Cain’s Book (13 page)

Who speaks, knows not; who knows, speaks not.

W
INDY MARCH
and I make another beginning.

To bleed a stone. The anguish of this compulsion to record that swells beyond meaningful record. It is positively d.i.s.h.o.n.e.s.t. If I could find something to compel me equally. Marijuana has
a tendency to set me against myself. My shadow waits for me, an instant of time in advance of me, and my knowledge of it can cause us to freeze into long abeyances. This practising of deceit
against oneself, while it might be felt to be a waste of time, worse, perilous to one’s integrity, is common knowledge to the wise. To live within one’s imagination is brave, necessary;
a man should know that the victims of his imagination can be many. The mass of men is afraid of imagination for this reason; with good reason, the tribunes will claim. Tell the tribunes that there
can be no good reason for fear. It is fear that will destroy us.

The 8th Avenue bus took me to 34th Street, the crosstown on 34th to Pier 72. The tug was already there and I boarded the
Samuel B. Mulroy
under a flood of insults from the tugboat
captain. The scowman is the leper of the New York waterfront; he is old and can’t work or he is a zombie who won’t. The four scows linked together single file lay with the down tide
from a corner of Pier 73 for three hours. Shortly after midnight the tug returned and the short slow haul down the Hudson to the stake boat in Upper Bay began. Mine was the last scow and I sat aft
at my open cabin door and watched the dark west waterfront of Manhattan slide away to the right. I thought of a night a long time ago when I had a girlfriend aboard for a short trip and how at the
same kind of midnight we went naked over the end of a long tow, each in the hempen eye of a dockline, screaming sure and mad off Wall Street as the dark waves struck.

We arrived at
Bronx Stake Boat No. 2
shortly after three in the morning and the tug, churning foam on the black water, backed away, its bell clanking instructions to the engine room.
She slewed round then and moved quickly away into the darkness. I watched her for a few minutes until the glow from her deck lights dimmed and only the mast lights were visible. Then I entered the
cabin.

A chair, a typewriter, a table, a single bed, a coal stove, a dresser, a cupboard, a man in a little wooden shack, two miles from the nearest land.

I remember feeling the night was going to be interminable.

I split a log and got the fire going. That helped... for a few moments, until I smoked a cigarette, stubbed it in an overflowing ashtray, and wondered what to do next. Even then, and all this is
a long time ago now, I was no sooner alone than I would begin urgently to take stock.

I had come from London to New York and when I realized that the long affair between Moira and me was over I got a job on the scows. Time to think, to take stock. The grey table in front of me
strewn with papers, inventories from the past, from Paris, from London, from Barcelona, notes neatly typed, notes deleted, affirmations, denials, sudden terrifying contradictions, a mass of
evidence that I had been in abeyance, far out, unable to act, for a long time.

I wrote for example: “If I write: it is important to keep writing, it is to keep me writing. It is as though I find myself on a new planet, without a map, and having everything to learn. I
have unlearnt. I have become a stranger.”

Seated at the grey table in front of cigarettes, matches, the dregs of a cup of tea. No radio. Dead silence broken only by dripping, on deck, at the windows, on the roof, in the bilges below.
Sometimes the cabin shook in a gust of wind. And the sound of the bell came, giving me a sense of the emptiness of the night beyond the walls, and of the trackless water. For two hours I fought
panic. I feared those moments and yet sometimes I felt a faint lust on me to live them again; and then I slid into a relentless movement which carried me again to the brink of hysteria.

It rained all night.

10 a.m.
Samuel B. Mulroy
, deck scow, bobs around on tide and currents, a low-slung coffin on the choppy grey water. The day is dull. The sky is low and greywhite. Tugs come and go,
hauling linked scows, like toy boats playing dominoes. They come suddenly out of the mist which obscures Manhattan Island, hooting importantly. Leave two, take one. It goes on all the time the
scows lie here. At the moment there are eleven of us strung out on wet ropes at the stake boat. The stake boat, which provides temporary moorings for scows on their way to unloading stages in
Brooklyn and Newark, NJ, is uninhabited. It is an engineless hulk painted green and red and set with bollards, cleats, a winch and a few hawsers. A painted wooden board identifies it as
Bronx
Stake Boat No
.
2
. The stake boat swings about its anchors with the tide, the scows stranded out behind it in three rows, like beads on a string. Somewhere, not far off but invisible,
a bell clanks dully and monotonously, a banshee wailing her dead. It comes from a marking buoy which flashes at night at regular intervals, a sudden explosion of white light which seems to hesitate
before it occludes. And at night, if the mist rises, the lights on the lower end of Manhattan strike upwards out of the dark like an electric castle.

