Chapter 4

When I came out in the summer of 1942, it was Victor who got me a berth. He had sat for his master’s license while I was away and now he was sailing as chief mate for a line called Cape American. He had left the Lucknow after fifteen years because they wouldn’t give him better than second mate even now that he had a master’s ticket. Evidently he didn’t have as many connections in the office as he thought. I think the truth was that the Lucknow had begun to carry passengers now on its newer cargo ships and was going in for a lot of deck chairs and polished brass, and Victor in his turtleneck sweater and tennis shoes wasn’t quite elegant enough for them. Victor didn’t waste any time arguing with them, because there were plenty of berths now anyhow. The war boom was on and a lot of new lines were springing up to get the Army contracts. The Kaiser yards were launching five or six Liberty ships a week, and even old ships that were ready to be scrapped were patched up and sent out on the Pacific run. Cape American had started out in 1941 with two ships and now they had four or five. They sailed them under Panamanian registry because the taxes were lower and there weren’t so many regulations and safety rules, and they didn’t inquire what you had been doing lately or whether you had a union card, which was fortunate, since mine had run out. I didn’t feel the organized labor movement would miss me very much.

All this Victor explained in a letter he sent to me while I was still in San Quentin. It was the only letter I ever got from Victor and probably the only one he had ever written. “It is not much of a ship but the way things are going these days it is a chance to get a command About time too since yours truly has been sailing since all those other vags were learning to blow their nose. The Old Man on this ship is some kind of a dago, he has got a stomach-ache and is looking a little peaked and I don’t think he will last for long.” And then he concluded “Yours as always” and forgot to sign his name.

Along with the letter they gave me a package Victor had sent, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a piece of marlin. Inside I found my old cap with the faded gold braid, a couple of work shirts, some underwear, and a pair of shoes I had forgotten I owned. The shoes were moldy and I threw them away, the rest of the stuff I wrapped back up in the brown paper. I left prison wearing the same clothes I had worn two years before and carrying the bundle under my arm. On the bus going into San Francisco I opened the bundle again and took out the cap. It smelled a little musty from being wrapped up so long, but when I tried it on my head it slipped into place as though I had been wearing it the day before. The bus was going over the Golden Gate bridge and down below I could see a ship coming in through the channel along the Presidio, a tanker looking very small and leaving a track of foam behind it like a white arrow across the bay. There was something that looked different about it and then I saw that everything was painted gray, the hull, the superstructure, even the rigging and the lifeboats. Then I remembered that the war was on and everything would be different; I had thought I could start in again from where I left off, but now I saw the ships weren’t the same anymore and I knew I wouldn’t be the same either. It was the second time I had come to this city on a us; that other time it had been night and I couldn’t see the ships, only hear them, and I had been half sick from the two packs of cigarettes I had smoked. I patted my pockets, but I didn’t even have a cigarette now. That time I had started from zero, now it was minus one.

From the bus depot I went uptown to pick up the papers that were waiting for me in the Federal Building, and then I took a streetcar down Market to the Embarcadero. At the ferry building I got off and began walking, still carrying my paper bundle. It was all different; the waterfront was jammed with traffic, there were lines of new jeeps and trucks parked along the railroad tracks waiting to be loaded, sentries with helmets and rifles were standing at the gates to all the piers.

I was perspiring; I wasn’t used to the exercise and it was a hot sticky day. The pier I was looking for was a long way up the Embarcadero and I had to walk for perhaps a mile. When I finally found it I had to show my papers to the sentry. When you got close to him you could see he was a National Guard soldier, white-skinned and soft, an insurance clerk in uniform. “Go right on your ship and don’t fool around looking at anything else,” he told me. He looked as though he didn’t know how to hold his rifle and I thought it would be lucky if he didn’t shoot somebody out of sheer jitters.

I walked through the warehouse full of stacked Army crates and jeeps and out onto the dock in the sunlight. In the first berth there was a small Socony tanker with a hole in the side large enough to drive a truck through. I went to the edge of the dock to look at it. The whole ship looked oddly bent and the windows in the pilot house were shattered, and the deck over the hole had bulged up like a mushroom but it hadn’t broken. The oily harbor water was surging in and out of the hole with a sucking noise. There were Navy officers all over the deck, and another one of the insurance-clerk sentries at the gangway. I went up and asked him where the tanker had picked up the hole.

