To Have and Have Not

Chapter Nine

ALBERT SPEAKING

We were all in there at Freddie’s place and this tall thin lawyer comes in and says, “Where’s Juan?”

“He ain’t back yet,” somebody said.

“I know he’s back and I’ve got to see him.”

“Sure, you tipped them off to him and you got him indicted and now you’re going to defend him,” Harry said. “Don’t you come around here asking where he is. You probably got him in your pocket.”

“Balls to you,” said the lawyer. “I’ve got a job for him.”

“Well, go look for him someplace else,” Harry said. “He ain’t here.”

“I’ve got a job for him, I tell you,” the lawyer said.

“You ain’t got a job for anybody. All you are is poison.”

Just then the old man with the long gray hair over the back of his collar who sells the rubber goods specialties comes in for a quarter of a pint and Freddy pours it out for him and he corks it up and scuttles back across the street with it.

“What happened to your arm?” the lawyer asked Harry. Harry has the sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.

“I didn’t like the look of it so I cut it off,” Harry told him.

“You and who else cut it off?”

“Me and a doctor cut it off,” Harry said. He had been drinking and he was getting a little along with it. “I held still and he cut it off. If they cut them off for being in other people’s pockets you wouldn’t have no hands nor no feet.”

“What happened to it that they had to cut it off?” the lawyer asked him.

“Take it easy,” Harry told him.

“No, I’m asking you. What happened to it and where were you?”

“Go bother somebody else,” Harry told him. “You know where I was and you know what happened. Keep your mouth shut and don’t bother me.”

“I want to talk to you,” the lawyer told him.

“Then talk to me.”

“No, in back.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. No good ever comes of you. You’re poison.”

“I’ve got something for you. Something good.”

“All right. I’ll listen to you once,” Harry told him.

“What’s it about? Juan?”

“No. Not about Juan.”

They went back behind the bend of the bar into where the booths are and they were gone quite a while. During the time they were gone Big Lucie’s daughter came in with that girl from their place that she’s always around with, and they sat at the bar and had a Coca-Cola.

“They tell me they ain’t going to let no girls out on the streets after six o’clock at night and no girls in any of the places,” Freddy says to Big Lucie’s daughter.

“That’s what they say.”

“It’s getting to be a hell of a town,” Freddy says. “Hell of a town is right. You just walk outside to get a sandwich and a Coca-Cola and they arrest you and fine you fifteen dollars.”

“That’s all they pick on now,” says Big Lucie’s daughter. “Any kind of sporting people. Anybody with any sort of a cheerful outlook.”

“If something don’t happen to this town pretty quick things are going to be bad.”

Just then Harry and the lawyer came back out and the lawyer said, “You’ll be out there then?”

“Why not bring them here?”

“No. They don’t want to come in. Out there.” “All right,” Harry said and stepped up to the bar and the lawyer went on out.

“What will you have, Al?” he asked me.

“Bacardi.”

“Give us two Bacardis, Freddy.” Then he turned to me and said, “What are you doing now, AI?”

“Working on the relief.”

“What doing?”

“Digging the sewer . Taking the old streetcar rails up.”

“What do you get?”

“Seven and a half.”

“A week?”

“What did you think?”

“How do you drink in here?”

“I wasn’t till you asked me,” I told him. He edged over a little towards me. “You want to make a trip?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“We’ll talk about that.”

“All right.”

“Come on out in the car,” he said. “So long, Freddy.” He breathed a little fast the way he did when he’s been drinking and I walked up along where the street had been tore up, where we’d been working all day, to the corner where his car was. “Get in,” he said.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to find out.”

We drove up Whitehead Street and he didn’t say anything and at the head of the street he turned to the left and we drove across the head of town to White Street and out on it to the beach. All the time Harry didn’t say anything and we turned onto the sand road and drove along it to the boulevard. Out on the boulevard he pulled the car over to the edge of the sidewalk and stopped.

“Some strangers want to charter my boat to make a trip,” he said.

“The customs got your boat tied up.”

“The strangers don’t know that.”

“What kind of a trip?”

“They say they want to carry somebody over that has to go to Cuba to do some business and can’t come in by the plane or boat. Bee-lips was telling me.”

“Do they do that?”

“Sure. All the time since the revolution. It sounds all right. Plenty of people’ go that way.”

“What about the boat.”

“We’ll have to steal the boat. You know they ain’t got her fixed so I can’t start her.”

“How you going to get her out of the sub-base?”

“I’ll get her out.”

“How’re we coming back?”

“I’ll have to figure that. If you don’t want to go, say so.”

“I’d just as soon go if there’s any money in it.”

“Listen,” he said. “You’re making seven dollars and a half a week. You got three kids in school that are hungry at noon. You got a family that their bellies hurt and I give you a chance to make a little money.”

“You ain’t said how much money. You got to have money for taking chances.”

