Algren at Sea (60 page)

Smith began that slow rotation of his skull which betokened inner agitation.

“I left the joint early one night—about twelve—and left Gracie in charge. It was breaking daylight when she came in. I was in bed. She put eighty-five bucks on the dresser. Then she took off her slipper and put two c-notes on top of the eighty-five.

“‘Where're
they
from?' I asked her.

“‘A new trick,' she told me.

“‘I didn't notice him—he must have come in after I left,' I told her.

“‘No, he was there when you left. The Bosun's Mate,' she told me.

“‘
Him?'
I asked her. ‘
Him?
Where would
he
get two bills to blow so free and easy?'

“‘I don't know, Daddy,' she told me, ‘but the man is ready to beat.'

“‘You don't know where the money is from but you think the man is ready to beat?' I tried her.

“‘Not if
you
don't think so, Daddy,' she told me, coming into bed.

“I let her go to sleep. I didn't mind beating a Bosun's Mate but I didn't want to undertake whipping the American navy. What if it were ship's funds the man was spending?

“‘I don't want you to rap to that new trick,' I told Gracie the first thing in the morning. ‘Don't even say “hello.”

“‘Whatever you say, Daddy,' she agreed.

“Things never start the way you think they're going to. Gracie shook
the Bosun's Mate off, wouldn't even drink with him, and he left without a beef. After he left I relaxed because, what I hadn't told Gracie, the reason I was scared of the man wasn't that he might be a thief so much as I was afraid he
might
be law. I was sitting there with a couple old-time hookers, thinking about this move to myself, when one of the hookers says, of a sudden, ‘All I want to do is get married.' ‘What in God's name you hangin' around
here
for then?' I asked her. ‘To give the joint a little class,' she answered me. ‘You wouldn't add class to a geek-show,' I let her know, ‘every time you come in that door the joint is brought down.' ‘In that event I'll leave,' she jumps salty. ‘'N don't come back'—I threw that in just to speed her on her way and she stops dead at the door—‘Just for that last crack,' she tells me. ‘I am coming back.' ‘We'll wait,' I let her know, not worrying about a thing.

“It wasn't half an hour before the door flies open and in comes a flying wedge of so many seamen I thought the S.S.
Idaho
must be in port—at least forty of them lined up at the bar and here comes the Bosun's Mate—250 pounds of him in new whites acting like he never been in the joint before.

“‘Who's the head-pimp here?' he wants to know, coming directly to me to put that question.

“‘I am,' I told him, ‘you looking for work?'—and he slugged me so fast I went ass over teakettle and landed against the bar.

“‘And now,' he tells me while I'm still sitting there trying to clear my head, ‘we're going to wreck this joint.'

“‘Let me lock the door,' I asked him, ‘and we'll help you wreck it.'

“I made it through that mob of sailors to the door, even though my head was still swinging from that sock he give me. I got the door locked. Then
we
went to work.

“I wrapped myself around one of the Bosun's arms, the drummer got the other, and the sissy rapped him with the gearshift-cover. The man didn't even shake. ‘I'll kill you a hundred times!' the sissy hollered, and rapped him again. He shook, but didn't go down. ‘Give
me
that thing,' I told the sissy, and I brought that rubber down flat on the man's skull. But he didn't go down.

“‘Let
me
try,' the drummer asked, and I handed the rubber to the drummer. He tried it from the back on the very point of the man's skull. That worked better. The man went down.

“But he got right up.

“‘Get Bull,' I told the sissy.

“Bull came out in his high collar and tie, grasped the situation and made a sign for us to step aside. Bull backed up a few feet, then came on skull first right into the Bosun's middle. The man made a sound like
Wuffooooof
and went down doubled up. Then we went to work on the others.

“By the time the shore patrol got there we had fifteen sailors laid out. The rest had fled. The Bosun's Mate had come to, but all he could do was sit in the middle of the floor and hold his middle.

The next day the navy hung an OFF LIMITS sign on us. I was as good as out of business. I went to see the Commandant.

“‘Sir,' I told him, ‘I've served my country's armed forces too.'

“‘What has that got to do with it?' he asked me.

“‘Sir,' I tried another tack, ‘I realize we hospitalized one or two of your men.'

“‘Six of them are still in traction,' he told me, but I think he was exaggerating.”

Danielsen came in wearing that lonesome smile; without saying what he had in mind in coming down to the crew's lounge.

“No game tonight,” Smith told him, “the guys aren't taking another draw until we hit Calcutta.”

Then, since Danielsen merely stood there smiling wanly, Smith concluded his wandering tale.

“I was shut down for twenty-three days. Gracie had to start working out of a joint called
The Club Gayety.
I went to see the Commandant every day. ‘I'm sorry as can be, sir,' I'd tell him, ‘that we put your men in traction. But, in a manner of speaking, sir, you have
me
in traction too. I can't move either.'

“‘In that case we'll take you out of traction when my men get out,' he told me.

“‘But that may be weeks,' I beefed.

“‘Might be months,' he told me.

“‘I'll be out of business by that time, sir,' I told him.

“‘Your old lady will help make ends meet,' he tells me just like that.

“‘Can we leave her out of this, sir?' I asked him.

“‘Well,' he tells me, sitting back comfortably in his big navy chair, ‘you
are
a pimp, aren't you, Smith?'

“‘I'm not sure what you mean by that, sir,' I told him, staying cool as possible. “‘I run a bar where seamen come looking for women and I don't stand in the way of their wishes, that's all.'”

Smith glanced at Danielsen to see whether the man had decided what he wanted; but all Danielsen did was to smile remotely.

“You see,” Smith addressed himself once more to me, “I realized that what the man was doing was trying to provoke me. He was being straight-on insulting so I'd flip and try to slug him, only I didn't flip. I set myself to let anything he said roll off me.

