Algren at Sea (45 page)

Lowball is the game with these seaborne stiffs who settle for low in everything. Concannon appears to be the only one of the lot deeply dissatisfied with a life of many big drunks and few small cares, a pint of cheap gin and a girl by the clock; of being expendable at sea and unwanted on the beach; and of coming at last to fear any woman not for sale or rent.

Call
that
a life on the roving deep.

If your wife can't stand your moods any more, your girl friend claims she's broke, if you can't dance and can't stay sober, then a mariner's life, a seaman's life, a jolly life on the rolling deep,
that's
the life for you.

The Negro seaman's story is something else, of course: a way out of a slum with equal pay and a tour of ports where color don't matter.

“What. Kind. Work. You. Do. Mister?” Munde asked me.

“I'm in iron and steel,” I told him, “my wife irons and I steal.” Quong laughed. But, then, Quong laughs at everything.

“Quong,” Concannon saw fit to put in, “here's a man
paying
to go to Calcutta—what do you think of
that?
”

“Oh-oh-oh
-Cay-O-Cutta,
” Quong recalled, “
Cay-O-Cutta
gel, she treat
him
very nice. Very pretty gel, he
glad
he come
Cay-O-Cutta.
”

“Wait,” Bridelove tried to wise me up, “wait till you
see
Calcutta.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Wait,” Bridelove reassured me.

“I. Don't. Like. Memphis,” Muncie announced. Muncie didn't stutter. He just couldn't handle a whole sentence together.

“This boy ain't stupid,” Bridelove assured me quickly, “just slightly retarded.”

“Oh. No. I. Only.
Slow,
” Muncie explained.

Then the cards went around, the goony-birds dipped, the long deck tilted as the waters shifted.

“Seven-card stud,” Concannon announced, “high-hand only,” and gave the deck to Chips, beside me, to cut.

He dealt me two diamonds down and one up. I paid to stay in just to see what he had in mind. Two clubs fell. I would have dropped but for that interesting exhibition Sparks had given me. When the ten of diamonds fell I took another look at my hole cards: I lacked nothing but the queen of diamonds to have a straight flush, king high.

I centered my index finger dead-center on the back of my hole-cards.

I waited until the cards had been dealt around, face-down, before I peeked
—fall my way and we'll all be rich.

Six of clubs.

Ouch.

Smith won the hand. When Chips threw in his cards I saw that his last card had been the queen of diamonds. Missed by one. And it had cost me sixty dollars out of a traveler's check for a hundred.

“Let me have what you can spare,” Chips asked me when Smith gave me forty dollars in change. I had three hundred more in traveler's checks when I pushed the forty to Chips.

In the next few hours I had a pat flush, a pat full-house, trips back to back three times and two straights. Sometimes the card I signaled Sparks for came; sometimes it didn't. When it did it made no difference. Smith topped me every time.

“Toward morning the farmer gets lucky,” he encouraged me when my last hundred-dollar check went into a pot. I was holding two pair, aces up and deuces, and the game was draw. I signaled Sparks for a third ace. I didn't get it. I got the third deuce. As a full house it would have to do. I checked to Smith. He bet and I raised. I raised him back. He raised me.

I felt a sudden chill and merely called.

He had a full house with fours up.

“If you'd filled up with aces instead of deuces,” he began to console me as he hauled in the pot—“If the rabbit had been carrying a gun he would have shot the ass off that hound,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” Sparks put in, looking too benign, “and if your ass was pointed—”

“
Deal, deal,
” I demanded irritably. Something had gone wrong on the
Malaysia Mail.

Toward morning the farmer went broke.

“Deal me out,” I told Smith, and went up to my stateroom to watch the goony-birds through the porthole.

I waited, when I heard Sparks come up, until he'd reached his shack. Then I followed him into it.

He already had his headphones on when I came in.

I waited.

I helped myself to his gin. He took the headphones off.

“How much did you go for?” he inquired.

“The roll.”