“There ain’t much money in any kind of chances now, Al,” he said. “Look at me. I used to make thirty-five dollars a day right through the season taking people out fishing. Now I get shot and lose an arm, and my boat, running a lousy load of liquor that’s worth hardly as much as my boat. But let me tell you, my kids ain’t going to have their bellies hurt and I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed them. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.”

“I went out on strike against those wages,” I told him.

“And you come back to work,” he said. “They said you were striking against charity. You always worked, didn’t you? You never asked anybody for charity.”

“There ain’t any work,” I said. “There ain’t any work at living wages anywhere.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “But my family is going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they’re trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That’s what I hear. I hear they’re buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they’re going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.”

“You talk like a radical,” I said.

“I ain’t no radical,” he said. “I’m sore. I been sore a long time.”

“Losing your arm don’t make you feel better.”

“The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There’s worse things than lose an arm. You’ve got two arms and you’ve got two of something else. And a man’s still a man with one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then after a minute he says, “I got those other two still.” Then he started the car and said, “Come on, we’ll go see these fellows.”

We rode along the boulevard with the breeze blowing and a few cars going past and the smell of dead sea grass on the cement where the waves had gone over the seawall at high tide, Harry driving with his left arm. I always liked him all right and I’d gone in a boat with him plenty of times in the old days, but he was changed now since he lost his arm and that fellow down visiting from Washington made an affidavit that he saw the boat unloading liquor that time, and the customs seized her. When he was in a boat he always felt good and without his boat he felt plenty bad. I think he was glad of an excuse to steal her. He knew he couldn’t keep her but maybe he could make a piece of money with her while he had her. I needed money bad enough but I didn’t want to get in any trouble. I said to him, “You know I don’t want to get in any real trouble, Harry.”

“What worse trouble you going to get in than you’re in now?” he said. “What the hell worse trouble is there than starving?”

“I’m not starving,” I said. “What the hell you always talking about starving for?”

“Maybe you’re not, but your kids are.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “I’ll work with you but you can’t talk that way to me.”

“All right,” he said. “But be sure you want the job. I can get plenty of men in this town.”

“I want it,” I said. “I told you I want it.”

“Then cheer up.”

“You cheer up,” I said. “You’re the only one that’s talking like a radical.”

“Aw, cheer up,” he said. “None of you Conchs has any guts.”

“Since when ain’t you a Conch?”

“Since the first good meal I ever ate.” He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.

“All right,” I said to him.

“Take it easy,” he said. Ahead of us I could see the lights of this place.

“We’re going to meet them here,” Harry said.

“Keep your mouth buttoned up.”

“The hell with you.”

“Aw, take it easy,” Harry said as we turned into the runway and drove around to the back of the place. He was a bully and he was bad spoken but I always liked him all right.

We stopped the car in back of this place and went into the kitchen where the man’s wife was cooking at a stove. “Hello, Freda,” Harry said to her. “Where’s Bee-lips?”

“He’s right in there, Harry. Hello, Albert.”

“Hello, Miss Richards,” I said. I knew her ever since she used to be in jungle town, but two or three of the hardest working married women in town used to be sporting women and this was a hard working woman, I tell you that. “Your folks all well?” she asked me.

“They’re all fine.”

We went on through the kitchen and into this back room. There was Bee-lips, the lawyer, and four Cubans with him, sitting at a table.

“Sit down,” said one of them in English. He was a tough looking fellow, heavy, with a big face and a voice deep in his throat, and he had been drinking plenty you could see. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” said Harry.

“All right,” said this Cuban. “Have it your own way. Where’s the boat?”

“She’s down at the yacht basin,” Harry said.

“Who’s this?” the Cuban asked him, looking at me.

“My mate,” Harry said. The Cuban was looking me over and the other Cubans were looking us both over. “He looks hungry,” the Cuban said and laughed. The others didn’t laugh. “You want a drink?”

“All right,” Harry said. “What? Bacardi?”

“Whatever you’re drinking,” Harry told him.

“Does your mate drink?”

“I’ll have one,” I said.

“Nobody asked you yet,” the big Cuban said. “I just asked if you drank.”

“Oh, cut it out, Roberto,” one of the other Cubans, a young one, not much more than a kid, said. “Can’t you do anything without getting nasty?”

“What do you mean nasty? I just asked if he drinks. If you hire somebody don’t you ask if he drinks?”

“Give him a drink,” said the other Cuban. “Let’s talk business.”

“What you want for the boat, big boy?” the deep-voiced Cuban called Roberto asked Harry.

“Depends on what you want to do with her,” Harry said.

“Take the four of us to Cuba.”

“Where in Cuba?”

“Cabañas. Close to Cabañas. Down the coast from Mariel. You know where it is?”

“Sure,” said Harry. “Just take you there?”

