And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (7 page)

The hall was beginning to empty out and now an old Swede was coming around with a broom. The dispatcher had gone home and the girl in front of the board with the earphones was gone home, and I guess Joe Curran was gone home too. It was thick and gray outside. Phillip and I sat in the empty row and smoked the last cigarette.

Suddenly Phil said, “If we go to France, let’s jump ship and hike to Paris. I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”

“What about the war?” I asked.

“Oh, it’ll probably be over by the time we get there.”

I gave this a thought for a while.

“Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t embark on anything like that unless I were drunk.”

“We’ll get drunk in port and start off in the middle of the night.”

“What about MPs and French authorities and all that?”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” he said.

“I’d do anything if I were drunk,” I said.

We sat there thinking about this new plan, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt the dare, although somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it couldn’t work and we’d be arrested.

Phillip lapsed into a sort of meditative silence so I started talking to him. “You’ll like shipping out,” I said. “Boy, when you get to port there’s nothing like it.”

“One time my ship got into a little port in Nova Scotia called Sydney. We’d been anchored in an Arctic Greenland fjord for two months and every one of us was all wound up for a big drunk. The whole crew went ashore—a hundred and fifty of us, it was a mediumsized transport cargo—and only fifty of us managed to stay out of jail. One of them was arrested for jacking off a horse on Main Street. Another was walking
around with his dick dangling out because he’d forgotten to put it back in after taking a leak, so they pulled him in.

“I was walking along with a bunch of shipmates and we all went down to the waterfront and found a shack and started fooling around. Two of the guys went inside the shack and then one of them poked his head out of a hole in the roof and started singing. Some of the guys were pushing against the shack to see if it would move. It did. While the two seamen were still in the shack, we pushed it over the side right into the water. It’s a wonder they didn’t drown. Maybe they were too drunk to drown.

“Later, I was walking up an alley with a full quart of whiskey that a guy who had six of them stuck all over his pockets gave me, when I came on a shipmate of mine bending over a man’s body. The man—he looked like a Sydney waterfront bum—was dead drunk and this shipmate was taking his wallet. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut about this,’ he said to me, standing up with the wallet in his hand. ‘It’s your business, not mine,’ I said. He laughed and asked for a drink, but I left because I didn’t like him much.

“I was ashore for three days on a twelve-hour pass. On the third day, in the afternoon, I was walking with a guy in back of the Sydney YMCA when here comes
two Canadian SPs and two army MPs from our own ship. They had guns and told us to come with them. My buddy started running up the alley and they shot over his head, so he came back, laughing. We were still drunk—we’d been drunk all the three days—and we didn’t care about anything

“Anyway, the MPs and the SPs took this guy and I to a Canadian corvette base and had us put in the guardhouse until the Liberty boat was to come and pick us up and take us back to our ship. So we slept for a couple of hours. You wouldn’t believe it, but I was so drunk and tired I slept on two sawhorses I put next to each other. I was drunk and I kept saying to myself that I mustn’t sleep on the floor and get my clothes dirty. So here I lay in a little ball on top of two sawhorses and slept.

“Finally I woke up and it was getting dark. There were some British sailors playing catch with a ball and gloves outside the guardhouse. I jumped out the window at the side and walked around the guardhouse and started playing with them. They were awkward and didn’t know how to throw, so I kept giving them the fancy Bob Feller windup. Then it got dark and the game broke up. There were no guards around, I guess they were eating chow, so I jumped over the fence surrounding the base and went back into town.

“I started drinking again. That night I went up to the suburbs of Sydney where no SPs would be likely to find me. This neighborhood consisted of miners who worked in the Princess Colliery. I drank in several little honky-tonk joints and finally picked up a De Soto Indian girl. I stayed most of the night in a windswept cottage with her until she kicked me out. I was sleepy now so I went into the first house I saw down the street and went to sleep on the couch.