It was dawn when I went out on the catwalk.

The sun was struggling to break through a low mist and the surface of the water, glassy at this hour, was vaguely tinted with colour. I counted four scows behind me, a chain of three lying
directly behind the stake, and, on the far side, three brick scows piled high with red bricks and two yellow sand scows. This small shanty town had come to exist during the night.

The front scow of the centre chain is grey and red. It is one of seventeen scows of a small sea transport corporation.

I sat on an upturned bucket at the stern on the port side and gazed across the water towards the gradually appearing Brooklyn waterfront. I had been drinking coffee all night and I had smoked
some marijuana. The smooth water, grey-yellow, the tilting black cones of the distant buoys, and the passing freight which moves slowly across the estuary towards the North and East Rivers all
contributed to the profound sense that came over me that I was living out of time. It was cool on deck. I was waiting to catch the junk boat which comes out to the moorings from time to time to buy
old ropes and to sell newspapers and cigarettes.

Day. The rain is off. I am alone, suspended between land and land, waiting to go with my load of grey stone to my destination,
Colonial Sand and Stone
, Newark, NJ. I watched dawn come
near the open door of my little white cabin, looking across the water at the extinguished sign of
Isthmian Lines
,
¹⁸
and I was wondering what I
was doing, doing just that.

It had been the same for years. The same situations. Sometimes I thought I was learning something of my own constructions. A scow on the Hudson, a basement room in London, a tiny studio in
Paris, a cheap hotel in Athens, a dark room in Barcelona... and now I was living on a moving object, every few days a new destination... but always into the same situation. The voices, judging and
protesting, seemed familiar.

There was the Swede again.

It was around noon and I had been going to make a cup of coffee but I was out of milk. Scow behind me was Harry T. O’Reilly. I climbed up the short ladder on the bows onto the load of
stone chips. I like walking across a load. The stones crunch under your feet as you walk the length of the scow. There are 800 to 1,300 tons of crushed stone to a load. A thread of thin grey smoke
was coming from the smokestack of the cabin at the stern. Get some sugar. Two oil tankers were moving slowly towards the East River. A helicopter hovered not far away. It was heading towards
Manhattan.

The Swede was using a hand pump to clear his bilges of water. He looked up as I approached. Broad face with cropped grey hair, stocky, small blue eyes, and a thick red neck. I’d forgotten
it was his scow. He was a deep-sea man, on the scows only until they were laid off for the winter, he said. And then he’d ship out.

Another time I ran into him I made the mistake of accepting a cup of coffee. We had just begun the voyage downriver from the quarry. I couldn’t get rid of him all day after that. He was
always corning over to my scow on one pretext or another.

“How ya doin’?”

The man didn’t read, not even a newspaper. He was always doing something with ropes or a hammer. The gallows carpenter of the Bothnian Gulf.
¹⁹

“How moch water ya got?”

He referred to the water which seeped in between the heavy planks and lay darkly like water under a pier in the bilges.

“Not much, I pumped her out yesterday.”

He went away and I pretended to be engrossed in a newspaper. If it had been a book he would have asked me to tell him about it. “I no read moch bot you tell me, ’sgood?”

Five minutes later he was back.

“Ja, ya got seven inches... more. I measure. I thought yo tell me yo pomped?”

“Yeah.”

“I bin down’n looked. What ya say I bring my pomp over, hey?”

“No, man. Just leave it, see? I like a bit of water for ballast.”

“Ballast! Yo sink. Then it’s not so fonny.”

