The Sand Pebbles (14 page)

Shing collected a lump sum that covered laundry and barber and tailor bills and tips for Wong and Oh Joy, and it came to about ten percent of each man’s pay. No one ever asked for a breakdown. Shing dumped the dollars clinking into a basket on deck beside the table and they made quite a heap when it was all there. Then Clip Clip and Oh Joy would carry the basket aft and down to the Chinese quarters while Shing shuffled behind them with his cane. After payday the men who did not have liberty would gamble, rolling dice or playing blackjack, and sometimes poker. Restorff was usually the big winner.

When they were not steaming, Holman took his regular turn at quarterdeck watches. He learned to stand them well, disliking them but never hinting it. All the ship’s traffic funneled across the quarterdeck, and at times it was interesting. The big event each day at anchor was when the chow came aboard. Big Chew would go over to market, importantly in a gray silk gown and carrying a fan and parasol. At the walled cities, he would always have a sedan chair to carry him, while Small Chew or Jack Dusty ran alongside. Having selected the food, Big Chew would come back alone and shortly afterward his helper and the market people would bring the food down. The food had to be inspected on the quarterdeck and the Sand Pebbles liked to gather and watch it and speculate on how it would taste.

Jennings, the pharmacist’s mate, inspected the food. He took all his responsibilities very seriously and he was never known to laugh. He was a blond man with close-clipped hair and a rosy face and large, solemn pink eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He would kneel and look at the profusion of fruits and leafy vegetables in straw and wicker baskets and then look up at Big Chew.

“Chew, you must wash all this very thoroughly in permanganate solution,” he would say.

Then Jennings would stare dubiously at the meat, usually pork and
chicken, poke it, smell of it, and make fussy worry-sounds.

“Chew, you must cook this meat very, very thoroughly,” he would say.

Big Chew never washed anything in permanganate, but he cooked it all Chinese fashion and no one ever got sick. The
San Pablo
did not have refrigeration and, except for dry stores, they had to live off the country. Away from Hankow the food was almost wholly Chinese. It was roast duck and chicken and pork and ham cut up small and sweet little shrimps stewed or boiled or fried with rice and all manner of vegetables and spicy, gingery sauces. Every meal was different and each one was an experience to remember. Bordelles always paid without question whatever Big Chew said it cost, and that was another big source of squeeze.

“Who cares, so long as Big Chew stays inside the ration and keeps the troops happy?” Welbeck would say.

Big Chew kept the troops happy, all right. After every meal someone or other was certain to lean back and pat his stomach and say, “I can’t give her much on liberty, but by God she’s a home and a feeder!” He would be speaking for all of them.

She could not be very much on liberty in Western Hunan, because there were no treaty ports with bars and whorehouses for the ocean devils. Off duty, the Sand Pebbles flaked out in their bunks or played cribbage and acey-deucey at the mess tables or stood on deck and stared back at the Chinese. Out in the lake, they sometimes went ashore to explore islands or hunt or fish through the mud flats and the reed marshes. There were millions of birds, but they lost most of those they shot, and they were always talking about getting a ship’s dog.

They could go ashore sightseeing in the walled cities, but they had a rigid rule not to get drunk. The Hunan coolies were not as tame as the treaty port coolies and there were no Sikh cops to keep them in line. The old walled cities interested Holman. They lay along the rivers, with a paved bund and flights of stone steps leading down from it to the water. The walls were old and crumbling and gray, with
embrasured parapets, but with lines of laundry flapping up there instead of knights in armor. The gate houses had heavy, curving tiled roofs, like temples. All day long files of water coolies yo-hoed and slopped their way up the steps from the river with wooden buckets of water at the end of carrying poles, because the cities had no other water system. They had no electricity either, and the only lights at night were bobbing paper lanterns.

