Ship of Fools (48 page)

“Why, we are together now,” she reminded him, disingenuously.

“Yes, I know,” he said, trying to pull himself together, all his deepest suspicions rushing back upon him, “but this can't go on like this, you know perfectly well what I'm talking about …”

“I no understand Enlish very well,” she told him, “but you mean you want sleep with me?”

Denny was delighted with this turn of the conversation. “You bet,” he said, “now you're talking. I want to know when!”

“No,” said Pastora seriously, “first, monee, how much monee.”

“Well, how much?”

“Twennee dollars.” Denny, in the act of swallowing his last mouthful of wine, now choked violently and spewed it back in the air above her head. She was liberally besprinkled, wiped her hair with her paper napkin, and said, with some dignity: “That is not nice. Now I go.” Denny took her wrist as she stood up and said, desperately, “Tonight?”

“Not tonight,” she said coolly disengaging herself. “Tonight, I am tired.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe. Let my arm go. People will think you are going to try to make love to me here on the table.” She drew herself away with finality, and left him. It was all he could do to pay the bill and get out with everybody staring at him, or so he believed. He hadn't dared to look around to see.

Now he decided to tell David Scott a reconstructed story of the event. “Cost me a bottle of that lousy champagne,” he admitted, rather shamefacedly, omitting to mention the cigarettes and the raffle tickets. “She doesn't drink much, but she wants only the best—I mean, she wants champagne. She's got the cutest little feet I ever saw, no bigger than a baby's and soft as a bunch of feathers. She took off her shoes and we played footie the whole time, like two school kids. But she wants more monee, as she calls it, than she's going to get, from me.” And he wasn't going to cross her palm with silver until after the ball was over. He knew better than that, he hoped. A few drinks now and then and he would string her along, but that was all. No bed, no board, that was his policy.

“You sure had better get what you're going to get before you start crossing her palm with silver,” said David. “She'll never put out afterward, let me tell you—I know the type.”

“Well, in a way, that's fair enough,” said Denny. “If I can get it before I pay her, and I'm going to, well, I won't pay her, either!” He brooded on his words a moment, surprised to find he had made this drastic decision. He'd never tried to do a girl out of her money yet. He had always simply been careful not to pay her too much. But there was something about the way this one was trying to play him for a sucker that made him want to get back at her. “Listen!” he said, with indignation as hot and real as if the cheat had already taken place, “if I give her any money before, she'll put out all right or it'll be the last white man she'll ever gyp.” David said nothing, and after a moment Denny added, “Up till now I've never had anything to do with anybody but white girls.”

“These girls are white,” said David.

Denny was plainly baffled. “Well, I mean
white
—American girls.”

David, who had spent a long hard apprenticeship learning to be a man among men in the mixed society of the Mexican mining camp, took his bottle of genuine sour mash, Old Cedar Rail, out of the Gladstone bag. “Have one?” he asked. Denny nodded and watched him pouring into the thick cabin tumblers. “Get the champagne out of your mouth,” David said.

“One thing,” Denny pursued his single idea in a worried tone, after a good swig of his drink, “one thing is, there's no
place
on this boat. She's got that pimp of hers in with her, and of course, I know that Amparo's pimp dodges around the ship all hours of the day and night while Hansen is in their cabin, but that kind of stuff gives me the jitters. It just wouldn't work, that's all. I see Rieber and that long-legged road-runner of his crawling around into dark places on the boat deck and anywhere else, but I don't think they really mean business. I think they just like to tickle each other. And besides, Pastora didn't say a thing practical except about money. She never did say where, or when.”

“Why don't you ask her?”

“I did. She said, tomorrow, maybe. But where, that's what's on my mind.”

“In the mining camp,” said David, pouring another round, putting the stopper back and bracing the bottle between his feet, “up in the mountains of Mexico where I had my first job, the whorehouse, the only one, was just one big room, big as a barn, with rows of cots so close together you could barely squeeze your way in between them, and it was dark in there except for a red light in one corner. You and your girl just fumbled around among the cots until you got one that wasn't busy, just ran your hands along until you didn't feel a leg or a rump, and then you piled in …”

“Gosh, I'd a went limp,” said Denny, appalled, sitting on the floor and taking off his shoes.

