The Sand Pebbles (10 page)

“I steamed her, when I was a kid,” Nobby said. “She was a mankilling bitch to steam, but she was a home.” He looked fondly at the picture.

The Red Dog was standing between Holman and Farren. He thumped the leather dice cup on the bar and rolled five aces.

“You got the devil on your side, Red Dog,” Nobby said.

“He’s my uncle. When he dies, I’ll inherit hell.”

“What’ll you do with hell?” Farren asked.

“I’ll sell it to the missionaries for a million dollars.”

“You think you’re joking, but I believe you, you Irish peckerhead,” Farren said.

“It’s true,” the Red Dog said. “Roll ’em, boys!”

Holman lost. He called for a new bottle of White Horse and said to leave it on the bar, which meant he was buying the bottle. The white-coated bar boy set up the drinks. In China, the white bartenders never mixed or served drinks.

“Sure you’re that flush, Holman?” Farren asked.

“I’m going to win nine Mex from the gunner,” Holman said.

“Ho ho ho!” Farren said. “That’s what you think.”

They drank and talked and laughed, the Red Dog grinning up impishly from under his sun helmet cocked askew. They were all feeling the whisky and it was going to be one of the happy, floating drunks, Holman could tell. Some drunks were wild and jumpy and some were morose and savage and Holman’s drunks by himself were always sad and gloomy ones, but this drunk was floating. It was a knack the Red Dog had, to lift and carry a drunk. The Fleet sailors had finished their chow and were drinking at their table, talking in bursts and then falling silent, with morose faces, as if they could not get their drunk off the ground. They were from the U.S.S.
Pigeon
, a minesweeper. The Red Dog had taken the spirit of the place away from them, and they did not like it.

“How come you guys up here out of uniform?” Nobby asked.

“We’re in uniform,” the Red Dog said. “We’re river rats, and this is our proper uniform.”

One of the Pigeons started to sing “Subic” and the others joined hoarsely and they all went flat and false and petered out on the first verse. They were pretty drunk, but it was a heavy, lumpish drunk. The burly shipfitter they called Buffalo slapped the table.

“God damn it!” he roared. “Boy! More drinks, you slant-eyed son of a bitch!”

He was a hulking man with a scarred, beaten-up face, probably a fighter. Holman knew how they were feeling; they would not get drunker, they would just get meaner. One or another of the five kept
scowling at the Red Dog. They thought he was too cocky and happy.

“Lynch was in a while back,” Nobby said. “With that Russian.”

“She’s a cow,” the Red Dog said. He hunched his shoulders and squeezed spurts of milk from imaginary breasts.

“Red Dog, where’s them Russian princesses?” Holman asked.

“Right now they’re taking baths in donkey milk,” the Red Dog said. “They’re very special gear, Holman. They’re all directly descended from Ivan the Terrible. They won’t come in till the rabble clears out.”

A chair scraped behind them. “Hey, you guys,” Buffalo said. The Sand Pebbles swung around. Farren squeezed the Red Dog’s arm and frowned a signal to be quiet.

“Seen any elephants today?” Buffalo asked.

“Not today,” Farren said.

“Wearing them hats, I thought you might be hunting elephants. Want me to tell you how to catch a elephant?”

Holman squeezed the Red Dog’s other arm. “All we’re hunting today is white horses,” he said. “We already caught one.” He motioned his head at the bottle, almost empty now.

“You want to catch a elephant, the first thing is, you show him your pretty white legs,” Buffalo said.

The other Pigeons laughed jeeringly. They meant to start a fight. Nobby Clarke hurried around the bar.

“Hold it, you guys! Have a drink on the house,” he pleaded.

“We’re the experts on elephants,” the Red Dog said. “We know elephants always come back to crap in the same place. So we find five piles of elephant crap and then we wait for the elephant.”

Farren laughed and Holman joined him. They exchanged a look above the Red Dog’s head. We’ll take ’em, the glance agreed. It was a sudden warm bond between them and they turned the Red Dog loose.

“Listen, slow down, take a turn, you guys! Take your Goddamned argument outside,” Nobby was saying.

“I saw some elephants over in the Jap Concession,” Buffalo said. “I think you better go over there.”

