John Passos - 1919

“Well, what’s the trouble, boys? It’s all right now, everybody knows me here. You have to be careful on this island, boys, they’re touchy, these people, very touchy…. You boys better come along with me and have a drink….” He took them each by the arm and walked them hurriedly up the street. “Well, I was young once… I’m still young… sure, had to see the island… damn right too, the most interesting island in the whole Caribbean only lonely… never see a white face.”

When they got to his house he walked them through a big whitewashed room onto a terrace that smelt of vanilla flowers. They could see the town underneath with its few lights, the dark hills, the white hull of the Callao with the lighters around her lit up by the working lights. At intervals the rattle of winches came up to them and a crazy jigtune from somewhere.

The old feller poured them each a glass of rum; then another. He had a parrot on a perch that kept screeching. The landbreeze had come up full of heavy flowersmells off the mountains and blew the old feller’s stringy white hair in his eyes. He pointed at the Callao all lit up with its ring of lighters. “United Fruit… United Thieves Company… it’s a monopoly… if you won’t take their prices they let your limes rot on the wharf; it’s a monopoly. You boys are working for a bunch of thieves, but I know it ain’t your fault. Here’s lookin’ at you.”

Before they knew it Larry and Joe were singing. The old man was talking about cotton spinning machinery and canecrushers and pouring out drinks from a rumbottle. They were pretty goddam drunk. They didn’t know how they got aboard. Joe remembered the dark focastle and the sound of snoring from the bunks spinning around, then sleep hitting him like a sandbag and the sweet, sicky taste of rum in his mouth.

A couple of days later Joe came down with a fever and horrible pains in his joints. He was out of his head when they put him ashore at St. Thomas’s. It was dengue and he was sick for two months before he had the strength even to write Del to tell her where he was. The hospital orderly told him he’d been out of his head five days and they’d given him up for a goner. The doctors had been sore as hell about it because this was post hospital; after all he was a white man and unconscious and they couldn’t very well feed him to the sharks.

It was July before Joe was well enough to walk around the steep little coraldust streets of the town. He had to leave the hospital and would have been in a bad way if one of the cooks at the marina barracks hadn’t looked out for him and found him a flop in an unused section of the building. It was hot and there was never a cloud in the sky and he got pretty sick of looking at the niggers and the bare hills and the blue shutin harbor. He spent a lot of time sitting out on the old coalwharf in the shade of a piece of corrugated iron roof looking through the planking at the clear deep bluegreen water, watching shoals of snappers feeding around the piles. He got to thinking about Del and that French girl in Bordeaux and the war and how the United Fruit was a bunch of thieves and then the thoughts would go round and round in his head like the little silver and blue and yellow fish round the swaying weeds on the piles and he’d find he’d dropped off to sleep.

When a northbound fruitsteamer came into the harbor he got hold of one of the officers on the wharf and told him his sad story. They gave him passage up to New York. First thing he did was try to get hold of Janey; maybe if she thought he ought to, he’d give up this dog’s life and take a steady job ashore. He called up the J. Ward Moorehouse advertising office where she worked but the girl at the other end of the line told him she was the boss’s secretary and was out west on business.

He went over and got a flop at Mrs. Olsen’s in Redhook. Everybody over there was talking about the draft and how they rounded you up for a slacker if they picked you up on the street without a registration card. And sure enough, just as Joe was stepping out of the subway at Wall Street one morning a cop came up to him and asked him for his card. Joe said he was a merchant seaman and had just got back from a trip and hadn’t had time to register yet and that he was exempt, but the cop said he’d have to tell that to the judge. They were quite a bunch being marched down Broadway; smart guys in the crowd of clerks and counterjumpers along the sidewalks yelled “Slackers” at them and the girls hissed and booed.

In the Custom House they were herded into some of the basement rooms. It was a hot August day. Joe elbowed his way through the sweating, grumbling crowd towards the window. Most of them were foreigners, there were longshoremen and waterfront loafers; a lot of the group were talking big but Joe remembered the navy and kept his mouth shut and listened. He was in there all day. The cops wouldn’t let anybody telephone and there was only one toilet and they had to go to that under guard. Joe felt pretty weak on his pins, he hadn’t gotten over the effect of that dengue yet. He was about ready to pass out when he saw a face he knew. Damned if it wasn’t Glen Hardwick.

Glen had been picked up by a Britisher and taken into Halifax. He’d signed as second on the Chemang , taking out mules to Bordeaux and a general cargo to Genoa, going to be armed with a threeinch gun and navy gunners, Joe ought to come along. “Jesus, do you think I could get aboard her?” Joe asked. “Sure, they’re crazy for navigation officers; they’d take you on even without a ticket.” Bordeaux sounded pretty good, remember the girlfriends there? They doped out that when Glen got out he’d phone Mrs. Olsen to bring over Joe’s license that was in a cigarbox at the head of his bed. When they finally were taken up to the desk to be questioned the guy let Glen go right away and said Joe could go as soon as they got his license over but that they must register at once even if they were exempt from the draft. “After all, you boys ought to remember that there’s a war on,” said the inspector at the desk. “Well, we sure ought to know,” said Joe.

Mrs. Olsen came over all in a flurry with Joe’s papers and Joe hustled over to the office in East New York and they took him on as bosun. The skipper was Ben Tarbell who’d been first mate on the Higginbotham. Joe wanted to go down to Norfolk to see Del, but hell this was no time to stay ashore. What he did was to send her fifty bucks he borrowed from Glen. He didn’t have time to worry about it anyway because they sailed the next day with sealed orders as to where to meet the convoy.

It wasn’t so bad steaming in convoy. The navy officers on the destroyers and the Salem that was in command gave the orders, but the merchant captains kidded back and forth with wigwag signals. It was some sight to see the Atlantic Ocean full of long strings of freighters all blotched up with gray and white watermarkings like barberpoles by the camouflage artists. There were old tubs in that convoy that a man wouldn’t have trusted himself in to cross to Staten Island in peacetime and one of the new wooden Shipping Board boats leaked so bad, jerrybuilt out of new wood — somebody musta been making money — that she had to be abandoned and scuttled half way across.

Joe and Glen smoked their pipes together in Glen’s cabin and chewed the fat a good deal. They decided that everything ashore was the bunk and the only place for them was blue water. Joe got damn fed up with bawling out the bunch of scum he had for a crew. Once they got in the zone, all the ships started steering a zigzag course and everybody began to get white around the gills. Joe never cussed so much in his life. There was a false alarm of submarines every few hours and seaplanes dropping depth bombs and excited gun crews firing at old barrels, bunches of seaweed, dazzle in the water. Steaming into the Gironde at night with the searchlights crisscrossing and the blinker signals and the patrolboats scooting around, they sure felt good.