Free Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon Page A

wonder.
    Bolingbroke bolted the door. They threw down their bedding and sat, and drank wine. Outside a small wind had risen, which rattled the flaps of tar paper and blundered baffled and turbulent into and around the jutting corners and irregular angles of the shack. Somehow they started telling sea stories. Pig told about how he and a sonarman named Feeny had stolen a horse-drawn taxi in Barcelona. It turned out neither of them knew anything about horses and they wound up driving full tilt off the end of Fleet Landing, pursued by at least a platoon of Shore Patrolmen. While they were floundering around in the water it occurred to them that this would be a good time to swim out to the carrier Intrepid and stomp hell out of a few airedales. They would have made it had it not been for the Intrepid's motor launch, which caught up with them a few hundred yards out. Feeny managed to throw the coxswain and the bow hook over the side before some wise-assed ensign with a .45 stopped all the fun by shooting Feeny through the shoulder. Flange told about how one spring weekend back in college he and two comrades had swiped a female cadaver from the local morgue. They took it up to Flange's fraternity about three in the morning and deposited it next to the president of the house, who was lying passed out on his bed. Next morning bright and early all the brothers able to ambulate marched en masse to the president's room and began banging on the door. "Yes, just a minute," a voice groaned from inside, "I'll be right with. Oh. Oh, my god." "What's the matter, Vincent?" somebody called. "You got a broad in there?" And they all laughed good-naturedly. About fifteen minutes later Vincent, ashen and trembling, opened up and they all trooped in noisily. They looked under the bed and moved the furniture around and opened the closet, but no corpse. Puzzled, they began pulling out dresser drawers, when suddenly there was a piercing scream from outside. They rushed to the window and looked down. A coed had fainted in the street. It turned out Vincent had knotted together his three best neckties and hung the body outside the window. Pig shook his head. "Wait a minute," he said. "I thought you were gonna tell a sea story." By this time they had killed the gallon. Bolingbroke produced a jug of home-made Chianti from under his bed. "I would have," Flange said, "only I couldn't think of any offhand." But the real reason he knew and could not say was that if you are Dennis Flange and if the sea's tides are the same that not only wash along your veins but also billow through your fantasies then it is all right to listen to but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth's extent but the minute you became active you are somehow, if not violating a convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things, much as anyone observing subatomic particles changes the works, data and odds, by the act of observing. So he had told the other instead, at random. Or apparently so. He wondered what Geronimo would say.
    Bolingbroke, however, had a sea story. He had spent some time bouncing around from port to port on a variety of merchantmen, all vaguely disreputable. He had spent two months right after the first war on the beach in Caracas with a friend named Sabbarese. They had jumped a freighter called the Deirdre O'Toole , sailing under Panamanian registry— Bolingbroke apologized for this detail, but he insisted it was true: back then you could register anything, a rowboat, a seagoing whorehouse, a battleship, anything that floated, in Panama — to escape from Porcaccio the first mate, who had delusions of grandeur. Three days out from Port-au-Prince Porcaccio had stormed into the captain's cabin with a Very pistol and threatened to turn the captain into a human flare unless the ship were turned around