AMERICANS AT SEA

It was night and we were steaming south through the Bashi Channel into the South China Sea. The black water was absolutely still. There was no moon, no stars. Out the porthole I could hear the quiet rush of the ship’s wake but I couldn’t see anything. I sat on the edge of my bunk and used a towel to wipe the sweat off my face. I took off my socks and looked at the splotches on my feet. They were larger than they had been in the morning. In the center of each splotch there were little bubbles of pus.

Rumor had it we would off-load at Qhi Nhon, then steam for India. It was a bad time of year to go to India. It didn’t make any difference to me. I was jumping off her in Vietnam. The ship owners had their plans, I had my plans. I was going to become a famous war correspondent. Why not? I’d been at the writing business fifteen years and it was time something came of it. Vietnam might turn out to be my cup of tea. I picked up the typewriter and walked down the passageway to the crew mess.

The heat was stifling. I set up the typewriter on the table and got out my notes. The chief cook was at the other table picking at his guitar. The Chief was Black but it didn’t sound like it. Maybe he was a beginner. He had a white towel wrapped around his throat and his sweat had filled it up and was running down his chest. There was a fan at either end of the little room pushing the hot air around. While I typed sweat ran down my arms and dripped off the ends of my elbows.

“GODDAMM,” the Chief yelled.

I jumped off my stool ready to run or fight for my life, I didn’t know which.

“Motherfuckin mosquitoes eatin my ass UP.” He grabbed one ankle then the other.
I sat back down. The heart was pounding.

“We’re too far out to sea for mosquitoes,” I said politely.

“SHIT. These motherfuckers is bred for distance. Don’t talk too-far-out-to-sea to these cocksuckers. They flies where they wants to fly. Don’t bother puttin them steel screens in those portholes either. That jus makes em angry. Once they gets angry, five, six mosquitoes hit that screen at once an jus blast on inside here. They want in, them cocksuckers? They jus muscle on in.”

“I wonder why they aren’t biting me?,” I said politely.

“Shit,” the Chief said. He plucked at his guitar uncertainly.

I tried to get on with the typing. Pretty soon Sal came in looking for someone to talk to.

I said: “Hey, wearing your fancy slippers, eh? Look at that gold braid.”

“Big Lucy gave me these last time I was down in New Orleans. Did I tell you about her? Big Lucy was a lady wrestler. One night we....”

“You told me.”

“Fuck you then,” Sal said. He laid his crooked Italian face on one shoulder and grinned sweetly.

De Marion popped his big stubborn sloped-back head through the hatch way. The sweat was running in rivulets down his thick neck. Apropos of nothing he said: “Best piece I ever had was in Sasebo. Or was it Kobe? I can’t remember no more.”

He took a stool at the table. The size of his body overwhelmed the stool. It overwhelmed the table.

“Anyhow, it was night and the Japs were having a festival. Lanterns, people dancing in the streets, shit like that. A girl grabbed my arm and asked if I wanted to fuck. She looked about twelve years old. How old are you, I said? She said fifteen. I didn’t believe her but I went with her anyway. Har, har, har.”

The first cook, plucking quietly at his guitar, looked slyly around at De Marion.

De Marion said: “When we got to her room she started laughing like she was crazy. She was so skinny it was like fucking a couple a bones. She couldn’t get enough of the fucking but she laughed all night. I tell you, that laughing can get to you. The next morning she tried to get me to promise to come back later. I told her, fuck you kid. You laugh too much.”

Sal said: “When I was in the Philippines I had a girl who....”

De Marion said: “One time in the Philippines I was fucking this broad when I felt something sucking on my balls. I thought, Jesus, this girl really has something going for her down there. But when I looked down it was a little pig.”

Sal said: “A what?”

“A pig. Oink oink. Don’t you know what a pig is?”

“Shit.”

De Marion said: “The Philippines is where the kid shits and the mother wipes its ass with her big toe. Har, har.”

“Shit,” Sal said.

“Shit?,” De Marion said. “Is that all you can say? Don’t you have no stories? You got a writer here. You can make yourself famous.”

“All right,” Sal said. “In Paris after the war there was so much fucking you’d get tired of it....”

“You’d get tired of it,” De Marion said.

“Shut the fuck up, will ya? After the war over there, when you took a broad to your room instead of laying her you’d just stuff a silk handkerchief up her twat and the next morning when you went down to the cafe for breakfast you’d take out the handkerchief and give your friends a sniff. You were so tired of fucking that was all you could handle.”

