Fo'castle Waltz

Finally, Perry slammed the cartons down on the counter and took the four-fifty price with a hurt look.

My box of Sweet Caporals was not included in the deal. The guy gestured toward them, but Perry waggled that finger again. Oh no, not at that price. The Argentinian seemed interested. Perry screwed up his eyes and seemed to be giving the Sweet Caps a build-up. He topped his argument by dramatically pointing to a ragged poster of Firpo, the Bull of the Pampas, that hung on the wall back of the counter. That seemed to settle it and for those special cigarettes the Argentinian paid eight pesos—a profit of almost two and a half dollars, since the purser had only charged me (on his books) seventy cents for them.

He explained to us after we left the shop he had told the guy Sweet Caporals were the favorite smoke of Firpo when he was up in the States—the cigarette that all our heavyweight prizefighters train on. They're good for the wind.

We made for the only decent barroom in the town. It was over near the railroad station.

It was a high-ceilinged room lit up by a couple of electric bulbs over the Cafe Expresso machine behind the bar. The rest of the room was dark. A large battered pool table took up one section of the room.

We had stopped in on our way back from Bahia Blanca the night before and had a few drinks. The noisy crew of that Hog-Islander were draped all over the place, and a few Limeys and some of our own crew drank quietly off in one of the darkened comers.

Joe had been right—that Hog-Islander was manned by a lot of Texans. They looked and sounded more like a bunch of farmers than sailors as they cackled their thin jokes and yuk-yuk'd their delight with their own sallies. Our S.S. Hermanita crew seemed like a dignified, well-contained group in comparison. After we had a drink or two, one of those hatchet-faced yokels who wore his hat thrust over one eye grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward the light.

"Hey—lookit heah—this fella don' need a shave. He's raisin' a bea'd. What d'hell ya raisin' a bea'd fo'? Yo're an American, aincha?"

I jerked loose from that heel.

There it was again, the dilemma with which every guy who wears glasses is always being confronted. Should I take my glasses off or wait? If I took them off I was a touchy, belligerent boil (cancha take a little kiddin'?) looking for a fight. If I kept them on I was a yella-bellied-sonovabitch who hides my cowardice behind my specs and the seven years of prison everyone knows he'll get for hitting a man with glasses on.

I'm getting a little doubtful about that seven-year yam. Although I've slugged and been slugged now and again with and without my glasses on, nobody landed in prison for it, and though some of my best friends are ex-cons, I never met any who served time for that offense. Mayhap I don't know the right kind of criminals. In any case, we weak-eyed guys get the worst of it when we take our glasses off and almost always the first sock in the moosh (our own) while we blink and try to get our eyes focusing and looking fierce at the same time.

For example, the proper procedure—after this Texas punk had rudely whirled me around—was to look him over to be sure he wasn't too drunk to take a punch. Then, that he wasn't too little. In either case a good-natured crack was the proper response. If he was too big, that's all right—a handicap of a bottle or a length of pipe was allowed in such cases. If he's about your own size and weight and sober enough to be responsible for what he said and did as this Hog-Islander was, you take your dilemma by the horns and juggle it quickly.

Before I could come to any logical conclusion Joe had reached over my head and straightened the Texan's hat as he said:

"Nice hat you got, boy. You a cowboy?"

"Yessuh, ya gad damn right. Ah'm a long ho'n from way back. I've rid' the range from Tulsa to—"

One of his buddies had said something that set all of them yapping and cackling like a birdhouse in the zoo at feeding time, so we never heard to where. He turned back to his outfit.

They were all medium-sized guys, and if there had been any trouble I imagine we'd have done pretty well.

A plumpish, pink-cheeked young fellow got talking to us. He was the radioman of that Hog-Islander, a well-spoken, nice guy, and he courteously invited us to sit at one of the tables and have a drink with him. We all ordered brandy but he asked for port—the only thing he could drink was port, he said. When he found out that Al and Mush were at school, and I was in the art business, he was delighted.

He hadn't had a chance to talk to anyone but those Hog-Islanders for months, and he yearned for some intellectual conversation. He wasn't drunk. That's the way he talked. It seems he'd read a lot of morbid German philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Schlegel—and that's what he wanted to talk about. That was all right with me, but neither Al nor Mush had read them or cared—and their interest lagged.