“That’s all. Take us there and put us ashore.” “Three hundred dollars.”

“Too much. What if we charter you by the day and guarantee you two weeks’ charter?”

“Forty dollars a day and you put up fifteen hundred dollars for if anything happens to the boat. Do I have to clear it?”

“No.”

“You pay for the gas and oil,” Harry told them.

“We’ll give you two hundred dollars to take us over there and put us ashore.”

“No.”

“How much do you want?”

“I told you.”

“That’s too much.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harry told him. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your business is and I don’t know who shoots at you. I got to cross the Gulf twice in the winter time. Anyway I’m risking my boat. I’ll carry you for two hundred and you can put up a thousand for a guaranty nothing happens to the boat.”

“That’s reasonable,” Bee-lips told them. “That’s more than reasonable.”

The Cubans started talking in Spanish. I couldn’t understand them but I knew Harry could.

“All right,” the big one, Roberto, said. “When can you start?”

“Any time tomorrow night.”

“Maybe we don’t want to go until the night after,” one of them said.

“That’s O.K. with me,” Harry said. “Only let me know in time.”

“Is your boat in good shape?”

“Sure,” said Harry.

“She is a nice looking boat,” the young one of them said.

“Where did you see her? “

“Mr. Simmons, the lawyer here, showed her to me.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“Have a drink,” said another of the Cubans. “Have you been to Cuba much?”

“A few times.”

“Speak Spanish?”

“I never learned it,” Harry said.

I saw Bee-lips, the lawyer, look at him, but he is so crooked himself that he’s always more pleased if people aren’t telling the truth. Just like when he came in to speak to Harry about this job he couldn’t speak to him straight. He had to pretend he wanted to see Juan Rodriguez, who is a poor stinking Gallego that would steal from his own mother that Bee-lips has got indicted again so he can defend him.

“Mr. Simmons speaks good Spanish,” the Cuban said.

“He’s got an education.”

“Can you navigate?”

“I can go and I can come.”

“You’re a fisherman?”

“Yes, sir,” said Harry.

“How do you fish with one arm?” the big faced one asked.

“You just fish twice as fast,” Harry told him. “Did you want to see me about anything else?”

“No.”

They were all talking Spanish together. “Then I’ll go,” said Harry.

“I’ll let you know about the boat,” Bee-lips told Harry.

“There’s some money got to be put up,” Harry said.

“We’ll do that tomorrow.”

“Well, good night,” Harry told them.

“Good night,” said the young pleasant speaking one. The big faced one didn’t say anything. There were two others with faces like Indians that hadn’t said anything at all any of the time except to talk in Spanish to the big faced one.

“I’ll see you later on,” Bee-lips said.

“Where?”

“At Freddy’s.”

We went out and through the kitchen again and Freda said, “How’s Marie, Harry?”

“She’s fine now,” Harry told her. “She’s feeling good now,” and we went out the door. We got in the car and he drove back to the boulevard and didn’t say anything at all. He was thinking about something all right.

“Should I drop you home?”

“All right.”

“You live out on the county road now?”

“Yes. What about the trip?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether there’s going to be any trip, See you tomorrow.”

He drops me in front of where we live and I go on in and I haven’t got the door open before my old woman is giving me hell for staying out and drinking and being late to the meal. I ask her how I can drink with no money and she says I must be running a credit. I ask her who she thinks will give me credit when I’m working on the relief and she says to keep my rummy breath away from her and sit down to the table. So I sit down. The kids are all gone to the diamond ball game and I sit there at the table and she brings the supper and won’t speak to me.

