Manhunt. Volume 13, Number 5, September 1965

Blood Brother by Jerry Spafford

He was no seaman... they could sense that. But he was big, and he moved like a fighter... and they could smell danger.

I wiped the blood off my hands with the big blue and white-spotted handkerchief. The white design spreading out from its center looked like a crushed sea-slug. They come in red colors, too. I wished this one was red. I kept wiping my hands on it like the splotches on them were hot, crimson tar. I got them pretty clean, except around the callouses on my palms. I don’t know why I worked so hard at cleaning my hands. They got all slippery again when I raised the Dunlop kid’s head in my cupped palms. All my anger and madness flowed away, seeming to keep pace with the life fluid draining from him. I never would have thought the kid had so much blood.

I knelt beside him, one shoulder pressed for balance against the big steel mooring bit which had cracked his skull. The stern deck vibrated beneath my knees with every lift of the churning screw as the ship pitched to a swell. I looked up at the three big men grouped around me. I stared hardest at Stemweather.

“You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, Stem,” I said. “He’s dead.”

The big man gave a consulsive start at my words. So did the other two, as if jerked by the same string.

“He had it comin’,” growled Stemweather, trying to sound tough to cover his fear. He was scared; I could smell it on him. He added: “Any guy would cheat his own shipmates got it comin’ the same.”

“You don’t kill a man for cheating at cards,” I said.

Stemweather took a step towards me. So did Nova, his brute-faced watch partner. The third man, Joe Pigglia, hung back like he always did, but he would side with the winner.

“Who you think you are, of a sudden?” bellowed Stemweather, waving a big fist at me. “You were—”

Whatever he was about to say was interrupted by the sound of running feet thudding along the wooden cat-walk which ran over the deck cargo on the after deck. Two slim young Filipinos from the stewards department came to a sudden halt in the passageway between the docking bridge and bulwarks. Filipinos are crazy about fights. These two must have heard the scuffling and shouting and decided to watch the show. They had no stomach for this one. They cast one quick, frightened look at me and the bloody-faced kid in my arms and another at the three big men clustered around us, fists clenched, and then took to their heels. Stemweather turned to Nova. “Get after them,” he growled.

Stemweather was a leader and Nova a follower. He didn’t even nod as he took off after the frightened Filipinos. They’d never tell anyone what they’d seen tonight, I knew; not after he got through telling them what would happen if they did.

Stemweather squatted beside me and thrust a rough hand inside the kid’s shirt. As he did so I thought I heard a faint whimper, like a gull’s cry. I shuddered, wondering if it was the sound of the kid’s departing soul. The big man apparently heard nothing.

“You sure he’s dead, Sam?” he asked, his voice gruff.

I nodded, watching him. He shoved me to one side, and grabbed the kid under the shoulders. He looked up at Pigglia.

“What y’ standin’ there for? Grab his feet, Piggy.”

Pigglia blanched, backing away. “I won’t have nothin’ to do with this,” he squealed, his pink fleshy face screwed up in fright.

“You best do what I tell you,” warned Stemweather, his voice flat, an almost cutting edge to it.

Pigglia made some more noises in his throat, the kind you hear in a pet shop, but he took hold of the kid’s legs. Together they lifted the body and began walking toward the far end of the stern, careful to avoid the neatly-flaked mooring lines which are so treacherous underfoot. Stemweather turned his head toward me, the bright moonlight glittering for a moment on his offset eyes.

“You, Sam,” he said, jerking his head at the pool of blood at my feet, “clean up this mess. Break out a fire hose. When you call the engine room for water, tell ’em we had a acid spill on deck. It’ll be dry by mornin’.”

I nodded, my throat suddenly dry. I wiped my hands again on the soggy handkerchief. They felt sticky and I discovered that I was holding them away from me like I wished they weren’t mine. I watched, hearing them grunt as they heaved Dunlop’s body to the rail. They gave it a push. I winced at the sound of the splash as it hit the sea. I could almost see the crimson tinge appear in the rolling froth of water surging out from the threshing screw. An image of the kid’s limp body, rolling and twisting in the turbulent wash, dead eyes staring up at me from the battered white face, was to haunt my mind until the day I died.

After that, I wouldn’t let myself think about it, the Dunlop killing. I trained myself not to think about it. Sometimes though, especially at night on lookout or lying in my bunk, I’d feel the picture of it trying to creep into my brain and force me to take another look. Sometimes I did get this look, and it never was any prettier than the real thing. Most of the time I’d find I could push it away, like I had little hands in my skull, and then I’d keep it away by staring at a star or the lighted tip of my cigarette until my eyes ached and I felt the memory crawl away into the darkness. Nights like these, when it happened, I’d find I was covered with sweat and had a pounding in the back of my head. But one day it all came back in broad daylight, as clear as if it happened yesterday.

