Sweet Reason Read Online Free

paper clotting the blood on a shaving nick, J. P. Horatio Jones looked like a figment of his own military imagination.
    “Now the Captain is on the bridge,” Tevepaugh yelled into the ship’s loud speaker system.
    For an instant Jones stood on the threshold of the pilot house savoring the moment. For thirty years he had dreamed of commanding a ship. Now the dream had come true. Jones pressed his eyes shut and saw himself standing next to the helm of a full-rigged fifty-gun ship-o’-the-line, saw himself casting an experienced eye on the trim of the sails, saw himself demanding a slight alteration in the mizzen topgallant staysail from the XO, who barked at Lustig, who put a megaphone to his lips and sent the half-naked seamen scurrying up the halyards.
    It was the XO who snapped the Captain out of his reverie. “Six minutes twenty seconds,” he said, punching a stopwatch when the Officer of the Deck slammed the inboard door to the pilot house and drove home the teeth with a whirl of the wheel. “Not bad, Skipper.” Holding his stopwatch and smiling broadly, the XO could have passed for an astronaut — clean-cut, crew-cut and crisp. He was wearing work khakis now, but in his starched white uniform he looked like a sail waiting to see which way the wind would blow.
    “Not bad,” the Captain agreed.
    “Not bad at all,” Lustig chimed in from the other side of the open bridge where he had taken up his general quarters post as gunnery officer. (“You could have timed this with a calendar,” he came up with later.)
    Suddenly there was a loud knock on the bulkhead door leading from the inboard ladder to the pilot house.
    “My god, what in Christ’s name is that?” asked the XO.
    “It would appear, XO, that the ship is not cleared foraction after all,” the Captain said dryly. “I suggest that somebody open it.”
    Tevepaugh, who was the messenger of the watch during general quarters also, sprang to the door and spun the wheel, disengaging the teeth from the bulkhead. Then he pulled open the heavy door.
    In stumbled Wally (The Shrink) Wallowitch. He was dressed in cowboy boots, skivvy shorts and a tennis sweater and wore a sword strapped to his waist. Mumbling about how it was “impossible to get any sleep in this hotel,” Wallowitch made his way past the Captain and climbed up to his battle station in the main director.
    Wallowitch’s Curriculum Vitae
    “I swear to God I thought she said ‘pecker,’ ” exclaimed the Shrink, whose nickname came, albeit illogically, from the fact that almost anytime he wasn’t on watch he could be found stretched out on the wardroom couch.
    “Bullshit,” said the Poet.
    “No, no, I swear, really. Listen, it was a natural mistake. There we were on the back porch of the sorority house. Sort of cuddling together to keep warm, right? And she, being a political science major, is holding forth on the single most important thing that Capitalism and Communism have in common. ‘They both have a pecker order,’ says she. Well, I naturally thought it was one of those newfangled sexual theories, but just to make sure I says ‘pecker as in prick?’ ‘Not pecker,’ she says, red in the face, ‘p-e-c-k-i-n-g order.’ Like I said, it was a natural mistake. And anyhow, it broke the ice.”

    The Poet laughed appreciatively. “Shrink, you are a man without a conscience.”
    Wallowitch flailed his arms over his head. “Conscience is crap,” he said excitedly. “You know what Mencken said about conscience. Conscience is that little old inner voice that warns you somebody is looking. Only me, I give ’em something to look at.” Here Wallowitch went into the spastic routine that he swore almost got him out of NROTC — bending his wrists back as far as they would go to make it look as if his hands were deformed, craning his neck, twitching one ear, letting his lower lip hang slack until saliva ran down his chin.
    Stretched out on the wardroom couch, his cowboy boots propped up