Chapter Ten

HARRY

I don’t want to fool with it but what choice have I got? They don’t give you any choice now. I can let it go; but what will the next thing be? I didn’t ask for any of this and if you’ve got to do it you’ve got to do it. Probably I shouldn’t take Albert. He’s dumb but he’s straight and he’s a good man in a boat. He doesn’t spook too easy but I don’t know whether I ought to take him. But I can’t take no rummy nor no nigger. I got to have somebody I can depend on. T f we make it I’ll see he gets a share. But I can’t tell him or he wouldn’t go into it and I got to have somebody by me. It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don’t think I can handle it alone. I t would be much better alone. Albert is better off if he don’t know anything about it. The only thing is Bee-lips. There’s Bee-lips that will know about everything. Still they must have thought about that. They must figure on that. Do you suppose Bee-lips is so dumb he won’t know that’s what they will do? I wonder. Of course maybe that isn’t what they figure to do. Maybe they aren’t going to do any such thing. But it’s natural that’s what they would do and I heard that word. If they do it they’ll have to do it just when it closes or they’ll have the coast guard plane down from Miami. It’s dark now at six. She can’t fly it down under an hour. Once it’s dark they’re all right. Well, if I’m going to carry them I got to figure out about the boat. She won’t be hard to get out but if I take her out tonight and they find she’s gone they’ll maybe find her. Anyway there will be a big fuss. Tonight’s the only time I’ve got to get her out though. I can take her out with the tide and I can hide her. I can see what she needs if she needs anything, if they’ve taken off anything. But I got to fill gas and water. I got a hell of a busy night all right. Then when I’ve got her hid Albert will have to bring them in a speed boat. Maybe Walton’s. I can hire her. Or Bee-lips can hire her. That’s better. Bee-lips can help me get the boat out tonight. Bee-lips is the one. Because sure as hell they’ve figured about Bee-lips. They’ve got to have figured about Bee-lips. Suppose they figure about me and Albert. Did any of them look like sailors? Did any of them seem like they were sailors? Let me think? Maybe. The pleasant one, maybe. Possibly him, that young one. I have to find out about that because if they figure on doing without Albert or me from the start there’s no way. Sooner or later they will figure on us. But in the Gulf you got time. And I’m figuring all the time. I’ve got to think right all the time. I can’t make a mistake. Not a mistake. Not once. Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to do and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. With no boat to make a living with. That Bee-lips. He don’t know what he’s into. He ain’t got any idea what this is going to be like. I hope he shows up pretty soon down at Freddy’s. I got plenty to do tonight. I better get something to eat.

Chapter Eleven

It was about nine-thirty when Bee-lips came into the place. You could see they had given him plenty out at Richard’s because when he drinks it makes him cocky and he came in plenty cocky.

“Well, big shot,” he says to Harry.

“Don’t big shot me,” Harry told him.

“I want to talk to you, big shot.”

“Where? Back in your office?” Harry asked him.

“Yes, back there. Anybody back there, Freddy?”

“Not since that law. Say, how long are they going to have that six o’clock business?”

“Why don’t you retain me to do something about it?” Bee-lips says.

“Retain you hell,” Freddy tells him. And the two of them go back there where the booths and the cases with the empty bottles are.

There was one electric light on in the ceiling and Harry looked in all the booths where it was dark and saw there was no one.

“Well,” he said.

“They want it for late day after tomorrow afternoon,” Bee-lips told him.

“What they going to do?”

“You speak Spanish,” Bee-lips said.

“You didn’t tell them that though?”

“No. I’m your pal. You know that.”

“You’d rat on your own mother.”

“Cut it out. Look at what I’m letting you in on.”

“When did you get tough?”

“Listen, I need the money. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m all washed up here. You know that, Harry.”

“Who don’t know that?”

“You know how they’ve been financing this revolution with kidnapping and the rest of it.”

“I know.”

“This is the same sort of thing. They’re doing it for a good cause.”

“Yeah. But this is here. This is where you were born. You know everybody works there.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to anybody.”

“With those guys?”

“I thought you had cojones.”

“I got cojones. Don’t you worry about my cojones. But I’m figuring on keeping on living here.”

“I’m not,” Bee-lips said.

Jesus, thought Harry. He’s said it himself.

“I’m going to get out,” Bee-lips said.

“When are you going to get the boat out?”

“Tonight.”

“Who’s going to help you?”

“You.”

“Where you going to put her?”

“Where I always put her.”

There was nothing difficult about getting the boat out. It was as simple as Harry had figured it. The night watchman made his rounds on the hour and the rest of the time he was at the outer gate of the old Navy Yard. They came into the basin in a skiff, cut her loose on the ebb tide and she went out herself with the skiff towing her. Outside, while she drifted in the channel, Harry checked the motors and found all they had done was disconnect the distributor heads. He checked the gas and found she had close to a hundred and fifty gallons. They hadn’t syphoned any out of the tanks and she had what he had left coming across that last time. He had filled her up before they started and she had burned very little because they had to come across so slow in the heavy seas.

“I’ve got gas at the house in the tank,” he told Bee-lips. “I can take one load of demijohns out with me in the car and Albert can bring another if we need it. I’m going to put her up in the creek right where it crosses the road. They can come out in a car.”

“They wanted you to be right at the Porter Dock.”

“How can I lay there with this boat?”

“You can’t. But I don’t think they’ll want to do any car driving.”

“Well, we’ll put her there tonight and I can fill and do what needs to be done and then shift her. You can hire a speed boat to bring them out. I got to put her up there now. I got plenty to do. You scull in and drive out to the bridge and pick me up. I’ll be on the road there in about two hours. I’ll leave her and come out to the road.”

“I’ll pick you up,” Bee-lips told him, and Harry with the motors throttled down so that she moved quietly through the water, swung her around and towed the skiff close in to where the riding light of the cable schooner showed. He threw the clutches out and held the skiff while Bee-lips got in.

“In about two hours,” he said.

“All right,” said Bee-lips.

