Able Baker

A STORY

by JOSEPH WHITEHILL

CHIEF ENGINEER BAKER, who had been called Able Baker for so long now that he resignedly believed it to be his real name, was sympathetically examining the monkey’s scalp ringworm when the fan belt in the blower housing broke. Baker closed his stubby hands over the bony bundle of fur in his lap and raised his heavy head to listen. When a unique noise overrides the complex, intricate roars of the main engine and the auxiliary, it is generally impossible to use the practiced human sense to discover its source. A new sound must repeat itself many times in a hinting rhythm before one can zero in on it and find out what went wrong; like the children’s game in which all but one are blindfolded, and he who is It must go “peep, peep” at regular intervals to lead the others to him. Able Baker released the monkey and rose from his stool to hear better, should the sound come again. He stood still on the soapy-feeling deck plates, steadying himself with a grip on the main engine guardrail, and he looked about the cream-painted engine room with his head thrust up and out in a walleyed, bovine fashion, as a man will do when his ears have a mystery.

Orion, the monkey, climbed happily up to the sloping top of the gray-painted, stand-up log desk and nestled in the basketful of fuel reports to scratch. Orion hated these daily examinations of his ringworm because after the attentive petting always came a burning application of salicylic acid which sent him slinging around the engine room in a stung rage until the pain stopped.

At first, as Able Baker stood there beside the magnificent old twelve-cylinder diesel, gimbaling slowly with the roll of the ship, he wondered whether the sound he had heard might not have been the scraping of flotsam along the ship’s side; but because the Captain was on Conn, this seemed unlikely. The Captain had an old maid’s eye for floating things. Able Baker, sixty-four years old, never considered that he might have heard something that was not. There was a new, unusual air about the engine room which told him something was markedly amiss. The air now seemed hotter — closer.

Then his wandering eyes surprised him by discovering the fault. Years ago, when he had first joined this ship, he had tied a pennant strand of white blonde manila to the grill of the ventilator inlet over his head, and for all these years it had fluttered gaily, losing weight and growing dirty, telling him that the exhaust blower on the other side of the compartment was doing well. But now this telltale was hanging limp and dead.

Engineer Baker found a blackened electricalburned screwdriver on the tool board and, after poking affectionately at the monkey with it, started around the main engine. Baker, a man of efficiency, moved in his thwartships progress with the roll of the ship, shuffling forward when the catwalk slanted downward and stopping to wait on the rise. There was a heavy roll on today, after yesterday’s half-gale.

At the blower housing, which looked like a washtub-sized snail, Able Baker peered into the screened intake and saw the big squirrel-cage rotor standing still in the darkness, He went around to the other side of the housing, skinning under a sweating fire main, and used the screwdriver to loosen the painted-over Dzeus fasteners holding the side cover on. The cream-colored paint around the edges of the cover popped and scaled as he pried the cover loose, and some of the flakes snowed down into the bilge. Engineer Baker leaned the freed cover against the fire main carefully, with a good cant to it so that it would not fall with the ship’s roll, and turned with medical professionalism to look into the cavity of the blower housing.

There the fuzzy black belt, like a long snake in the agony of exuviation, lay helplessly twisted over the shaft of the rotor, irreparably parted. The dusty black electric motor was running fast and quietly in relief. Baker untwisted the broken vee belt and, climbing over the fire main this time, carried it back to the cluttered little tool bench by the power panel. Counting in his head from left to right along the row of disconnect switches, he stopped at the seventh and flipped it off to shut down the blower motor. Then, with his intractable steel tape, he fumblingly measured the length of the broken belt and its width across its back.

He went to the communicator handset hanging on the bulkhead by the log desk and pushed the button marked “Conn.” While he waited for them to answer, he scratched the monkey’s ringworm between the shoulders where it was difficult for Orion to reach.

“Conn.”

“This is the Engine Room,” Baker said, squinting. These telephones were highly irritating, being of the sort called “dead microphone transmission,” which do not permit the speaker to hear his voice in his own ear. With telephones like these, one tends to speak louder and more distinctly than otherwise, but there is a frustrating deadness about them which gives a man the feeling he is trying to talk to God and is not getting through. Baker stopped scratching Orion and put his scratching finger in his uncovered ear. “Hello, Conn? That you, Mate?”

“This is the Captain,” came the linear answer.

“Oh, hello, Captain. Is the Mate up there?”

There was a long pause, during which Engineer Baker wrote on the open page of the Engine Room Log, “0940 — Cast and Broke Belt of Engine Room Ventilator Blower.” Then the Mate came on: “Yeah, Able?”