They did not even have rickshaws. People who rode inside the cities had to ride jouncing in sedan chairs carried by coolies who never stopped screaming for gangway. Holman liked to walk through the narrow, crowded streets of open-front shops and stop and watch the work going on in back—woodcarving with the clean smell of camphorwood, chopstick splitting with the smell of varnish, the beating out of silver into the thin foil they used to make money for dead people in an endless shower of hammer
tinks
. The Chinese stared back at Holman, and he was a show to them. He wandered long, smelly, stone-paved streets narrow enough to span with his arms and roofed into dim tunnels with bamboo and matting. He always went into the temples and stared back at the fierce guard-gods with black beards and glaring eyes, and he nodded at the fat, calm Buddhas and smiled back at the gravely smiling Kwan Yins. He always left his money in Kwan Yin’s offering box. He was struck again and again with the thought that up until now he had never really been in China, but only in the treaty ports, which were a kind of bastard China.

Sometimes in the cities he would meet other palefaces, walking or in chairs, and they would pretend not to see each other. It was well known that missionaries despised sailors. They thought sailors set bad examples and cut down the local recruiting for Jesus, and the scuttlebutt was that they wanted all the gunboats taken clear out of China. Ensign Bordelles always had to call on the missionaries and see if they were having any trouble. Lt. Collins would not see them unless he had to. But he always called on the local warlords and went to their feasts and invited them and their staffs aboard the
San Pablo
for dinner in the wardroom. They would come down to the ship in
chairs, some wearing civilian gowns and some in uniform, and the Sand Pebbles always put on a smart show of saluting and bugling. Big Chew would feed their enlisted bodyguard outside the galley. Warlord soldiers never looked very military. They were scrawny men in sleazy gray cotton uniforms and straw sandals, and in full kit they would have a teapot hung from their belts and a paper parasol. It was common knowledge that they never fought battles, but only made a great looksee pidgin of yelling and shooting in the air, while their warlords fought the real battle with silver bullets.

The
San Pablo
carried a locked storeroom full of beer in brown quart bottles, bought with the welfare fund. Several evenings each week Oh Joy would hire a sampan or wupan to lie alongside and the liberty men would go down into it to drink beer, because it was against regulation to drink beer aboard. They had to pay Oh Joy for the beer, and the profit went into the general coolie fund. Oh Joy would keep the beer in a tub with gunny sacks and pour river water over it to cool it as much as he could. He was a spry, dry, chattering old Chinaman with big yellow front teeth, and he looked like a wise, wicked old rabbit.

Every payday they would have what Jennings called a “biological.” They always arranged to be at one of the walled cities, and Holman’s first one was at Changteh on the Yuan River, when he was still restricted from the Hankow trouble. Oh Joy and Clip Clip went ashore to line things up and the hired junk came alongside right after breakfast. Drills went sloppily that morning because the Sand Pebbles were trying to catch glimpses of the women and they were all kidding Jennings. He would go aboard the junk and take smears and paint iodine numbers on their bellies so nobody could switch them on him when he came back to run his clap tests in the
San Pablo
sick bay. It would have been easier to bring the women to the sick bay, but there was a regulation against that. The Sand Pebbles always accused Jennings of turning down the young, pretty ones and keeping the old and ugly ones with bound feet.

Excitement would build up and just before dinner Red Dog Shanahan would always put on the same act in the open space by
the barber chair, which they called the bull ring. Red Dog would sketch out with gestures a woman on the deck and pretend to be Jennings examining her. Here now, down with the trousers, he would say, pulling them down, and up with the jacket, rolling it back, and he would paint the iodine number on the imaginary belly with pursed lips and sweeping flourishes. Sometimes the woman didn’t understand and the Red Dog would assure her that it was only doctor pidgin. Then he would poke and prod and sniff and squint and wrinkle his nose and make worry noises, exactly as Jennings always did when he examined meat on the quarterdeck. The Sand Pebbles at the mess tables would hush laughing as Crosley began sneaking up behind the Red Dog. Crosley would wait until the Red Dog had his head right down in there and then he would make to push it while they all held their breaths and, after a few false starts, he would push it. The Red Dog would pretend his head was caught and he would lunge and buck and strangle while everybody roared. Finally he would get his head out and then reach in after his imaginary glasses and begin wiping them off.

“Crosley,” he would say solemnly, “you must be sure to prong this meat very, very thoroughly.”

That always brought the most thundering laugh of all.

