XVIII
June, 1908 34°50'N, 151°00'W
From a marine's diary:
The Florida banished from the Fleet! Scuttlebutt has it that we're headed for Midway Island; never heard of it; there was a Midway at the World's Fair in Chicago; I don't think it's the same! Must be a scrap heap for derelict battleships; rose at 4 bells, lashed hammock, polished buttons, and ready to go on watch early this morning; later we cleared for action and I drilled on the six pounder; Beck and Garrett! Mother would faint dead away if she saw all the betting going on here.
The Florida had seen many notable events and achievements in its career, but nothing had ever captured the imagination of the crew like the boxing tourney announced that June of 1908.
When Captain Oates learned of the impending match between Midshipman Beck and Ensign Garrett, he expressed doubts to his exec, Lieutenant Grissom.
"Do you think Garrett will be able to put up much of a fight? He looks fit--all my lads do. But... he's not very broad in the shoulders."
"Hard to tell, sir. He's spry. But one good hit...."
"He might take a thrashing. Won't look very good, a midshipman manhandling an ensign. Then again, it will certainly take the men's minds off this--" he made an expressive gesture "--detour. Besides, from what I hear, Mr. Garrett might deserve a comeuppance."
"It was only a dolphin, sir."
"Oh, not only that. There was that girl back in Norfolk--hear about that? And other things."
"You mean the stewards. We don't know if he was responsible. Anyway, the niggers needed to be put in line."
"I thought that was our job, Mr. Grissom."
The sailors gathered on the quarterdeck like supplicants awaiting the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, there was an almost religious fervor in the congregation. They were present to witness a sacrificial spilling of blood. For one man to physically dominate another was a holy event. Nothing could be settled in this world until it was understood who was in control. Without that knowledge, Man would be as aimless as a flock of gulls at night. Certainly, Captain Oates was the supreme authority on the Florida. But boxing represented the footing of his domain.
This was illustrated at its most fundamental level by the first match of the day: a fight between one of the ship's stewards and the boatswain's mate.
Depending on the mood of the officers, blacks were either banned from or cajoled into boxing on naval vessels. Naturally, most whites thought it beneath their dignity to engage in fisticuffs with Negroes, and even more undignified to get knocked down by one in a fair fight. But there was a new world heavyweight champion, black as night and an undeniable blot on white manhood. There was probably not a captain in the Fleet who did not fantasize of culling a proper challenger from his stout lads to battle Jack Johnson and win back the title. People were already calling the Atlantic Squadron the Great White Fleet, and it seemed only proper that the Great White Hope should come out of it.
Of course, this meant would-be challengers would have to fight black men, in order to brush up on the subject.
Amos Macklin had fought in over a dozen matches, winning most of them. Unlike Midshipman Beck, however, there was no question of his having a choice in his opponent. Had that been the case, Ensign Garrett would have been cream o' wheat long ago.
Right now, he was squared off against the boatswain's mate, for whom Oates had high hopes. He was about the same height as Amos, but burly and much slower.
Three left jabs were enough to throw the mate off balance and a right threw him to the mat. Amos stood back and cast his eyes down. It was best not to look at the hooting ring of sailors after a brief affray like this. Certainly, it would have been suicidal to gloat.
One man in the crowd was strangely quiescent. Amos raised his head a little and found himself looking at Ensign Garrett, all decked out for the fight to come. It was then Amos knew he could afford to grin. Thoughts of Jack Johnson and White Decline were not at the top of the list, today. The eager eyes popping on the weather deck were awaiting Garrett vs. Beck. Amos caught a whiff of fear from the edge of the ring.
Fear never truly vanished from a fighting ship. Overlaying the Florida like an invisible hairshirt was fear of humiliation, fear of botching an assignment, fear of showing fear--of being shown up as an inadequate man among men. The smell was as prevalent as the stench of bilge water. It was highly noticeable among the blacks on the ship; to be so easily dispatched to the galleys, robbed of their rating, was a consummate embarrassment--the thing most feared. Their birth decreed it.
Amos recognized his own fear. The last time he had gone to the voting office in Savannah to register, he'd been brimming with pride and confidence. He departed shattered and heartbroken. Georgia had just introduced a literacy requirement. Anyone who wanted to vote must be able to read abstracts from the state constitution. This did not faze him. When he was a boy he'd worked as a janitor's helper in a nursing home. An old woman there had taken a shine to him and taught him to read. Within a year, he was flipping through Bleak House as though it was a primer, prompting the old lady to declare him the brightest boy she'd ever met. It was an observation he bore with pride--a pride that, over the years, became something of a conceit.
But when the registrar shoved a parchment towards him to test his reading skills, he found the writing incomprehensible.
