Microcosmic God (35 page)

He reached town about eleven at night. He was pretty much of a mess—covered with grime, cut and bruised and sick. Someone saw him leaning rockily against the sun-dried wall of a gin mill, trying to revive himself with the faint clinking of glasses and the fainter
odor of liquor that drifted from inside. Someone else said, “Look at the hulk; let’s feed him a drink.” It was a lucky break for Barry; with his metabolism in the pickled state it was, he would most certainly have dropped dead if he had not had that snifter.

They led him in and gave him a couple more, and his garbled mutterings were amusing to them for a time, but after a while they went home and left him cluttering up a round table with his spent body.

Closing time—which meant the time when there was no one left around to buy a nickel beer—came, and the bartender, a misplaced Louisiana Cajun, came over to throw the sailor out. There was no one else in the place but a couple of rats and some flies. One of the rats had only two legs and wore a collar and tie even in that heat. The other rat had some self-respect and scuttled under the beer pulls to lap suds, being a true quadruped with inherited rat reflexes.

The two-legged rat’s name was Zilio. He was a small oily creature with swarthy skin, a hooked nose supported by a small mustache, an ingratiating manner and a devious way of making a living. His attention was attracted toward Barry by the barkeep’s purposeful approach. Zilio slid off his stool and said:

“Hold it, Pierre; I’m buying for the gentleman. Pour a punch.”

The name did not refer to the ingredients of the drink but to its effect. The barkeep shrugged and went back to his bar, where he poured a double drink of cheap whiskey, adding two drops of clear liquid from a small bottle, this being the way to mix a Zilio punch.

Zilio took it from him and carried it over to Barry. He set it on the table in front of the seaman, drew up a chair and sat close to him, his arm on Barry’s shoulder.

“Drink up, old man,” he said in an affected accent. He shook Barry gently, and the sailor raised his head groggily. “Go on,” urged Zilio.

Barry picked up the glass, shaking and slopping, and sipped because he had not energy for a gulp.

“You’re a sailor, eh?” murmured Zilio.

Barry shook his head and reared back to try to focus his disobedient eyes on the oily man. “Yeah, an’ a damn good one.”

“Union member?”

“What’s it to you?” asked Barry belligerently, and Zilio pushed the glass a little closer. Barry realized that the smooth, swarthy character was buying a drink, and promptly loosened up. “Yeah; I belong to the union.” He picked up the glass.

“Good!” said Zilio. “Drink up!”

Barry did. The raw liquid slid down his throat, looped around and smashed him on the back of the neck. He sank tinglingly into unconsciousness. Zilio watched him for a moment, smiling.

Pierre said, “What are you going to do with that broken down piece o’ tar?”

Zilio began to search Barry’s pockets diligently. “If I can find what I’m looking for,” he said, “this broken down piece of tar is going to be removed from the rolls of the unemployed.” Another minute’s searching uncovered Barry’s seaman’s papers. “Ah—able seaman—quartermaster—wiper and messman. He’ll do.” He stood back and wiped his hands on a large white handkerchief. “Pierre, get a couple of the boys and have this thing brought down to my dock.”

Pierre grunted and went out, returning in a few minutes with a couple of fishermen. Without a word they picked up the unconscious Barry and carried him out to a disreputable old flivver, which groaned its way out of sight down the dusty road.

Zilio said, “ ‘Night, Pierre.” He handed the bartender two clean dollar bills for his part in the shanghai, and left.

When Barry swam up out of the effects of Pierre’s Mickey Finn, he found himself in all too familiar surroundings. He didn’t have to open his eyes; his nose and sense of touch told him where he was. He was lying in a narrow bed, and the sparse springs beneath him vibrated constantly. His right side felt heavier than his left, and he rolled a little that way, and then the weight shifted and he rolled back. He groaned. How did he ever get working again?

He opened his eyes at last, to see what kind of a box it was that he had shipped out on. He saw a dimly lit fo’c’s’le with six bunks in it, only one of which was occupied. The place was filthy, littered with empty beer cans, dirty socks, a couple of pairs of dungarees,
wrapping paper from laundry parcels, and cigarette butts—the usual mess of a merchant ship’s crew’s quarters when leaving port. He closed his eyes and shook his head violently to rid himself of this impossible vision—he didn’t remember catching a ship,
knew
he was on the beach, and was good and sick of seeing things he could not believe. So—he closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it, and when he did that he groaned in agony at the pain that shot through it. Oooh—that must have been a party. Wow! He lay very still until the pain subsided, and then cautiously opened his eyes again. He was still in a ship’s fo’c’s’le.