“I kept convincing myself it was the back room of a honky-tonk joint. But when the sun came up, I found that there were two other guys from my ship sleeping on the floor and that we were in the front room of somebody’s home because you could hear the family at the breakfast table in the kitchen down the hall. Finally the man of the house, a miner, came clumping down the hall with his lunch pail and then saw us in the parlor. He said, ‘Good morning boys,’ and went out. I never had seen anything to beat it, it was so crazy.

“We left the house and passed a store and the first thing I knew one of the jackoff seamen put his fist through the plate-glass window. We ran in all directions and finally I got back to town on a trolley and went into a bar. I had a few drinks and decided to get some sleep.

“None of us dared to go into the seaman’s club because the MPs would surely keep a lookout there for
us, but I decided to go anyway because I was tired and it was time to give myself up. Funny thing was, the MPs weren’t there. Nobody was there, just a big hall full of empty cots, with everybody gone hiding or arresting one another. So I went to sleep on one of the cots and had a good long rest.

“I woke up refreshed and went downtown that night and got drunk again. I noticed I didn’t have any money left, to speak of, so I boarded a Liberty boat and went back to my ship. That night, we pulled out with everybody accounted for, and I was one of the last of the stragglers. I was logged five bucks.

“We got to Boston three days later after a stopover in Halifax, and it started all over again. Here were these seamen with their thousand-dollar payoffs staggering drunkenly off the gangplank with all the things they’d picked up in Greenland: small kayaks, harpoons, fish spears, stinking furs, skins, everything. I had a harpoon. Me and a few other guys stashed all our stuff away in the baggage room of North Station and wired home most of our money. Then we started out on a binge.

“It was a Saturday night, I remember, and October. I drank at least forty-five or fifty glasses of beer that night, and that’s no lie. We were down in South Boston taking over joint after joint and singing over microphones on bandstands and banging on drums and
all that. Then we sort of drifted toward Scollay Square and wound up in that joint of joints, the Imperial Café. Here were two floors and five rooms of sailors, soldiers, and seamen, women, music, whiskey, smoke, and fights.

“It was all a blur to me. I remember later on we were standing in a courtyard somewhere in midtown Boston and the seaman with me was calling up to a second-story window where a whore was supposed to live. The window opened and this big Negro stuck his head out and poured a bucket of hot water down on us.

“Well, finally, the sun came up, and I was lying on a City Department toolbox on Atlantic Avenue, right on the waterfront, and there were all these little fishing smacks docked right beside me with the red sun touching their masts. I watched that for a while, then I sort of dragged myself to North Station to get my gear, and then had to go across town in a taxi to South Station and buy a ticket for New York. I’ll never forget that glorious return to our fair shores.”

Phillip was smiling all the way through my story. It was almost dark outside, so cloudy and gray it looked like a rainy dusk. The old Swede had finished his sweeping.

“Let’s go to Dennison’s,” Phil said. “All this makes me want to get drunk and we haven’t any money.”

“Okay with me,” I said and we started out of the hall.

We were on the steps and suddenly I saw a familiar figure coming down 17th Street toward the hall.

“Look who’s coming,” I said.

It was Ramsay Allen, and he hadn’t seen us yet. He was hurrying in long, eager strides, and the expression on his face was like that of the mother of a lost child rushing to the police station to find out if the child they’re holding there is hers. Then he saw us. His face lit up instantly with recognition and joy, then the old affable and sophisticated expression readjusted itself.

“Well,” he said as he came up, “what’s been going on behind my back?” We all smiled as though we were proud of our separate achievements. Then Al looked seriously at Phillip: “You haven’t got a ship, have you?”

“Not yet,” said Phillip.

We started walking. Neither one of them said a word about anything of much point. Phil started to tell him about our new plan to jump ship in France and go to Paris, and Al said, “Do you think it’s safe?”

“We’re not worried about that,” Phil said.

We walked down to Dennison’s place and sat on his doorstep to wait for him to come home from work. We waited awhile, and then we walked over to Chumley’s, where he generally eats.

