Terrapin

[Walker]

Terrapin

Spoiler

Snippet I wrote for creative writing homework. Whaddayathink? Further explanation, I don't want to prejudice you, so read it before you read this:

Spoiler

Spoiler

It was supposed, theoretically, to imitate the first paragraph of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, and use a "difficult" character. Walter Kelly here is designed to be an asshole. Also, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Corps is my idea for the NOAA commissioned officer corps being militarized for an all-out war. The enlisted portion of the force is being formed around a core of Navy and Coast Guard men on loan, and the ships are surplused from other services as well, plus the ships NOAA already has.

Spoiler

The Terrapin is a CG cutter, WPB, Marine Protector Class. The idea here is that those have been replaced by... I don't know, something else by now. And so most of the Marine Protectors were being gotten rid of. The war I have some vague idea of a multifront war between some combination of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, the US, and possibly some others. Not sure what the sides would be, exactly. From the sounds of this, it'd be Pakistan/China allied, but... yeah. Not sure that makes sense.

Tell me what you think!

The “food service specialist” was not happy to be here, in the cramped galley of a Marine Protector-class patrol boat, scraping away at a hank of burned cheese on the griddle. He seized every chance to make his opinions known to poor Seaman Apprentice Rogers. The SA, a young, fresh-faced black woman, was the lowest ranker on the boat. She graduated in the first class of enlisted men from the new Oceanic and Atmospheric Corps basic training, and she was a non-rate, the lowest of the low, no regular duties. But even her, they only assigned to help Seaman Walter Kelly when there weren’t a single other thing she might do. Walter, secure in the superiority, made certain that she knew he was only here, in this lowly position, because of the lying OA Corps recruiter, who assured him that there was a need for his hard-won sociology degree.

Walter was on his second deployment to this rainy hell. The OACS Terrapin, was a surplused Coast Guard cutter with a surplused Navy/CG crew, covered in antennas and busily watching all the big, dangerous warships thronging the Indian Ocean these days. Walter kept his head down in the galley, *****ed at SA Rogers, and hoped none of the big boys decided they needed some target practice.
Rogers smiled hopefully at him. “Kelly, did you hear? Chief Zahren says that there’s an open slot at aviation surveyor school! Says I have a good chance of getting in, too.”

Walter snorted, and gave her a disgusted look, leaning with the heel of his hand against the edge of the griddle. “Why d’you want that ****? Why’d you put yourself in that situation? You know what they do with them, don’t you? You’ll be dropping out of C-130s over the goddamn Indian jungle, marking out trails for the damn pussy Marines to follow in whenever the hell they get over there. You got snakes and ****ed-off, indiscriminate guerillas and Pakistani and Chinese Army assholes who aren’t going to care that you’re a ****ing surveyor instead of a real soldier. Stay here—I’ll get you the cooking training you need and you don’t have to worry about getting shot or bit or poisoned.”

Spoiler

Also, yes, my formatting is probably a little ****ed up. Copy/pasting did screwy things. And it's so short because I had a three hundred word limit. And I'm at 368. So I'm actually working on cutting it down.

 

[Warpedhero]

Re: Terrapin

I like it.

 

[Walker]

Re: Terrapin

Spoiler

Do you have any criticisms? Suggestions for improvement? I can see a few typos and ****ed-up commas, but aside from that.

Think it can be extended to a longer story?

Final version... for now, anyway:

The “food service specialist” was not happy to be here, in the cramped galley of a Marine Protector-class patrol boat, scraping away at a hank of burned cheese on the griddle. He seized every chance to make that opinion known to poor Seaman Apprentice Rogers. The SA, a young, fresh-faced black woman, was the lowest ranker on the boat. Graduated in the first class of enlisted from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Corps basic, and she was a non-rate, nothing but basic behind her. But even she was only assigned with Seaman Walter Kelly when there wasn’t a single other thing to do. Walter, secure in his superiority, made certain that she knew he was only here, in this lowly position, because of the lying OA Corps recruiter, who assured him they needed his hard-won sociology degree and shipped him off to Coast Guard basic.

This was Walter’s second deployment to rainy hell. The OACS Terrapin was a surplused Coast Guard cutter with a surplused crew, covered in antennas and busily watching the big, dangerous warships thronging the Indian Ocean today. Walter kept his head down in the galley, *****ed at SA Rogers, and hoped none of the big boys decided they needed some target practice.

Rogers smiled hopefully at him. “Kelly, did you hear? Chief Zahren says that there’s an open slot at aviation surveyor school! Says I have a good chance of getting it.”

Walter snorted, gave her a disgusted look, leaning the heel of his hand against the edge of the griddle. “Why d’you want that ****? Why’d you put yourself in that situation? You know what they do, right? You’ll be dropping from C-130s over the goddamn Indian jungle, blazing trails for the damn pussy Marines to follow in whenever they show up. You got snakes and ****ed-off, indiscriminate guerillas and PLA assholes who don’t care you’re not a real soldier. Stay here, I’ll get you the cooking training you need and you don’t have to worry about getting killed—much.”

 

[Warpedhero]

Re: Terrapin

Could definitely be expanded. Do it.

 

[Steve]

Re: Terrapin

Nice one Walker. Keep 'em coming.

 

[Walker]

Re: Terrapin

Hey, I've expanded this quite a bit. Doing the extended version for my creative writing workshop. Not done yet, but comments? Concerns? Thoughts?

The “food service specialist, 2nd class” was not happy to be here, in the cramped galley of a Marine Protector-class patrol boat, scraping away at a hank of burned cheese on the griddle. He seized every chance to make that opinion known to poor Seaman Apprentice Banneker. Secure in his superiority, he made certain that she knew he was only here, in this lowly position, because of the lying OA Corps recruiter who assured him they needed his hard-won sociology degree and shipped him off to Coast Guard basic. In fact, his current silence, as he slaved away in such a waste of his talents, was only because he had just shut up after a fifteen-minute rant. The SA was the lowest ranker on the boat, and there wasn’t much she could do about being stuck down here with Petty Officer 2 Walter Kelly.

She was a young, fresh-faced black woman fresh out of high school who had graduated in the first class of enlisted from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Corps basic, and she was a non-rate, no A-school to have given her a designated specialty. Even with her lack of skills, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Zahren tried to avoid assigning her with Walter, who was famed everywhere for being a creepy sonuva*****, and irritating at that.

This was Walter’s second deployment to rainy hell. The OACS Terrapin was a surplused Coast Guard cutter with a surplused crew, covered in antennas and busily watching the big, dangerous warships thronging the Bay of Bengal today. Walter kept his head down in the galley, *****ed at SA Banneker, and hoped none of the big boys decided they needed some target practice.

Banneker smiled hopefully at him. “Kelly, did you hear? Chief Zahren says that there’s an open slot at aviation surveyor school! Says I have a good chance of getting it.”

