Fo'castle Waltz

JOE LIT A CIGARETTE, GAVE ME A BIG WINK and after a few drags, began to chip. I couldn't understand this deliberate masochistic choice that he'd made to red-lead the stem of the S.S. Hermanita. If he felt he had to do his duty by the ship he could have picked a lot easier one. I sat there for a few miserable minutes studying the flat stretch of cold muddy water which lapped at our heels. It was no consolation that the harbor looked pretty, with the black hulls of the bumboats and fishing smacks breaking the flat sheen of the water—their reflections streaming away from them like fluttering silken ribbons.

"And damn it, it's cold down here. What the hell you got me into this for—"

"Chip!" he ordered.

So I chipped—not a moment too soon. The Mate had stuck his head out the porthole and had strained his neck around trying to see the section we were working on. He couldn't, but he seemed satisfied we were getting something done from the intent look on both our faces and the noise our chipping hammers made.

A few minutes after the Mate had withdrawn his head, Joe quit work for the day.

He smiled and gestured toward me with the flat of his hand, a gesture that was intended to mean everything is hunky-dory and according to plan. He squinted out toward a passing bumboat and hailed the Argentinian who stood in it rowing with long easy strokes.

"Buenos dias."

The guy looked up and swung his boat toward us. When he was close by he responded, '"Buenos dias."

Joe laughed and made a crack or two in his Spanish. The guy didn't know what he was talking about. After a while, he said:

"Mucho trabajo."

I knew what that meant—too much work—we were working too hard—everybody down there said that—everybody was working too hard.

"Si, mucho trabajo y poco dinero."

Then one thing led to another and I heard vino mentioned and the guy rowed off to one of the small fishing boats, and came back in a few minutes. He pulled alongside of Joe and the big fellow loosened his bucket of paint from where it hung under his scaffold seat. The guy in the boat lifted a gallon glass jug of purple red wine. There was an exchange and a few "'gracias, senors," and some other chitchat, and then he slid off quietly with Joe's bucket of good ship's paint in his boat.

Joe grinned. "S'notbad—heh, kid?"

He swigged a big gulping drink of the wine and reached it over to me. So we spent the morning sitting there quietly, smoking, talking and emptying that jug.

I apologized to Joe for misjudging him and expressed my admiration for his excellent planning. He modestly shrugged that off—pas de tout—it was nothing, and he told me of more worthy occasions: the time he had sold a couple of hundred running foot of brand, new and shiny hawser off a ship for the equivalent of ten American dollars and a small keg of brandy, one inky black night in Marseilles.

The morning passed pleasantly and around about noon there were only a few more drinks left in that jug. I told Joe I didn't want any more. I was holding on to my edge of that plank rather grimly...

Joe threw his head back and drained the last of that wine in one long, continuous swallow. As I watched the wine bubbling out of that jug into his mouth it looked as if those bubbles were going down his thick, curved throat carried by the spasmodic rolling of his Adam's apple. It made me feel seasick as I watched.

After what seemed an endless period, while he waited for the last few drops to roll down the inside of the jug to his waiting outthrust tongue, he sat bolt upright, his chin pulled back, and rested the empty pinkish glass jug on his knee. He belched —a long, rolling, roaring belch—and then he jerked his head around toward me with a big grin of accomplishment.

"Oh boy—dat's good—heh, keed?"

I yeah'd. I tried to belch too, but no go.

Then Joe got busy. He swooped his long arm down, filled the jug with water, and let it sink down into the harbor. He took my bucket of paint and with a few expert twirls of the brush, smeared the unchipped hull with a series of dabs, streaks, and blotches. When he was through it looked as if we'd put in a hard morning's work, and had chipped and red-leaded a lot more than our share on the stern of that ship.

A very artistic-looking job, we both agreed, and Joe carefully arranged a series of dabs and smears down near the water line which made a crude but readable big capital J.

Being a provident, farsighted guy, he had tied a rope ladder up at the rail and attached it to our plank early that morning. At that, when we loosened the lines that had curved us around the hull and swung out, I had quite a time getting back on the ship; but after he grabbed me a few times as I thrust my foot through the wobbly rungs of the ladder and almost toppled into the water, he boosted me up to the rail and told me to stay off ships. I'd never be a sailor.