“Belt on the ventilator blower just broke. I wondered if you would drop me a spare down the hatch so I won‘t have to leave watch?”

“What size?”

“It’s eighty-two inches around and it’s three quarters of an inch across the flat. I expect that‘s a C or D section belt.”

“Just a minute,” the Mate said. “I gotta write that down. It’s rolling like hell up here.”

Able Baker smiled at his own wit and said, “It’s rolling down here, too. That must mean we‘re on the same ship.”

“Oh, you‘re a funny one, you are. What was that again, now?”

“Eighty-two inches around and three quarters of an inch across the flat.”

“Eighter-two around and tharee quarter across. I’ll look around. I think your spares are in the aft lazaret. I’ll call you back.”

Able Baker licked the corner of his mouth where a little tobacco juice had escaped: “Kind of hurry, will you? It‘s getting hotter down here.”

But the Mate had hung up without hearing. Baker collared the monkey and held him up where he could see the air temperature thermometer. Orion reached out with his delicate fist and rapped the round glass of the thermometer to make the needle bounce properly. The slim black needle quivered, then settled finally on a hundred and eleven degrees Fahrenheit. Baker poured each of them a drink from the iced scuttle butt and punched out into his palm two salt tablets from the phallic dispenser. He spit his used charge of plug into the bilge by the main engine and swallowed one of the pills. He gave the other to the monkey, who retired to the log desk to suck it meditatively.

2

TO KILL time until the return call from the Mate, Baker went to his gage panel and shopped over it with his eyes, not really intending to buy anything, but interested just the same. . . . That main engine was a fine old thing. Its rpm’s had hung right at five-seventy for more than two hours without a touch to the fuel-oil feeds. The auxiliary, the little eight-cylinder affair which generated electrical power of several kinds, was only a year old and was still youthfully erratic. Its speed wandered between nine hundred and fifty and nine hundred and seventy-five revolutions with no evident purpose. When he saw the tachometer needle again begin its upward hunting, Baker shook his head in irritation. At the shake of his head, drops of sweat from his eyebrows scurried down inside the lenses of his steel-rimmed bifocals, making everything look wavy. He took them off and cleaned them, then wiped his forehead and the folds of fat at the nape of his neck with a blue bandana.

Able Baker, like all white men who work sensibly in hot places, always wore full clothing — long khaki pants and a long-sleeved khaki shirt. Let the youngsters in the deck gang cultivate their tans — he intended to stay cool. Once, when some seamen were twitting him about dressing so formally, he had tried to explain how it was that wearing thoroughly sweat-soaked rough cotton increased one‘s evaporation efficiency, but he had run aground in their laughter and had been silenced.

“Pooh!” he said at the recollection. “Here, Orion.” Able snapped his fingers and the monkey swung onto his knees. Holding him firmly about the chest with one hand so that the animal could not escape, Baker uncorked the bottle of salicylic acid and fished a Kleenex out of the box in his drawer. When Orion saw what was imminent, he shook his little ball-like head as though his neck were a free swivel, then ducked his head and bit the hand which held him. Able was not startled. He had been expecting the bite and knew it would not hurt excessively, so he held firm and began swabbing the monkey’s ringworm. After squirming twice in panic, the monkey grudgingly submitted and lay trembling quietly in Able‘s hand. When he was done, Able released the monkey to career wildly about the compartment to run out its pain, and he used the other end of the Kleenex to daub some of Orion’s medicine on the bitten place on his hand.

The gong of the communicator hammered out shrilly over the din of the engines. As Baker answered it, he positioned himself so that he could look reassuringly up at the limp manila telltale dangling from the grill of the air intake overhead. He wanted to tell it that everything would be all right in a little bit, just as soon as he had installed the new belt. “Engine Room,” he said into the handset as he corked his ear with his forefinger.

“Engine Room? Conn. La’ona’ika noka dice.”

Able Baker shoved his finger farther into his ear canal: “What?”

“What d’ya mean, what?” came the thin sound of the Mate’s insolent voice.

“Excuse me,” Baker said humbly. “Repeat, then.”

“That’s better. You got big tough tit, Dad. No belt.”

“Are you sure? It must be on board somewhere.”

“Nope. None.”

Able Baker’s mouth worked as he groped for words. He pushed his finger harder into his ear in the despairing hope that something constructive would come out of his mouth. At length, he said, “There should be a belt on board. I put in for one at Honolulu. Are you sure there isn‘t?”

“You don’t believe me, then go look for yourself.”

