Saint Jack (11 page)

I look back and see a wild August storm, known in Singapore as a Sumatra: a high wind blows suddenly from the west and the sky gathers into unaccountable blackness, a low heavy ceiling, night at noon, the cold rain sheeting horizontally into the surf. That day I was standing in the wheel house of a rocking launch. It was warm and sunny when we left the quay, but fifteen minutes out the sky darkened, the cabin door banged, and rain began hitting the glass with a sound like sleet; we bolted the doors and breathed the engine fumes. Stonelike waves, each dark one with streaming ribbons of oil on its bumpy edges and topped with a torn cap of lacy froth, slammed into the starboard side of the launch, making the same boom as if we had run aground. I hung onto a canvas strap and wiping the steam off the back win! dow put my nose to the moaning glass.

We were towing a forty-foot lighter, the sort used for transporting bales of raw rubber; Chinese decorations were painted on the bow, evil white and black eyes, green whiskers, and a red dragon-fang mouth. The painted face with its scabrous complexion of barnacles rose and fell, gulping ocean, and the canvas cover, a vast pup tent pitched over the lighter, was being lashed by the wind; our towrope, now loose as the lighter leaped at us, now tight as it plunged and dragged, was periodically wrung of water, which shot out in a twist of bubbly spray as it stretched tight. A grommet on the corner of the canvas tarp tore free, and the tent fly burst open, unveiling our cargo, twenty-three smartly dressed Chinese and Malay girls, their scared white faces almost luminous in the gloom of the quaking shelter; they were huddled on crates and kegs, their knees together, holding their plastic handbags on their heads.

The visibility, what with the fog and rain and steamed-up windows, was very poor, and I had the impression we were thrashing in the open ocean, for no ships and not even the harborside could be made out. It was just after tiffin; no wharf lights were on. It was fearfully dark and cold, and I was dizzy from the cabin fumes. We might have been in the South China Sea.

“More to port,” I shouted to Mr. Khoo, showing him a circle I had drawn on the Western Roads of my harbor chart.

“No,” he said, and spun the wheel starboard.

“Don't give me that!” I said, and went for him. The launch bucked and threw me to the floor. I could feel the launch turning, slowed by the weight of the lighter, and just under the whistling wind the screams of my girls. Mr. Khoo was taking us back.

I had seen seamen fight below decks during storms on the
Allegro;
it was something that made me want to strap on a life vest and hide near the bridge, like a child in a slum running from his quarreling parents. My fear was of seeing people enclosed by a larger struggle swept away and dying in a hammer lock. The storms encouraged fighting, and the fighting seemed to intensify the storm.

“Give me the wheel like a good feller,” I said to Mr. Khoo.

Mr. Khoo threatened me with a sharp elbow and held tight to the wheel. The wipers were paralyzed on the window; I swayed and tried to see.

“Do you know what this is costing me!” I shouted.

“Cannot,” said Mr. Khoo, refusing to look at me.

“Drop the anchor, then,” I said. “I'll do it.”

I unbolted the door and stepped into the wind. Up ahead, the rusty brown silo of a ship's stern loomed, a light flashed, and I made out the name,
Richard Everett, Liverpool.

“Oh boy, there she is!”

Mr. Khoo gave a blast on the horn; he was crouched at the wheel. He looked up at the freighter, twisting his head. I stayed on deck, waving to faces framed by yellow bonnets. It was too rough to use the ladder; some men in slickers and boots were pushing a cargo net over the side.

The launch still pitched. Mr. Khoo worked the lighter close by circling the launch around and nudging it against the side of the
Richard Everett
, and I had the satisfaction in a storm during which other lightermen waited at the river mouth by Cavanagh Bridge, of seeing my girls hoisted up, three at a time in the hefty cargo net, all of them soaked to the skin, fumbling with collapsed umbrellas and shrieking at the gale. The crane swung them on board and lowered them into the hold. There was a cheer, audible over the storm and wind, as the cargo net descended.