De Marion said: “Last month I met this broad in the park in San Pedro. She had red hair and we got to talking. Her old man had left her. One thing led to another and she offered me seventy-five dollars a week if I’d live with her and her two little girls. I tried it for a week but the kids were too much. They’d jump up on my lap and call me daddy, shit like that. I kept gettin a hard-on. What kind of daddy would I be, I thought? Another week and I’d be finger-fucking both of them and by the time they were ten I’d be peddling their ass. Nah, I thought, this isn’t the life for me, and I come to sea again.”

“You’re a pretty sensitive guy,” I said.

“Shit,” Sal said.

The Chief unplugged his guitar, gathered up his sheet music and walked out.

De Marion said: “There goes a guy with a sense of humor.”

“Shit.”

“Can’t you say nothin but shit?”

Through the porthole we could see great sheets of lightening illuminating the black ocean and the black sky.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” De Marion said. “I didn’t expect to sail on no bucket of rust like this one. If this tub sinks tonight it won’t surprise me.”

“What surprised me,” I said, “was when I saw the holes in the lifeboats.”

“All these old Victories have holes in the lifeboats.”

“Why doesn’t somebody fix them? Plug up the holes?”

“Oh, what the fuck,” Sal said. “if she goes down, she goes down. Who gives a shit?”

De Marion said: “I’d rather ship on a tanker any time. There when you go, it’s all at once. POOF. A flash of light and instant death. Har, har, har.”

Suddenly a rain began to fall. We went out on deck laughing and yelling and splashing in the falling water. Half a dozen other guys came out and joined us. It rained hard for twenty minutes then stopped. Inside the mid-ship house again the air was sweltering. I took my cot out on deck and set it up alongside number two hatch. The night air was warm and fresh. I listened to the cool easy rush of the ship’s wake. The sky had partially cleared. Here and there stars shone brilliantly in the blackness. Wisps of filmy cloud drifted past. Once, in the early morning, I woke with a dark rain falling on my face.

The ship was gliding through the top of the calmest sea I’d ever seen. On the horizon to the east there were piles of black clouds. Rain fell from the clouds in dark slanting columns into the sea. Somewhere beyond the clouds and the rain lay the coast of Vietnam.

The air grew heavier and hotter. By noon the horizon was lost in a colorless haze of heat. In the engine room the temperature under the blowers, the coolest place there, was one hundred eight degrees. The engine radiated heat through the steel bulkheads, up through the steel decks. The deck hands worked with blue or red kerchiefs tied about their foreheads. At noon mess when I went below and opened the door to the refrigerated box the cold air struck my body like a blow.

The new rumor had it that we were steaming for the mouth of the Saigon River. We were all recovered from going ashore in Yokosuka and the rumor excited us. I got out my map and found Vung Tau. That would be the closest town. About sixty miles from Vung Tau straight up the highway was Saigon. A little swamp, I’d heard, some jungle. I thought about how I hadn’t done any reporting before. Now that I was there almost, who would I sell it to? There were things I hadn’t thought about yet.

The steward called a meeting of the steward’s department. We gathered in the mess at 1400. It was stifling and we were all pissed. Everyone showed up on time except the chief cook and the steward. That’s the sort of asshole the steward was. Marlow went topside and found him sleeping in his bunk and rousted him out. Illuminado found the chief cook sleeping on the fantail but he didn’t roust the Chief. The steward came down and in his vacant way started to open the meeting.

“We aren’t going to have a meeting of the steward’s department until the chief cook is here.” We all said it.

The Steward said: “All right. Where is the Chief?”

“On the fantail.”

“What’s the Chief doing on the fantail?”

“He’s sleeping, you asshole.”

The Steward said: “Illuminado, go roust the chief cook and get him in here.”

Illuminado said: “You bein foony, Stew? No thees Puerto Riqueno, no sir.”

“Marlow,” the steward said, “you want to roust the Chief?”

“Roust him yourself, asshole.”

“We’ll have the meeting without the Chief,” the steward said. “The Chief’s been working hard this voyage.”

We said there wouldn’t be a meeting of the steward’s department unless the entire department was present.

“Oh, let it go then,” the steward said vacantly. “It’s not important.”

“Asshole.”

