U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [186]
Journal and sat with the paper on his lap looking at the headlines: RUSH MORE
TROOPS TO MEX BORDER. What the hel could he do? He couldn't even join the national guard and go to Mexico; they wouldn't take you if you were sick and even if they did it would be the goddam navy al over
-52-again. He sat reading the want ads, the ads about adding to your income with two hours agreeable work at home evenings, the ads of Pelmanism and correspondence courses. What the hel could he do? He sat there until it was dark. Then he took a car to Atlantic Avenue and went up four flights to the room where he had a cot under the window and turned in.
That night a big thundersqual came up. There was a lot of thunder and lightning damned close. Joe lay flat on his back watching the lightning so bright it dimmed the streetlights flicker on the ceiling. The springs rattled every time the guy in the other cot turned in his sleep. It began to rain in, but Joe felt so weak and sick it was a long time before he had the gumption to sit up and pul down the window.
In the morning the landlady, who was a big raw-boned Swedish woman with wisps of flaxen hair down over her bony face, started bawling' him out about the bed's being wet.
"I can't help it if it rains, can I?" he grumbled, look-ing at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over him that she wag kidding him and they both laughed. She was a swel Woman, her name was Mrs. Olsen and
she'd raised six children, three boys who'd grown up and gone to sea, a girl who was a school teacher in St. Paul and a pair of girl twins about seven or eight who were always getting into mischief. "Yust one year more and I send them to Olga in Milwaukee. I know sailormen." Pop Olsen had been on the beach somewhere in the South Seas for years.
"Yust as wel he stay there. In Brooklyn he been always in de lockup. Every week cost me money to get him outa yail."
Joe got to helping her round the house with the clean-ing and did odd painting and carpentering jobs for her. After his money ran out she let him stay on and even lent him twentyfive bucks to pay the doctor when he told her about being sick. She slapped him on the back when he
-53-thanked her; "Every boy I even lend money to, he turn out yust one big bum," she said and laughed. She was a swel woman.
It was nasty sleety winter weather. Mornings Joe sat in the steamy kitchen studying a course in navigation he'd started getting from the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Afternoons he fidgeted in the dingy doctor's office that smelt of carbolic, waiting for his turn for treatment, looking through frayed copies of the National Geographic for 1909. It was a glum looking bunch waited in there. Nobody ever said anything much to anybody else. A couple of times he met guys on the street he'd talked with a little waiting in there, but they always walked right past him as if they didn't see him. Evenings he sometimes went over to Man-hattan and played checkers at the Seamen's Institute or hung around the Seamen's Union getting the dope on ships he might get a berth on when the doc dried him up. It was a bum time except that Mrs. Olsen was darn good to him and he got fonder of her than he'd ever been of his own mother.
The darn kike sawbones tried to hold him up for an-other twentyfive bucks to complete the cure but Joe said to hel with it and shipped as an A.B. on a brandnew Standard Oil tanker, the Montana, bound light for Tam-pico and then out east, some of the boys said, to Aden and others said to Bombay. He was sick of the cold and the sleet and the grimy Brooklyn streets and the logarithm tables in the course on navigation he couldn't get through his head and Mrs. Olsen's bul ying jol ying voice; she was beginning to act like she wanted to run his life for him. She was a swel woman but it was about time he got the hel out.
The Montana, rounded Sandy Hook in a spiteful lash-ing snowstorm out of the northwest, but three days later they were in the Gulf Stream south of Hatteras rol ing in a long swel with al the crew's denims and shirts drying
-54-on lines rigged from the shrouds. It was good to be on blue water again. Tampico was a hel of a place; they said that mescal made you crazy if you drank too much of it; there were big dance hal s ful of greasers dancing with their hats on and with guns on their hips, and bands and mechanical pianos going ful tilt in every bar, and fights and drunk Texans from the oilwel s. The doors of al the cribhouses were open so that you could see the bed with white pil ows and the picture of the Virgin over it and the lamps with fancy shades and the colored paper trimming; the broad-faced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But every-thing was so damned high that they spent up al their jack first thing and had to go back on board before it was hardly midnight. And the mosquitoes got into the focastle and the sandflies about day and it was hot and nobody could sleep.