Fo'castle Waltz

Perry, on whom I depended as my liaison with the untutored Argentinians who spoke no English, was out—or I should have said—in. He'd been jugged along with the Polack guy from Baltimore. And we saw no more of them and they no more of Rio Santiago until they were led meekly back to the ship on the day we weighed anchor and shipped south.

We all had been doing port work. Yes, every last one of those pampered A.B.'s were as greasy and dirty as any of us Cinderella men—the regular day men. And we gloated.

They couldn't stall or finagle any angles—the first few days anyway. Maybe that's the reason Perry and his accomplice pulled what they did. They'd rather languish in the calaboose than lift a hand in honest toil. Under the watchful eye of the Swede Mate, the Bos'n and the young Third Mate—whose business it was to superintend the loading or unloading of the ship, and he was always on deck—the crew worked and got dirty.

The Mate set us to painting oversides, unpleasant work but not very strenuous—the sort of job where you can look as if you're working a lot harder than you are, and it's only you and your conscience that is any the wiser.

We paired off (Slim was my partner) and we dropped heavy, twelve-foot-long planks about ten inches wide over the side. Of course, we had lines tied to both ends of the plank—that is, to the second one Slim and I shoved over. That first one I managed to get over (with my new-found strength from the goat milk) that morning before Slim had tied his line to it. We lashed our lines to the rail and that was our scaffold.

When each of us with a bucket of red lead, a brush and a chipping hammer, climbed over side, and settled on our plank to spend the morning chipping rust blisters on the old tub's hull. Then we'd paint the patch with red lead. The opportunity to stall there is obvious—only you could see and judge how much chipping the plate you were banging your nose against needed, if you felt like chipping, or how much red leading, if you felt like painting. And you could twiddle your hammer with a concentrated look on your face for hours at a time, while you thought of the finer things of life.

And if the Mate leaned over the rail and howled, "Vat d'hell you doin' dere?" you could calmly and with complete assurance say, "Come and look," and know he wouldn't, since two of us on that tilting plank served to balance it, and if he just dared to climb down, we'd all surely be tumbled and go splashing down into the cold, dirty river. And we knew it and so did he.

Perry had carried that attitude just a little too far in his argument with the Mate that afternoon. The insatiable Perry had talked the Polack guy into lunching at the Chicago Bar. He must have been very persuasive for the Polack was a quivering mess from his night ashore. They came back to the ship with a rolling list that made you dizzy while you watched them. With a whoop and a howl they scrambled over side and down to their plank. There, Perry stood holding on with one arm crooked around the line at his end of the plank, as he gestured wildly with his dripping paintbrush held in the other hand and edified us all with a lecture on the rights and privileges of American seamen in foreign ports. The Polack, giggling and squirming at the other end, joined in at the infrequent pauses in Perry's dissertation with his hard inane howl.

The Swede Mate poked his head over the rail and shouted down at Perry, and he, with great bravado and his massive accumulation of questionable Maritime Law and a venomous sarcasm, told the Mate off to the grinning silent approval of the rest of the crew. And Perry almost drew an irrepressible round of applause when at one time during his oration a magnificent gesture upward with his paintbrush caught the Mate and spotted his white yachtsman's cap with big gooey drops of red lead.

Perry concluded with the Marseillaise, followed by a direct and very personal—

"And foidermore, f'cue, Mr. Mate. We're walkin' off dis lousy ship any time we wanta. Yeah—right now. Howya like dat? Come on, Polack."

The Mate didn't say a word to that—not a word. He looked down at them in a roaring silence, then he was gone from the rail.

Perry and the Polack climbed back on the deck, marched back aft, and dressed themselves up in their striped silk shirts and going-ashore clothes. It seemed that a lot of us had tumbled our buckets about that time and lost our paint so we too climbed back on deck to get a refill. We all politely waited our turn at the big barrel of red lead Chips had mixed, so that there were quite a few of us on the shore side of the ship when Perry and the Polack burst through the fo'castle door to rumble down the deck to the gangplank, still helling around and haw-haw-ing to each other how they'd showed this Mate up.