Читать книгу The Sand Pebbles - Richard McKenna - Страница 4

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He woke to reveille on a bugle. They were all putting on the white shorts, so he put on undress whites. The head and washroom opened off the rear of the bunkroom and also out onto the fantail. They were clean, airy places with plenty of room and of course no fresh water rationing. When Holman came back a Chinese messcook was putting gray enamel pitchers of hot coffee on the mess tables and another Chinese was making up Holman’s bunk. He poured himself a cup of coffee at the mess table nearest his bunk.

“You’ll sit here, across from me, old Pitocki’s place,” a red-bearded man said. A white lanyard came from under his beard to a bosun’s pipe in his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” Holman said.

He sat down. In a chair. A solid wooden chair. The table was solid wood, with a bare, scrubbed top. Only three men to a side. Another table like it stood on the starboard side and there was a larger table aft, where the bunks were two high. The after table was for nonrated men, Holman thought, and even they had chairs. He saw the boatswain’s mate watching him and grinned.

“I’m just taking it all in,” he said. “It’s all right.”

“She’s a home, all right.”

That was the best thing a man could say for a ship, and it was not said of many. The worst thing you could say was “She’s a madhouse.” Holman was not ready to say anything yet. He felt the chair with his body. It was solid, separate, a chair. A regulation navy mess had rickety ten-man folding tables and narrow folding benches that sagged so that all the rumps kept sliding together and often the benches collapsed. Holman’s place was at the head of this table and he could lean back and touch his bunk and locker and just outside the door and around the corner was the engine room hatch. He knew he was going to like being all gathered together like that. On the other ships he had always been scattered around. The compartment was clean and attractive with white enamel paint and green curtains and varnished wood and bright brass fittings. The deck was polished red linoleum. Forward of the mess tables the sides slanted in to leave a trapezoidal open space set off by two white stanchions. The open space held a wooden barber chair and some gear lockers. It was a fine place.

The other men on his mess, his new messmates, came up and poured coffee and sat down. One was Burgoyne.

“Morning, Jake,” he said. “What you think of the old Sand Pebble by now?”

“I’m still taking it in,” Holman said. “They made up my bunk for me. Do they always do that?”

“Every blessed morning.” Burgoyne grinned.

“They pick up your dirty clothes and wash and iron ’em and stow ’em clean back in your locker,” the red-bearded one said. The others called him Farren.

“They mend your clothes,” the round-faced machinist’s mate said. “When something wears out, they survey it and make you a new one. You always got a locker full of clean, new clothes.” His name was Wilsey.

They all began telling Holman things. Just about everything a sailor had to do for himself on other ships was done for him on this one. They all watched Holman, wanting to see surprise and pleasure in his face, the same delight they had felt when they first came aboard this ship. Holman felt it, but he would not show it. He did not like being pushed to feel, or pretend to feel, anything, and he thought there must be a hidden catch in all of this.

“It’s a pretty good deal,” he said. “How in hell do you pay for all that service?”

Farren shrugged. “They squeeze. They squeeze the bejesus out of everything,” he said. “And they collect from us on payday.”

“It ain’t never very much,” the craggy, white-haired electrician said.

“We call it our club dues,” Restorff said.

He was a stubby, brown, blunt-faced gunner’s mate, and he sat on Holman’s right. Farren sat across from Holman. On other ships the engineers always lived and messed separately. It was going to be strange eating with topside sailors. They had a Chinese messcook named Wong to wait tables in the crew’s mess, Farren said. Another one named Lemon took care of the CPO mess. The ship’s cook and master of the galley was named Big Chew, and he was the best cook in China. All the sailors nodded agreement to that. Wong was bringing in rations on separate plates to the other tables. Burgoyne stopped him and asked for bacon and hot cakes.

“Jake, we run a short-order breakfast on here,” he said. “Wong’ll fetch you anything you want.”

“Ham, bacon, hot cakes and eggs,” Farren said. “Any combination.”

“And all you want,” Harris, the electrician, said. He clicked his teeth. They were big and white and looked false.

“I love fried eggs,” Holman said.

On Fleet ships you always got eggs scrambled and padded with cornstarch, except for the hard-boiled eggs that went with corned beef hash. Only now and then on a Sunday you might get a couple of cold, burnt, leathery fried eggs, and you never got more than two. When Wong brought Holman’s order, on a platter because a plate wouldn’t hold it, Holman looked fondly at the six hot cakes and the dozen fried eggs. The eggs were well cooked but not burnt and all the yolks stood up unbroken. He let his pleasure show at last, in his face and voice.

“By God, she is a home!” he said.

“She ain’t much to look at, but she’s a home,” Restorff agreed.

They were all grinning at Holman, sharing his feeling.

“Looks like you got competition, Harris,” Wilsey said. “Harris is the chow hound on this mess,” he told Holman. “He’ll try to ruin your appetite with filthy talk at dinnertime, so there’ll be more for him.”

“He used to drive old Pitocki away from the table sometimes,” Farren said. “Harris is the foulest-mouthed bastard alive.”

“Prong you and all your relations and all your ancestors back to George Washington,” Harris told Farren amiably, between clicking bites of ham.

“You see?” Farren said. “That’s the only way Harris knows how to say good morning.” He grinned through his beard.

“I got a cast-iron gut,” Holman said. He was dabbling hot cake in egg yolk and eating it. “I’m going to like this ship.”

“She ain’t much on liberty, but she’s sure enough a home and a feeder,” Burgoyne said.