“It wasn't so bad,” said David. “In fact, for what it was, it was all right.” And slowly there poured through all his veins again that deep qualm of loathing and intolerable sexual fury, a poisonous mingling of sickness and deathlike pleasure: it ebbed and left him as it always had before, merely a little sick. Once in the early days with Jenny, he had confessed to her, haltingly, after their fresh gay love-making in the cool spring morning, the strange times he had lived through in that place; somehow he felt, and expected her to understand, that this aftertaste of bitter disgust had cleansed him, restored him untouched to the wholeness of his manhood. He was glad to be able to say he was sick of the thought of sex for a good while after such nights. He had felt superior to his acts and to his partners in them, and altogether redeemed and separated from their vileness by that purifying contempt.

Jenny, sitting up in bed, had leaned over and taken his face between her hands and said blithely, “Never mind, darling. That's a normal Methodist hangover. Men love to eat themselves sick and then call their upchuck by high-sounding names … I … Oh, I do hope you won't make yourself sick on me!” He had never forgiven her for that. He never would.

“Another?” he asked, pouring. Denny nodded. “Well,” he said, “hot chance there is for any loose piling in bed around this tub!” He inspected his ingrowing toenail with deep alarm. “Gosh,” he said, “I think this thing is infected!” He forgot everything else in his search for the iodine.

Until they came on the ship, Hans had never seen his parents dressing and undressing together. He could remember when he was very little, they would take him into bed with them in the morning and play with him. But one day, he did not know just when, his mother said to him, “No, Hans, you are a big boy now, time to stop all this babying.” Until then, he had been able to open their door and come in when he pleased. Afterwards when he tried the knob now and then, the door was always locked; his father and mother came instead into his room at night to say evening prayers with him.

In their close, crowded cabin, there was nothing for it, nowhere to go. When the time came, his mother would fold a handkerchief over Hans's eyes, and say, “Now, don't take this off until I tell you! and don't peep!” But he did peep of course. To his disappointment, there was nothing much to see. He could not quite understand what all the mystery was about. With their backs turned to him and to each other, they would remove their clothes a garment at a time, slipping their night clothes on a little at the same time, so they were never really undressed at all, and he caught only an occasional glimpse of his mother's plump shoulder, or his father's lean ribs. This secrecy was all the more mysterious to him because he had many times seen more of them in broad daylight at the beach. So he was certain there was something about undressing for bed that was different from undressing at other times, and he meant to find out what it was if he could. Before Hans could quite see how it happened, they would face about fully covered again, his father in a long skinny nightshirt edged with red cotton braid, his mother in a billowing, long-sleeved white nightgown. She would say “Now!” as if it were a game, and whip the handkerchief from his eyes, and Hans would try to look sleepy.

The air of the cabin was thick, even when the porthole was open; but it was closed at night, for night air was always dangerous, but night air at sea was deadly. While his parents were undressing they loosed smells from their skins that made Hans long to beg to have the porthole opened, but he would never dare—his father's smell, bitter and sharp like the drugstore in Mexico City where his father often went with a little paper his doctor had given him; his mother's smell, sickly sweet, like the mixed-up smells of the fishstalls and the flower stands right next to each other under the hot noon sun of the Merced market. He knew which smell was which, his father's and his mother's, for he often got a whiff of them outside, in the garden in Mexico or at the table, or even on the deck of this ship. It made him sick, it made him feel sometimes that his mother and father were strangers, he was afraid of them, there was something wrong with his father's breath and his mother's armpits, and it made him wonder if there was something wrong with him. Now and then he would turn his head towards his own shoulder and breathe in, or even pull open his shirt front and take a good sniff of himself from below. He always smelt just like himself, nothing wrong at all, and he would feel easier for a while.

