American Front

XIX

A few miles outside of Boston harbor, Patrick O'Do

"Aye aye, Skipper," Enos answered; the biggest difference between life aboard the Spray and the way things had gone aboard the Ripple was that commands got answered in Navy talk these days.

George wished he had a winch with which to haul in the thick line and the insulated telephone wire wrapped around it. But the Spray had no winches for its own trawls, and one would have looked decidedly out of place at the stern. The steam trawler wanted to look like an ordinary fishing boat, not arousing the suspicions of Entente warships till too late. And so he did the work by hand.

Harvey Kemmel said, "Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen."

Although he had been in the Navy for years, Kemmel still flavored his speech with Midwestern farm talk George Enos sometimes found incompre hensible and often amusing. Today, though, he could do nothing but nod. "We were a little on the excited side when we sank that Rebel submarine," he admitted. "Begi

"One way to put it," Kemmel said. "Christ, our pictures in the paper and everything. Felt good while it lasted, but we haven't had a sniff from the Rebs or the Canucks since."

A nibble, Enos would have said. However you said it, though, the message was the same. Nobody could prove the enemy was wise to the trick the Spray and other boats like her were trying to play, but neither she nor any of those other boats had lured a cruiser or a submarine to destruction since, either. "Hey, we've got a good load of fish in the hold," George said, pausing for a moment to look back over his shoulder.

Kemmel rolled his eyes. "I don't think I'm ever going to look a fish in the face again, now that I know what a hell of a lot of work it is to try and catch the bastards. I thought I was tired on a destroyer, but I didn't know what tired was. I feel like somebody rode me hard and put me away wet."

That was another comparison Enos never would have come up with on his own; he had trouble remembering the last time he'd ridden a horse. Again, though, he understood what his comrade was driving at. He answered, "The smaller the boat, the more work it takes."

"You did this stuff for years, didn't you?" Kemmel said. "Each cat his own rat, but -" He shook his head in bemusement.

"I'd sooner fish than watch a horse's rear end all day," George answered, dirt farming being the only thing he could think of that might possibly have been harder work than fishing.

"Soon as I got old enough, though, I got off my pa's farm and as far away as I could go," Kemmel shot back. "War hadn't come along, you would have kept on doing this your whole blessed life."

George Enos shut up and went back to pulling in the heavy, wet rope and the telephone line, one tug after another, hand over hand. It was hard work, but easier than bringing in the trawl full of fish. There was, at the moment, nothing at the end of this rope.

He'd just brought in the dripping end and coiled the rope neatly in place when a tug steamed up alongside the Spray and demanded her papers: no ship got into the harbor these days without being stopped and inspected first. Since they were Navy, passing the inspection proved easy enough. A pilot came aboard to guide them through the mine fields protecting Boston from enemy raiders. Every time they came back from a trip out to one fishing bank or another, more mines had been sown. Every once in a while, the mines came loose from their moorings, too. Then, pilot or no pilot, a boat or even a ship was likely to go to the bottom in a hurry.

"Wonder where the submersible's gone," Enos said. As had become its custom, the submersible had remained under the sea after releasing the tow- line. Maybe it went into Boston, sneaking under the mines, or maybe to one of the other ports nearby.

Harvey Kemmel laughed. "I can tell you ain't been in the Navy long -you still ask questions. What they want you to know, they'll tell you. What they don't want you to know ain't your business anyhow." George would have argued with him, but he looked to be right.

The pilot brought them in to T Wharf as if the Spray were an ordinary fishing boat. Patrick O'Do

"What's going on, sir?" George asked him. Off to one side, Harvey Kem-mel snickered. Enos' ears got hot. He did still ask questions. The United States were a free country, and most places you could do things like that. But when you were in the Navy, your freedom disappeared.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," the lieutenant commander said. The hell of it was, George understood the fellow was doing him a favor.

They all walked down T Wharf after the officer. Real fishermen and other people with business on the wharf gave them curious looks, those who didn't know they were Navy themselves. What the dickens did a spruce lieutenant commander want with a bunch of ragamuffins in dungarees and overalls and slickers and hats that had seen better days?

Most of the couple of blocks just back of T Wharf were full of tackle shops and saloons and boatbuilders' offices and whorehouses: businesses serving the fishing trade and the men who worked it. In one of the whorehouses, a girl stood naked behind a filmy curtain: a living advertisement. A cop across the street looked the other way. Actually, he looked right in at her, but he didn't do anything about her. George looked at her, too. He was happy being married to Sylvia, but he was a long way from blind.

He flicked a glance up toward the lieutenant commander. The man's head never moved. Maybe his eyes slid to the right, but George wouldn't have bet on it. He seemed as straight an arrow as Enos had come across in some time.

He led the crew from the Spray into a Navy recruiting station sandwiched between a saloon and a cheap diner. Charlie White said, " 'Scuse me, sir, but we already joined up." The ex-fishermen all laughed. The sailors who filled out the crew didn't.

A couple of young men sat in there, talking earnestly with a gray-haired petty officer. Enos had a pretty fair idea what they were doing: trying to con vince him they ought to be allowed to put on whites before conscription made them don green-gray. From things he'd read about what life in the trenches was like, and from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed day in and day out, he had a hard time blaming them.

The lieutenant commander led the men from the Spray into a back room. "Be seated, men," he said, waving to the chairs around the big wooden table. There were just enough chairs for the ersatz fishermen and, at the head of the table, for the officer. As George Enos sat down, he wondered if that was a co incidence. He had his doubts. The Navy didn't run on coincidences.

He also wondered if Patrick O'Do

The lieutenant commander coughed. Maybe he was having trouble coming to the point. George didn't like that. If somebody didn't want to tell you something, odds were you didn't want to hear it, either. At last, the officer did speak: "Men, we are ending the program in which you have been engaged. Results have not shown themselves to be commensurate to the effort involved."