Sitting on the steering seat, moving ahead slowly in the dark, keeping well out from the lights at the head of the docks, Harry thought, Bee-lips is doing some work for his money all right. Wonder how much he thinks he is going to get? I wonder how he ever hooked up with those guys. There’s a smart kid who had a good chance once. He’s a good lawyer, too. But it made me cold to hear him say it himself. He put his mouth on his own self all right. It’s funny how a man can mouth something. When I heard him mouth himself it scared me.

Chapter Twelve

When he came in the house he did not turn on the light but took off his shoes in the hall and went up the bare stairs in his stocking feet. He undressed and got into bed wearing only his undershirt, before his wife woke. In the dark she said, “Harry?” and he said, “Go to sleep, old woman.”

“Harry, what’s the matter?”

“Going to make a trip.”

“Who with?”

“Nobody. Albert maybe.”

“Whose boat?”

“I got the boat again.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“You’ll go to jail, Harry.”

“Nobody knows I’ve got her.”

“Where is she?”

“Hid.”

Lying still in the bed he felt her lips on his face and searching for him and then her hand on him and he rolled over against her close.

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. Now.”

“I was asleep. Do you remember when we’d do it asleep?”

“Listen, do you mind the arm? Don’t it make you feel funny?”

“You’re silly. I like it. Any that’s you I like. Put it across there. Put it along there. Go on. I like it, true.”

“It’s like a flipper on a loggerhead.”

“You ain’t no loggerhead. Do they really do it three days? Coot for three days?”

“Sure. Listen, be quiet. We’ll wake the girls.”

“They don’t know what I’ve got. They won’t never know what I’ve got. Ah, Harry. That’s it. Ah, you honey.”

“Wait.”

“I don’t want no wait. Come on. That’s it. That’s where. Listen, did you ever do it with a nigger wench?”

“Sure.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like nurse shark.”

“You’re funny. Harry, I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish you didn’t ever have to go. Who’s the best you ever did it with?”

“You.”

“You lie. You always lie to me. There. There. There.”

“No. You’re the best.”

“I’m old.”

“You’ll never be old.”

“I’ve had that thing.”

“That don’t make no difference when a woman’s any good.”

“Go ahead. Go ahead now. Put the stump there. Hold it there. Hold it. Hold it now. Hold it.”

“We’re making too much noise.”

“We’re whispering.”

“I got to get out before it’s daylight.”

“You go to sleep. I’ll get you up. When you come back we’ll have a time. We’ll go to a hotel up in Miami like we used to. Just like we used to. Someplace where they never seen either of us. Why couldn’t we go to New Orleans?”

“Maybe,” Harry said. “Listen Marie, I got to go to sleep now.”

“We’ll go to New Orleans?”

“Why not? Only I got to go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep. You’re my big honey. Go on to sleep. I’ll wake you. Don’t you worry.”

He went to sleep with the stump of his arm out wide on the pillow, and she lay for a long time looking at him. She could see his face in the street light through the window. I’m lucky, she was thinking. Those girls. They don’t know what they’ll get. I know what I’ve got and what I’ve had. I’ve been a lucky woman. Him saying like a loggerhead. I’m glad it was a arm and not a leg. I wouldn’t like him to have lost a leg. Why’d he have to lose that arm? It’s funny though, I don’t mind it. Anything about him I don’t mind. I’ve been a lucky woman. There ain’t no other men like that. People ain’t never tried them don’t know. I’ve had plenty of them. I’ve been lucky to have him. Do you suppose those turtles feel like we do? Do you suppose all that time they feel like that? Or do you suppose it hurts the she? I think of the damndest things. Look at him, sleeping just like a baby. I better stay awake so as to call him. Christ, I could do that all night if a man was built that way. I’d like to do it and never sleep. Never, never, no, never. No, never, never, never. Well, think of that, will you. Me at my age. I ain’t old. He said I was still good. Forty-five ain’t old. I’m two years older than him. Look at him sleep. Look at him asleep there like a kid.

Two hours before it was daylight they were out at the gas tank in the garage filling and corking demijohns and putting them in the back of the car. Harry wore a hook strapped to his right arm and shifted and lifted the wicker-covered demijohns handily.

“You don’t want no breakfast?”

“When I come back.”

“Don’t you want your coffee?”

“You got it?”

“Sure. I put it on when we came out.”

“Bring it out.”

She brought it out and he drank it in the dark sit- ting at the wheel of the car. She took the cup and put it on the shelf in the garage.

“I’m coming with you to help you handle the jugs,” she said.

“All right,” he told her and she got in beside him, a big woman, long legged, big handed, big hipped, still handsome, a hat pulled down over her bleached blonde hair. In the dark and the cold of the morning they drove out the county road through the mist that hung heavy over the flat.

“What you worried about, Harry?”

“I don’t know. I’m just worried. Listen, are you letting your hair grow out?”

“I thought I would. The girls have been after me.”

