Two Twenties

The fog came down on the fourth night of the sixth week since the boarding, and it came the way it does in that part of the ocean: without warning and all at once.

By nine in the evening the water had gone the colour of a nickel and the ship had begun to feel her way. The captain had gone to modified watch at sunset, the way a careful captain does, and the crew had gone quiet the way a crew goes quiet when it cannot see past the rail: not frightened, exactly, but reduced. A fog at sea takes the world away and leaves you a deck and a bell. Twice an hour the bell struck the time, brass and bright, and the sound went out forty yards and stopped, as though the ship were a room with the walls drawn in, and after the strike there was only the machinery and the water going along the hull.

Sunny had the middle watch, and his station was the forward lookout on the forecastle.

It is a lonely post in fog. You stand forward of the breakwater and you look into nothing and you listen, because in fog a lookout uses his ears; a ship announces herself by her engines before she shows you anything, and the job is to hear her coming and say so out loud, loudly, into a radio, soon enough to matter. He had been there since midnight, with a coat on and a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand, and he was for the first time since he came aboard entirely alone.

At half past one he heard a foot on the deck plates behind him.

There is a rule about the forecastle at night and everybody knows it: it belongs to whoever is stationed there. A man who comes forward at that hour, in fog, has come forward for a reason.

"Steady," the man said. "Don't call out."

Sunny turned his head. In fog, at night, with the deck lights darkened down, there is no such thing as a face four feet away; there is a shape in a coat, and a voice, and that is all.

"Who is it?"

"It's Peltier. Second division. Afterguard. You wouldn't know me."

"I know you," Sunny said, which was not true, but he said it the way he said most things, and the shape beside him took that in and was quiet for a moment.

"You were on the Bill of Rights," Peltier said. "They took you off her. Against your captain's say-so."

Sunny did not answer. He did not see what there was to answer.

"Me, I signed," Peltier said. "I put my hand up and I said the oath. Nobody dragged me. And I'll tell you something, and you can do what you like with it: there's no difference at the end of it. You get told where to stand just the same, and if you say a word about it you're a bad sailor, and if you say three you're in the irons."

"Nobody's in the irons on this ship," Sunny said.

"Not yet."

Here is the thing about Sunny, and it is the whole of the thing. He had a nature that could not do arithmetic on people. When a man said something to him, he took the sentence at its face and answered the sentence. It never once occurred to him that a man might speak a sentence in order to accomplish something other than what the sentence said. Deceit was not hidden from him; it was simply not in his field of vision, the way a colour is invisible to an eye that has never had the cells for it. That is what innocence means: not being good, but not yet having been made to be careful.

So when Peltier said, "Not yet," Sunny heard a young man at a rail and waited for him to say the rest.

"How many of us are there?" Peltier said.

"Us?"

"Off the merchant ships. Off the docks. The ones who didn't choose it." His voice had gone a little quicker. "You'd be surprised. There's more than you think, and they're not all in the deck divisions. There's a cook's mate who's been aboard eight months and never once said a word to a chief without wanting to break something. There's two in the deck department I won't name. There's a lad in the supply office." He laughed, very quietly. "There's a whole list, and the list has a name."

"A name?"

"A word for what we are." And he said a word, and it was a small one, and Sunny never told anybody what it was, and there is no transcript anywhere that has it, because the only man who ever heard it took it with him into a cell and did not put it down. I have come to believe the word did not matter and that the word was the point, the way a handle is the point of a knife: a thing to hold the rest by. Whether the list was real I never settled. In eleven years I have not found one other man who would admit to being on it, and Peltier was off the ship before the boy was in irons, and I have not found him either. So I have to leave you where I am, holding a handle with nothing on the other end of it.

"We're going to do something," Peltier said.

The bell struck the half hour somewhere below and the sound went out and died. Sunny, at his post, with a cold cup in his hand -- this part he told me himself, years later, in a garage in the valley, and it is the only thing in this chapter he ever told anybody -- felt his chest go tight.

"What kind of something?"

