Fo'castle Waltz

They left us and went over to try that dead-cushioned pool table. After they racked up the balls and Mush was just getting set to shoot, he let out a yelp.

"Gawd—what d'hell's that?"

We went over to his side of the table. He was crouched over looking down at some guy who lay there flat on his back, his eyes closed and a thin red trickle oozing out of his mouth.

"That's one of our crew," the radio guy said.

"Is he dead?"

"No—just drunk, I think."

"Well, how we gonna play if we keep stumbling over his head as we go round the table? Think he'd mind if we dragged him out?"

"He might."

We walked around the table looking for his legs. They stuck out plenty on the other side. This guy was long, and when we saw him standing up some time later, we found we'd underestimated—he was longer.

He lay there under that table with his arms folded over an empty bottle which rested on his chest, smiling gently, dead drunk. Al and Mush gave up the thought of a game and after promising to visit the radio guy on his ship some Sunday (he had a lot of books up there and he'd let us borrow some if we wanted any), we went back to our ships.

Perry wouldn't let us go directly to that barroom. First he had to find one of the shrimp peddlers he said were all over the place. Since he had our pesos lumped up with his own money and wouldn't settle our accounts out on the open road, we stuck with him.

A little kid with a sniveling nose came down the road toward us carrying a large damp burlap bag. He set his bag down when we met and opened it up. It was half-full of cold, boiled shrimps. Perry ordered a measure for each of us. The kid, after hastily wiping his nose, with an expert twist made wide-mouthed cornucopias of sheets of newspaper and he filled each of them to overflow with a tangle of bright, pink shrimps. We walked along the road eating them.

"Delicious, ain't dey?" said Perry. "They catches 'em right here in the harbor and boils 'em on the spot—strictly fresh."

Joe walked along nibbling and said nothing.

I didn't think they were so much, but I agreed with Perry they were good. There wasn't much to them. The body of them wasn't much bigger than healthy New York cockroaches, and they had long antennaes, legs, feelers, streaming out of their shriveled little bodies in all directions. Their tiny dead black eyes stared back resentfully as you started to pluck at them. When you finally had stripped them down to their edible tails —you had a morsel of food about as big as the half of a worm one sometimes finds in a partly chewed apple.

"Tender, ain't they? And sweet, too," Perry went on. "Tell you what we'll do—we'll get a bottle of sauterne. That'll be good, huh? White wine's good with shellfish."

Joe, who had been getting more and more irritated as he pecked at his shrimp trying to get at the tails, gave up in disgust.

"Shellfish! Hell, dese are bugs. You like them? Have some more." And he smacked his paper of shrimp down on top of the mess Perry already carried, stuck his hands in his pockets, and walked along feeling more cheerful now that he had got rid of those crawly little dead things.

The barroom was crowded. Our whole deck crew (almost) was there and quite a few from the black gang; the Hog-Islanders, too, with that big guy who had been stretched out under the pool table, upright now, and as nasty as the rest of them. Like them, too, he wore his ordinary felt hat as if it were a ten-gallon Stetson and his trousers low at the waist, trying to get the effect of chaps like the rest of those cowboys.

Mush, Scotty, and the young Polack were holding down one corner of the bar with their elbows spread. They squeezed together to make room for us. Perry offered them shrimp, but told them not to eat them yet. Wait'll he got the sauterne.

The proprietor didn't have any, or any other white wine, so we drank the regular vino rojo and we nibbled the shrimp. While Perry was telling them about the deal he'd pulled with my Sweet Caporals, a big hand reached over our heads and plucked a mittful of shrimp.

"Ah like these too—thanks, buddy."

It was the big Hog-Islander. Now that he no longer sprawled over the bar and had stretched to his full height, that guy was tall. He towered over Joe by a good four inches. Why, he was as big as a Shiluk, and just about as narrow. He stood picking at the shrimp, stretching his finely trimmed mustache with an insolent smirk.

"Hey, Big Boy, you goin' over to the Mission for the fights?"

Joe, leaning with his elbows on the bar, looked up at him and grinned.

"Yeah—maybe."

"Wa-ll, you looks about ma' weight. Wanna put on the gloves for a few rounds?"

Joe looked him up and down, still grinning, and said, "Yeah —maybe," and kept looking him over. His eyes measured this big skinny guy up and down and across—they weighed him and felt the puny muscles of his scrawny arms.