Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0) (16 page)

Bilge water, they say, is thicker than blood, and once men have been shipmates, no matter how much they hate each other’s guts, they stand together against the world. That’s the way it is supposed to be, but it certainly wasn’t going to be that way with Duggs and me. I decided that in a hurry.

From the hour I shipped on that freighter, Duggs made it tough for me, but it wasn’t only me but the whole crew. You don’t mind so much if a really tough guy makes you like it, but when a two-by-twice scenery bum like Duggs rubs it into you just because he has the authority, it just naturally hurts.

If we’d gone off on the dock where it was man to man, I’d have lowered the boom on his chin and left him for the gulls to pick over. But we were aboard ship, and if you sock an officer aboard ship, it’s your neck.

Sometimes I think he laid awake nights figuring ways to be nasty, but maybe he didn’t have to go to that much effort. I suspect it just came naturally. He made it rough for all of us but particularly me. Not that I didn’t have my chances to cool him off. I had three of them. The first was at sea, the second in Port Swettenham, and the third—well, you’ll hear about that.

Every dirty job he could find fell to Tony or me, and he could think of more ways to be unpleasant without trying than you could if you worked at it. Unless you have been at sea, you can’t realize how infernally miserable it can become. There are a thousand little, insignificant things that can be done to make it miserable. Always something, and it doesn’t have to be anything big. Often it is the little things that get under your skin, and the longer it lasts, the worse it gets.

Of course, the food was bad, but that was the steward’s fault. Curry and rice and fried potatoes for three straight weeks. That was bad enough, but Duggs kept finding work for us to do after we were off watch. Emergencies, he called them, and you can’t refuse duty in an emergency. There were men aboard that ship who would have killed Duggs for a Straits dollar. Me, I’m an easygoing guy, but it was getting to me.

One morning at four o’clock I was coming off watch. It was blowing like the bull of Barney, and a heavy sea running. Duggs had just come on watch, and he calls to me to go aft with him and lend a hand. The log line was fouled. Back we went, and the old tub was rolling her scuppers under, with seas breaking over her that left you gasping like a fish out of water, they were that cold.

We reeled in the log line, hand over hand, the wind tearing at our clothes, the deck awash. He did help some, I’ll give him that, but it was me who did the heavy hauling, and it was me who cleared the little propeller on the patent log of seaweed and rope yarns.

Right there was the perfect opportunity. Nobody would have been surprised if we’d both been washed over the side, so it would have been no trick to have dumped him over the rail and washed my hands of him. Duggs had on sea boots and oilskins, and he would have gone down quick.

I finished the job, tearing skin from my hands and getting salt into the raw wounds, the ship plunging like a crazy bronco in a wild and tormented sea. Then, in the moment when I could have got him and got him good, he leaned over and shouted to be heard above the wind, “There! I’m sure glad I managed to get that done!”

And I was so mad I forgot to kill him.

The next time was in Port Swettenham. Duggs knew I had a girl in Singapore, but instead of letting me go ashore, he put me on anchor watch. All night long I stood by the rail or walked the deck, looking at the faroff lights of town and cussing the day I shipped on a barge with a louse-bound, scupper-jumping, bilge-swilling rat for mate. And my girl was ashore expecting me—at least, I hoped she was.

We sailed from Singapore, called at Baliwan and Penang, and finally we crawled up the river to Port Swettenham.

It was hot and muggy. Keeping cool was almost impossible, and I had only two changes of clothes for working. One of them I managed to keep clean to wear off watch; the other was stiff with paint and tar. When time allowed I’d wash the one set and switch. The mate deliberately waited one day until I’d changed into clean clothes, and then he called me.

We were taking on some liquid rubber, and down in the empty fuel-oil tank in the forepeak was a spot of water about as big as a pie plate. He told me to climb down fifteen feet of steel ladder covered with oil slime and sop up that water. Aside from being a complete mess before I’d reached the bottom, there was almost an even chance I’d slip and break a leg.

Forward we went together, then down in the fore-peak, and stopped by the manhole that let one into the tank. He held up his flashlight, pointing out that dime’s worth of water. I had a steel scraper in my hand, and when he leaned over that manhole, I thought what a sweet setup that was.

I could just bend that scraper over his head, drop him into the tank, put the hatch cover on, then go on deck and give them the high sign to start pumping rubber. There’d be a fuss when the mate turned up missing, but they’d never find him until they emptied the tank, and if I knew the old man, I knew he’d never pump the rubber out of that tank for a dozen mates. And just then Chips stuck his head down the hatch and yelled for Duggs.

Time passed, and we tied up in Brooklyn. I drew my pay and walked down the gangway to the dock. Then I turned and looked back.

From beginning to end that voyage had been plain, unadulterated hell, yet I hated to leave. When a guy lives on a ship that long, it begins to feel like home no matter how rough it is, and I had no other.

Six months I’d sailed on that packet, good weather and bad. Around the world we’d gone and in and out of some of the tiniest, dirtiest ports in the Far East. I’d helped to paint her from jack staff to rudder and stood four hours out of every twenty-four at her wheel across three oceans and a half-dozen seas. She was a scummy old barge, but as I stood there looking back, I had to cuss just to keep from feeling bad. Then I walked away.

After that there were other ships and other ports, some good and some bad, but I never forgot Duggs and swore the first time I found him ashore, I’d beat the hell out of him. Every time I’d see that company flag, and they had thirty-odd ships, I’d go hunting for Duggs. I knew that someday I’d find him.

One day in Portland I was walking along with a couple of guys, and I glimpsed that house flag over the top of a warehouse at the dock. Thinks I, now’s my chance to get that mug; this will be him.

