The darn kike sawbones tried to hold him up for another twenty-five bucks to complete the cure but Joe said to hell with it and shipped as an A.B. on a brandnew Standard Oil tanker, the Montana, bound light for Tampico and then out east, some of the boys said, to Aden and others said to Bombay. He was sick of the cold and the sleet and the grimy Brooklyn streets and the logarithm tables in the course on navigation he couldn’t get through his head and Mrs. Olsen’s bullying jollying voice; she was beginning to act like she wanted to run his life for him. She was a swell woman but it was about time he got the hell out.
The Montana rounded Sandy Hook in a spiteful lashing snowstorm out of the northwest, but three days later they were in the Gulf Stream south of Hatteras rolling in a long swell with all the crew’s denims and shirts drying on lines rigged from the shrouds. It was good to be on blue water again.
Tampico was a hell of a place; they said that mescal made you crazy if you drank too much of it; there were big dance halls full of greasers dancing with their hats on and with guns on their hips, and bands and mechanical pianos going full tilt in every bar, and fights and drunk Texans from the oilwells. The doors of all the cribhouses were open so that you could see the bed with white pillows and the picture of the Virgin over it and the lamps with fancy shades and the colored paper trimming; the broadfaced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But everything was so damned high that they spent up all their jack first thing and had to go back on board before it was hardly midnight. And the mosquitoes got into the focastle and the sandflies about day and it was hot and nobody could sleep.
When the tanks had been pumped full the Montana went out into the Gulf of Mexico into a norther with the decks awash and the spray lashing the bridge. They hadn’t been out two hours before they’d lost a man overboard off the monkeywalk and a boy named Higgins had had his foot smashed lashing the starboard anchor that had broken loose. It made ’em pretty sore down in the focastle that the skipper wouldn’t lower a boat, though the older men said that no boat could have lived in a sea like that. As it was the skipper cruised in a wide curve and took a couple of seas on his beam that like to stove in the steel decks.
Nothing much else happened on that trip except that one night when Joe was at the wheel and the ship was dead quiet except for the irregular rustle of broken water as she ploughed through the long flat seas eastward, he suddenly smelt roses or honeysuckle maybe. The sky was blue as a bowl of curdled milk with a waned scrap of moon bobbing up from time to time. It was honeysuckle, sure enough, and manured garden patches and moist foliage like walking past the open door of a florist’s in winter. It made him feel soft and funny inside like he had a girl standing right beside him on the bridge, like he had Del there with her hair all smelly with some kind of perfume. Funny, the smell of dark, girls’ hair. He took down the binoculars but he couldn’t see anything on the horizon only the curdled scud drifting west in the faint moonlight. He found he was losing his course, good thing the mate hadn’t picked out that moment to look aft at the wake. He got her back to E.N.E. by ½E. When his trick was over and he rolled into his bunk he lay awake a long time thinking of Del. God, he wanted money and a good job and a girl of his own instead of all these damn floosies when you got into port. What he ought to do was go down to Norfolk and settle down and get married.
Next day about noon they sighted the grey sugarloaf of Pico with a band of white clouds just under the peak and Fayal blue and irregular to the north. They passed between the two islands. The sea got very blue; it smelled like the country lanes outside of Washington when there was honeysuckle and laurel blooming in the runs. The bluegreen yellowgreen patchwork fields covered the steep hills like an oldfashioned quilt. That night they raised other islands to the eastward.
Five days of a heavy groundswell and they were in the Straits of Gibraltar. Eight days of dirty sea and chilly driving rain and they were off the Egyptian coast, a warm sunny morning, going into the port of Alexandria under one bell while the band of yellow mist ahead thickened up into masts, wharves, buildings, palmtrees. The streets smelt like a garbage pail, they drank arrack in bars run by Greeks who’d been in America and paid a dollar apiece to see three Jewishlooking girls dance a belly dance naked in a back room. In Alexandria they saw their first camouflaged ships, three British scoutcruisers striped like zebras and a transport all painted up with blue and green watermarkings. When they saw them, all the watch on deck lined up along the rail and laughed like they’d split.
When he got paid off in New York a month later it made him feel pretty good to go to Mrs. Olsen and pay her back what he owed her. She had another youngster staying with her at the boarding house, a towheaded Swede who didn’t know any English, so she didn’t pay much attention to Joe. He hung around the kitchen a little while and asked her how things were and told her about the bunch on the Montana, then he went over to the Penn Station to see when he could catch a train to Washington. He sat dozing in the smoker of the daycoach half the night thinking of Georgetown and when he’d been a kid at school and the bunch in the poolroom on 4½ Street and trips on the river with Alec and Janey.
It was a bright wintry sunny morning when he piled out at the Union Station. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind to go over to Georgetown to see the folks. He loafed around the Union Station, got a shave and a shine and a cup of coffee, read the Washington Post, counted his money; he still had more’n fifty iron men, quite a roll of lettuce for a guy like him. Then he guessed he’d wait and see Janey first, he’d wait around and maybe he’d catch her coming out from where she worked at noon. He walked around the Capitol Grounds and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. On the Avenue he saw the same enlistment booth where he’d enlisted for the navy. Kinder gave him the creeps. He went and sat in the winter sunlight in Lafayette Square, looking at the little dressed up kids playing and the nursemaids and the fat starlings hopping round the grass and the statue of Andrew Jackson, until he thought it was time to go catch Janey. His heart was beating so he could hardly see straight. It must have been later than he thought because none of the girls coming out of the elevator was her, though he waited about an hour in the vestibule of the Riggs Building until some lousy dick or other came up to him and asked him what the hell we was loitering around for.
So Joe had to go over to Georgetown after all to find out where Janey was. Mommer was in and his kid sisters and they were all talking about how they were going to have the house remodeled with the ten thousand dollars from the Old Man’s insurance and they wanted him to go up to Oak Hill to see the grave, but Joe said what was the use and got away as soon as he could. They asked all kinds of questions about how he was getting on and he didn’t know what the hell to tell ’em. They told him where Janey lived but they didn’t know when she got out of her office.