Ice Brothers (31 page)

The north wind increased during the ten days it took them to reach the mouth of Narsarssuak Fjord. Paul had never really been to sea in a howling Arctic gale, and he was relieved to discover that both he and the ship could endure it without even a great sense of danger. Paul's stomach still would hold no food but hot bouillon and crackers with a little chocolate, but there was no more convulsive heaving, and he was strong enough to remain on the bridge almost all the time, napping as he sat on the stool, but alert enough to awake instantly when there was any change in the motion of the ship or the sound of the wind.

Although the wooden hull of the
Arluk
creaked and complained as she rolled her scuppers under, she always managed to rise to each mountain of water which rolled up astern and when she went rollercoastering into the great valleys of the sea, her blunt bow always rose triumphantly without burying the three-inch gun in more than foam. The heavy diesel engine rumbled without missing a beat, and enough men remained on their feet to man the controls and to keep lookouts on the gun deck and the flying bridge.

The acrobatic performance of the heavy trawler in the rolling seas would have been astonishing if it had been brief, but after a few days Paul began to take the ship's ability to survive for granted. He felt quite safe as he sat wedged into a corner of the bridge on his stool, which had been lashed to the bulkhead. The hissing steam radiators kept the bridge warm and the ports unfogged, even when the lookout on the gun deck was clapping his mittened hands together to maintain circulation, and cowering in the lee of a canvas-covered 20-millimeter gun.

Paul did not realize at first that the snugness of the bridge could foster a dangerously false sense of security. One night, during the brief hour of darkness, he was napping on his stool while Nathan, who had the watch, clung to a stanchion near the wheel, the wire handle of his galvanized bucket looped over his arm, his gaunt face like a mask of tragedy in the dim light from the binnacle. The roar of the seas and the wind outside had not changed in pitch for days, and therefore Paul was aware of it only when he had to shout to give orders to the helmsman. It had been more than eighteen hours since he had stretched out in his bunk and his eyelids felt heavy, but his hard stool felt curiously comfortable, and the hissing radiators warmed the bulkhead against which his back rested. As he dozed, his chin rested against the bulge of his parka, and sometimes he fell into a deep sleep for as much as fifteen minutes before starting and staring out the porthole into the darkness ahead. Little could be seen. Low-scudding clouds obscured the stars and a new moon, and there was only the dimly luminous flash of a breaking sea to prove that the glass in the porthole had not been painted black. Although he might as well have been blind, Paul was not unduly worried. In Greenland there at least was small chance of meeting other ships, and he had steered twenty miles to the west of the ice pack before turning south. While he dozed he dreamed of women, as he almost always did, of the few girls he had known before his marriage, of Sylvia, and disturbingly of late, of fat Hilda, who had had the redeeming grace of wanting him so much.

Suddenly something woke Paul up. He never knew what it was: a change in the motion of the ship, some new sound, or even divine intervention, but he came abruptly from a deep sleep to full alertness, stared through the port, saw a flash of white in the black sea ahead, and before he was even sure what it was, shouted, “Right full rudder!”

When the sleepy helmsman reacted slowly, Paul grabbed the wheel and frantically spun it with all his strength. Turning her side to the seas, the ship rolled almost on her beams ends. Losing his grip on the stanchion, Nathan fell, his bucket clattering on the deck, and the helmsman reeled against a bulkhead. Paul held the bucking wheel hard over until the ship rounded into the sea, where she plunged her bow through the crests, throwing cascades over the well deck. Nathan was pulling himself to his feet, hanging onto the engineroom telegraph. When Paul said, “Ahead slow,” he adjusted the handle before the helmsman could reach it.

“Ahead slow,” he gasped as the bell sounded. “What the hell is going on?”

Without answering, Paul opened the door of the bridge, pushing it against the wind with all his strength. Standing there he could clearly see the iceberg, so close and so big that it towered like a mountain above the ship. On the windward side of its base, where the ship would have hit it, the great seas crashed, sending spray fifty feet in the air, and there was a hollow booming sound. The ship had missed it by not more than a hundred yards. Her turning circle and momentum had, with the rush of the wind, brought them abeam of the monster, which now lay only about three hundred yards away, not far enough if there was an underlying wedge of ice.