“Hey!” he called weakly.

The figure on the lower bunk opposite started, and a man pushed his head into the light that trickled in from the alleyway.

“Hey, where am I? Eh—when is this?”

Apparently the man could make sense out of the vague question. “Tuesday,” he said. That meant nothing to Barry. “Ye’re aboard th’
Jesse Hanck
. Black oil. Far East.”

Barry lay back. “Oh,” he moaned.

The Hanck ships were famous—or was it notorious? They were old Fore River ships, well-deck tankers. They were dirty and unseaworthy, and they were hungry ships and paid ordinary seaman’s wages to their petty officers, grading it on down from there. Twenty-eight lousy dollars a month. No overtime. Eighty-six-day runs.

Barry got up one elbow and said half to himself, “What did I do—
ask
for this job?”

The other man rolled out and sat on the edge of his bunk, putting on a tankerman’s safety shoes. “Damfino. Did you ever meet a guy called Zilio?”

“Ah—Yeah.”

The man nodded. “There you are then, shipmate. He gave you a drink. You passed out. You wake up aboard this oil can. That’s Zilio’s business.”

“Why the dirty—I’m a union member! I’ll tie this ship up! I’ll have her struck! I’ll report her to the Maritime Commission! I’ll—”

The other man rose and came across the fo’c’s’le to lean his elbows on Barry’s bunk and breathe his gingivitis into Barry’s face. “You’ll
do your work and shut up. When you sober up enough to look around, you’ll find out you’re sailing without seaman’s papers. If you’re a good boy and play along with the seahorse that calls himself a chief mate, you’ll get them back. Step off the straight and narrow and you’ll be beached somewhere without your livin’. An’ listen—better dry up with that union talk. You got picked up by a fink-herder and shipped on a fink ship. They don’t go for that around here, that fellow-worker stuff.”

“Yeah?” Barry swung his feet over the side of the bunk and had to clutch his pounding head. “I’ll jump ship in Panama! We got to go through the canal!”

“Ain’t nobody jumpin’ no ship in Panama nowadays, friend. They’ll send out a fifth-colyum alarm fer you from the ship an’ you’ll spend somethin’ like fifty years in a military bastille. Besides—time you get to Colon you won’t want to be jumpin’ ship. Better cool off now. G’wan back to sleep. I got the eight to twelve. You got the twelve to four.”

So Barry went back to work again. He spent his days and nights in the utmost misery. The packing around the posthole beside his bunk had kicked out some years ago, and every time the weather got a little drafty, his bunk shipped water. The food was atrocious, and the crew was composed of bootblacks, kids on vacation, ex-tenant farmers, and one or two bonafide seamen like himself, either outright finks or shanghaied wrecks. But all of this didn’t stack up to his horrors. They persisted and they grew.

It isn’t often a man gets them that badly, but then it isn’t often that a man lets himself get into the state that Barry was in. He walked in a narrowing circle of ravenous beasts. When he slept he dreamed horrible dreams, and when he lay awake he could feel tiny, cold, wet feet crawling over his body. He was afraid to stand a lookout watch by himself, and the mate had to batten down his ears for him before he would go out to the fo’c’s’le head at night. He was dead sure that there was something horrible hiding in the anchor engine, ready to leap out at him and wrap him up in the anchor cables. He was just as afraid to be in a roomful of men, because, to his sodden eyes, their
faces kept running together fluidly, assuming the most terrifying shapes. So he spent his hours off watch hovering in the outskirts of smaller groups of men, making them nervous, causing them to call him Haunt and Jonah.

He found out what the eight-to-twelve man had meant when he’d said that Barry wouldn’t feel like jumping ship in Panama. A day before they made the canal, those who might make trouble were called to the second mate’s room, each secretly, and fed rotgut liquor. They hadn’t learned—not one of them. It was a Mickey again. When they came to, they were in the Pacific.

