M/V Pleiades: Her Final Voyage

M/V Pleiades

Her final voyage

A novel by

R. Cliff Harris

©2013

Smashwords Edition

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To all the ships at sea

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people.

-Abraham Lincoln

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few vertues.

-Abraham Lincoln

Contents

INTO THE LIGHT

ALONE

ABU GHRAIB BLUES

NAVY DAZE

ADRIFT

FOUR FIFTY-SIX

MISSION ROCK RESORT

SILVER BIRDS

TURNED TO

DJIBOUTI VICE

FIRST BLOOD

FORE ’N AFT

PERPETUAL MOTION

MID WATCH

THE GULLY GULLY MAN

HIGH SEAS

BT DAWN

BUNKERS

BREAKOUT

RUMORS

HEIGHT OF POLARIS

BITCH BOX BLUES

ALEX

AN-PDR-27

NUKES

UNDER THE GUN

DEATHDAY

THE POET

GLOSSARY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

August 25th 1989

INTO THE LIGHT

So uh…can I ask ya a question? Ever smell something in a dream? And I don’t mean to ask if you ever dreamed you’re smellin’ somethin’. I mean really smellin’ something, and we’re not talking breakfast driftin’ in from the kitchen, either. The reason I ask is the first thing that hit me was the stink. Forty-Nine Plymouth, no mistake about it. If you’ve never been in a Forty-Niner, like my folks used to call it, there’s nothin’ I can tell you. If you absolutely had to know where I was coming from, like just what that smell was like, you’d have to go find you one of them old-time bombers and sit in it. The next thing that hit me was that I wasn’t hearin’ words. What I was hearin’ was like barks and yaps. And last but not least, and what really bowled me over, was that I was being carried. No shit. There I was in my mother’s arms. But all this wasn’t like a memory or a dream. I was there. It was like I was really there and I was smellin’ stuff. Really smellin’ it. Go figure.

There we were. We were getting out of the Forty-Niner, my family I mean. There was my sister, Marie, hoppin’ around. She couldn’t even have been in grade school. And my parents, they were like kids too. My old man’s tattoos were sharp and crisp, fresh from the war in the Pacific. During the Second World War the government moved my grandfather from the mine to the shipyard. That there was just how a coal miner’s daughter collided with a merchant seaman. The sun hadn’t even faded them tats a tad, the way I’d become accustomed to remembering them. And ma, she was dressed like you’d picture June Cleaver to dress, with the hair to boot. And after we like got situated there on the sidewalk, we started walking towards this brick house, and I knew the house. It was my mother’s aunt’s place. Tower City, Pennsylvania. Upstate is what we used to call it, bein’ as it was upstate from Philly. Tower City was a coal-mining town that had pretty much died right along with the mining industry. At one point it must’ve been a hoppin’ place. I’ll never forget the last time my mother and I visited my father’s grave before she died. She pointed at this old dilapidated house on the way out of town and she said, That was the whore house, Frank.

Onto the porch of my mother’s aunt’s house we went, and my old man knocked on the front door. A young aunt Anna answered the door. Christ, it never dawned on me she ever had been younger than the old, bent-over, and wrinkled soul that I remembered. Her husband had been killed in the mines and she never did leave that town. It had been an ugly accident. In those days, before the mines shuttered their doors, they’d blow a whistle when somebody died and the townspeople would all gather together…and wait.

And then that barking and yapping I told you about earlier started up again. And as it turned out, I was the center of attention. But mind you, all I could do was gawk back. So after a spell I’m carried by my mother up a long flight of steps in the front hallway and carried into a room on the second floor. I’m placed in a crib and, after a little doting, I’m left there. I listen as my mother’s footsteps fade away as she descends the stairway. Boy, times have changed. The room was barren. There was no carpet on the hardwood floor and only a few pieces of furniture. There was a doily on a chest of drawers, and on it a lamp with a rich red fluid in its pimpled glass base. It must have been springtime. The window was a quarter open and the scent of the mountain air invaded the room. Lace curtains swayed gently in the light breeze. Other than the furniture, all there was was a big cast iron radiator in the room and a crucifix on the wall. The crucifix was one of those one’s that opened up and had the holy water and candles and stuff for the last rights. Aunt Anna’s husband, the one that had been crushed in the mine, he had had his open casket viewing right there in that house, right there in their living room, and where the couch usually was was where they sat the casket. That’s how they did things back then in Tower City.