“Left full rudder,” Paul said, coming to glance at the compass. “Steady on three-zero-zero.”

“Steady on three-zero-zero,” the helmsman repeated. “Did you see anything, sir?”

“Lord God,” Nathan said. He was standing at the open door staring at the iceberg, which was slowly receding into the night.

“Nathan, get the lookouts on the gun deck and the flying bridge in here.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Forgetting his pail, which continued to roll on the floor, he went out the door, his long arms seeking handholds. Paul picked up the clattering bucket, carried it to the wing of the bridge, and heaved it into the sea, much as Mowrey might have done, he didn't realize until later. When he returned to the bridge, Mowrey himself was standing in the open door to his cabin, unshaven and dressed only in his long gray underwear.

“What the hell is going on?”

“We almost hit an iceberg,” Paul said. “Go back to your bunk, skipper.”

“You been going ahead full. You got to slow down when the visibility is bad. Haven't you learned that yet?”

“I have now, skipper. Go to bed.”

Grumbling, Mowrey shut the door. Soon Nathan came back, followed by the two lookouts. They all had been drenched by spray.

“Did you men see that berg?” Paul asked quietly.

“After you turned,” one lookout said, and the other stayed silent.

“Nathan, you were the watch officer, and you two guys were the lookouts on duty. You fucked up. If I hadn't seen that berg in time, we would all be dead now because for whatever reason, you three men were not performing well enough to stay alive. There's nothing I can say to you that could make you feel worse than the knowledge of your own inadequacy ought to make you feel. Now go below. Nathan, send Seth and two lookouts who can stay awake up here.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Nathan said. “I'm
sorry!
”

“I know you are. So?”

“I'll do better!” Nathan said and went below, his gaunt body bent against the wind.

“Tell Cookie to bring me a cup of coffee!” Paul called after him, and Nathan gave a small wave of acknowledgment.

When they were safely away from the iceberg, Paul went back to his southerly course, but he proceeded at slow speed until the first streaks of dawn allowed him to see a thousand yards ahead.

“Sir,” the helmsman said, “maybe the
Nanmak
hit a berg like that. Maybe the Krauts didn't get her at all.”

“Maybe.”

“Could we have got off on the berg if we had hit?”

“Not in this weather.”

“If there had been less wind and sea?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe they're waiting for us, holed up on some berg.”

“Maybe,” Paul repeated. “Mind your helm there. Don't let her yaw.”

The excitement of the emergency had been almost pleasurable for Paul, but as he reached out for the coffee which Cookie brought to him, his hand was shaking so much that he spilled a little. They had come within only a few seconds of death, and had survived only by luck, of by divine guidance if one could believe in that. In the months ahead, how many more such emergencies would arise, and how long would it be before the law of averages killed them?

Paul's brain had long been aware of danger, but for the first time his heart now felt it enough to race. Death. On such a ship on such a mission with such a crew, death was a near certainty in the near future. If Hansen, with a lifetime of experience in the Arctic, had been unable to survive in summer, what chance would Paul have in winter?

Death. The prospect of it did not fill Paul with as much self-pity as fury. Damn it, he hadn't yet had time for hardly any life at all! Twenty-two damn years, and the first ten of them he remembered hardly at all. The twelve years he did remember had been pretty well loused up by the Depression, the constant scramble for money and by legions of people, starting with his mother, who had kept yelling orders at him. In his present mood of depression, he felt that in his whole damn life, he could remember only about twenty good days. Loving Sylvia had been full of the pleasure of anticipation, but when he came right down to it, they had really not had many good nights.

The thing that made Paul angriest was the realization that throughout his brief so-called youth he had remained so stupidly
chaste
. Among his set at Boston University, he had enjoyed a raffish reputation, if only because he had married so astonishingly early, but the horrible truth was that in his whole life, he had bedded precisely three women, including his wife. One of these had been a crazy drunken girl who had been laying practically everyone at a fraternity party and the other had been a Radcliffe girl who said she loved him, but whom he had abandoned for Sylvia. His damned obsession with Sylvia, since the time she was sixteen years old, had robbed him of what should have been the best days of his short life. And marriage had not turned out to be the long sexual revel he had imagined it to be. A lot of it had been that mysterious tension and fights.

