Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0) (14 page)

Maybe Snipe was one of us after all, but he didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. He was one of those guys who just don’t belong. He couldn’t even find a place with us, and we had about hit rock bottom. Maybe in the end he did find a place, but if he did, it wasn’t the place he wanted.

He had sort of drifted in, like all the rest. A little, scrawny guy with a thin face and a long nose that stuck out over the place where his chin should have been. His chin had slipped back against his neck like it was ashamed of itself, and he had those watery blue eyes that seemed sort of anxious and helpless, as though he was always afraid somebody was going to take a punch at him.

I don’t know why he stayed, or why we let him stay. Probably he was so much of a blank cartridge nobody cared. We were a pretty tight little bunch, otherwise, and we had to be. It was a matter of survival. It was the waterfront, and times were hard. Getting by was about all a guy could do, and we did it and got along because each of us had his own line and we worked well together. Snipe didn’t belong, but he seemed to like being around, and we didn’t notice him very much. Whenever Sharkey and Jim would get to talking, he’d sit up and listen, but for that matter, we all did. He seemed to think Sharkey was about the last word in brains, and probably he was.

Snipe was afraid to die. Not that there’s anything funny about that, only he worried about it. It was like death had a fascination for him. He was scared of it, but he couldn’t stay away. And death along the waterfront is never nice. You know what I mean. A sling breaks, maybe, and a half-dozen bales of cotton come down on a guy, or maybe his foot slips when he’s up on the mast, and down he comes to light on a steel deck. Or maybe a boom falls, or the swing of a strongback mashes him. But no matter how it happens, it’s never pretty. And Snipe was scared of it. He told me once he’d always been afraid to die.

Once, I’d been down along the docks looking for a live wire to hit up for the price of coffee, when I saw a crowd on the end of the wharf. Guys on the bum are all rubbernecks, so I hurried along to see what was doing. When I got closer, I could see they were fishing a stiff out of the water. You know what I mean—a dead guy.

Well, I’ve seen some sights in my life, and death is never pretty along the waterfront, like I’ve said, but this was the worst. The stiff had been in the water about two weeks. I was turning away when I spotted Snipe. He was staring at the body like he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and he was already green around the gills. For a minute I thought he was going to pull a faint right there on the dock.

He saw me then. We walked away together and sat down on a lumber pile. Snipe rolled a smoke from a dirty-looking sack of Bull Durham, and I tossed little sticks off the dock, watching them float lazily on the calm, dark water.

Across the channel one of the Luckenbach boats was loading cargo for her eastern trip, and the stack of a G.P. tanker showed over the top of a warehouse on Terminal. It was one of those still, warm afternoons with a haze of heat and smoke hanging over Long Beach. Another tanker was coming slowly upstream, and I sat there watching it, remembering how I’d burned my knees painting the white S on the stack of a tanker like it. I sat there watching, kind of sleepy-like, and wishing I was coming in with a payoff due instead of kicking my heels in the sun wishing for two bits. But all the time, way down deep, I was thinking of Snipe.

I felt in my pockets hoping for a dime I’d overlooked, but I’d shook myself down a dozen times already. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Snipe staring out over the channel, that limp-looking fag hanging from his lip, and his damp, straw-colored hair plastered against his narrow skull. His fingers were too long, and the nails always dirty. I felt disgusted with him and wondered what he wanted to live for. Maybe he wondered, too.

“That stiff sure looked awful, didn’t it?” he says.

“None of them look so good t’ me.”

“I’d hate to look like that. Seawater is nasty stuff. I never did like it.”

I grunted. A shore boat was heading for the Fifth Street landing, and I watched it as the wake trailed out in a widening V, like the events that follow the birth of a man. Then we could hear the slap of water under the dock.

“I’d sure hate to die like that. If a guy could die like a hero now, it wouldn’t be so bad. I wonder what Sharkey meant the other night when he said when it was no longer possible to live proudly, a man could always die proudly?”