“What’re you looking for?”

“Chileno Cape.”

“Down the dock,” he told me, motioning with his head without taking his hand off the rifle sling. He had his helmet down over his eyes and his rifle slung upside down as though he had just got off Bataan with MacArthur. Probably he had been seeing too many war movies. As I left a Navy officer went up the gangway and the sentry came to attention violently, with a chorus of clinks and jangles from his gear as though somebody had dropped a cupboard full of saucepans. It was the first time for two years I had seen anybody taking anything seriously.

Astern of the tanker I found the Chileno Cape, an old-fashioned well-deck freighter with a wooden superstructure painted a tarry gray. There were streaks of rust under the scuppers and a dirty Panamanian flag hung over the stern. I saw there were fuel lines draped over the side, so at least she was oil-fired and I wouldn’t spend the next six months up to my neck in coal dust.

At the gangplank there was another Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sentry and a customs man, and I had to show my papers again. I began to see the Japanese would be landing in Santa Monica while we were all showing each other our papers. I thought I recognized the customs man, and I asked him where I could find the chief engineer. “I don’t know if these spic ships even got one,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be anybody around out on deck, spies or anybody else. I wandered around the ship trying to find someone to tell me where my cabin was. There was soot all over everything, rusted tackle lying around, scraps of lumber all over the decks. A gang of longshoremen was loading Army trucks into one of the forward holds, but nobody else seemed to be working. A cook in his undershirt came out of the galley and stared at me, scratched his armpits, and spat over the side. He didn’t have anything to say to me and I didn’t feel I had anything to say to him. I decided to go back aft where I knew the engineers’ quarters would be and find the cabin for myself. The after well deck was loaded with aviation gasoline in steel drums, standing on end and lashed down with wire cables. There were no smoking signs everywhere, and sitting on one of the drums with his foot propped up was a man smoking a cigarette. He was naked except for a pair of dirty khaki pants and sandals and his chest was absolutely hairless, as though it had been shaved. He examined me for a while with a silent stare, pulling at the cigarette.

“Looking for something?”

“The chief, I guess.”

“Who are you?”

“Backus. Third engineer.”

“The chief’s ashore.”

This seemed to be all he had to say. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and ran his tongue over his lip, still staring at me. His teeth were yellow and broken.

‘Where’s your gear?” he asked after a while, looking at my paper bundle.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

Your cabin’s aft,” he told me finally. “The only empty one.” As I went away he lazily threw away the cigarette and sat watching me.. “I’m the second,” I heard him say behind me. “I’m on watch, you relieve me at noon.”

The cabin was small, with a single porthole which somebody had blacked out by carelessly slapping gray paint over it. There was no other ventilation and an odor of fuel oil hung in the air. The mattress on the bunk was folded back, and there was no pillow and no bedding.

I looked at the porthole to see if I couldn’t open it and get some air in the cabin, but it had been welded shut. When I turned on the faucet in the washbowl a trickle of rusty water came out. I threw my bundle of shirts and underwear on the berth and went out, leaving the door open. There didn’t seem to be any key to the door, but I didn’t have anything to steal.

I found Victor in his cabin up forward under the bridge. The cabin was bigger than mine and had two portholes, but they were welded shut too. Victor was still wearing the same serge pants and turtleneck sweater, war or no war. I don’t know what else I expected, perhaps to see him in a tin helmet with a slung rifle. We didn’t have very much to say to each other. Neither one of us was addicted to small talk and there didn’t seem to be much point in discussing the night in the Italian place or what had happened since. I sat around for a while looking at everything, and finally I said, “Thanks for pulling me the berth.”

He was bent over trying to find some papers in the bottom drawer, and with his back turned he said, “I told them you’d been on the beach running a power plant up in Marin County. All you’ve got to do is keep your mouth shut.”

“As a matter of fact they did want me to run the steam plant, but I turned them down.”

He didn’t seem to be interested in discussing my two years on the beach. Instead, as in the old days, he began filling me in on the crew, who I could trust and who I was supposed to watch out for. On this ship it seemed I was supposed to watch out for everybody but Victor.

“Did you talk to anybody yet?”

