1919 (8 page)

Joe went below to clean up the cabin. He'd just kid 'em along, he was thinking. He'd oughtn't to have a rough time with girls and all that now that he was going to marry Della. He heard the sound of the oars and went out on deck. A fogbank was coming in from the sea. There was Hart and his two girls under the stern. They tripped and giggled and fell hard against him when he helped 'em over the side.
They'd brought some liquor and a couple of pounds of hamburger and some crackers. They weren't much for looks but they were pretty good sorts with big firm arms and shoulders and they sure could drink liquor. Joe'd never seen girls like that before. They were sports all right. They had four quarts of liquor between 'em and drank it in tumblers.

The other two barges were sounding their claxons every two minutes, but Joe forgot all about his. The fog was white like canvas nailed across the cabin ports. They played strip poker but they didn't get very far with it. Him and Hart changed girls three times that night. The girls were cookoo, they never seemed to have enough, but round twelve the girls were darned decent, they cooked up the hamburger and served up a lunch and ate all old man Gaskin's bread and butter.

Then Hart passed out and the girls began to get worried about getting home on account of the fog and everything. All of 'em laughing like loons they hauled Hart up on deck and poured a bucket of water on him. That Maine water was so cold that he came to like sixty sore as a pup and wanting to fight Joe. The girls quieted him down and got him into the boat and they went off into the fog singing
Tipperary.

Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with 'em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn't be a plaster saint for anybody. He was feeling fine, he wished he had something more to do than spin that damn claxon.

Old man Gaskin came on board about day. Joe could see he'd gotten wind of something because after that he never would speak to him except to give orders and wouldn't let his boy speak to him; so that when they'd unloaded the granite blocks in East New York, Joe asked for his pay and said he was through. Old man Gaskin growled out it was a good riddance and that he wouldn't have no boozin' and whorin' on his barge. So there was Joe with fortyfive dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house.

After he'd been a couple of days reading want ads and going around Brooklyn looking for a job he got sick. He went to a sawbones an oldtimer at the boarding house told him about. The doc who was a little kike with a goatee told him it was the gonawria and he'd have to come every afternoon for treatment. He said he'd guarantee to cure him up for fifty dollars, half payable in advance, and that he'd advise
him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and that would cost him fifteen dollars. Joe paid down the twentyfive but said he'd think about the test. He had a treatment and went out onto the street. The doc had told him to be sure to walk as little as possible, but he couldn't seem to go home to the stinking boardinghouse and wandered aimlessly round the clattering Brooklyn streets. It was a hot afternoon. The sweat was pouring off him as he walked. If you catch it right the first day or two it ain't so bad, he kept saying to himself. He came out on a bridge under the elevated; must be Brooklyn Bridge.

It was cooler walking across the bridge. Through the spider-webbing of cables, the shipping and the pack of tall buildings were black against the sparkle of the harbor. Joe sat down on a bench at the first pier and stretched his legs out in front of him. Here he'd gone to work and caught a dose. He felt terrible and how was he going to write Del now; and his board to pay, and a job to get and these damn treatments to take. Jesus, he felt lousy.

A kid came by with an evening paper. He bought a
Journal
and sat with the paper on his lap looking at the headlines:
RUSH MORE TROOPS TO MEX BORDER
. What the hell could he do? He couldn't even join the national guard and go to Mexico; they wouldn't take you if you were sick and even if they did it would be the goddam navy all over again. He sat reading the want ads, the ads about adding to your income with two hours' agreeable work at home evenings, the ads of Pelmanism and correspondence courses. What the hell could he do? He sat there until it was dark. Then he took a car to Atlantic Avenue and went up four flights to the room where he had a cot under the window and turned in.

That night a big thundersquall came up. There was a lot of thunder and lightning damned close. Joe lay flat on his back watching the lightning so bright it dimmed the streetlights flicker on the ceiling. The springs rattled every time the guy in the other cot turned in his sleep. It began to rain in, but Joe felt so weak and sick it was a long time before he had the gumption to sit up and pull down the window.