“What the hell difference does it make how you die? A corpse is a corpse, no matter how it got that way. That stuff about a life after death is all hooey. Like Sharkey said, it was an invention of the weak to put a damper on the strong. The little fellow thinks that if the big guy is worried about the hereafter, he’ll play it fair in this one, see? A dead man don’t mean anything, no more than a rotten potato. He just was something, that’s all!”

“But what became of the life that was in him? Where does that go?”

“Where does the flame go when the fire goes out? It’s just gone. Now, forget it, and let’s find the gang. I’m fed up, talking about stiffs.”

We started for the shack. A few clouds had rolled up, and it was starting to drizzle. Out on the channel the ripples had changed to little waves with ruffles of white riding the crests. There was a tang in the air that smelled like a blow. I looked off toward the sea and was glad I was ashore. It wasn’t going to be any fun out there tonight. Snipe hurried along beside me, his breath wheezing a little.

“I’m a good swimmer,” he said, reaching for a confidence I could tell he didn’t have.

“Well, a pretty good swimmer.”

Where did a runt like him ever get that hero idea? From Sharkey, I guess. Probably nobody ever treated him decent before. Looking at him, I wondered why it was some guys draw such tough hands. There was Sharkey, as regular a guy as ever walked, a big, finelooking fellow with brains and nerve, and then here was Snipe, with nothing. Sharkey had a royal flush, and Snipe was holding nothing but deuces and treys in a game that was too big for him.

His frayed collar was about two sizes too large, and his Adam’s apple just grazed it every time he swallowed. He didn’t have a thing, that guy. He was bucking a stacked deck, and the worst of it was, he knew it.

You see a lot of these guys along the waterfronts. The misfits and the also-rans, the guys who knew too much and those who knew too little. Everything loose in the world seems to drift toward the sea and usually winds up on the beach somewhere. It’s a sort of natural law, I guess. And here was Snipe. It wouldn’t have been so tough if he’d been the dumb type that thought he was a pretty swell guy. But Snipe wasn’t fooled. Way down inside he had a feeling for something better than he was, and every time he moved he knew it was him, Snipe, that was moving.

You could see him seeing himself. It gave you kind of a shock, sometimes. I had never quite got it until then, but I guess Sharkey had from the first. You could see that Snipe knew he was Snipe, just something dropped off the merry-go-round of life that didn’t matter.

Instead of going on with me, he turned at the corner and walked off up the street, his old cap pulled down over his face, his funny, long shoes squidging on the sloppy walk.

It was warm and cheery inside the shack. Sharkey had had the guys rustle up some old papers and nail them over the walls as insulation. When you couldn’t do anything else, you could read the latest news of three months back or look at pictures of Mae West or Myrna Loy, depending if you liked them slim or well upholstered. Most of them looked at Mae West.

The big stove had its belly all red from the heat, and Tony was tipped back in a chair reading the sports. Deek was playing sol at the table, and Jim was standing by in the kitchen watching Red throw a mulligan together. Sharkey had his nose in a book as usual, something about the theory of the leisure class. I had to grin when he showed it to me. We sure were a leisure class, although there wasn’t one of us liked it.

It was nice sitting there. The heat made a fellow kind of drowsy, and the smell of mulligan and coffee was something to write home about. I sat there remembering Snipe walking off up the street through that first spatter of rain, and how the wind whipped his worn old coat.

He was afraid of everything, that guy. Afraid of death, afraid of cops, scared of ship’s officers, and of life, too, I guess. At that, he was luckier than some, for he had a flop. It would be cold and wet on the streets tonight, and there would be men sleeping in boxcars and lumber piles, and other guys walking the streets, wishing they had lumber piles and boxcars to sleep in. But we were lucky, with a shack like this, and we only kept it by working together. In that kind of a life, you got to stick together. It’s the only answer.

Windy Slim was still out on the stem. He never came in early on bad nights, it being easier to pick up a little change when the weather is wet and miserable. Cooper was out somewhere, too, and that was unusual, him liking the rain no better than a cat. The drizzle had changed now to a regular downpour, and the wind was blowing a gale.