Outside the bugle blew officers’ call and then assembly and they all trooped aft to stand quarters for muster. The sun was bright on the brown river and many brown junks and sampans were out there. The San Pablo deck coolies were working in undress whites without insignia, and Holman felt he looked more like the coolies than like the real sailors in their shorts. He would have to have some shorts made for himself.

“We fall in here, to starboard,” Burgoyne said.

The whole crew made only one double rank across the fantail, with the needle nose of a one-pounder gun projecting over their heads from the boat deck rail above them. At their backs, doors led into the head and washroom and a central hatch led down to the Chinese quarters in the hull. A wooden grating two feet above the deck filled the semicircular stern and covered the rudder quadrant. The captain, a short, dark, stern-looking lieutenant, stood on the grating against the varnished wheel with the bare flagstaff angling up behind it. A bigger, awkward-looking ensign stood on deck with the backs of his legs against the grating and out in front of him three chiefs faced the sailors.

“Fall in, sailors!” each chief said separately to his gang. “Atten-shun! Answer up to muster!”

The sailors wore black shoes with white socks rolled to their shoe tops. The chiefs and officers had white shoes and ribbed white socks that came up to their knees. That, and their regulation uniform caps, was their only difference from the white-hatted sailors. Lynch, the chief machinist’s mate, was a man who looked big more with whisky bloat than with muscle, and his face had a flabby, sagging look. He was being very military.

“Burgoyne!”

“Here, sir!”

“Holman!”

“Here ... sir.”

You were not supposed to have to say “sir” to a chief after boot camp. Holman hated to say it to anyone. It was his private trouble to hate everything like this muster and not be able to explain why even to himself. But he could stand it for a while, and then he would have his way of getting out of it. On the stone-faced river bank to his left Holman saw from the corner of his eye the mob of watching coolies, all brown skin and blue rags and gaping faces under broad bamboo hats or head rags. The Chinese were always gaping at the ocean devils. Ordinarily, Holman could ignore them as completely as other sailors did.

“Front and center!” the ensign barked. When the three chiefs heel-clicked to attention in line before him he snapped, “Report!” and each chief saluted and reported all hands in his department present or accounted for. The ensign returned each salute and said, “Very well!” and then about-faced and saluted and told the captain what the captain could not help already knowing.

“Very well!” the captain said, saluting down at the ensign.

The ensign about-faced. “Posts!” he snapped, returning the chiefs’ triple salute, and the chiefs ran off their clean, brisk, square-cornered little dance in reverse and all was as before.

Maybe that’s it, Holman thought. From the first “Here, sir!” they had all been telling each other what everybody already knew, and it had to be very serious and set and precise, as if it meant something important, but it did not mean anything at all. It was like extra rocker arms and idler gears in a machine, to click and spin and bob and make a show, and do nothing except soak up power that should go to the machine’s real work. Well, at least it’s a show for them coolies, Holman thought. Thank Christ it’s over.

It was not over. A quartermaster came on from port, with a seaman and a Chinese trailing him. The seaman held the colors in their triangular fold, breast high in two hands, and the Chinese had a shiny bugle under his arm. The quartermaster stepped up on the grating and saluted the captain.

“The clock reads eight o’clock, sir,” he said.

“Make it so,” the captain said.

Almost instantly eight bells began striking from the bridge and the Chinese bugler snapped his bugle to his lips. On the last bell, he blew attention.

“Atten-shun!” all the chiefs barked.

Chiefs and officers about-faced and stood at salute. The bugler blew colors and the quartermaster hoisted the colors quickly to the peak of the staff, where the river breeze caught them and streamed them rippling toward the watching coolies on the bank. The quartermaster stood at salute until the bugler blew carry on. Then he fell back into ranks.

This was battleship stuff. The rule was that the smaller and more isolated the ship, the less you had of military crap, and this ship should have least of all. But here they were pulling battleship stuff.

“Take stations for physical drill,” the ensign ordered.

Holman set his jaw grimly. They were not going to leave out anything. He hated physical drill. The men opened out and spaced off with extended arms. Two of the chiefs and the ensign stood to one side and the big chief boatswain’s mate stepped up on the grating to lead the drill. He had a tanned, open face and a powerful voice and yellow hair thick on his arms and crowding out the open neck of his shirt. His name was Franks.

“Jumping jack!” he said.

They all jumped and clapped their hands together above their heads twenty times. Then he gave them the windmill and touch-toes and twist-belly, each one twenty times, slashing with his hairy arm as he counted cadence in a great voice, starting with a roar and trailing off, “ONE ... two ... three ... four,” over and over. The captain stood quietly watching it, and he made a picture against the big wheel with the flag streaming above him. Franks gave them push-ups on a two-count and they all brought their faces right down to the deck, still damp from scrubbing. They finished with stationary double time. Franks started it as mark time, and he marked time himself, not counting, and all the sailors kept pace with him. Franks raised it slowly through quick step to double and to double-quick, they all following the rhythm of his feet, then faster still, as fast as they could run in place, knees pumping, elbows jogging, teeth bared, Holman with a growing ache in his side, no voices but the sob of breath and the slap of many feet building and building a stupid thundering stampede going nowhere faster and faster until Jake Holman could not stand it any longer and Franks roared, “Ship’s compan-EEEE ... halt!”

The ensign came forward. “Resume ranks!”

They fell in, red-faced, puffing, tucking in shirt tails and wiping sweat. The coolies on the bank probably figured it was some kind of joss pidgin, Holman thought. Chinese believed all ocean devils were crazy, and stuff like this gave them a right to think that.

“Fall out!” Lynch said.

Franks sounded his bosun’s pipe. “Now d’ye hear there, fore and aft, all hands turn to!” he bellowed. “Commence ship’s work!”

