He explained to us after we left the shop he had told the guy Sweet Caporals were the favorite smoke of Firpo when he was up in the States—the cigarette that all our heavyweight prizefighters train on. They're good for the wind.
We made for the only decent barroom in the town. It was over near the railroad station.
It was a high-ceilinged room lit up by a couple of electric bulbs over the Cafe Expresso machine behind the bar. The rest of the room was dark. A large battered pool table took up one section of the room.
We had stopped in on our way back from Bahia Blanca the night before and had a few drinks. The noisy crew of that Hog-Islander were draped all over the place, and a few Limeys and some of our own crew drank quietly off in one of the darkened comers.
Joe had been right—that Hog-Islander was manned by a lot of Texans. They looked and sounded more like a bunch of farmers than sailors as they cackled their thin jokes and yuk-yuk'd their delight with their own sallies. Our S.S. Hermanita crew seemed like a dignified, well-contained group in comparison. After we had a drink or two, one of those hatchet-faced yokels who wore his hat thrust over one eye grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward the light.
"Hey—lookit heah—this fella don' need a shave. He's raisin' a bea'd. What d'hell ya raisin' a bea'd fo'? Yo're an American, aincha?"
I jerked loose from that heel.
There it was again, the dilemma with which every guy who wears glasses is always being confronted. Should I take my glasses off or wait? If I took them off I was a touchy, belligerent boil (cancha take a little kiddin'?) looking for a fight. If I kept them on I was a yella-bellied-sonovabitch who hides my cowardice behind my specs and the seven years of prison everyone knows he'll get for hitting a man with glasses on.
I'm getting a little doubtful about that seven-year yam. Although I've slugged and been slugged now and again with and without my glasses on, nobody landed in prison for it, and though some of my best friends are ex-cons, I never met any who served time for that offense. Mayhap I don't know the right kind of criminals. In any case, we weak-eyed guys get the worst of it when we take our glasses off and almost always the first sock in the moosh (our own) while we blink and try to get our eyes focusing and looking fierce at the same time.
For example, the proper procedure—after this Texas punk had rudely whirled me around—was to look him over to be sure he wasn't too drunk to take a punch. Then, that he wasn't too little. In either case a good-natured crack was the proper response. If he was too big, that's all right—a handicap of a bottle or a length of pipe was allowed in such cases. If he's about your own size and weight and sober enough to be responsible for what he said and did as this Hog-Islander was, you take your dilemma by the horns and juggle it quickly.
Before I could come to any logical conclusion Joe had reached over my head and straightened the Texan's hat as he said:
"Nice hat you got, boy. You a cowboy?"
"Yessuh, ya gad damn right. Ah'm a long ho'n from way back. I've rid' the range from Tulsa to—"
One of his buddies had said something that set all of them yapping and cackling like a birdhouse in the zoo at feeding time, so we never heard to where. He turned back to his outfit.
They were all medium-sized guys, and if there had been any trouble I imagine we'd have done pretty well.
A plumpish, pink-cheeked young fellow got talking to us. He was the radioman of that Hog-Islander, a well-spoken, nice guy, and he courteously invited us to sit at one of the tables and have a drink with him. We all ordered brandy but he asked for port—the only thing he could drink was port, he said. When he found out that Al and Mush were at school, and I was in the art business, he was delighted.
He hadn't had a chance to talk to anyone but those Hog-Islanders for months, and he yearned for some intellectual conversation. He wasn't drunk. That's the way he talked. It seems he'd read a lot of morbid German philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Schlegel—and that's what he wanted to talk about. That was all right with me, but neither Al nor Mush had read them or cared—and their interest lagged.
They left us and went over to try that dead-cushioned pool table. After they racked up the balls and Mush was just getting set to shoot, he let out a yelp.
"Gawd—what d'hell's that?"
We went over to his side of the table. He was crouched over looking down at some guy who lay there flat on his back, his eyes closed and a thin red trickle oozing out of his mouth.
"That's one of our crew," the radio guy said.
"Is he dead?"
"No—just drunk, I think."
"Well, how we gonna play if we keep stumbling over his head as we go round the table? Think he'd mind if we dragged him out?"
"He might."
We walked around the table looking for his legs. They stuck out plenty on the other side. This guy was long, and when we saw him standing up some time later, we found we'd underestimated—he was longer.
He lay there under that table with his arms folded over an empty bottle which rested on his chest, smiling gently, dead drunk. Al and Mush gave up the thought of a game and after promising to visit the radio guy on his ship some Sunday (he had a lot of books up there and he'd let us borrow some if we wanted any), we went back to our ships.
Perry wouldn't let us go directly to that barroom. First he had to find one of the shrimp peddlers he said were all over the place. Since he had our pesos lumped up with his own money and wouldn't settle our accounts out on the open road, we stuck with him.
A little kid with a sniveling nose came down the road toward us carrying a large damp burlap bag. He set his bag down when we met and opened it up. It was half-full of cold, boiled shrimps. Perry ordered a measure for each of us. The kid, after hastily wiping his nose, with an expert twist made wide-mouthed cornucopias of sheets of newspaper and he filled each of them to overflow with a tangle of bright, pink shrimps. We walked along the road eating them.
"Delicious, ain't dey?" said Perry. "They catches 'em right here in the harbor and boils 'em on the spot—strictly fresh."
Joe walked along nibbling and said nothing.
I didn't think they were so much, but I agreed with Perry they were good. There wasn't much to them. The body of them wasn't much bigger than healthy New York cockroaches, and they had long antennaes, legs, feelers, streaming out of their shriveled little bodies in all directions. Their tiny dead black eyes stared back resentfully as you started to pluck at them. When you finally had stripped them down to their edible tails —you had a morsel of food about as big as the half of a worm one sometimes finds in a partly chewed apple.
"Tender, ain't they? And sweet, too," Perry went on. "Tell you what we'll do—we'll get a bottle of sauterne. That'll be good, huh? White wine's good with shellfish."
Joe, who had been getting more and more irritated as he pecked at his shrimp trying to get at the tails, gave up in disgust.
"Shellfish! Hell, dese are bugs. You like them? Have some more." And he smacked his paper of shrimp down on top of the mess Perry already carried, stuck his hands in his pockets, and walked along feeling more cheerful now that he had got rid of those crawly little dead things.
The barroom was crowded. Our whole deck crew (almost) was there and quite a few from the black gang; the Hog-Islanders, too, with that big guy who had been stretched out under the pool table, upright now, and as nasty as the rest of them. Like them, too, he wore his ordinary felt hat as if it were a ten-gallon Stetson and his trousers low at the waist, trying to get the effect of chaps like the rest of those cowboys.