“ I think I‘ll go on up there.”

“Come ahead. Out.”

“Out.” Able Baker hung up the handset and again mopped the sweat from his shining red face. Sometime before a man’s hair turns gray, sometimes early, sometimes late, he learns one thing well. He learns that even with a willing coöperator on the other end of the line, if he wishes to achieve the exact end he dreams of he must do the errand himself. Of course there was a belt aboard. Had he not put in for one? And did he not, because of his trusted conservatism in the matter of spares, always receive what he put in for?

Standing before the log desk on hot, tired feet, in high black shoes that squished with the sweat inside, Baker marveled at how hot the engine room had grown because of the failure of the blower. The air temperature thermometer now stood at an incredible hundred and twenty-one degrees; virtually too hot to open one’s eyes.

Baker found in the drawer his stiff, grease-caked gauntlets and dropped them over his hands. He beckoned to Orion to accompany him topside, but the monkey, over its pain now and basking sleepily in the increasing heat, clung to the wires of the basket with all four hands to indicate that it was quite satisfied to remain behind. At the foot of the ladder, before he began the arduous climb, Baker looked down over his clothing with minute care and found with wonder that, for the first time he could remember, there was not a dry spot on him. His faded khakis had turned back to the color they were when new.

3

AS HE climbed the welded ladder to the main deck the temperature dropped some, but Able Baker was unprepared for the shocking blast of cold air which struck him as he turned back the hatch in the sunlight and blinked at the far blue sea. He swung his thick legs clumsily over the hatch coaming and stood up dizzily, clinging for support to the lifeline at the rail. In the cold Force Five wind, bits of his wetly matted gray hair raised and ruffled stiffly. Shivering in his wet clothes, Able Baker lumbered aft and climbed to the flying bridge.

The Mate and the Captain were there, leaning against the forward rail, silently watching the coming horizon. At the top of the ladder, Baker stopped to catch his breath. From the engine room up to the flying bridge was a climb of seventy feet, as Baker had once measured when he wondered if he were growing old. “It’s cold up here!” Baker said loudly, his ears still full of the roar of the engines. Both the Mate and the Captain started and turned. “Good morning, Captain,” he added.

“Good morning, Mister Baker,” the Captain answered, standing at attention. The Mate, though not addressed, nodded.

“Uh — Captain, when we were in Honolulu a couple of months ago, I put in for a new belt for that blower fan, so it must be aboard somewhere.” Baker fluffed his hair before the wind with his hand, that, it might dry.

“Mate says it isn’t,” said the Captain, looking at Able Baker’s stomach where it bulged over the top of his pants.

Baker drew in a breath to raise his chest to a protrusion approximating that of bis stomach. “Well, sir,” he persisted, “we could look at the stores records for Honolulu and see what happened.”

The Captain, seemingly now aware that Baker was not to be distracted by verbal finalities, said to the Mate, “The bridge is yours, Mister,” and led the way below to the ship’s office. Baker followed, full of breathless satisfaction at having incepted progressive action in his commander.

From the the cabinet in the office the Captain withdrew a sheaf of matériel requisitions and leafed through them until he found the Engineering Department sheet which had been sent ashore at Honolulu. Baker, impolitely reading over his captain’s shoulder, was the first to find the item about the belt, and pointed at it with a dirty finger. The Captain pulled the paper away, out of the reach of soil, and put it on the desk, where it might be safely examined without being touched.

“There it is, sir,” Baker said, peering gratefully at the typed line which proved him not a fool.

The Captain was tapping his foot to illustrate his impatience. ”Yes,” he said, “but the shore office sent it back marked T. X. Just a minute. I’ll read you what that means.” The Captain found a thin black book with the Company‘s seal embossed in varnished gold on the cover. “Here. See right here? It says, ‘T. X. indicates that the requisition has been set aside on the ground that the item or items requested fall in the group of supplies which have a service expectancy greater than the time between scheduled wharfside overhauls. Items in this group must be replaced at the time of overhaul, by Company shore personnel.’ There, Baker, you see? The belt didn‘t come aboard at all.”

