The Caine Mutiny (8 page)

“Please.”

The Southerner rasped it open and read the orders. “Jesus,” he murmured. Keggs fell on his cot with his face to the wall, groaning.

“For God’s sake,” said Willie, “what is it?”

“’Report to San Francisco for transportation to DMS 21-
U.S.S. Moulton
.’ ”

Keggs sat up. “A ship? A ship? Not Mine Disposal-a ship?”

“A ship,” said Keefer. “Now what is a DMS?”

“Who cares? A
ship
!” Keggs fell back on his cot, threw his legs and arms in the air, and neighed, wept, and giggled all at once.

Keefer drew a picture manual,
Ships of the Navy, 1942
, from a shelf. “DMS-DMS-I swear to God there ain’t no such ship-no wait. Here it is-DMS-page 63.”

The others crowded around him as he flipped the stiff pages to a picture of a queer narrow three-stack vessel. He read aloud: “ ‘DMS-Destroyer Minesweeper. World War I destroyer converted for high-speed sweeping.’ ”

“Oh, God!” breathed Keggs. “Mines. Mines.” He dropped into the chair and writhed.

“Hell, boy, that’s a sight better than Mine Disposal. Sweeping is nothing.”

Willie couldn’t muster up any such false cheer. The three had often talked about minesweeping and agreed it was the worst seagoing horror the Navy had to offer. He pitied Keggs. All up and down the floor shouts were being exchanged. Most of the men had received their first preferences. Those who had been honest rejoiced; the others sulked or shivered. Willie was annoyed to learn that everyone who had asked for communications school, even as third choice, had been sent there. He had missed a chance. But Staff, Atlantic, was fair enough.

The mate of the deck appeared in the doorway. “Here’s yours, Keith. Just came up.”

Willie opened the envelope with a thrust of his forefinger and yanked out the sheaf of papers. His eye darted to the third paragraph. The words seemed to rise up at him with a sound of trumpets:
Report to Receiving Station, San Francisco, for transportation to

DMS 22-
U.S.S. CAINE
.

PART TWO

THE CAINE

CHAPTER 6

Dr. Keith’s Letter

When Ensign Keith followed the bellboy into his room in the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, he was struck at once by the view of the city in the sunset. The hills were twinkling under a sky massed with clouds, pink in the west, fading to rose and violet in the east. The evening star shone clear, hanging low over the Golden Gate Bridge. Eastward the lamps were burning along the gray arches of the Oakland Bridge, a string of amber gems. The bellboy turned on lights, opened closets, and left Willie alone with the sunset and his bags. The new ensign stood by the window for a moment, stroking his gold stripe, and wondering at so much beauty and splendor so far from New York.

“Might as well unpack,” he said to the evening star, and opened his pigskin valise. Most of his belongings were in a wooden crate in the hotel’s check room. In the valise he carried only a few changes of clothes. On top of a layer of white shirts lay two mementos of his last hours in New York-a phonograph record and a letter.

Willie rolled the record between his fingers and wished he had brought his portable phonograph. How perfect a setting the evening was for May’s sweet voice, and the Mozart aria! She had recorded it for him in a Broadway shop one eight when they were both giddy with champagne. Willie smiled as he thought of the delicious April evenings with May during his ten days’ leave. He reached for the telephone, then pulled back his hand, realizing that it was near midnight in the Bronx, when all candy stores were shut and dark. Besides, he reminded himself, he was giving May up, because he couldn’t marry her, and she was too good a girl to be kept dangling. His plan had been to enjoy an ecstatic farewell, then depart and never write or answer letters, allowing the relationship to die peacefully of malnutrition. May hadn’t been informed of the plan. He had fulfilled the first part, now he must remember the second.

He laid aside the record and picked up his father’s mysterious letter. No use holding it to the light, it was bulky and utterly opaque. He shook it, and sniffed it, and wondered for the fortieth time what could possibly be inside.

“When do you think you’ll get to the
Caine
?” the father had asked, the afternoon before Willie’s departure.

“I don’t know, Dad-in three or four weeks.”

“No more?”

“Maybe six weeks, tops. They move us out pretty fast, I hear.”

Thereupon his father had limped to the desk and drawn the sealed envelope out of a leather portfolio. “When you report aboard the
Caine
-the day you get there, not before or after, open this and read it.”

“What’s in it?”

“Why, if I wanted you to know now I wouldn’t have gotten myself a writer’s cramp scrawling it, would I?”

