Fo'castle Waltz

None of the sailors on that ship ever said larboard or starboard, except the fat old Sailing Man, but no one paid him any mind. The officers might have used that terminology—I never talked to them much, rather they didn't to me.

Mush dashed for the rail, and after I unscrambled myself from some buckets I was carrying through the shelter deck, I was after him to see the coast of Brazil with its waving palmettos, maybe a few sloe-eyed senoritas. . . .

"What land—? Where is land?"

"Dere, look. What's d'mattaire, you blind?"

We squinted—well, I was nearsighted and depended upon Mush to confirm Joe's sight of land—but he evidently couldn't see any more than I.

"Are you kidding?"

"Naw, dere she is on d'horizon."

"You mean that thin gray strip like a long skinny wave?"

"Yeh, dis is Brazil."

"It don't look like much to me." Frankly, Mush was disappointed. So was I.

"Much? She's biggaire than your United Steaks."

"Well, she don't look it."

And since I couldn't see any difference between that gray strip and the rest of the gray water, the coast of Brazil had no effect on me, though it was nice to know that it was there.

Then, those porpoise-like days became wetter. We'd get some rainy days and we Soogie-Moogied without the hose—let the rain wash away the Soogie. The guys began to look different as they put on more clothes. I invested in a fine suit of yellow oilskins and a sou'wester from the slop chest, which were all ripped up a few days after I bought them. I was told I didn't know how to hang them up right—they should have been oiled or something. All I knew, they'd stick together in a messy lump and, as I pulled the sleeve of the jacket out from the rest of it and tried to struggle into the thing, something ripped—and in a few days, it was so slashed through that the whole suit was useless.

But I have the consoling memory of the first day or two that I wore it and looked like the man in the yellow oilskins on the bottles of Scott's Emulsion my sister used to take when she was little. I looked very much like that man. Of course he carried an immense codfish on his back and I wore glasses, but aside from that we were very similar, beard and all. My beard was definitely beginning to show, and when dust gathered in my whiskers, some recognized its existence. Most of the crew thought I should wash my face more often. Colder weather was no excuse for curtailing the daily bucket bath.

We lived a more interior social life now, sitting around the fo'castle of an evening. There the discussions covered a wide field—economics, politics, religion, philosophy, art, life and death. Talk on the women of the Argentine that Birdneck had foretold hadn't started yet.

The fat Sailing Man's bunk was in the center of the fo'castle and there was no way of keeping him out of any argument or discussion. Each of the crew had fixed up his bunk and the bulkhead around it into a snug personal expression. Naturally, there were the pin-ups—nothing salacious, usually a corny chromo, some magazine print of a saccharine sweet dame with flowers. Small, clean linen bags containing sewing equipment hung along there, too; watches, pipe-racks, framed photographs. All their bunks looked clean and homey. All except the fat Sailing Man's. That was as messy and tangled as a pigsty.

He'd waddle back into the fo'castle every evening after his bath with his dirty towel draped around his shoulders. He was never completely dry or completely clean. Rivulets of dirty water and soapsuds would still be dribbling down his back and legs as he slopped down, kerplunk, in the middle of his bunk on top of whatever was lying there—old shoes, greasy dungarees, lumpy blankets, et al. Then he'd root around that mess and drag out his pipe and from some other damp pile dig out a crumpled paper of tobacco. He'd fill up, dripping grains of tobacco all over himself and his bunk. The matches he dug out from God-knows-where would always be damp—he'd borrow a light. He'd suck his pipe with a noise like a heavy head cold, and when he got going good, he'd look up and smile brightly.

That loose tobacco and his dampness seemed to have stained his whole bunk and its contents a nicotine tan. His bunk stood out in a color and quality all its own. It was a blight on the neatness of the fo'castle and I'd heard some mumbling that they were going to make him clean up that mess, but nothing ever happened. No one spoke to him about it the whole length of the trip.