After evening mess Haskell and I sat on a plank laid across two line pins and watched the sun go down behind the quiet gray sea. Sundown and sunrise are the two best times when you’re at sea. Haskell was pulling on a pint of his apricot home brew. It was the first time I’d tasted it. It wasn’t bad. The bosun had searched the ship from top to bottom looking for Haskell’s cooker but hadn’t been able to find it.

Haskell looked like a direct descendant of one of Quantrill’s’ raiders, tubercular and murderous, his mouth full of rotten teeth. When I first saw him I thought he had a crippled arm but it was just his crab-like way of moving around. At mess he spoke so softly I had to bend over to get his order right. He’d been going to sea fifteen years.

“When I was in Ethiopia I had me an old gal with lips so thin there was just a line where her mouth was.”

“Is that right?”

“She lived in a hut with cardboard walls. She had two holes out back. She shit in one and kept her chow in the other. It was some kind of rubbery black shit. What she ate, I mean. I used to get drunk, then I’d be worried I’d go out there in the night and shit in the wrong hole.”

“That would have been impolite.”

“She’d tear off a hunk of that rubbery shit and chew it up just like it was good. Good for me, she used to say, no good for you. I’d tell her you bet your ass no good for me.”

About 2100 a wind blew up from the south. Marlow and me went up to the prow to take a look around. We looked at the black ocean, the black sky. The wind beat our lashes into our eyes. There wasn’t anything to see.

At daybreak the wind was still blowing and the sea was a mass of whitecaps. During morning mess I discovered that the ventilation system over the sinks wasn’t working. I told the chief cook. He told me to tell the union representative so I told Sal and he told the engineer. The engineer came down, looked up inside the air shaft and said the system was plugged up with dirt. The engineer brought the first mate down and the First said he had already spent more money on maintenance this trip than was allotted him. He said he would speak to the Captain about it however.

When they left I said: “Fuck all of you. I’m getting off her anyhow.”

At noon we saw land off the starboard bow. Vietnam. It looked like a lot of other places I’d seen. Low sprawling hills, scrub brush, empty, drab. At evening mess we heard six or seven big, deep explosions in the distance. I thought they sounded like ships’ artillery. Most of the guys thought they were bombs. They were probably right. We hadn’t seen another ship on the water in five days.

It was too hot in the foc’sle to sleep. Marlow and I took our cots forward and set them up alongside number two hatch. I asked Marlow if he was going to jump ship with me.

“Not if you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do.”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m going to look for the war.”

“Oh, boy. What a schumck.”

“I don’t really expect you to get off with me.”

“If you had a little business deal to take care of in Saigon, I might consider stepping off this tub.”

“I’m no good at little business deals. All I think about is the writing.”

“Why don’t you forget the writing? Think about business for a change. You can’t write. You don’t have any talent. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Give it up. It wouldn’t even be a sacrifice. Put your mind to business.  Business is the way to get ahead in the world. Make some money. Live like a regular person for a change. You want to live like this the rest of your life?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Not for you maybe. You have no future. For someone like me, going to sea is just a stop-gap, a way to have time to decide on something else.”

We lay on our cots in the moonlight. The warm wind blew across our bodies and rattled the ship’s lines. The sea was up a little and the old Victory wallowed, its booms creaking. Occasionally a solitary figure walked past silently. In my imagination I tried to picture how it was going to be.

Marlow said: “After this voyage is out of the way, let’s go to Hong Kong. I’ll figure out something to do. Smuggle gooks across from the mainland. Smuggle dope. Something.”

“I wouldn’t mind living in Hong Kong.” I was getting drowsy.

“It’d beat getting your cock shot off in Vietnam.”

“I’ll never become a famous war correspondent in Hong Kong.”

“Who cares? We could wear whites in Hong Kong. We could be taken for retired navy officers. I could anyhow. I don’t know about you. I’d tell people you were my faithful bat boy. How does that sound?”

“That sounds okay.” I closed my eyes.

“If people wonder why I’m out of service at so young an age I’ll say my chief mate ran us aground one night and I took the rap for him. I’ll wear an old captain’s cap. It’ll have tarnished decorations and look like it’s seen years of service. I’ll act world weary and marry a rich countess. If someone presses me about my background I’ll mention the Egyptian navy and act as though I don’t want to talk about it.”

I was almost asleep.

Marlow said: “In Hong Kong we could. . . .

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