Free 1919 by John Dos Passos Page B

nasty sleety winter weather. Mornings Joe sat in the steamy kitchen studying a course in navigation he’d started getting from the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Afternoons he fidgeted in the dingy doctor’s office that smelt of carbolic, waiting for his turn for treatment, looking through frayed copies of the
National Geographic
for 1909. It was a glum looking bunch waited in there. Nobody ever said anything much to anybody else. A couple of times he met guys on the street he’d talked with a little waiting in there, but they always walked right past him as if they didn’t see him. Evenings he sometimes went over to Manhattan and played checkers at the Seamen’s Institute or hung around the Seaman’s Union getting the dope on ships he might get a berth on when the doc dried him up. It was a bum time except that Mrs. Olsen was darn good to him and he got fonder of her than he’d ever been of his own mother.
    The darn kike sawbones tried to hold him up for another twenty-five bucks to complete the cure but Joe said to hell with it and shipped as an A.B. on a brandnew Standard Oil tanker, the
Montana
, bound light for Tampico and then out east, some of the boys said, to Aden and others said to Bombay. He was sick of the cold and the sleet and the grimy Brooklyn streets and the logarithm tables in the course on navigation he couldn’t get through his head and Mrs. Olsen’s bullying jollying voice; she was beginning to act like she wanted to run his life for him. She was a swell woman but it was about time he got the hell out.
    The
Montana
rounded Sandy Hook in a spiteful lashing snowstorm out of the northwest, but three days later they were in the Gulf
Stream south of Hatteras rolling in a long swell with all the crew’s denims and shirts drying on lines rigged from the shrouds. It was good to be on blue water again.
    Tampico was a hell of a place; they said that mescal made you crazy if you drank too much of it; there were big dance halls full of greasers dancing with their hats on and with guns on their hips, and bands and mechanical pianos going full tilt in every bar, and fights and drunk Texans from the oilwells. The doors of all the cribhouses were open so that you could see the bed with white pillows and the picture of the Virgin over it and the lamps with fancy shades and the colored paper trimming; the broadfaced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But everything was so damned high that they spent up all their jack first thing and had to go back on board before it was hardly midnight. And the mosquitoes got into the focastle and the sandflies about day and it was hot and nobody could sleep.
    When the tanks had been pumped full the
Montana
went out into the Gulf of Mexico into a norther with the decks awash and the spray lashing the bridge. They hadn’t been out two hours before they’d lost a man overboard off the monkeywalk and a boy named Higgins had had his foot smashed lashing the starboard anchor that had broken loose. It made ’em pretty sore down in the focastle that the skipper wouldn’t lower a boat, though the older men said that no boat could have lived in a sea like that. As it was the skipper cruised in a wide curve and took a couple of seas on his beam that like to stove in the steel decks.
    Nothing much else happened on that trip except that one night when Joe was at the wheel and the ship was dead quiet except for the irregular rustle of broken water as she ploughed through the long flat seas eastward, he suddenly smelt roses or honeysuckle maybe. The sky was blue as a bowl of curdled milk with a waned scrap of moon bobbing up from time to time. It was honeysuckle, sure enough, and manured garden patches and moist foliage like walking past the open door of a florist’s in winter. It made him feel soft and funny inside like he had a girl standing right beside him on the bridge, like he had Del there with her hair all smelly with some kind