Free 1919 by John Dos Passos

week’s rent. All the jobs Joe applied for needed experience or training or you’d ought to have finished high school and there weren’t many jobs anyway, so in the end he had to go boating again, on a seagoing barge that was waiting for a towboat to take her down east to Rockport with a load of coal.
    There were five barges in the tow; it wasn’t such a bad trip, just him and an old man named Gaskin and his boy, a kid of about fifteen whose name was Joe too. The only trouble they had was in a squall off Cape Cod when the tow rope parted, but the towboat captain was right up on his toes and managed to get a new cable on board ’em before they’d straightened out on their anchor.
    Up in Rockport they unloaded their coal and anchored out in the harbor waiting to be towed to another wharf to load granite blocks for the trip back. One night when Gaskin and his boy had gone ashore and Joe was on watch the second engineer of the tug, a thinfaced guy named Hart came under the stern in a skiff and whispered to Joe did he want some c—t. Joe was stretched out on the house smoking a pipe and thinking about Della. The hills and the harbor and the rocky shore were fading into a warm pink twilight. Hart had a nervous stuttering manner. Joe held off at first but after a while he said, “Bring ’em along.” “Got any cards?” said Hart. “Yare I got a pack.”
    Joe went below to clean up the cabin. He’d just kid ’em along, he was thinking. He’d oughtn’t to have a rough time with girls and all that now that he was going to marry Della. He heard the sound of the oars and went out on deck. A fogbank was coming in from the sea. There was Hart and his two girls under the stern. They tripped and giggled and fell hard against him when he helped ’em over the side.
They’d brought some liquor and a couple of pounds of hamburger and some crackers. They weren’t much for looks but they were pretty good sorts with big firm arms and shoulders and they sure could drink liquor. Joe’d never seen girls like that before. They were sports all right. They had four quarts of liquor between ’em and drank it in tumblers.
    The other two barges were sounding their claxons every two minutes, but Joe forgot all about his. The fog was white like canvas nailed across the cabin ports. They played strip poker but they didn’t get very far with it. Him and Hart changed girls three times that night. The girls were cookoo, they never seemed to have enough, but round twelve the girls were darned decent, they cooked up the hamburger and served up a lunch and ate all old man Gaskin’s bread and butter.
    Then Hart passed out and the girls began to get worried about getting home on account of the fog and everything. All of ’em laughing like loons they hauled Hart up on deck and poured a bucket of water on him. That Maine water was so cold that he came to like sixty sore as a pup and wanting to fight Joe. The girls quieted him down and got him into the boat and they went off into the fog singing
Tipperary.
    Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with ’em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn’t be a plaster saint for anybody. He was feeling fine, he wished he had something more to do than spin that damn claxon.
    Old man Gaskin came on board about day. Joe could see he’d gotten wind of something because after that he never would speak to him except to give orders and wouldn’t let his boy speak to him; so that when they’d unloaded the granite blocks in East New York, Joe asked for his pay and said he was through. Old man Gaskin growled out it was a good riddance and that he wouldn’t have no boozin’ and whorin’ on his barge. So there was Joe with fortyfive dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook