We pumped Philip to get the dope. Wasn't there any talk up in the officers' mess about shoving off from this goddam steel pier we'd been tied to for almost three weeks? Everybody was sick of that dull coast.
One evening Philip came back aft with a big smile—Captain Brandt had said we'd ship out in just a few days with no cargo. While the rest of us felt pretty good about it. Mush—all of a sudden an expert seaman—jumped on the no-cargo phrase in Philip's report.
"What, no cargo?"
"No cargo."
"Ain't he takin' on any ballast or something—?"
That guy must have read a book.
"I don't know—he didn't say."
"G-a-w-d—no cargo and no ballast. Is the Old Man goin' crazy? An empty ship going up through the South Atlantic in September, in the hurricane season. Hell's bells, that ain't good."
Mush's under lip hung down on his chest. The old pink-eyed guy cheered up that book sailor with "Oh—don't worry so much. We don't hit the hurricane belt for quite a spell—up about Rio. Guess we'll pick up cargo before then, up the coast. They don't sail a ship—even one like this—very far empty. It costs too much."
That consoled Mush, and me too, though I hadn't expressed any qualms concerning Captain Brandt's seamanship. But this guy Mush had a perverse way of getting you to worry with him.
Now that that was settled we yipped it up and decided to have a celebration. I suggested it and I started to collect. I put the pressure on some of the guys who hadn't come through for that fo'castle party up in Rio Santiago—they had some money and I knew it. I didn't collect very much—enough to buy some wine. Philip got us some stuff from the locked icebox late that night.
It wasn't much of a party, and what took the edge off it for me was that guy, my pal Joe.
When I had hit him up he shook his head—all right, so I passed him up. The guy must be broke. I went ashore with Mush and we brought back a dozen bottles of vino. When we returned to the fo'castle we found our pal Joe all washed, shaved, and dressed up for a big night, with striped silk shirt, fancy armbands, et al. He stood there adjusting the knot of his tie in his locker-door mirror, reeking of hair tonic, shaving lotion, talc, and eau de cologne. Mush and I realized this guy wasn't getting dressed up for our sakes. We said as much. He grinned, gave us the wink, and said he was going up to Bahia Blanca. How? He winked again.
Why, it costs one peso fifty to go to the city, three pesos round trip. We could have bought a couple of more bottles for that money...
Our pal Joe had reneged!
T'hell with him. It was his money. He could do whatever he goddam well wanted to do with it, but goddam it, he was a member of the crew, and if he'd been holding out so he could go awenchin' when the rest of the crew couldn't even afford a whole bottle of wine a man— Where was his community spirit—? Why, goddam, he was positively anti-social, a selfish indecent throwback on human society, and he goddam well ought to have his A.B. papers revoked. . . .
Joe said nothing. By that time he was completely dressed. He carefully adjusted his stiff, straw hat with the proper Maurice Chevalier angle, tapped the top of it, gave us another wink, and swung out of the fo'castle door leaving us shouting at the wind.
T'hell with him. So we had the party without him.
25. Brassy, Gassy Officialdom
THERE WAS A FLASH OF BRASSY ARGENTINIAN OFFICIALDOM up on the Captain's deck in the late afternoon. Uniformed port officials—at least three of them with brief cases and large stapled documents clutched in their hands—golden watch-chained civilians, pompous black-suited Argentinians with more brief cases and more papers; and they fussed, frowned, coughed, counted noses, rattled their papers, stamped ours, shook hands with the Captain, and we shoved off.
As I stood in the lineup on the Captain's deck to be counted with the rest of the crew, just to be sure none of us had had a romantic urge and had stolen away to become a Gaucho or a tango dancer—or that we hadn't stepped off the road in Ingeniero White and been swallowed up by the mudflats and quagmires—I pondered on an intensely interesting aesthetic problem, i.e., the logic of certain plastic forms in relation to their functional necessity. Why the curious geometric setup which seems prevalent among all the Argentinian civilian officials that I had seen?
Why did they all swell through the torso, thorax and abdomen running together into one smooth tight round shape, and that riding above their thin close-fitted trouser legs—a puffy sphere on two inverted cones? They gave the effect of always rising on their toes, yet their bull-nosed shoes rested splayfooted on the deck. It couldn't only be the food and drink they absorbed. Maybe because of the tumultuous pressure of official business their food didn't digest properly (they all knit their brows and talked with a burpy sound) and gases were formed that swelled them out that way—and like any other gas-filled unit they tended to rise and pull away from their moorings.
Maybe they wore lead in their high-heeled, heavy-soled shoes which clattered with such metallic importance on the decks. Lead for ballast.
Yeah, ballast—that's what our ship needed. Why were there so many officials aboard anyway for our dinky empty ship? Perhaps Captain Brandt had planned it. ... It wouldn't be a bad idea to shanghai that bunch, using them as ballast till we hit our next port or the States. If we held on to them till we reached the States, that might not be a bad idea. There it might be arranged that a secondary clerk from the State Department could lead them around and give them a good look at our Nord Americano way of life and culture.
Look—our doors have air brakes on them. They don't smash against walls even if you're strong. Look—our Chinese restaurants understand English when you order chop suey. Look —we have heat on our trains, sometimes even too much. Look— our American money. It's hard to get but it doesn't fall apart when you get it. Look—there are other things to eat besides steak Caballero. Look—we have shops that display "habla Espanol" signs on them. Of course, you'll be gypped—that extra percentage is worth it for the linguistic convenience of protesting comprehensively. Why don't you try a few "habla English" signs on your gyp joints? Look—we have bars that are bars, not floozie traps. We call a floozie trap a floozie trap —etc., etc. I bet we do a lot for Pan-American relations (all this having been thought out up on the Captain's deck before P.A.R. became G.N.P.—Good Neighbor Policy).
Then having done that, if we haven't succeeded in completely deflating those puffed-up Argentinian officials, we could cut them loose from their moorings, these lead-filled shoes, and let them rise and float back home. If they didn't make it and landed somewhere else, it would do them good. If the representative from the Section of Cultural Relations of our State Department did succeed in impressing and deflating those guys down to normal they could be sent home aboard one of our warships with a handful of those informative brochures the Section of Cultural Relations has been mailing me ever since; I paid my own fare down to Washington to attend (a recent and I very special invitation) a conference on the Interchange of' Culture through the Contemporary Plastic Arts—or some such title—run by that section of the State Department, and I listened with three other sculptors and ten painters to a hundred and fifty museum directors, professors of fine arts, artt critics, etc., tell us that the best exchange of Contemporary Plastic Art and Culture would be: