The Ultimate Egoist (12 page)

They can’t do that to me.

The evening dragged along, and the crews started straggling in. As I whipped into my work, turning out hamburgers and Westerns, I burned. First, because I was sore. But after a while I began to wonder why I was sore, and that’s when I started to be surprised.

I watched her. A honky-tonk in a Southern oil-seaport is no bed of roses. She was green, but she caught on fast. Soon she was wheedling nickels from drunken sailors to feed the hungry maw of the phonograph, dancing with two-legged wolves, drinking numberless
glasses of cracked ice with three drops of cheap wine in it at two bits a throw on somebody else, coaxing trayfuls of water-cut kidney-killer down their thirsty throats—doing all this, and doing it like an old timer. She had grit, and it did things to me. I’m no lily of the valley. Five years of being a truck driver, tanker sailor, hash-slinger, had, until she came along, cured me of being impressionable and idealistic. But something about Gay cracked that veneer of tough living, tough thinking, tough acting. When I saw a flash of disgust, quickly concealed, on her pale face, or a flash of shock at some particularly flowery bit of profanity, it hit me somewhere deep, in a place I thought was dead. Because she had shown me up, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word to her. But I watched her. It seemed as if I had spent my whole life getting ready for a chance to watch her … And I
had
to find the right line.

About eleven o’clock she was fooling around the second pumpman off the
Swansea Queen
. He’d stopped spending and the Syrian caught Gay’s eye and motioned her over to a two-table party of jabbering squareheads. But when she tried to break away the pumpman took two round turns and a half-hitch around her waist with his sweaty arms and seemed to be there for the night. I vaulted over the oyster bar, slipped into the next booth, and leaning over the pair of them brought the edges of my hands scissorwise, and with everything I had, down on the back of his neck. He stayed where he was, and Gay and I went back to work. But not before I grabbed her arm and whispered, “How’m I doin’?”

“Fine,” she said. “As a bouncer.”

Point two.

So not even rough stuff, that old standby, would do it. Well, I wasn’t at the end of my rope. By this time I’d stopped fooling around.

When we broke up for the night I left the odds and ends to the cook, who saw I was on the make and that it would do no good to keep me, and slipped out early, crossed the street and stood in the shadows of a store. Soon Gay came out and started up Flimson Street. I gave her a block, and then followed, catching her just as she crossed Sixth. Coming up from behind I confidently took her arm. She started, pulled away violently, and looked into my face. Then, “Oh,” she
said, without enthusiasm, “it’s you.”

“Looking out for you, as usual,” I said breezily. “Youngster like you has no business parading around town this time of the morning alone.”

“Good grief!” she cried in exasperation. “Don’t I have enough trouble getting away from the customers without having to fight the help too?”

“Help”! How do you like that? “Listen, sub-deb,” I said roughly, “if you can’t see an honest gesture when your nose is rubbed in it, you can live happily ever after without it.”

“Swell!” she said, and as I started off, called, “Leo! Did you mean that?”

“Yeah.” And suddenly, I did!

“Come on,” she said briefly.

It was a heavy night, and the sky was luminous from the reflection of one of the occasional “flashes” at the refinery, where a heater had got out of control and lighted up a few hundred barrels of crude. By the soft glare Gay seemed strange, other-worldly. I was trying to find a name for the precise shade of her green eyes under neon, and having a hard time of it; but as long as puzzling over it made me keep my mouth shut she seemed content to have me along. Imagine getting on the right side of a cool cookie like her without a line!

Suddenly she gasped and clutched my arm. A drunk was lying sprawled out on the sidewalk almost under our feet. His arms were stretched out and his head was back. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and he had a nasty knot on his forehead. He was moaning quietly.

I bent down, took him under the armpits and set him on his feet, but he seemed to have no control over his legs. I put him in a doorway out of the way, and came back to Gay. She was hysterical, sobbing in painful little shrieks.

“What’s the matter?” She stood there, sobbing crazily, openly, her hands at her sides. God! No woman should cry like that. I slapped her, hard, but it seemed only to add me to the legion of terrors that plagued her. I started to bawl her out. I called her things … but none of it did any good until I snapped, “It’s nobody’s fault but your
own. You
would
come to this God-forsaken hole. When you came here, you were looking for just what you’re getting. It’s your own damned fault!”