At Changteh, when dinner was finished, Franks sounded his bosun’s pipe on the quarterdeck and passed the word: “Awa-a-ay
boarders!”
The liberty men climbed across to the foredeck of the junk, where there was room for Clip Clip tending a tub of beer and room to roll dice for drinks. They also rolled to see who went first on the women and who took wet decks, and there was much laughing and despairing and arguing. The junk was the middle-sized kind, with three cabins in the low deckhouse amidships and a narrow walkway along each side. Oh Joy squatted on top of the deckhouse and collected two dollars from each man who entered one of the low, sliding doors. There was a standing argument about which was best, to keep going back to the best-looking girl or to take each in turn. Crosley, Ellis, Stawski and Perna formed what they called the Clean Sweep Club, and the last one to make a clean sweep had to buy beer for the others.

The duty section men stood along the bulwark and watched enviously. When one of the liberty men had enough, he could come back aboard and stand by for a duty man, and before the day ended all hands except the restricted men had a crack at it. For the first one, Holman was glad that he was still restricted. The junk was hired for the day by Oh Joy and the women were from someplace on the beach; the people who owned the junk and lived aboard it stayed inside the stern castle. Twice a little boy got out and wanted to play on deck and his mother scolded him and dragged him howling back inside. Wong kept handing more beer across to Clip Clip and taking the empties aboard. They were singing and having a very good time on the junk. The best-looking girl was in the center cabin and she got most of the repeat trade. Late in the afternoon she began crying and wailing inside the cabin and shortly afterward Bronson came out and went forward.

“What’d you do to that pig, to make her cry like that?” Harris asked Bronson. “You ain’t hung as heavy as all that.”

“She dropped her shoe in the piss pot,” Bronson said. “Hell of a thing to bawl about, ain’t it?”

She was still crying inside there when the junk pulled away, after evening colors. It cut down her trade a lot, but Oh Joy climbed down off the deckhouse with a whole sack full of Mex dollars. Clip Clip had a smaller sack full, from the beer. The profits from the biologicals went into the general coolie fund.

In spite of the comforts and interests topside and ashore, Holman still loved the engine. On a steaming watch he would often lose the thread of Burgoyne’s talk as his eyes and ears drifted off into the engine, into the maze of oil-shining brass and steel higher than a man’s head and twenty feet long and all in whirling, stroking, rocking, lawful motion. The three piston rods stroked up and down out of the overhead cylinders, driving the crossheads to bend like giant knees. The crossheads drove the conn rods like thick legs striding and the cranks went round and round like ponderous feet and ankles. Beside each crank, driven by it, the twinned eccentrics jigged their diverging rods to each end of the rocking, overarching link bars, which in
turn drove slender valve spindles back into the cylinder casting to measure and control the flow of power to the cranks. It was all flowing power, tons of sculptured metal in cyclical, patterned motion, and the light played through it in a pattern of rhythmic gleam and shadow. The manifold, repeating sounds of it flowed into Holman’s ears. The vibrations came in through his hands and feet and the smell of steam and hot oil and burnt packing filled his nostrils. It was all inside of him in a pattern of blood-pulse and nerve-thrill.

Then he knew the engine was a blind, bolted-down giant doing a tireless three-legged dance. On his starboard side the main circulator
chuck-chuck-chucked
rapidly, pushing the cooling river water through the condenser tubes, and on his port side the main air pump plunged and wheezed and gasped, starting the condensed steam on its way back to the boilers. Aft and away, whirling whitely through spring bearings and the squat thrust block, the shaft ran into the gloom of its long tunnel.

Holman was tuning his ears to hear the individual sound of each working part of the engine and of each pump and, while he talked absently to Burgoyne, he would practice picking each one out separately with his ears. Within a few watches he had added an ear picture to the eye picture already inside his head, and he could make an inspection tour of the engine room with his ears alone, without leaving the throttle station. Whatever was going wrong, he would know it. That faculty with his ears was what had made men on other ships think Jake Holman had black magic with machinery. He began teaching it to Po-han. He was increasingly pleased with how Po-han could learn. The eager young coolie was teaching himself, and when Holman opened a new door for him, Po-han knew how to explore the room for himself. He was always surprising Holman with how much he had learned. Burgoyne praised Po-han and took pride in him too, because they were all watchmates.