Algren at Sea (61 page)

“Not ten cents and not ten bucks either.”

“You doubt I'm good for it?” Smith's tone accused me.

“No doubt whatsoever. I
know
you're not good for it.”

Smith's head jerked half a notch out: he was getting hot. Then he decided he'd just be hurt.

“I can borrow from any man aboard this ship, sir. You
know
that. But as you're our only passenger I wanted to give you first crack.”

“I don't deserve it,” I told him, “give my chance to Manning.”

“Smith,” Manning came bellowing down-deck as though he'd been called—“Smith!
Don't move!
” But Smith was already to the ladder. Manning watched him skipping down.

“You're going to get this ship in trouble, Smith!” Manning warned him, then stood looking down at something on the dock. I went over and looked too. It was a young Indian woman in dirty robes, hair matted and eyes sunken. She held one palm upward toward us.

“Papa!” she pleaded, “you give!”

Both Manning and I stared at this sight of living starvation: and living starvation stared back at Manning and me.

“Don't call
me
your papa,” Manning called down—“I'm not
your
father.” And when I looked at him he was ashen-pale.

I recall tossing a coin onto the dock and seeing a uniformed guard bearing down on the woman to take it from her. When I looked at Manning again his color had returned.

“Caught Chips with nine cartons,” he reported to me briskly, “three Camels, three Old Golds, three Kools.”

“Congratulations,” I told him.

“Seamen
never
learn,” he explained, “just because Customs is soft in one port they think Customs is soft everywhere. I have to protect them from themselves.”

Glancing across his shoulder I saw four white-uniformed men drive onto the quai. The only officers who wear white in India are customs cops. As I watched, another car, with four more, joined them. All eight waited in the cars. Manning turned to see what was transfixing me.

“What are
they
up to?” I heard him ask himself.

“Waiting to come aboard,” I told him as though nobody else could possibly have guessed.

Manning took off his officer's cap and began running a finger around its sweatband.

“They usually only send Sirdar,” he complained.

“Who's Sirdar?” I asked, but he didn't answer.

I left him running one finger around and around his hat.

I found Concannon half stripped at his mirror and preparing to shave. A pair of new whites lay on his bunk.

“
Accentchuate the positive,
” he was singing or bawling “
Ee-liminate the negative / Latch on to the affirmative—
”

Sparks was feeling better.

“Going ashore, Sparks?” I inquired.

“Not
about
to stay aboard.”

“You're going to be delayed.”

Concannon went to the rail, took one look and began pitching bottles and cartons into the depths of the receiving set that ran the length of his shack. In its vasty deeps he had receivers hidden within receivers.

“I once crammed a little whore in here—she was cramped but she came out okay. All she needed was a shower. Paid her extra. Now,” he paused, “was that in Macao or Saigon?” Then he remembered our transistors.

“
Get those sets,
” he commanded me, and I was off straight down into a hell of boilers, pistons and furnaces, barometers and engines, that got hotter and deeper as I descended. At the bottom of that broiling pit I took one moment to look up, down, and all around lest Manning be lurking behind a boiler. We'd hidden the sets behind a red warning: DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. I began the ascent, with two sets under each arm, two steps at a time. By the time I reached the deck I was pouring sweat.

The deck was clear. I made the run to the radio shack—followed in by Smith, breathing as hard as I was.

“I only followed you halfway down,” he apologized. “I was protecting you against Manning.”

What Smith was after was a place to hide his own contraband. Concannon took his cartons and dumped them after our transistors.

“Stay away from Smith ashore,” Concannon advised me.

I went to the officer's lounge to see what was happening.

The customs cop questioning the Captain seemed to sense that Karensen couldn't afford to lose another ship.

“Your ship has a bad name, Captain.” His accent was Oxford.

“I don't gather your meaning, sir,” Karensen answered.

“No meaning was intended for your gathering. That your ship has a bad name is a mere statement of fact.” He paused. “You are now free to deny the statement.”

Karensen wiped sweat off his face. The more he wiped the more he sweated.

“I deny the statement,” he said at last.

The officer shoved a paper in front of Karensen, turning it around so he could read it.

“Five,” the officer announced, and took the paper back.

“Five
what?
” I inquired from where I stood.

“I beg
your
pardon?” the officer asked me.

“I wondered five what,” I answered.

“Who are you?” he wanted to know.

“A passenger.”

“Would you mind waiting outside until we are ready for passengers?”

Across the rail the lamps of Calcutta shone through a curious haze: the city burned like sacrifice lit by a memorial light.

When Karensen came out he looked miserable. I returned to the lounge and handed the officer my passport.

“Did I ask you to show me that?” he inquired coldly.

“Come to think of it, you didn't,” I admitted, and replaced it in my pocket.

“Will you sit down?” he asked me.

I sat.

“May I see your passport?”

I took it out and handed it to him once more.

Then, after examining my declaration: “Where is your typewriter?”

“Which one?” I boasted, “I have an electric and an un-electric.”

“There is only one declared here,” he went for it.

“I didn't bring the electric. I was afraid India wasn't ready for it.”

“Where is the other?”

“In my stateroom.”

“May I trouble you to bring it here?”

I went up to my stateroom, returned with the machine, placed it on the table before him without opening it. As soon as I did he was going to tell me he hadn't asked me to open it.

