Channel fever set in days before land was sighted, sea projects giving way to diffuse anticipation with no clear object. Farmingdale stowed away his hemp dolls and took to winding his watch so often Eddie was sure he would snap the gears. At last the mooring lines were brought up from the storeroom and the booms raised to discharge cargo.
After quarantine, the Elizabeth Seaman docked in Table Harbor to unload her cargo of bauxite and take on stores of fresh food and water. Cape Town was a favorite port, and those not assigned to port watch hightailed it off the ship at sundown: the merchant crew and navy gunners to the Malay Quarter, whose whores the port agent had specifically warned them against; gasheads like Farmingdale to the cheapest gin joints. Naval officers occupied a different sphere in port; Lieutenant Rosen, the armed guard commander, and his junior officer, Ensign Wyckoff, were greeted at the gangway by car and taken to dinner at a private home.
Roger and Stanley, the merchant cadets, watched forlornly in their pressed academy uniforms as the navy officers were spirited away. Too inexperienced for brothels, they were uncertain where they belonged. Eddie promised he would take them to a nightclub before they left Cape Town.
Radio operators had few duties in port and often disappeared, but Sparks chose to remain on the ship. “The fuck am I going to do in Cape Town?” he asked Eddie, who stayed aboard the first night in port to keep him company. “Drag this fucking leg around, saying, ‘Thank you very much, I’d like a glass of milk’? I can see their famous Table fucking Mountain right from my porthole—look, there it is, I needn’t shift a limb to play the tourist. Now I can use this radio for the purpose God intended.”
It had been weeks since they’d heard any news in the radio silence, and what those hushed BBC announcers had to report was mostly good: Rommel’s prize tanks fleeing helter-skelter in Tunisia; the Russians surging in Kharkov; the Allies pounding Messina.
“We’re winning the fucking war, Third,” Sparks said. “What do you say to that?”
“Who can tell, with those voices,” Eddie said. “They could say I was a dead man, and I’d think I was hearing good news.”
Sparks reared back in disdain. “Third,” he said. “I’d never have thought you’d be a pussy for a posh accent.”
Eddie conjured the lacerating snap of the bosun’s speech. “I wouldn’t have, either,” he said.
He climbed down through the empty ship to return Sparks’s cup to the galley. The bosun was there, drinking coffee and reading. At the sight of Eddie, he stood and clapped the book shut, holding his place with two fingers. Eddie, too, was taken aback.
“I’m surprised you’re not ashore, Bosun,” he said.
“What conceivable reason could you have to be surprised, Third?” the bosun said sourly. Clearly, he’d not expected to see anyone, and seemed out of sorts.
“We’ve shipped together before,” Eddie reminded him. “Then you went ashore whenever you’d the chance.”
“As you did, if memory serves,” the bosun retorted. “Perhaps your dizzying new stature accounts for your change of routine. But you’ll note that I merely speculate. It is none of my affair what you do—or do not—with your liberty, just as it is none of your affair what I do with mine.”
“Keep your shirt on,” Eddie said. “I was making conversation.”
The bosun eyed him skeptically, holding his place in the book. Eddie caught the surprising pink of his palm against the blue-black iridescence of his skin. When he’d worked under the bosun, those flashes of pink had mesmerized Eddie like a flutter of wings.
“Making conversation has its uses, I will grant you,” the bosun said. “In the present case, however, the explanation strikes me as disingenuous for the simple reason that it ignores our unwavering acrimony. We are, as it were, beyond making conversation. Ipso post facto, your statement cannot be taken at face value.”
“Do you talk this way to everyone?”
“What can be the purpose of your question, Third?” the bosun erupted, losing his bookmark and throwing up his hands in frustration. “Do you intend it rhetorically or literally?”
“Literally,” Eddie said, not entirely certain of the difference.
“Very well, then. You are a literal man, Third, and I will give you a literal and, if you will permit me, bracingly candid response.” The bosun took a step closer and lowered his voice. “I do not talk this way to everyone. Men so far outside my intellectual scope do not normally crave extensive and repeated interactions, as you do. Your reasons for persisting in this effort elude me, I confess. I could speculate, of course, but that would be a fool’s errand—in part because it would imply that our inner lives had the slightest modicum of solidarity—which I more than doubt—but also because it would indicate that I care one jot about what moves and motivates you, Third, which I do not.”
Eddie lost his way early on, but he knew he was being insulted. Blood rose to his face. “Fine, then,” he said. “Good night.”
He turned and left the galley, taking scant satisfaction in the bosun’s visible surprise. Eddie felt like a whipped dog but knew he’d only himself to blame. What did he want from the bosun? He didn’t know.
The next afternoon, he left the ship with the cadets to explore Cape Town. It was larger than Eddie had expected, a real city crouched under the earthen gaze of Table Mountain. The cadets bought chocolate and satsuma oranges. Eddie bought Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes and smoked them as they walked along Adderly Street, a grand thoroughfare lined with columned buildings. He knew within twenty minutes why the bosun had stayed aboard. Negroes were kept apart from whites in every sphere: buses, shops, theaters, picture houses. Eddie was accustomed to seeing Negroes treated badly—on the West Side piers, wops were regarded as Negroes and Negroes as something worse. Still, he was shocked when a policeman asked an elderly Negro lady to leave a bench where she’d stopped to rest with her shopping bags. The imperious bosun would never set foot upon the soil of such a place. Still, Eddie had to admire a man with enough self-restraint to resist touching land after forty-seven days at sea, purely on principle.
After dark, he brought the cadets to a nightclub he’d heard Lieutenant Rosen mention at chow that morning. As Eddie had hoped, Rosen himself was there, along with Ensign Wyckoff, and they invited Eddie and the cadets to their table. Rosen was a handsome Jew, a reservist who worked in advertising. Wyckoff looked at least a decade younger: a pudgy, freckled enthusiast. Elatedly, he described to Eddie a tour of wine vineyards that he and Rosen had made that afternoon with their South African hosts. They’d watched the grape harvest, and Wyckoff had purchased two cases of wine.
“Wine?” Eddie said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
Wyckoff was serious. After the war, he hoped to become a wine merchant.
“I’ve never cared for wine,” Eddie admitted, although he did like champagne mixed with Guinness—black velvet, they called it.