I never woke him again. I just gathered the hammers and brushes quietly and let him sleep.
We'd get down on our hands and knees armed with one of those hammers and attack the rust blisters that coated the old metal deck and chip away the rust on its pock-marked plates. Then with the stiff wire scrubbing brushes we'd scrub the area we'd chipped until we'd rid it of all the rust that had gathered in its pocked surface. After we swept it down we'd get a large bucket of rancid fish oil and each of us would dunk a hand swab into the fish-oil bucket and paint the deck with this odoriferous goo.
Crawling around all afternoon on a hot metal deck was hard on the knees—if I remember correctly, in one of the more excruciating Oriental tortures the victim kneels on a lumpy hot metal plate, with drops of water hitting him one by one between the eyes while a wingless fly crawls on a bit of exposed anatomy and while some other part of him is smeared with some sweet liquid and a herd of vicious red ants... That seems a little confusing and I might have mixed up a few recipes, but it does feel like chipping decks.
Though chipping has one quality—if you'd call it that. It awakens and stirs thoughts, and you find yourself reviewing all you ever learned about anatomical structure. You try straight simple kneeling, as if in prayer. In a little while you become conscious of your patella squirming about between the knobs of your femur and tibia, trying to get comfortable and adjusted to the unrelenting knobs on the deck. The tendons that hold it in place snap about and when that becomes unbearable you shift to the left hip with a little support of the left gluteus maximus and, supporting yourself with your left arm, you chip away. The muscles along the inner right leg, the tailor muscles, begin to react first. You try to readjust by sitting up higher. The triceps in the shoulder begin to go, you feel it in the under forearm, finally the wrist and palm tendons, and then in the left thigh structure; the left cheek of the gluteus maximus is worn through . . .
So you shift, readjust, and try it all out on the right side; but since you're not ambidextrous, after a few ineffectual twiddling chips with the hammer in your left hand—the right is required to support the arrangement and maybe some one bellyaches that you're stalling—you attempt another arrangement, then another, until every one of your two hundred and six bones is a raw, mangled, disconnected unit, and each of your protesting muscles a bloody, loud-mouthed, screaming agitator, and all your nerves knotted together in one tremendous headache.
Cracking up the crust of rust sent a dirty, biting cloud of dust up your nostrils, into your eyes, and into the sweaty creases of your skin—that was unpleasant. Scrubbing down a deck with that damned wire brush, ripping your finger tips on its loose strands and on the deck itself, was an unhappy experience. But swabbing that fish oil by hand as the heat of the sun beat down on the base of your neck and your back—with the fish oil almost sizzling as it'd hit the broiling deck and throwing the heat and stench up into your face—that was tops. And just as bad, hot or cold.
Now, then, stowing gear, Soogie Moogie, washing down, chipping decks, and later in our trip scraping and painting and red-leading and painting overside (which is an item in itself) and cleaning bilges is what deckhands who work as day men do aboard a freighter. So, if you thought as I did, that a ship is shoved out to sea and the deckhands heave a deep sigh and settle down to a long pleasant browse until the ship sights port again, accept my assurance—it isn't so.
Not for us a turn at the beautiful little brass wheel in the crystal clean wheelhouse, not for us the poetic leaning up in the prow like an ingrown ship's figurehead as a look-out. Lookout for what, I asked A.B.'s as they came back off watch to the fo'castle. Well, they'd say, maybe a bit of wreckage, or an iceberg. Ever see one in these waters? No, but you might, they'd say hopefully.
But each day (which really wasn't so awful; I've just been bearing down on the heavy pedal) brought the consolation of evening. And evenings aboard the dirty little Hermanita were beautifully long and full. Music, singing, talk, arguments.
7. Sailors' Music
THE SUN WAS STILL HIGH WHEN WE'D KNOCK OFF and carry our hammers and things up fo'ard to Chips. He'd be readying himself for supper and impatient to lock up his storeroom.
Mush and I would grab our dungarees and shirts (the ones we'd washed—our dinner clothes), towels, soap, and bucket, and go back aft to the bathroom. Al and the Fat Man would be there ahead of us, since they lived right next door in the fo'castle. We'd strip, fill our buckets from the fresh-water tap, warm it up with a dash of steam from the pipe, then—here's the recipe for a bucket bath: dunk your arms, splash some water on your body, then work up a mass of lather. The Fat Man looked like a melting snowman when he did a real job on himself, but he usually skimped—might have been too tired on some evenings.
Properly and completely lathered, you lift your bucket, stand upright and dump its contents over your head. If you've done it right, you've washed all the soap away; if not, that's too bad. For there was an unwritten law in the fo'castle that everyone adhered to: two buckets of fresh water a day for each man —one for washing your clothes and one for bathing.
After a few days of bathing with the Fat Man, Al, Mush, and I maneuvered so that we bathed just a moment or two before or after he did. Not that we minded him so much, but he was too big around to scrub his own back and each one of us had been roped in by his pitiful, "Listen, feller, will you gimme a rub?"
Scrubbing his broad, beefy red back with curly bristles sprouting on it was too much after a day of chipping decks. It was too much like washing an immense, gritty old sow.
Bucket bathing is one of the most satisfactory methods of bathing I know (provided you bathe without fat men). I've attempted it now and again later on, but it seems the drainage in our bathrooms has never been adjusted for that final splash, and we get complaints from the people downstairs. I understand the Balinese bathrooms provide for bucket bathing, but I've never been to Bali.
Then, refreshed, with our hair slicked down and dressed in our clean dungarees, we'd light up our cigarettes and sit out in the sun on the after hatch. I'd given up shaving—I mention that perhaps too casually. Perhaps I should admit it now and get it done with: I decided to raise a beard.
It was the first of three I've raised more or less unsuccessfully in my lifetime. In those days scraping a razor over my face was a senseless business. In fact, every fourth day required a very careful scrutiny through my glasses to find hairs long enough to demand a razor. My nearsighted eyes were always weak, and I believe the added strain I imposed on them with that every-fourth-day shave didn't help any. For ten days I hadn't shaved, and since I was pretty well tanned up by this time and my beard sprouted blond, no one paid any attention to it. But since that beard did bear some relation to events that follow—my first encounter with a hardened fille de joie in a place called The Philadelphia Bar in Rio Santiago; again on the occasion when I was mistaken for a North American Indian in Bahia Blanca; and in the mutiny later on—I thought I'd call your attention to it now in preparation. And too, though I sadly shaved it off on my return to New York, I never shaved the mustache that was raised with it to this very day.
Sitting on the hatch, with the sun coppering up the color of everyone with a fine warm glow, those half-hours between our bucket baths and supper were as golden a series of half-hours as I ever remember. I never had one complete 22-carat hour, but I've had a lot of 14-carat half-hours on the old Hermanita.