“It isn’t!” she wailed; then pushed me away and started walking. I was beside her as soon as I could make it, but she said no more.

“Why isn’t it?” I prompted gently.

Irrelevantly, she asked, “Why did he have to be there just as we passed?”

“Who; that rumdum? Gay! Don’t tell me that’s what’s bothering you? Holy smoke! Didn’t you ever see a drunk before?”

“Not like that,” she said brokenly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Leo. But I hate it so here, and seeing him just topped it off.” And she began crying again.

“Gay, how long have you been here?”

“Four days.”

“Tonight’s Thursday,” I said conversationally. “Monday night a woman shot her husband in front of the Evergreen Tavern. Saturday two men were killed: one right there in the Anchor, the other across the street in front of the beer distributor’s. It averages three a week. No one keeps track of what happens over there across the tracks. An oil town isn’t Park Avenue. What did you come here for, a vacation?”

She shuddered. “How can you be so matter-of-fact about it?”

“You’ve got to be. You get to be. If you don’t, you might as well go back where you came from. That last goes for you too; go back where you came from. This is no place for people like you.”

“You’re like me,” she said softly, quite taking my breath away.

“I do, Gay, I do; and maybe I was once. But I’m not.”

She was quiet a while, figuring that out. Then, “But I
can’t
go back—yet.”

We had come to the Franklin, the four-a-week joint where she was staying, but she walked right past it and sank onto the shadowed steps of the next house. I stood before her feeling—what was it?—humble, by golly! Me! She glanced up, then moved over almost imperceptibly. I took the hint and sat down.

“Who are you?” she asked quietly.

“I told you. Leo. Hash-slinger, able seaman, midget Lothario.” I saw, out of the corner of my eye, her eyebrow go up three thirty-seconds of an inch, and added, “Blowhard, hey?”

“You fool.” But she didn’t mean it.

“Changee for changee.”

“What? Oh. Who, me? Just somebody looking for someone.”

I got up. Maybe if I acted like a gentleman—

“Gay,” I said, “I’d like to know about it. But I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give. Shall I beat it?”

“Sit down again, Leo.”

I did, and she sat for a moment with her chin in her hands. Then,

“I’m down here looking for a boy on one of the ships that loads here.”

“Which one?” I asked, immediately interested.

“It’s called
S.W. Wanderford
.”

“Midderland Oil? Coastwise? Loads here for Bayonne, Norfolk, and Revere, Massachusetts?”

“Yes! Have you ever been on her?”

“Yeah. Two years ago. I went wiper and then ordinary seaman. Got fired in the shipyards at Brooklyn for being careless about throwing my fists around.”

“Then you knew Billy—Bill Atherton?”

“Atherton? No; I was only on her two months. What is he?”

A glow came into her voice. “He’s a fireman. He was a wiper for only six months and then got a fireman’s papers!” I didn’t say anything about the legal qualifications for fireman, which are six months wiping time. “He works terribly hard; twelve hours a day, sometimes more, and the heat is terrible. The meals are very bad, and he told me that he is sometimes so sick he can hardly stand; but he goes right on stoking those fires.”

This Billy is a pip, I thought to myself. I’d seen his kind before. Ride one of the ships for a month or two, and then get salty; tell the little woman all about the hardships of life at sea. Holy pumps! If four hours on and eight off comes to twelve hours work a day, and if the Midderland tankers are hungry, and if the
Wanderford
, which is a motorship, has anyone but the chief wiper “stoking” her oil-burning
donkey-boiler, then I’m a Chinese Indian.

I said, “And how does the gentleman rate having you chase some two thousand miles for him?”

“It was all a misunderstanding,” she said miserably. “You see, I had known him for years; I was in school with him. And we had planned to—to get married when he had a good job—” she gulped, and then went on, “And then when he went to sea he used to write and tell me when he’d be in next, and I’d plan all sorts of things for us to do. Well, about a year ago he docked in Bayonne and took the train home, and hired a car and we rode all around the city. And when it got dark we went into the park and sat there talking, and—well, I hadn’t seen him for so long, and—” She stopped, confused.