"This isn't English."
"It's the state constitution," the agent nodded agreeably.
"But it isn't English. It looks like Latin."
"Maybe, but it's still the constitution."
"Can you read it?"
"I can read the letter of the law. And that says, I quote: 'Anyone who cannot read selected parts of the state constitution shall not be granted the privilege of voting.' Unquote."
"But--"
"I think you best move on, boy. There's a line building up behind you."
Well, Amos consoled himself with feeble humor, whoever said Georgia was a part of America? But it was a sign--and the Navy made proof of it. There was no reason for complacency. Nothing had changed. The only proper, and safe, emotion for a black man was fear.
Yet in the world of odors, differences could be discerned between moral fear and physical fear. Amos had won all his fights--except two. Both losses had been at the hands of a large fireman; though he scrubbed up for the fights, it was impossible to get all the coal dust out of his skin on short notice. Amos had the strange feeling he was fighting a mulatto rather than a grimy white man. He was slow, as most stokers were. But none of Amos' rapid punches made any visible impact. The stoker just kept coming, grinning, taking blows, grinning, taking gut shots, grinning. He threw very few punches. He had to save his wind for chasing Amos in circles. Besides, once he trapped Amos, only one shot was needed. The stoker had a right that could knock you back to Bible class.
Amos had no desire for a rematch, but pressure was put on and he had no choice. The men wanted to see if the first knockout had been a fluke.
It hadn't been. The only difference in the second fight was that he ran even more. It didn't help.
He had smelled fear that time--his own. A stench right up his nose. This was what caused men to weaken like children, to dread, to cower. Not the implacable foe, but the noxious fumes generated in one's own body.
The white sailors had had a high old time that day. Amos had revenged himself by devastating six challengers in a row. But it did not erase the memory and smell of defeat.
But now the reek of fear was not his own. For all his calm exterior, his smirk, his seeming indifference, Ensign Garrett was a deeply frightened man. Not only of the possible beating he might take, but of what they all feared most: public humiliation.
Well, Amos thought, it was about time.
Yet for a moment he was touched by pity for the ensign. He recalled the secret beating he'd taken outside the galley. Garrett coming in at him, flailing his small ineffectual hands, more like an angry child than a grown man. Ensign Garrett could not beat the petals off a wilted daisy, was Amos' conclusion. He deserved to be flayed alive. And yet....
Before Amos could search out Beck to get a better idea of what the ensign faced, he was shuffled belowdecks. The sailors had grown tired of trying to rouse his opponent and were carting him away.
A few minutes later, Garrett stood in his place.
Midshipman Davis had mixed feelings about missing the fight between the ensign and his erstwhile friend. It might prove to be memorable, if one sided. Davis was one of those who believed Beck would make short work of Garrett. He'd boxed against Beck himself at the Academy. Scheduled for three rounds, Davis found himself talking to angels within thirty seconds. When the instructor finally coaxed him to consciousness, he discovered he was not the only one flat on the mat. Beck was down, too.
"Did I hit him?" Davis asked with groggy incredulity.
While stanching the flow of blood from his nose, the instructor shook his head. "No. He took one look at this gusher of yours and passed right out. Mr. Beck has a lovely right cross, but he'll never have the killer instinct."
When Beck walked into the junior officers' mess all sprite and cocky, he pointedly avoided sitting with Davis. Had events run their normal course, their grudge would have culminated in a match of their own. But Beck was sickened by the sight of blood and Davis was an easy bleeder. Neither desired a repetition of their Academy embarrassment, so their disaffection sat festering. For all his eagerness to see Garrett thrashed, it was harder swallowing Beck's swagger.
Still, it came as a blow when he was ordered to stay with Dr. Singleton in his cabin while the fight took place in the shadow of the aft turrets.
"Is he sick, sir?" he'd asked Lieutenant Grissom.
"Aye, and still under arrest."
When the marine posted at Singleton's door smirked knowingly, Davis caught a strong whiff of the truth.
"Come to keep an eye on the old souse?" the doctor slurred as he entered. "I asked specif-f-fically for you, young man. Oates said someone had to watch me... make sure the old fool don't slip with the razor or something. Bad press, bad press. Either that or he's curious where I get my liquor. Anyway, I say, 'Why not my old companion, Midshipman Davis?' And here you are."
He was seated in an odd-looking chair Davis had noted on earlier visits to the cabin. The middy refrained from asking about it. The doctor might decide to put him in it and Lord knew what it was designed for.
"I see you looking at my throne. This was invented by Dr. Brendel. Out of Tschupackowka. Russia. Successfully tested on the Hamburg-American liner, Patricia."
Davis gave in. "Tested for what?"