I went up myself with the last load of girls and to the sound of steel doors slamming in the passageway, had a brandy with the first mate, and played a dozen hands of gin rummy; the light softened in the porthole and then the sun came out. He paid me fifteen dollars a girl. He had asked for them on consignment, but I insisted on a flat rate. Two hours later, in sparkling sunshine, we were on our way. I rode in the lighter with the girls. We took down the canvas roof and May played a transistor radio one of the seamen had given her. Some of the girls put up their umbrellas, and they all sat as prim as schoolteachers on a Sunday outing. Junie wore a sailor hat. We cruised slowly back, enjoying the warmth and the light breeze, and docked at Pasir Panjang behind a palm grove—I could not risk arriving at Collyer Quay or Jardine Steps with that cargo.

It was not my first excursion. I had been doing it for several months, usually small loads. Sometimes only two in a sampan rowed out from Collyer Quay to an old tanker, the girls disguised as scrubwomen in faded
sam-foos
, with buckets and brushes and bundles of old rags, to fool the harbor police. I had always made it a practice—I was the first in Singapore, perhaps anywhere, to do so—to have a girl along with me when I delivered groceries and fresh meat and coils of rope, just in case. The girl was always welcome, and came back exhausted.

The storm made me; it became known that I was the enterprising swineherd who took a lighterful of girls out at the height of a Sumatra that swamped a dinghy of Danish seamen that same day. A week later a crewman on the
Miranda
buttonholed me: “You the bloke that floated them pros out to the
Everett?
”

I told him I was, and stuck out my hand. “Jack Flowers,” I said. “Call me Jack. Anything I can do for you?”

“You're a lad, you are,” he said admiringly, and then over his shoulder, “'ey, Scrumpy, it's
'im!
”

I rocked back and forth, smiling, then took out my pencil and clownishly licked the lead, and winked, saying, “Well, gentlemen, let's see what we can scare up for you today . . .”

The Sumatra had come sudden as a bomb, darkly filling the sky, outraging the sea, pimpling it with rain like lead shot, wrinkling it and snarling it into spiky heaves. I never let on that it hit us when we were halfway to the
Richard Everett
or that I had put my last dollar into releasing those girls and hiring the launch and lighter, and that to have turned back—no less perilous than going forward—would have disgraced me and ruined me irrecoverably. If we had sunk it would have been the end, for none of the twenty-three girls knew how to swim. I had not known the extent of the risk, but it was a venture—probably cowardly: I was afraid to lose my money and scared to turn back—that had tremendous consequences. The mates on the
Miranda
were the first of many who praised me and gave me commissions.

And Hing's business boomed.

I had known Hing long before I jumped ship. The Allegro was registered in Panama, but her home port was Hong Kong. We were often in Singapore, and the only occasion in eleven months we left the Indian Ocean was to take a cargo of rubber to Vancouver. I thought of jumping ship there, and nearly did it, except that beyond Vancouver and the cold wastes of Canadian America I saw the United States, and that was the place I was fleeing.

Hing was the first person I thought of when I developed my plan for leaving the
Allegro.
At the time he seemed the kindest man. I always looked forward to our stops in Singapore, and Hing was glad of our business. Just a small-time provisioner, delivering corn flakes to housewives at the British bases and glad for the unexpected order of an extra pound of sausages, he worked out of his little shop on Beach Road; Gopi packed the cardboard cartons, and Little Hing took the groceries around in a beat-up van. We were not dealing with Hing then. Our ship chandler was a large firm, also on Beach Road, just down from Raffles Hotel. One day, checking over our crates of supplies, I saw some secondhand valves wrapped in newspaper that I felt were being palmed off on me.

“We didn't order these,” I said.

The clerk took them out of the crate. He dropped them on the floor.

“Where are the ones we ordered?”

The clerk said nothing. The Chinese mouth is naturally grim; his was drawn down, his nether lip pouted; his head, too large for the rest of his body, had corners, and looked just like a skull, not a head fleshed out with an expression, but in contour and lightness, the sutures and jaw hinges visible, a bone with a flat skeletal crown. This feller's head, ridiculously mounted on a scrawny neck, infuriated me.

“Where,” I repeated, “are the ones we ordered?”

He swallowed, setting his Adam's apple in motion. “Out of stock.”

