Chapter Ten #3
The following morning, when the man came to sell eggs, the monkey was back.
He took a liking to Felix, sat on his shoulder and picked at his hair and tried to dig his fingers into Felix’s ears.
The sailors traded bars of soap and wool socks for eggs, and every morning they turned down the offer to buy the monkey.
Keane hated the thing (it had run off with his toothbrush).
Hicks said it smelled like wet rope. But Augie liked the monkey and named him Jamoke.
That was the name of the retriever he’d had growing up, he said.
One night, as if they’d been weighing the option, he suggested they buy Jamoke and bring him back on the ship—what did Felix think?
Augie wasn’t serious, Felix knew, was just wanting to see his reaction.
“As your superior officer,” Felix said, “no.” The two of them were a little drunk on Bir Kar.
All Jamoke needed, Augie said, was to learn some manners.
Felix joked about sending him to finishing school.
Then the two of them bantered about how Jamoke would become refined, go out into the world, and return decades later having made a fortune and wanting to support them in their old age.
Neither of them acknowledging what this scenario was really painting.
Then came their last night on the island. As rested as they were, they were exhausted too. They winced when the sky began to lighten.
—
Back on the Teague, it wasn’t quite business as usual.
For all of them, the hard-won turn of events in Europe indicated that they were either contributing to the next big victory or were now consigned to the part of the war that had no end in sight.
Felix and Augie, in this heightened atmosphere, did their best to settle back into their roles but had to be even more careful about casual interaction and the occasional glance.
The difference in their ranks, the fact that they’d shared the Quonset hut, seemed risky in hindsight. Not that anyone had seemed to notice.
They hadn’t talked about how what had transpired reflected on who they were and what they each had back home.
The island—not the ship, as he would have expected—had shifted Felix’s sense of balance.
His sense of gravity. He’d been expecting some kind of moral crisis for having stepped outside of his marriage vows.
What he found instead was confusion, and a cautious swell of gratitude.
He longed to talk to Augie. He longed to do more than that, of course, but he wanted to have a conversation about what they’d shared.
More than once, Augie had mentioned wanting to have a family one day.
Was he truly that gung-ho, or was he more like Felix—and Helen and Mabel—assuming marriage and traditional family life was unavoidable and so bracing himself for a life within the status quo, and crossing his fingers that he was up for the task?
Felix had been serious—heart serious—in his vows to Margaret, and he still was.
He loved her, cared about her, and at the same time he felt that this part of himself—with Augie—was more than just excess to be trimmed from the edges of the mold, more than just sprue to be diverted.
Talking to Augie, he knew, would have to wait till they got to the next port and there was an opportunity to get off the ship again and stretch their legs, carve out a little privacy for a walk and a chat.
But when the opportunity finally presented itself—not in New Guinea, where they didn’t get an hour’s rest, but at the base on Nouméa, two weeks after they left Espiritu Santo—Felix lost his nerve and didn’t seek Augie out when they were docked.
He had no idea if Augie wanted to talk to him, wanted to see him, and he was afraid to find out.
So he dodged him, which wasn’t hard to do in Nouméa, there was so much going on.
He went to the commissary and to a pub, and he kept his head down, in general, avoiding the very person he wanted, confused by that, irritated with himself.
Back onboard, when Augie passed Felix on deck, he saluted, and Felix felt a surge of longing as he saluted back.
Next port, he thought. New Guinea again, in six days.
—
On the evening of June 25, 1945, they were out to sea, packed to the gills, the sky a pearly scrim of clouds laid across a waning moon.
The torpedo—a Long Lance, Type 93—came in just after 0400 hours, drawing a thin spine along the smooth, dark surface, traveling at thirty-six knots when it struck the hull on the port side, between the engine and the boiler.
The impact and explosion shook the entire ship.
Felix had just completed his watch ten minutes earlier, was on the second floor of the deckhouse on the ship’s starboard side, almost to his quarters, when he was thrown sideways into the wall.
