by 

Jansen Estrup

 

 

All of them were tired, Anyon supposed. Had been for days, maybe longer. 

 

What comes after tired? 

 

Flagged? Exhausted? Enervated? Desiccated? Blown out? Beat? Shot. 

Drained. He was drained.  

 

It was not so much a physical thing, although work had been involved. It was not so emotional, either, ‘though every hour had been demanding.  Clearly it was not sensory deprivation. Perhaps sensory overload.

 

And it was sleep deprivation. When had he last slept? When had he or any of them last slept more than an hour or two? Overloaded senses deprived of sleep. 

 

He staggered down the ship’s narrow passageway, using his thick shoulders as padding to cushion frequent collisions with the pea-green bulkheads and things which projected from either side. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurts in that quasi-consciousness nearing coma. 

 

Dimly he thought that he did not stagger. The ship scarcely rolled at all. From long years at sea he could feel the quickening vibrations of the engines and screws as the warship pulled away from the fleet  tanker. But it was mostly smooth on a windless night. 

 

No, it was not the ship and he  was not staggering. He  was reeling, too disoriented to defend himself. 

 

Reeling drunk. Drunk with delusion.

 

He was hardly the only one. The whole crew must be in the same shape. Two hundred fifty zombies. Where were they? In his whole journey down the centerline passageway he had seen no one. Had they already laid down to sleep? 

 

Who could blame them. Only one desire moved any of them. Sleep.

 

Tonight they’d had three rendezvous, three evolutions, three special sea details sometimes called working parties. Stores had been first, such essentials as candy for the ship’s store, milk for their bones,  movies for morale and bug juice for the galley. They took it all,  knowing that other, larger ships had already taken the good stuff, the grape and cherry. Stuck again with lemon and whatever that green flavor was, it was better than the flavorless silky stuff made down in the ship’s evaporators.  And the awful movies the morale officer had  just foisted off on some other destroyer now came cycling back to this crew like a boomerang. Maybe the reconstituted milk was best. It came out of its plastic tube in glops and spurts looking more like clabber than cow juice.

 

All of that was stored below decks while the ship chased across the South China Sea to get in line for ammo. He’d been on watch for that one, but knew the drill. 

 

Pallets of 5 inch ‘bullets’ were high-lined amidships. Working parties, as in a bucket brigade passed the high explosive and white phosphorus rounds hand-to-hand fore and aft to the magazines for mounts 51 and 52, the enclosed twin main battery. The 50 pound rounds had to be handled with exacting precision. Nobody wanted to drop one or slow the progress. In no time each weighed 75 pounds, then a hundred.

 

Refueling had gone off just right, as it usually did. Not forgotten, however, was the time two years before when a tanker had sprayed half the ship with fuel oil. 

 

That was done. Now, in only a couple of hours, Jolly John would be back in Da Nang’s harbor, anchored as a floating artillery barge. The main batteries would be shooting all day at the deep green mountain. Then, after dark, the ship’s motor whale boat would patrol round and round dropping grenades into the water to repel enemy swimmers, but all it really accomplished was keeping the crew awake in their sweat soaked bedding.

 

Even so, two hours sleep, any kind of sleep, was enough to covet, to kill for. 

 

Petty officer Anyon stopped at the ladder which led down to his berthing compartment. He did not want to fall. A caution tried to embrace him.

 

For a moment he stood frozen, glaring at a baffling puzzle. In a dim light the place looked much the same, three tiers of bunks in rows on either side of the centerline. Dominating the space was a wide round cylinder which reached from deck to overhead and through to the main deck. The magazine. Atop it rested the twin 5" gun battery in a housing which protected its crew from  weather and small arms fire. 

 

Finally, through the fog of exhaustion, he saw that the deck was wrong.  Instead of a pattern of black and white tile, it was mottled and distorted with ... what? 

 

Ammunition. Oh, just ammo for the five inch guns. At least a hundred rounds, side by side in a line five or six abreast running around the bunks as if they were patrons of a new film waiting for the box office to open. 

 

They rested on their casings, deadly noses pointed upward at the overhead. 

 

“Oh,” he thought, “just explosives.” 

 

Nothing special. Except that he would have pass over  them to get to the bunk he called his rack. Sleep was still the only goal, his only motivation.

As if already in a dream, he planned his approach. By clinging to the overhead I-beams and cable runs, he could swing over the obstacles. Each giant ‘bullet’ had a brass cap he could step on if his weight dragged him down. That should be safe, right?

 

It had not yet occurred to Anyon to wonder why the munitions had not been properly stored. He did not really care. If a matter did not relate to his sleep, it was not relevant.

 

He solved the problem the way any good petty officer would. He improvised. Zombie-like, hand over hand, a foot occasionally  balanced on the safety cap of a live projectile, he moved. 

 

Had someone been there to observe, he might have seemed closely related to a shaggy orange ape casually making his way between trees.

 

Impressed with himself, he made the turn between bunks and the locked magazine door. Only a few more feet and he could stand carefully on the deck. It was almost open there.

 

He dropped his rack, the bottom of three, and sat on the edge of it. A moment later, without even kicking his shoes off, he slid back into the cramped space which resembled an open-sided coffin. He closed his eyes.

 

On his left he felt the icy cold steel hull. He could hear the ocean swishing on the other side, a murmur, part of the chorus of vibrating shafts and thrashing screws. Dim, soothing, comforting industrial sounds. Sleep inducing.

 

And then an unusual instrument joined. 

 

Tinkle. Tinkle. Not like glass. A metallic sound. Tinkle. Tinkle-tinkle. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle, tinkle-tinkle. 

 

A xylophone key tapped over and over, more and more rapidly, and simultaneously, too. Same note diminishing only as it progressed around the corner like falling dominos. Tinkle, tinkletinkletinkle, tinkle, tinkle-tinkle.

 

Tinkle-tinkle. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle. The sound returned, closer, louder. 

 

A hundred mad tinklers taunted him. 

 

He opened his eyes and glared at them. 

 

The two and a half foot tall bullets danced, rubbing against each other as they sang. Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle-tinkle-tinkle, tinkletinkletinkle, tink!

 

They mocked him. Soon they would lean and clang.  Eventually, they’d fall and start rolling around like ten-pins. 

 

Anger flashed in Anyon. The intrusion kept him from sleeping. The anger gave him enough energy to move. 

 

Another motive squirmed into his mind. Something like duty. Whose? Not his. Weapons were somebody else’s responsibility. 

In an unbidden flash he remembered cruising past the fleet flagship, Oky City ready for repairs in Yokosuka.. On her port side was a tangle of steel and gun barrels, black with fire and ruined paint smeared up her superstructure. Accident? Enemy gunfire? How many dead?

 

It was a twin mount just like the one only a few feet away. Okay, he thought. Duty. He would do his duty, then sleep.

 

Heaving himself out of his bunk, he gripped again the overhead handles and climbed over the explosives. It was trickier this time because they were moving back and forth, side to side. But he made it to the phone which was attached to the magazine bulkhead. 

 

He pushed the button marked ‘Bridge’ and rang it. A long moment passed. Maybe no one was on the bridge. Maybe he was the only one aboard.

 

A voice answered, “Bosun of the Watch.”

 

“This is Petty Officer Anyon in the Ops Department berthing compartment. There are a hundred projectiles rolling around on the deck down here. Unless you want the whole ass-end of this ship blown off you better get somebody to stow them!”

 

“Aye,” the voice said indifferently. 

 

Anyon hung up and retraced the hand holds to his bunk. This time he took his shoes off. 

 

 

Duty done, he slept soundly for an hour and a half.