Baker blinked at such arrant injustice, and moved between the Captain and the door, so the Captain could not escape, “But sir! Nobody told me. It’s a mistake. It’s all wrong. You know it is, sir.” Knowing he was beginning to whine, he took a râle-sounding breath before he went on more calmly, “The kind of stuff they mean there is stuff like cylinder liners and shaft log packing glands and things that are expensive. Not fan belts!&38221;

“There it is,” the Captain said shortly, and there it was indeed. Baker had in his lifetime heard the ending of enough things to know with certainty when the end had arrived — the point beyond which further pursuit was futile. Baker put his hands under his damp stomach and lifted it a little, and turned to go. The Captain said as Baker stepped up over the sill, “You could rig a canvas wind scoop at the intake on deck. As long as we‘re in the Trades, you’d get some circulation down there. It’ll only be eight more days and we’ll get you a belt at Balboa.” Able Baker paused to hear his captain out, then nodded and left.

He found the Third Mate working with a rustbrushing detail of deck hands on the starboard quarter of the main deck, and said to him, “You got the key to the rope locker? I need some supplies.”

The Third Mate stood up and shut off his electric rotary brush. His hair and face were covered with a Ben Day of rust flakes. “Whadda you need?”

Able Baker thought a moment, calculating in his head, then said, “Twenty-five feet of three-quarter manila and four rolls of Okonite tape.”

“Four rolls! My God, what’re you settin’ out on?”

Baker loathed going to this red-haired young pup for supplies. Somehow the Third Mate, with his slack-jawed expression of chronic shock, made Baker feel that he was the most prodigal user of stores aboard and that his ends were frivolous. “I have my uses, sonny, don’t you worry,” he said.

“You know how much that tape costs? It costs a dollar a roll, that’s how much. You‘re not getting it for inventory, are you?”

“I am not,” Baker said firmly, as if the idea were unthinkable. “I have to jury up something, is all, and I’d appreciate a little speed. There’s nobody down in the engine room but Orion.”

Baker stood a moment at the main-deck hatch leading below to the engine room, arranging his new supplies for the climb down. He hung the coil of bright, clean manila rope about his neck, and stuffed the four rolls of self-vulcanizing rubber tape inside his shirt front. Then he stood stiffly by the rail, breathing deeply of the cool sea wind. Unconsciously, he tried to pre-chill himself for the coming plunge into the inferno of the engine room. It was not in Baker’s nature to rail uselessly against the Company, or against the human obtuseness of its agents, but now, standing in the bright Pacific sun, he felt he was about to be swallowed up in a rising wrath of delicious indignation. Hurriedly, before he said something to himself he might regret, he laid back the hatch and started down the ladder.

4

DOWN In the engine room, Baker quickly regretted ever having gone topside; it seemed so much hotter now, partly by contrast with the coolness he had just quitted. Because it was important to Baker to know precisely to what measurable extent he was suffering, he went to look at the thermometer. The pointer read a hundred and twenty-nine degrees, one degree short of its maximum. “My Lord!” Baker said to himself, but his voice fell dead under the tappeting roar of the engines and he could not hear it. This was not air he was breathing, he felt, but a denser, hot fluid with a pronouncedly sweet taste. A mortal man, and proud of his mortality, he wondered how long he could survive down here in this hell.

Baker, gasping this furnace air which seemed to have no extractable good in it, looked about him to see how Orion was taking it, but the monkey was nowhere in sight. Then, avoiding the burning touch of the steel everywhere near him, Able Baker shambled around the main engine feeling its glow upon the left side of his face, and took his new rope around behind the broken blower. With a cool crescent wrench from his hip pocket, he loosened the mounting bolts of the electric motor and heaved it along its slots toward the axle of the squirrel cage rotor. Having thus minimized the belt span, he looped one end of his rope around the big pulley of the fan shaft, around the small pulley on the motor, and back to the big pulley again. Pinching the rope with one hand to mark the place, he dabbed up with his fingertip a bit of dirty grease which had exuded from one of the shaft bearings, and marked the rope.

On his way back to the small workbench, a seizure of heat-risen ague racked his shoulders, and he was obliged to catch at the blistering guardrail to halt his teetering. When the fit had passed, he rubbed his smarting palm over the wet front of his shirt, then spread the rope out loosely on the open area of steel deck before the workbench. With fingers circling nimbly, he began to unlay one strand of the three composing the rope. He worked by blind touch, for his spectacles were so smeared and wet that they were useless. A great, heaving groan of misery escaped him and he did not hear it: nor did his freckled, mottled hands pause in their spiraling race. It was as though he had only thought the groan.