“It isn’t money? I won’t need money.”

“No, not money.”

“Sealed orders, eh?”

“Something like that. You’ll do as I say?”

“Of course, Dad.”

“Fine- Put it away and forget about it. Never mind mentioning it to your mother.”

Three thousand miles from his father and the scene of the promise, Willie was tempted to peek at the contents; merely to glance at the first page, no more. He tugged at the flap. It was dry, and came loose easily without tearing. The letter was open for Willie’s inspection.

But the thin strand of honor held, after all, across the continent. Willie licked the crumbled paste on the open flap, sealed the letter tight, and tucked it out of sight at the bottom of the valise. Knowing his own character, he thought it well to minimize the strain on it.

Well, he thought, he would write a letter to May after all-just one. She would expect it. Once he went to sea, silence would be understandable; now it would be cruel, and Willie didn’t want to treat May cruelly. He seated himself at the desk and composed a long warm letter. May would have needed second sight to read her dismissal in it. He was writing the last tender paragraph when the phone rang.

“Willie? Doggone you, boy, how are you?” It was Keefer. “I got your wire, boy. I been phoning all day. Where you been, boy?”

“Plane got hung up in Chicago, Rollo-”

“Well, come on out, boy, time’s a-wasting. We just getting a party organized-”

“Where are you-Fairmont?”

“Junior Officers’ Club-Powell Street. Hurry up. There’s a tall blonde on the loose here that is a dish-”

“Where’s Keggs?”

“He’s gone already, Willie, gone to sea. Three weeks’ delay getting transportation for everybody in Frisco except old horseface-”

“How come?”

“Why, the poor boy was down in transportation office, see, he just come off the train, he was getting his orders endorsed. Wouldn’t you know, the phone rings and it’s the skipper of a creeping coffin that’s going to Pearl, and he’s got room for three more officers. Keggs gets endorsed right over to him. He never even changed his socks in Frisco. Left Tuesday. Missed everything. This is the town, Willie. Liquor and gals till you can’t stand up. Get on your bicycle-”

“Be right over, Rollo.”

He felt slightly hypocritical, finishing up the letter to May. But he asserted to himself that he was entitled to any fun he could grasp before he went out to sea.

Willie considered himself a mistreated hero; he still smarted, under the insult of his orders to the
Caine.
After triumphing over the handicap of forty-eight demerits and rising to the top five per cent of the school, he had been sent to sweep mines on an obsolete World War I ship! It was mortifying-twice so, because Keggs, nearest him on the alphabetical list but almost two hundred numbers below him in standing, had drawn identical duty. Obviously the Navy had disposed of the two men with no thought of what they deserved, one after another, like hogs being slaughtered. So Willie believed.

He was drawn into a round of drinking and partying that lasted twenty days. He rolled with Keefer from clubs to bars to girls’ apartments. He quickly became popular because of his piano entertaining. Officers and girls alike were rapturous over
If You Knew What the Gnu Knew:
he had to sing it several times every night. He resurrected a knack developed in college days of making up rhymes on people’s names as he sang:

“Hirohito trembles when he hears of Keefer,

To calm his nerves he has to light a reefer-”

Willie could go nimbly from name to name in the room, improvising such couplets to a jazzy refrain. This astounded his audiences, especially the girls, who thought his talents bordered on witchcraft. He and Keefer roared up and down the hair-raising hills in an old rented Ford, and dined mightily on Chinese food, abalones and crabs, and did very little sleeping. They were invited to fine homes and exclusive clubs. It was a great war.

Keefer became friendly with an officer in the transportation department. The result was that the roommates were assigned to a hospital ship for their voyage westward. “Nurses and fresh strawberries-that’s the ticket, Willie my boy,” Keefer said, proudly announcing this
news. They
rolled aboard the
Mercy
at dawn after a roistering farewell party, and they continued the same pace of pleasure all the while the ship was steaming toward Hawaii. Nurses clustered around Willie at the piano in the lounge every evening. There were sharp restrictions aboard the
Mercy
on place and time of meetings between the sexes, but Keefer quickly learned his way about the ship and arranged for the pursuit of happiness at all hours. They saw very little of the Pacific Ocean.

They debarked in Honolulu arm in arm with two freethinking nurses, Lieutenants Jones and Carter; exchanged brief kisses under the huge Dole’s pineapple electric sign, and agreed to meet for dinner. The two ensigns piled their luggage into the taxicab of a snub-nosed grinning Hawaiian in a rainbow-colored shirt.