In the morning the landlady, who was a big raw-boned Swedish woman with wisps of flaxen hair down over her bony face, started bawling him out about the bed's being wet. “I can't help it if it rains, can I?” he grumbled, looking at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over him that she was kidding him and they both laughed.

She was a swell woman, her name was Mrs. Olsen and she'd raised
six children, three boys who'd grown up and gone to sea, a girl who was a school teacher in St. Paul and a pair of girl twins about seven or eight who were always getting into mischief. “Yust one year more and I send them to Olga in Milwaukee. I know sailormen.” Pop Olsen had been on the beach somewhere in the South Seas for years. “Yust as well he stay there. In Brooklyn he been always in de lockup. Every week cost me money to get him outa yail.”

Joe got to helping her round the house with the cleaning and did odd painting and carpentering jobs for her. After his money ran out she let him stay on and even lent him twentyfive bucks to pay the doctor when he told her about being sick. She slapped him on the back when he thanked her; “Every boy I ever lend money to, he turn out yust one big bum,” she said and laughed. She was a swell woman.

It was nasty sleety winter weather. Mornings Joe sat in the steamy kitchen studying a course in navigation he'd started getting from the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Afternoons he fidgeted in the dingy doctor's office that smelt of carbolic, waiting for his turn for treatment, looking through frayed copies of the
National Geographic
for 1909. It was a glum looking bunch waited in there. Nobody ever said anything much to anybody else. A couple of times he met guys on the street he'd talked with a little waiting in there, but they always walked right past him as if they didn't see him. Evenings he sometimes went over to Manhattan and played checkers at the Seamen's Institute or hung around the Seaman's Union getting the dope on ships he might get a berth on when the doc dried him up. It was a bum time except that Mrs. Olsen was darn good to him and he got fonder of her than he'd ever been of his own mother.

The darn kike sawbones tried to hold him up for another twenty-five bucks to complete the cure but Joe said to hell with it and shipped as an A.B. on a brandnew Standard Oil tanker, the
Montana
, bound light for Tampico and then out east, some of the boys said, to Aden and others said to Bombay. He was sick of the cold and the sleet and the grimy Brooklyn streets and the logarithm tables in the course on navigation he couldn't get through his head and Mrs. Olsen's bullying jollying voice; she was beginning to act like she wanted to run his life for him. She was a swell woman but it was about time he got the hell out.

The
Montana
rounded Sandy Hook in a spiteful lashing snowstorm out of the northwest, but three days later they were in the Gulf
Stream south of Hatteras rolling in a long swell with all the crew's denims and shirts drying on lines rigged from the shrouds. It was good to be on blue water again.

Tampico was a hell of a place; they said that mescal made you crazy if you drank too much of it; there were big dance halls full of greasers dancing with their hats on and with guns on their hips, and bands and mechanical pianos going full tilt in every bar, and fights and drunk Texans from the oilwells. The doors of all the cribhouses were open so that you could see the bed with white pillows and the picture of the Virgin over it and the lamps with fancy shades and the colored paper trimming; the broadfaced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But everything was so damned high that they spent up all their jack first thing and had to go back on board before it was hardly midnight. And the mosquitoes got into the focastle and the sandflies about day and it was hot and nobody could sleep.

When the tanks had been pumped full the
Montana
went out into the Gulf of Mexico into a norther with the decks awash and the spray lashing the bridge. They hadn't been out two hours before they'd lost a man overboard off the monkeywalk and a boy named Higgins had had his foot smashed lashing the starboard anchor that had broken loose. It made 'em pretty sore down in the focastle that the skipper wouldn't lower a boat, though the older men said that no boat could have lived in a sea like that. As it was the skipper cruised in a wide curve and took a couple of seas on his beam that like to stove in the steel decks.