It made no difference that all hands were right there in front of him and he could have spoken in an ordinary voice.

They broke ranks and headed forward. Lynch held Holman for a handshake and a short talk. He did not ask the usual things about past experience with machinery and so on. He only said welcome aboard and we really been needing a man to take old Pitocki’s place and you got yourself a real pair of man’s shoes to fill on this ship, Holman. Holman was still burning inside from the drill.

“How come good old Pitocki ever left this ship?” he asked.

“He died last winter in Changsha. Typhus, they said.” Lynch’s manner turned cold. “Pitocki had twelve straight years aboard this ship. He could’ve retired, and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even go up for chief.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Holman said. He was not really sorry.

“Well, take today to get settled in,” Lynch said. “Tomorrow we’ll look around the engine room and get you squared away down there.”

A fat little Chinese in a black skull cap and gray gown popped out of the hatch behind them. “Ho, you, Ho-mang,” he said. “Must makee sew sew pidgin.”

“This is Sew Sew,” Lynch said. “He wants to take a template off you, for your uniforms. You need shorts.”

“A template?” Holman stared.

Lynch laughed. “How we do it on here. Well, take it easy.”

He went forward. Sew Sew had a narrow board with a set of strings dangling from it. It had a big Chinese character in red at one end and smaller ones in black above each cord peg.

“This befoh time belong P’tocki,” Sew Sew said. He held it at arm’s length and looked from the dangling strings to Holman and back again. “My tinkee you litee bit all same P’tocki,” he said.

Each cord was a body part measurement. One by one, Sew Sew tried Pitocki’s cords on Jake Holman’s body and he snipped pieces off the too-long ones, and when they were too short he made new ones. It felt weird to Holman. He was bigger than Pitocki around biceps and chest, but Pitocki was longer in arm and leg and bigger around the belly. It built up a weird feeling of standing inside Pitocki’s ghost, with here one of them sticking out and there the other. Sew Sew muttered each time he had to change a cord. To him, all sailors were lumpy, forky objects to be covered smoothly with cloth and it would be very nice if they were all exactly the same size and shape. Sew Sew finished his template and held it up and gazed at it and he looked pleased. He said he would make six suits of shorts and they would be in Holman’s locker the next morning.

“Make four suits of dungarees, too,” Holman said.

Sew Sew looked doubtful. “Sampabble any man no wanchee too much dunglee,” he said.

“My wanchee foh piecee dunglee,” Holman said firmly.

When he made himself the place he wanted on this ship, he was practically going to live in dungarees.

In the captain’s day cabin Lt. Collins and Ensign Bordelles sat at the round, green baize-covered table. They had cups of coffee on the table and the various parts of Holman’s service record lay spread out before them.

“Tom, I doubt the man,” Lt. Collins said. “I never saw this pattern before in a service record.” He tapped a sheet with a pencil. “Eight ships in eight years. Only bad apples get bounced around like that.”

“Bad apples don’t get four-oh marks and letters of commendation,” Bordelles said.

“He’s been commended for difficult emergency repair jobs. No doubt he’s a fine engineer. But why the low marks in leadership?”

“And only in leadership.”

“Precisely!” Lt. Collins took a sip of coffee. “Not in conduct. He has four-oh conduct. If he had a string of mast reports and court-martials, I’d call him a good man forthwith.”

Bordelles shook his head and raised his cup to drink.

“Tom, these service records don’t always give a complete picture of a man. Men like Pitocki was, yes. This man Holman ... I wonder.” Lt. Collins’ thin, dark face was thoughtful and he shuffled the papers before him restlessly. “A ship’s company is like an orchestra. A big ship can absorb a few sour notes and put on the kind of pressure that can change them,” he said. “San Pablo is just not that big. I saw you watching Holman at quarters. What’s your subjective impression of him?”

“Hard. A bruiser. Good man in a football line,” Bordelles said. “I couldn’t tell anything from his face.”

“Hides his feelings. I thought I saw a trace of sullenness,” Lt. Collins said. “Or it might have been quiet contempt or secret triumph. It was just enough to make me uneasy, even before I looked at his record.”

“We’ve only a few days. If we start the summer cruise with him, we’re stuck for a year.”

“See what the chiefs think of him, in the next few days. I’ll have a talk with Holman myself.”

“Yes, sir.” Bordelles gulped the last of his coffee and stood up. “It’s almost time for battle drills, sir. What shall we run today?”

“Repel boarders. Starboard,” Lt. Collins said.

Sew Sew ducked back down the hatch and Holman started forward. A bugle blasted and he heard Chief Franks’ voice from the boat deck, “All hands! Repel boarders, starboard! Repel boarders, starboard!” Sailors exploded out of the compartment and all over the ship feet thudded as they ran to their stations. Holman tried to get into the engine room to get out of the way and he met Burgoyne coming out, dragging a steam hose. Then Lynch grabbed him.

“Stand by here, Holman. You’re in the waist party.”

They stood by on the triangular quarterdeck. The arms locker behind the ladder to the boat deck stood open. Lynch snatched a riot gun, handed it to Holman, and motioned to him to join the men kneeling along the bulwark. The gate in it was closed and the short gangplank pulled inboard. Holman knelt and Burgoyne knelt beside him and balanced the steam hose nozzle on the steel bulwark. It was a valve and a short piece of pipe wrapped in gunny sacking.

“Waist party ma-a-anned and ready!” Lynch yelled. He had a husky voice. The bow and stern parties reported manned and ready.