Sure enough, when I walked down the dock, there he was, giving the last orders before casting off and standing right at the foot of the gangway ready to board. It was now or never. I walked up, all set to cop a Sunday on his chin, and I say, “Remember me?”

He sized me up. “Why, sure! You’re Duke, aren’t you?” There’d been a time they called me that—among other things.

“That’s me. And you—!”

“Well, well!” He was grinning all over. “What do you know about that? We were just talking about you the other day, and we were wondering what had become of you!

“Remember Jones? He’s skipper on the
Iron Queen
now, and Edwards—he was third, you’ll remember, he’s with the Bull Line. They’re all scattered now, but that was a good crew, and we came through a lot together. I’ll never forget the night you hit that Swede in the Dato Kramat Gardens in Penang! Man, what a wallop that was! I’ll bet he’s out yet!

“Well,” he says then, “I wish we could talk longer. It’s like old times to see somebody from the old ship, and we came through, didn’t we? We came through some of the roughest weather I ever did see, but we made it! And they say bilge water is thicker than blood. Well, so long, Duke, and good luck!”

Then Duggs stuck out his mitt, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t shake hands with him!

T
HE
A
DMIRAL

Long ago I considered writing an entire book of short stories about Shanghai, but war and revolution changed the situation, leaving it still an important city and one of the great ports of the world but lacking some of the variety and color it formerly possessed
.

These next three stories are but little fragments, glimpses that in a small way portray what I had in mind
.

A
FTER I FINISHED painting the hatch-combing, I walked back aft to the well deck where Tony and Dick were standing by the rail looking down into the Whangpoo. The sampan was there again, and the younger woman was sculling it in closer to the ship’s side. When she stopped, the old woman fastened a net on the end of a long stick and held it up to the rail, and Tony put some bread and meat into it.

Every day they came alongside at about the same time, and we were always glad to see them, for we were lonely men. The young woman was standing in the stern as always, and when she smiled, there was something pleasant and agreeable about it that made us feel better. The old woman gave the kids some of the bread and meat, and we stood watching them.

Probably they didn’t get meat very often, and bread must have been strange to them, but they ate it very seriously. They were our family, and they seemed to have adopted us just as we adopted them when they first came alongside at Wayside Pier. They had come to ask for “bamboo,” which seemed to mean any kind of lumber or wood, and for “chow-chow,” which was food, of course. The greatest prize was “soapo,” but although most of the Chinese who live like that sell the soap or trade it, our family evidently used it—or some of it.

That was one reason we liked them, one reason they had become our family, because they were clean. They wore the faded blue that all the Chinese of that period seemed to wear, but theirs was always newly washed. We had thrown sticks of dunnage to them or other scrap lumber and some that wasn’t scrap, but then the mate came by and made us stop.

There were five of them, the two women and three young ones, living in a sampan. Tony had never seen the like, nor had I, but it was old stuff to Dick, who had been out to the Far East before.

He told us lots of the Chinese lived that way, and some never got ashore from birth to death. There is no room for them on China’s crowded soil, so in the seemingly ramshackle boats they grow up, rear families, and die without knowing any other home. There will be a fish net on the roof of the shelter of matting, and on poles beyond the roof the family wash waves in the wind. Sometimes the younger children have buoys fastened to their backs so they will float if they fall over the side.

Two of the children in our family were girls. I have no idea how old they were. Youngsters, anyway. We never saw them any closer than from our rail to the sampan. They were queer little people, images of their mother and the old woman but more serious. Sometimes we’d watch them play by the hour when not working, and they would never smile or laugh. But it was the Admiral who was our favorite. We just called him that because we didn’t know his name. He was very short and very serious. Probably he was five years old, but he might have been older or younger. He was a round-faced little tyke, and he regarded us very seriously and maybe a little wistfully, for we were big men, and our ship was high above the water.

We used to give them things. I remember when Tony came back from a spree and brought some chocolate with him. When he was painting over the side on a staging, he dropped it to the Admiral, who was very puzzled. Finally he tasted it and seemed satisfied. After that he tasted everything we dropped to him.

Tony had a red silk handkerchief he thought the world of, but one day he gave it to the Admiral. After that, whenever we saw the Admiral, he was wearing it around his head. But he was still very serious and maybe a little prouder.

Sometimes it used to scare me when I thought of them out there on the Whangpoo in the midst of all that shipping. Partly it was because the Chinese had a bad habit: they would wait till a ship was close by and then cut across her bows real sharp. Dick said they believed they could cut off evil spirits that were following them.

There were wooden eyes painted white with black pupils on either side of the bow of each sampan or junk. They were supposed to watch for rocks or evil spirits. Those eyes used to give me the willies, always staring that way, seeming to bulge in some kind of dumb wonder. I’d wake up at night remembering those eyes and wondering where the Admiral was.

But it got Tony more than me. Tony was a hard guy. He was said to have killed a cop in Baltimore and shipped out to get away. I always thought the old man knew, but he never said anything, and neither did the rest of us. It just wasn’t any of our business, and we knew none of the circumstances. Something to do with payoffs, we understood.

Tony took to our family as if they were his own flesh and blood. I never saw a guy get so warmed up over anything. He was a tough wop, and he’d always been a hard case and probably never had anybody he could do for. That’s what a guy misses when he’s rambling around—not somebody to do something for him but somebody to think of, to work for.

One day when we were working over the side on a staging, the sampan came under us, and Tony turned to wave at the Admiral. “Lookit, Duke,” he says to me, “ain’t he the cute little devil? That red silk handkerchief sure sets him off.”

It was funny, you know? Tony’d been a hard drinker, but after our family showed up, he began to leave it alone. After he gave that red silk handkerchief to the Admiral, he just quit drinking entirely, and when the rest of us went ashore, he’d stay aboard, lying in his bunk, making something for the Admiral.