Walter snorted and gave her a disgusted look, leaning the heel of his hand against the edge of the griddle. “Why d’you want that ****? Why’d you put yourself in that situation? You know what they do, right? You’ll be dropping out of C-130s over the goddamn Indian jungle, blazing trails for the damn pussy Marines to follow in whenever they show up. You got snakes and ****ed-off, indiscriminate guerillas and PLA assholes who don’t care you’re not a real soldier. Stay here, I’ll get you the cooking training you need and you don’t have to worry about getting killed—much.”

Banneker’s face twisted with disgust. The features of an exceptionally pretty young woman weren’t really meant for such masterful disdain, but she managed it with the underhanded dexterity she did everything—in this case, she had practiced in the mirror—“**** you, Kelly. My brother’s one of those ‘damn pussy Marines,’ and our older brother is Army. If I do this, I might be able to keep them whole and alive. Hell, my sister’s a Hog Driver with the Air National Guard. I might even be able to help her out, running down antiaircraft positions and stuff.”

Walter’s ears heated, and he just knew that his face looked like a tomato. Embarrassment lead to anger, and he stared back at Banneker with the petulant, barely concealed hate of a born bureaucrat. “Oh, bull****. They can find landing spots and survey terrain and run down missile batteries a hell of a lot easier just by firing up a recon satellite. What do they need your little ass jumping out of planes for?”

“For one thing, the Chinese can shoot down sats easy. In case you missed it, the Russians have been screaming about it everywhere since the second they entered the war and the Chinese blew the hell out of everything they had in space. For another, yeah, they can see a lot with a satellite. But when there’s a missile battery shut down and camouflaged, what are they can do? They can hide it from a chunk of metal miles up, not from me sitting down there with a camera and a radio. And let’s say that somebody mined the **** out of a beach down there, or a convenient spot of open ground. I can find those, when a satellite might miss it. Keep our guys alive when they go in.”

Walter shook his head disparagingly. “You’re just rationalizing it. The only reason that the aviation surveyors exist is because some NOAA commissioned officer who spent the last thirty years going crazy sitting on a research ship in the Arctic came up with a brilliant idea and managed to talk some dumb **** at the Pentagon into it.”

Banneker threw up her hands and turned her back on him, fuming under her breath. He had her cleaning out one of the ovens, and even that was better than listening to his stupid opinions. Walter turned back to his assault on the burned cheese lump of doom, but not before he gave her an appreciative glance. She might be eight years younger than him, but seeing her bent over to scrub away at the inside of the oven was not a sight you’d want to miss if you were dead, let alone a few years older.

***​

Walter was slumped back in his rack when his roommate, Boatswain’s Mate 2 Mason, walked through the hatch, looking green enough to be cast as the Wicked Witch of the West.
Walter glanced over. “Still puking your guts out?”

“**** you, Kelly.” Mason hoisted himself into his rack and lay back. “It’s not my fault I ran out of my pills. New medical officer back at Pedro refused to issue them. ‘You dumb mother****er,’ I said, ‘I leave tomorrow for a three-day patrol up the Indian coast, I get seasick without this ****, I need this.’ What does he say? ‘I’m sorry, Petty Officer, but we’ve been using too much, they want us to cut back.’”

“I still can’t believe you’ve been doing this for as long as you have. You seriously drove small boats for a living?”

“Yes, I did. Me, I can’t believe that you worked in customer service. You’re an asshole.”
Walter took this with surprising equanimity. Perhaps the fact that Mason could have broken him in half between two of his long, muscular fingers, or maybe just that the big man was 6’5” and had served in Navy special forces for fourteen years before he retired, had something to do with it. “I’m not an asshole. And working at a library is easy. If the customer *****es about a small fine, waive it. A big one, pass the buck. If they’re jackasses, pass the buck. If you can’t be bothered to deal with them—“

“Pass the buck?”

Walter grinned. “Yep.”

“You are an asshole, Kelly. The only reason you’re even halfway good at your job is because you can’t pass the buck. If you **** up dinner, Master Chief Dixon’ll come down on you like… something that comes down really hard. Even you don’t want that.”

“Hell, no. She’s the only person on this boat scarier than you. But hell, you’ve been eating my food for the past month, at least when we’re at sea. I cook good.”

“Yeah, and that’s the only reason you haven’t been fed to a shark. But if you keep ****ing off SA Banneker, you probably will end up that way, good cook or not.”

“Banneker? What does she have against me?”

Mason gave a groan and there was the thump of his head hitting the wall. Walter couldn’t tell if the groan was because his stomach was twisting especially uncomfortably, or if it was exasperation, but the head-pounding was definitely the second. Mason had beat his head against the wall at Walter’s astonishingly stupid or assholely comments so many times that it was probably dented.

“You’re a condescending prick. When she reported aboard, you asked her where she was from, and immediately said it was a ****hole. You asked her where she had graduated from, and when she said, ‘a high school in PG county,’ you said, ‘oh, I should have known you didn’t go to college.’ You then proceeded to tell her that you worked in PG county, ask her what high school, and tell her that it was an exceptionally ****ty one. The fact that she agreed with you is irrelevant.”
Walter opened his mouth, “But I—” Mason bulled on, his powerful, level voice rolling right over Walter.

“You look at her like a slab of meat, and we’re all pretty sure that you try to set up situations where you have something to look at. Half the time whatever you say to her is so layered with lecherous innuendo that if the brothers she’s always talking about heard you, they would gut you like a fish. Hell, you’re going to be lucky if she doesn’t cut off your **** and shove it down your throat before she tosses you to the sharks. Incidentally, these are all reasons why Dixon doesn’t like you either. Not that you’re dumb enough to look at her like a slab of meat, but she knows how you treat Banneker even if she hasn’t caught you at it, and she is just looking for a reason to break you.”

Mason couldn’t see him, so Walter indulged in some exaggerated gesticulations of rage, his face looking like a defiant fourth-grader being told off for running on the playground.
“And get that stupid expression off your face. It makes people want to punch you.”

***​

Walter was in the galley, alone one day, getting ready to make some rolls when Chief Zahren walked in. The chief was an older man, tall and thin with graying blond hair, and very good at what he did. He was technically a Boatswain’s Mate, had to be if he was going to be assigned to a ship this small, but he had been recruited primarily for his expertise in the area with which the OAC was technically concerned. Everyone on the ship, all ten of them, knew that he had taught middle-school science for the last twenty years, because the man loved to talk about it, but only Lieutenant Washington and Master Chief Dixon knew that for the first ten years of his post-college career—at the age of 17—had been split evenly between the most esoteric areas of meteorological physics, and service with the Air Force’s special operations weathermen, including the invasion of Grenada.

Walter braced himself when he saw the man, expecting another long, rambling story about some kid he taught, delivered in a stentorian orator’s voice and equipped with the most dramatic tones and facial expressions that ever lent themselves to a tale of schoolboy (or girl) cheating.

But Zahren seemed distracted, worried. He ignored Walter, grabbed a drink from the fridge, and sat in the mess deck area beside the galley, swilling his vile Sri Lankan soda, a fruity-flavored purple thing that no one else aboard could stand.

