Yeah, Al, Mush, and I who had been the social lights of the ship were ostracized. We had gumbriosis, halitosis and all the other social handicaps—and our best friends told us so: we smelled. We were lepers.
Up on the poop one of those evenings Perry, from a good distance and on the windward side of the ship, gave us the low-down on the Maritime Law and its particular relation to us and our lives in the bilges. He gleefully whispered across to us:
"Oh boy, this time that goddam Swede Mate stuck his neck out. Oh boy, this time he done it good."
"Done what?" I asked grabbing at a straw. Perry's reasoning was always flimsy stuff.
"Why, he can't do that—he can't work deckhands down below the water line out at sea—it ain't legal. It says in the Maritime—" and Perry quoted a book, chapter, paragraph, and line to prove the Mate was breaking a law of the sea—the Maritime Workers Union or the Free Trade Inter-American Pact—I couldn't make out which.
"He's doing it, ain't he?"
"Yeah, he's doing it. But I'm telling you he can't get away with it."
"What about—in cases of emergency involving life and welfare of personnel, ship and cargo—how about that?" grumbled Mush.
Perry was stumped. So were we all. That guy Mush had a book—he'd been checking up on his rights. I never remembered seeing him reading anything, but he must have had a book.
After Perry had swallowed he rolled his tongue around in his cheek, screwed up his eyes, and studied the problem in a corner of the sky. Then he took off again.
"Emergency—that's it. There was no emergency. For a fact, he made the emergency. See what I mean?"
"No."
"Sure—lissen. I know those bilges ain't been cleaned for six years. I got that from the Second. Now"— Perry recrossed his legs, his arms, pointed a lumpy forefinger at us— "did he at any time order them bilges cleaned back in port when we was tied up and he had a right to? No. He kept us painting overside this lousy tub as if she was a lousy millionaire's yacht."
We all grunted a disgusted yeah to that. Although "lousy" in all its various forms—noun, verb, adjective or adverb—was used by everybody aboard, I never heard anyone get as much out of the word as Perry, comme ca:
"There y'are. The bilges were all full of crap. This louse floods the lousy holds that louses up the pumps and they won't work. See what I mean? The louser made the emergency by not ordering ya when he should have."
And that sea lawyer leaned back with a grin and swung his leg. The old Fat Guy took his pipe out of his mouth.
"Well, what'll we do—quit the bilges?"
"O-h naw—not that. Keep working 'em. You'll be playing right into his hands if ya quit. See—keep workin' 'em. Then if anything develops—say we ship a couple of waves down through the open hatch and say one of you get drowned or something—you'd have him, see. He wouldn't have a leg to stand on."
So we were back where we started, back in the bilges.
And so one stinky day oozed into the next and we worked the bilges—and our empty ship tiptoed up that strip of ocean. We were approaching the Equator again and getting deeper into the hurricane belt. The weather stayed good; as far as I was concerned, I didn't give a damn if a blow started. The monotony of bringing up filth past my nose day after day while I half sat and half crouched in that mess was beginning to get me.
It was not the smell so much any more; my olfactory nerves were blunted by the stench, and since then, the smell of some fresh flowers make me nauseous, my sense of smell may have taken an unnatural twist. A lot of perfumes I sniff get me sick, yet I like the tarry smell of a distant skunk on the evening air, the smell of stables and blacksmith shops (those particularly when the smith's burning the hoof of a horse with a white-hot iron shoe), docks at low tide, all babies—even when they're sour.
Soon the bilge smell was all over the ship; the drip of the big buckets on the deck as they were carried to be dumped over the side had spread that perfume until Al, Mush, and I were again received into the bosom of the crew's social circle. We no longer stank like strangers—we smelled like local boys.
There was a short period when we bilge rats were the envy of all the crew. That was for a few days just before, during, and after our ship crossed the Equator.
We were down in our nice cool bilge, not up topside in the sizzling sun or down in the stifling engine room. We each had our own individual cool mudbath. Only hippos in the sweltering jungle know such luxury. Some of the A.B.'s were painting the broiling decks; the Mate was sure bent on prettying up that ship. We for our part continued to fill the big pails and tie them to the lines that dangled from the hatch. Then we'd holler to the A.B. on watch to yank them up. Their faces looked miserably hot as they appeared over the rim of the hatch. We gave them the bird and climbed back into our nice cool bilge with some satisfaction.
The evening of that day we crossed the Equator we sat around on the ladder up to the messdeck waiting for Flip to holler supper. We weren't as tuckered out as the rest of the crew. We felt pretty good.
Scotty, who never stopped kidding around with us even when we first dipped into the bilge and our smell was new and unfamiliar, usually came along about that time of the evening to pass the time of day and console us. That evening he was late coming up from his engine room; when he did come up he stumbled out on deck and carefully sat down without a word.
That cherubic First Engineer had put Scotty to cleaning the inside of the boilers all through that day that we crossed the Equator. Scotty lost fifteen pounds that day at one clip, and since he was always a slender guy, he sat there hollow-eyed and unable to speak above a whisper—and everybody else shut up too. That guy stripped to the waist with his elbows resting on his blackened wet pants looked like a Christ—one of the mellowed, alabaster carvings the French did back in the thirteenth century. He had sweated out so much he was completely dried out, and the bones and tendons of his neck, torso and arms were clear and cleanly indicated. It took him almost a week to get normal again. Everybody cursed that goddam engineer for Scotty's sake. Later that evening I tried to make a drawing of the way I remembered Scotty looked. It didn't amount to much.
Joe didn't hang around with us so often—he was taking a cure. He was the only guy aboard that ship that had been burnt in Argentina. Another of his little, plump, brown-skinned pigeons that he'd found in one of the Bahia Blanca houses had given it to him. Joe wasn't resentful—she was still an awfully nice girl and a dose didn't worry him. He'd had it before, now and again. In fact, he said, this made the ninth he'd had, and he'd been cured of all of them—all except the first. I believe it was an inherited taste from his English father that was responsible for Joe's penchant for little, plump, brown-skinned pigeons, and not a nostalgic memory of his Island. It seems to me I remember reading some Elizabethan poets who sang the praise of their "nut-brown maidens."
Birdneck, who had gone through his cure just before he signed up in the States, had a case full of the latest medicines, injections, applications, pills, salves—a regular seagoing drugstore, he boasted—and he'd made us promise before we tied up in our first port in Argentina to come to see him if anything happened; he'd cure anything any member of the crew got—just let him know. He had laid out a section of his cabin like a pharmacy, and was ready to hospitalize anybody who needed him—friend or foe—including his roommate, the Maverick.