Joyride on a Pusher Boat

My daughter is having problems with pigs.  Not the human variety; her husband is quite a sterling fellow.  Feral hogs are rooting up her lawn.  I suggested a website where aboriginals come to your place and hunt down the juggernaut piggy with trained Dingos, spears, bows and arrows.

In payment for their services, they conduct a spiritual luau in your backyard, eating vast quantities of spit-roasted hog meat; while treating the Dingos by tossing them the hooves, snout, ears and other unmentionable parts of the carcass.  This ceremony has the intended purpose of appeasing the spirit of the slaughtered animal, so that its ghost will not return and hunt you down.  It is your homestead that the beast attacked, is it not?

Having gorged themselves, they polish off the festivities with singing to the complement of their tubular winded instruments. The music excites them to a ground-stomping hunt dance around the pit they dug in your yard for the cookout.

As the cock crows, they pile their untethered wild-tame dogs back on the flatbed truck, to take the leftovers home to their families.  Off they ride into the orange glow of dawn, singing some harmonious refrain in their aboriginal sing-song gibberish.

Day’s work done!

The homeowner is left with the onus of re-turfing a 1000 square foot plot of ruined lawn.  I would suggest seeding the area with Winter Rye.  It germinates and grows to a green lush in short order.  It is cheap and the homeowner won’t be too upset when the farrowed offspring of the slain boar come forward en masse to repeat the mischief of their progenitor.

I myself have a feral hog of sorts.  Naturally, I refer to Goofy, my 40 lb. Standard Dachshund.  While I vacate the night-night for my 4:00 AM pee, he takes the opportunity in my absence to root, furrow and burrow the bedclothes (I have GOT to take him and Sticky for a pedicure!). 

When I return from my necessary, the messy mess awaits me with the Goof in his signature position of tummy-face-up, groaning his pleasure at his handiwork and wagging his tail in ecstatic triumph.

He is also reclining on my pillow.  I grunt and shove his rotundness over onto his side of the bed; then make a feeble attempt to bring order to the chaos.  Failing that, I once again resign myself to an earlier-than-civilized beginning of the new day.

Three…two…One…and we’re back. 

Sitting here at the keyboard, squinting at the monitor; crassly ordering my muse to keep his fucking shirt on while the rest of me comes to full alert, to gets meself on with the monologue for today.

(That was one really really really long sentence fragment, huh, Spellcheck?  Yet another ‘ignore once’ and shove it down your gaping matrix, you little binary shit!  Or is it binary bitch? Do Billy and the boys think of their lugubrious handiwork as boys or girls? And how was it for you, Mr. Perkins?  Turning in your grave, are you?  Good.  The running desecration of ‘proper’ grammar goes on.  I am so loving it! )

The ‘fall’ monsoon season persisted for three long months.  That is a dreadful oxymoron: all minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months were intolerably long in-country.

 The only brevity or suspension of time was the stepchild of drugs and alcohol.  During the press of incessant rain, sober time was exacerbated and more monotonous than usual; as if there is a statistical norm for monotony.  Unfortunately, Duty gives no rain checks for the weather.  Wet or dry, the work went on.

One night, Earl and I decided it would be a hoot to go out on a pusher boat call.  What these boats did was to lash their bows to the bow of a ship.  At a signal from the Boats driving the tugboat, the pusher would go full throttle forward while the tug brought the stern to dock.

A tug working alone could accomplish the same maneuver; it just took three times as long to do it and increased the risk of damage tenfold to the ship and dock.

Even as we shoved off, this night had the feel of one of those tenfold risks of danger.  In pitch black (no running lights permitted) Frank guided his boat towards the rendezvous with YTD-76, one of the newer electric tugs, captained by Maloney.

Our coxswain was Frank.  He was a poster child image of the all-American boy.  Natural platinum blond hair neatly trimmed, immaculate fatigues when on duty, deft at the helm, quick to volunteer: the boatswains’ mates loved him.  For some of them…that endearment was literal.

Maloney was another favorite of Division, of both the boss men and the yes men.  The youngest sailor to achieve First Class in I Corps, He was looking to cop his Chief’s hat in record time.  High spirited on and off duty, he could be seen on occasion water skiing behind his own tug.  Out of sight of the causeway, of course.

Teaming Frank and Maloney for this particular midnight job was no random selection.  The Whiskey Oscar at Tug Control had ordered them out to dock a bullet boat, chock full in the holds with every conceivable type of ordinance; all on its way to blow up Charlie somewhere.  No one wanted the kind of docking error that would result in blowing up Deep Water Piers.

To add to the excitement, a monsoon was boiling up in the harbor.  This was why your blonde headed hero and Earl the Pearl had wanted to tag along.  Out on the water, the swells were fifteen to eighteen feet.

Any seasoned maritime vet is already feeling the sensation of riding out those enormous swells with the heaving deck below his feet.  Imagine if you will; what it would feel like, if you were suddenly elevated to the height of a two story house, and dropped just as suddenly back to ground level.  It sort of feels like riding a rubber ducky in white water.

That was my thought as I slumped against the below-deck bow of Frank’s boat, in my usual hallucinatory stupor.   Did you think the Pearl and I would take this joyride in sobriety?  Not a chance.  We were out there, being pitched around—like a rubber ducky—in the middle of a howling storm because we wanted the thrill of a roller coaster ride for free.

We were getting one, too.  As Frank nosed his bow to touch the bullet boat’s high-rise bow, there was a thump and a jolt which jerked me from my revelry.  All the pusher boats had dim lighting down in the hold; this apparently did not violate the running light prohibition.  I looked around and spotted Earl with one of his shit-eating grins that signified his pleasure at risking his life for nothing more than a giggle.

I squinted in the nightlight gloom and focused on another passenger down there.  This guy was holding the reefer door shut with his head.  He was lying on his back, unconscious; and crossways to the forward deck against the crew’s tiny refrigerator.  At least, I mused, the beer isn’t spilling out and being shaken into a pressurized foam bomb.

Of this third man: he wasn’t crew, he wasn’t part of our party of two; shit,  I don’t remember seeing him assigned to the Division.  WTF?!  Oh well, I reasoned; he isn’t any more of a trespasser than me and the Pearl.  He can just es’plain hisself when we get back to the causeway.

With that, I succumbed to the swirl of the sea and the swirl in my head; I conked out and did not come to until Frank shook me vigorously (I would have said rudely, but I was on his fricking boat after all) telling me to go topside; they wanted to get back to sleep.

Earl and the stowaway had vanished.  I never did learn anything about him.  Like so many recollections before my mind’s eye, this was one more face without a name to match.

The names on the Black Wall are mostly faceless to me.  Not so, for their progeny and the loved ones who long vainly for one more look…