The alarm sounded. He righted himself but could tell the ship was already beginning to list to port. Doors up and down the passageway fell open; men scrambled out, half-dressed, half-awake.
Behind or beneath the commotion, Felix noticed the engines had stopped.
He was making his way toward the phone box at the end of the passageway, moving past men headed in the other direction, bound for the deck, when a second blast—somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship—made him stumble.
A hand took his arm, pulled him up. Lieutenant Nowak from Alaska.
“Abandon,” Nowak hollered over the alarm, just as the order came over the loudspeaker.
He motioned for Felix to help him as he pulled on an emergency cord hanging down from a wall-mounted netting of kapoks—fat-necked, olive-gray life vests spidery with straps and buckles.
When they were released, the kapoks didn’t fall so much as tumble down the sloping wall to their feet.
Nowak grabbed one and tossed it to someone behind him, who tossed it to someone else.
He tossed another, and another, up the passageway, and Felix tossed several to the men filing down the ladder at the other end.
Then Nowak hollered for Felix to put on a kapok himself, and by the time Felix got the straps buckled, the list was so bad that he had to stand with one foot on the floor and the other against the port wall. Nowak was gone.
Where was Augie? His quarters were one floor down. The ship had to be burning even as it took on water; it was moaning in ways it never had before. Listing by at least twenty degrees. Then the lights cut out.
At the top of the ladder, a red emergency light came on, and he climbed toward it, but a third blast from somewhere below made him lose his grip, and he landed hard against the number four hatch.
His left arm and shoulder exploded with pain.
His forehead felt wet; when he touched it, his fingers came away bloody.
He got to his feet, thinking how, in the number one and two holds closer to the bow, there were a hundred and fifty motorcycles.
Behind the engine, two hundred jeeps. The stern was lower than the bow now, but the ship wasn’t going down that way; the ship was flooding through the hole that had been blasted into its port side, and it was listing more than thirty degrees.
The ship, he felt certain, was going down sideways. Or rolling.
There were two other men against the outside wall of the deckhouse with him.
One was Anders, the barber from San Antonio who’d cut his hair for the past three and a half years.
The other was Turowski, from Ipswich, who worked maintenance on all the cranes and winches.
Like Felix, they had kapoks, but Turowski had injured his leg.
Felix knew they had to pull themselves up to the bulwark on the starboard side while they could still get there.
Only, up wasn’t up; up was across. Cut through with pain—he couldn’t even tell where it was coming from—he stretched and managed to get his good arm, the one that used to be able to throw a fifty-yard pass, around the bulwark, and extended his foot, and Turowski used him like a rope to get himself up. Then they helped up Anders.
Across the water came distant booms. Cauliflower flashes of orange-yellow etched in black. The entire convoy, most of it ahead of them, was under attack.
There was no sign of Augie.
Up and down the starboard side of the ship, men reached for the bulwark, some of them tumbling backward onto the men clinging to the port side.
When the roll reached forty-five degrees, the cables snapped and the foremast and jumbo boom broke off with ear-splitting cracks.
Felix and Turowski and Anders straddled the bulwark as it rose into the night sky.
Anders lost his grip and fell. Turowski jumped. All along the bulwark, men were either jumping or falling.
Felix jumped.
Nine minutes had passed since the torpedo had struck.
On its side, the Teague was still smoking, the water churning around it, the stern sinking ahead of the bow.
Then the bow, its two anchors snug against the hawsepipes, was all that was left and seemed to be dissolving on the surface.
The suction—not as strong and vast as they’d been told to expect but still powerful—pulled some of them under, and not all came back up.
Many of them had leaped into a scrim of oil that coated them, burned their eyes, funneled down their throats.
Some were still on the ship. Later, more than one survivor would say the Teague became illuminated: a brilliant green that flashed once beneath the surface, then went dark.