There were five barges in the tow; it wasn’t such a bad trip, just him and an old man named Gaskin and his boy, a kid of about fifteen whose name was Joe too. The only trouble they had was in a squall off Cape Cod when the tow rope parted, but the towboat captain was right up on his toes and managed to get a new cable on board ’em before they’d straightened out on their anchor.
Up in Rockport they unloaded their coal and anchored out in the harbor waiting to be towed to another wharf to load granite blocks for the trip back. One night when Gaskin and his boy had gone ashore and Joe was on watch the second engineer of the tug, a thinfaced guy named Hart came under the stern in a skiff and whispered to Joe did he want some c — t. Joe was stretched out on the house smoking a pipe and thinking about Della. The hills and the harbor and the rocky shore were fading into a warm pink twilight. Hart had a nervous stuttering manner. Joe held off at first but after a while he said, “Bring ’em along.” “Got any cards?” said Hart. “Yare I got a pack.”
Joe went below to clean up the cabin. He’d just kid ’em along, he was thinking. He’d oughtn’t to have a rough time with girls and all that now that he was going to marry Della. He heard the sound of the oars and went out on deck. A fogbank was coming in from the sea. There was Hart and his two girls under the stern. They tripped and giggled and fell hard against him when he helped ’em over the side. They’d brought some liquor and a couple of pounds of hamburger and some crackers. They weren’t much for looks but they were pretty good sorts with big firm arms and shoulders and they sure could drink liquor. Joe’d never seen girls like that before. They were sports all right. They had four quarts of liquor between ’em and drank it in tumblers.
The other two barges were sounding their claxons every two minutes, but Joe forgot all about his. The fog was white like canvas nailed across the cabin ports. They played strip poker but they didn’t get very far with it. Him and Hart changed girls three times that night. The girls were cookoo, they never seemed to have enough, but round twelve the girls were darned decent, they cooked up the hamburger and served up a lunch and ate all old man Gaskin’s bread and butter.
Then Hart passed out and the girls began to get worried about getting home on account of the fog and everything. All of ’em laughing like loons they hauled Hart up on deck and poured a bucket of water on him. That Maine water was so cold that he came to like sixty sore as a pup and wanting to fight Joe. The girls quieted him down and got him into the boat and they went off into the fog singing Tipperary.
Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with ’em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn’t be a plaster saint for anybody. He was feeling fine, he wished he had something more to do than spin that damn claxon.
Old man Gaskin came on board about day. Joe could see he’d gotten wind of something because after that he never would speak to him except to give orders and wouldn’t let his boy speak to him; so that when they’d unloaded the granite blocks in East New York, Joe asked for his pay and said he was through. Old man Gaskin growled out it was a good riddance and that he wouldn’t have no boozin’ and whorin’ on his barge. So there was Joe with fortyfive dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house.
After he’d been a couple of days reading want ads and going around Brooklyn looking for a job he got sick. He went to a sawbones an oldtimer at the boarding house told him about. The doc who was a little kike with a goatee told him it was the gonawria and he’d have to come every afternoon for treatment. He said he’d guarantee to cure him up for fifty dollars, half payable in advance, and that he’d advise him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and that would cost him fifteen dollars. Joe paid down the twentyfive but said he’d think about the test. He had a treatment and went out onto the street. The doc had told him to be sure to walk as little as possible, but he couldn’t seem to go home to the stinking boardinghouse and wandered aimlessly round the clattering Brooklyn streets. It was a hot afternoon. The sweat was pouring off him as he walked. If you catch it right the first day or two it ain’t so bad, he kept saying to himself. He came out on a bridge under the elevated; must be Brooklyn Bridge.
It was cooler walking across the bridge. Through the spider-webbing of cables, the shipping and the pack of tall buildings were black against the sparkle of the harbor. Joe sat down on a bench at the first pier and stretched his legs out in front of him. Here he’d gone to work and caught a dose. He felt terrible and how was he going to write Del now; and his board to pay, and a job to get and these damn treatments to take. Jesus, he felt lousy.
A kid came by with an evening paper. He bought a Journal and sat with the paper on his lap looking at the headlines: RUSH MORE TROOPS TO MEX BORDER. What the hell could he do? He couldn’t even join the national guard and go to Mexico; they wouldn’t take you if you were sick and even if they did it would be the goddam navy all over again. He sat reading the want ads, the ads about adding to your income with two hours’ agreeable work at home evenings, the ads of Pelmanism and correspondence courses. What the hell could he do? He sat there until it was dark. Then he took a car to Atlantic Avenue and went up four flights to the room where he had a cot under the window and turned in.
That night a big thundersquall came up. There was a lot of thunder and lightning damned close. Joe lay flat on his back watching the lightning so bright it dimmed the streetlights flicker on the ceiling. The springs rattled every time the guy in the other cot turned in his sleep. It began to rain in, but Joe felt so weak and sick it was a long time before he had the gumption to sit up and pull down the window.
In the morning the landlady, who was a big raw-boned Swedish woman with wisps of flaxen hair down over her bony face, started bawling him out about the bed’s being wet. “I can’t help it if it rains, can I?” he grumbled, looking at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over him that she was kidding him and they both laughed.
She was a swell woman, her name was Mrs. Olsen and she’d raised six children, three boys who’d grown up and gone to sea, a girl who was a school teacher in St. Paul and a pair of girl twins about seven or eight who were always getting into mischief. “Yust one year more and I send them to Olga in Milwaukee. I know sailormen.” Pop Olsen had been on the beach somewhere in the South Seas for years. “Yust as well he stay there. In Brooklyn he been always in de lockup. Every week cost me money to get him outa yail.”
Joe got to helping her round the house with the cleaning and did odd painting and carpentering jobs for her. After his money ran out she let him stay on and even lent him twentyfive bucks to pay the doctor when he told her about being sick. She slapped him on the back when he thanked her; “Every boy I ever lend money to, he turn out yust one big bum,” she said and laughed. She was a swell woman.
It was nasty sleety winter weather. Mornings Joe sat in the steamy kitchen studying a course in navigation he’d started getting from the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Afternoons he fidgeted in the dingy doctor’s office that smelt of carbolic, waiting for his turn for treatment, looking through frayed copies of the National Geographic for 1909. It was a glum looking bunch waited in there. Nobody ever said anything much to anybody else. A couple of times he met guys on the street he’d talked with a little waiting in there, but they always walked right past him as if they didn’t see him. Evenings he sometimes went over to Manhattan and played checkers at the Seamen’s Institute or hung around the Seaman’s Union getting the dope on ships he might get a berth on when the doc dried him up. It was a bum time except that Mrs. Olsen was darn good to him and he got fonder of her than he’d ever been of his own mother.