“You got it made,” Glass explained to Brace. “Me, I don’t got it made. Not ’till get next to those rich Cubans.”
Red neon. Blue neon. Green neon. Tattoo neon. Light pulsing on the wan faces of bar girls with names that were fabulous: Jungle Judy, Radar the Snipe, Feelie.
“I never did anything to make Dane hate me.”
“You never did nothing to make him love you.”
“And there’s rich Cuban ladies.” Glass traced bountiful lines in the air with his hands. “We shouldn’t never forget the ladies.”
“Those ladies all smoke cigars,” Howard told him.
The bars of Portland and the crusty waterfront, etched stark by sunshine where weathered gray boards of buildings stand like tall slats against the northeast wind; the bars which ruin “livers and lights” are places where crews unhunch from frustration, and drink against the illusion that fear is swept away.
Glass pointed out that if there were no bars there could be no waterfront missions. Unsaved souls would have to wander through mists more terrible than any imagined by the spiritualist Lamp.
Howard agreed. Howard said that bartenders were seminarians.
The crew went ashore and gradually got straight. Cutter Adrian slumbered on repair status. Cutters in Portsmouth, Boston and New Bedford took the duty. Adrian would cross courses with all of them during any year, small ships appearing ghostly from fog or mist, ships seen laboring in gale, and ice-covered from piling seas or from the black and howling mouth of storm; the new and competent 83 boats, the harbor and ocean-going tugs with towing screws to envy.
When the luck was thin, like ice in the knitted wool of a watch cap, the lousy cutter Able, of New Bedford, might be working alongside. Able was the broken strand in the hawser, the frail anchor line in the web of competence reaching from Argentia to Block Island. It was the ship that could not do, would not do, and which no one trusted. Able was sloppy and unhappy, perpetually changing officers and crew in a hopeless search for the combination that would make it a going concern.
In later years, forming one more grand theory of ships, Lamp would claim that when Able’s keel was laid the wives of seamen wept. “Boy, boys… I be double-dog-damn.” According to Lamp, Abner was lucky, Adrian was well sinewed, and Able was jinxed.
“You got it made, chummy,” Glass insisted. “You coulda been sent to Able. It’s a sub.”
“It’s the navy has the submarines,” Brace said wisely into his fourth fresh glass of beer.
“He means,” said Howard, “that every time you see it you’re surprised it’s still afloat.”
“I seen that thing in dry dock,” Glass said. “It rusted the dry dock.”
When you are young, experience seems to be a silk dragon or a cleverly stitched tiger on the sleeve of your tailormades. The ancient, ever-moving and murmuring sea pops small waves onto the beach through the summer calm. At Portland Head, the lighthouse is glazed cake-frosted white with sun, like a building from the Med plucked by Greek gods and transported.
Brace’s instincts were sometimes good about the decks of a vessel on repair status, but they were lacking in other ways. He saw the sea and told Glass of a summer visit he had once made to Lake Michigan. Brace was not going to sea, and he was not going ashore with much success. The crew knew that repair status was more than luxury, it was luck. Brace was missing a bandstand opportunity.
The crew was woman-needful and brash. The men toured the bars, breathing the cool, stale beer smell of the bar that was as much their familiar as the sea. They engaged in territorial movement, like eager dogs wetting boundaries around hydrants. The crew was wary of foreign ships, of fancy and gorgeous uniforms that captured the entranced attention of the only women they knew.
“I hear your queen’s got bow legs.”
“Mate, you can’t say that about our queen.”
“There’s this about your queen….”
The fight, often joyous, with split lips and broken teeth.
“Honest, judge…”
“It was double jeopardy,” Glass said. “I studied this.”
“You missed one Holy Roller of a fight,” Howard told Brace. “You miss just about everything, kid.”
Each night Dane sat in a booth in the aft end of the bar, cool in khaki among the white uniforms or optional blue uniforms of his deck gang. Dane with his shack job, Florence, or “Flossy,” drinking beer after beer as he spoke easily and with humor to the not unattractive, spoiled woman who drove expensive automobiles and enjoyed slumming. Outdrinking his deck gang, Dane seemed to be saying, was just one more boring part of his job.
“He won’t leave us alone,” Bruce said. “Even ashore.”
“He leaves me alone.”
“You can always go to another bar.”
“I got drunk once, really drunk,” Brace said with deep and awful meaning. “If he keeps it up, I’m going to do it again.”
Seaman Glass, recognizing a statement of experience that yeoman Howard at first missed, pursued the matter during the shore-going, and hot, and too short summer.
“He’s deep,” Glass told Lamp.
Lamp tsked to Amon. Amon’s flat, Hawaiian face, which was principally Japanese, became studious in that way that happened when Lamp talked of mysteries. Amon may have thought Lamp in touch with old gods, or with living dragons wise with centuries; or, lighted by his name, thought him the one glow of sanity in Amon’s otherwise closeted and lonely life. Amon, with an unease not otherwise known in New England, refused to wrestle with the source of revelation. He went to Howard instead.
“Brace is deep,” Amon told Howard.
Brace was deep. Jensen was dead. Jensen’s story, it was believed, was told. Brace’s tale was only beginning, and Glass, responding to the unlined forehead and occasional petulance of Brace, was shocked and morally twinged to learn that Brace had even a meager kind of history.
Lamp, in contrast, clucked to the crew over Brace’s virtue. He hinted boldly to Dane that Brace would make a fine apprentice cook.
The crew eased mentally sideways, commented, judged and forgot. Brace’s life story was not a sea story, but a small tale of the messdeck where Joyce, Majors and Conally sat to starboard, hunched and chomping, left thumbs—through habit—anchoring trays to table, forks stabbing from right hands with the delicate precision of men accustomed to eating rapidly below wildly skidding decks. The black gang—McClean, Masters, Wysczknowski, Racca and Fallon—chomped to port. At a small table near the ship’s office the bridge gang of Rodgers, Chappel, James and Howard were a coffee-muzzling crew. The seamen, firemen, and Adrian’s young pigeon, Brace, sat midships. Lamp stood like a wide-butted archangel wielding the hot sword of his galley fires. Amon was a constantly running thread tying all to the wardroom where Levere and Dane sat solitary.
The tale, transcribed from the beer-drinking confidences of Brace, through the twinge of Glass, and arranged into a morality play by Lamp, was not human drama until after a great deal of thought.
Brace had an older cousin—Jim or John, it makes no matter—and perhaps his last name was Smith; but as surely as old ships are reengined between wars, young men must have heroes.
“A jerk,” Glass confided to Lamp. “He’d last five minutes in Boston.”
This Jim or John was a midwestern miracle of a type so common in those parts that the miraculous is the standard of Rotarians. He raised 4-H cattle that won prizes, played basketball for a state university, and was healthy and blond and tanned and modest. He was, in sum, decent; a moral and right-thinking body, who, in the distance of time and miles translated through Brace’s memory, was the ideal creature of conduct that Lamp applauded. On the surface, Brace’s hero was sinless and guileless, and, if presented with his actual shape, Lamp would not have known what to do with him.