Since leaving Boston, Paul had fallen into the habit of romanticizing his marriage with Sylvia and his whole past. He had dwelt lovingly upon the few good nights he and Sylvia had spent aboard the
Valkyrie
, a great climax to the sunny summers of longing for her. The bitter realization that most of his marriage and his entire youth had been one long exercise in frustration had the curious effect of making death easier to face. When he forced himself to be “realistic,” it seemed as though his life probably would have continued to be fairly lousy, even if there had never been a war. His dream of sailing his family's rotten old yawl around the world obviously had been a no-go from the start. Instead of doing that, he doubtlessly would have taken a job in his father-in-law's bank, moved into the little white house in the suburbs which Sylvia so craved, and divided his life between shuffling papers in an office and raking leaves at home. All the men he knew ended up like that, except his father, who sat at home carving wooden chains and puffing cigar smoke into his furnace. Terrific.

So … if life was all that rotten, what was so bad about dying young? This was certainly a revolutionary thought for him, but there was at least a kind of peace in it, relief from the violent rebellion he felt whenever he considered his dismal future. The trouble was, the contentment of this theory didn't last long. If he lowered his guard for a moment, memories of the way Sylvia looked when she stood in the sunlight streaming through the window by her bed possessed his mind, and he hated the thought of death so much that he began thinking of ways to evade it. If the government was crazy enough to contrive for him a doomed situation aboard a fishboat on the east coast of Greenland in winter, why accept his fate with such dumb passivity? If he put a bullet in his foot while practicing with one of the .45 automatics which the government had issued to all the officers aboard the
Arluk
, he would be transferred to a hospital and soon released from the service. Probably no one would even contend that his injury was not an accident, but there were less painful ways to earn release. He could, for instance, tell Mowrey that he loved him and wanted to go to bed with him. Christ, the old ice pilot would be sure to put up a fine howl about that, provided he didn't immediately take him up on the proposal, Paul thought with a sudden shock of intuition.… Less drastically, he could plead chronic seasickness to the point of disability and get shore duty, where his promotions would probably come faster than to men at sea.

Except he couldn't do that, wouldn't do that, Paul realized with a kind of surprise. Why? He couldn't quite bring himself to believe that the destiny of the United States depended on his personal bravery. A history instructor at college had once said that no nation has a much better record of morality than any other. If police records were kept on nations, every country on earth would be counted a murderer and a thief. The Germans and the Japs had not been good boys lately, but they had killed fewer people over the centuries than the Russian czars, the English kings, and the Chinese warlords, who hadn't been butchering other people much lately because they had been too busy butchering each other. If America's record was better, despite the complaints of Indians, Negroes and Mexicans, it was at least partly because her history was comparatively short, the very young instructor of history had said to his very young class. At the time Paul had been shocked and surprised that he could not refute the argument very well. He had been more shocked when the instructor had claimed that modern wars brought no benefit at all to the men who actually fought them, whether they won or lost. Almost all the men who rushed from their farms or factories to defend their country, he said, went back to poverty if they were lucky enough to live through a war, no matter what victories had been theirs. The rich, even in those countries which lost, soon found ways to recover their fortunes. The mystery was, the instructor had said, why, in view of this dismal history, governments often found it so easy to get men to fight. He'd said that since men fight without realistic hope of profit, and usually with no cause that could be shown morally superior to any other—not the case, Paul felt now—they must fight simply because they
like
fighting. Men can pretend to fight for a religion or a country they can persuade themselves to believe is morally superior to all others, despite the testimony of history, but men don't make up such elaborate excuses to do something they don't really want to do, he'd claimed. It would be more reasonable to say that one should mine coal, till the soil or labor on an assembly line for the benefit of a religion or a country, but men won't do work like that unless they're sure of immediate profit. For fighting other men, any excuse will do. Since man has evolved from those animals which outfought all the others, the all-knowing twenty-five-year-old instructor had concluded, this should surprise no one. The only question was whether or when man's mind and spirit could overcome his inherited instincts.