So I’m in that there crib and I’m lookin’ around. The party was obviously downstairs. I was missin’ my first boat, in a manner of speakin’, so I started wailin’ away. Screw this, I wanted down stairs. Well, after a spell my mother reappears. She gently feels me and, no, I don’t have a full diaper thank you. Then she leans over and again gently picks me up and softly croons something I can’t make hide nor hair of. A baby bottle appears like out of nowhere and, hey, no thanks, you’re missin’ the point. I just wanted into the mix down stairs. I push the damn thing away, so I’m placed back down in the crib and, watchin’ me all the while, she backs out of the room. As her footsteps fade down the stairs again, I give up. What’s the point? Hey, take it from me, if you have you a tot at home, there’s more to their existence than food n’ crap.

BAM. Fade to black.

So then all of a sudden I’m sittin’ on my parents’ bed in our row house on Saint Vincent Street in Philly. Our house was right across the street from Jardel Playground to be exact. And again, there is Marie, my sister. I figure she’s in maybe second grade and I haven’t hit kindergarten yet. She’s sittin’ on the bed there with me and she has a small toy car and she is looking out the window at the traffic light on the corner. When the light is green she meanders around with the toy car, navigating the pattern on the bedspread. When the light changes to red, she stops. But what gets my attention is out the window there is a U. S. Navy blimp floating in the sky, up there among the clouds. The Philadelphia Navy Yard used to have more blimps than a park has pigeons. They used them for maritime patrols in the Atlantic and based them there. Again, this like ain’t no dream. It’s like I’m really there.

BAM. Fade to black….

So, like shit, what the hell’s goin’ on? Whisky tango foxtrot? Next thing I know I’m sittin’ in our kitchen there on 72nd Avenue. We had moved from that row house to this big-ass twin house. My old man wasn’t sailin’ boson no more. Now he’s the NMU Port agent in Philly. He had made the big time. I’m at the kitchen table studying the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates. I’m starin’ at a drawing of an earthworm. My mother’s on my shit big time because I’m screwin’ up in school. I figure I am in second or third grade, hell I don’t know, when do they teach ya about backbones? I do remember Sister Assumption doing the teaching, though. She was ancient, but it was hard to tell just how old she was. That was back in the days when all the nuns dressed like penguins. And when anybody seriously screwed up, she’d say And they shot Lincoln. Yo, from the looks of her she just might have cast a vote for him.

So the doorbell rings and ma goes to answer it. Obviously we’re not talking a door-to-door salesman because there was a ruckus goin’ on. Next thing you know, these guys in suits, shit, three or four, come into the kitchen. Turns out they were G-men, you know, FBI. They started shakin’ down our house, something to do with my old man’s union business. Ma and me got our very own agent to keep an eye on the two of us as they proceeded to dismantle the place. And all the while my mother is standing there holding the warrant and sobbing.

BAM. Fade to black….

So there she is, my mother, crying again. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, there I am at my old man’s funeral. A heart attack blew right by his sclerosis of the liver. My mother had given the undertaker a fifteen-year-old picture of him, and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t look fifteen years younger planted right there in his casket. Just by lookin’ at him—you know how they look like figures in the wax museum—I could have told you exactly which picture my mother had given the mortician. All the people were standing around awkward like, but when you heard the comment about him lookin’ good, you knew they meant it. And there was the smell thing again. You couldn’t see the walls of the place through all the flowers. The place stank like a flower shop. There was a parade of union punks there. Sorry my ass. Them boys were there to conduct business, not to mourn. Yeah, a dead port agent. Hey, we’re talking employment opportunities and career advancement. Them assholes were like lickin’ their chops and they weren’t the least bit bashful. And all the while they’re being all polite to my mother. Well you know what, brotherhood my ass. After all them flowers died, that was all she wrote. My poor mother was left to twist in the wind and fend for herself. She had always been a housewife. What the fuck was she supposed to do to support herself? The union survivor’s pension hardly covered a pot to piss in.

I startled myself when I looked down. I was wearing my high school ring, in my first semester of my junior year. I found that damn ring a while back. Frickin’ thing didn’t even fit on my pinky. But what the hell, turned out I never graduated anyway. My old man was the only one who could kick my ass, so after he passed away I ran amok.

BAM. Fade to black….

