Red Sky in Morning A Novel of World War II Page 9

  “Thanks for your help today, Sarge.”

  “That’s what all that money they pay us is for. You goin’ out tonight, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “Haven’t thought about it.”

  “This ain’t San Diego, sir. San Fran’s a whole lot different, whole lot better. Places here we can go and wail and nobody will care two shits about what color we is.”

  “I don’t have a horn.”

  “That’s a detail I can handle. What say?”

  “. . . I’ll meet you in front of the HQ building.”

  Sarge flashed a grin. “Yes, sir,” he said, then boarded the bus.

  Connor stared at Pete as the rest of the coloreds kept climbing up the stairs onto the vehicle. “Don’t tell me you got friends on the Globetrotters, Pete?”

  “Why not?” Pete asked. “Don’t Rochester and Mr. Benny get along?”

  “Yeah,” Connor admitted. “But that’s radio. This here is closer to real life.”

  Chapter 5

  JULY 17, 1944

  The night Pete Maxwell had gone out clubbing with Sarge and Willie in San Francisco had been a revelation. The handful of joints they took in seemed color-blind, Negro and white musicians and even audience members mingling without incident. The two colored musicians knew enough guys on the various bandstands to give the three Navy men plenty of chances to sit in. Pete had borrowed a horn from a colored cat who was so much better than he was, the thought that he was blowing into the same horn as a Negro never occurred to him till later.

  What a kick, playing Ellington, Jordan, and Calloway tunes with such a variety of great players till the sun came up. In the four weeks since that golden night, Pete remembered that fondly as the last really great time he’d had, with one exception.

  That exception had been a weekend liberty during the brief in-port training period, where Kay rode the train up to see him, and they’d taken a hotel room at the Mark Hopkins no less, and shared room service and made love till he thought his poor pecker would fall off. They’d done a little sightseeing—Fisherman’s Wharf, the Presidio—but mostly, when they weren’t in bed, they just walked around and kissed and talked like the high school sweethearts they’d not long ago been.

  Before he put her back on the train at the Bay Bridge Terminal, they stood kissing on the steam-swept platform like a scene out of half a dozen movies they’d seen, only usually it was the soldier or sailor getting on the train, not the pretty girl.

  “Is this the last time we’ll have together before you go out to sea?” she asked.

  “Probably.” Pete really had no idea, and if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to tell her; loose lips and ships and all. So he just said reassuringly, “Ammo ships have to come back to San Francisco to reload, eventually, so maybe it won’t be so long.”

  “I . . . I have a feeling we did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “It’s silly, but . . . yesterday afternoon, I just know we made a baby.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  She shrugged, her brown hair bouncing off her shoulders, an image that would replay in his mind a thousand times in the days ahead.

  “If not,” she said, “we’ll just have to keep trying.”

  Then she was leaning out a window waving, and he was doing that stupid routine from the pictures where the lover ran along after the train leaving the station. Such a silly stupid cliché, he thought, standing there on the platform, tears on his face, like he was just a kid and not a man.

  Other than the two oases of pleasure—music and romance—the last twenty-six days had been Hell, the skipper keeping his promise, officers and crew putting in long roundthe-clock shifts, practicing everything from dropping anchor to going to battle stations, to pulling off all the wooden panels that covered the five hatches of the five holds. The colored boys had performed much better than any of the officers could have hoped for. Especially Captain Egan.

  The apparent contradiction between the captain’s private racist comments (to his young officers) and his public pep talk (to the colored crew) had been cleared up soon after they’d sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Once the land was gone and the ocean was everywhere, Egan had called the four officers into his office for a meeting.

  The office adjoined the captain’s cabin, which was spacious compared to Pete’s quarters but still a trick to accommodate five men. An oak desk, a refrigerator, and a safe were among the other accoutrements, but the conference took place with Driscoll and Pete seated on a bench under the porthole and with Rosetti and Connor in bolted-down oak chairs opposite.

