37
There was a vastness, something epic in his memory of those few panicked men who grappled madly that day to save themselves and their ship. Like men betrayed they bellowed curses at whatever it was they believed in, demanding strength from each by name, their knotted hands crucified on the steel barbs of the cable, blood spouting through their gloves as they hauled hard back in a terrific refusal to give ground.
It was hell or it was monotony. Mitchell kept them apart by exploring the expanses of sea and sky and daydreaming about getting laid with beautiful brown-eyed women. War is for men with a hard-on for the world. He was just a kid alone, blowing town.
He had learned on his watches to wait for the screams. Then it was reflex, running headlong to drag broken men into the shadows catacombed beneath the winch operator’s platform, away from the rage of bombs on deck. Running to the gunner’s mate, his foot crushed into his boot under the elevator from the helicopter deck. Running to men collapsed with heat-stroke down in the hellish temperatures of the boiler room. Running out of his sleep with other hospitalmen to resuscitate the Filipino steward unconscious in his bunk. They didn’t know him but they worked in shifts until their lungs were exhausted. Most of the steward’s ribs were broken from the intensity of their heart massage. He was dead.
Mitchell remembered the agony erupting from a cook who had drenched himself with a pan of scalding grease when the ship rolled suddenly. He had cut the cook’s clothes off with a bosun’s knife, screams shattering the passageways as sailors carried the man writhing to the table in sick bay. They strapped him on a rubber sheet and buried him from the neck under a mound of ice. An Hispanic guy. Dark. Handsome as hell. Mitchell couldn’t remember his name or what had happened to him after. He was thankful for the forgetting...
The wind backed and the sloop swung before it. Watching the harbor Mitchell sat alone now among hundreds of boats with empty cockpits. "Strange companion this solitude," he said. "No conditions, no remorse. Allows me my heart."