“You can get it back.”

“How?”

“Transistors. You can buy them for twenty apiece in Hong Kong and get sixty for them in Bombay. A hundred bucks will get you three hundred.”

“I don't have a hundred left.”

He pulled out his wallet and clamped on his headphones.

“Take two out of there,” he told me.

I took it.

We were twenty-four hours from the Port of Pusan.

It is evening in this fogbound warren above the East China Sea: that low-burning hour when the sourish-sweet tenement-supper smell of
kimchi
cooking upstairs and down, pervades harbor, hall and street. I'm waiting for Concannon in front of the American Club. The only sound is a lone hound's hunger-howl up the green mountain: then his echo begins sliding down. Chew your own echo, hound: call
that
supper.

“Man, do you think I'm going bamboo?” is all I've heard from Concannon for days. He's putting in so much time on this bamboo problem he's keeping
me
from going bamboo.

A woman naked to her waist and breast-feeding an infant comes slogging through the rutted mud toting a bucket of suds in her free hand. She's wearing a G.I. fatigue cap and sandals chopped out of a tire. Her features are ravaged so delicately it looks like hunger has used a thin chisel to form them. Four thousand years looks down, from that ancestral mountain, upon a race of hardluck aristocrats toting buckets of slopwater.

Slopwater is by courtesy of the American mess hall,
chapeau
by the Quartermaster Corps. Shod by Firestone, employed by nobody, impregnation courtesy of the American P.X. You can get anything at the P.X.

Homemade soap is stuffed into
Palmolive
wrappers here; something passing for candy is offered as
Baby Ruth;
and cigarette snipes are dressed in beat-up
Chesterfield
packs. Girls are permitted inside the Seamen's Club; but their pimps have to wait outside.

I'll only stand around pretending to be a spy fifteen minutes longer. If Concannon doesn't pick me up by then, he's finally gone bamboo.

Here comes an aging slicky-boy with a mug divided between a beetling scowl and a smile, sweet as apple pandowdy, under a frightwig of black-wire hair. How can a mug like this get himself a girl to work for him?

“Number-One Joe! Welcome Club Frisco!”

Pumping of my hand.

He looks like he's been creeping under a fence and part of the wire has stuck to his skull. One side of his face has been paralyzed and the other side survives only by that smile. Well, that's what comes of crawling under other people's barbed wire.

“Long time you gone, Number-One Joe!”

I feel like I've never been away.

“Make yourself home, Number-One Joe! What I got for
you!
A-One quality for Number-One Joe!”

The red, white and blue card he slipped into my hand framed an American sergeant embracing a slant-eyed girl under a palm. Slicky-Boy must have a Los Angeles Branch.

We have very nice girls and all kinds of drinks—try onece,
the card informed me.

“Waiting for friend,” I explained, returning the card.

“
What
frien'
Who
frien'
Where
frien'?
You
come by Club Frisco,
me
Number-One Joe's good old frien'.” He took my arm—a move to which I have an aversion as it makes me feel I'm being pinched. I shook him loose and he looked dumbfounded. How could I walk out on him after he'd been waiting for me so long?

“You
Captain-Ship
now or something, Joe?”

“No,” I had to admit, “not Captain. Only passenger.”

“Pass-in
-Chair!
O God!” He struck the back of his hand to his forehead at the news. “
Now
you Pass-in-Chair! O, you come longside
me,
Number-One Joe. Pass-in-Chair! I got for
you
A-One Quality Eng-ilsh Pass-in-Chair-gel!” He took me into custody again.

Again I uncustodified myself; and again he didn't like it. He stepped in close and lowered his voice to a stoolie's whisper.

“
What
you like, Joe?”

Talent can spring up anywhere.

“I like you go,” I guaranteed him.

“You give dollar, I go,” was his counter-offer, “far.”

“Give nothing.”

“No go far.”

His breath was formidable. But if he could stand it all day I could put up with it a few minutes.

