If he hollers let him go

CHAPTER III

I climbed the outside wooden gangway from the dock and went aboard through the gangway port, an accommodation opening in the shell that put me on the third of the five decks. The compartment I entered was the machine shop; forward was the carpenter shop; aft were the various lockers, toolrooms, storerooms, and such, and finally the third-deck showers and latrine-all a part of the ship itself-where my gang was working.

The decks were low, and with the tools and equipment of the workers, the thousand and one lines of the welders, the chippers, the blowers, the burners, the light lines, the wooden staging, combined with the equipment of the ship, the shapes and plates, the ventilation trunks and ducts, reducers, dividers, transformers, the machines, lathes, mills, and such, half yet to be installed, the place looked like a littered madhouse. I had to pick every step to find a foot-size clearance of deck space, and at the same time to keep looking up so I wouldn't tear off an ear or knock out an eye against some overhanging shape. Every two or three steps I'd bump into another worker. The only time anybody ever apologized was when they knocked you down.

Bessie, one of the helpers in my gang, met me at the midship bulkhead with the time cards.

'Are you evil too?' she greeted.

'Not at you, beautiful,' I grimaced.

All I knew about her was that she was brown-skinned, straightened-haired, and medium-sized; she wore a hard hat, clean cotton waists, blue denim slacks, and a brown sweater. I'd never looked at her any closer.

'You folks got me almost scared to come to work,' she was saying.

I ducked through the access opening without answering, came to a manhole, went down a jack ladder to the second deck, threaded through a maze of shapes to the sheet-metal toolroom. The Kelly that Conway had been whipping in the car was our supervisor. He was a thin, wiry, nervous Irishman with a blood-red, beaked face and close-set bright blue eyes. He had fought like hell to keep me from being made a leaderman, and we never had too much to say to each other.

I tossed the cards on the desk before the clerk with the late cards on top. She picked them up without saying anything. Kelly looked up from a blueprint he was studying with Chuck, a white leaderman, and his face got redder. He turned back to the print without saying anything, and I turned to go out. He had given me enough jobs to last my gang another week and I didn't see any need to say anything to him either. But before I got out he stopped me.

'How's that coloured gang of yours coming along, Bob?'

It was a moment before I turned around. I had to decide first whether to tell him to go to hell or not. Finally I said, 'Fine, Kelly, fine! My coloured gang is coming along fine.' I started to ask him how were the white gangs coming along, but I caught myself in time.

'You coloured boys make good workers when you learn how,' he said. 'I ain't got no fault to find with you at all.'

Chuck gave me a sympathetic grin.

'Now that's fine,' I said. I opened my mouth to say, 'What do you think about the way we're blasting at Ireland?' but I didn't say it.

I turned to the crib girl and said, 'Let me have S-l4.'

She was a fat, ducky, blue-eyed farm girl with round red cheeks and brownish hair. She widened her eyes with an inquiring look. 'What's that?'

'A print.'

'What's a print?' she asked.

She hadn't been on the job very long so I said patiently, 'A print is a blueprint. They're in that cabinet there. You have the key. Will you unlock the cabinet and give me the print-the

blueprint-marked S-14?'

She unlocked the cabinet reluctantly, giving quick side glances at Kelly to see if he'd say anything, and when she saw that S-l4 was marked 'Not to be taken from office,' she turned to Kelly and asked, 'Can he see this?'

My head began heating up again. Kelly looked up and nodded. She took down the print and handed it to me. 'You'll have to look at it here,' she said.

All the leadermen took out prints. I wanted to explain it to her, knowing that she was new on the job. But she had tried my patience, so I said, 'Listen, little girl, don't annoy me this morning.'

She looked inquiringly at Kelly again, but he didn't look up. I walked out with the print. She called, 'Hey!' indecisively, but I didn't look around.

A white helper was soldering a seam in a trunk while a white mechanic looked on. The mechanic and I had 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 white chickens lay black eggs and the white folks is Jim Crowed while the black folks is-'

He broke off as Smitty came in with a white leaderman named Donald. They didn't see me. He showed Donald where he had cut an opening in his duct for an intake vent, and Donald said he'd cut four inches off the X.

'That's where Bob told me to cut,' he said.

Donald shook his head noncommittally; he was a nice guy and he didn't want to say I was wrong. I'd often wondered if he was a Communist. He had a round moonface, pleasant but unsmiling, and that sharp speculative look behind rimless spectacles that some Communists have.

I stepped into the picture then. 'When did I tell you to cut out there?' I asked Smitty.

Donald turned red. 'Hello, Bob,' he said. 'Smitty said you was off today.'

'Jesus Christ, can't you coloured boys do anything right?' Kelly said from behind me. He had slipped in unnoticed.

Air began lumping in my chest and my eyes started burning. I looked at Kelly. I ought to bust him right on the side of his scrawny red neck, I thought. I'd kill him as sure as hell. Instead I ground out, 'Any mechanic might have made the same mistake. Any mechanic but a white mechanic,' I added.

He didn't get it. 'Yeah, but you boys make too many mistakes. You got to cut it out.'

Donald started moving off. 'I ain't made a single mistake this month, Mr. Kelly.' Conway grinned up at him from where he knelt on the floor, soldering a seam.

Pigmeat nudged me. 'See what I mean? Got 'em skunt back to his ears. He thinks the man a dentist.'

Kelly heard him but acted as if he didn't. He said to Conway, 'I wasn't talking about you. You're a good boy, a good worker. I was talking 'bout some of these other boys.'

In the silence that followed Peaches said, 'Oh, Conway gonna get a raise,' before she could catch herself, having thought we'd keep on talking and she wouldn't be heard. Somebody laughed.

I kept looking at Kelly without saying anything. He turned suddenly and started out. When he had gone Smitty said, 'How come he always got to pick on you? He don't never jump on none of these white leadermen. You know as much as they do.'

I unfolded my rule and tapped the duct he was working on. 'Cut your bottom line ten inches from the butt joint,' I directed, trying to keep my voice steady. He was just a simple-minded, Uncle Tom-ish nigger, I told myself; he couldn't help it. 'You'll have a four-inch gap. Take this duct over to the shop and get a production welder to weld in an insert plate and grind the burrs down as smooth as possible.' I turned and started out, then stopped. 'And remember I'm your leaderman,' I added.

Ben was standing in the opening, grinning at me. He was a light-brown-skinned guy in his early thirties, good-looking with slightly Caucasian features and straight brown hair. He was a graduate of U.C.L.A. and didn't take anything from the white folks and didn't give them anything. If he had been on the job for more than nine months he'd probably have been the leaderman instead of me; he probably knew more than I did, anyway.

I grinned back at him.

He said, 'Tough, Bob, but you got to take it.'