"Nothing that gets anybody hurt. That's not what this is." Peltier turned and leaned his back against the rail and looked at where Sunny was, which in that fog came to the same thing. "We need the men forward to stand down when the word comes. That's all. Not to fight anybody. Just not to be where they're told to be, and to stay there, and to make it last long enough that somebody has to come and talk to us instead of telling us. Six days is what it took last time. You know what last time was."

"There's no last time."

"There's a ship called the Halstead," Peltier said quietly, "and every man on this deck knows what happened on her, and every chief on this deck has been told in writing not to let it happen again. That's exactly why it could work."

Then his hand came out of his coat and he held two small folded things up between them, close, where the fog made them look like nothing: two bills folded once, the way a man folds money he intends to hand over.

"Yours," he said, "if you'll only--"

And Sunny's body answered before Sunny did.

He did not decide to speak. Something came up out of him and took the wheel, and what came out was broken, because it was the middle of the night and a man had put the whole of his life into Sunny's hand in the dark. "D-D-D--" he said, and stopped, and tried again. "I d-don't know what you're d-driving at. You'd b-b-better go. You'd b-better go b-back where you b-belong."

Peltier did not move. That was the part Sunny remembered: that he did not move. He stood with the money in his hand in the dark and he did not go, and the not-going was worse than anything he had said.

"I'll t-t-tell you one more t-time," Sunny said, and his voice came up out of his chest and got louder, and it came out of him the way a large quiet animal speaks when it has finally been made to stand up. "If you d-don't start, I'll t-t-t-oss you over the r-r-rail."

The shape looked at him a moment longer than a man looks at a thing he understands, and then it went, without a word, aft along the deck and out of sight, and the fog closed behind it the way water closes over a stone.

Sunny put both hands on the rail. His heart was going like a running engine. He stood and looked into the grey and tried to get his breath back, and he did not know yet, would not know for months, would not know until the last morning of the world, that he had just been given the only chance he would ever get to save his own life, and that he had taken the right action in the wrong language, and that the wrong language would be read out to a board of officers in a room.

Then a light passed.

It came along the deck from aft, a torch swinging low, the sort a duty petty officer carries on his rounds, and it swept along the starboard side and up over the windlass and out across the forward rail, and Sunny stood still with his hands on the rail and let it find him, and the light held on him for a second and moved on.

"Hallo," said a voice out of the same fog, behind him. "What's the matter up here?"

It was one of the forecastle watch, a man named Ordway, awake and out on deck for the air, or for the smell of something happening. He came along the rail and squinted. "Was that you making the noise?"

"A man came forward. Aft division. He had no business up here."

"Which man?"

"I don't know his name."

"You know his name well enough to know he's aft."

"He went aft."

Ordway thought about it. He was a veteran of twelve years and had an instinct for the shape of an untold story, and he looked at Sunny a while, and then he said the kind of small, sharp, accidental thing that men say at sea and remember the rest of their lives.

"Ah, Sunny," he said. "Something got to you. You st-st-stuttered."

And he laughed, not unkindly, the way a man laughs at the one thing on a ship that everybody knows and nobody says, and clapped Sunny on the shoulder and went below, and left him alone with the bell and the fog and his own heart, which had begun, the way hearts begin to be told a lie, to slow back down.

Here is what Sunny did with the night.

He had been approached before by men who wanted things -- a cigarette, a friend, a fight -- but never by a man who wanted him to help break something, and he had no place to put it down.

He came back most often to the money. Where does a seaman apprentice in the middle of the ocean get two twenties? A deployed ship is a cashless world, and the only paper money aboard is what a man carried in his wallet when he came up the brow six weeks ago and has never had a reason to open. By the third day Sunny had begun counting up, in his head, who aboard had cash. Nobody did. He thought about Dolly Vane, the chief storekeeper, and what she would have said if he had asked her where the twenties could have come from, and he knew that asking her was a thing he could not undo.

That was the moment the whole thing turned, and he turned it the wrong way, and the reason he turned it the wrong way is the reason he was on that forecastle at all.