  Hands on hips, the big crusty Egan stood as if at the head of an invisible table between the bench and the chairs, and they had to crane their necks to give him their full attention.

  “You men know how I feel about the make-up of our crew,” he said with frigid distaste. “But it doesn’t matter a damn that I don’t like the way this ship smells—it won’t keep me, it won’t keep us, from doing our goddamn jobs. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” they all said.

  One shaggy eyebrow rose. “So I did my job—I gave the spooks the ‘Win One for the Gipper’ speech. I got them all fired up, and to their credit, they ate it up like watermelon.”

  Connor sneaked Pete a look; Pete ignored it.

  Egan was saying, “Now, it’s your job to keep them that way—nappy and happy. My job is to sail this goddamned ship—you men just keep those colored boys out of my sight and busy, none of this shiftless nonsense. We have a brig for goldbrickers, so don’t be afraid to use it. Do I make myself clear, Lieutenant Driscoll?”

  “In spades, sir,” Driscoll said, a remark the Fantail Four would roar over in the officer’s mess but which was delivered straight here.

  “Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” they all said.

  Pete had found that treating these men like men, with the respect any man expected, hell, deserved, was all it took to get good work out of them. He extended that attitude to the four white non-coms aboard as well, and so far this crew, black and white alike, seemed hard, dependable workers. Even that bigoted bastard Griffin performed his duties well enough, though he obviously did his best not to interact with the Negroes more than necessary.

  As ordered by the President, the Navy had “integrated,” but the reality was a sort of segregated integration. Like Pete and the other officers, the four white non-coms had their separate space. None of the Negroes were trained in running the engines, the two steam turbines that drove the ship: that was where Griffin and his buddies came in.

  The two men who ran the engines, and that meant the engine room as well, were E-7s, chief petty officers. Tom Whit-ford was a tall drink of water from Del Rio, Texas, square-shouldered, honest as Abe Lincoln but as prejudiced as his buddy Griffin. The other E-7 was a slightly shorter, stockier guy from Paterson, New Jersey—Albert Blake, who made it known he didn’t “give two shits what color you are, as long as you get the fuckin’ job done.”

  Dale Griffin was an E-5, a petty officer second class from Tupelo, Mississippi. Pete had to admit that Griffin was a darn good worker, but it wouldn’t have surprised Pete to see the guy show up to shift in a white sheet. The other petty officer second class was from some little town in Missouri—John Smith, with a personality as anonymous as his name.

  Griffin and Smith were charged with running the boilers that created the steam turning the turbines. One man manning the boiler and one chief petty officer running the turbines were in the engine room at all times, normally Griffin with Whitford, Smith with Blake. They worked twelve-hour shifts with Blake and Smith usually taking midnight to noon.

  When the Liberty Hill Victory was at sea, only three of her sixty-plus crew were needed to keep her running: the engine man, the boiler man, and an oiler (a glorified gofer charged with following the orders of the other two, taking care of anything that they were too busy to do).

  The oilers worked three eight-hour shifts, and—because this role was ca
rried out by Negroes—the non-coms charged them with the shittiest jobs. This was in addition to the colored oiler’s tasks of charting hourly readings and getting sentenced to shaft alley, the darkest, noisiest area in the bowels of the ship.

  A fat man’s squeeze of a narrow corridor in the absolute bottom of the ship, shaft alley was crowded with steam pipes above and to the side of the massive steel housing that held the spinning drive shaft of the propeller. This dimly lit, dingy hole running half the length of the ship was exactly where nobody wanted to go.

  The oilers, lucky them, had to traverse the alley once an hour, making sure that the drive shaft was properly lubricated by taking readings at various stations along the way.

  Though most sailors considered this the worst job on the ship, for many it still meant being a seaman and not—as had been typical for Negroes throughout the history of the Navy—lowly steward’s mates. Willie Wilson had begged Pete to get him an oiler’s job, but you needed a seaman’s rating to hold the position, and no steward’s mates did.