“The second engineer. He was out on deck.”

“Agh, that Kouralis. He’s a fairy, leave him alone.”

“I could see that for myself.”

“He always sails with the same kid, an oiler named Riga, they’re a couple of Greeks. These people, I don’t know where they get them, they come crawling out of the woodwork. The cooks are no better and the deck gang is a bunch of vags they found in some Sailors Mission. The Old Man’s sick, there’s something wrong with his stomach. He never comes out of his cabin and he spends all day taking pills.” He found a cargo plan he was looking for, stuck it up on the desk, and went on searching. “Stay out of the way of the chief steward, he’s one of these operators, has his hatchet men in the galley and he gets a cut on everything that goes on. Kammerath, a Dutchman. I knew him out on the islands, he’s been sailing for years.”

It seemed the briefing was over. Victor went on looking through the drawer and didn’t say anything for a while.

“What happened to the Socony tanker up ahead?”

He turned around for the first time, sat in the chair and lit a cigarette, and began talking while he was still shaking out the match.

“Agh, they picked that up on the Honolulu run,” he said scornfully, as though getting torpedoed was a stupid trick that only happened to amateurs. “A lot of things have changed since you were sailing, kid. You notice the welded portholes? No lights on deck now, and you can’t throw trash overboard in the daytime. It leaves a track in the water and they can come up behind you. The Emil is a month overdue from Sydney. Bettleman, the nigger cook, the old chief, all those guys were still on her.” He wasn’t quite so optimistic as he had been in the letter. It was a new side of Victor. I had never heard him complain about anything before, but now he was talking about the war as though it was a personal affront. “In the Atlantic it’s even worse, they’re sinking them right off the Carolinas in sight of the coast. They and their lousy war, you spend thirty years going to sea and then you end up making a hole in the water.” It was not clear who he meant by “they”: the Pentagon, the Nazis and Japanese, or possibly the mysterious Jewish gray eminences of Wall Street. It didn’t make any difference to me and I wasn’t in the mood for Victor’s labyrinthine antisemitism.

“Listen, Victor, I’m broke. I need cigarettes, shoes, some work clothes. I’ve got nothing.”

He looked at me, his red face expressionless. “I thought they gave you something when you got out, some pocket money.”

“I spent it on the bus, other things.”

“Agh,” I could hear him wheezing to himself. He got up and began wandering around the cabin, fumbling through the pockets of clothes. Several times he threw up his hands, as if to indicate that he couldn’t find what he was looking for, exactly as he had that night years before when he had stolen my billfold. I waited. Finally, when he saw I wasn’t going to leave, he unlocked the drawer under his berth and took out his wallet and gave me fifty dollars. “You kids, you never think of anybody but yourselves. I’ve got expenses, medicine, I spend a lot of money on doctors.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Arthritis, they call it, but what do they know? Agh, the fatheads.”

He went on grumbling to himself as he put the wallet away. It was the first time I had ever heard him talk about his health or admit to any physical frailty. I put the fifty dollars in my pocket; it wasn’t very much for the two years he had taken out of my life but it was more than he had ever given me before.

The next day the shipping commissioner came on board with an agent from the line and we spent the morning signing articles. When I came into the messroom around nine o’clock there were already eight or ten people waiting, and Kammerath, the steward, was sitting in an armchair smoking while the commissioner made out his papers. He was a massive pale man with a milky face, and his corpulence somehow had a synthetic look, as though he were made out of some chemical substance that had nothing to do with ordinary flesh. On the other side of the table the shipping commissioner and the man from Cape American passed the papers back and forth and talked in an undertone, but Kammerath just sat there with his flesh squeezing into every crevice of the chair and ignored everything that went on around him. His two followers, the first cook and the radio operator, stood behind the chair, and once in a while one of them would bend over to speak to him, but Kammerath never bothered to answer. When the commissioner asked him for his next of kin he merely stared back at him with his slightly contemptuous indifference and said, “None.”

The commissioner was a somewhat overworked bureaucrat with a coat and a tie which he wore in spite of the heat in the messroom, and his rimless glasses were already beginning to leave a red spot of the bridge of his nose. “You’re entitled to war risk insurance, a paid five-thousand-dollar policy, but you’ve got to name someone as beneficiary,” he explained patiently.