Holman glanced around. A big flat-faced sailor was holding the bight of the steam hose waist high with heavy gloves. Lynch had a pistol in his left hand and a shiny cutlass in his right. He frowned and motioned with his cutlass for Holman to face outboard. Holman did, and noticed that the other men’s faces were keen and tense and their eyes were scanning back and forth. In addition to Burgoyne there were the pleasant-faced kid, Wilsey, with a riot gun, and the old electrician, Harris, scowling down the barrel of an automatic rifle, his coarse white hair bristling. Holman sighted along his riot gun and felt stupid. A riot gun was a kind of sawed-off shotgun that fired buckshot. Holman had never fired one.

The same crowd of brown, ragged, cone-hatted coolies was up on the bank watching, all along the brick wall where Holman had stood, and twenty or more were down on the pontoon gazing stupidly into gun muzzles almost near enough to nudge them. Hard to figure what they made of it all, Holman thought. Probably not much. Ensign Bordelles came down the ladder to the quarterdeck. Lynch said, “Manned and ready, sir.” Holman felt the ensign’s eyes on his back.

“One of your riot guns has no reserve ammunition,” he said.

“He’s a new man, sir, not instructed yet.”

“Very well. Why haven’t you steam to the hose nozzle?”

“Condensation would start leaks in the hose, sir,” Lynch said. “I can’t drain it and warm it up on account of the slopeheads on the pontoon.”

“This is not Long Beach and it is not even Hankow,” Bordelles said sharply. “When San Pablo holds a drill it is always in Hunan Province and it is always in deadly earnest. You know that, Chief. Now bear a hand and get steam on that hose!”

“Aye aye, sir! Stawski! Cut in the root steam.”

“Chien! Steam on the deck valve!” a voice yelled.

“Belay that! This is a battle drill, Stawski. You cut in that steam!” Lynch said angrily. “Crack it in slow. Frenchy, aim the nozzle down the side.” Lynch came to the bulwark and waved his cutlass. “Cheelah! Stand clear, you slopeheaded bastards!” he yelled at the coolies on the pontoon.

They stared stupidly and did not move. Stawski cut the steam in fast. The steam came pushing a plug of hot water ahead of it and the hose jumped like a snake and almost got away from Burgoyne. Scalding water sprayed out with a spluttering roar over the coolies and they pulled back with wild yells of fear and pain. Then steam came in a roaring, billowing cloud that hid the scrambling coolies.

“Maskee. Throttle off, Frenchy,” Lynch said.

Someone laughed on the boat deck. Bordelles ran up the ladder and snapped, “Silence during drills!” The steam cleared off and the last of the scalded coolies were still running up to the bank. The coolies up there were laughing and pointing fingers. They thought it was a good joke on the scalded coolies. The steam hose humped across the pulled-in gangplank, leaking badly even after being drained. It was made of interlocking brass strips wound in a spiral, with asbestos packing between the turns, and it was supposed to be self-tightening under pressure. But steam feathered all along it and it made the whole quarterdeck hot and wet and steamy.

When they secured, Lynch told Holman that he would be second in command of the waist party. He gave Holman a key to the arms locker, the same key Pitocki had carried for twelve years. Holman was going to have to co-sign all the Title B cards with Lynch, for the stuff in the locker. There was a lot of stuff, including a box of grenades and a dozen cutlasses. It was not good news to Holman.

“Chief, do you have quarters and battle drills like this every day on here?” he asked.

“All but weekends. Some days we skip the battle drills.”

Holman did not let his dismay show on his face.

It was not until after dinner that Holman could get into dungarees and into the engine room. He sniffed in the smell, and his heart beat faster. Seven or eight half-naked coolies were scrubbing and shining. One was Po-han, and Holman winked at him. He started at once to learn the plant. The main plant was the two boilers, the engine, the main condenser, the main circulating, air and feed pumps, and all the piping that served them. The auxiliary plant was the dynamos and the remaining pumps and heat exchangers and piping. The piping was hardest to learn, and almost all navy engineers figured they knew it when they knew all the key valve combinations for routine operating. On any ship the piping had hundreds of valves and fittings and it branched and snaked behind things and through bulkheads and in and out of the bilges until a man’s eyes became lost and dizzy trying to trace and remember. On an old ship there would always be hidden cross connections and plugs and blanks and drain valves, put in for some forgotten purpose by men long since dead or transferred, and no one would even know they were there. No one but Jake Holman. It was part of his secret to take all of the piping, clear and sharp in detail, inside his head.

He started with the steam at the boiler shells and traced it through every branching to every outlet and memorized the position of every valve. Then he went to the log desk and sketched the system from memory and checked his sketch against the actual piping, and he had it, all right. He took up the exhaust system. The tracing took him all around the engine room and he could feel the coolies watching him and not liking it and the boss coolie liking it least of all. The boss coolie wore a black jacket with cloth buttons to show that he did not work. He was old, with a bony, cruel face and a few long hairs on his chin. Holman knew that feeling from his other ships, although it was strange to feel it from Chinese. There was always a clique of old hands in an engine room, and they always wanted a new man to learn from them as much as they wanted him to know and wait his time for admission to the clique. It always disturbed them to see Jake Holman learning by himself. They were afraid he would learn too much and have power over them, and they were right. It was rough on them. They couldn’t try to learn more themselves, because they had spent too many years pretending they already knew it all. They couldn’t openly stop Holman from learning, because learning the plant was supposed to be good. So they always tried by the weight of their silent disapproval to force Jake Holman to stay as fumbling and ignorant as they were, and nothing in the world could spur Jake Holman on more than that silent disapproval. The machinery was always on Jake Holman’s side, because machinery was never taken in by pretense and ignorance.

