Fo'castle Waltz

Big Joe, who should know, whipped out a seven-inch-blade clasp knife and showed how a knife should be thrown. He first showed his knife off. It had a fine handle with a tricky button in it. He pressed this button and the big blade snapped open instantly, all the way, ready for blood. Then Joe snapped it shut again and put it in his back pocket, stepped forward, and with one gesture snapped out his knife and threw it at the canvas-covered box on which I was sitting. There had been no pause to open the knife—it all had been done in one quick movement. The blade had rested on his open palm, point forward, as he threw it underhand and it landed in the side of that box just a few inches from my dangling, naked foot.

Then when Perry, the cockeyed Portuguese, persuaded Big Joe to let him try his knife, I hopped off that box quick and stood behind Perry to watch him pitch it. After all, that's the best way to watch. Umpires stand in back of the hurler's box instead of up at the catcher's end. That's not for fear that they might be beaned by an erratic pitcher. It's a more scientific approach, observing at the source, rather than the receiving end, a missile in flight, be it rawhide or cold steel.

After that a little more talk on cutting—the old-fashioned razor method with the blade folded back over the closed fist for slashing across, glass beer mugs smashed on the table so that the handle remains clasped in the hand while the jagged edges can be used for gouging (a similar technique was crashing the bottle and using the neck as a handle while you ripped with the splintered other end). I recall no mention of schlaege, the refined German university sport which is not just straightforward cutting so much as a form of mutual masochism.

Philip, the Captain's messboy, talked quietly and apologetically about Flip to Mush and me. It seems Flip was an Igoroti, one of the Philippine mountain people. Philip told us old Flip's grandfather had cut up and eaten his enemies. It was said the mountain people were cannibalistic in the old days. What disturbed Philip most was the fact that Flip had put in three long hitches in the U.S. Marines and had shipped a number of years on ships with English-speaking crews, and stiU his English vocabulary consisted of about only thirty or forty words.

The triumphant announcements that he made when he slapped our food down in front of us, his "Por' chops, opricock pie, etc.," usually took hours of drilling every morning before they could be considered even good Igoroti English. For that Philip apologized.

Well, I thought Flip was one I could count on. The least he could do was to cut those lines they tied us with and I'd have a running chance. I could hop about until the ship was safely over the Equator and then shout "Out of bounds" or something else as appropriate when we were safely over into latitude S. 01. According to the laws of the sea they shouldn't be able to do anything then.

Maybe I could depend upon Flip. I picked up the papers and pencils I'd come for and went back to the shelter deck where Birdneck was to have waited for me—to draw his portrait. I found him stretched out and snoring in the sultry shade of the deck. I let him sleep, and sat down there and worried— till I fell asleep too.

In mid-afternoon we crossed the Equator.

Mush, the pale guy from the black gang, and I had arranged to meet before breakfast that day and talk over some sort of all-for-one-one-for-all protective pact. Nothing came of it. We couldn't agree.

All afternoon that day we chipped deck up on the prow— that was tops in misery.

"We should be hitting the old belt right about now."

I looked up into the sun's glare at the Bos'n.

"What'd you say—?"

He was standing with shimmering waves of heat from the sizzling deck coming up around him, squinting up at the burning sun with his head cocked. His watch was opened in his hand.

"The way I figured it, we should be crossing the Equator right about now."

We were listlessly, miserably chipping that prow deck— I'd given up trying to get comfortable. I've seen some hopeless old plugs standing in the city streets, standing foursquare with their bloated old bodies suspended from each of their rickety legs. If anyone had shoved one of those woodeny old supports out of line, they'd have fallen over with a dusty crunch. I felt like that. Day had run into night and night into day. There was glaring light or a lack of it, but the heat had tied those past seventy-two hours into one continuous misery.

All the others looked up at the Bos'n. Nobody asked how he knew. We all had heard from Philip who serviced his cabin, too, that the little man spent those long evenings in his room, charting the course of our ship by guess—by information he extracted from the men on watch and by shooting the sun crudely with his fingers—a trick I'd heard of, that improvised sextant stunt, but never seen done until I saw him do it one noon.