“The hell with them. You keep it like it is.”

“Do you really want me to?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the way I like it.”

“You don’t think I look too old?”

“You look better than any of them.”

“I’ll fix it up then. I can make it blonder if you like it.”

“What have the girls got to say about what you do?” Harry said. “They got no business to bother you.”

“You know how they are. You know young girls are that way. Listen, if you make a good trip, we’ll go to New Orleans, should we?”

“Miami.”

“Well, Miami anyway. And we’ll leave them here.”

“I got some trip to make first.”

“You aren’t worried, are you?”

“No.”

“You know I lay awake almost four hours just thinking about you.”

“You’re some old woman.”

“I can think about you any time and get excited.”

“Well, we got to fill this gas now,” Harry told her.

Chapter Thirteen

At ten o’clock in the morning in Freddy’s place Harry was standing in against the bar with four or five others, and two customs men had just left. They had asked him about the boat and he had said he did not know anything about it.

“Where were you last night?” one of them asked.

“Here and at home.”

“How late were you here?”

“Until the place shut.”

“Anybody see you here?”

“Plenty of people,” Freddy said.

“What’s the matter?” Harry asked them. “Do you think I’d steal my own boat? What would I do with it? “

“I just asked you where you were,” the Customs House officer said. “Don’t get plugged.”

“I’m not plugged,” Harry said. “I was plugged back when they seized the boat without any proof she carried liquor.”

“There was an affidavit sworn to,” the customs man said. “It wasn’t my affidavit. You know the man that made it.”

“All right,” said Harry. “Only don’t say I’m plugged at you asking me. I’d rather you had her tied up. Then I got a chance to get her back. What chance I got if she’s stolen?”

“None, I guess,” said the customs man.

“Well, go peddle your papers,” Harry said.

“Don’t get snotty,” said the customs man, “or I’ll see you get something to be snotty about.”

“After fifteen years,” said Harry.

“You haven’t been snotty fifteen years.”

“No, and I haven’t been in jail either.”

“Well, don’t be snotty or you will be.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. Just then this goofy Cuban that drives a taxi came in with a fellow from the plane and Big Rodger says to him,

“Hayzooz, they tell me you had a baby.”

“Yes, sir,” says Hayzooz very proudly.

“When did you get married?” Rodger asked him. “Lasta month. Montha for last. You come the wedding?”

“No,” said Rodger. “I didn’t come the wedding.”

“You missa something,” said Hayzooz. “You missa damn fine wedding. Whas a matta you no come?”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hayzooz. “I forget. I didn’t ask you. . . . You get what you want?” he asked the stranger.

“Yes. I think so. Is that the best price you have on Bacardi?”

“Yes, sir,” Freddy told him. “That’s the real carta del oro.”

“Listen Hayzooz, what makes you think that’s your baby?” Rodger asks him. “That’s not your baby.”

“What you mean not my baby? What you mean? By God, I no let you talk like that! What you mean not my baby? You buy the cow you no get the calf? That’s my baby. My God, yes. My baby. Belong to me. Yes, sir!”

He goes out with the stranger and the bottle of Bacardi and the laugh is on Rodger all right. That Hayzooz is a character all right. Him and that other Cuban, Sweetwater.

Just then in comes Bee-lips the lawyer, and he says to Harry, “The customs just went out to take your boat.”

Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. Bee-lips went on in this same tone without any expression in it. “Somebody saw it in the mangroves from the top of one of those high WP A trucks and called up from where they’re building the camp out at Boca Chica to the Customs House. I just saw Herman Frederichs. He told me.”

Harry didn’t say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again. Then he said to Bee-lips, “You hear everything, don’t you?”

“I thought you’d like to know,” Bee-lips said in that same expressionless voice.

“It’s none of my concern,” Harry said. “They ought to take better care of a boat than that.”

The two of them stood there at the bar and neither one said anything until Big Rodger and the two or three others had drifted out. Then they went in the back.

“You’re poison,” Harry said. “Everything you touch is poison.”

“Is it my fault a truck could see it? You picked the place. You hid your own boat.”

“Shut up,” Harry said. “Did they ever have high trucks like that before? That’s the last chance I had to make any honest money. That’s the last chance I got to go in a boat where there’s any money.”

“I let you know as soon as it happened.”

“You’re like a buzzard.”

“Cut it out,” Bee-lips said. “They want to go late this afternoon now.”

“The hell they do.”

“They’re getting nervous about something.”

“What time do they want to go?”

“Five o’clock.”

“I’ll get a boat. I’ll carry them to hell.”

“That isn’t a bad idea.”

“Don’t mouthe that now. Keep your mouth off my business.”

“Listen, you big murdering slob,” said Bee-lips, “I try to help you out and get you in on something—”

“And all you do is poison me. Shut up. You’re poison to anybody that ever touched you.”