Nothing much else happened on that trip except that one night when Joe was at the wheel and the ship was dead quiet except for the irregular rustle of broken water as she ploughed through the long flat seas eastward, he suddenly smelt roses or honeysuckle maybe. The sky was blue as a bowl of curdled milk with a waned scrap of moon bobbing up from time to time. It was honeysuckle, sure enough, and manured garden patches and moist foliage like walking past the open door of a florist's in winter. It made him feel soft and funny inside like he had a girl standing right beside him on the bridge, like he had Del there with her hair all smelly with some kind of perfume. Funny, the smell of dark, girls' hair. He took down the binoculars but he couldn't see anything on the horizon only the curdled scud drifting west in the faint moonlight. He found he was losing his course, good thing the mate hadn't picked out that moment to look aft at the wake. He got
her back to E.N.E. by ½E. When his trick was over and he rolled into his bunk he lay awake a long time thinking of Del. God, he wanted money and a good job and a girl of his own instead of all these damn floosies when you got into port. What he ought to do was go down to Norfolk and settle down and get married.

Next day about noon they sighted the grey sugarloaf of Pico with a band of white clouds just under the peak and Fayal blue and irregular to the north. They passed between the two islands. The sea got very blue; it smelled like the country lanes outside of Washington when there was honeysuckle and laurel blooming in the runs. The bluegreen yellowgreen patchwork fields covered the steep hills like an oldfashioned quilt. That night they raised other islands to the eastward.

Five days of a heavy groundswell and they were in the Straits of Gibraltar. Eight days of dirty sea and chilly driving rain and they were off the Egyptian coast, a warm sunny morning, going into the port of Alexandria under one bell while the band of yellow mist ahead thickened up into masts, wharves, buildings, palmtrees. The streets smelt like a garbage pail, they drank arrack in bars run by Greeks who'd been in America and paid a dollar apiece to see three Jewishlooking girls dance a belly dance naked in a back room. In Alexandria they saw their first camouflaged ships, three British scoutcruisers striped like zebras and a transport all painted up with blue and green watermarkings. When they saw them, all the watch on deck lined up along the rail and laughed like they'd split.

When he got paid off in New York a month later it made him feel pretty good to go to Mrs. Olsen and pay her back what he owed her. She had another youngster staying with her at the boarding house, a towheaded Swede who didn't know any English, so she didn't pay much attention to Joe. He hung around the kitchen a little while and asked her how things were and told her about the bunch on the
Montana
, then he went over to the Penn Station to see when he could catch a train to Washington. He sat dozing in the smoker of the daycoach half the night thinking of Georgetown and when he'd been a kid at school and the bunch in the poolroom on 4½ Street and trips on the river with Alec and Janey.

It was a bright wintry sunny morning when he piled out at the Union Station. He couldn't seem to make up his mind to go over to Georgetown to see the folks. He loafed around the Union Station, got
a shave and a shine and a cup of coffee, read the Washington
Post
, counted his money; he still had more'n fifty iron men, quite a roll of lettuce for a guy like him. Then he guessed he'd wait and see Janey first, he'd wait around and maybe he'd catch her coming out from where she worked at noon. He walked around the Capitol Grounds and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. On the Avenue he saw the same enlistment booth where he'd enlisted for the navy. Kinder gave him the creeps. He went and sat in the winter sunlight in Lafayette Square, looking at the little dressed up kids playing and the nursemaids and the fat starlings hopping round the grass and the statue of Andrew Jackson, until he thought it was time to go catch Janey. His heart was beating so he could hardly see straight. It must have been later than he thought because none of the girls coming out of the elevator was her, though he waited about an hour in the vestibule of the Riggs Building until some lousy dick or other came up to him and asked him what the hell we was loitering around for.

So Joe had to go over to Georgetown after all to find out where Janey was. Mommer was in and his kid sisters and they were all talking about how they were going to have the house remodeled with the ten thousand dollars from the Old Man's insurance and they wanted him to go up to Oak Hill to see the grave, but Joe said what was the use and got away as soon as he could. They asked all kinds of questions about how he was getting on and he didn't know what the hell to tell 'em. They told him where Janey lived but they didn't know when she got out of her office.