1919
Back in town they didn’t know just what to do. They wanted some drinks and a couple of frails but they were afraid of getting tanked up and spending all their money. They went to a poolroom Will knew and shot some pool and Joe was pretty good and cleaned up the local boys. After that they went and Joe set up a drink but it was closing time and right away they were out on the street again. They couldn’t find any hookers; Will said he knew a house but they soaked you too damn much, and they were just about going home to turn in when they ran into two high yellers who gave ’em the eye. They followed ’em down the street a long way and into a cross street where there weren’t many lights. The girls were hot stuff but they were scared and nervous for fear somebody might see ’em. They found an empty house with a back porch where it was black as pitch and took ’em up there and afterwards they went back and slept at Will Stirp’s folks’ house.
The Tampa had gone into drydock at Newport News for repairs on a started plate. Joe and Will Stirp were paid off and hung round Norfolk all day without knowing what to do with themselves. Saturday afternoons and Sundays, Joe played a little baseball with a scratch team of boys who worked in the Navy Yard, evenings he went out with Della Matthews. She was a stenographer in the First National Bank and used to say she’d never marry a boy who went to sea, you couldn’t trust ’em and that it was a rough kind of a life and didn’t have any advancement in it. Joe said she was right but you were only young once and what the hell things didn’t matter so much anyway. She used to ask him about his folks and why he didn’t go up to Washington to see them especially as his dad was ill. He said the old man could choke for all he cared, he hated him, that was about the size of it. She said she thought he was terrible. That time he was setting her up to a soda after the movies. She looked cute and plump in a fluffy pink dress and her little black eyes all excited and flashing. Joe said not to talk about that stuff, it didn’t matter, but she looked at him awful mean and mad and said she’d like to shake him and that every thing mattered terribly and it was wicked to talk like that and that he was a nice boy and came from nice people and had been nicely raised and ought to be thinking of getting ahead in the world instead of being a bum and a loafer. Joe got sore and said was that so? and left her at her folks’ house without saying another word. He didn’t see her for four or five days after that.
Then he went by where Della worked, and waited for her to come out one evening. He’d been thinking about her more than he wanted to and what she’d said. First, she tried to walk past him but he grinned at her and she couldn’t help smiling back. He was pretty broke by that tome but he took her and bought her a box of candy. They talked about how hot it was and he said they’d go to the ball game next week. He told her how the Tampa was pulling out for Pensacola to load lumber and then across to the other side.
They were waiting for the trolley to go to Virginia Beach, walking up and down fighting the mosquitoes. She looked all upset when he said he was going to the other side. Before Joe knew what he was doing he was saying that he wouldn’t ship on the Tampa again, but that he’d get a job right here in Norfolk.
That night was full moon. They fooled around in their bathing suits a long while on the beach beside a little smudgefire Joe made to keep the mosquitoes off. He was sitting crosslegged and she lay with her head on his knees and all the time he was stroking her hair and leaning over and kissing her; she said how funny his face looked upside down when he kissed her like that. She said they’d get married as soon as he got a steady job and between the two of them they’d amount to something. Ever since she’d graduated from high school at the head of her class she’d felt she ought to work hard and amount to something. “The folks round here are awful no-account, Joe, don’t know they’re alive half the time.”
“D’you know it, Del, you kinda remind me o’ my sister Janey, honest you do. Dod gast it, she’s amounting to something all right. . . . She’s awful pretty too. . . .”
Della said she hoped she could see her some day and Joe said sure she would and he pulled her to her feet and drew her to him tight and hugged her and kissed her. It was late, and the beach was chilly and lonely under the big moon. Della got atrembling and said she’d have to get her clothes on or she’d catch her death. They had to run not to lose the last car.
The rails twanged as the car lurched through the moonlit pine-barrens full of tambourining dryflies and katydids. Della suddenly crumpled up and began to cry. Joe kept asking her what the matter was but she wouldn’t answer, only cried and cried. It was kind of a relief to leave her at her folks’ house and walk alone through the empty airless streets to the boarding house where he had a room.
All the next week he hoofed it around Norfolk and Portsmouth looking for a job that had a future to it. He even went over to Newport News. Coming back on the ferry, he didn’t have enough jack to pay his fare and had to get the guy who took tickets to let him work his way over sweeping up. The landlady began to ask for next week’s rent. All the jobs Joe applied for needed experience or training or you’d ought to have finished high school and there weren’t many jobs anyway, so in the end he had to go boating again, on a seagoing barge that was waiting for a towboat to take her down east to Rockport with a load of coal.
There were five barges in the tow; it wasn’t such a bad trip, just him and an old man named Gaskin and his boy, a kid of about fifteen whose name was Joe too. The only trouble they had was in a squall off Cape Cod when the tow rope parted, but the towboat captain was right up on his toes and managed to get a new cable on board ’em before they’d straightened out on their anchor.
Up in Rockport they unloaded their coal and anchored out in the harbor waiting to be towed to another wharf to load granite blocks for the trip back. One night when Gaskin and his boy had gone ashore and Joe was on watch the second engineer of the tug, a thinfaced guy named Hart came under the stern in a skiff and whispered to Joe did he want some c—t. Joe was stretched out on the house smoking a pipe and thinking about Della. The hills and the harbor and the rocky shore were fading into a warm pink twilight. Hart had a nervous stuttering manner. Joe held off at first but after a while he said, “Bring ’em along.” “Got any cards?” said Hart. “Yare I got a pack.”
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.