Fo'castle Waltz

Suddenly, the day was with us. There was a stir on deck, and Mush was up. I saw big Joe ambling along the deck on his way to breakfast and I talked him into lending me the dollar watch he always carried. And I gobbled down my breakfast quick, put on my hat, and was off. I didn't run through the town—I walked quickly. The breeze kept lifting my stiff-brimmed hat.

The long narrow platform of the railroad station was completely deserted. In a flat straight ribbon the tracks shot off into the horizon—no sign of a train to break its unerring aim. I picked up a timetable in the little station. It was easy to figure out—that spur of track began at Buenos Aires and went through forty or fifty assorted names of saints, ports, and villas, and came to a dead end in Rio Santiago. There would be no train until about noon. The only other morning train had pulled out about the time I tried to curl my mustache at sunup.

A typical suburban train schedule—if you want to get away from any of the festering little colonies outside of any metropolis you usually have to get up at some ungodly hour in order to make the city at some reasonable time, or else you must wait until the housewives have sent all the children off to school, rushed through the dishes, finished with their household chores, and travel with them around noon in a train which gets into town in time for them to grab a marshmallow sundae and dash off to a matinee or do some shopping. That noon train seemed to be that sort of setup, even though housewives in Rio Santiago were as rare as marshmallow sundaes and the city was only about twenty miles away.

After I'd marched a few miles up and down that narrow station platform, I sat in the sun on some damp railroad ties at the station end nearest Buenos Aires and wished I'd planned the day better.

The morning limped along. About an hour before the train was due a few people had begun to gather along the platform. A few women among them might have been from the houses, but I couldn't tell. They wore dark, sedate clothes and so many of those women had looked like any others I'd seen, there was no way of telling their profession without their kimonos or bathrobes.

Then along came two little old men I knew. I'd seen them around in some of the barrooms and had spoken to them and occasionally bought them a drink. They were a couple of American beachcombers, nice old guys who looked and dressed so much alike I couldn't tell them apart. One was a little shorter than the other, but if you didn't see them together that didn't help, since they both were so frail and small, you needed the two of them around to scale each other.

They wore massive short white beards that jutted (mustache and all) out and away from their pinched regular features. Cloth boys' caps, pulled forward, shaded their eyes so you couldn't see them. They talked through their beards like department-store Santa Clauses, with their mustaches hiding their mouths. I noticed when they crooked their thin necks back and swallowed their drinks they seemed to pour the liquor into the bush of their whiskers. You never knew where they wore their mouths—but they did.

I was glad to see them. The littler one told me they were going up to Buenos Aires, and when I asked if they knew the address of the American Consul they said sure. That's where they were going. Stick with them and they'd show me the way. Now that was lucky meeting them there.

The little one, standing there with his ragged collar pulled up against the wind and his hands thrust deep into his threadbare, patched trousers, squinted up at the sky and mumbled:

"Looks like a fine day."

"Yeah."

"Gittin' sort of warm too—ain't it?"

Well, he might have had a bit of fever, I thought. Though the sun was out, there was a cold wind blowing that this little man felt too as he shivered and I said, "Yep."

"Yep—it's getting real warm and dry, too," he coughed.

His bigger twin brother nodded sagely. We'd been walking along the station as we talked, they on either side of me. I found somehow we had stopped in front of a shack that peddled cigarettes, newspapers, and big bottles of black beer. They stood there staring at the bottles displayed in the window of the shack.

"Say," I said, brightly, "d'ya think we've got time to drink a bottle of beer before the train comes along?"

"Sure have," and they had edged me into that shack, ordered three bottles, one for each of us, which I paid for before my invitation for one split bottle was out of my mouth.