  From 0700 to 1500 hours, the biggest man that Pete had ever seen, white or black, served as oiler. This Negro made the bouncer at the Silver Slipper look like Billy Barty. Hell, “Big” Brown was almost too large to fit into shaft alley. Brown’s given name was Simon, according to the crew roster, but the other colored boys and most of the whites never called him Brown, always Big Brown.

  An exception was the racist Griffin, who (according to ship scuttlebutt) had once snapped at Big Brown over some screw-up real or imagined, “You’re the biggest black idiot I ever saw, Brown!”

  Big Brown reportedly picked the much smaller Griffin up by both arms and smiled into his face and said, “My friends call me ‘Big Brown,’ Mr. Griffin.”

  Whether the story was true or not, Griffin rarely spoke to the intimidating boiler at all, and certainly kept his epithets to himself, apparently understanding that discretion was the better part of valor when Big Brown was around.

  The 1500 to 2300 shift belonged to Lenny Wallace, a light-skinned Negro seaman from Seattle. A college student at Seattle Pacific University, Wallace had applied to Officer Candidate School but—after he was repeatedly turned away—settled for being a seaman.

  Manning the overnight shift from 2300 until 0700 hours was Orville Monroe, an elfish, articulate, effeminate Negro. When Sarge and Pete had been alone on the fantail one night, smoking Chesterfields, Sarge had asked the officer to watch out for Monroe.

  “Poor little guy’s queer as a square egg,” Sarge had said. “None of the other boys want nothing to do with him. If I hadn’t set ’em straight, they beat his ass purple by now.”

  “You know,” Pete had said, “you can be tossed out of the Navy for deviant acts.”

  “Mr. Maxwell, if every sailor ever sailed up the brown canal got tossed out of the service, there be you and me and maybe Popeye left. And I ain’t so sure about Popeye.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m serious about Orville. Poor little punk’s caught in between.”

  “In between what?”

  “Let’s put it this way—guys like that prick Griffin, meanin’ no disrespect, think we’re a bunch of shiftless niggers. And about every other Negro on this ship thinks white folk are the enemy, and this war just means a temporary truce.”

  “Surely it’s not that bad.”

  “It’s worse for Orville. Think about it.”

  And Pete had. On a ship divided along racial lines, Orville Monroe was indeed caught between. Pete recalled that poem from high school: John Donne had said, “No man is an island,” but you couldn’t prove it by the likes of Orville Monroe, poised to catch crap from both sides.

  So Pete had gone out of his way to be friendly and fair with Orville, who’d approached the lieutenant about getting him a transfer.

  “Mr. Maxwell,” the long-lashed seaman had said, “I’m gettin’ ten kinds of holy hell over my intelligence and artistical ways. Is it my fault I’m smarter and more sensible than these gorillas? I learned to type in junior high. Maybe I could transfer to an office somewheres.”

  “Orville, I’ll put in for a transfer for you, but, honestly, we’re so shorthanded, the chance that Captain Egan will give up an able-bodied man like you is somewhere between slim and none.”

  “You consider me able-bodied, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “Sure. You’re small, but you pitch in.”

  Orville had gone off pleased with himself, and Pete had wondered if his “able-bodied” remark had been taken in some weird sexual way by the sailor. He knew very little about homosexuals, other than that a janitor at the post office where his pop worked back home had been fired for it.

  Still, Pete had done what he could for the kid. He got Driscoll to order Wallace and Orville to switch shifts from their original assignments, which had Wallace working overnight. Under the new orders, Orville only spent an hour a day with Whitford and Griffin. Pete hoped Griffin couldn’t pile too much grief on the little guy in only an hour.

  One might think keeping a born victim like Orville Monroe from being worked to death would be a fairly simple matter; but if loopholes took on water, the Liberty Hill would have been on the bottom by now. With only five officers—including their recalcitrant skipper, who barely left the bridge or his cabin—they couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  Plus, the non-coms had a certain amount of power of their own, especially within the confines of the engine room.