Kammerath didn’t bother to answer. The first cook did all his talking for him. He was a Brooklyner named Cheeney, a small nervous man with a wrinkled forehead and little protruding ears set at right angles to his head. “He knows that,” he told the commissioner. “He’s been sailing for thirty years.”

“Who’s signing articles, you or him? I’ve got to have a next of kin to put on this form.”

“He already made all those papers when he signed for the last trip,” broke in the radio operator. “This is his second voyage.”

“I don’t care about that. I’m signing him for this voyage.”

Cheeney bent over and said something to Kammerath, but the big pale man shook his head. Finally he raised the cigarette slowly and put it back into his mouth. “Make it out to the Red Cross,” he told the commissioner.

The commissioner muttered something under his breath and wrote down “American Red Cross” on the form. When Kammerath had signed he got up and moved off like a pale cloud toward his cabin, and the first cook and the radio operator followed him. Somebody said he had been taken first because he had heart trouble and couldn’t stand waiting in line. The rest of us went on signing articles, but we didn’t sit in the armchair and we didn’t smoke. The next one in line was the chief engineer, a crusty old Scotchman with a whiskey complexion. He left his insurance to the San Francisco local of the union, and the first engineer wrote his out to Sailor’s Relief. When the commissioner came to Victor and me he lost his patience. Neither of us had anybody to leave the insurance to either, so we had made it out to each other.

He flung his pencil down. “What are you, all crazy today? Now listen, you two, be sensible. This way if anything happens to the ship—” the cautious insurance-man’s euphemism—“if anything happens to the ship neither of you would collect. Haven’t you got anybody on dry land to leave it to?”

Victor thought for a while, and then he said he wasn’t particularly interested in what happened after he drowned.

The commissioner turned to me, his eyeglasses glinting. “And you?”

“Well, if I can’t give it to Victor suppose I make it out to you?” I suggested. “You’re on dry land.”

He gave up, with an exasperated wave of his hand, and Victor and became each other’s next of kin. I think at the bottom the reason we resented the insurance was that we didn’t like the idea of anybody else making a profit out of our misfortune.

That afternoon I went ashore and bought some clothes and some other things I needed with Victor’s money. The tugs came alongside about four o’clock, and by six we were out through the Golden Gate. When I came out on deck after supper the sun was setting; the land astern was only a smudge on the horizon and you could see the Farallons off the starboard bow. I was supposed to go on watch at midnight and I decided to go to my cabin and try to get some sleep for an hour or two. It was dark in the cabin and the air was thick and fetid, with the odor of fuel oil that hung over everything in the ship. I couldn’t sleep and for a long time I lay with my eyes open in the darkness, listening to the rhythm of the propeller and the hiss of the long Pacific swells rising under the hull. I knew it was not a very good ship but it didn’t matter very much; at least I had a place to sleep and nobody could bother me here, it was where I belonged. The sounds and odors, smell of fuel oil and the clatter of dishes from the galley, were familiar and reassuring and it was as though the two years hadn’t happened or as though I had spent them asleep. I thought how strange it was that this cabin where countless anonymous engineers had slept, identical to all the other anonymous cabins in all the other ships, was my place, the only place on earth where I was not an outsider and an exile. It didn’t matter very much and the important thing was that there would be food and sleep, and twice a day for four hours there would be work to do. The ship began to roll a little, I could feel the seas coming up under the hull with a harder lurch, and I knew we had cleared the Farallons and were turning to the south. Finally I managed to sleep a little, about a half an hour.

When I was called at midnight I went below and relieved Kouralis. The engine room was like all the others, only a little more decrepit and badly cared for. The machinery was old and had only been patched up instead of overhauled; there were steam leaks in all the joints and nobody had bothered to tighten them. Everything was slippery with grease, a rancid slime that came off continually on your hands and clothes. My wiper was a Mexican boy who was only seventeen or eighteen; he didn’t seem to understand very much English and apparently he knew nothing about machinery. When I told him to start tightening some joints he just grinned at me, and finally I had to show him how to do it myself. The fireman was a small pudgy man named Squires who seemed to be some kind of a religious crank; he brought a Bible with him on watch and sat in the boiler room on a chair reading it instead of paying attention to his job. I saw the only one in the watch I could count on was Welsh, the oiler. He was a hard-bitten old bird who had been sailing in the Pacific all his life; he was taciturn and dirty and I knew he would be lazy and dodge all the work he could, but in the end he knew machinery and was not going to let it run out of oil while he was watching it.

