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the harbor and ocean-going tugs with towing screws to envy.
    When the luck was thin, like ice in the knitted wool of a watch cap, the lousy cutter Able , of New Bedford, might be working alongside. Able was the broken strand in the hawser, the frail anchor line in the web of competence reaching from Argentia to Block Island. It was the ship that could not do, would not do, and which no one trusted. Able was sloppy and unhappy, perpetually changing officers and crew in a hopeless search for the combination that would make it a going concern.
    In later years, forming one more grand theory of ships, Lamp would claim that when Able 's keel was laid the wives of seamen wept. "Boy, boys ... I be double-dog-damn." According to Lamp, Abner was lucky, Adrian was well sinewed, and Able was jinxed.
    "You got it made, chummy," Glass insisted. "You coulda been sent to Able . It's a sub."
    "It's the navy has the submarines," Brace said wisely into his fourth fresh glass of beer.
    "He means," said Howard, "that every time you see it you're surprised it's still afloat."
    "I seen that thing in dry dock," Glass said. "It rusted the dry dock."
    When you are young, experience seems to be a silk dragon or a cleverly stitched tiger on the sleeve of your tailormades. The ancient, ever-moving and murmuring sea pops small waves onto the beach through the summer calm. At Portland Head, the lighthouse is glazed cake-frosted white with sun, like a building from the Med plucked by Greek gods and transported.
    Brace's instincts were sometimes good about the decks of a vessel on repair status, but they were lacking in other ways. He saw the sea and told Glass of a summer visit he had once made to Lake Michigan. Brace was not going to sea, and he was not going ashore with much success. The crew knew that repair status was more than luxury, it was luck. Brace was missing a bandstand opportunity.
    The crew was woman-needful and brash. The men toured the bars, breathing the cool, stale beer smell of the bar that was as much their familiar as the sea. They engaged in territorial movement, like eager dogs wetting boundaries around hydrants. The crew was wary of foreign ships, of fancy and gorgeous uniforms that captured the entranced attention of the only women they knew.
    "I hear your queen's got bow legs."
    "Mate, you can't say that about our queen."
    "There's this about your queen ... ."
    The fight, often joyous, with split lips and broken teeth.
    "Honest, judge ... "
    "It was double jeopardy," Glass said. "I studied this."
    "You missed one Holy Roller of a fight," Howard told Brace. "You miss just about everything, kid."
    Each night Dane sat in a booth in the aft end of the bar, cool in khaki among the white uniforms or optional blue uniforms of his deck gang. Dane with his shack job, Florence, or "Flossy," drinking beer after beer as he spoke easily and with humor to the not unattractive, spoiled woman who drove expensive automobiles and enjoyed slumming. Outdrinking his deck gang, Dane seemed to be saying, was just one more boring part of his job.
    "He won't leave us alone," Bruce said. "Even ashore."
    "He leaves me alone."
    "You can always go to another bar."
    "I got drunk once, really drunk," Brace said with deep and awful meaning. "If he keeps it up, I'm going to do it again."
    Seaman Glass, recognizing a statement of experience that yeoman Howard at first missed, pursued the matter during the shore-going, and hot, and too short summer.
    "He's deep," Glass told Lamp.
    Lamp tsked to Amon. Amon's flat, Hawaiian face, which was principally Japanese, became studious in that way that happened when Lamp talked of mysteries. Amon may have thought Lamp in touch with old gods, or with living dragons wise with centuries; or, lighted by his name, thought him the one glow of sanity in Amon's otherwise closeted and lonely life. Amon, with an unease not otherwise known in New England, refused to wrestle with the source of revelation. He went to Howard instead.
    "Brace