Joe was his first and only patient and he seemed to thrive under Birdneck's care. The cure included sun baths. Joe had plenty of time for them, though he'd not take them too seriously, for often, when we climbed out of the hatch at noon and as we stood around scrubbing ourselves down with swabs of kerosene from the big drum, Joe, sun bathing up on the poop-deck, would grab his towel from around his middle and do an interpretive dance a la Duncan to cheer us up.
There were many scientific theories advanced in our discussions on the poop—even on the proper cure for what chauvinistic Benny Cellini had said is called the French disease by the Italians and the Italian by the French, though since he'd written his imaginative journal, which should be taken with a grain of salt from one of his precious, pretty little salt cellars (museums, and collectors can fight about them—I won't; his stuff looks like gift shoppe specials to me), we know that the source of that infection is international.
One of the old guys had a complicated series of treatments he told about which included a vigorous massage with Sloan's liniment, and Philip made the fantastic claim he had effected a cure with the assistance of a kind-hearted, one-eyed blonde lady in Panama City.
28. The One-Man Mutiny
WHAT WE NEEDED DOWN IN THOSE BILGES WITH US WAS—a gypsy.
One of the teacup readers who tell the past, present and future from the wormy little fragments they find in teacups in those twenty-five cents for tea-and-cookies-including-your-for-tune shops that flourish around the big department stores in New York.
She (it would be a she gypsy, I imagine—one of those dingy, saggy-bosomed shes with stringy hair, who would have made no contribution to the smell—no one could) might have given us a hand in the bilge and helped us too with her expert opinion on the past history of our ship, reading from the bilge slime. That would have settled a lot of the arguments we had as we cleaned the bilge and discovered mementoes and fragments of the cargo she had carried.
None of us cared about the ship's future. As far as we were concerned she could blow up or be sunk after she came within a few miles of New York. Incidentally, that's what eventually did happen to that ship. She was sunk many years later with a lot of her sister ships—quickies which had been built during the First World War. I saw it in a newsreel.
There was a lot we archaeologists of the bilge had established for ourselves in our excavations, and all we needed was confirmation. We all had found specimens that indicated the ship had carried various grains, lumber, coffee, latex, hides, meat, and bone (from that Santos bone hill) up from South America; but what cargo did she carry down from the States during the six years recorded in the bilge slime? That we couldn't figure out, and for that we needed a gypsy.
Those big knobs and splinters of purple-blackened bone that we found in the bilges had caused most of the trouble with our pumps. The rest of the goo, the shreds of hide, decaying fibers of meat, latex, etc., would have been sucked through the outlets if they hadn't had those bones to cling to and jam our pumps.
Those damned lumps of bone broke up our shoes, too. The leather, softened by weeks of soaking, would scrape up against some of those splinters and open up. I used up two pairs of shoes in the bilges: an old pair, which I had used for plaster casting and had brought aboard, were dried up and cracked and didn't last more than a few days in the bilge; then a good pair of heavy work shoes fell to pieces after some two weeks. On the twenty-first day in the bilges, I regretfully climbed into my daily stint of drek wearing my last pair of shoes—my going-ashore shoes.
I was sore that morning. Hell, there was no profit in that job—three pair of shoes in three weeks. We had cleaned up the two holds back aft, number five and number four. The number three hold midships was a small one and I don't remember working it. And on that twenty-first morning we were almost finished with number two up forward. We were only three days away from New York and I was sore.
Here I'd traveled sixty-five hundred miles and got nowheres. Nothing had happened, I'd seen nothing, there'd been no shipwrecks or blood-curdling adventures to tell about to the Turk, Fish or Mish or any of the other guys whose studios I hung around in New York. I'd have nothing to talk about. Where have you been through the summer—the Catskills? No—I've been no place just six thousand five hundred miles away—that's all—and that's all I'd have to say. I might get a book about some salty seafaring yarns and augment my conversation a bit with a few plagiarisms, but most of those guys had library cards too.
Why, I wasn't even tanned. That three weeks in the bilges had bleached all four of us into a sickly, greenish-white color. I had my whiskers, but they too had developed a greenish cast and weren't the nice blond they'd promised to sprout. I was low.
There hadn't been anything interesting up on deck in the evenings outside of a few consoling accidents to the Mate's plans for painting up the ship and making it beautiful, like the sudden quick squalls that washed away the nice gray paint he personally had applied to some sections of the ship. Then there was that pleasant overflow of black fuel oil all over the freshly red-painted officers' deck the night before at suppertime. We all stopped eating the better to hear the Mate roar—in English, Swedish, and German. It's too bad he didn't know Russian. That's a fine strong language for blowing your top.
Talking with my brethren of the bilge about the misery of the Mate didn't ease me any. Along about mid-morning the Bos'n climbed down to visit with us for a minute. He had been painting up on the deck helping to repair the damage done by the fuel oil and he was all smeared with red paint. He told us to buck up—he'd inspected the last hold up forward toward the prow, the number one hold, and it was almost completely dry; we'd be through with bilges right soon, he said.
That news cheered the old fat Sailing Man so, he stuck his dirty face up out of his bilge and gave out with a bellowing chanty. He had a good voice—there was volume to it—and since I didn't know any of the old chanties he sang I never could tell if he was off key or if they should be sung the way he sang them. I found out later he sang them right and now I wish I'd paid more attention to his renditions. Mush and Al shouted him down with one of their Forward for Good Old Illinois Prep school songs, and after they'd succeeded in shushing the old guy, we all joined in singing Hinky Dinky Parley-Voo, improvising a bit to make the Mate the villain of the piece. The Polack guy, dressed in his dry hip boots, who was the A.B. on watch down in the hold to tie on the big pails, added his voice to the chorus and didn't help much.
The acoustics in that empty hold were good, and we sang some more with more attention to close harmony. We were doing a pretty good job on There Was an Indian Maid (or is that called Red Wing?) in its original version, when the Mate leaned over the open hatch and shouted down at us. That fuel-oil accident still rankled in him, I guess. He was crabbier than ever. He kept shouting at us until one by one we quit singing and listened to him howl.
"Shut up, down there. Shut up and get to work."
That ruffled the Fat Guy. He wiggled his gut out of his bilge and stood up in it as he bellowed back at the Mate.
"What d'hell you think we're doing down here—think we're playing baseball?"
"Well, shut up and get to work—"
"A-urr. Go t'hell," came from the Fat Guy. Guess it was loud enough to carry up to the hatch, but his more interesting i mumble as he glowered and bent to his bilge wasn't.
"An' you—you feller with the glasses" (you'd think that I damn Scandihoovian would have known my name by that time) "you quit that goddamned singing and stop that smoking." I had just lit a cigarette during his exchange with the Fat Guy. Everybody else was smoking, and that goddam Swede picks me for a special admonition; that boiled me.