“You seen that feed pump?” he asked me.

“What’s wrong with it?”

Instead of answering he made a snort of contempt and spat on the throttle platform under his feet. I looked at the pump and saw we were going to have trouble with it, but there was nothing we could do until it actually broke down. The old reciprocating main engine flogged away, somehow the shaft went on turning, and I stood my watch for four hours. About three-thirty I went forward to the boiler room to check up on Squires. This time he wasn’t reading the Bible, but he was sitting on the busted wooden chair paying no attention to a smoky burner that needed changing.

“How long have you been going to sea?” I asked him.

“My wife thrown me out three years ago. Since then I been wandering around, no place to lay my head. You know, mister, these are the last days, and then after that comes the time of Judgment.”

“How about changing that burner?”

“It smokes a little. It don’t matter anyhow in the last days.”

The officers’ messroom on the Chileno Cape was forward under the bridge and the galley was aft. The messboys had to carry everything across the deck, through the deckload of gasoline drums, and by the time the food got there it was usually cold. Luckily very few people on this ship were gourmets. The next morning when I went in to breakfast I saw the captain for the first time. Nobody introduced me to him, and I don’t think I spoke to him more than once or twice all the time I was on that ship. He was a Guatemalan named Firmín, and as Victor had said his stomach was bad. He ate very little, for breakfast only some toast soaked in canned milk. He sat by himself with a bottle of brown pills on the table in front of him, and he was always studying some kind of a paper while he ate, a radiogram or a bill of lading, pondering over it as though it were his death sentence written in an unknown language. You could see he was not used to papers and they gave him a stomach-ache, and this was why he had to take the pills out of the brown bottle. Except for meals he almost never came out of his cabin. I never heard him give an order and the crew paid no attention to him. They went ahead and did their jobs, some well, some badly, but in any case without talking. Once in a while Firmín would come up on the bridge, start puzzled into the compass like an Indian looking at a gramophone, and brood for a while over the chart laid out on the chart table. Evidently he couldn’t make anything of it, because after ten minutes he would go silently back to his cabin. As far as I could tell he was harmless, but he could have died of whatever it was that ailed him or fallen overboard and nobody would have known the difference. He was not a great leader of men.

There were three tables in the officers’ messroom: one for the captain with his milktoast and pills, one for the deck officers, and one for the engineers. That first morning I sat down across from Kouralis and started eating my scrambled eggs made out of egg powder. I noticed him staring at my hair which still had a San Quentin haircut: high on the sides and straight across the back of the neck. He had a way of looking at you with a kind of contemplative insolence while he ran his tongue over his lower lip, as though you had egg on your face or had left something unbuttoned. I didn’t pay any attention to him and went on eating my breakfast. Finally he said, “You been in the Navy?”

“I’ve been in a lot of places.”

“I thought maybe you’d been doing a stretch,” he said, making a kind of a grin on one side of his mouth.

“Yeah, I shot McKinley.”

“All right, kiss my ass,” he said indifferently. After that he left me alone. He still stared the same way when he passed me on deck or when I relieved him in the engine room, but I don’t think he ever spoke to me again. The only ones I ever talked to on that ship were Welsh in the engine room and Victor. Victor had the four-to-eight and was on watch when I had breakfast, but usually I had dinner and supper with him. After that first morning I moved over to the deck officers’ table so I wouldn’t have to look at Kouralis while I ate. The food on the Chileno Cape was the worst I had even seen. We ate goulash in a greasy yellow sauce, leathery steaks, canned peaches covered with a fuzz of green mold. We didn’t have a baker and Kammerath had bought a lot of bread in San Francisco and put it in cold storage. When we were a week out the refrigerating system broke down; we fixed it and it broke down again. By this time the bread had begun to crawl and some people wouldn’t touch it, but I didn’t think it was any worse than the goulash. I always socked mine with my fork before I ate it, and little black specks would crawl out and run across the tablecloth. Nobody complained; some people ate the bread and some didn’t. If you didn’t want to eat it you didn’t have to. I stood my watches, slept all morning, and ate the yellow goulash without a word, and nobody else said anything either. If the food was bad, well let it get worse. There never such a taciturn bunch since men started going to sea. We sit there every night eating supper and nobody would talk to anybody. Firmín, that melancholy Aztec, would sit at the table by himself with his brown bottle, chewing methodically and silently. Usually about halfway through the meal the old red-faced chief engineer would come in and sit at his table, and they would eat without talking. Sometimes Firmín would mutter, “Hullo, chief,” but the old Scotsman would never answer him. He had been going to sea for a long time and he wasn’t having any of the goulash; for supper he had some tack crackers with canned sardines.