“Cut it out, you bully.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. “I got to think. All I’ve done is think one thing out and I got it thought out and now I got to think out something else.”

“Why don’t you let me help you?”

“You come here at twelve o’clock and bring that money to put up for the boat.”

As they came out Albert came up to the place and went up to Harry.

“I’m sorry, Albert, I can’t use you,” Harry said. He had thought it out that far already.

“I’d go cheap,” Albert said.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said. “I got no need for you now.”

“You won’t get a good man for what I’ll go for,” Albert said.

“I’m going by myself.”

“You don’t want to make a trip like that alone,” Albert said.

“Shut up,” said Harry. “What do you know about it? Do they teach you my business on the relief?”

“Go to hell,” said Albert.

“Maybe I will,” said Harry. Anybody looking at him could tell he was thinking plenty fast and he did not want to be bothered.

“I’d like to go,” Albert said.

“I can’t use you,” Harry said. “Let me alone, will you?”

Albert went out and Harry stood there at the bar looking at the nickel machine, the two dime machines and the quarter machine and at the picture of Custer’s Last Stand on the wall as though he’d never seen them.

“That was a good one Hayzooz told Big Rodger about the baby, wasn’t it?” Freddy said to him, putting some coffee glasses in the bucket of soapy water.

“Give me a package of Chesterfields,” Harry said to him. He held the package under the flap of his arm and opened it at one corner, took a cigarette out and put it in his mouth, then dropped the package in his pocket and lit the cigarette.

“What shape’s your boat in, Freddy?” he asked.

“I just had her on the ways,” Freddy said. “She’s in good shape.”

“Do you want to charter her?”

“What for?”

“For a trip across.”

“Not unless they put up the value of her.”

“What’s she worth?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

“I’ll charter her,” Harry said. “Will you trust me on her?”

“No,” Freddy told him.

“I’ll put up the house as security.”

“I don’t want your house. I want twelve hundred bucks up.”

“All right,” Harry said.

“Bring around the money,” Freddy told him.

“When Bee-lips comes in, tell him to wait for me,” Harry said and went out.

Chapter Fourteen

Out at the house Marie and the girls were having lunch.

“Hello Daddy,” said the oldest girl. “Here’s Daddy.”

“What have you got to eat?” Harry asked.

“We’ve got a steak,” Marie said.

“Somebody said they stole your boat, Daddy.”

“They found her,” Harry said.

Marie looked at him.

“Who found her?” she asked.

“The Customs.”

“Oh, Harry,” she said, full of pity.

“Isn’t it better they found her, Daddy?” asked the second one of the girls.

“Don’t talk while you’re eating,” Harry told her. “Where’s my dinner? What you waiting for?”

“I’m bringing it.”

“I’m in a hurry,” Harry said. “You girls eat up and get out. I got to talk to your mother.”

“Can we have some money to go to the show this aft, Daddy?”

“Why don’t you go swimming. That’s free.”

“Oh, Daddy, it’s too cold to go swimming, and we want to go to the show.”

“All right,” said Harry. “All right.”

When the girls were out of the room he said to Marie, “Cut it up, will you?”

“Sure, Honey.”

She cut the meat as for a small boy.

“Thanks,” Harry said. “I’m a hell of a goddamn nuisance, ain’t I? Those girls aren’t much, are they?”

“No, Hon.”

“Funny we couldn’t get no boys.”

“That’s because you’re such a man. That way it always comes out girls.”

“I ain’t no hell of a man,” Harry said. “But listen, I’m going on a hell of a trip.”

“Tell me about the boat.”

“They saw it from a truck. A high truck.”

“Shucks.”

“Worse than that. Shit.”

“Aw, Harry, don’t talk like that in the house.”

“You talk worse than that in bed sometimes.”

“That’s different. I don’t like to hear shit at my own table.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Aw, Honey, you feel bad,” Marie said. “No,” said Harry. “I’m just thinking.”

“Well, you think it out. I got confidence in you.” “I got confidence. That’s the only thing I have got.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No. Only don’t worry no matter what you hear.”

“I won’t worry.”

“Listen, Marie. Go on up to the upstairs trap and bring me the Thompson gun and look in that wooden box with the shells and see all the clips are filled.”

“Don’t take that.”

“I got to.”

“Do you want any boxes of shells?”

“No. I can’t load any clips. I got four clips.”

“Honey, you aren’t going on that kind of a trip?”

“I’m going on a bad trip.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God, I wish you didn’t have to do these things.”

“Go on and get it and bring it down here. Get me some coffee.”

“O.K.,” said Marie. She leaned over the table and kissed him on the mouth.

“Leave me alone,” Harry said. “I got to think.”

