Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“You aren’t treating me square,” he said.

“Who did you treat square, you rummy?” I told him. “You’d double-cross your own mother.”

That was true, too. But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. But I wouldn’t carry him the way things were now, not even if I wanted to.

He started to walk off down the dock looking longer than a day without breakfast. Then he turned and came back.

“How’s to let me take a couple of dollars, Harry?”

I gave him a five-dollar bill of the Chink’s.

“I always knew you were my pal. Harry, why don’t you carry me?”

“You’re bad luck.”

“You’re just plugged,” he said. “Never mind, old pal. You’ll be glad to see me yet.”

Now he had money he went off a good deal faster but I tell you it was poison to see him walk, even. He walked just like his joints were backwards.

I went up to the Perla and met the broker and he gave me the papers and I bought him a drink. Then I had lunch and Frankie came in.

“Fellow gave me this for you,” he said and handed me a rolled-up sort of tube wrapped in paper and tied with a piece of red string. It looked like a photograph when I unwrapped it and I unrolled it thinking it was maybe a picture someone around the dock had taken of the boat.

All right. It was a close-up picture of the head and chest of a dead nigger with his throat cut clear across from ear to ear and then stitched up neat and a card on his chest saying in Spanish: “This is what we do to lenguas largas .”

“Who gave it to you?” I asked Frankie.

He pointed out a Spanish boy that works around the docks who is just about gone with the con. This kid was standing at the lunch counter.

“Ask him to come over.”

The kid came over. He said two young fellows gave it to him about eleven o’clock. They asked him if he knew me and he said yes. Then he gave it to Frankie for me. They gave him a dollar to see that I got it. They were well dressed, he said.

“Politics,” Frankie said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“They think you told the police you were meeting those boys here that morning.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Good thing you go.”

“Did they leave any message?” I asked the Spanish boy.

“No,” he said. “Just to give you that.”

“I’m going to have to leave now,” I said to Frankie.

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Very bad politics.”

I had all the papers in a bunch that the broker had given me and I paid the bill and walked out of that café and across the square and through the gate and I was plenty glad to come through the warehouse and get out on the dock. Those kids had me spooked all right. They were just dumb enough to think I’d tipped somebody off about that other bunch. Those kids were like Pancho. When they were scared they got excited, and when they got excited they wanted to kill somebody.

I got on board and warmed up the engine. Frankie stood on the dock watching. He was smiling that funny deaf smile. I went back to him.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t you get in any trouble about this.”

He couldn’t hear me. I had to yell it at him.

“Me good politics,” Frankie said. He cast her off.

I waved to Frankie, who’d thrown the bowline on board, and I headed her out of the slip and dropped down the channel with her. A British freighter was going out and I ran along beside her and passed her. I went out the harbor and past the Morro and put her on the course for Key West; due north. I left the wheel and went forward and coiled up the bowline and then came back and held her on her course, spreading Havana out astern and then dropping it off behind us as we brought the mountains up.

I dropped the Morro out of sight after a while and then the National Hotel and finally I could just see the dome of the Capitol. There wasn’t much current compared to the last day we had fished and there was only a light breeze. I saw a couple of smacks headed in toward Havana and they were coming from the westward so I knew the current was light.

I cut the switch and killed the motor. There wasn’t any sense in wasting gas. I’d let her drift. When it got dark I could always pick up the light of the Morro or, if she drifted up too far, the lights of Cojimar, and steer in and run along to Bacuranao. I figured the way the current looked she would drift the twelve miles up to Bacuranao by dark and I’d see the lights of Baracóa.

Well, I killed the engine and climbed up forward to have a look around. All there was to see was the two smacks off to the westward headed in, and way back the dome of the Capitol standing up white out of the edge of the sea. There was some gulfweed on the stream and a few birds working, but not many. I sat up there awhile on top of the house and watched, but the only fish I saw were those little brown ones that rise around the gulfweed. Brother, don’t let anybody tell you there isn’t plenty of water between Havana and Key West. I was just on the edge of it.

After a while I went down into the cockpit again and there was Eddy!

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter with the engine?”

“She broke down.”

“Why haven’t you got the hatch up?”

“Oh, hell!” I said.

Do you know what he’d done? He’d come back again and slipped the forward hatch and gone down into the cabin and gone to sleep. He had two quarts with him. He’d gone into the first bodega he’d seen and bought it and come aboard. When I started out he woke up and went back to sleep again. When I stopped her out in the gulf and she began to roll a little with the swell it woke him up.

“I knew you’d carry me, Harry,” he said.

“Carry you to hell,” I said. “You aren’t even on the crew list. I’ve got a good mind to make you jump overboard now.”

“You’re an old joker, Harry,” he said. “Us conchs ought to stick together when we’re in trouble.”

“You,” I said, “with your mouth. Who’s going to trust your mouth when you’re hot?”

“I’m a good man, Harry. You put me to the test and see what a good man I am.”

“Get me the two quarts,” I told him. I was thinking of something else.

He brought them out and I took a drink from the open one and put them forward by the wheel. He stood there and I looked at him. I was sorry for him and for what I knew I’d have to do. Hell, I knew him when he was a good man.

“What’s the matter with her, Harry?”

“She’s all right.”

“What’s the matter, then? What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Brother,” I told him, and I was sorry for him, “you’re in plenty of trouble.”

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t got it all figured out yet.”

We sat there awhile and I didn’t feel like talking to him any more. Once I knew it, it was hard to talk to him. Then I went below and got out the pump-gun and the Winchester thirty-thirty that I always had below in the cabin and hung them up in their cases from the top of the house where we hung the rods usually, right over the wheel where I could reach them. I keep them in those full-length clipped sheep’s-wool cases soaked in oil. That’s the only way you can keep them from rusting on a boat.

I loosened up the pump and worked her a few times, and then filled her up and pumped one into the barrel. I put a shell in the chamber of the Winchester and filled up the magazine. I got out the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami from under the mattress and cleaned and oiled it and filled it up and put it on my belt.

“What’s the matter?” Eddy said. “What the hell’s the matter?”