“All right,” I said. “You don’t have to draw me any pictures.”

“Please, Leo,” she said angrily. “… well, then he just stopped writing. I couldn’t understand it, but all the time I knew it wasn’t his fault. Something must have happened to him. Mother said that he had run out, but she didn’t know Billy. And Father—he was rotten about it. He had a suspicion of what had happened, and actually took out a court order against poor Billy!”

“Poor Billy,” I said under my breath.

“It took me a long time, but I found out through the company that he was still on the ship. I saved all I could of my allowance until I had enough to come down here. I couldn’t meet him anywhere up North because Father would have found out about it, and had Billy put in jail.”

“Tsk tsk.”

Luckily she was too deep in her story to hear. “So here I am, and when Billy comes in, we’ll be married and I can stay here and see him every trip.”

Just like that, eh? “Gay, did you buy a round trip ticket from up North?”

“Of course not. Why should I?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Does he know you’re here?”

“No. Won’t he be surprised? One of his shipmates once told me that he ‘hangs out at the Blue Anchor’ when he’s in here. You
must
have seen him.”

“No, lady. Not that I can remember. I came here with the cook only about two weeks ago. If I have seen him I don’t remember it.”

“Well,” she said, “you will. He docks here on Saturday.”

Afraid so, I thought.

Well, that was the setup. I can fight anything I can see, or anything I can understand. If I’m on the make for some gal who’s carrying the torch for someone else, I know what to do if he’s halfway normal; simply use his own line better than he does. But here was Gay, dead gone on a phony, playing God knows what sort of game. They say love is blind, and no one can understand women, and so forth; but until I met Gay those things were just collections of words. And talk about youth and innocence …!

I got up to go. “I hope things work out the way you want them to, Gay,” I said. “But if they don’t, remember I’m standing by. If I can ever do anything—”

“Oh, thanks, Leo. But you’ll never have to. You don’t know Billy.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

She opened the door of the Franklin, and then turned to look at me. “You’re such a comfortable person to be with, Leo.”

That wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it would have to do. I left in a rosy haze.

And I mean just that. Remember how it was the first time you went for a girl? I don’t mean an attraction; I mean something big. I mean wanting a girl so badly that you’re afraid to touch her. I mean something that fills you and yet leaves a hollow inside. What the hell. You know what I mean.

Poor Billy, my starboard elbow!

Saturday really was busy. The Syrian circulated around the floor rubbing his hands and beaming, and the cook and I were mobbed. I wasn’t too rushed, though, to watch out for how the boys were treating Gay. She had learned quickly. Her artificial smile was brighter and she stopped freezing when the men she was dancing with held her too closely. She was doing all right.

About nine, the crew of the
Wanderford
began to struggle in. I saw two or three of my old shipmates, among them a little Swede
who had been my particular sidekick. He was the only one who had thrown in with me in that ruckus in the Brooklyn shipyards.

“Ho!” I cried when I saw him.

“What ho?” he bellowed, in the old formula.

“Tallyho!” and then the usual handshaking and free beer.

And as any two seamen will, we starting gossiping about old shipmates. Blackie got left in Revere; the mate pulled a gun on a lime-juicer in port here last trip; the Feds got Murphy for an old forgery charge through the fingerprints on his papers.

“But you ought to be on the old can now,” Swede wound up. “I’d like you to see Steamboat.”

“Steamboat?”

“Yeah. A wiper we picked up in Bayonne when Didon got fired. Believes anything you tell him. One night we were running through a heavy swell and we told him he better pack his suitcase. We says we’ll have to take to the boats during the night. By golly, he did! Not only that, but he turned in with his life-preserver on, and got one of the boys to lash him in his bunk! Yeah!” Swede took a pull at his beer.

“Another time the first assistant spent two hours explaining the burners on the donkey boiler to him, and when we got in he left the kid in the fireroom. Fifteen minutes later she popped off, and the first runs in and finds the water shut down and the oil wide open in all three fires. He finally found the kid in the messroom playing five hundred. He’d gone up for a drink of water, he said, and forgot he was on watch!”