The Log from the Sea of Cortez (41 page)
Read The Log from the Sea of Cortez Online
Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro
“Say Doc,” he said, “I’m having a little trouble peeing. What’s a good diuretic?”
Ed fell into that hole. “I never needed to think beyond beer,” he said.
The man looked at the bottles in Ed’s hand and raised his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. And only then did Ed realize that he had been had. “Oh, come on in,” he said, and he bought beer for both of them.
Afterward he said admiringly, “Can you imagine the trouble he went to for that beer? He had to look up the word diuretic, and then he had to plan to be there just when I went over for beer. And he had to read my mind quite a bit. If any part of his plan failed, it all failed. I think it is remarkable.”
The only part of it that was not remarkable was planning to be there when Ed went for beer. He went for beer pretty often. Sometimes when he overbought and the beer got warm, he took it back and Wing Chong exchanged it for cold beer.
The various hustlers who lived by their wits and some work in the canneries when they had time were an amazing crew. Ed never got over his admiration for them.
“They have worked out my personality and my resistances to a fine mathematical point,” he would say. “They know me better than I know myself, and I am not uncomplicated. Over and over, their analysis of my possible reaction is accurate.”
He was usually delighted when one of these minor triumphs took place. It never cost him much. He always tried to figure out in advance what the attack on his pocket would be. At least he always knew the end. Every now and then the audacity and freedom of thought and invention of his loving enemy would leave him with a sense of wonder.
Now and then he hired some of the boys to collect animals for him and paid them a fixed price, so much for frogs, so much for snakes or cats.
One of his collectors we will call Al. That was not his name. An early experience with Al gave Ed a liking for his inventiveness. Ed needed cats and needed them quickly. And Al got them and got them quickly—all fine mature cats and, only at the end of the operation did Ed discover, all tomcats. For a long time Al held out his method but finally he divulged it in secret. Since Al has long since gone to his maker and will need no more cats, his secret can be told.
“I made a double trap,” he said, “a little cage inside a big cage. Then in the little cage I put a nice lady cat in a loving condition. And, Eddie, sometimes I’d catch as many as ten tomcats in one night. Why, hell, Ed, that exact same kind of trap catches me every Saturday night. That’s where I got the idea.”
Al was such a good collector that after a while he began to do odd jobs around the lab. Ed taught him to inject dogfish and to work the ball mill for mixing color mass and to preserve some of the less delicate animals. Al became inordinately proud of his work and began to use a mispronounced scientific vocabulary and put on a professorial air that delighted Ed. He got to trusting Al although he knew Al’s persistent alcoholic history.
Once when a large number of dogfish came in Ed left them for Al to inject while he went to a party. It was a late party. Ed returned to find all the lights on in the basement. The place was a wreck. Broken glass littered the floor, a barrel of formaldehyde was tipped over and spilled, museum jars were stripped from the shelves and broken. A whirlwind had gone through. Al was not there but Al’s pants were, and also an automobile seat which was never explained.
In a white fury Ed began to sweep up the broken glass. He was well along when Al entered, wearing a long overcoat and a pair of high rubber boots. Ed’s rage was terrible. He advanced on Al.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” he cried. “I should think you could stay sober until you finished work!”
Al held up his hand with senatorial dignity. “You go right ahead, Eddie,” he said. “You call me anything you want, and I forgive you.”
“Forgive me?” Ed screamed. He was near to murder.
Al silenced him with a sad and superior gesture. “I deserve it, Eddie,” he said. “Go ahead—call me lots of names. I only regret that they will not hurt my feelings.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” Ed demanded uneasily.
Al turned and parted the tails of his overcoat. He was completely naked except for the rubber boots.
“Eddie boy,” he said, “I have been out calling socially in this condition. Now, Eddie, if I could do that, I must be pretty insensitive. Nothing you can call me is likely to get under my thick skin. And I forgive you.”
Ed’s anger disappeared in pure wonder. And afterward he said, “If that Al had turned the pure genius of his unique mind to fields other than cadging drinks, there is no limit to what he might have done.” And then he continued, “But no. He has chosen a difficult and crowded field and he is a success in it. Any other career, international banking for instance, might have been too easy for Al.”
Al was married, but his wife and family did not exercise a restraining influence on him. His wife finally used the expedient of putting Al in jail when he was on one of his beauties.
Al said one time, “When they hire a new cop in Monterey they give him a test. They send him down Cannery Row, and if he can’t pick me up he don’t get the job.”
Al detested the old red stone Salinas jail. It was gloomy and unsanitary, he said. But then the county built a beautiful new jail, and the first time Al made sixty days he was gone seventy-five. He came back to Monterey enthusiastic.
“Eddie,” he said, “they got radios in the cells. And that new sheriff’s a pushover at euchre. When my time was up the sheriff owed me eighty-six bucks. I couldn’t run out on the game. A sheriff can make it tough on a man. It took me fifteen days to lose it back so it wouldn’t look too obvious. But you can’t win from a sheriff, Eddie—not if you expect to go back.”
Al went back often until his wife finally tumbled to the fact that Al preferred jail to home life. She visited Ed for advice. She was a red-eyed, unkempt little woman with a runny nose.
“I work hard and try to make ends meet,” she said bitterly. “And all the time Al’s over in Salinas taking his ease in the new jail. I can’t let him go to jail any more. He likes it.” She was all frayed from having Al’s children and supporting them.
For once Ed had no answer. “I don’t know what you can do,” he said. “I’m stumped. You could kill him—but then you wouldn’t have any fun any more.”
A complicated social structure existed on Cannery Row. One had to know or there were likely to be errors in procedure and protocol. You could not speak to one of the girls from Madam’s if you met her on the street. You might have talked to her all night, but it was bad manners to greet her outside.