Holman could not really believe he was going to be in a struggle with the coolies. They were just coolies and even Stawski, the fireman, could give them orders. Holman finished the feed system and he was ready to start tracing lines in the bilges and he needed help. Po-han and another coolie were scrubbing the white round of the auxiliary condenser.

“You, Po-han. You, Joe,” Holman said, pointing at them. “My looksee bilge side. Take up floh plate. You sabby?”

“My sabby. Catch fye sclapah,” Po-han said.

He dropped his rag in the bucket and went around the engine to the workbench. The other coolie just stared at Holman. The boss coolie came up. He was angry.

“Bilge pidgin no can do,” he said. “Lynch speakee me washee poht side.”

“My talkee Lynch by-m-by,” Holman said.

“No can do bilge pidgin!”

The old man’s voice rose high and cracked and he had spittle on his lips. The coolies had all downed rags to watch, and now face was involved. Holman had to save both their faces. He tapped his chest.

“My do bilge pidgin. Looksee pipe, larn pidgin all pipe, you sabby?” he said mildly, wanting all of them to hear. “Must have one man floh plate pidgin.”

“One piecee man can do,” the boss coolie said grudgingly. “Two piecee man, no can do.”

He was willing to save face, but he was still angry. Holman shrugged. Po-han came with a file scraper and Holman had him lift a floorplate beside the main air pump. He found it dark and hard to get around in the bilges. The main engine foundation ran along the keel like a wall and heavy I-girders ran curving down and across from the bilge stringer to the engine foundation. Fore-and-aft brace and tie plates between the girders made a honeycomb of what were called bilge pockets. Along the side were the auxiliary machinery foundations and the water ends of pumps. Holman had to squirm across the tops of the girders, between the light angle-iron framing that supported the floorplates.

He grunted and squirmed along. It was hot, hard and dirty work, and just because of that, the bilge piping was always the least known. Most of the piping ran on top of the girders, but some went lower, through the limber holes of the girders, and Holman looked at every inch of it and ran his hands along the sides that he could not see. He did not want to miss any hidden fitting or cross connection. Even if it was only an ear left on a gasket, he wanted to know about it.

Po-han was a good helper. Whenever Holman tapped on the underside of a floorplate, Po-han was right there to lift it and let light flood in. The bilges were very dry and clean, for bilges, and they smelled cleanly of paint and oil. Everything was painted with red lead except the bottom plating, which was coated with black bitumastic. In places the plating bulged inward and even some of the girders looked slightly askew. There was no dirt or rust. But red lead in bilges never gets quite dry and down beside the engine oil had rotted the bitumastic, and when Holman came out to make his first sketch he was dripping sweat and smudged from head to foot with red and black.

Po-han took sharp interest in the sketch. He pointed to the crosses and said, “Wowel? B’long wowel?” until Holman understood he meant “valve” and nodded.

Holman worked across back of the engine and along both sides and finally across the front. He was getting very tired, and part of it was the mental concentration of so much learning. The pockets across the front were the worst of all, with heat from the steaming boiler softening the bitumastic and a tangle of hot drain lines to dodge, but quite a bit of light came down the backs of the boilers and there was no need to lift floorplates. He had just traced a feed suction line over to a hydrokineter when Chinese yelling broke out above him and someone cried, “Jehk! Jehk!” and a slug of hot water hit him on the back of his legs. He scrambled into another bilge pocket just in time. Steam roared and blasted where he had been and came through the limber hole beside him very hot and choking.

“Turn off that steam! You sons of bitches, turn off that steam!” Holman yelled.

It stopped. Holman was shaken and angry. He crawled back to where a floorplate was up and came out. Someone had blown down the boiler water glass, but no one was near it now. The coolies were all going up the starboard ladder.

“Stop! Which one of you bastards blew that glass?” Holman yelled through the engine at them.

They went on up. Holman ran around the engine and got control of himself at the foot of the ladder and stood there fuming. Po-han, his face a blank, stood over by the workbench. He would not meet Holman’s eyes. Holman calmed himself down. He knew that boss coolie had blown the glass. Po-han had objected and had tried to warn Holman, but Po-han probably had good reasons for being afraid of the boss coolie. Po-han was still all right.

“Holman! What the hell happened to you?”

Wilsey was coming down the ladder, clean in white shorts.

“Been in the bilges,” Holman said. “That God damned bone-faced boss coolie blew the glass right on top of me!”

“Old Chien? Well, we always blow the glass when the watch changes.” Wilsey stopped at the foot of the ladder. “None of us ever goes in the bilges,” he said. “Chien probably didn’t know you was there.”

“He knew. He knew, all right. Then they all hauled ass.”

“They always knock off at four o’clock, and Chien always blows the glass then,” Wilsey said soothingly. “Chien’s a good old guy. If you treat him right, he’s always respectful and does what you tell him.” He edged past Holman and went to the log desk. “We couldn’t get along without old Chien,” he said.

“By God, I can get along without him!”

Wilsey turned. His round, pleasant face looked annoyed. “Just what in hell were you doing in the bilges in the first place?”

“Tracing lines.”

“I’d’ve been glad to show you where the valves are. On this ship, only coolies go bilge crawling.” He looked Holman up and down and frowned. “We all lose face when a white man gets as filthy and dirty as you are right now. If you want Chien to respect you, just stay out of the bilges.”

“I don’t give a shit about your face,” Holman said. “Chien don’t have to respect me, but he better God damned well not cross my bow again. I just want to learn this plant, and nothing’s going to stop me!”