T
UESDAY NIGHT
I
MET
H
ELEN IN
C
HUMLEY’S
. Helen was a hostess from the Continental Café. We had some vermouth and soda, and I drank the first one right down. I was so thirsty from running around all day, I felt like my mouth was going to jump right out at that vermouth like a Mexican drawing I saw once in a museum where a guy was represented with his mouth sticking out on the end of a long tube like it couldn’t wait for the rest of his face. In the middle of the second vermouth I felt a little better and dropped my hand down on Helen’s bare knee and squeezed it.

She said, “Why, Mr. Dennison!” and I gave her a paternal smile.

I looked up and saw a good-looking young man in merchant marine khaki come through the door. It was a fraction of a second before I realized it was Phillip. I
looked right at him and didn’t recognize him. Then I saw Al and Ryko behind him.

They came over to the table and we said hello all round. Then the waiter put two tables together and we moved over.

Phillip said, “Well Dennison, we’re shipping out tomorrow. This may be the last time we’ll ever see each other.”

“So I hear.”

Al said, “They plan to go to France and jump ship.”

I turned to Phillip and said, “What are you going to do in France?”

He went into a long spiel. “When we get there we’re going to jump ship and start off cross-country for Paris. By then the Allies will have broken through to Paris and maybe the war will be over. We’re going to pose as Frenchmen. Since I can’t speak French very fluently, I’m to be a sort of idiot peasant. Mike, who speaks good French, is going to do all the talking. We’ll travel by oxcart and sleep in haylofts till we get to the Left Bank.”

I listened to this for a while, then I said, “What are you going to do for food? Everything is rationed. You need books for everything.”

He said, “Oh we’ll just say we lost our books. We’ll say we’re refugees just back from a concentration camp.”

“Who’s going to say all this?”

“Ryko. He’s half French. I’m going to be deaf and dumb.”

I looked dubiously at Ryko and he said, “That’s right. My mother taught me French. And I can speak Finnish too.”

“Oh well,” I said, “do what you like. It’s no skin off me.”

Then Al said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea at all.”

I said, “Caution is no virtue in the young. In fact, come to think of it, it’s a good idea.”

Al gave me a furious look which I ignored.

“France ...” I said dreamily. “Well, give my regards to the place when you gets there—
if
you gets there.”

The food began to arrive at this point. First shrimps, then hot soup, which was put on the table at the same time as another round of cocktails. This is something that usually happens, and the result is that either the soup gets cold while you’re drinking the cocktail or you drink the soup, which spoils the effect of the cocktail.

We finished dinner a while later and Helen said she was going home to Queens. Al gave me four dollars, which was supposed to pay for all the food and cocktails he and Ryko and Phillip had guzzled down, but I was glad to get even that much.

We went out in the street and walked around talking about what we were going to do. Al said, “Well, we might go and see Connie.”

Phillip asked, “Who’s Connie?”

“She’s the girl that works on
P.M.
,” Al answered. “The one I told you about I laid on the roof two weeks ago.”

So Ryko said, “Okay, let’s go.”

Al said, “But the only trouble is she moved, and I haven’t got her new address, or I lost it. I’d have to find out from Agnes or somebody.”

“Well,” I put in, “we can’t go there then.”

Al said, “No, I guess not.”

At this point a black-haired boy of about twelve walked by, and Al said, “Hiya, Harry,” and the boy said, “Hiya, Al.”

There was a big crap game in front of Romany Marie’s, several hundred dollars in the street. We stopped for a while to watch the game. A fat greasy character with a big cigar picked up the dice, throwing down five dollars. He rolled a ten. The gamblers stood around with money in their hands and money pinned under their feet to keep it from blowing away. They started laying bets with the shooter and side bets with each other.

“Four to two no ten.”

“Five no ten eleven.”

“Two no ten a three.”

The shooter took about thirty dollars of the twoto-one bets. He hit the ten and collected money from all sides, gathering bills from under people’s shoes and from outstretched hands. Leaving ten on the ground, he said, “Shoot it.” Someone faded him. The come-out was a seven. He doubled again, shooting the twenty.

They were all taut and tense with purpose. The dice hit a board and bounced off, coming out a nine. The wrong bettors started laying the odds.