This was on a day hot even for a San Pedro summer. The desert-fried Santa Anna blew down on us from the dry hills wavering in the distance, its dust-laden wind drying and cracking my lips. My eyes were bloodshot, burning from the reflected glare of the bright sunlight glancing off the white paint of the amidship house. Visible heat waves shimmered about the steel decks and superstructure, which first absorbed and then rejected the vast stores of heat discharged by the burning sun. The ship was like a giant oven releasing a continuous blast of overheated air. When someone told me it was coffee time, the traditional twenty minute break accorded seamen, I moved wearily into the shade and sagged on the cap rail by the gangway, Frisco jeans and T-shirt plastered to my skin with sweat. The old prune-faced bos’n, a Creole from Louisiana, stood next to me, body bent in the age-old posture of the seaman standing a step away from another trip or escape to shoreside.

We both watched a big, curly-haired guy coming up the dock, noticing how he kept a wary eye on the loaded, and empty, pallet boards rising and falling at the ends of the runners extending from out-thrust, low-hung booms. He walked like a fighter, light and easy and always on balance. He swung the two big suitcases in either hand as if their weight was nothing to him. I guessed, as the bos’n probably did, that he was the last minute replacement for an ordinary seaman who’d unexpectedly quit.

“He no seaman,” grunted the bos’n.

I didn’t pay much attention to the old coot. He said the same thing about anyone who hadn’t started under sail. Still, for some reason, his remark made me curious. I turned my head.

“How can you tell?”

“Too proud,” he said.

As usual, I was sorry I’d asked. He was always saying things like that; giving you an answer that wasn’t an answer. Besides, if he thought the guy coming up the dock was too proud to be a seaman, that meant he thought I had no pride. I’m touchy that way. I take everything personally when it comes to someone being better than me. I think I’m as good as the next guy. Maybe I didn’t finish grade school or learn what fork to use in a fancy restaurant, but all those fancy people weren’t born knowing everything either. Feeling the familiar resentment rising up within me in a sour flood, as it did whenever I got to thinking like this, I gave the bos’n a disgusted look and turned back to watch the guy with the suitcases.

Still, as he drew closer, I found myself agreeing with the bos’n. There was something not right about the look on his face. He was staring up at the ship with the hungry gaze of a captain approaching his first command. It wasn’t natural for an ordinary seaman, that look. Usually a new man looks like someone who has just signed a contract without reading the fine print. ‘The bosn’s right,’ I thought. ‘This guy smells as wrong as a beached whale.’

I watched him closely as he paused at the foot of the gangway, looking up. Suddenly I felt the hair at the back of my neck stir. There was something familiar about his square-jawed face and the set of his hard, blue eyes. And then I knew! This guy was a bigger copy, much bigger, of the Dunlop kid whom I’d last seen slipping over the stern of a ship almost three years ago. I’d seen him more recently in my dreams, too, and that’s why the sight of this guy tied a chain of square knots through my guts. My sweaty T-shirt became clammy, as if a cold breeze had begun blowing at my back.

“I don’t like ’m,” croaked the bos’n, who had been watching the new man, sizing him up with his wise monkey-eyes. He shifted the bulge of snoose under his lip. “This one, he got the smell o’ death about ’m,”

“Why don’t you go peddle your shrunken heads somewhere else?” I snarled at him. His words didn’t untie any of the knots in my belly. I’d caught a whiff of the open grave, too.

The bos’n stared at me, like he was going to say something else, and then shrugged bowed shoulders. Maybe the superstitious old Creole can read my mind, I thought. More likely my thoughts were written all over my face like a navigation chart. I couldn’t even be sure if the old clam-mouth knew more about the Dunlop kid’s death than he would ever tell anyone. If he did, and had sailed with the kid at some time, then he would guess that the guy with the suitcases was the brother. You couldn’t tell with him. But if he knew that much, then he’d figure, like me, that it was pretty odd that the first time Stemweather, Nova, Pigglia and I shipped together since the kid was supposed to have been lost at sea, the older brother should turn up on the same ship. I wondered, without any doubt that it had happened, how much he’d paid the other ordinary seaman to quit. Beyond that, I thought, still quivering inside, it didn’t take much imagination to figure why he’d want to sail with the four of us. I edged away as he climbed the gangway with long, easy strides. His deep voice, a kind of low growl, tightened the knots in my belly.

“The bos’n or deck delegate around?”

“I bos’n,” I heard the Creole answer. “Come, I take you to delegate. You be on 12 to 4 watch.”

The canny old bos’n kept Dunlop apart from the four of us the next two days in port. The one time I stood next to him in the forepeak, waiting for the storekeeper to hand us our tools or paint, he ignored me. Another time, when we were loading stores, it struck me that he never uttered a word throughout the usual kidding and complaining the gang always set up when the stores were late and delaying our knocking-off period. He made no effort to be either agreeable or disagreeable to anyone. For the first time I began to wonder if I’d been wrong about him. I was really whistling into the wind that day.