Well, the smell wasn’t the only thing that came thundering back big time. This time I’m pie-eyed in P-I, the Philippines that is, Magasisi Boulevard to be exact. And again, I ain’t dreaming about bein’ drunk off my ass. I am drunk, big time. A full bag. I’m ricochetin’ down the street there headin’ for the Quarterdeck, a bar I’ve been told to stay clear of by none other than the captain of the replenishment tanker Wichita. I’d been thrown out of high school after being nailed with a pint of Jack Daniels in World Affairs class, and mind you we weren’t studying the booze industry in Tennessee. Into the Navy I went. Hey, what’s a drunk to do?

So this here was my first taste of the third world. Subic Bay -- ugly man’s paradise -- the place where zit-encrusted adolescence collided with green-card mania. If you trip into a bar there and talk to a woman, you are now property. One of the most vicious scrapes I ever saw was two of them bar girls goin’ at it over ownin’ the rights to this squid. And you don’t pay the women, you pay the bar. The bar fine is what it is called, and after paying it the little lady would take you home and bug you to buy her shit from the Navy exchange there on the base.

Yeah, ass-backwards all right. The women over there chase you. Go figure. And ships stayed there for a long while, owing to they used the shipyard there and the low-wage labor to do major maintenance, so you stayed there for weeks. So I meet this cute little number and we start going steady. After knock off I’m in my civvies and over the shit river bridge, they called it, which led off the base and into Olongopo like a heat-seeking missile. A buddy of mine married his little honey ko. He was a second class BT. He had met her during an earlier WestPac Cruise. They had their wedding in this Catholic church in Subic, which is like thirty clicks south of Olongopo. I took my girl and when we left the reception this local police like guy starts arguing with her in Tagolog. Then he takes her to the local magistrate, which turns out to be a bunch of guys with a tub full of ice and beer playing poker on a porch. Her crime? She don’t have her bar-fine tab. You see, I had picked her up at her apartment, not the Quarterdeck where she worked, so I had to go all the way into Olongopo to the Quarterdeck and pay the bar fine and bring back the receipt so I could spring her. Like I was saying, the place took a little getting used to.

So, to make a long story short, I start drippin’. Evidently the little woman had been doing some moonlighting when I had duty days. Man was I pissed. That bitch. I got to get my butt shot up and the Navy don’t let anybody off the base until they stop leakin’, which in my case was four days. And like I said, the old man had forbid me from going back to the Quarterdeck owing to how pissed I was. You slap a lady over there and you are on legal hold until they sort things out, which can take months. I waddled over the Shit River Bridge with every intention of stayin’ away from her, but like I said, I’d been drinkin’.

Magasisi Boulevard. The smell of open sewers battled with the monkey meat they was cookin’ on street stands all over the place, and all you heard was the sounds of them little dirt bikes whining off in the night. They dueled with the jitneys, these Jeeps they chromed and decorated the shit out of. So I go into the Quarterdeck and there she is, sittin’ there at a table all pretty like. Lucky for me she ain’t with another squid ‘cause getting in a brawl with somebody would’ve brought the Shore Patrol on for sure. I’ll never forget, I walked up to her and leaned over her table on my fists and slurred, Bitch, you gave me the clap. Well, I was dealing with a professional. She didn’t even bat an eye. I didn’t give you the clap, she says, you bought it.

BAM. Fade to black….

What hit me next was the heat. There I was getting bumped around in the back of a little dinged-up Toyota pick-up truck. Man the heat and the dust just had their way with you. The sun was still low on the horizon being as it was early morning. You knew it was gonna be a scorcher. It was me, this fella’ named JW, and a whole bunch of suitcases, and in my case a seabag being jostled around in the bed of the truck there. We were in Djibouti, in Africa. We were inside the harbor compound driving past all the warehouses and shit. I’m not saying anything to JW, you’ll know why soon enough. I’m bushed. We’d been flying for what seemed like a week. I’m lookin’ and lookin’ and then I see her, for the first time. She was there by the pier, hull down, and you could only make out her superstructure and stack and masts above the dock and all the crates and crap strewn all about on the pier. Yes sir, that there was the first time I ever laid eyes on the motor vessel Pleiades.

BAM, fade to black…and pitch black is how it stayed this time.

