The Death Ship (22 page)

“All right, get going and come below here. A bar fell out,” the fireman cried angrily.

“Let’s heave the ashes first, the bar can wait. I have to teach the new one,” Stanislav cried back.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Mine? Pippip.”

“Pretty name. Are you a Turk?”

“Egyptian.”

“Good to hear it. An Egyptian, eh? That’s exactly what we were missing to be complete. You see, we have all nationalities here on this can.”

“All, you say? Yanks also?”

“I guess you are still asleep to ask such a silly question. The only two representatives of foreign nations that never ship on a death can are the Yanks and the Comms.”

“Comms?”

“Don’t try that old trick on me, making me think you a baby. Playing the innocent kid. Not me, buddy. You know quite well what I mean. Comms, you ass. I mean Bolshes. Communists, you bonehead. Yanks do not hop on such a bucket, because they would die in that filth within twenty-four hours.

Apart from that, Yanks are always well tipped off by their consuls. They have got the finest consuls on earth. Almost as good as are the British.”

“And the Comms?” I asked.

“Those guys are too smart, by far too clever. Cannot catch them. I tell you they have got a smeller that knows right away what’s the matter. If they see only the mast-head of a can, they can tell you offhand every meal that is served on that ship, and they guess the pay so close to the fact that you can bet six shillings on their being correct. Whenever there is a Comm on a bucket, no insurance money can ever be cashed in. They bury every insurance policy regardless of how well it is sugar-coated. And if they smell something about the can, they right away start making a mess. No port inspector can get away with five dollars for closing his eyes. I tell you whenever you see a regular bucket on which are shipping not alone Yanks, but, what is more, Yanks that are Commses, why, man, then you may say to yourself that you are sitting now fine and deep in real sugar. Right now I am sailing for no other reason than to get some day a chance to sign on for such a can. I certainly shall never leave it again, and I wouldn’t even go ashore to have a shot, because I’d be afraid I might lose that can. I would be the lowest drag in the lowest rat-watch to be on such a bucket. And of all the ships in the whole world the best of all are those Yanks from New Orleans. That’s the fortification of the Wobblies, and they sure know what they want. It would be paradise to have such a ship to sail on.”

“I have never seen a ship from New Orleans,” I said.

“A Yank from New Orleans would never take you on. Not even when you wait a hundred years for it. Not you. Not an Egyptian. They are particular. They don’t look at you even if you have got a sailor’s card like sweet honey, clean and honest. Well, now of course this dream, like so many others, is also gone. Any guy on earth that ever shipped on the
Yorikke
can never again get an honest tub. It’s after you, all the rest of your life, like the stinky pestilence. Oh, shit, let’s get at it.”

He yelled down the ash-tunnel: “Got it hooked, fire’m?” “Fire’m” meant fireman, in the
Yorikke
lingo.

“Heave up!” the fireman cried.

Stanislav moved the lever, and the ash-can came up, rattling against the tunnel-walls. As soon as it appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, Stanislav moved back the lever, and the can swung out.

“Now take the can off the hook and carry it to the railing, and there you dump the ashes into the sea. I warn you, do it carefully or the whole can’ll go overboard. Then we sit here and have to do the whole shit with only one can.”

The can was so hot that only with pain could I get a good grip on it. Stanislav saw it and said: “Hot, is it? You’ll get used to that after your hands have been scorched enough, don’t you worry. It won’t be long.”

The can was heavy. Eighty or ninety pounds when full. I carried it, holding it against my chest, across the gangway, which was about twelve feet. At the railing there was a short wooden shoot through which the ashes were dumped into the sea. This wooden shoot prevented the outside hull from being soiled by the ashes. The ashes were swallowed up by the sea with a loud, angry, whistling hiss. I carried the can back to the opening, hung it on the chain, and Stanislav pushed forward the lever. The can went down the tunnel like thunder.