 

[Walker]

I realize that this is going to be a doublepost, but I wanted to share the edited version. It may or may not be 6,143 words long. And the formatting is terrible because I copy/pasted from Word.

Walter Kelly felt reassuringly innocuous threading his way through a ludicrously multicultural crowd of uniforms and civilians. The vast, free-for-all marketplace that sprang up just far enough from the newish Sri Lankan Navy base at Point Pedro was frequented by the crew of every ship from the dozens of countries whose ships made up the Bay of Bengal International Neutrality Patrol. Why go into the town itself when every possible vice could be satisfied in less than fifteen minute’s walk? And at least here there were plenty of Sri Lankan police and military police to make sure that some of the Tamils didn’t decide to start up a little bit of revolting again and grab a drunk sailor to ransom.
As he made his way through the labyrinth of stalls and rough buildings, Walter managed to keep his money in his pocket and avoid the pickpockets. Sure, he could buy an overpriced beer from pretty much any of the eagerly screeching vendors—whether Hindu, Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, they didn’t feel any qualm about selling alcohol, whatever their faith of choice might say about drinking it—but he was looking for a very specific saleswoman.
It wasn’t all that long before he found her. The old woman was scrawny, with a leathery face that perpetually scowled at the world, and her cart was a world’s fair of lukewarm-to-hot beverages of the world, which she bought cheap and sold… slightly less cheap. She also rambled unceasingly in a mixture of what Walter assumed to be Tamil with occasional fragments of English. But her English was good enough when it came to bargaining.
“And what do you have today, granma?”
“Good stuff! Good stuff, son,” she gave a little cackle that devolved into a hacking cough, forcing her to clutch at her chest and hold up her hand for him to wait. When she recovered, she swept the blanket off the top of the cart to reveal the fat, furry bulk of her cat. She cursed at the beast and he cracked one lazy eye before turning and going back to sleep. So the old lady tossed him to the ground, revealing four rows of slightly furry drinks.
Walter pointed to a long row of red cans labeled “Carlton Draught.”
“Where?”
“Australian! Expensive. They love their beer, they do.”
“I bet, granma. I’ll give you five bucks for all of them.”
“My son! My own son. Cost me more than two dollars American each can. Don’t cheat a poor old lady.”
He ended up paying her seven dollars for the twelve cans, briefly thanking whatever Aussie sailors decided they’d sooner trade or sell their beer ration than take the extra pay they could get by forgoing it. He also bought six cans of a Japanese brand which, since he thought the Japanese ships were as dry as the American, he had no idea where she got. To keep Chief Etheridge slightly less unhappy with him, he also bought out her entire supply of Portello, a disgustingly purple soda sold by Fanta, which Walter had never seen anywhere but Sri Lanka.
He got back to the United States Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf right on time. He carried his duffel bag of contrabrand drinkables past a grinning seaman, who would be more than happy to take his bribe of two cans later on, when they weren’t standing right out in the open.
On his way down to the galley he stowed the beers in the morale office. Ensign Puller was easily the ****tiest morale officer ever born, so the only people he had to worry about finding them were the other enlisted men who got that job delegated onto their heads. And that was fairly unlikely, since nobody really needed anything from the morale office all that often. When he got to the galley he stowed the Chief’s sodas in the fridge, and started to clean, as if he had been a good little Petty Officer First Class food specialist, and hadn’t left the place all day.
Walter was not happy to be here at all, let alone standing in the galley scraping away at a hank of burned cheese on the griddle. But he did lighten a bit when PO Munro strolled through the hatch. Finally! Someone to bitch at.
“Goddamn it, Munro, do you know what I just found out?” Munro strolled over to the fridge, retrieved one of the cans of Mountain Dew hiding in the back, and held it up, sending Walter a questioning glance. The mess had a soda fountain with Coke products, but for anything else they were stuck with whatever limited cans they could buy.
“Sure, sure, go ahead. Anyway: A friend of mine from college got a job with the draft board, and a week before the first drawing he called me up and said that it looked like it was pretty likely I’d get drafted. I had a nice, comfy job. Worked at a library, made forty-five thousand dollars a year just checking books out and doing paperwork and ****. I just finished my degree. Sociology. Took a couple classes every semester on educational leave. Took me nine ****ing years, but I had it. I was going to go back and get my master’s in library science, become a librarian, rake in the real money.”
Munro seemed to feel the need to contribute, or at least interrupt Walter so he’d stop and take a breath. He slumped against a convenient appliance, his thick, stubby fingers swallowing up the can of soda. “You do recall that you already told me this, yes? At least six times? And you thought I was being obnoxiously unsympathetic and that I was an idiot for thinking librarian was a ****ty career?”
Walter scowled at him. “Go to hell. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. My ‘friend’ told me that the Army was really desperate for infantrymen, that they were snapping up people with social sciences degrees, especially ones they weren’t using, and tossing them into Afghanistan as bomb-fodder. The first part was true, the dumb asshole. I didn’t want to end up in Afghanistan getting my ass shot st, so I went online and looked at my options a bit. I didn’t have much time, but I saw that the Coast Guard was exempt from the draft.”
Munro snorted. “Not that I don’t want to hear about how stupid you are again, but yes, I know. Did my seven years, got a reserve slot, got my ass called up again, remember? I’m firmly aware that the US Coast Guard is a branch of the military.”
Walter’s glare only intensified, and he bulled on before Munro could elaborate on his theme. “I figured, a nice cushy job saving drunk boaters or whatever, it’d be great. So I called a recruiter, signed up, got shipped off to the new camp they had set up in Baltimore. Got through basic, got shipped off to a cutter. I look at my orders, and where are they sending me to board my new United States Coast Guard cutter? ****ing Japan. Japan! I’m sitting in San Diego waiting for my plane out when I run into a girl I went to college with. Got a sociology degree just like mine, but finished a couple years earlier. Spent those few years getting drunk and living in her parent’s basement. She’s a ****ing Army lieutenant. They were desperate for social sciences, but not because we were useless or some ****. The girl was part of a psywar outfit, dropping propaganda on Pakistan or India or China or the Russians or whoever else is mixed up in that shiny new clusterfuck we’re watching every day. Said that a couple other former classmates were commissioned all over the place, intelligence, psywar, recruitment. She was going to get based at some base we had in Japan, ****ing with the bad guys from five hundred miles away. And where do I end up?”
Munro gave up, shaking his head in resignation. “Lemme guess. Bay of Bengal?”
Walter gave him a beady-eyed glare. “The Bay of motherfucking, goddamn, piece of ****, Bengal. Who the hell cares about the Bay of Bengal? Who knows where the **** the Bay of Bengal is? Too damn many people, if you ask me. The convoy we escorted out had ships in it from every damn place, and the escorts! The Japanese, the Indonesians, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, and I didn’t even know Sri Lanka existed before they decided to base this piece of **** tin can there. Bad enough that they’re sending the Coast Guard—oughta be at home, protecting our damn coast—all over the place, but what was wrong with Tokyo? At least there was some nightlife there. And ****ing Malaysia.”
“I won’t kick your ass for badmouthing the Bertholf, because, yeah, I’d so much rather be on a boat station on dry land. But I’ve told you this before, genius. The CG is a branch of our military like any other. Even without getting shunted over to the Navy Department. And with our civilian functions and tiny, underpowered, who-would-call-that-a-warship cutters, we aren’t as likely to start a shooting war with the Russians or the Chinese if we’re the ones shoving our noses in their business, and we’re more than capable of handling the Pakistanis and Indians in their current fifty-billionth-war-smacked-to-hell state. But, more importantly, what in the hell do you have against Malaysia?”
Walter’s glare didn’t exactly slacken, but there was a hint, the barest hint, that he knew how absurd he was being. “The goddamn flag. Ugly barbershop-pole looking thing. Anyway, then we get here, and I’m stuck sitting in the galley slaving away at all hours under a stupid motherfucker like Chief Etheridge, worrying that some bored Chinese or Russian warship is going to see a piddly little cutter whirring away over here spying on them and sending our helos overhead to spy on them and generally being the biggest pain in the ass we can, and they’re going to toss a missile or a torpedo our way and I’m not even going to notice until we’re smacking into the bottom of the ocean. Makes me wish we were doing convoy duty. That wasn’t bad. Sure, the big warships followed us and all, but they were just worried about making sure some pirate didn’t get stupid or the other side try to frame them or some bullshit.”
Walter trailed off into muttering, leaning down again to scrape away around the edges of the burned cheese lump of doom. It wasn’t like there was really anything important to do. The the damn cheese aside, the only reason to have anyone on duty in the galley when the ship was in port and damn near everyone was on shore leave, at least until they went out on another stressful patrol up along India’s east coast, was to punish them.
Munro slurped away at his Mountain Dew, watching Walter work aimlessly around the edge of the griddle. “So, what’d you just find out?”
“What?” Walter’s expression was more than a little confused.
“You said ‘know what I just found out.’ So, what’d you just find out?”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Um… I don’t remember.”
Munro rolled his eyes. “So, you’re telling me that you just launched into a ten-minute rant about boring, stupid old **** that I’ve heard you whining about fifty billion times, and I completely missed your new load of bullshit? Man, you know I look forward to hearing you bitch like a fifteen-year-old girl, but not if it’s the same old trash. Don’t bore me.”
“Go to hell.”
“Anyway, I meant to ask. What stupid **** did you pull to get denied shore leave?”
“Bite me. PO Gantz deserved it.”
Munro looked confused. “The machinist? Short redheaded dude? Looks like he could bend steel bars? Don’t tell me you got into a fight with him or something.”
Walter rolled his eyes, as if this were the dumbest thing ever said by a bored sailor. “No, I didn’t get in a fight with him. I spit in his soup.”
Munro tossed his can in the recycling bin and cradled his forehead in his hand for a moment. “I won’t even ask what he did to **** you off,” he said, his voice slightly muffled by the hand over his face. “Knowing you, he probably told you that your **** stinks, and you just knew you had to teach him a lesson. I assume that he doesn’t actually know that you spit in his soup?”
Walter’s face went red. “No. No, he doesn’t. But apparently ‘spitting in a crewmate’s food’ is just this side of ‘raping a puppy’s corpse’ on the Chief Etheridge Scale of Unforgiveable Crimes.”
At silence behind him, Walter turned to see Munro’s recently raised head cradled in his hand again. “On that wonderful note, I’m out of here. We’re getting some new crew tomorrow. Try not to tell them about your puppy corpse raping, okay?”