"Why, seasickness! The prevention thereof. Uh... the corkscrew motion of the ship is compensated with lateral movements. The gyrations of Neptune, reciprocated by a motor connected to a belt, which is attached to the eccentric actuating the seat."
Davis could see the eccentric, all right. Quickly, he sat at a small sea table before Singleton could rise to offer his own.
But the doctor seemed incapable of rising. He thudded from side to side, between the high padded arms of his experimental chair. The low hum of the motor revved to a whine whenever it fought to right itself. The sea was steady. The imbalance came from the doctor, who swayed in the chair as though sitting out a typhoon. Every so often, Singleton would lean too far out, setting the chair into a crazy spiral that whirled him slowly like a top. Each time he emphasized a point by throwing up his hands, he went into a spin.
The dreaded mood-detecting machine was nowhere in evidence. On the table, in its place, stood a tall multi-tiered series of game boards. Chess pieces were arranged on the bottom two levels. It looked harmless enough, so the midshipman asked about it.
"Premiered by Dr. Ferdinand Maack at the Karlsbad Chess Tournament last year," said the doctor, who in Davis' estimation knew the name and address of every crackpot inventor in Europe and America.
"So it is chess."
"Three-dimensional." Singleton leaned forward to adjust some of the pieces. The chair lurched and he knocked down half a row of white pawns. With a resigned sigh, he eased back.
"I play," Davis offered. Better to wrap up the time with a new game than indulge Singleton's tedious maundering.
"Mmpphhh, you know the moves, I'm sure. In some respects, this comes far closer to the analogy of war beloved of armchair strategee... strategeee... strategists."
Singleton inserted a finger under his collar and flicked out his shirt a few times. Davis remarked the gray nipples of his flabby breasts under the sweat-soaked cotton. Once, he'd spotted Captain Oates lounging on a yacht off Cape Cod. He, too, seemed in need of mammary restraint as he flopped to his side. Davis wondered if that was where the derogatory phrase 'old woman' came from. Did men become... well, less than men as they aged? His own nipples brushed uncomfortably against his stiff tunic as he squirmed. What a dreadful fate!
Singleton dropped back. The little motor in the base of the chair whirred. He tilted, nearly fell out. The electric whine intensified and he straightened up.
"War… well, that's three-dimensional, right? Two-dimensional chess is a pale imitation. Eighty-one squares as compared to eight hundred and thirteen, parallelopipedons. Sixty-four to five hundred and twelve. The number of major pieces remains the same, but there are more pawns. Most of the moves are identical, simply extended to three dimensions. But the knight--ah! That's where the true art comes in. It…."
"Yes?" Davis prodded.
The doctor seemed to turn to stone. Disappointment leaked back into the midshipman's mood. Singleton had finally managed to interest him in something, only to veer off in the middle of his dissertation.
"I... I'm not very good at it." He pushed backwards. The motor whined. He produced a flask, took several sips.
"Sir, if you don't mind my asking... why did you come back?"
"Don't be a fool. Money, of course. And I can make a fine purse, now. 'I was a prisoner of the Grand Atlantic Fleet.' That's an article that'll sell, I'll warrant." Seeing the midshipman's anger, he softened his next words. "I think you really want to ask: Why do I drink?"
"No, sir. More like, why do you drink so much?"
"Fair enough." He took out a flask and took several sips. "What were you doing three years ago?"
"Sir? I was in school."
"Did they teach anything about the great eclipse of 1905 in that school?"
"We read about it some."
Stretching out his hand, the doctor described an arc in the air. For the first time Davis noted his wedding band. Hard to think of this old fart being married.
"From Hudson Bay to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic. Great swatches of the planet blotted out. Spain, Algiers, Tunis, Egypt. Total. But a total eclipse can't last for more than seven minutes. Very rare. The eclipse of 1905 lasted three minutes, forty-five seconds. We had to prepare a year in advance to make the most of those minutes. Much like all your training on the six-incher, wouldn't you say?"
Davis caught faint shouts through the scuttle. Had the Beck-Garrett fight begun? Or was it the preliminary bout?
"Nine expeditions were sent out from the States alone. Many more from the European nations. To look at the Sun. What we see is the photosphere--mere surface. Current theory has it that it's made up of billions of granules five hundred miles thick, floating on a dark surface." Singleton shrugged. "After that, there's a theoretical 'reversing layer'--called so because it reverses the solar spectrum. Farther down is the chromosphere, the red mass of hydrogen. It's from there that flames shoot up as much as one hundred thousand miles. Think about that, lad."
Not much to do with the cost of tea in China, Davis thought wearily.