Wilsey shrugged and turned his back and began writing up the log. Holman scowled at him a moment, then shrugged too and went back into the bilges. He did not have much more to go. When he finished and came out, Wilsey was gone.

“Good job. Make finish,” Holman told Po-han. “Come on. We knock off now. Clean up.” He made hand-washing motions.

“Hab got watch,” Po-han said.

That meant he would have to stay down there until eight o’clock. Holman stayed and talked for a few minutes to let Po-han know by his manner that he did not blame him for the steam blast. Then he headed for the washroom. He was pig-dirty and bone-tired, but he knew the piping.

Taking clean clothing from his big, new locker and walking through the clean, spacious compartment cooled Holman’s temper. So did the washroom. It was all enamel and shiny white tile, with four spigots along the trough and a shelf and mirrors above it. The two showers were inboard and they had steam connections of eighth-inch tubing and a cock, so you could set the water as hot as you liked. The windows and the door to the fantail were open and a cooling breeze blew through.

As he showered, Holman thought about the washrooms in Fleet ships. They were hot and crowded. You got a ration of one bucket of water to shave, brush your teeth, wash your clothes and take a bath. You bathed squatting on a tile deck with other naked men around you so thick that the saying was you had to scrub three strange asses before you came to your own. If you wanted a bath too often, they sneered at you for being too lazy to scratch.

He was shaving when the little man came in and undressed, dumping his clothes on the bench. Holman had met him that morning, but he could not remember the man’s name. On a new ship it always took Holman a long time to connect up names and faces, especially if they were not engineers.

“Hi, Holman,” the little man said. “Sunburned already?”

“Sunburned?”

“Backs of your legs all red.”

“Oh. I got hit in the ass with a steam blast.”

“Watch it when you first put on shorts. New guys always get sunburned.”

“I’ll watch it.” Holman kept on shaving.

The little man started the shower splashing and got under it. In the mirror, Holman could see the man eying him. He had bright red hair and pinched-in, elfish features under a bulging forehead. He was a wiry, fair-skinned little man.

“Holman!”

The little man’s voice was a whipcrack. Holman turned around, surprised.

“What’s my rate?”

“Storekeeper,” Holman guessed.

“Yeoman. Ship’s writer, to you. Now what’s my name?”

“I don’t know.” Holman almost said he didn’t give a damn, but the little man intrigued him. “I heard too many names today,” he said.

“I’m the Red Dog. Red Dog Shanahan. Red Dog Bite-’em-on-the-ass Shanahan, and nobody’s ever supposed to forget my name. I’m a dangerous and desperate man.”

Holman grinned. “I’ll remember it now,” he said. He turned back to shaving.

“Nobody ever shaves themselves on this ship,” Red Dog said. “You’re breaking Clip Clip’s rice bowl.”

Clip Clip was the Chinese barber. “Let him charge me double for haircuts,” Holman said. “I like to shave myself.”

“We don’t even sell razor blades and shaving gear in the canteen.”

“You got a canteen on here?”

“Yeah. It opens whenever somebody can get Duckbutt Randall off his ass.”

Holman finished shaving and ran his fingertips over his face and started to leave. Behind him the little man snapped, “What’s my name?”

“Red Dog Bite-’em-on-the-ass Shanahan,” Holman said.

“Arf! Arf! Good man, Holman!”

Holman walked back to his locker grinning.

After supper he went below again, in clean dungarees, to check some of his sketches. Po-han followed him and he would point to one of Holman’s sketched crosses and then to a particular valve and ask, “Same? B’long same?” Po-han was always wrong, but he knew that there was something very wonderful about those marks on paper, if he could only grasp the secret. He worked his lips and screwed up his features and he looked about to cry. Holman could read that expression and he had often known in himself the painful, tantalizing feeling behind it. Something in Holman answered to the young bilge coolie.

He tried to explain, but the pidgin English they shared was not enough. Po-han could not get the idea of breaking down the great mass of piping into separate systems. He could not say what was moving in what direction through any of the pipes that Holman pointed out. He did not even have the idea of stuff moving through pipes. All of Holman’s doubts came back. How could these bilge coolies ever tend machinery?

“Come over here,” he told Po-han.

Po-han followed him over to the feed pumps. Holman choked the throttle on the duty pump and dropped the pressure fifty pounds.

“You fix,” he told Po-han.

Po-han eased open the steam inlet and restored the pressure. The hot well stood just aft of the pumps. Holman knelt and opened the rundown valve. Po-han watched the water level drop in the gauge glass with his Chinese eyes as wide and round as he could get them. Just as the water went out of sight, Holman closed the rundown valve.

“You fix,” he said.

Po-han practically flew to the make-up feed pump and set it clacking. He watched tensely until the water level built up again and then secured the pump. Holman tried him on several other operations and questioned him on them all. Po-han knew what to do, but he did not know what it was that he did. He knew in a vague way that steam and water moved through pumps and valves, but when he twisted a valve he did not realize that he was opening or closing it. To Po-han, all that he did was isolated little magics that moved a pressure gauge pointer or a water level back to the right place. What he had glimpsed in Holman’s sketches, what his eager, wistful eyes were reaching out for, was the big magic that would make a living whole out of all the little magics. Well, some navy engineers he had known were not much better off than Po-han, Holman thought. He decided to try to show Po-han the steam cycle. He started at the boiler.

“Inside b’long steam. Live steam,” he said, thumping the boiler shell. “Strong steam.”