***​

The new crew rolled in around nine the next morning. Almost everyone else was off the ship, getting furiously drunk, ****ed, stoned, or otherwise amusing themselves before they had to head back. So it was that Walter found himself on deck with Munro, a recalled Chief Etheridge, and a collection of other chiefs and petty officers who weren’t able to make it off the ship.
Walter was mildly surprised to see that Ensign Puller was there as well, but he supposed that since the ensign always seemed to be drunk anyway, somehow, he didn’t need to leave the ship for it. The little group was joined after a bit by Captain Roker, their painfully young-seeming commanding officer, which was a little surprising, since Walter had expected the executive officer, if anyone. But Roker had spent fifteen years serving with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration commissioned officer corps before he ended up with the Coast Guard for the current emergency, and his youthfulness had more to do with a certain inexperience and earnest desire to learn new things—like dealing with new enlisted crewmen—than with actual youth.
The new crewmembers arrived on foot, looking thoroughly confused and very worried. He glanced over at Munro, who stood next to him, and around at the other men and women, all of whom had served longer than he had, even if, as with Munro, they had left and only come back for the duration of the crisis in India and Pakistan. None of them were looking happy at the sight of their new crewmates. Captain Roker didn’t seem to have noticed anything, and was giving a spectacularly pompous welcome speech. Under cover of Roker’s drone, Walter leaned over and asked Munro what was going on.
“Look at their stripes.” Walter looked. Except for a few seamen, they were all seaman apprentices, no rating marks beyond a general classification, two stripes each, at best half-trained.
“Wha—” he cut himself off. Every one of them wore green stripes, not red or white. Walter hadn’t noticed immediately because, well, he did a ****ty job of paying attention. White would have been seamen, generalists. Red would have been firemen, tracked for engineering, though very raw. But green was airman. Twenty-three airmen replacing the twenty-six firemen, seamen, and yes, two airmen who had left to go to assorted A-schools.
“Airmen? Why so many?”
Roker seemed to finally notice that something was disrupting his speech. He hesitated, and looked a little closer at the new crew. Then he looked around for a Chief. Etheridge, a Master Chief food service specialist, was the most senior, so he and one of the Senior Chiefs from engineering clustered around Roker, joined by Munro when he noticed that there were no deck force chiefs present.
Walter sidled over to the newcomers while his seniors hashed it out. “Hey, what’s happening?”
Most of the young men and women—painfully young from Walter’s lofty height of twenty-seven—looked away, or didn’t respond. But one, a baby-faced black woman with her long hair braided and pulled back in a complex knot to keep it above her neck and within grooming regulations, and who looked even younger than the rest, spoke up.
“How the hell should we know? We got shipped out here on an Air Force plane and then dropped at the airfield with directions to come here. No idea what the hell is going on. Still haven’t been to A-school. I did some of my apprenticeship on the Healy, then before I was done they said, ‘okay, you’re an airman, go here, get on this plane, do what you’re told.’”
Walter grunted. “And none of you thought to ask what was going on? Are you complete morons?”
The young woman’s face froze, apparently surprised, but before she could say anything, the little huddle of chiefs around Captain Roker broke up and they started handing out orders to the new crew.