“Naturally,” Stanislav said, “it’s clear why the life-jackets and the rings are gone. They say the old man sold them to make some extra coin. I know better. It wasn’t just for making that side money. You see the whole thing is like this: if there are no life-jackets, then there can be no witnesses. And if there are no witnesses, there can be no proper hearing in the court of the shipping board, see? Guess you get me. Old trick. They never can depend on witnesses. Witnesses might have seen something- or heard something, and then the insurance would get pretty sour with all the presidents and vice-presidents. You shouldn’t miss looking at the boats some time. What was your name? Yes, what I said, Pippip, look at the boats. You can throw both your shoes straight through the cracks the boats have. No survivors. Sorry, no witnesses.”

“Don’t tell me tales, young man. Doesn’t the skipper want to get out safely?”

“Now don’t you worry about the old man. Look after your own skin first,” Stanislav said ironically. “The skipper will get out all right. Never mind him. Would to the devil that you knew everything as well as that. He will make it fine. Ought to see how he is fixed.”

“But didn’t you come home safely from three death tubs already?” I asked.

“Yip. That’s true. The last one that shuffled down I forgot, at the last port, to board, and so I let her go without me. You just have to figure out when and where is the best time to stay behind. As to the other two, well, you have to have a bit of good luck. If you haven’t got luck, not any, you better stay away from the water by all means, or else you might get drowned even in a wash-basin when bathing your feet. They haven’t invented yet any kind of useful water in which you can find hooks hanging around wherever you grasp.”

“Lavski! What for thousand devils are you doing up there?” the fireman yelled up through the tunnel.

“Oh chucks,” Stanislav cried, “the chains have gone off the drum. I’ll have them fixed in a minute.”

“Now, you try the winch,” said Stanislav to me. “Take care. It kicks and hammers and jams worse than an overfed horse. It knocks your head off just like that if you don’t look out.”

I pushed the lever forward and the can was shot up right against the top of the tunnel. It sounded as if the whole tunnel would go to pieces. Before I could snatch the lever to pull it back, the winch set in reverse by itself, and the can shot down into the stoke-hold, hitting the bottom with such a bang that I thought the whole can must be smashed. The fireman bellowed that if I had any intention to kill him I should come down and do it like a brave sailor. I had not yet caught his words in full when the winch again reversed itself and the can, now half empty, thundered up the tunnel and again crashed with a bang against the top. When the can was just about to shoot down again into the tunnel, Stanislav grasped the lever. The can stood still as death the same instant.

“You see,” he said, “it isn’t quite as easy as kissing the bride. You will learn that all right. Just get all your knuckles peeled off and then you will know how it is done. Tomorrow at daylight I will show you the trick. You better go now, shovel the ash into the cans, hang them on the hooks, and I will serve the winch up here. You might smash the winch.

Should that happen, my boy well, I would not wish it to you nor to me. Then we would have to carry all the cans up here on our backs. Don’t you ever wish it, man. After we are through just with the ash of one watch, you would no longer know if the sky is above you or below. We would not walk, we would crawl instead. We sure would just roll from one place to the other. So better treat the windlass with love and kisses.”

“Let me try once more, Lavski,” I asked him. “I will say Gracious Lady to her. Maybe if I consider that winch a person, then she will do it and work with papa.”

I yelled down: “Hook on!”

“Heave up! “ came the call.

“Hello, Duchess, come, let’s do it together. Come, come, come, up with the shirt.”

Mohammed is my witness, she did it, and fine she came along. Like oil and soft flesh. Gentle like a lambkin. Papa is not without experience. I guess I know the
Yorikke
better than her skipper or her grandfather, the wise cook. That winch was still the same that was used by old man Noah. And the
Yorikke
had been built after blueprints left over by the Ark-builder. This windlass, therefore, belonged to pre-Flood times. All the little goblins of those far-off times which were to be destroyed by the Flood had found refuge in the
Yorikke
, where they lived in all the corners and nooks. The worst of these little evil spirits had taken up quarters in this winch. Consequently the winch had to be respected and the goblins hidden within her had to be treated well. Stanislav had won over these ghosts by long practice. I tried to make them friendly with noble speeches.

“Hey, Your Highness, once more, get your legs going, please.”

And how she came, that winch! Smoothly and with a decent shame. The can stood like a soldier exactly where I wanted it to make my embrace more powerful and carry the ash to sleep in the sea.

