Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

I had seen seamen fight below decks during storms on the Allegro; it was something that made me want to strap on a life vest and hide near the bridge, like a child in a slum running from his quarreling parents. My fear was of seeing people enclosed by a larger struggle swept away and dying in a hammer lock. The storms encouraged fighting, and the fighting seemed to intensify the storm.

“Give me the wheel like a good feller,” I said to Mr. Khoo.

Mr. Khoo threatened me with a sharp elbow and held tight to the wheel. The wipers were paralyzed on the window; I swayed and tried to see.

“Do you know what this is costing me!” I shouted.

“Cannot,” said Mr. Khoo, refusing to look at me.

“Drop the anchor, then,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I unbolted the door and stepped into the wind. Up ahead, the rusty brown silo of a ship’s stern loomed, a light flashed, and I made out the name, Richard Everett, Liverpool.

“Oh boy, there she is!”

Mr. Khoo gave a blast on the horn; he was crouched at the wheel. He looked up at the freighter, twisting his head. I stayed on deck, waving to faces framed by yellow bonnets. It was too rough to use the ladder; some men in slickers and boots were pushing a cargo net over the side.

The launch still pitched. Mr. Khoo worked the lighter close by circling the launch around and nudging it against the side of the Richard Everett , and I had the satisfaction in a storm during which other lightermen waited at the river mouth by Cavanagh Bridge, of seeing my girls hoisted up, three at a time in the hefty cargo net, all of them soaked to the skin, fumbling with collapsed umbrellas and shrieking at the gale. The crane swung them on board and lowered them into the hold. There was a cheer, audible over the storm and wind, as the cargo net descended.

I went up myself with the last load of girls and to the sound of steel doors slamming in the passageway, had a brandy with the first mate, and played a dozen hands of gin rummy; the light softened in the porthole and then the sun came out. He paid me fifteen dollars a girl. He had asked for them on consignment, but I insisted on a flat rate. Two hours later, in sparkling sunshine, we were on our way. I rode in the lighter with the girls. We took down the canvas roof and May played a transistor radio one of the seamen had given her. Some of the girls put up their umbrellas, and they all sat as prim as schoolteachers on a Sunday outing. Junie wore a sailor hat. We cruised slowly back, enjoying the warmth and the light breeze, and docked at Pasir Panjang behind a palm grove — I could not risk arriving at Collyer Quay or Jardine Steps with that cargo.

It was not my first excursion. I had been doing it for several months, usually small loads. Sometimes only two in a sampan rowed out from Collyer Quay to an old tanker, the girls disguised as scrubwomen in faded sam-foos , with buckets and brushes and bundles of old rags, to fool the harbor police. I had always made it a practice — I was the first in Singapore, perhaps anywhere, to do so — to have a girl along with me when I delivered groceries and fresh meat and coils of rope, just in case. The girl was always welcome, and came back exhausted.

The storm made me; it became known that I was the enterprising swineherd who took a lighterful of girls out at the height of a Sumatra that swamped a dinghy of Danish seamen that same day. A week later a crewman on the Miranda buttonholed me: “You the bloke that floated them pros out to the Everett? ”

I told him I was, and stuck out my hand. “Jack Flowers,” I said. “Call me Jack. Anything I can do for you?”

“You’re a lad, you are,” he said admiringly, and then over his shoulder, “’ey, Scrumpy, it’s ’im! ”

I rocked back and forth, smiling, then took out my pencil and clownishly licked the lead, and winked, saying, “Well, gentlemen, let’s see what we can scare up for you today…”

The Sumatra had come sudden as a bomb, darkly filling the sky, outraging the sea, pimpling it with rain like lead shot, wrinkling it and snarling it into spiky heaves. I never let on that it hit us when we were halfway to the Richard Everett or that I had put my last dollar into releasing those girls and hiring the launch and lighter, and that to have turned back — no less perilous than going forward — would have disgraced me and ruined me irrecoverably. If we had sunk it would have been the end, for none of the twenty-three girls knew how to swim. I had not known the extent of the risk, but it was a venture — probably cowardly: I was afraid to lose my money and scared to turn back — that had tremendous consequences. The mates on the Miranda were the first of many who praised me and gave me commissions.

And Hing’s business boomed.

I had known Hing long before I jumped ship. The Allegro was registered in Panama, but her home port was Hong Kong. We were often in Singapore, and the only occasion in eleven months we left the Indian Ocean was to take a cargo of rubber to Vancouver. I thought of jumping ship there, and nearly did it, except that beyond Vancouver and the cold wastes of Canadian America I saw the United States, and that was the place I was fleeing.

Hing was the first person I thought of when I developed my plan for leaving the Allegro. At the time he seemed the kindest man. I always looked forward to our stops in Singapore, and Hing was glad of our business. Just a small-time provisioner, delivering corn flakes to housewives at the British bases and glad for the unexpected order of an extra pound of sausages, he worked out of his little shop on Beach Road; Gopi packed the cardboard cartons, and Little Hing took the groceries around in a beat-up van. We were not dealing with Hing then. Our ship chandler was a large firm, also on Beach Road, just down from Raffles Hotel. One day, checking over our crates of supplies, I saw some secondhand valves wrapped in newspaper that I felt were being palmed off on me.

“We didn’t order these,” I said.

The clerk took them out of the crate. He dropped them on the floor.

“Where are the ones we ordered?”

The clerk said nothing. The Chinese mouth is naturally grim; his was drawn down, his nether lip pouted; his head, too large for the rest of his body, had corners, and looked just like a skull, not a head fleshed out with an expression, but in contour and lightness, the sutures and jaw hinges visible, a bone with a flat skeletal crown. This feller’s head, ridiculously mounted on a scrawny neck, infuriated me.

“Where,” I repeated, “are the ones we ordered?”

He swallowed, setting his Adam’s apple in motion. “Out of stock.”

“I thought as much. So you gave us these. You’re always doing that!” I almost blew a gasket. “We’re going to be at sea for the next ten days. What if a valve goes? They aren’t going to be any good to us, are they?” I wanted him to reply. “ Are they? ”

Anger takes some responsive cooperation to fan blustering to rage. He would not play; the Chinese seldom did. Some fellers accused the Chinese of harboring a motiveless evil, but it was not so. Their blank look was disturbing because it did nothing to discourage the feeling that they meant us harm. The blankness was blankness, a facial void reflecting a mental one: confusion. If I had to name the look I would call it fear, the kind that can make the Chinese cower or be wild. The clerk cowered, withdrawing behind the counter.

I kicked the crate and stamped out of the shop. Next door Hing was smiling in the doorway of his shop. I was immediately well disposed to him; he was reliably fat and calm, and he had the prosperous, satisfying bulk, the easy grace of a trader with many employees.