Fo'castle Waltz

Now what ten would you choose to be shipwrecked with on a desert island? I don't mean books—I mean buddies. I had no choice. Mine were picked for me and there they stood, all lined up.

"Here, you men. Why d'hell don't you swing that boat out? What d'hell you waiting for?"

Mush who had joined us at our end softly said, "You, sweetheart." But the Chief didn't hear him.

The Captain and the Swede were both shouting orders from both ends of the bridge. All along the deck the men were straining at the lanyards and shoving at their lifeboats to swing them out. Not one of those boats had budged an inch!

The pulleys and apparatus were so coated with successive layers of paint, it would have taken dynamite to blast them loose. After we'd strained and pushed a while longer, the ship's bell sounded again. The drill was over.

"Next time we'll swing 'em out and goddam well get them over side," growled the Chief, and he started down the ladder to the lower deck. He climbed so slowly those of us who had automatically followed him were piled up waiting for him to make the lower deck.

"Ch-r-ist," hissed Birdneck, "didja see dem lifeboats. Ch-r-ist, if anything happens aboard this ship—good night."

"They looked bad, all right," said the white-haired guy.

Perry came along looking as he always did when he was full of some special inside stuff. He leaned all over us as he tried to keep his voice down.

"Jeez, those boats ain't got any equipment at all. They ain't been caulked, they're as dry as a bone. The seams on 'em are opened up like that," and he spread his thumb and forefinger while he cocked his eye to measure.

"The way the davits are crusted up you'll never swing those boats out anyway," the white-haired guy mournfully added.

"If we hit something," put in Birdneck, "I'm swimmin'. I'll be a sonovabitch if I'd go in a lifeboat with that Maverick bastard."

I didn't say anything—what was there to say?

Back down on our own deck Perry had quickly spread his inside dope—what he had seen when he had ducked his head inside the lifeboat. Everybody grumbled. Every blemish on the old S.S. Hermanita was held up to ridicule and enlarged, every officer down to the inoffensive Filipino purser berated and dubbed a bastard. And that Swede Mate—that brass-polishing, yacht-swabbing, scurvy-bitten scum—they exhausted their vocabulary on him.

What would happen when we shipped back to the States in September, the hurricane season? What chance would an old oilcan like this have in a real blow? No chance at all. Then what have you got? The lifeboats—those rotted, dry old crates were worse than nothing.

Perry, having really stirred the pot, now took over. Nobody wanted to stay a moment longer on that ship. As soon as she docked in Rio Santiago we'd desert to a man.

That was not the way Perry wanted it. He knew the Argentine—in fact he was the only man aboard who'd ever shipped to little Rio Santiago.

"Naw, naw," he objected gathering the loudest-mouthed squawkers around him. "Go on d'beach in dat lousy port? Nah."

Then he bent his head confidentially into the center of the group and in a hoarse whisper which you couldn't hear beyond twenty yards he continued:

"Lissen, dere's no sense in skipping ship in any port down in d'Argentine. D'ting to do is wait till we come up again, see what I mean—?"

"And go on d'beach in Montevideo, huh?" one eager voice interrupted. "Jeez, dey says dere's more cat houses dere den any place in de woild. Boy—"

"Naw. Naw—lissen." Perry screwed up his face and impatiently wagged his gnarled forefinger. "Naw, that's no good either—"

Then he dug his head down further into the middle of the group and went on with his loud hoarse whisper. "Rio—now dat's where. If you go on de beach dere—boy, oh boy," and with a wave of his hand thrust out in front of him, he gestured that the world is yours, you beachcombers, in Rio de Janeiro.

Everybody listened respectfully and some grinned and nodded their heads. So did I. Beachcombing, that's something; and I'd rather keep everybody's mind on this planned mass desertion than on those other ideas that had come from Perry's big mouth this afternoon—education schemes for Mush and me up in the wheelhouse or provisions for crossing the Equator.

We all went to supper with Perry still talking with his head bent in the middle of us as he gleefully contemplated insurrection, and repeated his hoarse admonition that everybody keep his mouth shut. He entered the mess with his big flat cloth cap off, his head erect, looking from side to side with a look in his eye which said I deny all accusations.