Stemweather, Nova and Pigglia spent a great deal of time clustered on the deck in tight shifting knots, whispering together and watching Dunlop through narrowed eyes. I could see that they had no doubt who he was or why he was aboard. Stemweather hauled me into their circle when I happened to pass close by the second day after Dunlop’s arrival.

“We gotta watch him, Sam,” he growled, rapping a big knuckle against my chest while Nova and Pigglia nodded agreement. “He’s after the four of us. You’re with us, ain’t you?”

“You better go back to school, Stem,” I growled, not looking at him. “Your arithmetic is all wrong.”

He grunted like I’d pounded a fist below his belt line. I heard the ether two suck in their breath in surprise. “So that’s the way she rolls,” said Stemweather, his voice a husky whisper.

“That’s the way she rolls,” I answered, my voice grating in my throat. I shrugged my arm free of his big hand and walked away, heading amidships. The small of my back tingled until I’d rounded the corner of the house. But I’d steered clear of them for the past three years, and had no intention of altering my course. Not now! Not with a collision in sight.

Next day was sailing day with all its controlled confusion. The shouting, profane longshoremen closed the hatches and the ship’s carpenter, with an ordinary seaman to assist, dogged them down with his heavy air gun. We squared up the booms, securing them aloft with runners and guys, flying them. At ten o’clock that Thursday night, October 12th, we let go the lines, cast off the tug outside the breakwater, bound for San Francisco, less than a day’s run to the north.

Early the next morning I was tired and irritable as my flashlight picked a narrow yellow path up the foredeck toward the foc’slehead. ‘Four o’clock is a lousy time to go on watch,’ I thought. I had the first lookout, and was on my way to relieve the 12 to 4 man. I could see his dim figure in the bow, outlined against the luminous grey sky. A prickle ran up my spine when I recognized Dunlop. I turned off my flashlight, coming to a stop as far away from him as the narrow confines of the bow permitted.

“Okay,” I said, my voice sounding gruff.

“Nothing in sight,” he answered in the litany of the look out.

I shifted my feet on the wooden grating, waiting for him to leave. He continued to lean on the apron, staring straight ahead, smoking a cigarette. His silence struck me as unfriendly.

The sky overhead was like a shifting, upsidedown, grey-black sea, with the silver of moon a reflected steely blade slicing in and out of the murky billowing sea-clouds. Through the rents it carved, a glittering star would peer down and then blink closed like the eye of a hidden watcher in the night. The dark running waves beneath the bow pounded against the hull like the hollow thuds of an undead corpse battering at its coffin. Watching these waves, the way the splayed, black fingers at their crests seemed to reach for me as the bow dipped closer to the surface of the sea, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the Dunlop kid’s dead white face staring up at me from one of the narrow, dark troughs. Everything about me seemed to have turned drab and gloomy. The decks and bulwarks, hemming me in, were grey and black with pockets of inky shadow. The greyness and blackness of it all, the sea, the sky, the ship itself, seemed to seep into my skin, tinting it the same dull, dead shade. Behind me the faint whine of the wind through the taut guys and stays reminded me of the Dunlop kid’s dying whimper as I held his battered body in my arms. When a loud, human-sounding grunt, followed by a loud splash came from beneath the bow, I fell back with a frightened gasp before I realized it was a porpoise broaching the water after it became tired of tickling its tail against the pursuing stem of the ship. Afraid that my action might have given away my thoughts to the silent man next to me, I turned warily toward him. I saw the moonlight glint off his eyes as he turned to look at me.

“Crazy creatures, aren’t they, Hansen,” he said in his deep, purring voice, watching me.

“Yeh,” I answered, making my voice curt. And then I added; “There’s still some fresh coffee in messhall if you want some.”

He ignored my hint; just leaned there, smoking his cigarette and watching me. Finally he straightened, and for some reason my heart gave a lurch.

“You sailed with my kid brother.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no avoiding a reply.

“Yeh,” I felt my stomach muscles contract. He was silent a while longer. When he next spoke, it was like he was talking to himself, and he’d forgotten I was even there.

“He was a good kid. A little wild, but in time he’d have settled down. We thought going to sea would be good for him.”

I didn’t say anything. After a while he turned those glittering eyes on me.

“I heard you tried to help him.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, I talked to a couple of Filipinos who saw part of it.”

I knew what he meant by ‘it’. ‘So’, I thought, ‘the Filipinos had talked.’ He must have paid them plenty to overcome their fear of Stem, Nova and Pigglia. But no amount of money could make them testify in court; I knew that much for sure. No matter how hard Dunlop tried, the official verdict on his brother would remain: Lost at sea. I kept my silence, waiting for his next words. Some of the tension had drained out of me.