The
Jesse Hanck
steamed well out of the usual steamer lanes. The Hanck fleet were charter boats, and they saw to it that they were always behind schedule sufficiently to enable the captains to pad the fuel and store consumption accounts enough so that pockets were lined all around, except for those of the crews. A thoroughly rotten outfit. At any rate, Barry had his little accident eight days out of the canal.

The ship was shuffling along somewhere on the tenth meridian, and it was hot. It was one of those evenings when a man puts clothes on to soak up perspiration and rips them off thirty seconds later because he can’t stand the heat of them; when sleeping on deck is just as bad.

The men bunked all over the place, throwing mattresses down on the after boatdeck, swinging hammocks from the midship rigging, crawling under the messroom tables, which were out on the poop now—sleeping anywhere and everywhere in impossible attempts to escape the cruel heat. Calling the watch was a hit-or-miss proposition; you might find your relief and then again you might wake the wrong man from a rare snatch of real sleep and get yourself roughed up for your mistake.

Barry came off watch at four that morning. He turned in somewhere back aft. He never got up for breakfast anyway, and when the eight-to-twelve ordinary seaman tried to call him for lunch at eleven-thirty, he couldn’t be found. It was one-thirty before the bos’n missed him. Sometime between four in the morning and one in the afternoon, then, Barry had left the ship.

It gave all hands something to talk about for a couple of days. The captain wrote up a “lost at sea” item in the log and pocketed Barry’s wages. An ordinary seaman was given Barry’s duties with no increase in pay. Barry was forgotten. Who cared, anyway? Nobody liked him. He wasn’t worth a damn. He couldn’t steer. He couldn’t paint. He was a lousy lookout.

Barry himself always gets that part of his story garbled. How a man trained at sea, capable in any emergency of looking out for his own skin, no matter what the weather or his state of sobriety, could possible
fall
off a ship at sea is beyond understanding. I don’t believe he did. I think he jumped off. Not because of the way he was being treated aboard that slave ship; he hadn’t self-respect enough left for that. It must have been his horrors; at any rate, that, according to him, is the last thing he remembers happening to him aboard the
Jesse Hanck
.

He had just drifted off to sleep, when he was aroused by some shipboard noise—the boilers popping off, perhaps, or a roar from the antiquated steering engine. At any rate, he was suddenly dead certain that something was pursuing him, and that if he didn’t get away from it, he would be horribly killed. He tried, and then he was in the water.

As the rusty old hull slid past him in the warm sea, he looked up at it and blinked the brine out of his failing eyes and made not the slightest attempt to shout for help. He trod water for some moments, until the after light of the tanker was a low star swinging down on the horizon, and then he turned over on his back and kicked sluggishly to keep himself afloat.

Now delirium tremens is a peculiar affliction. Just as the human body can be destroyed by a dose of poison, but will throw off an overdose, so the human mind will reach a point of supersaturation and return to something like normality. In Barry’s case it was pseudosanity; he did not cease to have his recurrent attacks of phantasmagoria, but he became suddenly immunized to them. It was as if he had forgotten how to be afraid—how, even, to wonder at the things he saw and felt. He simply did not care; he became as he is
today, just not giving a damn. In effect, his mind was all but completely gone, so that for the first time in weeks he could lie at ease and feel that he was not mortally afraid. It was the first time he had been in real danger, and he was not afraid.

He says that he lay there and slept for weeks. He says that porpoises came and played with him, bunting him about and crying like small children. And he says that an angel came down from the sky and built him a boat out of seaweed and foam. But he only remembers one sun coming up, so it must have been that same morning that he found himself clutching a piece of driftwood, rocking and rolling in a gentle swell just to windward of a small island. It was just a little lump of sand and rock, heaped high in the middle, patched with vegetation and wearing a halo of shrieking sea birds. He stared at it with absolutely no interest at all for about four hours, drifting closer all the while. When his feet struck bottom he did not know what it meant or what he should do; he just let them drag until his knees struck also, and then he abandoned his piece of wood and crept ashore.

The sun was coming up again when Barry awoke. He was terribly weak, and his flesh was dry and scaly the way only sea-soaked skin can be. His tongue was interfering with his breathing. He lolled up to his hands and knees and painfully crawled up the sloping beach to a cluster of palms. He collapsed with his chin in a cool spring, and would have killed himself by over-drinking if he had not fallen asleep again.