 

[Walker]

***​

Walter was back in the galley that evening. Most of the day was spent showing around a small group of the new crew, getting them acclimated. Then he and Ensign Puller were stuck in the morale office together, handing out Bertholf morale t-shirts and hats and generally getting the new guys fitted into their bare minimum of morale-building exercises.
He was slamming a tray of rolls roughly into the oven to bake, so they’d be ready for the next day, when he heard someone come through the hatch.
“What do you want, asshole?” He didn’t bother to turn around, and he gave a smug grin to himself as he heard a shocked breath. He vanished the smile and turned back, trying to look vaguely apologetic.
“****, sorry. Thought you were Munro.”
The young woman straightened herself, less like she was coming to attention—which, since he wasn’t a commissioned officer, would have been inappropriate anyway—than as if she were getting ready to ream him out. “Petty officer. I was ordered to report to you.”
“What the hell’s an airman doing assigned to the galley?”
“I don’t know, petty officer. Apparently, they didn’t need twenty of us for your two helos. So we’ll be on a rotation. I’m with you for awhile, then I’ll get some time with the aircrews.”
“Great. Know anything about baking?”
“Not a thing. What do you need me to do?”
“Know what ‘kneading’ is? Knead the hell out of the dough in that bowl.”
“You got it.”
Walter turned and occupied himself with something that looked vaguely like work for a couple minutes, before he went over to the soda fountain and filled a cup with coke. “So, what’s your name?”
The young woman kept kneading not looking at him as he watched her over the top of the can.
“Erickson, petty officer.”
“C’mon, what’s your first name? I don’t like this military bullshit.”
“Call me Erickson, petty officer.”
“I’m Walter.”
“Glad to hear it, petty officer.” Walter glared, suspecting that he saw a smile on her downturned face.
“Where’re you from, Erickson?”
“Maryland.”
“Really? So am I. What part?”
“PG County.”
“No ****? I worked there. Kinda a ****hole.”
Erickson didn’t respond, but she picked up the lump of dough and slammed it down with what Walter thought was excessive force. He grinned to himself, and took another loud, pointedly obnoxious slurp of his soda.
“You go to college? I just graduated from Maryland.”
“Good for you, petty officer.”
Walter waited, but that seemed to be all he was going to get. “Well, did you?”
“No, petty officer. I graduated a year early and enlisted.”
“Duh, should’ve realized that. But just how young are you?”
“Seventeen, petty officer.”
“Damn. What high school’d you go to? I probably know it.”
“Dr. Henry A. Wise High School, petty officer.”
“Yep, I know it. I worked in Upper Marlboro. The only school worse than Wise is Largo.”
“My older siblings went to Largo, petty officer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I insult you?”
“It isn’t a very good school.” Walter grinned to himself. Ha! No ‘petty officer’ on the end of that one.
“Aww, don’t get ****ed. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Erickson straightened up, looked him straight in the eye, and gave a big smile. It had to be a smile, because no growl showed so many straight, white teeth. “I’m not angry, petty officer. Is this kneaded enough?” Walter shook his head and stuck his empty glass in the dishwasher.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll finish that up. Can you clean the oven? The one I’m not using, I mean. We had some lasagna explode. Somebody thought it’d be a great morale-builder to have the different departments cook dinner. And you should apparently never let gunnery cook. I’ve had the auto-clean running, you just need to grab the cleaner from the cabinet under the sink, hit it, and then scrub the hell out of it.”
Walter stepped over to start making rolls out of the dough, but paused halfway through the motion. Watching Erickson bend over to grab the cleaner was definitely worth it.

***​

Walter was slumped back in his rack when Munro, walked through the hatch, looking green enough to be cast as the Wicked Witch of the West.
Walter glanced over. “Still puking your guts out?”
“**** you, Kelly.” Munro hoisted himself into his rack and lay back. “It’s not my fault I ran out of my pills. New pharmacist mate thought we were using too much. So he cut down on our order ‘You dumb motherfucker,’ I said, ‘I get seasick without this ****, I need this.’ What does he say? ‘I’m sorry, Petty Officer, but we’ve been using too much, they want us to cut back.’”
“I still can’t believe you’ve been doing this for as long as you have. You seriously drove small boats for a living?”
“Yes, I did. Me, I can’t believe that you worked in customer service. You’re an asshole.”
Walter took this with surprising equanimity. Perhaps the fact that Munro could have broken him in half between two of his short, muscular fingers, or maybe just that the big man spent the five years since he originally left the Coast Guard working for the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had something to do with it. “I’m not an asshole. And working at a library is easy. If the customer bitches about a small fine, waive it. A big one, pass the buck. If they’re jackasses, pass the buck. If you can’t be bothered to deal with them—“
“Pass the buck?”
Walter grinned. “Yep.”
“You are an asshole, Kelly. The only reason you’re even halfway good at your job is because you can’t ‘pass the buck.’ Chief Etheridge knows what you should be doing, and if you **** it up he can and will come down on you like… something that comes down really hard.”
“What do I care? It’s not like he could make me life any more unpleasant. And I cook good, so it’s not like I have to worry about that.”
“Yeah, and that’s the only reason you haven’t been fed to a shark. But if you keep ****ing off Erickson, you probably will end up that way, good cook or not.”
“Erickson? What does she have against me?”
Munro gave a groan and there was the thump of his head hitting the wall. Walter couldn’t tell if the groan was because his stomach was twisting especially uncomfortably, or if it was exasperation, but the head-pounding was definitely the second. Munro had beat his head against the wall at Walter’s astonishing depths of stupid jackassery so many times that it was probably dented. The wall, that is. Munro’s skull would need something harder than that. Like maybe a grenade.
“You’re a condescending prick. And don’t even pretend it’s not on purpose, I’ve heard you talking to her.”
Walter opened his mouth, “But I—” Munro bulled on, his powerful, level voice rolling right over Walter.
“You look at her like a slab of meat, and we’re all pretty sure that you try to set up situations where you have something to look at. Half the time whatever you say to her is so layered with lecherous innuendo that if the brothers she’s always talking about heard you, they would gut you like a fish. Hell, you’re going to be lucky if she doesn’t cut off your dick and shove it down your throat before she tosses you to the sharks. Incidentally, these are all reasons why Etheridge doesn’t like you either. He knows how you treat Erickson even if he hasn’t caught you at it, and he’s got that whole protective father-daughter vibe going on with the girl. He is just looking for a reason to break you now.”
Munro couldn’t see him, so Walter indulged in some exaggerated gesticulations of rage, his face looking like a defiant fourth-grader being told off for running on the playground.
“And get that stupid expression off your face. It makes people want to punch you.”