Sparks was coming down the other side of the street with his specs in his hand, blind as an owl. I cut over to meet him.

Slicky-Boy Number One, Port of Pusan, came up on Sparks' other side. “Hi, Joe! Me your good old frien'!” Sparks adjusted his specs and looked down.

“Who's your buddy?” he asked me.

“I don't know,” I replied, “but he's hard to shake.”

Slicky-Boy followed us up to Kim's place, where Sparks blocked him and slammed the door in his face.

He hadn't been hard to shake after all.

Up a narrow stair through a cloud of
kimchi,
past a furlong of doors, all closed. Then an open one and a high, flat warning like a very old woman's cry—

“
Number four-seven-two Cho-Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong!
”

It was a purple-black bird, no larger than a crow, perched in a cage big enough for a turkey. In a parlor from some age that was purple; that now had long faded to rose.

A great old-fashioned bed of the curtained kind, stood with its curtains drawn as though they'd been drawn for years. A portable record player and a few chairs: we were home.

“
Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong!
” the myna bird shrieked. “
Pay what you like!
”

A slant-eyed little fireship in a green kimono, her dark hair piled, came forward as softly as a Siamese cat. I saw why communications officers go bamboo.

“Him crazy,” she nodded at the bird.

“Him not so crazy,” I thought to myself.

“Meet Kim,” Concannon decided to introduce me.

She gave me both hands so narrow, so firm; in her brief grip I felt a contained pride.

How many a midnight seaman, on leave or on the beach, had she locked fast between those slender thighs? And held till he'd fainted within
her? Then had kicked him lightly in the small of the back with her child-like slipper—“Time up, Joe!”

And yet had kept her pride.

How many midnight passages with the robbed drunk sleeping it off and the desk clerk waiting below? How many madams? How many jails? How many slicky-boys? How many blows? Seamen on leave or on the beach, M.P., tourist, policeman and pimp, each had taken his measure of her flesh. Not one had let her go.

In bars where fists are what count most, chance had pitched her, small and weak. She'd made shore on her own strength alone.

“Me speak Eng-ilsh pretty good,” Kim assured me, “but not read worth good damn”—she took a record off the player and put a finger on its title—“You tell, please.”

The record was
Rock Love,
that I'd first heard in a Chicago bar nearly as old-fashioned as the parlor where I now stood, in 1953.

Kim stood over it as it played, guardedly. The machine was her most precious possession. Music that an American woman can buy for a dollar, she had had to pay for more dearly.

Concannon drew the bed-curtains aside and stretched out like a begoggled bear; the first low snore of Kingfisher (Oklahoma's) greatest lover, rumbled forth. Kim took my hand, led me to a window, raised the shade and pointed down.

“Port of Pusan,” she explained.

A line of low roofs shimmered as though oiled; around a pond so stagnant that it gleamed. Thin trails of smoke rose from rooftops toward a moon so low it looked tethered.

“
Kimchi,
” she told me, “are
cook
-ing.”

The women of the shacks were cooking
kimchi.
A dog head-down and dreaming of dinner came trotting between the pond and the moon.

Kim raised the window and called, in a silvery twitter, to someone below.

A girl, wearing a babushka, stepped out of a door that sagged on a single hinge. She turned her face up to us and waved; then went back into her sag-door house. Kim drew the shade.

“Port of Pusan,” she repeated sorrowfully.

And seamen's voices in the street took up her sorrow, like voices trying to feel happy far from home. I had heard that lonesome pining in voices of farm-boys singing no farther away from home than their town's last street-lamp.

Concannon murmured in sleep. Kim unlaced his boots and took them off without waking him. Concannon wriggled his toes as though dreaming he was walking barefoot in the sandhills again. Then turned on his side, cursing somebody
—
“
Ahr-ahr-your-ass-I'll take-ahr-ahr-arh-Ho-Phang Road—
” and into a dreaming triumph, I think, of pitching Manning over a rail into heavy seas.