Usually after supper Victor and I would go out and sat on the hatch and smoke for a while before I went in to sleep. It was quiet there, in the lee of the deckhouse out of the wind, and we sat smoking with the cigarettes cupped inside our hands because you weren’t supposed to show any lights on deck. Victor and I were like two strange cats; we didn’t trust each other but we were willing to be there together, and it was as though for the time being we had reached a sort of a truce. He even seemed to have a kind of respect for me now and after a while I understood why. I knew him well enough to guess what was going on in his head, but he couldn’t tell what I was thinking. He was waiting for me to say something about that night in the Italian place, but I never did. I was different now in a way he couldn’t understand and I didn’t really understand it myself, but it was as though in prison the muscles of my face had rearranged themselves. I was inside the face but I had nothing to do with it; it had become a thing I could lift and wove if I felt like it. Even my eyes were beginning to feel the way Victor’s looked: alert, opaque—I could see out but nobody could see in. The oilers and wipers couldn’t figure me out either, but in the meantime they were careful not to give me any trouble. “That guy, he don’t give a damn for anybody,” they would say about me. This was about as much praise as you could get from anybody on the Chileno Cape. I wasn’t very interested in what they thought about me. I stood on two watches a day and ate my three meals, and if Victor wanted to talk I listened to him. Every evening we sat out on the hatch he talked in his choppy contemptuous fragments, looking not at me but out at the horizon, and I answered in monosyllables. I supposed the others, the ones who saw us from the outside, had the idea that we were friends.

In any case Victor at sea was a different kind of an animal from Victor on the beach. He smoked Old Golds, he didn’t steal my money from me, and he didn’t drink. He wouldn’t have anything to do with the others on the ship. Half of them were incompetent, and most of the rest of them were drunks. Even the old chief went around smelling like whiskey and slept half the day. If Firmín noticed he never said anything. When the ship was two or three days out of San Francisco somebody started a floating poker game up forward in the paint locker. The same gang was always there: Kouralis and his boy Riga, the bosun, two or three Jamaicans out of the deck gang, the oiler Welsh from my watch. They got a washtub and filled it full of canned fruit and poured a gallon of tequila in on top of it and they would sit around all day eating it with spoons while they slapped down the greasy cards. Whenever somebody left to go on watch somebody else would come and take his hand. After the fruit salad was gone they would start dipping out the sauce with coffee mugs. I don’t know why they bothered with the fruit anyhow except that Welsh said after you left it for a while the alcohol fermented the fruit juice; I don’t think any of them knew very much about chemistry. A lot of money changed hands in this game and it seemed that Kouralis and his followers, Riga and the others, won most of it.

Victor had nothing but contempt for this bunch. “Agh, you think these guys are sailors. They’re nothing but a bunch of vags. I was under sail in the grain barks from Melbourne, around the Horn in the winter. That was going to sea, you made it or they shoveled you over the side.” Victor was no moralist, he didn’t care if you drank wood alcohol or Sterno, mainlined with heroin or cut up little children, but he had a contempt for anybody who would go to sea all his life and not care enough about it to do the job right. One of the few he respected was the old chief; he was a drunk but he was a good engineer, and he never got so drunk he didn’t know how much fuel he had left in number three tank. I don’t know whether Victor was a good chief mate or not but he was a professional. He could tell by looking at the stars, sitting there on the hatch in the dark, whether the helmsman was on course or not, “That ape is five degrees off,” he would mutter to himself, squinting through the rigging at the constellations. A little later you would hear the watch officer up on the bridge barking at the helmsman, and the ship would turn slowly and settle back on the course, leaving a ragged bend in the wake behind.