“Yes,” he repeated. “They told me how you tried to help him. I owe you something for that.”

Just that. No recriminations. I relaxed a trifle more. “Forget it,” I said, making my voice gruff.

“Not until you have a drink with me in San Francisco.” He was silent, like he had more to spill but didn’t know where the scuppers were. I guessed he wasn’t enjoying this talk any more than I was. He turned his head away again, and I could feel that he was nerving himself to say something more, something important. “Besides,” he added, his voice sounding muffled, “you might be able to tell me something more about how it happened; something you might’ve forgotten at the inquest.”

I felt my neck muscles tighten. When I spoke, my voice had a squeaky sound to it.

“I told everything I know,” I said, ashamed of the fear I could hear in my own voice. “I don’t know anything else.”

“Think about it,” he said, his voice gone suddenly soft, but with a dry whisper to it that rustled through my bones. “I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

A ‘mistake’. There it was! I knew the mistake meant the evening of the score for his brothers death. There was no more need for guesswork. I stared at his dim outline in the darkness, trying to hold it up in my mind’s eye and measure it against the bulk of bone and muscle represented by Stemweather and his two hulking shadows. Despite the heavy list to Stemweather’s side, I found that Dunlop didn’t seem to unbalance much. Still, I knew no one man could stand against them.

“You haven’t got a chance,” I said, blurting it out before a sick feeling in my belly told me I’d given myself away. I don’t know what made me say it. I pressed my clenched fists together, waiting for his next bitter words.

To my surprise, he didn’t answer right away. Maybe he’d guessed all along that I knew more than I’d told at the Coast Guard investigation. Whatever his game was with me, it didn’t seem like he was going to do anything about it right now. He straightened his shoulders, rubbing at his bruised elbows where they’d pressed too long against the cold steel of the apron. I couldn’t see his face in the sudden blackness that had drawn across it when the moon and stars were blacked out by a blanket of dark cloud, but I could feel him staring at me.

“No chance?” he asked, his voice calm again. “Oh, I don’t know, Sam. I could run into them one at a time.”

I felt myself tense at the meaning of his words. ‘One at a time,’ I thought. Like he’s alone with me now. Was he warning me that he hadn’t separated me from the others as he had led me to believe? In the dark I began to clench my fists.

“See you,” he said unexpectedly. Turning, he vanished into the night. I was glad to see him go. I’ve never been afraid of a man before.

The ship made its arrival time in San Francisco right on the nose, though not without the usual manipulations in speed which always caused friction between the skipper and the engineers. If they have as many arguments over atomic fuel as they do over a barrel of oil, I don’t want to be around to get my marrow cooked on a nuclear ship. Anyway, we docked just below the Oakland Bay Bridge at the company pier. It was a good tie-up for once. The pilot knew his onions, or maybe he was just lucky. But, this time, instead of rushing to get cleaned up and dressed to go ashore as I usually did, I found myself dragging my feet in every move I made. Actually the reason for my lagging was that it seemed to me that I had to duck about half the deck department. I wanted to run into Stemweather and his goons about as much as I wanted to meet Frankenstein and his two sons in a dark alley. That went for Dunlop, too. I hoped that by the time I left the ship, they’d have gone; all of them.

I wasted a lot of extra toothpaste and soap. Dunlop was waiting for me at the foot of the gangway. I hardly recognized him. He wore a suit sharp enough to carve his way into a tailors’ convention. I felt the old, familiar stab of jealousy that hit me whenever I ran into someone born into an advantage I never had. He wore his clothes like he’d invented them. My blue serge, which I’d always thought was pretty sharp, seemed to sag and wrinkle and grow old on my back without any middle age in between. What burned me up was the smug way Dunlop wore his suit, as if no one else would look as good in it, even if they could afford the tab.

“We can catch a cab at the gate,” said Dunlop, not even saying hello. He didn’t look at me directly. His eyes fastened on the top of my head like he was measuring me for a hat.

“Okay,” I grunted, staring at a point below his chin. I couldn’t help noticing his tie clasp. I’d never seen one like it. It was a small gold leaf, half the size of your little fingernail. The heavy bar of gold holding my own tie began to crush my chest. ‘Mine probably cost more,’ I remember thinking. But the thought didn’t seem to help a bit.