I started hearing something, a sound. I just couldn’t make it out. It didn’t sound natural or mechanical, and I couldn’t really make it out for some time. I really can’t explain it. The best I can do is say it sounded hollow like, like when Darth Vader breathed, except it was a constant sound, not breathing. And over time it got louder and louder. Louder and LOUDER. I don’t remember anything else, you know, like the temperature or smell or me even. That must be why the others that’ve been down this same road must have come up with that out-of-body bullshit term, you know, the experience. So I start to get to the point where this here sound starts to hurt, you know, like on a carrier flight deck during flight ops, and all the while it’s pitch black. Then all of a sudden the noise just vanishes, like BAM. But, like right when that happened, a little pinprick of white light punctures the blackness off in the distance. Way off in the distance. No sound now, just the light. If it was light, that is. I ain’t sure what it was, but it grew steadily, or I was being drawn towards it. I couldn’t figure out which it was, but it bathed you in warmth. No light like I ever saw ever made me feel like this here beam. Man, it beat the piss out of Jim Beam even, and this here is a boozehound talking, don’t you know.

And just like with what happened with the noise, the light thing grew steady. I could see beams headin’ my way from it, like light beams through a smoky room. And all these beams headin’ at you made it seem like a tunnel. A tunnel I was moving real steadily down.

Into the light.

ALONE

Near as I could figure, I was one pearly-gate bound bozo. I figured after a little jawbonin’ with Saint Peter, I’d be off to eternal bliss. And blissful I was there in the light, until I got nudged back to my senses, that is. Something nudged me from behind. I wasn’t real aware of my body until this thing hit my back. Then I really got thumped, and it knocked me clear out of the tunnel. All of a sudden I was in a brilliant aqua. No more black or ball of light. I turned and holy shit, and I mean holy shit, this giant snake, this constrictor, was snakin’ all over me. It had some lunch lined up, namely me. It was wrappin’ all around me. The fucker was going for the kill. The thing was like eight or ten inches thick and so long I couldn’t tell where the head or tail was. I started squirmin’ all around trying to get away, but it was hopeless. The more I struggled the more entwined I got myself. Then I just up and gave up.

And things just got worse. Another snake had him a victim maybe twenty or thirty feet away. Except, Jesus, it was awful, he had himself some hot lunch. The body it was snaking around was horribly burned. Later when the G-men were grillin’ me, they sure were interested in this guy. But lookin’ at him you couldn’t figure out his race let alone his face. He was burned so bad there weren’t any fingers on the stumps that used to be his hands. And past that snake and guy was something really bizarre. What I saw looked like the surface of the sun. No shit, I don’t know how else to put it. It was a brilliant sea of yellow, lapping and churning all about, and brilliant to the point where it actually hurt my eyes to look at it. And we were moving towards it, the snake and me.

What I thought I was looking at then was a sea of souls. Not individuals, like we are now, but like a pool of energy, everybody all lobbed in together. Them serpents, they were taking me and my toasted friend to hell. I thought I was sailing right into that blazing pool there to join ‘em all. Why the light earlier? Hey, I suppose hell wouldn’t be hell without a little taste of heaven. What I honestly thought I was seeing was the big mystery unfolding right there before me. Life after death, I mean. ‘So this is how it is,’ I was thinking.

If I’d kept on that line of thought, I more’n likely would’ve died. And it would’ve been a real painful, miserable end. What it was that pulled me through was a tuna. No shit. I haven’t had a tuna-fish sandwich since. I don’t want to take the chance of scarfin’ down the tuna that I owe my life to. Bad Karma. But there he was, a yellow-fin, moseying right on by me. Sound faded in too. I heard this deep roar. And these things started adding up, making me take another look at what I was seeing. Then I realize it ain’t no serpent. What it was was me and this other poor bastard are wrapped up in the Pleiades’ mooring lines. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was under a burning sea, and in that same split second it became real obvious to me I was shooting towards the surface, floating right to the top, and there would be no stopping that. One thing I learned out of all this right here is there must be something to training. Years before, way back in Navy boot camp, they’d taught us to wave your arms ‘round like a son of a bitch when you were under burning oil. That way you separate the flames, making a hole so you can get up an’ get yourself a breath. I remember they stuck us in this pool an’ tried to make us practice this. We paddled around, waiting for lunch mostly. But without even thinking about having been taught to do this years before, I just started doing it, like I’d been programmed like a machine or something. And I got to admit it worked like a charm, except they really ought to put the word out that the breath ya get is like sucking on an idling truck’s tailpipe. We’re talking burning hot and nasty. But hell, the bottom line in a case like this is it worked. It’s not like I’m bitching. An’ again, there’s no telling how long this wavin’ all ‘round an’ breathing an’ bobbing went on. But like I said, it felt like damn near forever.