Po-han nodded. They traced the steam from the boiler shell to the feed pump throttle, and Po-han could not understand the difference between live steam going in and exhaust steam coming out. He just did not have the basic words and saying “exhaust” to him did not give him the idea behind the word. It was no good showing him pressure gauges. Po-han thought fifteen pounds on the exhaust gauge was “moh plashah” than one hundred thirty pounds on the steam gauge, because the exhaust gauge and its numerals were physically the larger. He could not read the numerals and he did not know the meaning of “pressure.”

“Jesus. I don’t know how to tell you, Po-han,” Holman said.

Disappointment began dulling the eager pain on Po-han’s face.

“We’ll try a different way,” Holman said.

This time Holman acted it out. He was live steam, coming along the line snorting and bulging his muscles, and the live steam did work in the feed pump, Holman reaching in to the crosshead with both arms, grunting heavily, pretending to lift the piston rod up and down as it stroked, and then the steam came out the exhaust valve wheezing, drooping, muscles slack, staggered over to the condenser and went to sleep, Holman’s folded hands beside his head.

Po-han went through the same act. His eyes never left Holman’s face. He understood that the steam got tired in the pump, but he thought it died in the condenser.

“Maskee. This side steam makee dead,” Holman said, slapping the condenser shell. He knelt and bled water from a cock on the air pump discharge. “Before steam, just now water,” he told Po-han. “Water belong dead steam.”

“Stim dead! Stim dead!”

Po-han knelt with the water flowing over his fingers and his eyes sparkled. He knew fire turned water to steam in the boiler, but apparently he had never realized that a flow of river water through the condenser turned steam back into water. The thought excited him. Holman became water and made undulating motions along the condensate discharge line to the hot well. Po-han followed, undulating too. At the hot well he pointed to the water in the gauge glass.

“Stim dead!”

Holman nodded and grinned. He undulated from the hot well along the feed suction line into the water end of the feed pump. Po-han followed. Holman came out of the feed pump still undulating silently, but stiffly, fists clenched and muscles bulging to indicate increase in pressure. Po-han followed suit, but he looked puzzled. He did not understand pressure. Holman undulated stiffly through the feed heater and began making a sizzling noise.

“This side makee hot,” he told Po-han.

He had Po-han feel the temperature difference between inlet and outlet. Po-han understood. Holman sizzled and undulated along the feed line to the feed check on the boiler shell, pushed open an imaginary trapdoor, clacked and went into the boiler. Po-han clacked and went in too.

His face was like a searchlight. He looked at Holman and tapped the bottom of the boiler gauge glass. “Stim dead!” Then he tapped the steam space above the water in the glass. “Stim live! Stim live!” It was wonderful to see his face. He was just realizing in his own fashion the life-and-death cycle of the steam, endlessly repeated, and how it tied together pumps, piping and heat exchangers into the big magic. He looked like Columbus discovering America.

Suddenly, his Chinese face alive with joy, he began acting out the steam cycle again, as Holman had done it. Holman followed, grinning. When Po-han came back as water to the feed pump, his face shadowed and he stopped.

“This side ... how fashion ...”

He didn’t know how to ask and Holman didn’t know how to tell him.

“Pressure,” Holman said. “Makee pressure.”

“Plashah.” It was just a noise in the air to Po-han.

“Push. Workee,” Holman said. “Inside boiler live steam have got too much pressure. Suppose water wanchee go inside boiler, no have got pressure, no can open door.”

He imitated the clack of the feed check valve. Po-han was trying very hard, almost crying, but he couldn’t get it. Holman dropped the feed pressure by fifty pounds and tapped the gauge.

“You belong water. Just now no have got pressure,” he told Po-han.

He motioned Po-han to come along the feed line and Po-han did, undulating stiffly and doubtfully.

“My belong live steam, have got too much pressure,” Holman said.

He began snorting and grasped Po-han’s bare, sweaty shoulders and pushed him backward, sliding on the oily floorplates, to beside the feed pump. Then he stopped and raised the feed pressures back to normal and tapped the gauge. The feed check on the boiler began clacking again.

“Now you have got pressure!” Holman put Po-han’s hands against his shoulders. “Now push me, pushee live steam!” he said. Po-han pushed weakly. “Workee! Have got too much plashah!” Holman said. Po-han pushed harder and Holman’s feet began to slide. He slid backward, his hands resting lightly on Po-han’s shoulders, and he saw the pure light of joyful learning come back into Po-han’s face. This time he really had the idea, with no dark spots left in it anywhere.

“Plashah! Plashah!” Po-han cried.

“Pressure!” Holman echoed him, grinning happily too, and then he saw somebody in white watching them from the gratings. He dropped his hands, feeling foolish and embarrassed. Po-han, unseeing, went on to clack once more into the boiler.

The man in shorts came on down. He was the other watertender, the one junior to Burgoyne. Holman did not remember his name.

“I got to write up the log,” he said. “I didn’t want to break up anything.”

He had a perky, sparrowy manner, to match his long nose and beady eyes, and a nasty little grin.

“I was teaching him the steam cycle,” Holman said.

“That what you call it?”

He did not quite dare make the wisecrack he wanted to. Holman set his jaw.

“He don’t know enough English. He didn’t know what ‘pressure’ means,” Holman said. “I had to act it out for him. How would you do it?”

“I wouldn’t bother. He already knows all he needs to know. They’re all too stupid to learn anything.”

Holman flushed. “What’s your name?” he asked. “I forgot your name.”

“My name’s Perna.”

“Well prong you, Perna!” Holman said harshly. “Everybody’s got a right to learn. Whoever wants to learn what I know, I’ll teach ’em!”

“You don’t have to get your bowels in an uproar about it,” Perna said. He made a face and went around the engine to the log desk.

