, I retired to my cabin and sat down at my desk. For a few moments I sipped the bitter black coffee, then I lay down for a nap before the next watch. An hour later Mr. Rudd came in.

“Mr. Warren is in a bad way,” he said.

“He'll get over it,” I said.

“I don't know,” Mr. Rudd replied. “He's all tied up. I tried to talk to him, but it's like talking to a brick wall.”

“I guess we better just leave him alone,” I said. “It's pretty hard to talk a guy out of a thing like that.”

Mr. Rudd sat down and lit a cigar. He exhaled a cloud of smoke that almost obscured him from my vision.

“What an awful thing,” he said. “Here's this guy Warren on a ship full of tombstones sailing through a night blacker than Satan's belly with a tanker full of gasoline five hundred yards on one side of him and a Liberty ship that's probably full of ammo on the other side, and all he can think about is some God damn little split-tail in San Francisco!”

“For Christ's sake!” I replied. “If I had found my wife had run out on me I'd feel just as bad as he does.”

“I talked to him,” continued Mr. Rudd, “but I couldn't get anywhere at all. I told him that I had been divorced and that I understood how he felt. I told him that Flags had heard his wife wanted a divorce and still managed to stand his watches. I told him every God damn thing about bad women that I could think of. None of it worked. He still sat there as though I weren't even in the room.”

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Give him time, and he'll snap out of it.”

“God damn him, I hate to see it!” Mr. Rudd said angrily. “There he is, a man over twenty-one and educated to the hilt, and all he can find to think about in all the thousands of miles in the world is five God damn little feet of flesh that is one woman. His damn personal problems don't matter! They're not important! I don't mind seeing him worry, but I hate to see him worry about such a God damn unimportant thing!”

“You wouldn't feel that way if it had just happened to you,” I said.

“Of course I wouldn't!” retorted Mr. Rudd. “That doesn't mean I'm wrong, does it?”

During the night the seas increased. I was awakened by my books falling from their case to the deck. Sleepily I got up and piled them in a drawer. Snapping on a light above my bunk, I saw that it was one o'clock in the morning. Before my eyes got too used to the light, I snapped it off and went out into the dimly lit passageway to go up to the bridge. As soon as I opened the door to go on deck I realized that the wind had greatly strengthened. It jerked the door from my hand and slammed it back against the bulkhead. I stood there in the utter darkness wrestling with the door, finally managed to close it behind me and dog it down. The decks were wet and, as the ship rolled, I crouched low and clutched tight to the handrail. I made my way up the dripping companionway to the bridge. The chief boatswain's mate had the watch. I stood beside him and braced myself against the lurching of the ship. The wind was on our bow; as I stood peering ahead it filled my ears with a roaring sound and felt like a hand continually stroking my face. From time to time I could hear the thump of a sea landing on the well deck, but I could see nothing beyond the rail of the bridge.

“Where are the other ships?” I asked the Chief.

He came near to me and shouted against the wind. “Can't see them, sir. Just after I came on watch there was some sparks off the port bow, so I guess they're not too far away.”

I moved my stool from the wing of the bridge into the pilothouse and sat behind a glass window. I put my face close to the window to see. There my eyes did not have to squint against the wind and the rain, but the glass against the black night looked like a dripping panel of polished ebony. I could see nothing. Visions of the other ships ploughing blindly through the mounting seas crossed my mind. Steering just a few degrees off course might bring us right under the bows of the twenty thousand ton
Rocky Point
. I walked over and glanced into the dimly lit binnacle.

“Mind your course now,” I said to the helmsman and, turning to the Chief, I said, “Tell your lookouts to keep watch for collision. We couldn't see a ship till she was right on top of us.”

“I already have, sir,” the Chief replied.

The night was so bad that I knew the lookouts would be standing huddled at their posts with their backs to the wind. I shrugged my shoulders. Again I checked the compass. “Well,” I thought, “all we can do is steer our course and hope for the best.” The rest of the night I remained on the bridge, sometimes nodding on my stool, sometimes vainly trying to peer through the blindfold of the night.

When morning came we found that we had fallen a mile astern of the convoy. I called down to the engine room for an increase of speed. The morning brought no sunlight; it revealed only the slate gray ocean and the tossing ships. The dark sky had been pushed down toward the surface of the sea, and there was only a small margin between the racing tops of the waves and the low scudding clouds. I tapped the barometer with my finger and saw that it was dropping fast.