It never crossed his mind that this was a thing that belonged to somebody else. In the back of his head there was a plain morality off a working deck: a man settles his own business with his own hands, and a man who carries tales to the people who own the ship has done something worse than the man he carries them about. What stopped him was not fear. It was that reporting it would have required him to stand in a small room and tell men that another man had said something in the dark, and he could not make himself be that kind of man. So he kept it, and carried it around the ship for three days the way you carry a hot plate with no place to set it down.

On the third day he saw Peltier.

He was at the foot of a ladder in the forward passageway, leaning on the bulkhead, in the open, in daylight, talking to two other men about nothing. And when he saw Sunny coming he did not look away and he did not look smug. He nodded, a small easy ordinary nod, and smiled, and went on with his conversation, and let Sunny pass within arm's reach, and nothing happened.

Sunny got to the end of the passageway and had to stop and put his hand on the ladder rail.

Because a man who had meant what he said that night did not nod like that in daylight. And the easiest door in the world was standing open in front of him, and the door said: he was drunk. Or he was joking, and a boy off a merchant crew did not know how to take a joke. Or he had simply been talking to hear himself talk, the way men talk on a quiet watch, and had said more than he meant, and was embarrassed now, and the nod was an apology.

That was, on the evidence, the most reasonable reading available. It was the reading anybody would have chosen. And when the reasonable reading is also the one you want, it is not a reading. It is a place to sleep.

Two days later he went to Holloway.

He found him on the boat deck on a stool, repairing a boat cover with a palm and needle, and Holloway saw him coming and kept working, and Sunny sat down on the deck with his back against a stanchion and told it, not all of it, and with no name in it. He said a man had come forward at night and said something about a list, and about a word for what the merchant-crew men aboard were, and about a thing that was going to happen.

Holloway went on sewing. The needle went in and out of the canvas and the sun came across the boat deck at a slant and turned the water alongside into a sheet of flat gold, and the bell struck the end of the watch somewhere below, and he did not look up once, and Sunny began to think the old man had not heard him and had gone somewhere inside himself where the young ones could not follow.

"So it was an aft-division man," Holloway said at last, to the canvas.

"It was."

"Aft-division man with money on him."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You said the man showed you something. A man who shows you something in the dark at half past one, on your own deck, with a lookout's post behind you and nothing but fog in front of you, shows you a thing worth two weeks of his pay." He bit the thread off and put the palm down on his knee and looked up the deck, and his old blue-peppered face did the thing it did, which was to look at nothing for a moment and see everything. "What did he want you to do?"

"Nothing yet."

"Nothing yet." He said it slowly, the way a man tastes something that has gone off. "And when he does want you to do it, you'd like to know ahead of time that he'll be building a road right up to your rack."

Sunny did not answer.

"You think he's a fool," Holloway said. "You think he talked too much on a plain night and he's ashamed of it. I can see it on you." He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, and his voice was not unkind and had not a scrap of pity in it. "So I'll tell you what I know. An aft-division apprentice doesn't come forward in fog with two weeks of pay in his pocket and a speech in his mouth. He didn't get that money off a card machine. He didn't invent that speech on the way up the ladder. Somebody made the speech first, and paid for it, and sent the boy up here with it, because a boy with a little money and a friendly face is the one kind of thing that walks up to a man like you and does not set off the bell."

He picked the needle back up, and Sunny thought he was finished, and he was wrong.

Holloway put one more stitch in the canvas and said, without raising his eyes, without any weight at all, the way you would remark on the weather:

"A cat's-paw, that's all that boy is. The paw is his. The arm's somebody else's."

And then: "Didn't I say so, on the ladder? Didn't I tell you the chief has his eye on you?"

Sunny stood up. He had heard every word, and in the plainest part of himself he had believed it, because you believe an old boatswain's mate the way you believe a forecast. But hearing a thing and knowing it are two rooms in the same house, and he was standing in the wrong one, and there was no door between them that a man like him could open by himself. He thanked Holloway. He said he would go to the chief of the watch. He meant it when he said it. He went down the ladder and along the passageway past the paint locker and the two cells with the bolted door, and it was full dark by then and the fog had come back up over the water, and he went to his rack and lay with his eyes open. And the next morning there was a drill, and then a working party, and then a small thing in the mess deck that took him off that road entirely, the way a single bad step takes a man off a wall.