They were very fussy about keeping things clean up there, and I'm sure it was not their solicitude for the Chief so much as that fussiness which impelled them. Blood doesn't wash out of a bleached deck like that very easily. They couldn't let him dirty up the place with shreds of his squashed blubber and bashed brains.
Evenings in the fo'castle were dreary. We couldn't sit around talking very comfortably since the roll of the ship kept knocking us about and tumbling the benches we sat on. Then again, back there when the noise of the propeller became again the big ominous coffee grinder and then the crash as our stem settled back in the water, we all wished we were someplace else.
Up forward in our own cabin it was not much better, but I was nearer to my own life jacket racked up over my bunk.
I had given myself a few private life-saving drills (to be used when saving my own life) while our ship lay calmly tied up to the security of that steel pier in Ingeniero—after Philip had brought us the no-cargo, no-ballast news.
The first drill was the Sunday afternoon after our bon voyage party, when we hadn't enough wine to get drunk and tried to make up for the lack of it by helling around telling stories. Those that I had told (I had quite a repertoire in those days) were received quietly with polite smiles. Subtlety didn't count in that bull session. The stuff that earned the roarin', helpless belly laughs was the obvious raw tripe that I had heard when I sat around under carbon street lamps some summer evenings a long time ago, listening with guilty delight to some older kids whose voices were changing hoarsely whisper the facts of life and recount those archaic vulgarities they had heard from their older brothers.
Joe hadn't come back to the ship that night. Sometime Sunday morning he'd climbed aboard and gone to sleep for a few hours. At noon he dressed and sought me out to invite me to go ashore and have dinner with him—his treat and he ordered the best.
We ate as good as you could get in that port—a fish soup, then steak Caballero again. Somehow, Joe had a rather thickish roll of pesos. Over a bottle of cognac after dinner Joe gave out with the dope on his night ashore. He said he'd figured—all right, this report that we ship out in a few days, but you can't really depend on that. We still might be tied up in port for a week—he missed by two days. If he sunk his last couple of pesos in that party, it would have been improvident. He would have exhausted his capital. So he invested in his best asset— himself—Mr. Joe.
He took a train up to Bahia Blanca, and hung around the cafes and streets, until he was picked up (plucked up, he said). Whoever it was had paid well and that accounted for his affluence. Joe's English was always a little twisted, so I couldn't make out if he said it was an old coozie or old posie had plucked him up. Anyway, Joe had money for the last five days in port, and since he was an open-handed guy, those of us who were honored with his friendship no longer spent our time ashore outside barrooms looking in—as we found Al and Mush doing when Joe and I had walked toward the ship—not as long as his roll lasted.
That afternoon he had grabbed those guys by the elbows and pushed them very willingly through the door of that shop. I had had enough from the lesser half of that cognac bottle and went back to the ship alone to lie around my bunk and read. I had brought along a couple of books which I kept tucked away —I wasn't sure what reaction the crew would have to my reading Emerson or Montaigne.
The words on the pages of Cotton's translation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne jumped and ran together. I lay there staring at those life jackets. Two of them—one for Mush and the other for me—stuck into that rack above my head. I decided to try myself out. How quickly could I get dressed—just pulling on my dungarees, getting into my life jacket, grabbing the few things which I had with me which I considered of value— those three books, my portfolio of drawings, my toothbrush and my hat—and be ready to hit the deck, just in case something unforeseen happened?
Of course, my drill wasn't carried out under the best conditions, since there was not the element of an unpremeditated signal to start me off—a bell or something. I decided I'd read along in Montaigne until again I came to a passage where he quoted (and he was always quoting—what a memory or library that guy had) Diogenes Laertius—that would be the signal to begin my drill. Since I had no watch I began to count my movements. After the first or second time I pulled on my pants, grabbed my life belt—those life belts were made of bricks of cork sewn into a clumsy canvas vest, and one of them up in the rack had been kicked around, the canvas had rotted away in places, and the cork stuffing was crumbling and broken; the other one I chose for my own—I found I was doing pretty well.
I decided I could include a few more essentials in the stuff I grabbed, so I added my shoes and pea jacket.
About the fifth Cicero quote, in the essay "That the Relish of . Good and Evil Depends in a Large Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them" (I had changed the signal to Cicero; Montaigne wasn't quoting Diogenes Laertius much in that essay).
I had gone through my drill, grabbed my pants, tied on my life belt, swung my portfolio under my arm, thrown my pea jacket over my shoulder, picked up my shoes with my toothbrush in one of them—a time-saving device—and put my hat on my head in seven quick counts. I was just climbing down from my bunk when the door of our cabin opened. There stood Mush. His popeyes gave me a strange look.
"Where you goin'?"
I said, "No place. I was just reaching for a cigarette."
I calmly hung my hat up on its hook again, put my shoes back on the deck, stowed my portfolio away and climbed into my bunk again, and I picked up my book where I had left off.
"What you wearin' that life belt for?"
"Well, listen," I said, a bit impatiently—I hate to be talked to as I read, "this is my life belt. It's been chilly around here—"
Mush reached up and pulled the other life belt out of the rack. Over the edge of my book I could see him fingering the crumbling cork. He tried it on. Then he too lay down in his bunk, still wearing it.
We smoked quietly till suppertime. Neither of us talked about it but I guess he was thinking too that comes disaster—heaven forfend—we'd both go down squabbling over that one good life jacket.
26. Beachcomber's Heaven
SIX BANGING DAYS AND SIX BUMPY NIGHTS UP THAT COAST and we dropped anchor in the wide muddy mouth of the La Platte. I could almost hear that old S.S. Hermanita heave a deep sigh of relief along with her crew (from the engine room to the wheelhouse) as she floated in the gentle swell of those flat yellow waters.
For about two days we rode at anchor while Sparks jiggled his apparatus up in his shack, begging for cargo from the ship's agents ashore. As I've written before, that guy was the sort people wanted to stay away from. Maybe on his account—the way he worded his wireless cackle—the clerks in the Universal Tropical Line offices in Rio Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and all other ports within the reach of his radio key said to themselves: "Nuts, let's hold this load (of grain, meat or hides from the Argentine abattoirs or something else I'm sure they had stacked away in their warehouses) for the next boat. That S.S. Hermanita ain't the only tramp on the sea. That ship can't talk that way to us—who the hell they think they are? R.S.V.P., and make it snappy—"
So we didn't get any cargo. On the afternoon of the second day we flooded our lower holds with the dirty waters of the La Platte (that for ballast), dragged our anchor out of the muddy bottom, and steamed out again.