We turned and began walking along the dock. We both read the destinations stamped on the stacks of cargo piled opposite each hatch of the ship as if the shippers depended upon us for delivery. I usually cut through the warehouse. It was shorter, but I guessed it was too dusty and noisy for Dunlop’s high-faluting taste, or maybe the fumes from the racing forklifts were too rank for his lordship’s dainty nostrils. I knew I was thinking like a kid, but I found myself hating him for making me feel like a slob without saying a word. If someone calls you a slob to your face, you can do something about it, but if he makes you feel like one without saying a word, it leaves you with a helpless anger deep down inside you. That’s the way it is with me. That’s the way it was when I saw Dunlop’s girl for the first time. I was wide open for a sucker punch, like you always are when you’re sore. Whatever it was, at first sight she landed one on my chin that knocked me kicking. No matter what it was, no matter how dumb and impossible it was, it was a score for her, and one that I couldn’t forget, even after she turned on me.

It happened unexpectedly, without warning, this first look at Dunlop’s girl. He’d just raised his arm to hail a cruising cab when her voice halted his arm in mid-air. He looked like a guy who felt a gun being pressed against his back. I turned and saw her first. She was waving as she stepped out the door of a big black limousine, about a block long. Right away I could see how the sound of her voice calling his name could make him do the Statue of Liberty bit.

I’ve known plenty of good looking dames all over the world. I’m sort of big and rugged, and they seem to go for my looks. The only thing is, it never lasts like it does with other guys. This girl in every port bit never worked for me. I guess I’ve got the right chemicals but they’re all mixed wrong. I keep experimenting, but it doesn’t seem to change anything. Women just never hang around me very long. Once they take off, they never come back like they do in the movies. The truth is — I never much cared. At least that’s what I told myself. But it’s a rotten thing for a man to always have the woman walk out on him. As I said, there’s been a lot of them, but never one like this dame — Dunlop’s girl — crossing the cobblestones toward us like she’d been ducking trucks and forklifts all her life.

“Your girl?” I asked, turning to Dunlop, my voice strangely hoarse. I didn’t have to ask; I knew.

He nodded, a dazed look on his face. He was staring at her like I was, only maybe different. To me, she was high society, with the horsey set’s standard equipment. High cheekbones with deep hollows beneath; wide set eyes with more shadowed hollows beneath; a mouth painted on by a famous artist; and that arrogant stride they all have that makes clucks like me get out of their way. This walk of hers showed she was no lean strip of bacon like the suit she wore tried to make out. I’ve got a habit of sort of undressing a girl with my eyes, but with her it didn’t work. I don’t know why I couldn’t make it work with her. I knew she had the goods underneath those expensive clothes.

I saw her face kind of light up at sight of Dunlop. She was so beautiful, half-running toward us the way she was, that I found myself jumping to attention like one of those tin soldiers at West Point. The way her face changed when she saw me standing beside Dunlop was like being hit with a falling boom. It was only a split-second change, that look that came over her face, but I saw it and it registered. I told myself that it was disappointment, that look, disappointment that Dunlop wasn’t alone, and that she would have to hedge her greeting. But I’d seen that expression on a woman’s face before. I knew what it meant. In a glance she’d seen in me someone who didn’t belong. Why kid myself? Either I lacked something they demanded in a man, or had something they didn’t like. They could sense it right away, all of them.

When they came together, Dunlop and her, I turned away and walked off a step or two. I watched them, though. I found myself pretending to say the same things to her Dunlop did, as if she were my girl, not his. When he kissed her, I don’t mean I could feel the kiss, but my nerves jumped just the same. The whole thing was crazy. I didn’t even hate Dunlop for kissing her, for holding her in his arms, even though I found myself aching to do the same thing. I guess maybe at that moment I was even a little grateful to him for giving me the chance to get so close to a girl like her. When he introduced me, and explained why I was there, and that I had been a friend of his kid brother, I don’t know what I said in return. I do remember every word she said, though. It wasn’t much, but I’ll never forget it.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she said, smiling like she meant it. That’s all she said to me right then, but in my moment of madness it meant a lot to me. If I hadn’t seen that flicker of instant dislike a moment ago, I’d have thought she meant what she said. ‘That’s the way these bluebloods are,’ I thought. ‘They can talk to a two-headed man like he was normal.’ I used to say they were all phonies. With her it didn’t seem to matter.

I must have said ‘yes’ when they asked me to have a drink with them at the St. Francis Hotel. If I’d been in my right mind I’d have said no rather than find myself the champion of all third wheels. If I hadn’t been really smashed out of shape by the sight and sound of Dunlop’s girl, I’d have said ‘so long’ after one drink. Anyway, the next thing I knew we were climbing out of that big, sleek boat of a car, and I was shuffling my feet across the lobby of the hotel. I was blinded by so much class and can’t to this day remember what the place looked like. I stumbled in and out of an elevator behind them, and then almost tripped on the nap of a carpet which covered the floor of a cocktail lounge which made me blink. It was the sort of place where you expect to see Cary Grant or Liz Taylor or some other smoothy looking up at you from a table. All the people there looked like that, except me. I could feel everyone staring at me like they wondered who’d let the bars down.

