Algren at Sea (57 page)

Long before Ghandi came to the south of India, Kalyani was held in a brothel of the lowest order, against her will. But she succeeded in getting a note out addressed to her husband, advising him of where she was being held.

Kalyani's husband came immediately to that place, and fought bitterly (though no actual blows were exchanged) with his wife's
gharwalli.
He finally got Kalyani out of the place by giving the
gharwalli
a promissory note covering Kalyani's debt to the house.

“As I am now deeply in debt,” her husband then told Kalyani, “I will put you in a much better house.”

He was as good as his word. The house in which he put her, and in which Kalyani remains to this day, is one of the best in Bombay.

But she is still in debt. It is now plain that no spinning wheel will get her out.

This was why Kalyani asked The Master, “
How is the wheel to save us whom the loom has brought such shame?
”

Crying hoarse warnings to a soundless sea, the ship slides and dips in the trough of the waters, under a weighted sky. Rail, rigging and deck break out in a coldclinging sweat: the ship is afraid of the sea.

Two hours out of the Port of Cochin, we are running into heavy weather. Somewhere below, behind ladder or beam, Manning lurks, ready to pounce on contraband.

Chips is the party I'm salty about. He hasn't paid me the fifty he promised to return in Bombay.

I discovered him heaped beneath a G.I. blanket on the fantail, pretending to be asleep. I yanked the blanket off him. He was lying face-down naked to the waist, hugging the pillow, like a man dreaming he's having a woman. I kicked the sole of his big fat foot. He opened one great pale eye.

“I want that fifty in Calcutta,” I told him.

“You'll get it when I get a draw,” he told me, and shut the great pale eye. He looked like something fished from the deeps that hadn't been slit and hung to dry because the Captain thought we'd hooked something of interest to science.

“I'll get it draw or no draw,” I promised him, and walked away.

I went up to the radio shack. The door was shut. Within, the ceaseless jot-jot-jot of Morse code informed me Sparks was on the job. When I opened the door he turned his head, headphones clamped, toward me.

“It wasn't any of your business,” he told me.

“What business is
that?
” I wanted to know.

He turned back to his work. I knew what he meant alright. He was still salty about my getting between him and Manning to keep him from kicking the man to death. Let him stay salty. I went down to see what the seaborne winos were up to.

Where had I read that seamen had faces bronzed by sun and salt-sea air and that their eyes scanned far horizons? The only horizon I'd ever seen a seaman scan was a clothesline on which damp socks moved in the wind of a small electric fan, deep in the bowels of a ship. Their mugs were the hue of gin except for those who'd been born sunburned.

According to the script, they got homesick in every port. But I'd never seen one hit the beach, with money in his pockets, whose thoughts weren't cutting in closer to the closest whorehouse than to home. Nobody goes for a life on the roving deep whom life on the beach hasn't first made sea-sick.

Crooked-Neck was the only man in the crew's lounge; he was stretched on his side to favor The Monstrous Boil. A deck of cards was scattered along the mess table. I shuffled them and began dealing myself make-believe draw poker.

“I heard you wrote a poem,” Smith began his usual game.

“My trade is writing,” I told him defensively.

“Say a poem,” he ordered me.

The first hand I dealt held a pair of deuces, a pair of fours and a five. I threw away the five; rather shrewdly, I felt. The strongest hand left was a pair of eights with a pair of aces and a deuce. There goes the first guy's full house, I reflected, and took time out to accommodate Smith.

I remembered—

“That's all I remember,” I told him, drew one card face-down, one to a possible straight, one to a possible flush and one to the aces and eights. The first card I turned up was a deuce: well what do you know, a full
house with the case card. The other hands missed, every one. I dealt around once more.

“Come again,” Smith ordered. I waited till I had five cards to every hand—

I looked at my players' hands while Smith thought
that
one over. The first two hands were dead, but the third needed only one diamond to flush, the fourth held three sixes and the sixth hand held four clubs with a pair of jacks. I drew one card to the first hand, kept a king kicker to the three sixes and split the jacks on the last hand. The first hand missed the flush, the trips didn't improve, but what do you know, the club came in to the last hand! Toward morning the farmer gets lucky.

“It goes this way for days sometimes,” Smith began to grieve, “then it gets worse. Every time a man tries to do the right thing the world turns against him, sir.”

When Smith added a “sir” he was planning a touch.

“Don't try me for a nickel,” I warned him, “I won't bend.”

“It isn't money on my mind,” he complained, “it's the clap. I developed a drip the morning after we went ashore in Bombay and reported it to Manning. He made me promise to pick up the girl I'd been with and take her with me to the company doc.”

I kept dealing.

“It took me half the morning trying to find her. She was living with another hooker and they were both friendly girls. But I couldn't come straight out with my story because I didn't want to get my old-lady-of-the-night-before in Dutch.

“‘Do you feel like taking a walk with me?' I asked her. ‘No, but if you do, bring back another bottle of rum,' she asked me, and put on an old Johnny Ray record, all about a little white cloud that cried. I began dancing with my old lady's friend.

“I got along
good
with that one. It looked like I had me a new old lady, and my Night-Before-One jumped salty—‘We're out of rum,' she told me—‘How about it?' ‘Are you coming down to get it with me?' I asked her. ‘Get it yourself or blow,' she told me. That made
me
salty.