His mother knelt beside his bed, and Hans got up and knelt by her. The arm she put around his shoulders smelt of sweet freshly washed linen. His father knelt on the other side, and they said their prayers together in a murmuring chorus. They both hugged him and kissed him good night; and at once he felt so near to them, so full of confidence, he said, sitting up again: “Mama, today Ric and Rac told me they were going to throw me overboard, but I wasn't scared!”

His mother said sharply, “Hans, you are not supposed to talk after you have said your prayers.” But his father almost leaped out of his shirt, and said, “
What
did you say?” and to his wife, “Didn't you hear what he said? That those terrible Spanish children threatened …”

“Nonsense,” cried his wife, and to Hans, “What do you mean, running off to play with those children? Haven't I told you to keep away from them?”

His father said to his mother, “Well, where were you, that you lost sight of him?”

“I was at the hairdresser's, and I told him to sit still and wait for me in his deck chair. Blame me, of course—I am not to have a moment's peace for anything!”

“Look after your child, and stop tormenting your husband,” shouted his father, and Hans saw they had forgotten him entirely.

“I didn't leave my chair,” he said almost tearfully, “they came and stood there, and they said, ‘We are going to throw you overboard. And everybody else too, and the bulldog.' That is what they said, and it is not my fault. I said ‘Go away, or I'll tell my father.' And they laughed and made fun of me …”

“Monstrous!” said his mother, deeply shocked. “That good innocent helpless dog? Oh Hans, if you are ever so cruel as to mistreat a poor dumb animal, never let me hear of it.”

“I wouldn't hurt Bébé, not for anything,” said Hans, piously, having got his mother's attention again.

“I shall speak to them, or to their shameless parents if necessary,” said his father. “After all, it is not exactly a joke, they have threatened to throw Hans overboard as well, remember.”

“My advice is to say nothing to them, to ignore them as if they do not exist, and Hans, stay near me always and do as you are told—don't let me have to speak twice.”

“Yes, little Mama,” said Hans in his most submissive voice. The lights were turned out and all was quiet. Hans fell asleep after a short time of worry because his mother had not seemed to hear at all what he was trying to tell her about how very nearly he had come to being drowned off the ship while she was having her hair washed, without a thought for him.

Herr Rieber had wound himself up to a state of decision regarding Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker. First, she was not a Fräulein at all, but a woman of worldly experience; and though Herr Rieber liked nothing better than a proper amount of feminine coquetry and playful resistance, still, carried beyond certain bounds, they became mockery and downright insolence which no man worthy of the name would endure from any woman, no, not if she were Helen of Troy herself! In this frame of mind he took her arm after dinner and guided her for their stroll. While listening to music, he drew her up the stairs to the boat deck, and led her, with the silent intentness of a man bent on crime, to the dark side of the ship's funnel. He gave his prey no warning, no moment in which to smack his face or flee, he seized Lizzi low around her shoulders, hoping to pin her arms to her ribs, and snatching her to him, he opened his mouth for a ravenous kiss.

It was like embracing a windmill. Lizzi uttered a curious tight squeal, and her long arms gathered him in around his heaving middle. Her thin wide mouth gaped alarmingly and her sharp teeth gleamed even in the dimness. She gave him a good push and they fell backward clutched together, her long active legs overwhelmed him, she rolled him over flat on his back and for a moment her sharp hipbones ground his belly cruelly. Herr Rieber had one flash of amazed delight at the undreamed-of warmth of her response, then in panic realized that unless he recovered himself instantly, the situation would be irremediably out of his control.

He braced himself to reverse the unnatural posture of affairs, and attempted to roll into the proper position of masculine supremacy, but Lizzi was spread upon him like a fallen tent full of poles, her teeth now set grimly in his jowl, just under his jawbone. Pain took precedence of all other sensations in Herr Rieber's being; silently with tears in his eyes he fought to free himself. Yet there was a muted exhilaration in the struggle. When, if ever, he got the upper hand of this woman he would have got, he felt, something worth having. Meanwhile she showed no signs of surrender, but gripped him with her knees as if he were an unmanageable horse, her arms folded him in almost intolerably, with long thin tough muscles like a boy's working in them.