At six o'clock Mr. Rudd came up to the bridge. He stood in the open wing, his short heavy figure immovable against the wind. For a moment he surveyed the sea and the sky.

“What's the glass doing?” he asked.

“Falling.”

Mr. Rudd motioned to me to come out on the wing of the bridge. When we were out of the hearing of the helmsman he said, “Looks to me as though we were in for a typhoon.”

“I think so too,” I replied.

We both stared below at the well deck, which with each roll and pitch of the ship was flooded with white water. As we stood there, the ship mounted a particularly high sea. She paused, then hurtled downward. The bow cushioned itself in the trough, and the whole vessel shuddered.

“This is no ship to ride out a typhoon,” said Mr. Rudd. “Any chance of turning back?”

For a few moments I considered, then called Flags and told him to signal the commodore. “Just say, ‘Request permission to seek shelter,'” I told him.

While Flags was signaling I went into the chart room and consulted the charts. We were still not far from Luzon. A hundred and forty-three miles, I figured, from the nearest harbor. From the wing of the bridge I could hear the clicking of the blinker light. There was a long pause, and the clicking was resumed. In a moment Flags came into the chart room.

“The commodore wants to know if we are experiencing difficulty,” he said.

Taking a pad from the drawer, I wrote an answer for Flags to send. “Experiencing no serious difficulty at present moment,” I wrote, and added, “Believe indications of increased bad weather warrant our seeking shelter.” Handing the paper to Flags, I went out and stood by Mr. Rudd while the message was sent.

“The bastard ought to know what I mean,” I said. Suddenly I wanted more than anything in the world to change course for Luzon. All night I had been bracing myself to face a typhoon, and now there was suddenly offered a chance to escape. I went back into the chart room and figured out the course to San Fernando. Just when I had finished, Flags came in and handed me a piece of paper on which he had written the commodore's reply.

“If you are experiencing no difficulty, maintain your present course and speed. If you are experiencing difficulty, exercise your own judgement.”

“The bastard's hedging!” I said. I crunched the paper in my hand. It was wet and made a small spongy ball in my palm. I threw it overboard. An impulse to call out the new course to San Fernando parted my lips, but I shut my mouth. I deliberated.

“What the hell,” I said. “Let's keep going.”

Mr. Rudd grinned. “All right,” he said. “We'll see what happens.”

“Maybe the commodore has weather reports,” I said hopefully. “Maybe he doesn't think there is going to be a typhoon.”

“Maybe not,” said Mr. Rudd. “I'm going down and secure everything around the engine room just the same.”

He left the bridge. I watched him go down the companion-way and, leaning against the wind, push his way across the wet deck. When he opened the door to the passageway below the wind caught it, and he wrestled with it as I had. Just before he disappeared inside he turned and, still holding the door in both hands, he grinned at me. Then he slammed it after him.

At noon Mr. Crane came to the bridge and stood with his sextant in his hand. There was not even a bright spot in the gray clouds to tell where the sun was. He put the sextant back in its box. At twelve-thirty the commodore hoisted signal flags to give his position. We copied it down, and I watched Mr. Crane plot it on the chart. Using a very sharp lead pencil, he put a tiny dot on the white chart. Then, with the polished black parallel rules, he drew a thin gray line from the dot. On this line with the pinpoints of the dividers he measured off our future positions for every four hours. He was very neat and painstakingly exact.

“We'll be here at eight tonight,” he pointed out to me. “After that we won't be near enough land to seek shelter, no matter what happens.”

All that day and all the next day the wind increased. It did not increase in gusts or flurries; it increased slowly and deliberately, taking its time about it. Every watch we had to call for a few more turns from the engine room to keep up with the larger ships. On the third day we were proceeding at top speed. The ship threw herself maliciously against the onrushing seas. She shuddered and quaked and twisted. Below decks there was a shambles. The dishes had fallen to the galley floor and lay scattered there inches deep like huge jagged, snowflakes. From the racks around the crew's mess table fell jars of jam. Even after they had been wiped up the decks were sticky. There was the continual sound of one thing banging against another. Doors swung on their hinges, cups ticked against one another as they dangled from their hooks, the contents of drawers slid back and forth, and glasses in a rack jiggled together. The men went to their bunks as soon as they were off watch. Most of them were not actively seasick, but the continual effort of bracing oneself against the violent motion of the ship produced an acute physical weariness. Living aboard the ship was a little like standing on a still floor shifting one's weight from one leg to the other day after day.