“‘I have to blow anyhow,' I told her, ‘account I picked up a dose off you last night and I'm now on my way to the doc, so put on your hat and come with me unless your mind has snapped.' She came at me like gang-busters. She shoved me halfway down the stair—‘And don't come back!' she hollered after me.

“I done the best I could, didn't I?” Smith asked me. “After all, I'm not a Health Officer. Then the company doc tells me to use a condom next time and sends me on my way. I didn't have a thing!”

“So what's your beef? I should think you'd be happy to find out you're not sick after all.”

“I
was
happy about myself, but not about bugging that girl about being Infected. The only thing I could do was go back and tell her I was wrong. I wouldn't sleep that night if I didn't un-bug her. I went back.”

“That was very decent of you, Smith,” I told him.

“Wait till I tell you,” he cautioned me. “I went back and she was out—maybe gone to her own doctor—and the other girl was just sitting around looking restless. I asked her if I could wait for my Night-Before-Old-Lady and she said sure, and brought out rum and Cokes, and we had a couple of drinks. Then she put on Johnny Ray singing about that little white cloud, and before the cloud had finished crying we were in the sack making it—that girl was wound up so tight it felt like she never
would
unwind. But when she began unwinding she unwound so fast I had to hurry to catch up: it was absolutely The Greatest Lay—Ouch!”

Smith sat up grimacing with pain—he'd shifted onto The Monstrous Boil a moment. Now he shifted off it with such enormous care that, by the time the move had been made, he'd lost the thread of his story.

“Where was I? Oh yes—there we were, absolutely
out.
I had just strength enough left to fall off that girl and she was already asleep when in walks my Night-Before-Old-Lady—‘
What the hell is going on here?
Why you clappified double-backing sonofabitch'—she hauled me off the bed, straddled me and began banging my skull against the floor. She would have beat my brains out if she hadn't reached to grab a hairbrush off the dresser so I could tumble her off. I grabbed my pants and shoes and got
through the door with her after me with the hairbrush and down the stairs buck-naked. She came halfway down the stairs, pitched the brush and did a u-turn back into the room. I heard the door slam. I put my pants on in the street.”

“What about The Greatest Lay?”

“Either she was completely out or just pretending to be. All the while we were battling she didn't stir Inch One. What happened after I don't know, but I don't think my Night-Before-Lady was hot at
her.
It was the idea she had that I was making out when I had a dose, and I didn't get a chance to tell her I had the doc's okay.”

“Don't let it get you down, Smith,” I consoled him, “we're all human. We all make mistakes.”

“We don't all make mistakes like mine,” Smith grieved. “I've caught the worst dose I ever had in my life off The Greatest Lay—and all Manning will do for me is give me pills.”

“Don't worry,” I told him cheerfully, “maybe it's only congenital.”

The god of the Middle Border was a Now-you-see-me-now-you-don'tscratch-my-back-and-I'll-be-back-Sporty-O-Jehovah, propitiable by prayer. So long as you gave him an hour of hymning on Sunday morning and provided an organ with a heavenward trump, he'd vibrate your soul with an I-Shall-Quit-This-Mournful-Vale sensation then let you sleep it off on apple pandowdy all Sunday afternoon.

A God who wouldn't stick needles and pins in your little ones because you cut a corner or two on a real estate deal. What was wrong with speculation so long as you didn't use your own cash? Long before the Pentagon devised the phrase “military dialogue” the owners of the Middle Border knew there was nothing wrong with any war you didn't go to yourself.

If you didn't make trouble for Him, He wouldn't make trouble for you, this God-of-Good-Dividends who never tossed pebbles at your midnight window just to whisper “
Hey you! He who gains his life shall lose it.
” Nor ever tossed a rock through an Oak Park window wrapped in a warning—“
Man shall not live by bread alone, man.
”

Hard times on the rivers and hard times on the plains, hard times on the farm and hard times in town, had bred a midland generation of Righteous Grandfathers who'd stayed right with
Him.
And now, by God, Grandpa had the property to show for it.

Risks that were narrow had all been taken; times that were hard were over at last. What was there left to do in the world now for winners except to keep out losers?

“They built high walls, not only about the walls of their houses,” Booth Tarkington observed, “but they walled up their associations with one another as well.”

Coming from one Righteous Grandfather who owned a good piece of Indiana pandowdy himself, it is curious that Tarkington's observation touches upon that of Chekhov, writing, of Russia's landed gentry, that “there is poverty all around and the footmen are still dressed like court jesters.”

For it was not only their homes, and their associations with one another that the winners of the Middle Border walled, but their mills and factories as well. This was not only a means of protecting private property, but also a way of removing their lives from those of the men and women who worked for them. They thus effected a separation of their lives from the life of American multitudes; and subsequently created a dream-world more real to them than the world of struggle going on in the streets. The men that their power and wealth nominated for public office, therefore, were consistently men who prided themselves upon their “practicality.”

A practicality as wholly dedicated to keeping their dream-world inviolate as it was to keeping trespassers off their property: they had more success in keeping the violators of property out than in keeping out violators of their dreams.

Among the footmen of literature dressed like court jesters, defending a world in which property and prestige were more real than love and death, were such writers as Tarkington, Clarence Buddington Kelland and William Dean Howells; whose classic comment was that literature should be written for maiden eyes alone.

But American literature has not been made by writing about lives undeflowered. Literature is made upon those occasions when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.