Algren at Sea (43 page)

I must have looked apprehensive because he grinned like a wolf.

“Don't you trust me, old buddy?”

“I trust everybody,” I assured Concannon, “but I'll cut them twice just for luck.”

“I've sailed with Manning before,” Concannon filled me in, “I'm ready to drop the subject when you are.”

The subject dropped of its own dead weight.

Both Manning and Concannon are heavy boys, and each has naval service in World War II. There the resemblance ceases. No two men could be more American and no two men could be more different.

Concannon is “Sparks” or “Sparky” to the crew. Manning is “Acting Corporal.” Manning conducts himself toward the men confident that he is both loved and feared by them. Yet their respect for him is perfunctory: as ship's storekeeper he can inconvenience them.

“You can run your poker game,” Manning has told Able Seaman Gary (“Crooked-Neck”) Smith, “so long as you run it just for the crew.”

Smith had played it safe. “Yes, sir,” he'd assured Manning. Then he'd gone to Sparks.

“You and Danielsen can't play any more,” he'd reported to Concannon.

Concannon had gone directly to Manning.

“Let's go see the old man about this,” he'd offered.

Manning, of course, had had to decline. The purser has neither responsibility for the crew nor authority over them; and that had put an end to the matter.

Sparks, on the other hand, with the most responsible job aboard, appears to have no concern other than, “Where's the deck? Who's got the gin?” He conceals a high competence by flaunting his flaws. While Manning pretends he's a seaborne executive, Concannon makes himself out as the ship's outstanding sadsack. Neither man, when they pass each other on deck, raps to the other.

“I tried to touch Manning for ten bucks,” Muncie, a crew pantryman, complains with a speech impediment, “'n he asks me. Why don't I take advance. On my next draw. ‘Had I a draw comin' I wouldn't. Be trying to borrow off you. Personally. Would I?' I asked him. 'N walk away.”

“You should have gone to Sparky,” Chief Crew-Pantryman Bridelove advises Muncie, “has Sparky got it, you can have it.”

“Manning made forty thousand dollars one year,” I filled both men in.

“How do
you
know?” Bridelove asked.

“He told me so.”

“And he didn't spend. A dime of it. On me,” Muncie mourned.

Concannon was brought up, after a manner of speaking, by relatives more or less distant, around Kingfisher, Oklahoma, in the dust-storm years; never had a home until somebody slipped a pair of headphones over his ears in 1941. Since then, while the hair has thinned, his home has been a radio shack.

And all the brothels, small and great, of the great East China Sea.

From Bugis Street in Singapore to Cebu of the blue-mist Philippines, Sparks has left enough empty gin-fifths behind him to capsize the
Malaysia Mail.

Forever friendly, cheerful by the hour, dry, jocular, ready for anything, Concannon yet disclaims friendship. “The word ‘friend' isn't in my book,” he assured me, “the only things a seaman can depend upon are money and whiskey, because money and whiskey gets you the women—and what else is there besides women?”

“You don't want women because you're a seaman,” I suggested, “you're a seaman because you want women.”

“All I want,” he skipped the suggestion, “is all the fun I can handle, and then go out at sea. I don't want to be buried on land. The last stitch through the nose and over the rail,
that's
the burial for me.”

“You're putting me on,” I told Concannon.

“Why? What have I got to lose? Pussy brought me here and pussy's going to take me away.”

“I don't know what brought you here and I'm sure you're right about what will take you away. Only that wasn't what I meant. I meant the last stitch being through the nose.”

Concannon gave me a look so cold I was startled. I'd never seen a man turn unfriendly so fast.

“Ask someone else,” he instructed me, and clamped on his headphones.

I was dismissed.

In December of 1955, I bought a bag of unshelled peanuts in Miami and went into a strip-tease house, but I never saw the strip-tease. It was one of those places that show a film between stage shows, and the picture had just started when I came in. It was
The African Lion,
a Disney production.

It was the kind of house that always needs airing because it never closes long enough to open the doors. So many homeless men had slept here all night, to wake when the girls danced on, then had returned to sleep: to wake, to sleep, till sleep and waking were one. Now the stale death of their mingled breath hung waiting forever for girls to come dancing.

A bear-sized creature was hibernating in the seat in front of mine, with some kind of sun-helmet dangling off the back of his head. When his head lolled, the helmet rolled around the seat's curving back. It must be strapped to The Bear's neck, I decided, and dropped a handful of peanut shells into it.

On the screen, two lionesses were stalking some horned grass-chompers.

“What's
them,
honey?” a girl behind me asked her escort.

“Them is elks, Baby,” I heard him tell her, in a voice so authoritative there was no use contradicting it.

One lioness cut off the escape-route: now the girls had the herd entrapped. As the other charged, The Bear sat up and hollered “Look out!”—but too late. Just as in Miami, the prey never escapes. The Bear jammed his helmet down over his ears and began to eat a banana. What country did he think he was in? I wondered. I tapped him on the shoulder. He swiveled about.

“What country you think you're in?” I asked.

“What country
you
think
you're
in?” he challenged me brilliantly.

“
Take off the lid, Dummy,
” the Elk Authority came to my support.

The Bear took the lid off and went back to sleep without finishing the banana. Some Bear.

Now on the screen a new prey appeared: a rhinoceros. Yet it wasn't a lioness that had gotten
him.
It was quicksand.

