The little Bos'n was feeling good and felt like talking. After dinner, I asked him if he'd sit for a portrait. His face crinkled up in that catlike grin of his—he was embarrassed—but after a few minutes he said he'd be mighty proud to.
It was cold out on deck and we sat around in his dark varnished cabin and I made a drawing of him. He insisted on posing with that old dusty Ship's Officer's cap pulled forward shading his eyes.
After I'd been drawing a few minutes he talked, without moving his lips much. He told me he'd been worried about Mush and me hanging out with Perry. Not that Perry was bad. Just that he was the kind of sailor that makes mistakes and gets himself and everybody with him in trouble. He meant to warn us when he saw us going ashore back in Rio Santiago, but it was just as well, since we'd managed to stay out of any serious mess.
We looked like nice clean kids, he said, and he'd hate to see us go wrong—same as his own kid. Yeah, he had a kid—a nice kid back in the States. The kid boarded out while he was away at sea. Then he hunted around in his neat locker and got a photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of a blond, curly-headed boy about four years old.
The little Bos'n talked quite a lot about the little boy, and somehow his talk shifted and he told me about the officer's cap he was wearing. It was tied up with his thinking about the kid.
He had been an officer. He'd shipped as a Second Mate aboard American ships for quite a spell and he had a First Mate's license too. Something had happened down in El Maria, Spain, one night, and he'd been broken—well, here he was starting over again as a Bos'n. That officer's cap he wore was to remind him to hold his temper. It (his temper) had got him into trouble before.
Then he shut up and didn't talk any more for quite a while. I overworked that drawing hoping he'd start up again. Finally, he went on.
There had been an emergency aboard that ship that night down in El Maria—he didn't say what the emergency was and I didn't ask—and he was the only deck officer aboard. He went aft to the fo'castle and ordered the crew to turn to. There were big guys in that crew—and he reckoned they resented being ordered around by a shorter man. In those days he said he was kind of cocky too. Well, a lot of the men had been ashore drinking and they were sleepy. They told him to go to hell. They said a lot of other things. He riled up (he used words like that) and ran to his cabin and got his gun. Then he came back and told those sailors they had to get dressed and go to work. They swore at him again and one big guy rolled out of his bunk and made for him, howling he'd break every bone in his skinny little body. Our little Bos'n pulled his gun and shot this big guy in the belly.
So they jailed him for killing this guy and broke him. He served a year and two months in that Spanish prison and he's disliked Spiks ever since.
When he got back to the States he found his wife had gone off with another man. She wasn't much good anyway—she had dumped their kid, just two years old then, in an orphanage. He divorced her—cost him a lot of money—and he got the kid.
Then he kept quiet and so did I, ruining that drawing completely with a muddy background and a lot of nonessential detail. It turned out pretty awful but he liked it and I gave it to him. He said he'd frame it and put it up in the cabin of a trim sloop he was saving to buy.
Yeah, he was gonna get a sloop and hire him a couple of native boys as his crew, and he was gonna get a contract to carry mail down around the thousands of islands that dot the Caribbean. He'd take his kid with him and he and the kid would sail those islands from then on. It's pretty down around the islands in the Caribbean.
Yep, he always wore that cap aboard a ship to remind him to keep his temper. That was the cap he wore that night down in El Maria, Spain.
That Sunday dinner aboard that Limey hadn't been so hot, and the gang came back to our ship wishing they'd eaten aboard with us. We had taken on some fresh meat in the last port and our dinner hadn't been too terrible—a beef stew, not chicken, that Sunday.
Sitting around on that empty ship those evenings the crew talked about women. It was curious the talk wasn't about the women near by in Rio Santiago, Buenos Aires, or Bahia Blanca, whom they'd recently seen for a couple of pesos a look, but about distant women. Women they didn't pay for. It was the memory of those dames they carried inside them and wanted to talk about.
Ladies, it seems the tender emotion of undying love must be free of tariff to be transported for any distances unsoured in the tattooed, curly-haired, seagoing chests. If you charge even two pesos, you're written off and forgotten as traveling expenses. Of course, there are exceptions. Some dames in some houses in Vladivostok, Rotterdam, Brooklyn, Seattle, Chungking, or Calcutta, were worth a lot more than the price paid, and gave more—so they were remembered in those fo'castle reminiscences.
The young Polack had a girl in Baltimore. Hey, you, artist—you're an artist, aintcha?—how'd you like to have this babe for a model, huh?
He showed me a snapshot proudly. Some doll, huh? She was—a big fat dame bulging out of a frilly dress. Not the kind of young, fat bulges that swell out and stick up on their own axis, but the fold-over and flop type of fat that usually comes with age, though I've seen it happen on sloppy young women too. She smirked back at us from that snapshot. A frizzy bob (the coiffure of the period) stuck out about nine inches on either side of her flabby mush. Yeah, some doll. That young Polack deserved better.
Joe talked about the Australian gal he'd almost married six times. Some six trips he'd made to Australia—each time he almost married the girl. He traveled light and never carried pictures with him...
And to go on with these case histories, take that guy Slim— the Georgia boy. We didn't see much of him those evenings in port. He had wandered off by himself up in Rio Santiago, and again in Ingeniero he spent all his free time in the houses and about every penny he could draw or borrow with the women.
He didn't go to the big popular places, but he hung around the small joints where they only had the older, maternal-looking women. Even when he was finally broke he didn't hang around with us much in port; he walked the streets of the town. He didn't have any girl any place. The only woman he'd talk about much was his mammy.
It seems to me the most pathetically romantic guy aboard that ship was the fat old Sailing Man. He'd shipped out on this stinking tub because of his old woman, he said. He didn't approve of oil burners. He was a sailing man and he grudgingly conceded a ship the right to bum coal, though his preference was a good vessel pushed by a clean wind. But filthy, black fuel oil—goddam, that's for donkey engines.
His sacrifice for his old woman went beyond that. He spent very little money ashore, though he'd chuckle with delight when someone offered him a cigarette or a cigar and he smoked them carefully, relishing every puff. He bought a cheap, strong tobacco for his regular fare.
The old fat Sailing Man didn't spend much money on liquor. He nursed one beer all night in the bars, and about women— when the crew had rushed off with a roar that first night in Rio Santiago, he had taken me aside and asked where did I think he could buy a "pertector" in that port—had Perry (who knew the port and palled with me) said there were any drugstores around and what was the Spanish word for it. He'd not like to bring something back to his old woman and make her sick.
A few of the guys who had been cheerful and lively out at sea didn't talk much or mix with the rest of us while the ship was in port. They were morose and just wanted to get out to sea again.
They seemed to lose stature when they were ashore. It seemed to me they were always uncomfortable and sort of self-conscious, and if they ever said anything they seemed to indicate they wanted to ship out again. Scotty to a lesser degree, Birdneck, the big Russian and that Maverick guy (who had toned down considerably) were like that. They waited and we all waited impatiently now for some cargo. When d'hell we gonna ship outta this lousy port?