He’d bunked with as many as twenty men on the early non-union ships, before they were barred from the West Coast in the wake of the Great Strike. Criminals, dope addicts with hypos in their seabags, amateur boxers with holes in their memories—all stacked together so snugly in their sacks that when another man coughed or farted or moaned, Eddie thought he’d done it himself. Once he’d happened upon two men locked together in a stokehold in a slick, grunting embrace. The sight revolted and enraged him. He resolved to act—protest, find a sea lawyer and file a complaint—but by the time his watch ended, he’d ceased to care. The incident had fallen into the past, left behind with the nautical position at which it had taken place. They all had their secrets in 1937. No one talked more than men on ships, but the point of the stories they told was to hide the ones they could never divulge to anyone.
Pearl Harbor interrupted Eddie’s drifting. Experienced sailors were desperately needed to transport war supplies, and he was promoted—through no effort of his own—from an ordinary seaman to an able-bodied seaman. ABs were strongly encouraged to study for the third mate’s exam. For months Eddie resisted, longing to preserve the floating peace whose essential feature was his own passivity. It was no good; idleness in wartime—even a war he couldn’t see—had felt like loafing. He grew bored, restless. Finally, having not spent two consecutive weeks ashore in over five years, he’d paid off in San Francisco and taken the train to Alameda for the two-month officers’ training course.
Mindful of the hour, Eddie began descending Telegraph Hill. Warships crowded the bay. The hills around it were speckled with pale houses, like birds’ eggs. He was disappointed to find that the view had not assuaged his anxious new vigilance. But it wasn’t new. It was a relic from his old life. Eddie had forgotten what it felt like.
Thirty minutes later, he was climbing the slanted gangway from Pier 21 to the Elizabeth Seaman. Before he’d reached the deck, a familiar voice gusted against his ears: florid and bawling inside crisp British corners. Eddie froze on the gangway. He tried to imagine the voice issuing from another man—any other man—than the bosun who despised him. He could not. There was only one man in the world who talked like that.
On the main deck, he glanced through the tumult of booms and cargo and scrambling army stevedores for a glimpse of the bosun’s dark skin. But the Nigerian was nowhere in sight, nor could Eddie hear him anymore. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d conjured him up.
Outside the midship house, Eddie introduced himself to Mr. Farmingdale, the second mate. Farmingdale’s courtly manners and snowy beard gave him the noble air of a profile on a coin, but Eddie pegged him for a juicehead. It wasn’t just Farmingdale’s overcareful walk that gave him away—this was New Year’s Day, after all, and plenty of men were tiptoeing about. It was the smell that eked from his pores, like soil mixed with rotten orange peels. Eddie felt a twinge of distaste.
In the wardroom, he presented his brand-new third mate’s license to the master, the ink still wet, as it were. Young Captain Kittredge was fair-haired and striking—more like a picture star playing a skipper than a real one. Eddie felt old beside him; was old for a third mate. “You’ve come out of retirement?” the master asked, clearly thinking along the same lines.
“No, sir. I was already at sea.”
The captain nodded, doubtless placing Eddie in the category of misfits one found aboard merchant ships before the war. Kittredge had that American air of bullying optimism: expecting the best and presuming he’d get it—or else. This would be his third voyage on the Elizabeth Seaman, he told Eddie, the first two having been uneventful island-hopping runs to the Pacific.
“She’s a special girl, Mrs. Seaman,” he said with a wink. “We’ve been making twelve knots.”
“Twelve!” Eddie exclaimed. Liberties were notoriously slow; twelve knots would be flank speed. Perhaps some of the captain’s buoyant American power had seeped into the ship.
A breeze sallied through three open portholes on the forward wall. Beyond them, Eddie had an impression of San Francisco’s colors, blue, yellow, pink. It was a light city. In the union halls and seamen’s churches, men imparted ghastly tales from the East Coast: torpedoed tankers vaporizing like Roman candles, men frozen to death at their lifeboat oars on the dreaded North Sea runs to Murmansk. It was hard to envision any of that here. Eddie’s voyages in the year since Pearl Harbor had been much like the ones Captain Kittredge described: offshore unloading, no liberty, but no apparent danger, either, now that typhoon season was over.
His third mate’s stateroom was on the boat deck, starboard aft, beside the sick bay. Small and straightforward: a bed with built-in drawers, a small closet, desk, sink. But to Eddie—accustomed to living out of a single locker in a cabin with at least one other man, more often several—so much solitary space was an intimidating luxury.
Unpacking his seabag, he found a sealed envelope with Save for later written on the front in a neat schoolteacher’s hand. It must have been placed there by Ingrid, a young widow he’d met three weeks before, in San Francisco. Feeling a twinge of baffled irritation, he set the envelope inside the desk drawer and went to the wheelhouse to begin his third mate’s duties. He checked over the bell books and signal flags. Having already sailed twice on Liberty ships meant that he knew the Elizabeth Seaman—being mass-produced, Liberties were interchangeable down to the last oilskin locker. From the wheelhouse window, he watched the number two hold receive more of the boxed cargo he’d spotted from Telegraph Hill. They were aircraft, as he’d guessed: Douglas A-20s. The crates were stamped with Cyrillic letters.
He left the midship house and returned to the main deck. In the after part of the ship, number three hold was receiving general cargo: bags of cement, canned beef, powdered eggs, boxes of boots. Eddie climbed onto the rear gun deck and greeted the gunner on watch, painfully young and big-eared like they all were, with their crude generic haircuts. No sailor wanted the job of guarding a merchant ship, yet every cargo required a complement of navy gunners to operate the cannons and machine guns in case of attack.
As he climbed down from the gun deck, Eddie noticed that the hatch to the steering engine room, belowdecks, had been left ajar. Only officers were supposed to go down there, but the deck crew had ways of getting hold of the keys, as Eddie well knew, having done it himself. The steering engine room was an excellent place to dry laundry.
Curious to know who was behind the infraction, he began descending the ladder into the familiar greasy warmth of the ship’s innards. He nearly collided with the Nigerian bosun, who was on his way up the very same ladder.
“What? . . . You . . .” the bosun sputtered, surprise and displeasure rendering him uncharacteristically mute. “Is this a deranged attempt to report for work on my deck crew?”
Eddie had the advantage of forewarning. “Not at all, Bosun. I’ve my third mate’s ticket now,” he said, taking his first genuine pleasure in the promotion.