“I won’t be surprised if I end teaching this coolie a damned sight more than you got brains enough to learn!” Holman called after him.

He went up the ladder, angry again. He had met that kind on other ships. He knew them now by their very tone of voice and manner. They sat on a nickel’s worth of knowledge as if it were the great Inca treasure, and if anyone junior to them learned something, they thought they were being robbed. Nothing in the world delighted Jake Holman more than bankrupting a son of a bitch like that.

He could not go to sleep. Shadowy pipe and valves and fittings kept sliding across the dark gray screen of his closed eyelids. He had an angry knot left in his stomach and he could hear a faint buzzing behind his left ear. It had been a long while since he had heard that buzzing. It came only when he was very tired or worked up about something, something like the clash with Perna. It always led his mind back to where it had first started, and he could only get rid of it by going back there. It was not a very nice place, back there.

He had wanted very badly to finish high school, so where he had finished was in the jail in Wellco, Nevada, because that was how things worked in Wellco, Nevada. The town marshal was beating him up in a little room with a rough cement floor. The marshal had a blackjack swinging from his wrist, but he only used his fists. Holman could not seem to fight back. At sixteen, he was too near being a man to break and cry and not yet man enough to go for the throat and die fighting. His ears were ringing and he was losing the feel of his body and he could only keep getting up again from the floor that smelled like carbolic acid. The marshal’s face never changed, lean and leathery, not angry, not enjoying it, just doing a job in the same way he sometimes broke remounts for the U.S. Cavalry in the pole corral at the edge of town. And so he broke Joris K. Holman down at last to his hands and knees in a mess of his own blood and vomit sharp and burning in his throat.

Holman shuddered convulsively in his bunk. He was sweating all over.

It was easier in court. The buzzing made a kind of dream screen between Holman and the rest of them. Garbage Tin, the school superintendent, was there, his eyes still blacked. Judge Mason would not take Holman’s word against Garbage Tin’s, about the lie. But Judge Mason did fix it up about Holman’s age and got him into the navy. To the end Garbage Tin held out for reform school.

Holman relaxed slightly.

The navy was a lot like reform school, but they paid you for it. They made Holman a fireman, because of his husky build, and when he got a ship he could go ashore with a little money in his pocket, for the first time in his life. He made no friends on the ship and he avoided civilians ashore. He hated civilians. He found a pock-marked Mexican whore on Pacific Street, with a kind, sweet face, and she could make the buzzing go away for hours, sometimes for days. He kept going back to Maria. Aboard ship he hated all military crap and he hated personnel inspection most of all. You had to stand at attention with your eyes fixed on an imaginary spot three feet ahead and six inches up while the captain talked about you to your division officer as if you could no more see nor hear than a piece of machinery. At those moments the buzzing was very bad. They were all excited because they were Making the World Safe for Democracy. Holman did not care about that. The posters of Uncle Sam pointing and glaring reminded him too much of Garbage Tin. He heard that in the Asiatic Fleet there was a lot less military crap. Out there, the guys said, they were only keeping China safe for Standard Oil, Robert Dollar and Jesus Christ. All old Asiatic sailors were supposed to be crazy. Holman’s shipmates thought he was dim-witted, and sometimes they called him Asiatic. He decided slowly that he wanted to go to China, but he found it very hard to take initiative in anything in those days. Then his division officer dumped him in a China draft, to get rid of him, and so he went to China anyway.

Holman sighed and relaxed quite a bit. His stomach was easing.

It was much better in China. The whores were all like Maria, and the Japanese girls were the best ones of all, and they soothed and healed Jake Holman. The buzzing softened down and he began coming out from behind his dream screen. He liked it ashore. He liked junks and sampans and rickshaws and pagodas and tiled roofs with upturned corners. He liked the noisy, crowded, smelly streets of open-front shops full of everything from dried duck gizzards to lacquered coffins. He loved the hanging red-and-gold signs he couldn’t read and the yelling Chinese arguments he couldn’t understand and the twangy, jangling music that did not sound like music. It all made him know that he was a hell of a long way from Wellco, Nevada. He began taking more interest in his work aboard ship, and then he discovered the big secret.

Holman relaxed altogether. He could barely hear the buzzing behind his ear.

The secret was simple. They could not get along without the machinery. If it did not run, the ship would be a cold, dark, dead hulk in the water. And it did not work with engines to order them to run and to send down the marines to shoot them if they did not run. No admiral could court-martial an engine. All machinery cared about a man was what he knew and what he could do with his two hands, and nobody could fool it on those things. Machinery always obeyed its own rules, and if you broke the rules it didn’t matter how important or charming or pure in heart you were, you couldn’t get away with it. Machinery was fair and honest and it could force people to be fair and honest. Jake Holman began to love machinery.

It brought his mind alive again. Just as it had been with him in high school, he found that he could learn the inner secrets of machinery faster than anybody else. Just as it had been with his high school teachers, he discovered the basic ignorance of his senior petty officers, and of course they hated him for that. But they were also accountable to their officers for the machinery, and they were all secretly afraid of their machinery, and when they were convinced that Jake Holman knew more about it than they could ever learn, they were happy enough to let him take care of it and keep them out of trouble. The only favor he wanted in return was to be excused from all musters and inspections and topside military crap. That was an easy favor to grant, and they always granted it. Whenever he could, Holman always transferred to a smaller ship. The smaller the ship, the less they had of military crap.

Holman yawned and stretched his arms and the buzzing was all gone. This ship was the smallest yet, and it had as much military crap as a battleship. But they still had to have the machinery. And she really was a home and a feeder. He would worry about the rest of it tomorrow. He went to sleep.