Of course, the winch was not all the time good-humored. More than a hundred times she played me nasty tricks. What else can you expect from women? If the lever was not pushed or pulled exactly at the right fraction of the right second at the right distance, the can shot with rattling thunder up against the top of the tunnel so that the whole ship seemed to shake in her bones. Pushing the lever in or pushing it out one thirty-second of an inch too far made all the difference in whether the can stopped exactly in the right position.

Stanislav had gone below to shovel the ash and the slags into the cans. After I had heaved about fifty cans, Stanislav cried up that we would leave the rest to take out during the next watch.

I felt like breaking down at my knees after having carried so many heavy cans across the gangway. Hardly could I catch my breath. But before I had time to get acquainted with my feeling of collapse, Stanislav bellowed: “Hey, get ready, you, twenty to twelve.”

Partly crawling, partly staggering, I dragged my carcass to the foc’sle. There was no light on deck. Kerosene costs money. The company could not afford it on account of hard competition with other companies who offered still lower rates.

Several times I struck my knees and shins against something hard before I reached the quarters. Not easy to describe in detail everything that was lying about the deck. To make the description short I would say: everything possible under heaven was lying on deck. Even a ship’s carpenter was lying there, drunk like a helpless gun with all its ammunition shot off. Later I learned that this carpenter got drunk in every port we put in, and that, for this reason, during the first two days after the ship was out he could not be used even to scrub the deck. The skipper always felt lucky when the A.B.’s did not join the carpenter in his happiness, and when at least one A.B. was left sound enough to hold the wheel fairly by the course. The carpenter and the three A.B.’s were, by the way, so thoroughly drenched in body and brain that the skipper could give them life-jackets without any fear of making them bad witnesses when riding out the insurance. They had lost every ability to gather and to assort their ideas of what they had seen and what they had not seen. All they knew about the economic welfare of civilized nations was the exact price of whisky in the various taverns of the different ports the
Yorikke
usually put in. The skipper mentioned frequently that he considered these four men real pearls of first-class sailors.

In the quarter I fetched the coffee-can, went with it to the galley, and filled it with hot coffee which stood on the stove. With this coffee-can in hand I again had to make my way across the dark deck to the quarters. By now my shins and knees were bleeding, so often had I knocked them against boxes, hold-shafts, beams, chains, anchors. There was no such thing aboard as first-aid. The first mate played doctor. The medicine and other helpful material were stowed away well, so as not to make any extra expenses. With trifles like these — bleeding shins and knees and knuckles, anyway — one could not have gone to the first mate.

He would have laughed and said: “Where is it you are hurt? Don’t be silly, I can’t find anything wrong. Rub in coal-dust, bleeding will cease then. Out of here.”

I had to get up my fireman. He wanted to break my neck for waking him up so early. He said he had missed two full minutes of sound sleep on account of me being such a sap. But when the bell rang out and the watch from the bridge was singing down the “Ship all right!” my fireman wanted to smash in my head because I had called him too late and he sure would start his watch right away with a row with the second engineer, with whom he was not on good terms, he added. He gulped down his black unsweetened coffee, tore off a chunk from the loaf of bread that was lying on the table, pushed it into his swear-hold, and with a full mouth, while his eyes were swimming in red ink, he yelled at me: “Go below. I’ll come right after you. Get water ready for the slags.” His movements were heavy and tired. He did not sit upright at the table, but half lay on the bench. With his arms spread out on the table he pushed one hand forward as if in a dream to reach a knife he saw. He could not reach it with this movement. He gave it up. The knife was too expensive for him. So he grasped only the loaf of bread and tore off another chunk of it. Again he swallowed a gulp of coffee, and the bread in his mouth swelled up, compelling him to chew with his mouth wide open.

I drank half a cup of coffee. Before I could grasp the bread to cut off a slice, he said gargling to me: “You better go now. I come right after you.”

Passing the galley, I saw Stanislav moving about inside. It was dark in the galley. Only the glimmering live coal of the stove gave an uncertain light. Stanislav tried to find and steal soap hidden by the cook. The cook in turn stole the soap from the steward. The steward took the soap out of the skipper’s chest. Each of these persons was always surprised on finding his soap missing again. The rats were accused of being responsible for the disappearance of so much soap.