We sat down, and while she and Dunlop chatted I studied her more carefully than I’d ever studied anything in my life before. With my eyes I tried to drain some of her qualities into me. I pressed every feature of her into my brain, where it never faded, even at the last. I watched her mouth, the way her lips moved and changed shape while she talked or smiled; and then I’d watch for the flash of the even white teeth beneath or the glimpse of a pink tongue-tip; next it would be her eyes and the way they sparkled and darted from side to side as if she couldn’t get enough of seeing Dunlop head-on. And I saw the change come into those eyes, too, before I sensed beneath their light talk that they were quarelling. I knew without listening what it was all about. She wanted him to give up his mad plans, get off this ship we were on, and come home to her and his family. It was a familiar old story to me. But it was then that I sensed that there was a shift of interest to me. I wasn’t dumb enough to misunderstand. She was angry and woman-like turned to the nearest man to demonstrate her anger. But it didn’t make any difference to me. I basked in her pretended interest, ignoring Dunlop’s glares. I knew I should have left that table; left them alone. Instead, for the next two hours as we sat in the St. Francis, I made myself drunk with looking at her, with absorbing her into my veins and pumping her through my heart. When she rose to leave, she faced Dunlop with a cold look. He stood looking down at her with a stubborn expression on his face.

“I’m so sorry I must go,” she said, turning to me with that warm smile she had. My heart trembled under its impact. Without another glance at Dunlop, she turned and walked away. We both watched her go. I don’t know how he felt, but me — something in me seemed to stretch out after her like an elastic band, and break with a ‘snap’ you could almost hear when she passed out of sight into the waiting elevator.

We sailed the next day for Yokohama. The weather turned foul as soon as the ship’s bow nosed under the Golden Gate Bridge. The ship began to pitch and roll and the crew to curse and groan, especially the steward’s department. The building tension between Dunlop and Stemweather’s clique became as unpleasant as the weather. Dunlop made no bones about it now; he was openly asking for trouble with them. He allowed doors to slam in their faces; when hauling on a guy, he’d jab one of them with his elbow; or he might shoulder one of them as he passed in the narrow inside alleyways of the house. I knew, we all did, that he’d gone too far when he spilled a pot of grey paint down Stemweather’s back while they were painting the king posts from Bos’n chairs.

The rest of the deck gang stayed clear of the building storm. They were afraid of Stemweather’s group, and didn’t accept Dunlop as one of them. The old Creole bas’n just shook his head, looking gloomy. There was nothing he could do. He could find no fault with Dunlop’s work, which he performed with a kind of mechanical perfection rather than with the easy motions of the experienced seaman. I had a feeling, a very uneasy one, that this day, October 19th, was to be the showdown. I’d seen it happen before, and the signs were the same. At every chance Stemweather and his two ever-present shadows gathered together, muttering and glaring at Dunlop’s unconcerned back. They tried to rope me into their circle again, but I sheared off. After that I didn’t care much for the way their mean eyes began to fix on me, either.

‘Ah nuts!’ I’d say to myself, in an effort to head off my uneasiness. Then I’d start picturing what might happen when I told Dunlop’s girl what happened to him; how she might react if I made myself out a sort of hero who’d tried to help him, and failed. Impossible as these dreams were, and with my knowing it, I kept on with them.

This evening I came off watch certain the human explosion would take place. It had to, all the fuses were burned down to the nub. My guess was Stem’s gang would go for Dunlop tonight, while he slept. I’d seen it happen like that before. The best way for me to keep clear of the whole mess was to go out on deck and stay there until it was over.

I went down to the messhall for a cup of coffee, climbed the ladder back up to the main deck, carrying my heavy mug, and headed for the stern. I thought I’d be alone back there, but when I rounded the custom shack, I heard the sound of soft music. Dunlop, clad in a pair of khaki shorts, for the weather had now turned warm, sat perched on a neatly flaked mooring line, a small transistor radio in one hand. Light from two wall brackets highlighted the smooth bunching of muscles on his big frame. He appeared not to see me. I couldn’t very well walk away, so I sat on a bit, trying to gulp my coffee fast so I could leave on the excuse of getting another. It was lousy coffee, too.

“Nice night,” I commented without enthusiasm. I felt I had to say something. The silence was brittle, almost as if a sudden noise might shatter it.

He didn’t answer, and I cursed in silent embarrassment for speaking. Then I saw that he was listening to some sound, or sounds, other than the music. A shadow stirred in the darkness under the wings of the docking bridge. They came at him.

Nova came in first, a grin on his brute face. His close-cropped head was hunched between his shoulders. He swung a marlin spike in one hand like a club, holding it by the pointed tip. Reversed, it became a vicious dagger. Pigglia came next, Stemweather shoving him from behind. He held a whiskey bottle by the neck, shoulder high. Stemweather moved into the light, big fists out in front. He turned his glittering cockeyes on me.