***​

Walter was in the galley alone one day, getting ready to make some rolls when Chief Etheridge walked in. The chief was an older man, tall and thin with graying blond hair, and very good at what he did, which was cook. He had taught high school science, specifically physics, for the last thirty years, and he was inordinately proud of that fact. Every time he managed to trap someone, he launched into one boring-ass story or another about the kids he taught. Somehow, maybe on summer vacation for all Walter knew, the old fart found time to attend a world-class culinary school, and, like a lot of the crew, he was prior service—some kind of Air Force special forces, if you could believe it.
Walter braced himself when he saw the man, expecting another long, rambling story about some kid he taught, delivered in a stentorian orator’s voice and equipped with the most dramatic tones and facial expressions that ever lent themselves to a tale of a cheating tenth-grader.
But Etheridge seemed distracted, worried. He ignored Walter, grabbed a drink from the fridge, and sat in the mess just off the galley, swilling his vile Sri Lankan soda, a fruity-flavored purple thing that no one else could stand.
Etheridge sat there for awhile, and eventually Walter moved from dreading a conversation to getting creeped out. He muttered to himself for awhile, and was finally so exasperated that he left the rolls to bake and went over to the older man.
“Chief, what’s happening? You seem a bit out of it.”
Etheridge looked up from the spot on the bulkhead that had absorbed his attention, or at least occupied his eyes, for the last twenty minutes.
“Kelly,” he said. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Walter’s face went flat. “Chief, if you’ll remember, Ensign Puller delegated dealing with morale problems to me. If there’s something going on, I need to know about it so that we can try to take care of it. What is going on.”
It wasn’t a question. Etheridge looked up at him levelly and stood. Etheridge wasn’t as tall as Munro, but at about 6’3” he had four inches on Walter, enough to give him plenty of intimidation. Maybe it’d’ve worked better if he didn’t still have his bottle of unappetizing purpley stuff in his right hand.
“I don’t like your tone, Petty Officer. As unprofessional as it is, I don’t like you.” Walter was suddenly having disturbingly vivid flashbacks to his fourth-grade teacher. He’d never liked the man. Always clashing over something stupid. And Etheridge radiated that same sense of I-know-better-than-you as that teacher had. And he could just feel that dealing-with-a-stupid-adult expression crossing his face. The one that Munro said was going to get him beat to death with a comically oversized gardening implement one of these days.
Walter stepped back from Etheridge, glanced down at the other man’s hands. The right had a white-knuckle grip on the bottle of soda, the left was balled in a fist. “I apologize for my tone, Chief. But if there’s something going on that could affect the crew’s morale adversely… especially your morale. It’s a problem for the mission. There’s just us out here for the next day and a half. Brooding in the galley when I’m pretty sure you’re on watch is a bad sign.”
“Your concerns are noted, Petty Officer. Get back to work. And mind your own damn business.”
Etheridge glared at him until Walter wilted and turned back to his work. Then he tilted back his head and finished his soda, tossing it in the recycling bin as he went out the door. Walter glanced out the door after him. That was definitely a problem.

***​

Walter was sitting in the morale office, talking to one of the gunnery petty officers, when Erickson came in. Walter shoved the can in his hand into a box of t-shirts and stood up with what he thought was a welcoming smile.
“Hi, Erickson, what can I help you with?”
Erickson gave him a level look that just barely concealed her distaste.
“They wanted me to come down and sign up the aviation department to make dinner. We were thinking we’d do tacos next Friday.”
Walter nodded and smiled. “Great. That’s great. Nobody’s signed up and we have a bunch of frozen ground beef, plus some of that prepackaged taco seasoning. Will you need any help, or do you have enough people?”
Erickson’s teeth ground together, and she suppressed a wince as the damaged filling in one of her back teeth shifted. Walter was actually more annoying when he was trying to act friendly. “We have enough. Us extra airmen’ll all be working with them.”
“Cool. Just come by two or three hours before dinner and we’ll have everything ready for you.”
Erickson rolled her eyes and left. Walter shook his head and turned back to the gunnery PO. “Okay, that’ll be six bucks.”
The PO, who was about thirty-five and prior service with the Navy, squawked but paid Walter’s price.
Walter’s grin was more than a little smug. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
“Oh, yeah, a pleasure. Overpriced Australian ****, what could be better? And I get to buy it from my favorite cook, too.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know I’m universally loved. See you next week.”
Munro arrived, conveniently, less than five seconds later, and the gunnery PO departed more than a little hastily. The look on Munro’s face was disapproving in the same way that shelving library books was boring. “You’re going to get caught, you know. And when you do, I’m going to laugh.”
“So will I. I just made four bucks off five minutes of a work. They can’t take that away from me.”
“How much you want to bet? I can see them forcing you to donate it to the morale fund. And everyone will laugh with me, too. Sure, they buy from you, but they’re not happy that you charge disgusting prices and dole it out something like one can a week.”
“Hey, they can buy their own if they want. It’s not like it’s that hard. Hell, I hear that last cruise one of the machinist’s mates rigged up a still from spare plumbing supplies. They only caught him ‘cause they noticed he was actually volunteering for all the plumbing repairs that came up.”
Munro rolled his eyes. “I give it a week before you get caught.”

***​

“What the ****, Erickson?”
“You heard me, petty officer. You leave me alone, or I report you to the captain. Just be happy I’m not demanding a cut of your profits, you draft-dodging piece of garbage.”
Walter’s face was red, and his eyes bulged from his head like a psychotic frog’s. “Roker buys from me every ****ing week. He’ll be ****ed if you report me officially. And if you don’t have evidence, he’ll give me some bullshit punishment and let me go on my merry way.”
Erickson’s smile, practiced in the mirror before she even thought about confronting Walter, barely twitched. “And when I have Chief Etheridge right there by my side?”
Walter screamed another curse, slamming his fist down beside the griddle and then cursing again as the hamburgers that sizzled there splattered grease over his fist.
“Why the **** do you care?” His voice rose on the last word, an agonized whine like an enraged fourteen-year-old.
The smile was back on her face, though now it had more than a tinge of the enraged wolf about its corners. “I don’t like you, petty officer. You volunteered because you were too much of a squalling infant to take your draft notice like a man. My brothers and my sister all put their tukhuses on the line every day with the Marines, the Air Force, and the stinking Army, while you try everything you can to hide where it’s safe and do your best to make a quick buck off your own crewmates. You disgust me. You have a brain, and useful skills, and you don’t use them worth a counterfeit nickel, except to avoid work and to find ways to ogle me like I’m some kind of stripper in uniform. Honestly, I hope you tell me to go to hell, just so I can see you busted to seaman and assigned to a ****ant little patrol boat.”
Walter’s teeth ground together and he let slip a frustrated growl. “What the **** do you expect me to actually do?”
The grin that Erickson sent him now was that of the innocent, sweet little girl who finally had her older brother right where she wanted him, and she leaned forward over the counter.
“Don’t. ****. Me. Off.”