When he had unlaid the entire twenty-five-foot rope, he began re-laying one strand upon itself at the grease mark, making a closed loop, or grommet. Suddenly, as though birthed by a ghost, the wet, homuncular shape of the monkey dropped to Able’s shoulder and scrabbled weakly for a hold. Able started, then helped the monkey down to the bench and took off his glasses to see. The monkey’s fur was wet with dirty, oily water. Able was horrified. “You’ve been in the bilge!” He held up the monkey to look into its eyes, and what he saw there made him close his own in pain. Orion’s eyes, always black and bright, now had a glazed and vapid look, as though it did not care any more. “You silly!” Baker shouted, wanting to shake the little beast. “Why didn’t you run topside to cool off? No, not you, you Goddam engineer, you! You poor little fool. I’ll bet you swallowed a lot of that muck down there under the engine, didn’t you? And to think that’s where I spit! Oh, Mister, I’m sorry!” Sadly, he laid the ill monkey on a clean rag on the bench and turned again to his work.

His sweaty, trembling fingers slipped often on the rope. Once around the loop made two strands laid up, and once more made three. Engineer Baker now held a seemingly endless loop of threequarter-inch rope. He tucked the two strand ends together in a half-overhand and commenced wrapping the rope with the gummy rubber tape. The heat was now so intense that the rubber worked ideally under his hands, sticking hungrily to itself and smoothing neatly into the roughness of the rope.

When Able had used two full rolls of tape, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the monkey was in distress. It lay tangled in the rag, squirming and nibbling at the hem. Baker put down his work and tried to dry the monkey, but the little thing would not help him. It stayed curled up, with tense and quivering limbs, so the grieving old man had to put the monkey down again.

Impulsively, Baker stumbled to the gage board. The needle of the air thermometer was resting on the pin, having gone off scale. The water temperature of the main engine was already a hundred and ninety, far too hot for the health of the lubricating films.

While Able paused, watching the gage, he was suddenly blood-hammered at the sides of his head, and knew positively he was about to faint. He citing to the valve handles and bent his head down to his knees until he was all right again, then straightened with blood-blinded eyes and tottered back to the bench.

With his hands grown clumsy, he somehow managed to finish taping the new fan belt he had made, and broke the tape to end it. He bent over the monkey and peered shortsightedly at it, but Orion’s eyes were closed. Several drops of sweat-mixed tears fell from his face onto the monkey’s messy gray fur, and the monkey twitched.

Thus reassured that Orion still lived, and might not die, Able Baker took his newly fashioned fan belt and staggered with it toward the blower. Twice on the way the unruly belt caught on obstructions and jerked itself from Able’s hands, and each time he patiently recovered it and went on. At the blower he looped it over both pulleys, then shoved the motor back until the belt was tight. He cried out softly in pain when the perfidious vertebra low in his back jumped with his effort. He had to use his arms to help him straighten up. Now carefully keeping his back straight, he tightened the motor mounting bolts and replaced the side cover of the blower housing.

As he climbed over the fire main to return to the switchboard, he sat for a moment astride the cool, wet pipe, loving the coolness in his groin and loving the sitting still. He did not so pamper himself long, however, for he was not yet done. He dragged his back leg over the fire main and hobbled stiffly to the electric panel. Counting over, it was number seven, and he threw the switch. Instantly, the limp shred of manila on the grill of the intake duct fluttered, then stood out wagging happily. The blessed change of moving, cooler air at once enwrapped him in its kindness, and Able wiped his face in gratitude.

He went back to the workbench to tell Orion what he had done, and that everything was all right now, but when he picked it up gently, the monkey’s head lolled out over his hand, and it was smiling a crooked little dead smile.

Knowing now the pass that things had come to, knowing he had been truly robbed by someone else’s heedless stupidity, Able Baker nestled the monkey’s body in the crook of his arm and carried it in cold intentness over to the main engine control station. Here, he held Orion up so that the dead eyes might watch too, and he pulled down the great brass handle of the throttle. The huge main engine shuddered loosely in surprise, then slowed and stopped.

With the strength of rage, Able Baker wrenched back the long lever of the transmission, unclutching the drive. Near silence was his prize. All Able Baker now could hear was the muttering of the auxiliary, and the slow rushing sound of the great drive shaft as it rolled over slowly, free-wheeling, driven by the propeller under the stern as the ship ghosted quietly through the water.

As soon as Baker had dragged his stool over into the cool wind from the duct, and had sat down, the clangor of the communicator began. It rang once shortly, then once again in a steady, shrill tremor of alarm. The fat, tired old man hugged the monkey’s body until the ringing stopped. Then the chain-driven pointer on the dial of the engine-room telegraph oscillated peevishly, making fussy loud clangs at each oscillation. Engineer Able Baker leaned his stool back against, the hard steel bulkhead and stroked the monkey. He smiled through his tears while he waited for what came next.