“You dealt yourself out, it looks, Sam,” he growled at me. “You’d best stay out, hear?”

I nodded, my throat dry. Dunlop threw me a contemptuous look from where he now stood. Nova used his fractional inattention to spring forward, swinging the marlin spike at his head. It seemed impossible that he could miss, but he did. Nova staggered back, howling, as the transistor radio shattered against his face. Pigglia fell back with a squeal. Stemweather grabbed the bottle from his hand with a curse. The bloody-faced Nova came in again, the spike reversed in his hand. Dunlop threw a straight punch at him, the back of his fist up, with the knuckles of the first finger joints extended. The terrible blow caught Nova just under his blunt nose. There was a scream, a crunching sound, and a gout of blood. I think we all knew Nova was dead before he fell face forward to the deck. Pigglia screeched again, in mortal fear, tumbling to the deck as Stemweather thrust him aside with an oath.

“Got you, by God,” roared Stem-weather, swinging the bottle at Dunlop’s head. Dunlop ducked with incredible speed. The bottle shattered on a steel bracket which held an overhead storage space. Before Dunlop could recover, Stemweather, grunting with the effort, thrust the broken shard of bottle deep into his side. Stemweather, face twisted in a triumphant grimace, started a disemboweling slash down and then across Dunlop’s stomach. Dunlop grabbed his thick wrist and twisted. Stemweather’s hand slipped from the neck of the shattered bottle which remained embedded in the other man’s side, blood pouring from its spout. At the same moment both men shifted their grasp to lock their hands about the other’s neck. They stood facing each other, locked close together, glaring into each other’s eyes, each attempting to throttle the other. With their loud breathing stopped, the silence accompanying the death struggle between them served to intensify the horror of it all. But the grisly scene had not yet played itself out. A scuffling sound at the feet of the two dying men drew the eyes of the three of us.

The forgotten Pigglia, the fallen marlin spike in his hand, was rising to his feet to prove himself the most dangerous of them all. His piggy eyes darted and probed at the distorted faces of the two men who were slowly killing each other. A thread of saliva hung from a corner of his mouth. I watched him, frozen to my seat on the bits, as his gimlet eyes attempted to figure the probable winner. Like a shark, he would turn and rend the one who first appeared to be mortally hurt.

The eyes of the two struggling men rolled to watch Pigglia and the lifting spike in his hand. Both had bared their teeth, chests heaving for the air which could not pass tight-squeezed larynx’s. Their bulging eyes fastened upon the spike in Pigglia’s hand as if it hypnotized them,

Dunlop suddenly appeared to gain strength from some unknown source. He arched his back and his great corded arms began to strain upward. Stemweather’s big boots began to dance on the steel deck in an odd shuffle, as if he swung from the end of a short rope. Faster and faster his feet danced. His coarse face began to darken and turn blue, and the swollen tip of his tongue to emerge from between his teeth. Pigglia had found his wounded shark. He swung the marlin spike. It crashed against Stemweather’s head with a dull thud. And then it seemed like the whole crew was milling about us, shoving and shouting and cursing.

I liked being a celebrity, though I wouldn’t depart this now half-completed trial smelling like a rose. The district attorney’s pretended asonishment at my sitting idly by, during the death struggle, as I claimed had seen to that. Later, I began to emerge something like a hero when the two Filipinos took the stand and testified that they’d seen me trying to hold off the other three, Stemweather and his gang, from the badly beaten kid brother some three years before. That is, I was an almost hero while my court appointed attorney questioned them. But when I took the stand, the district attorney ripped me wide open. “Why didn’t you report the murder of the younger Dunlop to the proper authorities?” he thundered at me. The newspaper boys and girls didn’t seem to care. They loved me. I was good copy they said.

I felt good, too. Dunlop’s girl had given me a quick, warm smile of recognition when she first entered the courtroom. She sat in the row of seats behind me, now that Dunlop had finished testifying, about four seats to my right. I knew she didn’t mean anything by the smile, not really, but I went for it anyway, chain and anchor. My insides trembled every time I stole a look at her.

A breath of strange perfume eddied about my head as they were swearing the shrinking Pigglia in on the stand. I snorted when they addressed him as Mister Pigglia. I caught his darting, button eyes in a meaningful glance before I turned to see who belonged to the red fingernail tapping me on the shoulder. The perfume smelled stronger when I faced a pretty blond reporter in a tight red dress. She was with one of the wire services, I knew, for she’d interviewed me earlier with about twenty other reporters. Her green eyes were sparkling with excitement.

“I think I’m free to offer fifteen hundred dollars for an exclusive,” she whispered bringing her soft curls close to my cheek. “How about it, Mr. Hansen?”

