Fo'castle Waltz

He had no more right up in the chart room than any of the day men, and he never talked with the Second Mate who was the ship's navigating officer, but he asked the A.B.'s after they'd put in their turn at the wheel how many knots we'd made and what course we set and he made notes on a little pad. Everybody knew and everybody co-operated except that bullet-headed guy on the Third Mate's watch. That lug always forgot, he said.

We don't know why the little guy did it. Maybe just to kill time. Others thought he must have been a Mate aboard some ship, and had lost his berth, but no one knew for sure. He didn't talk about himself.

The men all kneeling bluntly like a herd of beasts on a sun-hardened, rusty, plain slowly turned their heads and squinted up at him as he looked back toward the bridge and our eyes followed his back. We all looked over our shoulders, all except the Fat Man. He'd given up trying to kneel as he chipped a long time ago. He rolled over and looked, uncovering a dark, damp spot on the deck. He'd sweated a pool around himself as he sat there frying in his own grease.

The Swede Mate was up on the bridge with the Third Mate, though it wasn't his watch. The Old Man must have been having his usual afternoon snooze in his cabin. Crossing the Equator was no novelty to him.

The forward deck was empty. For some reason it made me think of the flat stretch of a hot baseball field; I couldn't understand that—it hadn't the shape or color—maybe it was just the tension.

Mush and I anxiously watched those two doors that led into the purple darkness of the shelter deck. If the Maverick and his bloody Father Neptune brigade came at us, it would be from those doors. Sweat poured down on my glasses and I let it run—I hadn't any clean handkerchiefs. Finally, when the effort of twisting around and watching those ominous holes in the bulkhead got too much for me, I went back to chipping with a bitter indifference.

The hell with them. If they came, they came. Being hauled through that water couldn't be any worse than chipping rust blisters on that burning deck—it would be cool at least—and I decided if that bunch did show up with their keelhauling lynch ropes, homemade splintered wood razors, rusty wire shaving brushes, and buckets of flesh-eating lather (made the week before, the Maverick had told us, from a bucket of Soogie fermented in a mixture of fishoil and crude oil—equal parts), I'd ask the Bos'n to please keep my glasses for me. He was the only one on the prow deck who wore a shirt, and he could tuck them away in his breast pocket. Then I'd be ready for my shave by King Neptune's daughter—or was he to do the shaving and we marry the daughter, before or after we were keelhauled? I didn't know the procedure, and I never found out.

The Neptune brigade didn't show up.

In the hot mess at supper the Maverick and a few others bellyached: What did them lousers up on midships think—the crew was going to carry on the ceremonies on their own time? Nuts! If midships didn't have the decency to co-operate, and cut down the engines and give the crew time off when we hit the Equator—t'hell with them. There'd be no ceremonies. And there wasn't.

11. The Truth About Columbus

SOMEHOW I FELT NOW THAT WE WERE SAFELY OVER the bump of the Equator we'd go slithering down the underside of the globe lickety-split and tie up at our destined port in no time at all. Unfortunately I'd never paid much attention to geography after my third year in grammar school, where we learned that the world was round. What did it—and spelling, too, for that matter, which I never could manage—have to do with drawing pictures (rear view) of our moon-faced teacher, Miss Conway, who wore a gigantic black taffeta bow around the knees of her hobble skirt as she explained all this stuff from charts she scribbled on the blackboard? I learned how to draw to the detriment of my geography lessons.

Naturally I'd heard about this gravity thing, which clamps the lower Atlantic to the globe as securely as it fastens on our northern waters, but I figured vaguely it still was on the down-grade and there might be a little drip to it, so we'd slide a little faster down under.