“I said he was all right all the time,” the bosun said.
“George didn’t give a damn.”
“I wasn’t talking about George,” Monckton said. “George hasn’t made the grade yet.”
V
GEORGE TOLD us. “He’d keep on moping and mooning, see, and I’d keep on trying to talk to him, to tell him I wasn’t mad no more. Jeez, it had to come some day; a man can’t be a angel all your life. But he wouldn’t even look back that way. Until all of a sudden he says one night: “‘What do you do to them?’ I looked at him. ‘How does a man treat them?’ ‘You mean to tell me,’ I says, ‘that you spent three days with her and she ain’t showed you that?’
“‘I mean, give them,’ he says. ‘Don’t men give…’
“‘Jeez Christ,’ I says, ‘you done already give her something they would have paid you money for it in Siam, Would have made you the prince or the prime minister at the least. What do you mean?’
“‘I don’t mean money,’ he says. ‘I mean…’
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘if you was going to see her again, if she was going to be your girl, you’d give her something. Bring it back to her. Like something to wear or something: they don’t care much what, them foreign women, hustling them wops all their life that wouldn’t give them a full breath if they was a toy balloon; they don’t care much what it is. But you ain’t going to see her again, are you?’
“‘No,’ he says. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’ And he looked like he was fixing to jump off the boat and swim on ahead and wait for us at Hatteras.
“‘So you don’t want to worry about that,’ I says. Then I went and played the vie again, thinking that might cheer him up, because he ain’t the first, for Christ’s sake; he never invented it. But it was the next night; we was at the poop rail then the first time he had looked back watching the phosrus along the logline, when he says: ‘Maybe I got her into trouble.’
’'Doing what?’ I says. ‘With what? With the police? Didn’t you make her show you her petite?’ Like she would have needed a ticket, with that face full of gold; Jeez, she could have rode the train on her face alone; maybe that was her savings bank instead of using her stocking.’
“‘What ticket?’ he says. So I told him. For a minute I thought he was crying, then I seen that he was just trying to not puke. So I knew what the trouble was, what had been worrying him. I remember the first time it come as a surprise to me. ‘Oh,’ I says, ‘the smell. It don’t mean nothing,’ I says; you don’t want to let that worry you. It ain’t that they smell bad,’ I says, ‘that’s just the Italian national air,’”
And then we thought that at last he really was sick. He worked all day long, coming to bed only after the rest of us were asleep and snoring, and I saw him in the night get up and go topside again, and I followed and saw him sitting on a windlass. He looked like a little boy, still, small, motionless in his underclothes. But he was young, and even an old man can’t be sick very long with nothing but work to do and salt air to breathe; and so two weeks later we were watching him and George dancing again in their undershirts after supper on the after well deck while the victrola lifted its fatuous and reiterant ego against the waxing moon and the ship snored and hissed through the long seas off Hatteras.
They didn’t talk; they just danced, gravely and tirelessly as the nightly moon stood higher and higher up the sky. Then we turned south, and the Gulf Stream ran like blue ink alongside, bubbled with fire by night in the softening latitudes, and one night off Tortugas the ship began to tread the moon’s silver train like an awkward and eager courtier, and Carl spoke for the first time after almost twenty days.
“George!” he said, “do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure, bud!” George said, stamping on the deck each time the needle clucked, his black head shoulders above Carl’s sleek pale one, the two of them in decorous embrace, their canvas shoes hissing in unison: “Sure,” George said. “Spit it out.”
“When we get to Galveston, I want you to buy me a suit of these pink silk teddy-bears that ladies use. A little bigger than I’d wear, see?”
Carcassonne
AND ME ON A BUCKSKIN PONY with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world. His skeleton lay still. Perhaps it was thinking about this.
Anyway, after a time it groaned. But it said nothing, which is certainly not like you he thought you are not like yourself, but I can’t say that a little quiet is not pleasant He lay beneath an unrolled strip of tarred roofing made of paper. All of him that is, save that part which suffered neither insects nor temperature and which galloped unflagging on the destinationless pony, up a piled silver hill of cumulae where no hoof echoed nor left print, toward the blue precipice never gained. This part was neither flesh nor unflesh and he tingled a little pleasantly with its lackful contemplation as he lay beneath the tarred paper bedclothing.
So were the mechanics of sleeping, of denning up for the night, simplified. Each morning the entire bed rolled back into a spool and stood erect in the corner. It was like those glasses, reading glasses which old ladies used to wear, attached to a cord that rolls onto a spindle in a neat case of unmarked gold; a spindle, a case, attached to the deep bosom of the mother of sleep.
He lay still, savoring this. Beneath him Rincon followed.
Beyond its fatal, secret, nightly pursuits, where upon the rich and inert darkness of the streets lighted windows and doors lay like oily strokes of broad and overladen brushes. From the docks a ship’s siren unsourced itself. For a moment it was sound, then it compassed silence, atmosphere, bringing upon the eardrums a vacuum in which nothing, not even silence, was. Then it ceased, ebbed; the silence breathed again with a clashing of palm fronds like sand hissing across a sheet of metal.
Still his skeleton lay motionless. Perhaps it was thinking about this and he thought of his tarred paper bed as a pair of spectacles through which he nightly perused the fabric of dreams: Across the twin transparencies of the spectacles the horse still gallops with its tangled welter of tossing flames. Forward and back against the taut roundness of its belly its legs swing, rhythmically reaching and over-reaching, each spurning over-reach punctuated by a flicking limberness of shod hooves. He can see the saddlegirth and the soles of the rider’s feet in the stirrups. The girth cuts the horse in two just back of the withers, yet it still gallops with rhythmic and unflagging fury and without progression, and he thinks of that riderless Norman steed which galloped against the Saracen Emir, who, so keen of eye, so delicate and strong the wrist which swung the blade, severed the galloping beast at a single blow, the several halves thundering on in the sacred dust where him of Bouillon and Tancred too clashed in sullen retreat; thundering on through the assembled foes of our meek Lord, wrapped still in the fury and the pride of the charge, not knowing that it was dead.
The ceiling of the garret slanted in a ruined pitch to the low eaves. It was dark, and the body consciousness, assuming the office of vision, shaped in his mind’s eye his motionless body grown phosphorescent with that steady decay which had set up within his body on the day of his birth. The flesh is dead living on itself subsisting consuming itsetf thriftily in its own renewal will never die for I am the Resurrection and the Life of a man, the worm should be lusty, lean, haired-over. Of women, of delicate girls briefly like heard music in tune, it should be suavely shaped, falling feeding into prettinesses, feeding, what though to Me but as a seething of new milk Who am the Resurrection and the Life. It was dark. The agony of wood was soothed by these latitudes; empty rooms did not creak and crack. Perhaps wood was like any other skeleton though, after a time, once reflexes of old compulsions had spent themselves. Bones might lie under seas, in the caverns of the sea, knocked together by the dying echoes of waves. Like bones of horses cursing the inferior riders who bestrode them, bragging to one another about what they would have done with a first-rate rider up. But somebody always crucified the first-rate riders. And then it’s better to be bones knocking together to the spent motion of falling tides in the caverns and the grottoes of the sea. where him of Bouillon and Tancred too. His skeleton groaned again. Across the twin
