NEWSREEL XX 4 страница

When the magistrate had finished, the court attendants
said, "Hear, hear," under their breath and they all looked

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very savage and solemn and turned the American boys
loose after they'd paid their fines and the police sergeant
had looked at their papers. They held Joe after the others
on account of his paper being from the consulate and not
having the stamp of the proper police station on it but
after a while they let him go with a warning not to come
ashore again and that if he did it would be worse for
him.

Joe felt relieved when he'd seen the skipper and had
been taken on and had rigged up his bunk and gone
ashore and gotten his bundle that he'd left with the nice
flaxenhaired barmaid at the first pub he'd gone to the
night before. At last he was on an American ship. She had
an American flag painted on either side of the hull and
her name Tampa, Pensacola, Florida, in white letters.
There was a colored boy cooking and first thing they had
cornmeal mush and karo syrup, and coffee instead of that
lousy tea and the food tasted awful good. Joe felt better
than any time since he'd left home. The bunks were clean
and a fine feeling it was when the Tampa left the dock
with her whistle blowing and started easing down the
slatecolored stream of the Mersey towards the sea.

Fifteen days to Hampton Roads, with sunny weather
and a sea like glass every day up to the last two days and
then a stiff northwesterly wind that kicked up considerable
chop off the Capes. They landed the few bundles of cot-
ton print goods that made up the cargo at the Union
Terminal in Norfolk. It was a big day for Joe when he
went ashore with his pay in his pocket to take a look
around the town with Will Stirp, who belonged there.

They went to see Will Stirp's folks and took in a ball
game and after that hopped the trolley down to Virginia
Beach with some girls Will Stirp knew. One of the girls'

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names was Della; and she was very dark and Joe fell for
her, kind of. When they were putting on their bathing
suits in the bathhouse he asked Will would she . . . ?
And Will got sore and said, "Ain't you got the sense to
tell a good girl from a hooker?" And Joe said well, you
never could tell nowadays.

They went in swimming and fooled around the beach
in their bathing suits and built a fire and toasted marsh-
mallows and then they took the girls home. Della let Joe
kiss her when they said good night and he began kinder
planning that she'd be his steady girl.

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 some-
body 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 know-
ing 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

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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 advance-
ment 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 everything
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 get-
ting 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
time 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

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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 some-
thing. "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 sis-
ter 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
pinebarrens 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

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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 man-
ner. 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

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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

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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 doe 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
spiderwebbing 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

-52-

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, look-
ing at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over
him that she wag 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 clean-
ing 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

-53-

thanked her; "Every boy I even 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 Man-
hattan and played checkers at the Seamen's Institute or
hung around the Seamen'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 an-
other twentyfive 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 Tam-
pico 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 lash-
ing 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

-54-

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 broad-
faced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But every-
thing 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

-55-

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 1/2E. 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 be-
tween 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 cam-
ouflaged ships, three British scoutcruisers striped like zebras
and a transport all painted up with blue and green water-

-56-

markings. 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 stay-
ing with her at the boarding house, a towheaded Swede
who didn't know any English, so she didn't pay much at-
tention 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 dosing 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 4 1/2 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 Ave-
nue 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 sun-
light in Lafayette Square, looking at the little dressed up
kids playing and the nursemaids and the fat starlings hop-
ping 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 com-
ing out of the elevator was her, though he waited about an
hour in the vestibule of the Riggs Building until some

-57-

lousy dick or other came up to him and asked him what
the hell he 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.

He stopped at the Belasco and bought some theatre
tickets and then went back to the Riggs Building. He got
there just as Janey was stepping out of the elevator. She
was nicely dressed and had her chin up with a new little
cute independent tilt. He was so glad to see her he was
afraid he was going to bawl. Her voice was different. She
had a quick chilly way of talking and a kidding manner
she'd never had before. He took her to supper and to the
theatre and she told him all about how well she was getting
on at Dreyfus and Carroll and what interesting people she
was getting to know. It made him feel. like a bum going
around with her.

Then he left her at the apartment she had with a girl
friend and took the car back to the station. He settled
down and smoked a cigar in the smoker of the day-
coach. He felt pretty blue. Next day in New York he
looked up a guy he knew and they went out and had a few
drinks and found 'em some skirts and the day after that he
was sitting on a bench in Union Square with a headache
and not a red cent in his jeans. He found the stubs of the
tickets to the show at the Belasco theatre he'd taken Janey
to and put them carefully in the cigarbox with the other
junk.

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Next boat he shipped on was the North Star bound for
St. Nazaire with a cargo listed as canned goods that every-
body knew was shell caps, and bonuses for the crew on
account of the danger of going through the zone. She was
a crazy whaleback, had been an oreboat on the Great Lakes,
leaked so they had to have the pumps going half the time,
but Joe liked the bunch and the chow was darn good and
old Cap'n Perry was as fine an old seadog as you'd like to
see, had been living ashore for a couple of years down at
Atlantic Highlands but had come back on account of the
big money to try to make a pile for his daughter; she'd
get the insurance anyway, Joe heard him tell the mate with
a wheezy laugh. They had a smooth winter crossing, the
wind behind them all the way right till they were in the
Bay of Biscay. It was very cold and the sea was dead
calm when they came in sight of the French coast, low and
sandy at the mouth of the Loire.