We all knew what it would be like at sea, with the wind howling through the rigging like a lost banshee and the decks awash with black, glassy water. Sometimes the shack sagged with the weight of the wind, and once Sharkey looked up and glanced apprehensively at the stove.

Then, during a momentary lull, the door jerked open and Slim stomped in, accompanied by a haze of wind and rain that made the lamp spit and almost go out. He shook himself and began pulling off his coat.

“God have pity on the poor sailors on such a night as this!” Jim said, grinning.

“Say—” Slim stopped pulling off his wet clothes and looked at Sharkey. “Brophy and Stallings picked up Copper tonight!”

“The devil they did!” Sharkey put down his book. “What happened?”

“Copper, he bums four bits from some lug down on the docks where he used to work an’ goes to the Greek’s for some chow. He has a hole in his pocket but forgets it. After he eats he finds his money is gone. The Greek hollers for a bull, an’ Brophy comes running, Cap Stallings with him.

“Snipe, he was with Copper when he raised the four bits, but when the bull asks him did Copper have any money, the little rat is so scared he says he don’t know nothing about it. He always was scared of a cop. So they took Copper an’ throwed him in the can.”

“The yellow rat!” Tony said. “An’ after all the feeds Copper staked him to!”

“Why have him here, anyway?” Red said. “He just hangs around. He ain’t any good for anything!”

Me, I sat there and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything you could say. Outside the wind gathered and hurled a heavy shoulder against the house, the lamp sputtered and gulped, and everybody was quiet. Everybody was thinking what I was thinking, I guess, that Snipe would have to go, but there wasn’t any place for him to go. I tried to read again, but I couldn’t see anything but that spatter of falling rain and Snipe walking away up the street. Red was right, he wasn’t any good for anything, not even himself.

The door opened then, and Snipe came in. It was all in his face, all the bitter defeat and failure of him. That was the worst of it. He knew just what he’d done, knew just what it would mean to that tough, lonely bunch of men who didn’t have any friends but themselves and so had to be good friends to each other. He knew it all, knew just how low he must have sunk, and only felt a little lower himself.

Sharkey didn’t say anything, and the rest of us just sat there. Then Sharkey took a match out of his pocket and handed it to Snipe. Everybody knew what that meant. In the old days on the bum, when the crowd didn’t like a fellow, they gave him a match as a hint to go build his own fire.

Sharkey picked up the poker then and began to poke at the fire. Out in the kitchen everything was quiet. Snipe stood there, looking down at Sharkey’s shoulders, his face white and queer. Then he turned and went out. The sound of the closing door was loud in the room.

The next morning Sharkey and a couple of us drifted down to the big crap game under the P.E. trestle. Everybody was talking about the storm and the ferry to Terminal Island being rammed and sunk during the night. About a dozen lives lost, somebody said.

“Say, Sharkey,” Honolulu said, looking up from the dice. “One of your crowd was on that ferry. That little guy they called Snipe. I saw him boarding her at the landing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Sharkey looked down at the dice and said nothing. Slim was getting the dice hot and had won a couple of bucks. The lookout got interested, and when all at once somebody hollers “Bull,” there were the cops coming up through the lumberyard.

Two or three of our boys were in the inner circle, and when the yell came, everybody grabbed at the cash. Then we all scattered out, running across the stinking tideflat east of the trestle. I got a fistful of money myself, and there was a lot left behind. I glanced back once, and the cops were picking it up.

The tide wasn’t out yet, and in some places the water was almost knee deep, but it was the only way, and we took it running. I got all wet and muddy but had to laugh, thinking what a funny sight we must have made, about twenty of us splashing through that water as fast as we could pick ’em up and put ’em down.

I was some little time getting back to the shack, and when I did get there, Sharkey was sitting on the steps talking to Windy and Jim. They looked mighty serious, and when I came up, they motioned me to come along and then started back for the trestle.