I leaned my arm across the back of the long bench until I felt a pleasing softness against my elbow.

“Can’t you raise the ante, honey?” I asked, grinning at her.

“Aw, come on, Sam,” she pleaded, pouting and widening her big eyes at me. “It’ll be a real feather in my cap if you do.”

I pretended to fall for her baby doll look, enjoying myself.

“Okay, honey, it’s a deal.” I felt the tremor of excitement ripple through her breast where it touched my arm. “Come up to my hotel after the trial.”

“Oh, thanks Mr. Hansen,” she gasped, sounding like a kid waking up at Christmas.

“—but I’m warning you,” I added, watching her, “it will take all night.”

The light dulled in her green eyes and her face went stiff and cold. “Sure, Sam,” she said, her voice metallic. “I—”

She suddenly fell back in her seat with a gasp which was echoed from every mouth in the courtroom. I became conscious of Pigglia’s thin squeaking voice, gaining in volume as he spoke. A hush fell over the court. I found myself holding my breath. I began to feel sick; rotten sick.

“—and they told me to stand watch near number seven hatch,” Pigglia was squealing. “I saw them walk back” He paused to cast a frightened look at me “—and then I heard a shout and a — you know — a blow. I was afraid someone might’ve heard. I ran back—” Again he paused, looking like a frightened slug as he stared at me.

He ran his tongue along his thick lips like they were coated with glue. He hunched up on the witness stand like a fat praying mantis. He looked up at the judge, his insect voice squeaking on. “I ran back to the stern, you know, to tell them to keep it quiet. I... I saw young Dunlop getting to his feet, holding his jaw. H... Han... Hansen—” He pointed a dramatic finger at me, and his voice suddenly screeched through the court like a saw hitting a nail. “—Hansen was standing over him with his fists ready... I tried to stop him—” He had tried, the fat slob. “—but he shoved me away and began hitting the Dunlop kid like a crazy man. And then...”

Pigglia’s voice faded for me as my mind filled in the rest. Sure, I’d hit him. How could I ever forget it? I remember every blow, every word, as clearly as if it happened this morning instead of three years ago. I remember saying: “Kid, we don’t like card cheats on this ship.” And I remember his answer, the words that killed him. It wasn’t the words themselves, or the truth in them. All he said was: “The three of you’ve been cheating me for a month, haven’t you?” It was his arrogance, his contempt for me and his smug superiority. He was born with something I’d always wanted, breeding or class or whatever you call it — what Dunlop’s girl was loaded with — and here he was rubbing my nose in my own low-born, cut-rate image. A madness assailed me. I hit out at him. I remember hearing a rib snap beneath one pounding fist, feeling a cheekbone give beneath the other. I began to beat at him with both fists like a madman — like Pigglia said. The brute faced Nova got caught up in my frenzy. He began to pound the kid from the other side. Maybe that’s why he didn’t, couldn’t, go down as he was hurled back and forth between our hammering fists like a rubber-legged rag doll. And then the giant Stemweather stepped forward, a dull redness gleaming far back in his off-set eyes, tongue wetting his dry lips. He drew back his huge fist and slammed it full strength into the kid’s battered face. The kid’s feet flew out from under him. The madness drained out of me as quickly as it had come when I heard his skull shatter against the mooring bits. I knelt beside him, cradling his bloody head in my hands. I glared up at Stemweather. “You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, Stem,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Stemweather, Nova and Pigglia took a step toward me, eyes wide with shock, and then the two Filipinos ran up to see me cradling the kid’s broken body in my arms and shouting at the three big men.

The courtroom was in an uproar. The judge banged his gavel shouting: Order! The reporters thundered out the door like stampeding cattle. I turned to see Dunlop standing, trying to reach me. His lawyer hung on one arm, two burly cops on the other. ‘He’ll follow me all over the world until he kills me,’ I thought. Maybe I said it aloud, I don’t know. I turned back to study the faces of the judge, the district attorney, and the jury. Their faces held a common look of shock and loathing. ‘No mercy there,’ I thought. ‘But still, it’s only Pigglia’s word against mine. I can still beat this rap.’

I turned once more to look at the blond reporter in the tight red dress. She shuddered away from me.

“Brutus,” she hissed, whatever that meant.

And then I looked over and saw the expression on the face of Dunlop’s girl. She gazed at me with such a concentraiton of hatred and loathing that I felt something wither within me, like a flower hit by the flame of a blowtorch. Suddenly I didn’t care anymore what happened to me. I rose to my feet, shaking my lawyer’s hand free from my arm. I started walking toward the witness stand. Pigglia scuttled past like a cowardly crab. I seated myself in the big chair. I was a dead man anyway, wasn’t I? Dunlop would kill me if I went free. His girl would help him if she had the chance. I might as well let the judge and jury stretch my neck.