“Navy Base, Pearl, please.”

“Yes, gentlemans.”

Keefer got off at the bachelor officers’ quarters, a structure of unpainted wood. Willie went to the personnel officer in the cement office building of the Hawaiian Sea Frontier, and was told that the
Caine
was at the Navy Yard in repair berth C-4. He threw his baggage into another cab and raced out to the repair basin. Berth C-4 contained only a slosh of empty filthy water. He wandered around the yard amid deafening sounds of ship repair, asking questions of workmen, sailors, and officers. None of them had heard of the ship. Battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, in drydock or alongside docks, were everywhere: gray monsters in dozens, swarming with riveters and sailors. But no
Caine.
So Willie returned to the personnel officer.

“Don’t tell me,” said the fat lieutenant, “they fouled up this berthing chart again-” He searched through a heap of dispatches in a box on his desk. “Oh. Pardon me. Yep, she’s gone. Shoved off this morning.”

“Where to?”

“Sorry. Classified.”

“Well, what do I do now?”

“I don’t know. You should have caught her.”

“My ship just got in an hour ago.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Look,” said Willie, “all I want to know is, how do I get transportation from this point to catch up with the
Caine
?”

“Oh. You want Transportation. Well, I’m Personnel. You’ll have to see Transportation.” The lieutenant got up, put a nickel in a Coca-Cola machine, drew out a frosty bottle, and drank noisily. Willie waited till he had seated himself again.

“Who and where is Transportation?”

“Jesus, I don’t know.”

Willie walked out of the office. Blinking in the glare of the sun, he noticed a sign on the next door:
Transportation.
“He doesn’t know much,” muttered Willie, and entered the office. A dried-up woman of thirty-seven or so sat at the desk.

“Sorry,” she said, as Willie entered, “no more scooters.”

“All I want,” said Willie, “is transportation to the U.S.S.
Caine
.”

“
Caine
? Where is it at?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how on earth do you expect to get to it?” She pulled a Coco-Cola bottle out of a desk drawer, flipped off the cap against the edge of her desk, and drank.

“Nobody will tell me where the ship is bound for. It left this morning.”

“Oh. It’s not in the yard?”

“No, no. It’s at sea.”

“Well, then, how do you expect to get to it on a scooter?”

“I don’t want a scooter,” exclaimed Willie. “Did you hear me ask for a scooter?”

“You came in here, didn’t you?” snapped the woman. “This is the scooter pool.”

“It says ‘Transportation’ outside.”

“Well, a scooter
is
transportation-”

“Okay, okay,” said Willie, “I’m new here, and very stupid. Please tell me how to get a start toward my ship.”

The woman pondered, clicking the green bottle against her teeth. “Well, I guess you want Fleet Transportation. This is Yard Transportation.”

“Thank you. Where is Fleet Transportation?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Personnel next door?”

Willie gave up for the day. If the Navy was in no hurry to send him after the
Caine
, he was in no hurry to go. He went back to the bachelor officers’ quarters, thoroughly tired of piling a crate and two bags in and out of taxis.

“Just in time, boy.” Keefer was fresh and cool in newly pressed khaki shirt and trousers. Willie still wore his hot, heavy blues. “Big doings. Admiral giving a party for the nurses tonight. Jonesy and Carter got permission to bring us along.”

“Which admiral?”

“Who knows? They thick as fleas on a dog’s back around here. You find your ship?”

“Shoved off today. Nobody will say where.”

“Fine, fine. Nice delay, probably. Shower up.”

The admiral’s party, at his handsome home inside the base, started as a quiet affair. Most of the guests were within earshot of an admiral for the first time and they minded their manners. The admiral, a big bald man with startling black hollows under his eyes, received everyone with genial majesty in his straw-matted, flower-filled living room. After drinks had flowed for a while the atmosphere warmed. Willie, urged on by Keefer, timidly sat at the piano and played. The admiral brightened at the first notes, and moved to a seat near the piano. He waved his glass to the rhythm of the music. “The boy has talent,” he said to a captain at his elbow. “By George, these reserves bring some life into things.”

“They certainly do, sir.”

Keefer heard this exchange. “Hey, Willie, give us the
Gnu Knew
.”

Willie shook his head, but the admiral said, “What? What’s that? Let’s have it, whatever it is.”

The song caused a sensation. The admiral put down his glass and applauded, whereupon everyone else did the same. He was in chuckling high spirits. “What’s your name, Ensign? By George, you’re a find.”