"I was with the Minnesota. We dropped off Professor Bigelow at the Puerta Coeli Station in Spain. He would be performing experiments with the camera coelostat and the spectrograph. Meanwhile, we sailed on to Algeria.
"You can't possibly imagine how delicate our instruments were, how carefully they had to be managed." With unintended parody he demonstrated this fact by turning tiny invisible knobs. "We had a fifteen-inch camera mounted on a polar axis, a concave grating spectrograph, prismatic polarigraphs for measuring the polarity of the corona, a chromospectrograph--"
"Yes, sir."
"Uh... all the instruments were calibrated at the Naval Observatory in Washington, of course. But they had to be set up so precisely... a millimeter off and the results would be useless."
Listening to the doctor's long, sad sigh, Davis looked at him keenly. No doubt, this extended prologue was leading up to a point. The middy found his interest piqued in spite of himself. He sensed the profound event Singleton was about to reveal had much to do with his fall from grace. He looked like a man whose vision had skipped off the present and was sinking in the deep past.
"We were quartered in an old palace. I was given a room once used by a bey. Princely, to say the least. Come morning, we passed through Guelma...." The doctor stared at the shot glass on the table for a long moment, as though contemplating formality. Then he shrugged and took another long pull from the flask. "They all wore white there. They were a filthy, godless race... and they all wore white.
"The day came. August 30. And I handed over my duties to the naval science attaché."
Davis waited for his explanation. After a minute of listening to the little motor whir and whine, he grew impatient and asked, "Why did you do that, sir?"
"I couldn't function, lad."
"You were sick?"
"You mean snookered? No. I was supposed to make the final adjustments. Had to be sober as a bell. What happened... I don't know. You see, the night before…. What I'm trying to describe is a perfectly ordinary event that had extraordinary consequences. I'd drifted off by myself. Just looking around. All white. Kaffir or Moslem, didn't matter. All dressed in blessed white. Even their buildings, like adobe. All that virginal boasting in a land as scurrilous as Gomorrah. It was evening, you see. I had to get back to the site to take some astronomical readings. And just as I looked up I saw a minaret. And just above it--impaled almost--was Venus. Like some renegade Star of Bethlehem. And then the muezzin called for evening prayers...
"Do you know what a conjunction is, midshipman? The old astrologers believed in them. Venus, the minaret, the call to the faithful. It was a cabalistic moment. An evil conjunction. At that instant I lost... me. Nothing mystical. I didn't lose myself in something. I'm no saint. I'm a scientist. I simply lost contact..." he pinched himself, "…with this. With it all. I knew I wouldn't be able to function the next day. I suppose that's how I came to be here. When I handed over responsibility for the expedition to the attaché, the Navy thought I was being generous. Giving them the honor of discovery and all that. They were so thankful they gave me a berth with the Fleet."
"I don't get it," said Davis. He'd expected something more dramatic. An encounter with Berber pirates, a mutilating sword thrust. Singleton's epiphany seemed so groundless. Stupid. He looked away. It was hot. He yawned.
"Midshipman Davis," the doctor slurred, "I didn't expect you to understand. It was everything to me, though. Since that night I haven't been able to finish reading a single book. Not Euripides in the original. Not James to pass the time. I can't concentrate. I've lost focus. My self."
"You mean you forgot everything?"
Singleton reared up, startled by Davis' voice. The look in his eyes suggested he'd forgotten the midshipman was present. He had been speaking to himself. Already flush, he went even redder. "I… well, no. It's still all there. Up here. But it's... uh... jumbled. The Periodic Table is gone, for one. I remember all the elements. Used to be able to recite them in order. Atomic weights, valences. No more. The organization is…." He wiped his face. Davis could tell he was embarrassed. "And now here I am with my… my armamentarium, if you will. And I can't use a whit of it. "
This seemed a gross inaccuracy to Davis. Singleton had been playing with his scientific toys since day one of the voyage.
"Ah... it was an act of God in a godless land," Singleton concluded, averting his eyes.
Davis concentrated on the fight sounds coming through the scuttle. Forget Singleton, starting a story he couldn't finish. The fight outside would finish and he would only hear the report of it. Christ, what was the doctor going on about, anyway? He'd been in fine scientific fettle when he stuck all those men with needles.
Or had it all been a hoax?
He felt imprisoned. Worse, locked up in an insane asylum. Drunk as he was, Singleton saw a grand, comprehensible tapestry underlying his non sequiturs. Davis saw only a vermicelli mess.
Midshipman Beck was scared to death. He knew he had weight on Garrett. He knew he had reach. Muscle, no doubt. Moral sanctity as well.
But would he win?
Or would he make an ass of himself?
As the men cheered his entrance into the deck-plate arena he saw a small man opposite him--and had to glance twice before recognizing t