Fo'castle Waltz

Joe didn't hang around with us so often—he was taking a cure. He was the only guy aboard that ship that had been burnt in Argentina. Another of his little, plump, brown-skinned pigeons that he'd found in one of the Bahia Blanca houses had given it to him. Joe wasn't resentful—she was still an awfully nice girl and a dose didn't worry him. He'd had it before, now and again. In fact, he said, this made the ninth he'd had, and he'd been cured of all of them—all except the first. I believe it was an inherited taste from his English father that was responsible for Joe's penchant for little, plump, brown-skinned pigeons, and not a nostalgic memory of his Island. It seems to me I remember reading some Elizabethan poets who sang the praise of their "nut-brown maidens."

Birdneck, who had gone through his cure just before he signed up in the States, had a case full of the latest medicines, injections, applications, pills, salves—a regular seagoing drugstore, he boasted—and he'd made us promise before we tied up in our first port in Argentina to come to see him if anything happened; he'd cure anything any member of the crew got—just let him know. He had laid out a section of his cabin like a pharmacy, and was ready to hospitalize anybody who needed him—friend or foe—including his roommate, the Maverick.

Joe was his first and only patient and he seemed to thrive under Birdneck's care. The cure included sun baths. Joe had plenty of time for them, though he'd not take them too seriously, for often, when we climbed out of the hatch at noon and as we stood around scrubbing ourselves down with swabs of kerosene from the big drum, Joe, sun bathing up on the poop-deck, would grab his towel from around his middle and do an interpretive dance a la Duncan to cheer us up.

There were many scientific theories advanced in our discussions on the poop—even on the proper cure for what chauvinistic Benny Cellini had said is called the French disease by the Italians and the Italian by the French, though since he'd written his imaginative journal, which should be taken with a grain of salt from one of his precious, pretty little salt cellars (museums, and collectors can fight about them—I won't; his stuff looks like gift shoppe specials to me), we know that the source of that infection is international.

One of the old guys had a complicated series of treatments he told about which included a vigorous massage with Sloan's liniment, and Philip made the fantastic claim he had effected a cure with the assistance of a kind-hearted, one-eyed blonde lady in Panama City.

28. The One-Man Mutiny

WHAT WE NEEDED DOWN IN THOSE BILGES WITH US WAS—a gypsy.

One of the teacup readers who tell the past, present and future from the wormy little fragments they find in teacups in those twenty-five cents for tea-and-cookies-including-your-for-tune shops that flourish around the big department stores in New York.

She (it would be a she gypsy, I imagine—one of those dingy, saggy-bosomed shes with stringy hair, who would have made no contribution to the smell—no one could) might have given us a hand in the bilge and helped us too with her expert opinion on the past history of our ship, reading from the bilge slime. That would have settled a lot of the arguments we had as we cleaned the bilge and discovered mementoes and fragments of the cargo she had carried.

None of us cared about the ship's future. As far as we were concerned she could blow up or be sunk after she came within a few miles of New York. Incidentally, that's what eventually did happen to that ship. She was sunk many years later with a lot of her sister ships—quickies which had been built during the First World War. I saw it in a newsreel.

There was a lot we archaeologists of the bilge had established for ourselves in our excavations, and all we needed was confirmation. We all had found specimens that indicated the ship had carried various grains, lumber, coffee, latex, hides, meat, and bone (from that Santos bone hill) up from South America; but what cargo did she carry down from the States during the six years recorded in the bilge slime? That we couldn't figure out, and for that we needed a gypsy.

Those big knobs and splinters of purple-blackened bone that we found in the bilges had caused most of the trouble with our pumps. The rest of the goo, the shreds of hide, decaying fibers of meat, latex, etc., would have been sucked through the outlets if they hadn't had those bones to cling to and jam our pumps.