  The Orville matter concerned Pete enough that he’d asked the rest of the Fantail Four to keep an eye out for Orville’s welfare; whatever they might individually feel about (as Rosetti put it) “fairies,” they’d all agreed to do their best to keep Griffin and the rest from abusing the sailor.

  Now, the shakedown cruise was almost over. Mere hours away from port, Pete entered the officers’ mess for a late lunch. On the starboard side of the boat deck, between the officers’ pantry and the ship’s office, the mess was Pete’s favorite room on board.

  Not merely the font of food and ever-available hot coffee, the mess was consistently the quietest place on the ship. Even his own cabin was no safe haven—when Connor and Pete weren’t on separate watches, the latter had to put up with the former’s championship snoring, which sometimes made Pete think he’d sleepwalked down to shaft alley.

  The mess offered peace, quiet, and yes, a steaming cup of coffee. The short wall to the left and the long starboard wall opposite the door were home to long, green leather-covered banquettes. Long tables with wooden chairs ran in front of them, bolted to the deck. Two portholes and one fan served to cool the place, but today the portholes were closed and the fan turned off.

  July’s warmth was offset by their position on the eastern edge of a Pacific storm. For now at least, Captain Egan had successfully outrun the rain, the skies brighter to the east, toward home; but a chill still hung in the air, a stiff breeze stirring choppy swells, making sailing less than ideal.

  Pete poured himself a cup of coffee, then dropped into the sheer pleasure of the hard seat. He set his hat on the table.

  Willie, in his steward’s mate whites, ducked his head in. “Get you anything, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “What’s for lunch today?”

  “Got your favorite, sir. Shit on a shingle.”

  “Oh Christ. Willie, you know how to ruin a moment.”

  Willie’s mournful mug split into a grin. “I’m just razzin’ ya, sir. Cookie made up hot beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and green beans.”

  Soon Connor came in and made straight for the coffee urn, then he and his cup of joe slid into the banquette across from Pete.

  “Any sign of the Promised Land, Ben?”

  Connor gave him a fatigued smile. “Pete, you know my people are only happy when we’re suffering.”

  “And?”

  “You’re looking at the most ecstatic fucker on this tub.”

  Pete smiled. “Skipper still making your life holy hell?”

  “Aye aye.
I think El Capitan has figured out I’m not Irish.”

  “Really. And to think most people mistake you for Pat O’Brien.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t really become you farm boys. Stick with slapstick. Slipping in a cowpie, that kinda thing.” He sipped the hot liquid. “Seen Driscoll?”

  “Sacked out. He’s on watch with you tonight.”

  “Rosetti?”

  “Supposed to be running gun practice in . . .” Pete checked his watch. “. . . about half an hour.”

  “Gun practice since when?”

  “Since a couple of sea-going tugs are coming out from Frisco to meet us. They’ll be towing targets, and Vince and the gun crews are supposed to blow the bejesus out of them.”

  “Well, I’m glad somebody’s getting something worthwhile accomplished.”

  Willie came in, set their meals on the table and was gone again. The steward’s mate’s familiarity with Pete was reserved for when no other white officers were around.

  “What’s eating you, Ben?” Pete asked, filling a fork with potatoes and gravy.

  Making sure Willie was really gone, Connor said, “It’s these damn Negroes.”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sake—not you, too! You’re getting as bad as Dick. These guys are doing the best they—”

  Connor stopped him with an upraised palm. “No, no, you’re getting me wrong. I don’t think every colored boy aboard is dumber than Stepin Fetchit. Not at all. In fact, I’ve taken your lead.”

  “What ‘lead’ is that?”

  The comedy writer leaned forward. “I’ve been talking to these boys, trying to get to know them some. In the process, I’ve been watching them work, and noticing that they sometimes get even the simplest things wrong.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “Quiet, Andy Hardy. Listen to the judge. I knew they weren’t fouling up because they’re stupid; they are not stupid. Well, some are, but so are some of us. . . . Anyway, I wanted to know why the simple mistakes, oftentimes after they’d done some other thing a hundred times harder . . . so I started talking to them. One at a time. One fella to another fella.”