“OK, sailor, but just leave it. I’m busy.”

If he came with his pump he would be around for hours. It would break down. He would need my assistance to repair it. “Fon an games, hey?”

All afternoon he kept coming back. He spoke about women like a glutton might speak about pork chops (they were his enemies but he focked them), of one particularly whose legs he had broken in
New Orleans. He described a frog crushed under a buffalo’s weight. A white buffalo, a skinny brown frog. “Sure I got de doc, de best, an he ask me how dat happen, an I say hey hey you
never mind how it happen, doc, ya go ahead and fix it. I pay. Sure I pay. Dat coss me fifteen hunred dollars! Tree hunred for de doc an twelve hunred for de girl, hey hey! I gotta loak out! I doan
know my own strength!” He was grinning and his big chest was expanded for inspection. “Ya shore ya doan want dat pomp?”

I was surprised to see him using the hand pump.

“What happened to your pump?” I said as I climbed down onto the deck beside him.

“Yeah, dem bastards tuck it. Said I doan leak enough. I quit. You see.”

“I came to see if you had any milk.”

“Milk? I got damn-ass all. I bin out tree fockin’ days. I doan get ashore tomorrow I quit. I go down to New Orleans’n get me a piece of ass.”

“Break some more legs,” I agreed. I was glad he didn’t have any milk. I didn’t want him on my back.

A tug was approaching with three scows.

“Dey kom for me I tink,” the Swede said.

They hadn’t.

The tug came alongside and dropped off two of the scows. I knew one of the scowmen, Bill Baker. His wife, Jacqueline, was hanging some clothes on an outdoor line. Her thick white legs tensed as
she stretched upwards to clip the pegs on.

I got some sugar from her.

As I went back to my own scow the Swede stopped me. He leered. I was aware of his forearms, heavy like two cods, and tattooed from wrist to elbow. His broad teeth were stained the colour of a
neglected urinal.

“Hey,” he said, “what yo mean about I break legs?” He looked dangerous.

“You said it.”

“Ach, yeah... shore! But dat’s all right. I pay. Shore, I remember. But I get me a big time down there in New Orleans. I not always like dis.” He indicated his filthy
sweatshirt. “I got seven new suits, eight wid the one I got before, smart, de best material, an I got a 1955 Buick convertible. Dem clothe coss me near a tausen dallar. I go there I have all
the ass I want.” He hesitated and nodded in the direction of the woman who had returned to her chore. “Nat like her,” he said. “All I want. Yong pussy. I wouldn’ toch
her wid a goddam pole, heh, heh!” He grinned. “Yo kom mit me, yo see!”

I made my way for’ard, ignoring his restraining gesture. In my own cabin again I had just lit a joint when he knocked at the door. I stubbed the joint and dropped it in the table drawer.
He stood in the doorway, one hand on the portal, leaning there.

He said: “Yah! Sa great contry Amerika! People kom here! You take de Poles or de Germans, or even de English. And dere’s de Irish too... I like de Irish, dey’s good people...
hey, hey, yo lok what de English done to dem, heh? Dey all kom here. Man worrks, he git paid, de bess monney in de worrld, an hey! man free to go where he want, nut like de Rooskies. Dey got
anodder tink kommin to dem, dem Rooskies, yah! Dat Eisenwhore knows what he doin’, yo see. Yah! Here in Amerika yo got de great mixture. All kom here. Too many wops maybe. An dere’s de
niggers. I’m not for to discriminate against any man’n here in Amerika dey’s all equal, dass de law...”

“Yeah, big deal,” I said. “Now look, Swede, I want to read.”

“Yo read too moch,” he said, and he burst out laughing and tapped his close-clipped skull with his broad forefinger. “Yo read too moch yo get sick op here!”

“Yeah,” I said, “book-learning. Now, fuck off!”

When he had gone I found I’d got sugar instead of milk. I didn’t want to disturb Jacqueline again so I drank my coffee black.

I smoked the rest of the joint.

It was nearly dusk when I went on deck again. A small boat was pulling away towards Brooklyn with Bill aboard. He was seated at the stern, beside the man who handled the outboard.