***​

Eventually, the cruise came to an end, and the Bertholf arrived back at the docks at Pedro. Walter spent the whole time avoiding Erickson the way a tiny, terrified rodent avoids an enraged housewife, but got through it, apparently, without ****ing her off. In fact, he didn’t even see her until the first day they were back in port. She and Etheridge were in the mess, each with one of those nasty purple sodas. Through the serving window, which was cracked open, Walter heard her telling Etheridge some story about how she got hooked on the nasty **** when her dad, a Marine, was stationed at Diego Garcia naval base, and later at the US Embassy in Sri Lanka.
The two of them talked and talked, and then eventually they fell silent. Struck by a sudden suspicion, Walter rushed over to peer out through the crack at the bottom of the serving window. He was immediately disappointed. Etheridge sat, with his head cradled in his hands, clearly sobbing behind their cover. Erickson came around the table as Walter watched, and sat with her arm around the old man.
Walter saw Erickson glance over toward him, and leapt back to a hopefully convincing semblance of work. She didn’t seem convinced, some minutes later, when she came back into the galley.
Walter glanced over and gave her an innocent look. “What? Do you need help with something?”
“Go jump in a river, Kelly, I can see you’re just dying for gossip.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really. I already know all about Etheridge’s problems. He sees you as the daughter he could never have, you do realize that, right? I know that he helped get you accepted to the new joint Air Force Pararescue-Coast Guard rescue swimmer program. And I’m not such an idiot that I can’t tell the thought of you being in danger is tearing him apart.” Walter straightened up to look at her, and laughed at her astonished face. “I might not like the guy, and I might be an asshole, but I do understand people.”
“Glad to hear you won’t be a complete waste. Etheridge asked me to pass this on to you.” She passed him a thick packet of paperwork. “Coast Guard is opening up a psychological operations specialist rating. You’ve got orders to report to Army Airborne School, and from there to Army PysOps school. Congrats.”
“I have to go where?”
“Munro mentioned that you had a sociology degree. I guess that’s why they want you.”
“Airborne school?”
“I dunno sounds like you might have to get up close and personal with some bad guys.”
“Why the **** are you so happy about this?”
“Misery loves company, Walt. If I know you’re going to be completely miserable, it’ll be way easier to deal with you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Step one of pararescue training is airborne qualification. I get the joy of your company.”
Walter’s scream of rage could be heard throughout the ship.

(PS: There is a character limit on posts. So I had to triplepost.)

 

[Walker]

If anyone could comment on the below updated version of this story, I'd appreciate it. I want to actually have an ending for it, but I'm not sure what the ending should be.

Terrapin​

Jesse Thrift​

Walter Kelly was not happy as he sat in the galley of the United States Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf, scraping away at a hank of burned cheese on the griddle. He did his best to make sure that Seaman Banneker regretted it as much as he did.

“Goddamn it, I shouldn’t be here. A friend of mine from college got a job with the draft board, and a week before the first drawing he called me up and said that it looked like it was pretty likely I’d get drafted. I had a nice, comfy job. Worked at a library, made forty-five thousand dollars a year just checking books out and doing paperwork and ****. I just finished my degree. Sociology. Took a couple classes every semester on educational leave. Took me nine ****ing years, but I had it. I was going to go back and get my master’s in library science, become a librarian, rake in the real money.”

Banneker, who was younger than Walter by about ten years, a pretty black woman who enlisted right out of high school, tried to contribute something to the conversation. Or at least keep Walter from suffocating because he didn’t bother to stop and breathe.

“Do librarians really make that much money? And you have to pay all of that money to get—”

Walter broke in again before she had a chance to say anything else. “Yeah, so what? It doesn’t matter now. My ‘friend’ told me that the Army was really desperate for infantrymen, that they were snapping up people with social sciences degrees, especially ones they weren’t using, and tossing them into Afghanistan as bomb-fodder. The first part was true, the dumb asshole. I didn’t want to end up in Afghanistan getting my ass shot, so I went online and looked at my options a bit. I didn’t have much time, but I saw that the Coast Guard was exempt from the draft. I figured, a nice cushy job saving drunk boaters or whatever, it’d be great. So I called a recruiter, signed up, got shipped off to the new camp they had set up in Baltimore. Got through boot, got shipped off to a cutter. I look at my orders, and where are they sending me to board my new United States Coast Guard cutter? ****ing Japan. Japan! I’m sitting in San Diego waiting for my plane out when I run into a girl I went to college with. Got a sociology degree just like mine, but finished a couple years earlier. Spent the extra time getting drunk and living in her parent’s basement. She’s a ****ing Army lieutenant. They were desperate for social sciences, but not because they were useless or some ****. The girl was part of a psywar outfit, dropping propaganda or whatever. Said that a couple other former classmates were commissioned all over the place, intelligence, psywar, recruitment. She was going to get based at some base we had in Japan, ****ing with the Chinese from five hundred miles away. And where do I end up?

“Bay of Bengal?”

Walter gave her a beady-eyed glare. “The Bay of motherfucking, goddamn, piece of ****, Bengal. Who the hell cares about the Bay of Bengal? Who knows where the **** the Bay of Bengal is? Too damn many people, if you ask me. The convoy we escorted out had ships in it from every damn place, and the escorts! The Japanese, the Indonesians, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, and I didn’t even know Sri Lanka existed before they decided to base this piece of **** tin can there. What was wrong with Tokyo? At least there was some nightlife there. And ****ing Malaysia.”

“What do you have against Malaysia?”

Walter glared at her for having the temerity to interrupt. “The flag is an eyesore. But then we get here, and I’m stuck sitting in the galley slaving away at all hours under a stupid motherfucker like Chief Zahren, worrying that some bored Chinese or Russian or Indian or Pakistani warship is going to see a piddly little cutter whirring away over here spying on them and sending our helos overhead to spy on them and generally being the biggest pain in the ass we can, and they’re going to toss a missile or a torpedo our way and I’m not even going to notice until we’re smacking into the bottom of the ocean. Makes me wish we were doing convoy duty. That wasn’t bad. Sure, the Chinese followed us and all, but they were just worried about making sure some pirate didn’t get stupid and cause a diplomatic incident that’d give us an excuse to send in the big guns.”

Walter trailed off into muttering, leaning down again to scrape away around the edges of the burned cheese lump of doom. It wasn’t like there was really anything important to do. Walter was assigned as night baker because he had ****ed off Chief Zahren again, and Banneker had the bad luck of being the seaman who got roped into helping him. Bad enough listening to him at any time, but at midnight it was even worse.

Banneker couldn’t stand the silence. Walter, reveling in his petty authority, had told her to clean out the oven, and she hated cleaning out the oven. Honestly, she hated working in the galley period, but as a seaman, she didn’t have any specialty that would save her from the scutwork, and they were always short of people who wanted the food service rate. She stood up. Again, and smiled hopefully at him.

“Well, I’m, glad we’re not helping escort convoys. Sounds boring to me. We’re going to get roped into this war before too long, and out here we get told the interesting stuff. Did you hear about the new rescue swimmer-pararescue jumper combination training? Chief Zahren says that they’re going to let women join up, if they can make it. Says I have a good chance of getting it.”

Walter snorted and gave her a disgusted look, leaning the heel of his hand against the edge of the griddle. “Why d’you want that ****? Why’d you put yourself in that situation? You can be a rescue swimmer and go sit on a cutter or fly out of one of the air stations just fine, and you don’t have to worry about getting shot or dealing with the fact that the Air Force doesn’t let women be pararescue. You’re just making your life hard when it doesn’t have to be. You could be nice and safe. Hell, you can strike the food service rating. You’ll be a petty officer in no time. Hell, I’ve only been in a year or so and I’m a petty officer first class. They’re desperate for people right now, so it’s easy as hell to get promoted.”