He meant it to be a bluff-out, a forced runout, Holman realized. He
set himself to take that Buffalo, when the thing blew. He knew his own quick, terrible strength could take down almost any man, and he feared an angry fight. But this would be a happy fight.

“In case you elephant hunters lost your compasses, I’ll be glad to show you where the door is,” Buffalo said. The other Pigeons laughed nastily again and eased back their chairs. Their faces were ugly.

“Oh, pee on you, John,” the Red Dog said in falsetto.

Farren and Holman roared. It was a masterstroke of wit. The
Pigeon’s
Fleet nickname was
Pea John
and the Red Dog had insulted both the men and their ship. It stopped them cold. But, from their faces, in another heartbeat the air was going to be full of flying furniture. Nobby ducked behind the bar. Holman tensed for it.

Footsteps sounded, the door opened, and four British sailors came in. They wore shorts and sun helmets. The Red Dog snatched off his own helmet and swept out a grand bow.

“Dr. Bangerknox, I presume,” he said.

“As I live and breathe, it’s Milord Red Arse Bite-’em-on-the-dog Shanahan!” the foremost Limey said. “Hello, Farren.”

He was a square, ruddy man of about Holman’s build and he was half drunk, but his gray eyes went keenly back and forth. He knew something was wrong.

“We been hunting elephants and we caught a buffalo,” the Red Dog said. “What do you bold hunters know about buffaloes?”

“They’re vicious brutes. They charge with their eyes open,” the ruddy man said.

“This buffalo’s up a stump. We can’t make him charge.”

“Not sporting to shoot unless he charges.” The Limeys were spreading out and balancing on their toes, siding with the Sand Pebbles without question. “Might take a reef in his tail,” the ruddy man said.

“I’ll spit in his ear.” The Red Dog began hawking his throat.

They all chimed in with unprintable suggestions. The big ship-fitter’s lips were working and he was ready to go it blind mad. His shipmates could not face the sudden change in odds. “No, Martin. The hell with it, Martin,” they said, getting up. They did not call him
Buffalo any more. They got him moving toward the door. “Come on, Martin,” they said. “Let’s find an honest American place to drink.”

“Arf! Arf! Arf!” the Red Dog barked after them. All the river sailors laughed.

They were all at the bar with fresh drinks and the drunk was floating higher than ever. The ruddy man was Banger Knox, an engineer, and they were from H.M.S.
Woodcock
, which also cruised in Hunan Province. That made a bond between the two ships and they would always stand together against any Fleet ship or even a main river gunboat. The Hunan Chinese were much tougher and fiercer than the tame main river Chinese, they explained to Holman. The
Woodcock’s
nickname was
Timber Dick
, and the sailors were Timber Dicks, and in any main river port the Timber Dicks and Sand Pebbles always stood together. Farren told about the Red Dog’s stroke of wit against the Pea Johns and he had to explain it before the Limeys could laugh.

“Fair baffles me how you blokes can twist a name into an insult,” Banger said. “You’ve a low, nasty sort of talent for it.”

They shouted each other down telling Holman about a fight last winter in Changsha. The Red Dog had begun calling the Limeys Limber Dicks, and after it had been explained to them they had all had a very good fight in a place called the Red Candle.

“We tried for a fortnight after to hit on a good insult for Sand Pebble,” Banger said. “The best we could do was
simple apple.”
He looked pleadingly at Farren. “I hope you find that just a wee bit insulting?”

“I’ve heard of bad apples and horse apples.” Farren stroked his beard judicially. “I don’t know about simple apples.”

“We’ll consider it a mortal insult, just to be friendly,” the Red Dog said. “Nobody but our fellow Hunanese can call us that.”

Banger raised his glass. “Thank you, Milord Red Arse.”

“But the Hunanese are the natives,” an English sailor said.

“All right, we’re Hunaneers,” Holman said.

“Us Hunaneers, we got no fears,” the Red Dog said. He began to sing, in a clear Irish tenor:

The Limeys thought that was very good. They explained that what made it so funny was that you could not really hang them upon the walls, you know.