How Disney had induced that brute to lie down just there, when it had all the rest of Africa to rub its back in, is a trade secret I'm not free to disclose. In no time at all every hyena in Tanganyika was milling around, pleased as possible to be working as an extra again.

The hyena has two distinctions: he doesn't want to be first to try anything and he smells worse than everything. “You can't be
too
careful” is the essence of Hyena-Think. He feels his smell is a fringe benefit.

A buzzard is better. Every buzzard projects an image of himself as Top-Buzzard. He doesn't wait for the next buzzard to make the action. Where the hyena will settle for standing room only, the buzzard entitles himself to front-row center. When
they
came down, the hyenas didn't stop to ask to see their stubs. They hightailed for the back rows and began milling around.

“How come you birds always get seats front-row center?” they wanted to know from a safe distance, “when we're better looking?”

“We smell so nice we
deserve
front-row seats,” the buzzards explained.

Which goes to show you that no matter how bad you may smell, someone always smells worse.

All of a sudden the rhino went all out to raise himself out of that bog. It looked, for a moment, as though he might make it; until his very power worked against him and he began sinking slowly onto his side. The Bear came to and saw what was happening. “Dig a hole!” he hollered—whether to the rhino, the buzzards or the hyenas I still don't know.

The-Biggest-Buzzard-Of-All hung one moment on the wing spreading air, watching his shadow enshroud the rhino—then plummeted with talons outspread and somebody popped me in the left ear with a piece of popcorn.

It didn't hurt.

The Bear jammed his helmet down over his ears.

“
Take off the lid, Dummy.
”

I didn't want to go through all that again. I got up and walked out.

The first thing I noticed, back on the street, was that the lionesses had begun wearing the manes. I had a chocolate phosphate under a rye bread tree and took the next ship to Havana.

Cuba was the first single-crop country I'd seen. I walked around Havana two days eating bananas before I realized bananas weren't the country's single crop.

Girls!
That
was Cuba's single crop. Girls waiting in taxis, girls waiting on corners, girls waiting in hotel lobbies; girls waiting in doorways, strolling the tables of the Tropicana or waiting in front of funeral parlors; girls in the shadows of the skyscrapers of Vedado; girls waiting in drugstores and meat markets; girls waiting in bars and girls with no places to wait: these were just walking around. Girls waiting for seamen and soldiers.

Girls to whom the sweet cane had brought only bitterness.

In stores that sold nothing they waited for anything.

One whose hair was platinum blond yet black as the devil at the roots, invited me to step into her Nothing-Anything door. An American was studying the jukebox, preparing to invest; but he wanted an American song for
his
investment. When he finished reading the Spanish numbers he finally found one on the American side. It was the very one
I
would have picked had it been
my
quarter:

I've felt sentimental about that song ever since a so-long ago rainy afternoon when I skipped an algebra class to hear a baritone sing it at the Haymarket Burlesk and Miss June St. Clair came down the runway immediately after and shook all the Algebra out of my head for keeps:

I asked the young lady if she would care to go steady with me, but she nodded toward the investor: she was promised to another. Any man who could spend a quarter in a jukebox would make her a better provider than I would, I realized, and I left. I hope they found happiness.

I recalled then that I was supposed to visit the Hemingways.

Not that anyone had sent for me. But every American visitor to Havana who'd read a book was supposed to storm the Hemingways with the news. If you hadn't read one you were interviewing for the
Chicago Tribune.

I phoned and told Mary Hemingway I'd seen a good movie in Havana, so she said come out right away—if I weren't interviewing for the
Chicago Tribune.

Hemingway was sitting up in bed looking like John McGraw atoning from something; he wasn't atoning but he was abstaining, and invited me to help myself to the Scotch.

“How's the work going?” I asked him.

“I never turned the horse loose and let her run until this book,” he told me—“but we are so far ahead now that it is pitiful. The next time they're going to give the money back in the mutuels.”

He nodded toward the bottle beside his bed. Its label read:
Best Scotch Procurable.
“I can only have one an hour,” he explained, “doctor's orders. You go ahead.”

I went ahead.

A lion commanded one wall. Some sort of moose held an entire shelf of leatherbound Dickens at bay. On a wall all its own, like a sea all its own, a swordfish had room to zoom: or, if it would rather, just to sail around. A buffalo looked as if it had just thrust its head through the wall. Perhaps the rest of him was standing outside.

Every brute in the room seemed to proclaim its right to command, zoom, hold at bay or just sail around.

“You've got everything around here but a werewolf,” I observed, trying to sound disappointed.

“Why go after small game?” Hemingway asked.

“I don't even run rabbits myself,” I explained, “I go to movies instead. I just saw one where a rhinoceros got trapped in quicksand. Hyenas came around. You know what the worst thing about the hyena is?”

“I don't go to movies any more,” he told me, “but I still go to fights.”

“I'll tell you—it's the smell. Actually, of course, I couldn't smell a hyena in the movie, but you could tell, just by
looking
at him, how bad he smelled.”

“The smartest fighter I ever saw was Leonard,” Hemingway decided. “I never wrote a story about him.”

Hemingway didn't want to talk about hyenas. He wanted to talk about fighters. I didn't want to talk about fighters. I wanted to talk about hyenas. It was
his
Scotch.