The helmsman never got off course when Victor was on watch. He spent the four hours pacing constantly back and forth on the bridge, scratching his ribs through the old Navy sweater and staring out at the horizon. Whenever he passed the compass he glanced at it. He was on the wrong side of it but he could read it upside down. “One ninety-two, you farmer,” he would snarl if the card was beginning to drift a degree or two. At the other end of the groove he wore in the deck, out on the wing of the bridge, he would lift the big binoculars that always seemed too heavy for his skinny body and scan the horizon briefly before he went back in the wheelhouse. The binoculars were an unwieldy old-fashioned model, made by Zeiss for the German navy in the First World War, and they were one of the few possessions that Victor had carried around with him from ship to ship in the years he had been going to sea. He would only look out through them for a few seconds but he never missed anything. Half-sunken crates, dead fish, the smoke of passing ships, he saw it all, and before he went off watch he would write it down in the log: “0715 passed school of porpoises. 0735 kapok life jacket abeam starboard 1 mile.” One time off the Marquesas where a ship had been torpedoed the week before he saw something ahead that looked like a periscope from five miles away. All the bells started ringing and everybody ran around shutting watertight doors. Firmín came up on the bridge and stared out gloomily through his binoculars, saying he couldn’t see anything. “I dunno, Mister Gamoff, maybe you shouldn’t get everybody all upset until you’re sure. You know, I was asleep.” Victor didn’t say anything, and just kept raising the binoculars now and then to see if it was still there. Finally we ran it down: it was a corpse, face under, one ballooned leg floating, a black arm stuck straight up in the air like a mast. Victor changed the course a little and it drifted by ten yards away on the port side. As the wake struck it it rolled, reappeared once more in the foam astern, and sank.

In the South Latitudes there was no wind, the sea was hot and viscous, the steel plates baked. Kammerath sat in his cabin now and seldom came out. The rest of the crew spent most of their time making up legends about him. For example a rumor went around the ship never slept, that he had had an operation for trachoma or something and they had cut off his eyelids. There was nothing to this; if you watched him carefully you could see his eyelids flicker once in a while, invisibly fast, like the shutter of a fast camera. You couldn’t tell this to the rest of them because they preferred to think of Kammerath as omniscient, as some kind of a Baal or a voodoo god. “He doesn’t look like he’s watching, the sonabitch, but he sees everything that goes on,” Welsh told me. I hadn’t heard of a Jonah since the days when I read The Nigger of the Narcissus and I didn’t know anybody believed in them anymore. On this ship they blamed Kammerath for everything that went wrong, from the bad weather to the food. They claimed he sucked the juice from the meat, fattened on the nourishment while they got the pulp, kept the fresh coffee for himself and gave them coffee made out of used grounds and old socks. Instead of complaining about the food as they did on most ships they complained about the steward on account of the food: “That fat crook, look what he gives us to eat.” In this way Kammerath was useful to them; he gave them something to blame for the whole pointless lousiness of their lives. If they were on a tenth-rate ship and did their jobs sloppily it was because that fat slug sat in his cabin and put a jinx on everything.

If Kammerath was aware of all this he gave no sign. He stayed in his cabin most of the day, smoking and malting entries with a fountain pen in a big ledger. Instead of coming to the messroom he would have Cheeney bring his meals to the cabin on a tray. After he had served the steward’s dinner Cheeney would come out on the hatch and sit there in his white undershirt and his flour-colored cook’s face, waiting for somebody to talk to him. Because he was Kammerath’s toady nobody else on the ship would have anything to do with him, and this made him nervous, but he had to go on as he was because he sensed that in some way Kammerath was a source of power, and he felt insecure and this gave him the only identity he had. It was as though Kammerath exuded a kind of mysterious fluid that hung in the air around him, and his followers sucked in this fluid and were nourished by it, and it was from absorbing this stuff whatever it was that Cheeney himself had become so pale and milky, the same color as Kammerath himself. But he knew the others outside the galley despised him for it and that made him uneasy, and this was why he came out and sat on the hatch after supper, to try to talk to the others and make friends so he would still have connections on both sides. Welsh knew it made him nervous so he would always needle him about it, trying to get him to talk about Kammerath.