Holman began blanking out and coming back. Things were disconnected. They did a lot of singing. The Limeys had a good song about the old barstard from Kent. Two more bottles of White Horse were on the bar and Nobby Clarke floated around back there like a pink balloon with sparse white hair. It was a very happy, high-floating drunk. Holman talked very earnestly to Banger Knox. He had a profound new idea. Some men composed poems and some composed music, he explained to Banger, but Red Dog Shanahan was the world’s finest artist at composing drunks. It was a shame the world did not know that about him. Too bloody right, Banger agreed. The Red Dog should be buried in Westminster Abbey. They decided solemnly to crown him drunkard laureate and they pulled tail feathers from the stuffed pheasant to stick in his helmet band as a crown. But the Red Dog thought that made him an Indian and he climbed on the bar and warwhooped and wardanced the length of it.

There was shouting outside in the street and a bar boy went out to check and came in to say there was trouble.

“Hey, you guys! Hey, you guys!” Nobby was saying. “If there’s trouble, you better go down to the bund and stand by.”

“Let these main river people look after their own trouble,” Farren said. “We love everybody.”

“We’re Hunaneers,” the Red Dog said. “We’re just visiting up here.”

The thing about a floating drunk was that you were detached. You did not have to care about rules. You were floating so high and happy that the sad, serious people only laughed at whatever you did. It made them a little bit happy just to watch you and know how you were feeling and nobody wanted to shoot down a floating drunk.

Far off a power plant siren let go in short, fast hoots, on and on and on. Suddenly Nobby was wearing one of the washbasin British steel helmets and he was banging on the bar with a rifle butt.

“Come on! Come on! That’s the emergency signal for the Volunteers!” he was saying. “Come on, sailors! Shove off down to the river!”

They were following the Red Dog down a wide street and Chinese in blue gowns and rags were running both ways. The store windows were all broken and so much torn white paper was on the street that it looked like snow. Two coolies were smashing a heavy iron grating edgewise down on new bicycles. Holman and Banger took the grating. They were much stronger men than the coolies and they could bring the grating thundering down like a Nevada stamp mill and bend a new bicycle almost double. The coolies kept pulling away the smashed bicycles and feeding in new ones.

The crowd was thicker and it blocked them. The shaven Chinese heads were close together like cobbles in a pavement that also surged and heaved like a sea and a trapped rickshaw was like an island in it, shafts high, the fat Chinese passenger leaning forward onto the puller’s skinny brown shoulders. The Red Dog still had his feathered helmet and they followed it through the packed crowd. Veins throbbed and swelled in the temples of the shaven heads and the mouths were open, screeching, and showing teeth and fluttering tongues. They pushed through into an open space and Farren still clutched a bottle of White Horse. It was about one-third full. He beckoned grandly with the bottle.

“All hanje,” he said. “Time for lil drinkee.”

It was a half-circle open space around the entrance to a cross street, and across the entrance was a line of Sikh cops and helmeted white civilians with rifles. They were yelling and motioning. One white man stepped forward.

“Come inside, you drunken fools!” he said. “They’ll kill you!”

“Not ush,” Farren said. “We’re Hooney—we’re Hunaneers.”

“Come inside! That’s an order!”

The man pulled at Banger’s arm. Banger jerked away and looked very dignified.

“You talk like a bloody Yank, chum,” he said. “You can’t give orders to a Hunaneer, you know.”

The Red Dog began to sing.

More men came out and pushed and tugged them singing inside the line. Come on, you buccaneers, your officers are going to hear about this, the men said. Come on, for Christ’s sweet sake, before we all get killed! They went along the street, staggering and stumbling, and firemen in red helmets were running past them the other way, unreeling white hose. They were going along beside a brick wall covered with stucco that had fallen off from big, scabby patches and a file of British sailors came by on the run and somehow carried off the Timber Dicks in their wake. Holman stopped.

“You know, thish serious,” he said.

They all stopped and looked back. Their drunk was coming down to earth. The yelling at the head of the street was louder, a great screeching, and white plumes of water shot up there. Further back, the British sailors were making a barricade of planks and a dismounted gate. The wall beside the barricade had sharpened bamboo stakes along the top and a big tree bushed greenly out over the wall. A woman with a pad and pencil came up from somewhere. She was not very young, and she looked frightened.

“I’m a reporter,” she said. “Do you think they’ll try to storm the armory?”