“‘O,' he tells me, ‘I
beg
your pardon—I thought one of them redheaded whores was your wife.'

“That
almost
did it—but not quite. I felt my throat go dry and felt my face burning. But I gave him a kindly smile all the same.

“‘Sir,' I asked him, gentle-like, ‘has it ever occurred to you that anyone of us
might
have been the Christ Child?'

“He lost color because he hadn't expected me to turn sweet on him. Then he started getting red. I saw it was the moment to reach him.

“‘I'm afraid my wife will leave me if we don't get the place open soon, sir,' I told him—and got out of there fast.

The next day the shore patrol came by in a jeep, took down the OFF LIMITS sign, gave me a paper to sign releasing the navy from any legal responsibility, and wheeled away.”

“You and Gracie must have had a ball
that
night,” I surmised.

“It wasn't merely a ball,” Smith assured me—“it was a
celebration
—only Gracie wasn't there.”

“Gracie wasn't there?” I asked, with the uneasy feeling I've been had again.

“O no,” Smith assured me lightly, “she took off with the Bosun's Mate. Like I told you—never let a woman get so worldly-wise that she loses her leadership. Always remember that you can always treat a woman too good—but you can never treat one too bad.”

“Look, Smith,” I had to protest, “you got a boil on your ass as big as your mouth and you got plates in your mouth that don't fit. You owe everybody aboard and you've got chronic clap. Manning has your discharge papers ready to hand to the company as soon as the ship hits Long Beach and who do you think is going to give a man in your condition a job? You are absolutely the most-fouled-up man I've ever known on land or sea and the worst of it is you don't even seem to know it.”

Smith hitched his neck a notch outward to indicate he was giving serious reflection to my reproach.

“You left something out, sir,” he told me after a minute, in the hum-blest voice I'd ever heard him employ—“my wife is in and out of the loony-bin like a fiddler's elbow. Every time I send her an allotment the neighborhood winos take it out of our mailbox, sign it with her name and cash it. The poor thing is lucky if she gets a bottle out of it for herself. I can't do anything about it because my sister-in-law has a rape warrant out on me. And you understand that anyone with a chest as weak as mine can't afford to get into violent situations—to see my brother again would be to risk tuberculosis. Could you let me have five dollars till I get my draw in Calcutta, sir?”

I found myself examining my wallet and, finding it had nothing in it but a ten-dollar bill, showed it to Smith in order to prove that I didn't have five to loan him.

“I'll be right back with your change, sir,” I heard him say and noticed that I wasn't holding the tenner anymore.

“What did he mean?” Danielsen asked me.

“Mean by what?”

“By saying that anyone of us might have been Christ?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Danielsen turned to leave, but I had a question of my own. He waited.

“Sparks told me that when a sailor is buried at sea and the ship's carpenter sews him up, the last stitch goes through the nose. Is there anything to it?”

“An old sea-tradition still faithfully observed,” Danielsen assured me, and again turned to leave.

“
Why?
”—I stopped him
—
“
why?
”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

That irritated me.

“What the goddamn hell is all the stupid
secrecy
about?” I demanded to know. “You're the fourth man I've asked and everybody ducks like I'm asking a woman about her wedding night or something. There
has
to be a reason.”

“There is,” Danielsen told me, but lowering his voice and regarding me somehow remotely: “Seamen live between water and land and belong to neither, their whole lives. They can't rest at sea and they can't get rest on
land. So they get to thinking that, after death on the ocean bottom, they'll rest forever. But if a dead man's nostrils are left open, he'll take in too much water to get all the way down. He'll float, as he has in life, between bottom and top and never rest for all eternity.”

“You're putting me on,” was all I could think to say.

The change in Danielsen startled me. It looked like genuine anger. I'd never seen even the hint of that in him. Then his color returned, and he left without a word.

“They'll like me in Calcutta,” I assured myself.

A low half-moon came nodding toward our rigging; then nodded quietly away. A moon at rest, half-wearied yet uneasy, returned and still retreated. A moon for payday lovers, regretting passion spent.

Deep below-decks the seaman lies; whose whore sleeps well in Pusan or Kowloon. The orange-red lamp that lit his pleasure in Ho-Phang Road, burns for another seaman's joy tonight. Seaman who sleeps not well below: the moon is on the beach and broke again.

The tides of night still promise love from all earth's Bamboo Alleys. Women wait, in places called
Club Frisco
and
Sam's New York Bar,
for youths from Denver, Philly and The Bronx. All seas swell with women's longing, ceaselessly. Great fish are sleeping on the waters.

While the moon wanes slowly to ash-white.

Dock-hawks, pretending to be owls, followed us upriver; till our rigging severed the night's last star.

A smear across a dungsmoke pall became the ordinary day.

And dogs of those quais never bark but run away.

Then cowdung cooks, where their barge-fires burned beside our hull, blew smoke across our rails and readied for their day. We tied into a jungle of masts and jutting spars.

Whatever they were cooking was too pungent to be fried eggs: that had just occurred to me when the mad head of Crooked-Neck Smith, crowned with hair like feathers afire, thrust itself eye-level to the passenger deck; where it had no business being thrust. Seeing me he came up all the way; his head only one notch awry.

“Notice anything conspicuous about me?” Smith wanted to know.

His shirt, transparently thin, was jutting with contraband.

“Nothing but two cartons of Pall Malls,” I told him, “the other looks like Chesterfields.”

“Man!” Smith feigned astonishment, “how old are you?”

“Past fifty,” I had to admit.

“And with the eyes of a twenty-year-old Cheyenne!—God, I bet when you were
my
age you could see right
through
people!”

“I can still see through you,” I let him know, “I won't let you have a dime.”

“How about ten bucks?”