The Pug danced around, slapped, jabbed, pushed, but the Polack, grinning, always came toward him swinging and missing. A few clouts in the Polack's flat stomach sent the wine sputtering from his mouth. Then a couple of stiff jolts in the face started his nose bleeding and cut him over the eye. The mixture of wine and blood dribbled down his face and sent thin red rivulets rolling down the flat hills of his white belly.
That went on all through the bout. The crowd didn't cheer and the Pug and his gang weren't happy about it, but the Polack wouldn't quit. They washed him up between rounds and he'd go back to bleed again and vomit blood and wine. When the fourth round was finished no one waited for the referee's decision. The crowd got up and started back to their ships. Some went back to the barroom; a few of us helped wash the Polack up. There were a lot of hands that gently tugged his shirt back on.
24. Girls Sailors Remember
WE DIDN'T HAVE MUCH CARGO TO UNLOAD IN INGENIERO WHITE. In a few days our holds were clear. Joe and I spent long, pleasant afternoons stalling around the big barnlike shell of our empty ship. Of course, we carried our brooms with us and held on to them firmly as we sat around and smoked and talked the day away. Joe said we were waiting for cargo, and as we waited it became more difficult for him and me to find contrivances to stall about.
The goddam, brass-polishing, yachts-Captain of a Mate had set the crew to painting the bulkheads and overhead, as if we were a goddam crew of fancy-pants sailors on a lousy passenger liner. That was Perry's version. And furthermore, as soon as we shipped north again and the first port we hit beyond Argentine, he was going to skip this stinkin' tub.
He'd even beach in Montevideo, if that was our first port.
We had two Sundays in Ingeniero White. The whole crew was broke and rebellious. They weren't having fun in that port and the majority of them were cold sober for a week. Some growled they hadn't had a woman for a month.
I visited the radio guy of the Hog-Islander on one of those Sundays. He had a nice layout up in that radio shack of his. His ship was loaded down with lumber piled neatly on its decks up to around six feet above the rails. Long chains tied across those timbers lashed them down. I climbed the ladders from the pier to this immense raised wood raft and another shorter one to the radio guy's shack. The few members of the crew I saw on the ship were cordial. The Polack and the Pug's bout at the Seamen's Mission had given all of the members of the S.S. Hermanita s crew quite a prestige.
The Hog-Islanders, the Limeys, and the Belgians, while they were tied up alongside our ship, always greeted us pleasantly after that night and occasionally bought us a drink. I was sorry to see them steam out as they left the long steel pier a few days apart, until our empty ship was the only one tied up out there.
That radio guy had a five-foot shelf of nineteenth-century German philosophers up in his cheerful cabin. He kept his books in a glass-topped box that looked as if it had once held radio equipment. After we'd talked ourselves dry on the deep-bellied, heavy-headed Schreibers und Philosophischer Erklarers von der Deutsches Herrenvolk (just a lot of Weltschmerzen), my host broke out a couple of bottles of tawny port and a couple of sparkling, stemmed glasses.
It seemed to me port and Schopenhauer were incongruous, and we drifted into talk about women. Schopenhauer's ridiculous essay that argued the ugliness of the human female brought that on.
This plumpish, pink-cheeked young guy housed the splinters of a broken heart in his soft gray-sweatered bosom...
He had fallen in love with a co-ed up in Louisiana State University, but her papa and mama wouldn't have him, for he was a goy. That's putting it simply. He ramified, rationalized, and held forth at length on racial prejudice, tolerance, equality of man, and the survival of the species. She was Jewish, he a goy. His folks acquiesced, hers didn't.
C'est tout.
That had driven him to sea. He quit school, signed on this Hog-Islander, and would never return to Louisiana—he hoped.
It took a liter of port to finish the story. Then, after he'd opened the second bottle, we went through half of it with some biscuits he dug up, as I sat there, pondering and occasionally asked a leading question to indicate I hadn't dozed off. I suspect this guy had a couple of English novels tucked away in that cabin, which he didn't display as ostentatiously as he did his German philosophers. Seems I've read time and again, in some Trelawney novels, about school ties and English regiments in India, port and biscuit at ten in the morning—very Pukka Sahib.
Through that last half bottle I mulled over his tragic problem of love unrequited, and when we held our last drink in our glasses, I suggested a very clear and obvious solution.
Go thou and be circumcised!
It was as simple as that since her parents' only objection to him was that he was a goy. His pink face lit up like a rising summer sun—he would! He was delighted and thanked me profusely.
That guy took me too seriously and that had me worried. I warned him it hurt. Did it? Well, I'd been told— But I thought all Jewish boys—? Of course, of course. But it happened so long ago—anyway when a fellow's only nine days old that's one thing—it's only a snip—but from then on it's an operation, and terribly painful.
But that didn't faze this guy. For his dark-eyed, ivory-skinned little darling, why, he'd do more than that—why, he'd cut off his arm. He was ready to die for her.
I suppose I might have told him that story from the Old Testament (Genesis 34th Chapter) when that goy Shechem, son of Chamor the Hivite and a prince, at that, saw "Dinah the daughter of Leah whom she had borne unto Jacob," and—to quote again—"he took and lay with her and did her violence" unquote, and Shechem got to love the gal and wanted to marry her. Her brothers were all wrought up, and when this guy's old man, Chamor the Hivite, came along and said his son was sorry and that he and all the other goyim of that city in Cana'an admired the Jew girls and would like to marry them—to quote again—"the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and Chamor his father with cunning and spoke: because he had defiled Dinah their sister," and they said "on this condition will we consent unto you—if ye will become as we, that every male of you be circumcised."
The Hivites granted that and every man-jack went and got operated on. Then the story goes on that Jacob's boys avenged the family honor. "And it came to pass on the third day, when they [the Hivites] were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took each his sword, and came upon the city unresisted and slew all the males"—including of course Shechem and his old man—them "with the edge of the sword." I suppose that hurt more.
Old Jacob for practical reasons hadn't approved of that, but his boys were hot-headed and had their Irish up. And so it was written.
Of course, this moon-calf sitting there opposite me with his empty glass and the biscuit crumbs clinging to his cheeks was no rapacious Hivite. But I suggested he get some guarantee before he made hospital reservations, just to be sure that it wasn't only his goyishkeit that her family objected to in him. I didn't tell him that it might be this quality of wide-eyed immaturity and pompous preciosity I too found very wearing after spending the morning jabbering with the guy, and made me glad to say good-by after those bottles were emptied.
Back on our own ship that Sunday noon I found I had missed out on an invitation to eat roast beef aboard the Limey tied up alongside us. Al, Mush, Joe, Perry, Scotty—pretty much everybody had got in on it. Al with his smooth talk had arranged it, and the only one to talk to at our dinner table outside of Bird-neck, who hated Limeys, was the little Bos'n.