been in the department together for the past two years, but we had never spoken. He looked at me as I passed, I looked at him; we kept the record straight. I went up the jack ladder and came out on the third deck again.
There were a lot of women workers on board, mostly white. Whenever I passed the white women looked at me, some curiously, some coyly, some with open hostility. Some just stared with blank hard eyes. Few ever moved aside to let me pass; I just walked around them. On the whole the older women were friendlier than the younger. Now and then some of the young white women gave me an opening to make a pass, but I'd never made one: at first because the coloured workers seemed as intent on protecting the white women from the coloured men as the white men were, probably because they wanted to prove to the white folks they could work with white women without trying to make them; and then, after I'd become a leaderman, because I, like a damn fool, felt a certain responsibility about setting an example. Now I had Alice and the white chicks didn't interest me; I thought Alice was better than any white woman who ever lived.
When I ducked to pass through the access opening in the transverse bulkhead I noticed some words scrawled above and straightened up to read them: 'Don't duck, Okie, you're tough.' I was grinning when I ducked through the hole and straightened up, face to face with a tall white girl in a leather welder's suit.
She was a peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy mouth, kidney-shaped, thinner in the middle than at the ends. Her big blue babyish eyes were mascaraed like a burlesque queen's and there were tiny wrinkles in their corners and about the flare of her nostrils, calipering down about the edges of her mouth. She looked thirty and well sexed, rife but not quite rotten. She looked as if she might have worked half those years in a cat house, and if she hadn't she must have given a lot of it away.
We stood there for an instant, our eyes locked, before either of us moved; then she deliberately put on a frightened, wideeyed look and backed away from me as if she was scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong. It wasn't the first time she had done that. I'd run into her on board a half-dozen times during the past couple of weeks and each time she'd put on that scared-to-death act. I was used to white women doing all sorts of things to tease or annoy the coloured men so I hadn't given it a second thought before.
But now it sent a blinding fury through my brain. Blood rushed to my head like gales of rain and I felt my face burn white-hot. It came up in my eyes and burned at her; she caught it and kept staring at me with that wide-eyed phoney look. Something about her mouth touched it off, a quirk made the curves change as if she got a sexual thrill, and her mascaraed eyelashes fluttered.
Lust shook me like an electric shock; it came up in my mouth, filling it with tongue, and drained my whole stomach down into my groin. And it poured out of my eyes in a sticky rush and spurted over her from head to foot.
The frightened look went out of her eyes and she blushed right down her face and out of sight beneath the collar of her leather jacket, and I could imagine it going down over her over-ripe breasts and spreading out over her milk-white stomach. When she turned out of my stare I went sick to the stomach and felt like vomiting. I had started toward the ladder going to the upper deck, but instead I turned past her, slowing down and brushing her. She didn't move. I kept on going, circling.
Someone said, 'Hiya, Bob,' but I didn't hear him until after I'd half climbed, half crawled a third of the way up the jack ladder. Then I said, 'Yeah.' I came out on the fourth deck, passed two white women who looked away disdainfully, climbed to the weather deck. A little fat brown-skinned girl with hips that shook like jelly leaned against the bulwark in the sun. 'Hello,' she cooed, dishing up everything she had to offer in that first look.
'Hello, baby,' I said. The sickness went. I leaned close to her and whispered, 'Still keeping it for me?'
She giggled and said half seriously, 'You don't want none.'
I'd already broken two dates with her and I didn't want to make another one. 'I'll see you at lunch,' I said, moving quickly off.
I found a clean spot in the sun and spread out the print. I wanted an over-all picture of the whole ventilation system; I was tired of having my gant kicked down in first one stinking hole and then another. But before I'd gotten a chance to look George came up and said Johnson and Conway were about to get into a fight.
'Hell, let 'em fight,' I growled. 'What the hell do I care, I ain't their papa.'
But I got up and went down to the third deck again to see what it was all about. It was cramped quarters aft, a labyrinth of narrow, hard-angled companionways, jammed with staging, lines, shapes, and workers who had to be contortionists first of all. I ducked through the access opening, squeezed by the electricians' staging, pushed a helper out of my way, and started through the opening into the shower room. Just as I stuck my head inside a pipe fitter's tacker struck an arc and I jerked out of the flash. Behind me someone moved the nozzle of the blower that was used to ventilate the hole, and the hard stream of air punched my hard hat off like a fist. In grabbing for it I bumped my head against the angle of the bulkhead. My hat sailed into the middle of the shower room where my gang was working, and I began cursing in a steady streak.
Bessie gave me a dirty look, and Pigmeat said, 'We got Bob throwing his hat in before him. We're some tough cats.'
The air was so thick with welding fumes, acid smell, body odour, and cigarette smoke; even the stream from the blower couldn't get it out. I had fifteen in my gang, twelve men and three women, and they were all working in the tiny, cramped quarters. Two fire pots were going, heating soldering irons. Somebody was drilling. Two or three guys were hand-riveting. A chipper was working on the deck above. It was stifling hot, and the din was terrific.
I picked up my hat and stuck it back on my head. Peaches was sitting on the staging at the far end, legs dangling, eating an apple and at peace with the world. She was a short-haired, dark brown, thick-lipped girl with a placid air-that's as much as I'd seen.
'Where's Smitty?' I asked her. She was his helper.
'I don't know,' she said without moving.
Willie said, 'While you're here, Bob, you can show me where to hang these stays and save me having to go get the print.' He was crouched on the staging beneath the upper deck, trying to hang his duct.
I knew he couldn't read blueprints, but he was drawing a mechanic's pay. I flashed my light on the job and said, 'Hang the first two by the split and the other two just back of the joint. What's your X?'
'That's what I don't know,' he said. 'I ain't seen the print yet.'
'It's three-nine off the bulkhead,' I said.
Behind me Arkansas said, 'Conway, you're an evil man. You don't get along with nobody. How you get along with him, Zula Mae?'
'He's all right,' she said. She was Conway's helper. 'You just got to understand him.'
'See,' Conway said. 'She's my baby.'
Arkansas gave her a disdainful look. 'That's 'cause she still think you her boss. Don't you let this guy go boss you 'round, you hear.'
'He don't boss me 'round,' she defended.
'You just tryna make trouble between me and my helper,' Conway said. 'I'm the easiest man here to get along with. Everybody gets along with me.'
'You from Arkansas?' Arkansas asked.
'How you know I ain't from California?' Conway said.
'Ain't nobody in here from California,' Arkansas said. 'What city in Arkansas you from?'
'He's from Pine Bluff,' Johnson said. 'Can't you tell a Pine Bluff nig-Pine Bluffian when you see him?'
'Hear the Moroccan,' Conway sneered. 'Johnson a Moroccan, he ain't no coloured man.'
'You got any folks in Fort Worth, Conway?' Arkansas asked.
'I ain't got many folks,' Conway said. 'We a small family.'
'You got a grandpa, ain't you?' Arkansas persisted.
'Had one,' Conway said.
'Then how you know?' Arkansas pointed out.
Peaches was grinning.
'You going back?' Homer asked.
Arkansas looked at him. 'Who you talking to? Me?'
'You'll do. You going back?'
'Back where?'
'Back to Arkansas?'
'Yeah, I'm going back-when the horses, they pick the cotton, and the mules, they cut the corn; when the