“Why don’t he ever come out? What does he do in there all day?” he would ask him.

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“You’re his friend, ain’t you?”

“Me?” Cheeney would say, alarmed. “I’m not his friend.”

“You’d be his friend if he had a friend. What do you talk about in there when he’s eating dinner?”

With a small tremor working his cheek Cheeney would report what Kammerath had said. “He was telling me about during Prohibition he was a rum-runner. They used to run it across the Detroit River in speedboats. He had six guys working for him, and they would peddle the moonshine some other guy made up in Canada in a garage. In those days he made around a hundred thousand a year.”

“That wasn’t the last gut he ever rotted. What else does he say?”

“That’s all. That’s about all he said.”

“What did he say yesterday?”

The stories got more and more fantastic, and probably after a while Cheeney was making them up so he wouldn’t lose his audience. “Yesterday he was telling me about when he was on a ship running down from Macao to Hongkong, carrying Chinamen. He was a cook then himself. They used to steam up a barrel of rice for the Chinamen and throw in a gallon of fish-eyes. They lapped it up, according to him.

“Wish we had some of it now.”

Another time,” Cheeney would go on, with a sidelong glance as though he expected to see Kammerath floating up behind him and listening, he went on the beach once for five years in Malaya. He had a chippy to go to bed with and clean up the house and everything. He had it high to hear him tell it.”

”He should of stayed there,” grunted Welsh.

“He can’t take the heat so well. It’s bad for his heart.”

“If he’s got a heart, I’m a Chinaman, and I’ll eat fish-eyes to prove it.”

“I’m just telling you what he said,” Cheeney would say, getting more and more nervous.

Welsh was a kind of universal cynic, but he knew everything that was going on on the ship. When he wasn’t loafing out on the hatch he would sit in on the paint-locker tequila parties, and he used to tell me what went on up there. It seemed that about two weeks out of San Francisco there was a showdown between the paint-locker crowd and the messboys in the galley. It started when Kammerath refused to let them have any more canned fruit out of the stores. For a couple of days they drank the tequila straight out of coffee mugs, but when they brought the cups to the galley to be washed the messboys confiscated them and wouldn’t give them back. “Mister Kammerath, he says no cups to be taken out of the messroom,” Cheeney told Kouralis. There was an argument, and Kouralis came back with two or three of his shock troops, Riga and a couple of firemen. They pushed into the galley and walked off with the mugs, leaving Cheeney standing there with the corners of his mouth working.

After that it almost broke out in open war. Emissaries went from Kammerath to the chief engineer and back again, and some people even said that Firmín was consulted, although this seemed unlikely. That night the matter was settled. Kouralis and the firemen had to bring the cups back; Cheeney told them it was against the rules to take crockery out of the galley, but Mister Kammerath would sell them the cups if they wanted to pay fifty cents apiece for them. He didn’t explain whether the money would be passed along to the stockholders of the line, who were the legal owners of the cups. Kammerath had never moved from his chair in his cabin,

“That sonabitch,” Welsh commented that night in my watch, “he don’t care about the cups. He just don’t like to have anything going on aboard that he don’t have a finger in.”

The story down in the engine room was that Kouralis was plotting some kind of dark revenge and had said Kammerath had better be careful walking around on deck at night. But Kammerath never came out on deck at night, and only very rarely in the daytime. He went on sitting all day in his cabin, making entries in the ledger and smoking until the fingers of his left hand were stained yellow with tobacco. Three times a day, morning, noon, and night, Cheeney brought him his meals on a tray, provided with the same linen and silver service as the officers’ mess. If you happened to be going down the passageway you could look in through the half-open door and see Kammerath sitting in front of the white tablecloth, drinking his coffee out of a china teacup. Sometimes after dinner, when it was a little cooler, he would come out on deck and move ponderously toward the rail and stand there for a while looking out at the sea. In the daylight you could see that his face was not really white but faintly yellow, with a greenish shadow along the jowls where an ordinary man’s face is blue-black. He would’ stand there by the corner of the deckhouse watching the horizon for a while, and then when his cigarette was finished he would drop it in the sea and go back into his cabin.