From the windows of the laboratory Ed and I watched a piece of social cruelty which has never been bettered in Scarsdale. Across the street in the lot between the whorehouse and Wing Chong’s grocery, there were a number of rusty pipes, a boiler or two, and some great timbers, all thrown there by the canneries. A number of the free company of Cannery Row slept in the big pipes, and when the sun was warm they would come out to sit like lizards on the timbers. There they held social commerce. They borrowed dimes back and forth, shared tobacco, and if anyone brought a pint of liquor into sight, it meant that he not only wanted to share it but intended to. They were a fairly ragged set of men, their clothing of blue denim almost white at knees and buttocks from pure erosion. They were, as Ed said, the Lotus Eaters of our era, successful in their resistance against the nervousness and angers and frustrations of our time.
Ed regarded these men with the admiration he had for any animal, family, or species that was successful in survival and happiness factors.
We had many discussions about these men. Ed held that one couldn’t tell from a quick look how successful a species is.
“Consider now,” he would say, “if you look superficially, you would say that the local banker or the owner of a cannery or even the mayor of Monterey is the successful and surviving individual. But consider their ulcers, consider the heart trouble, the blood pressure in that group. And then consider the bums over there—cirrhosis of the liver I will grant will have its toll, but not the other things.” He would cluck his tongue in admiration. “It is a rule in paleontology,” he would say, “that over-armor, and/or over-ornamentation are symptoms of extinction in a species. You have only to consider the great reptiles, the mammoth, etc. Now those bums have no armor and practically no ornament, except here and there a pair of red and yellow sleeve garters. In our whole time pattern those men may be the ones who will deliver our species from the enemies within and without which attack it.”
But much as he liked the bums, he was grieved at their social cruelty toward George, the pimp of the whorehouse.
George was well built, a snappy dresser, and very polite. He had complete extra-legal police powers over the girls in the house and an arguable access to any or all of them. He might even treat a friend. He had dark wavy hair, a good salary, he ate in the house, and he clipped several of the girls for their money. In other words, he was rich. He was a good bouncer with an enviable reputation for in-fighting, and—when the problem grew more confused—a triumphant record of eye-gouging, booting, and kneeing. In a word, one would have thought him a happy man—one would, unless one knew the true soul of George, as we came to.
George was lonely. He wanted the company of men, the camaraderie and warmth and roughness and good feeling and arguments of men. He got very tired of a woman’s world of perfumes and periods, of hysterics and noisy mysteries and permanents. Perhaps he had no one to boast to of his superiority over women, and it bothered him.
We watched him try to associate with the bums sitting on the timber in the sun, and they would have none of him. They considered a pimp as abysmally beneath them socially. When George wandered up through the weeds and sat with the boys they would turn away from him. They did not insult him or tell him to go away, but they would not associate with him. If an argument was going on when he arrived, it would stop and a painful silence would take its place.
George recognized his ostracism and he was sad and hangdog about it. We, watching from the window, could see it in his wilting posture and his fawning gestures. We could hear it in his too loud laughter at a mildly amusing joke. Ed shook his head over this injustice. He had hoped for better from the boys.
“I don’t know why I thought they would be better,” he said. “Of course, being bums does give them advantages, but why should I expect them to be above all smallness just because they are bums? I guess it was just a romantic hopefulness.” And he said, “I knew a man who believed all whores were honest just because they were whores. Time and again he got rolled—once a girl even stole his clothes, but he would not give up his conviction. It had become an article of faith, and you can’t give such a thing up because it is yourself. I must re-examine my feeling about the boys,” he said.
We watched George fall back, in his craven loneliness, on bribery. He bought whisky and passed it around. He loaned money like a crazy man. The bums accepted George’s bribes but they would not accept George.
Ed Ricketts did not ordinarily meddle in the affairs of his neighbors but he brooded about George.
One afternoon he confronted the boys on the timber. “Why don’t you be nice to him?” he said. “He’s a lonely man. He wants to be friends with you. You are putting a mark on him that may warp and sour his whole life. He won’t be any good to anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were responsible for his death.”
To which Whitey No. 2 (there were two Whiteys, known as Whitey No. 1 and Whitey No. 2) replied, “Now, Doc, you’re not asking us to associate with a pimp, are you? Nobody likes a pimp.”
It must be noted that when the hustlers spoke to Ed formally he was Doc. When they hustled him, he was Ed, Eddie, or Eddie boy.
I don’t think that Ed had any idea how accurate his prediction was. But not very long after this George killed himself with an ice pick in the kitchen of the whorehouse. And when Ed berated the boys for having been one of the causes of his death, Whitey No. 1 echoed Whitey No. 2’s words.
“Hell, we can’t help it, Doc. You just can’t be friendly with a pimp.”
Ed mused sadly, “I find it rather hard to believe that the boys were moved by any moral consideration. It must have been an un-scalable social barrier that no argument could overleap.” And he said, “White chicks will kill a black chick every time. But I do hope it isn’t as simple as that.”
Ed’s association with Wing Chong, the Chinese grocer, and later, after Wing Chong’s death, with his son, was one of mutual respect. Ed could always get credit and for long periods of time. And sometimes he needed it. Once we tried to compute how many gallons of beer had crossed the street in the years of our association, but we soon gave up as the figures mounted. We didn’t even want to know.
Ed had many friends, and in addition he attracted some people from the lunatic fringe, like the Chinese detective and the snake woman. There were others who used him as a source of information.
One afternoon the phone rang and a woman’s voice asked, “Dr. Ricketts, can you tell me the name of a tropical fish with so many spines on the dorsal fin and so many on the ventral? The name begins with an L.”
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