Fo'castle Waltz

There had been an emergency aboard that ship that night down in El Maria—he didn't say what the emergency was and I didn't ask—and he was the only deck officer aboard. He went aft to the fo'castle and ordered the crew to turn to. There were big guys in that crew—and he reckoned they resented being ordered around by a shorter man. In those days he said he was kind of cocky too. Well, a lot of the men had been ashore drinking and they were sleepy. They told him to go to hell. They said a lot of other things. He riled up (he used words like that) and ran to his cabin and got his gun. Then he came back and told those sailors they had to get dressed and go to work. They swore at him again and one big guy rolled out of his bunk and made for him, howling he'd break every bone in his skinny little body. Our little Bos'n pulled his gun and shot this big guy in the belly.

So they jailed him for killing this guy and broke him. He served a year and two months in that Spanish prison and he's disliked Spiks ever since.

When he got back to the States he found his wife had gone off with another man. She wasn't much good anyway—she had dumped their kid, just two years old then, in an orphanage. He divorced her—cost him a lot of money—and he got the kid.

Then he kept quiet and so did I, ruining that drawing completely with a muddy background and a lot of nonessential detail. It turned out pretty awful but he liked it and I gave it to him. He said he'd frame it and put it up in the cabin of a trim sloop he was saving to buy.

Yeah, he was gonna get a sloop and hire him a couple of native boys as his crew, and he was gonna get a contract to carry mail down around the thousands of islands that dot the Caribbean. He'd take his kid with him and he and the kid would sail those islands from then on. It's pretty down around the islands in the Caribbean.

Yep, he always wore that cap aboard a ship to remind him to keep his temper. That was the cap he wore that night down in El Maria, Spain.

That Sunday dinner aboard that Limey hadn't been so hot, and the gang came back to our ship wishing they'd eaten aboard with us. We had taken on some fresh meat in the last port and our dinner hadn't been too terrible—a beef stew, not chicken, that Sunday.

Sitting around on that empty ship those evenings the crew talked about women. It was curious the talk wasn't about the women near by in Rio Santiago, Buenos Aires, or Bahia Blanca, whom they'd recently seen for a couple of pesos a look, but about distant women. Women they didn't pay for. It was the memory of those dames they carried inside them and wanted to talk about.

Ladies, it seems the tender emotion of undying love must be free of tariff to be transported for any distances unsoured in the tattooed, curly-haired, seagoing chests. If you charge even two pesos, you're written off and forgotten as traveling expenses. Of course, there are exceptions. Some dames in some houses in Vladivostok, Rotterdam, Brooklyn, Seattle, Chungking, or Calcutta, were worth a lot more than the price paid, and gave more—so they were remembered in those fo'castle reminiscences.

The young Polack had a girl in Baltimore. Hey, you, artist—you're an artist, aintcha?—how'd you like to have this babe for a model, huh?

He showed me a snapshot proudly. Some doll, huh? She was—a big fat dame bulging out of a frilly dress. Not the kind of young, fat bulges that swell out and stick up on their own axis, but the fold-over and flop type of fat that usually comes with age, though I've seen it happen on sloppy young women too. She smirked back at us from that snapshot. A frizzy bob (the coiffure of the period) stuck out about nine inches on either side of her flabby mush. Yeah, some doll. That young Polack deserved better.

Joe talked about the Australian gal he'd almost married six times. Some six trips he'd made to Australia—each time he almost married the girl. He traveled light and never carried pictures with him...

And to go on with these case histories, take that guy Slim— the Georgia boy. We didn't see much of him those evenings in port. He had wandered off by himself up in Rio Santiago, and again in Ingeniero he spent all his free time in the houses and about every penny he could draw or borrow with the women.

He didn't go to the big popular places, but he hung around the small joints where they only had the older, maternal-looking women. Even when he was finally broke he didn't hang around with us much in port; he walked the streets of the town. He didn't have any girl any place. The only woman he'd talk about much was his mammy.

It seems to me the most pathetically romantic guy aboard that ship was the fat old Sailing Man. He'd shipped out on this stinking tub because of his old woman, he said. He didn't approve of oil burners. He was a sailing man and he grudgingly conceded a ship the right to bum coal, though his preference was a good vessel pushed by a clean wind. But filthy, black fuel oil—goddam, that's for donkey engines.