At one point, while I had ducked under water, I caught me a glimpse of what looked like a dark hole, a black border. And I made my way for it. I started working in that direction. And after a piece, I got there. Lady Luck smiled on me big time that day. If only I could’ve got to Reno. I came out of the flames upwind. See, that way I was free an’ clear. If it’d been downwind, the flames would’ve just kept on coming at me. But there I was, all of a sudden, under a blue sky. And with that I felt like a million bucks just then. Until, that is, I started thinking an’ looking all around. Once I’d convinced myself the flames were heading away from me, I rolled over on my back an’ tried as best I could to rest a bit, to catch my breath. It’s funny ‘cause I remember my ears hurting something awful. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why until it dawned on me I’d been wearing sound-powered headphones. They must’ve been wiped off my head in such a way that they almost took my ears with ‘em. I’m lucky they didn’t break my neck. And the back of my legs hurt. You know, the calves. I must’ve banged ‘em pretty good flying off that rail like I did. I’d been perched on the Pleiades’ handrail.

But the more I thought, the worse it got. I caught myself looking ‘round for the Pleiades. That was the first thing I did after I got up the energy there. You can’t see much at all from the sea, when you’re in it I mean. Ya can hardly see over the waves all around you, even when you’re up on a crest. ‘What the hell happened?’ I started wondering. The more I thought in that there direction, the more I wished I hadn’t. The Pleiades must have exploded. She must’ve been ripped open if we were talking ‘bout burning fuel oil. She might’ve even went down. What else could it’ve been. But why?

Well, thinking ‘bout that there took me from bad to worse. It was a straight shot. If there’d ever been a case of out of the frying pan an’ into the fire, this here was it. The only thing I could think of was they had dropped one of them warheads they’d got. Obviously it wasn’t any nuclear blast, or I wouldn’t have been there at all. Hell, I would’ve been vapor. But I knew from my Navy days that these bombs had high explosives in ‘em to detonate the warheads somehow. An’ the high explosive could go off without making the big boom. Low order explosions, that’s what they called it when the HE went off without detonating the nuke. That’s what the Navy had trained me for: weapons-handling accidents. Only thing I could figure, the only thing right there that made any sense, was that there was what had happened on Pleiades. And that there was the problem, see. That’s what scared the living shit out of me. What all this meant was that for those of us who had survived that blast, there was like no hope. We were goners. It having happened so fast, you knew a Mayday couldn’t possibly have been sent out. An’ the Pleiades wasn’t the type of ship to send one of those out anyway, being as we’d been operating like a spy ship all along.

What all this came to mean was that the ones who’d been blown away in that blast were the lucky ones. They’d gone fast. The rest of us were looking at a slow death. So I took to screaming. It was bad enough thinking you were just gonna wither away there in the sea, to rot like a grape on a vine, but the thought of dealing with it alone, that thought there was just unthinkable. And I screamed, and I screamed. And every once in a while, I’d stop an’ listen. And the only answer to all the noise I’d been making was the sea. The sea just lapped on as it tossed me all about. I would’ve given my left nut right then and there to have been able to walk on water. Just for a split second, just to get up an’ get one good look around, to prove to myself there was nothing out there. That the Pleiades was really gone.

In a roundabout way, Lady Luck was still with me. I got to trying to kick myself as high in the water as I could, to get a look-see. I was getting maybe as high as my belly out of the water, that was about all, but something caught my eye, something orange. I made my way over in that direction. For a split second, I thought I’d come across somebody, but what it turned out to be was a life preserver, a kapok, entangled around a splintered lifeboat oar. I untangled the life vest. I was more interested in the whistle attached to it than the vest itself. I got that thing an’ started blowing it like a son of a bitch. The sound from a whistle travels miles at sea. That’s why they string ‘em on life vests. I just about blew the little ball right out of that damn thing.

But again, the only answer was the swish of the sea an’ the laps of the waves. That sound there was starting to get on my nerves. After a while I gave up an’ put on the vest. During all that what I’d been holding on to was this broken oar. And I started laughing, hysterical like. What had hit me so funny was the old saying about being up a creek without a paddle. Here I was all by my lonesome it looked like, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, clinging to a fricking paddle. That there back then, that there just tore me up. A creek