Banneker’s face twisted with disgust. The features of an exceptionally pretty young woman weren’t really meant for such masterful disdain, but she managed it with the underhanded dexterity she did everything—in this case, she had practiced in the mirror—“**** you, Kelly. My brother’s a Marine, our older brother is Army, and my oldest sister flies with the Air National Guard. I’d rather help them than be a coward like you. I volunteered to do this, because I knew it’d get me close to the action, and because I think that keeping our people out here in the Pacific safe from everything happening in India is important. If I can get even closer, and help even more? I’m going to take that opportunity. Not sit back here and hide in the galley like an old lady.”

Walter’s ears heated, and he just knew that his face looked like a tomato. Embarrassment lead to anger, and he stared back at Banneker with the petulant, barely concealed hate of a born bureaucrat. “Oh, bullshit. They have plenty of people more suited to be doing combat rescues than your skinny little ass.”

Banneker threw up her hands and turned her back on him, fuming under her breath. Even cleaning the oven was better than listening to his stupid bull. Walter turned back to his assault on the burned cheese lump of doom, but not before he gave her an appreciative glance. She might be eight years younger than him, but seeing her bent over to scrub away at the inside of the oven was not a sight you’d want to miss if you were dead, let alone a few years older.

​

***​

Walter was slumped back in his rack when his roommate, Petty Officer Mason, walked through the hatch, looking green enough to be cast as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Walter glanced over. “Still puking your guts out?”

“Shut up, Kelly.” Mason hoisted himself into his rack and lay back. “It’s not my fault I ran out of my pills. New medical officer back at Pedro refused to issue them. I said I got seasick, he said I was using too much, the bureaucracy won.”

“I still can’t believe you do this stuff for a living. And drove little itty bitty boats.”

“Yes, I did. Me, I can’t believe that you worked in customer service. You’re an asshole.”

Walter took this with surprising equanimity. Perhaps the fact that Mason could have broken him in half between two of his long, muscular fingers, or maybe just that the big man spent the five years since he originally left the Coast Guard working for the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had something to do with it. “I’m not an asshole. And working at a library is easy. If the customer bitches about a small fine, waive it. A big one, pass the buck. If they’re jackasses, pass the buck. If you can’t be bothered to deal with them—“

“Pass the buck?”

Walter grinned. “Yep.”

“You are an asshole, Kelly. The only reason you’re even halfway good at your job is because you can’t ‘pass the buck.’ Chief Zahren knows what you should be doing, and if you mess up he can come down on you like… something that comes down really hard.”

“Fine, okay. But you’ve been eating the product of my hard work, some of it, anyway, since we got shipped out here the first time. I cook good.”

“Yeah, and that’s the only reason you haven’t been fed to a shark. But if you keep ****ing off Banneker, you probably will end up that way, good cook or not.”

“Banneker? What does she have against me?”

Mason gave a groan and there was the thump of his head hitting the wall. Walter couldn’t tell if the groan was because his stomach was twisting especially uncomfortably, or if it was exasperation, but the head-pounding was definitely the second. Mason had beat his head against the wall at Walter’s astonishing depths of stupid jackassery so many times that it was probably dented. The wall, that is. Mason’s skull would need something harder than that. Like maybe a grenade.

“You’re a condescending prick. When she reported aboard, you asked her where she was from, and immediately said it was a hole. You asked her where she had graduated from, and when she said, ‘a high school in PG county,’ you said, ‘oh, I should have known you didn’t go to college.’ You then proceeded to tell her that you worked in PG county, ask her what high school, and tell her that it was an exceptionally terrible one. The fact that she agreed with you is irrelevant.”

Walter opened his mouth, “But I—” Mason bulled on, his powerful, level voice rolling right over Walter.

“You look at her like a slab of meat, and half the crew thinks you stalk her. Half the time whatever you say to her is so lecherous that if the brothers she’s always talking about heard you, they would gut you like a fish. Hell, you’re going to be lucky if she doesn’t cut off your dick and shove it down your throat before she tosses you to the sharks. Incidentally, these are all reasons why Zahren doesn’t really like you much, either. He just can’t call you on it because you’re somewhat subtle when he’s around and she’s too nice to lodge a complaint. So lay off.”

Mason couldn’t see him, so Walter indulged in some exaggerated gesticulations of rage, his face looking like a defiant fourth-grader being told off for running on the playground.

“And get that stupid expression off your face. It makes people want to punch you.”

​

***​

Walter was in the galley alone one day, getting ready to make some rolls when Chief Zahren walked in. The chief was an older man, tall and thin with graying blond hair, and very good at what he did, which was cook. He had taught high school physics for the last thirty years, and he was inordinately proud of that fact. Every time he managed to trap someone, he launched into one boring-ass story or another about the kids he taught. Somehow, maybe on summer vacation for all Walter knew, the old fart found time to attend a world-class culinary school, and, like a lot of the crew, he was prior service—some kind of Air Force special forces, supposedly.

Walter braced himself when he saw the man, expecting another long, rambling story about some kid he taught, delivered with melodramatic enthusiasm.

But Zahren seemed distracted, worried. He ignored Walter, grabbed a drink from the fridge, and sat in the mess just off the galley, swilling his vile Sri Lankan soda, a fruity-flavored purple thing that no one else could stand.

Zahren sat there for awhile, and eventually Walter moved from dreading a conversation to getting creeped out. He muttered to himself for awhile, and was finally so exasperated that he left the rolls to bake and went over to the older man.

“Chief, what’s happening? You seem a bit out of it.”

Zahren looked up from the spot on the bulkhead that had absorbed his attention, or at least occupied his eyes, for the last twenty minutes.

“Kelly,” he said. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

Walter’s face went flat. “Chief, if you’ll remember, someone assigned me morale officer. Your morale’s looking kinda questionable. So give.”

It wasn’t a question. Zahren looked up at him levelly and stood. Zahren wasn’t as tall as Mason, but at about 6’3” he had four inches on Walter, enough to be intimidating. Maybe it’d’ve worked better if he didn’t still have his bottle of unappetizing purple stuff in his right hand.

“I don’t like your tone, Petty Officer.” Walter was suddenly having disturbingly vivid flashbacks to his fourth-grade teacher. He’d never liked the man. Always clashing over something stupid. And he could just feel that dealing-with-a-stupid-adult expression crossing his face. The one that Mason said was going to get him beat to death with a comically oversized gardening implement one of these days.

Walter stepped back from Zahren, glanced down at the other man’s hands. The right had a white-knuckle grip on the bottle of soda, the left was balled in a fist. “I apologize for my tone, Chief. But if there’s something going on that could affect the crew’s morale adversely… especially your morale. It’s a problem for the mission. There’s just us out here for the next day and a half. Brooding in the galley when I’m pretty sure you’re on watch is a bad sign.”

“Your concerns are noted, Petty Officer. Get back to work.”

Zahren glared at him until Walter turned back to his work. Then he tilted back his head and finished his soda, tossing it in the recycling bin as he went out the door. Walter kept his eyes on what he was doing.