“
Would
you mind opening it?”

I was pleased to do so.

“Would you mind closing it?”

I was pleased to close it.

“Your passport will be returned to you before the ship sails,” he promised.

Going down the ramp with my typer banging my knees I ran head-on into another high-minded, bullet-headed official.

“Where going?”

“Ashore.”

“Has been
in
spected?” He pointed to the machine.

“Yes.”

“Show certificate of
in
spection.”

“I wasn't given any. You can inspect it yourself.”

“Is not my duty to inspect.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get certificate.”

I hauled the damned box back up to my stateroom and came back down the ramp without it. Now the only move he had left was to stop me because I
didn't
have a typewriter. He let me pass reluctantly. What they've failed to learn from the British about soldiering, these people have more than made up for in snobbery.

Danielsen, the loneliest-looking sailor since Alexander Selkirk, waited on the dock clasping one wrist with the other; as if trying to keep from arresting himself. His usual aspect was that of a man with the blues. I noticed he was now carrying a full set. For his voice, normally a whisper, was now lowered to a mere movement of the lips. Things that always went wrong with him had now gone even wronger: the customs cops had come on him while he was dressing, found three twenty-dollar bills on his bed, and snatched the lot. He was dead flat broke in Calcutta.

“Why didn't you declare your money?” I asked him.

“Because it worries me for people to know how much I'm carrying,” was his peculiar explanation.

“I promise not to tell anybody you're broke,” I tried cheering him up.

When I loaned him fifty, joy shook him so powerfully that he gave me
a barely perceptible nod. Then he dodged to one side to let a beggar pass. You're supposed to shove them out of your way. Danielsen just wasn't made of the stuff that makes great empires.

“If you let the gate cop take that fifty off you, you might as well go back to the ship,” I threatened him.

The gate cop stood beneath beacons so bright that it looked a simple matter to slip past him in the darkness behind the beacons. But he had a gun on his hip, even though no Indian soldier has yet hit a target smaller than a cow from further than four feet, this one might be just lucky enough to have a bullet ricochet off a buffalo and kill us both with a single shot. He decided to capture Danielsen first, as the most dangerous-looking, and escorted him to a dimly lit shack to be examined by one final bureaucrat.

I stood outside and watched Danielsen's papers being examined, stamped, restamped, and his passport re-examined, restamped; until at last he was dismissed and came out shaking his head as if he'd just been robbed and insulted again.

I entered and showed my shore-pass but did not so much as lay it on the desk.

“That's all,” this one informed me quickly.

“That's
all?
”

“Yis”—and began a smile so downright fawning that I thought he was going to his knees—“Yis. You
gentleman.
”

Well what do you know. I was tickled pink.

“You didn't take long,” Danielsen observed as we finally got into Calcutta.

“Because
I'm
a gentleman,” I reminded him.

He smiled so wanly I knew I'd made a wildly hilarious joke. “What are our plans?” I asked him, when we'd gotten into the cab.

“Ezekiel's,” Danielsen instructed the driver.

Tribesmen through endless Chinese ages, by foot and by horse, fought across the wastes of Asia down to the plains of Assam. What frozen heights, what burning valleys, what marshes, flights, descents and pursuits they endured, achieved this ultimate victory: their good-looking daughters boarded trains to get into a Calcutta cat-house.

Welshman, Cockney, Scot and Irisher, nobly volunteered to help the British put India under their Queen. Sikh and Hindi, Ghat and Gurka, had to yield or serve: simply to bring forth a new tribe on earth even loopier than the tribes that had come before. An estranged race, as unrooted in India as in England; detached from Calcutta and Southampton both: congenital expatriates called Anglo-Indians.

Nonetheless I remain enormously gratified by the concern of Sikh and Mongol footmen, Scots Guards, Welsh Grenadiers, Irish Cannoneers, Cockney cavalry and litter-bearers from Wessex, in preparing a field of lovely girls a full furlong long for me, some dusky as twilight with green half-slanted eyes, dressed for Eighth Avenue if not for Fifth; as well as those of rosier flesh, with hair dark blond or orange-red; dressed in the robes of Kashmir and Bengal. Who had told these kids I was coming?

Somebody must have because not one was missing. Between the bar and the bartenders, a three-piece combo and an air of haste, a welcome-home party was in progress for me at Ezekiel's; the classiest abyss in Calcutta.

Its class derives not merely from the profoundly bad taste of its décor and its genuine phoniness, but also from its practice, unique in Calcutta, of serving Scotch to patrons requesting Scotch and bourbon to those preferring bourbon, without watering either. When you ask for English gin you get English gin and not Indian gin, and nobody puts knockout drops in it in order to rob you later. You make your own arrangements for that.

Between the tables and the bar a pushing throng of seamen and whores, the seamen all drunk and the whores all sober, lent such a cheerful, homey air, what with a brawl of two jolly Englishmen trying to kill one another on the floor, I didn't see how anyone could help but be happy here. The scent of cheap whiskey mixing with cheaper cologne lent a woodland tang to the air, like early fall in Miami when ryebread trees throw out their first dark blooms. A seaman wearing a single earring pinched me and I would have seized him by his hair, but he was bald. The friendliness of the people and the air conditioning made me feel like going for a little stroll; which I did simply by shoving people aside.