The Curse of the Aurora
Chapter One
The brakes squealed and the front of the old dilapidated jeep pulled to the right and skidded to a stop next to the curb. The driver and his passenger sat in the jeep for two, maybe three minutes and stared in silence at the worst looking excuse for a ship either had ever laid eyes to. "Well, Wheels," the driver said, pausing to spit a wad of tobacco juice out of the open left side of the jeep. "That's your new home. Pretty, ain't she?"
The Aurora sat low in the water, moored port side to pier 21, an isolated area of the sprawling shipyard, not normally used for ship repair due mainly to its distance from the necessary shops clustered together at the opposite end of the yard. This out-of-the-way area of the Coast Guard Repair Base, Curtis Bay, Maryland, was commonly referred to by the yard community as the graveyard because ships that had been decommissioned or laid up for storage were kept here to await their fate.
The passenger sat straight up in his seat and exhaled a low whistle. His eyes roamed the length of the ship from bow to stern. He stretched his neck for a better look, then shook his head and closed his eyes tight as if this gesture in some way would improve the sight when he opened them. But luck was not on his side and if anything, the scene was worse. The great expectation he felt when he received his orders assigning him to the Aurora for duty, drained from him and left him with a tremendous sense of foreboding. He had in the past seen ships in the yard for repair, but he could not dredge up a mental picture that resembled the likes of what was now before him.
She looked as though she had been beat, banged, bruised, scraped, gouged, and generally mistreated until she resembled a garbage scow, rather than a proud ship of the United States Coast Guard. Her once white hull and superstructure was now dingy gray, and covered in great and small splotches of orange-colored red lead and yellow chromate preservative, the color of egg yolks. The varnished sign with her name in gold leaf had come loose from its perch at the top of the gangway and hung straight down, secured by a chain at one end. The barrel of the three-inch gun on her foredeck was being used as a clothesline to dry someone's laundry, and was almost hidden from sight. The sailors who moved slowly about her decks resembled zombies. He looked aloft at the tattered Coast Guard Ensign hanging limp in the hot, humid air at the top of the mainmast to assure himself that the vessel actually belonged to the United States Government and not some down and out foreign country.
Eddie Markel slumped back in his seat as if resisting any effort to make him take the final fatal step toward the ship. "Lord," he said, "I've never in all my life seen anything like that. Man, I just came off the Campbell. You could eat off her decks. From the looks of this scow, I don't think I'd even want to eat in her mess deck. What the hell happened? How in the name of God did she get in that shape?"
The driver wrinkled his nose and shifted the chaw to his other jaw. "Weather."
"Weather?" Markel said. "How did weather do that?"
"Yep," the driver said. "They had her ready to paint a couple of times when we got a solid week of rain. Now she's due to sail and looks like she has some sort of disease. Also had a problem keepin' her crew out of the local jail and the brig. The Base C.O. finally had her towed over here and restricted the whole bunch. That's the only damn way he could keep 'em straight."
Markel shook his head and blinked. "Man, you're not tellin' me they're gonna take a thing that looks that bad to sea. They aren't really gonna' let anyone outside the yard see her in that condition."
The driver scratched his head and spit another wad of tobacco juice. "As I said, she's due to sail Monday. No damn way they can get her painted by then, and there's no damn way the old man's going to let 'em stay one minute longer than her schedule. He wants that ship out of his yard. Heard him say so myself. I was his driver the last time he chewed her skipper's ass out for not keepin' a tight hold on his crew. I've been stationed in the yard for three years, and they're the wildest bunch I've even seen. Hell, man, two of 'em stole the old man's barge, took the damn thing over to the yacht club, and tried to trade it for a load of beer. He damn near stroked out when the yacht master called and told him."
Markel reached into his jumper pocket for a cigarette, snapped his lighter to the end and blew smoke out of both nostrils, dragon fashion before he spoke. "Lord! Lord! What have I got myself into?" He paused and took another long drag on the cigarette. He started to speak but then withdrew into his own thoughts. He had just come off the pride of the fleet to serve aboard the Aurora. When he told the assignments yeoman he wanted to be stationed in the south, he was thinking of white beaches, cool breezes and scantly clad girls, but not at this price. Markel had just completed a six-year tour of duty in the Third District, sailing out of New York. He was fed up with the cold country and the wild North Atlantic and longed for warm weather and calm seas, but now that he had his first look at his new home, he wondered if he had not made the biggest mistake of his career. He, in fact, wished that he could ease on back up to New York and tell the personnel people that he had changed his mind.
|