“I thought as much. So you gave us these. You're always doing that!” I almost blew a gasket. “We're going to be at sea for the next ten days. What if a valve goes? They aren't going to be any good to us, are they?” I wanted him to reply. “
Are they?
”

Anger takes some responsive cooperation to fan blustering to rage. He would not play; the Chinese seldom did. Some fellers accused the Chinese of harboring a motiveless evil, but it was not so. Their blank look was disturbing because it did nothing to discourage the feeling that they meant us harm. The blankness was blankness, a facial void reflecting a mental one: confusion. If I had to name the look I would call it fear, the kind that can make the Chinese cower or be wild. The clerk cowered, withdrawing behind the counter.

I kicked the crate and stamped out of the shop. Next door Hing was smiling in the doorway of his shop. I was immediately well disposed to him; he was reliably fat and calm, and he had the prosperous, satisfying bulk, the easy grace of a trader with many employees.

“Yes?”

Apart from a few wooden stools, a calendar, an abacus, bills withering on a spike, and on the wall a red altar with a pot full of smoldering joss sticks, the shop was empty of merchandise. Little Hing was carrying groceries from the back room, Gopi was ramming them into a crate.

“I need some valves,” I said. Then, “Got?”

He thought I was saying “bulbs,” but we got that straight, and finally, after I described the size, he said, “Can get.”

“When?”

“Now,” he said, calling Little over. “You want tea? Cigarette? Here—” He shook a cigarette out of a can. “Plenty for you. Don't mention. Come, I light. Thank you.”

He had the valves for me in twenty minutes, and that was how we started doing business with Hing. The next time the
Allegro
called at Singapore, Hing had put up his ship chandler's sign. There was nothing he could not get; he had a genius for winkling out the scarcest supplies, confirming the claim he printed on his stationery,
Provisions of Every De
scription Shall Be Supplied at Shortest Notice.
And every time I called on him with my shopping list he took me out to dinner, a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding feed at the Elizabethan Grill, or a twelve-course Chinese dinner with everything but bears' paws and fish lips on the table.

It was simple business courtesy, the ritual meal. I was buying a thousand dollars' worth of provisions and supplies from him; for this he was paying for my dinner. I was an amateur. I thought I was doing very well, and always congratulated myself as, lamed by brandy, I staggered to the quay to catch a sampan back to the
Allegro.
I only understood the business logic of “Have a cigar—take two,” when it was too late; but as I say, I started out hissing, “Hey bud” from doorways along Robinson Road. I was old enough to know better.

During one of the large meals, Hing, who in the Chinese style watched me closely and heaped my plate with food every five minutes, leaned over and said, “You . . . wucking . . . me.” His English failed him and he began gabbing in Cantonese. The waitress was boning an awed steamed
garupa
that was stranded on a platter of vegetables. She translated shyly, without looking up.

“He say . . . he like you. He say . . . he want a young man . . .”

“
Ang moh
,” I heard Hing say. “Redhead.”

The waitress removed the elaborate comb of the fish's spine and softened Hing's slang to, “European man . . . do very good business for European ship. European people . . . not speak awkward like Chinese people. And he say . . .”

Hing implored with his eyes and his whole smooth face.

I was thirty-nine. At thirty-nine you're in your thirties; at forty, or so I thought then, you're in the shadow of middle age. It was as if he had whispered, “Brace yourself, Flowers. I've had my eye on you for a long time . . .” I was excited. The Chinese life in Singapore was mainly noodles and children in a single room, the noise of washing and hoicking. It could not have been duller, but because it was dull the Chinese had a gift for creating special occasions, a night out, a large banquet or festive gathering which sustained them through a year of yellow noodles. Hing communicated this festive singularity to me; I believed my magic had worked, my luck had changed with my age; not fortune, but the promise of it was spoken. I saw myself speeding forward in a wind like silk.

Three weeks later, I walked into Hing's shop. He shook my hand, offered the can of cigarettes, and began clacking his lighter, saying, “Yes, Jack, yes.”

Little Hing came over and asked for the shopping list, the manifests and indents.

“No list,” I said, and grinned. “No ship, no list!” I had turned away to explain. “From now on I'm working for the
towkay.
”