He sat at the table and looked at the piano, the sideboard and the radio, the picture of September Morn, and the pictures of the cupids holding bows behind their heads, the shiny, real-oak table and the shiny real-oak chairs and the curtains on the windows and he thought, What chance have I to enjoy my home? Why am I back to worse than where I started? It’ll all be gone too if I don’t play this right. The hell it will. I haven’t got sixty bucks left outside of the house, but I’ll get a stake out of this. Those damn girls. That’s all that old woman and I could get with what we’ve got. Do you suppose the boys in her went before I knew her?

“Here it is,” said Marie, carrying it by the web sling strap. “They’re all full.”

“I got to go,” Harry said. He lifted the chunky weight of the dismounted gun in its oil-stained, canvas-web case. “Put it under the front seat of the car.”

“Good-bye,” Marie said.

“Good-bye, old woman.”

“I won’t worry. But please take care of yourself.”

“Be good.”

“Aw, Harry,” she said and held him tight against her.

“Let me go. I ain’t got no time.”

He patted her on the back with his arm stump.

“You and your loggerhead flipper.” she said. “Oh, Harry. Be careful.”

“I got to go. Good-bye, old woman.”

“Good-bye, Harry.”

She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide- shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.”

Chapter Fifteen

There were three tourists at the bar at Freddy’s and Freddy was serving them. One was a very tall, thin, wide-shouldered man, in shorts, wearing thick-lensed spectacles, tanned, with small closely trimmed sandy mustache. The woman with him had her blonde curly hair cut short like a man’s, a bad complexion, and the face and build of a lady wrestler. She wore shorts, too.

“Oh, nerts to you,” she was saying to the third tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a rusty-colored mustache, a white cloth hat with a green celluloid visor, and a trick of talking with a rather extraordinary movement of his lips as though he were eating something too hot for comfort.

“How charming,” said the green-visored man. “I’d never heard the expression actually used in conversation. I thought it was an obsolete phrase, something one saw in print in—er—the funny papers but never heard.”

“Nerts, nerts, double nerts to you,” said the lady wrestler lady in a sudden access of charm, giving him the benefit of her pimpled profile.

“How beautiful,” said the green-visored man.

“You put it so prettily. Isn’t it from Brooklyn originally?”

“You mustn’t mind her. She’s my wife,” the tall tourist said. “Have you two met?”

“Oh, nerts to him and double nerts to meeting him,” said the wife. “How do you do?”

“Not so badly,” the green-visored man said. “How do you do?”

“She does marvellously,” the tall one said. “You ought to see her.”

Just then Harry came in and the tall tourist’s wife said, “Isn’t he wonderful? That’s what I want. Buy me that, Papa.”

“Can I speak to you?” Harry said to Freddy.

“Certainly. Go right ahead and say anything you like,” the tall tourist’s wife said.

“Shut up, you whore,” Harry said. “Come in the back, Freddy.”

In the back was Bee-lips, waiting at the table.

“Hello, Big Boy,” he said to Harry.

“Shut up,” said Harry.

“Listen,” Freddy said. “Cut it out. You can’t get away with that. You can’t call my trade names like that. You can’t call a lady a whore in a decent place like this.

“A whore,” said Harry. “Hear what she said to me?”

“Well, anyway, don’t call her a name like that to her face.”

“All right. You got the money?”

“Of course,” said Bee-lips. “Why wouldn’t I have the money? Didn’t I say I’d have the money?”

“Let’s see it.”

Bee-lips handed it over. Harry counted ten hundred-dollar bills and four twenties.

“It should be twelve hundred.”

“Less my commission,” said Bee-lips.

“Come on with it.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You miserable little crut.”

“You big bully,” Bee-lips said. “Don’t try to strong arm it away from me because I haven’t got it here.”

“I see,” said Harry. “I should have thought of that. Listen Freddy. You’ve known me a long time. I know she’s worth twelve hundred. This is a hundred and twenty short. Take it and take a chance on the hundred and twenty and the charter.”

“That’s three hundred and twenty dollars,” Freddy said. It was a painful sum for him to name as a risk, and he sweated while he thought about it.

“I got a car and a radio in the house that’s good for it.”

“I can make out a paper on that,” Bee-lips said. “I don’t want any paper,” Freddy said. He sweat again and his voice was hesitant. Then he said, “All right. I’ll take a chance. But for Christ’s sake be careful with the boat, will you Harry?”

“Like it was my own.”

“You lost your own,” said Freddy, still sweating, his suffering now intensified by that memory.

“I’ll take care of her.”

“I’ll put the money in my box in the bank,” Freddy said.

Harry looked at Bee-lips.

“That’s a good place,” he said, and grinned.

“Bartender,” someone called from the front.

“That’s you,” Harry said.

“Bartender,” came the voice again.

Freddy went out to the front.

“That man insulted me,” Harry could hear the high voice saying, but he was talking to Bee-lips.

“I’ll be tied up to the dock there at the front of the street. It isn’t half a block.”

“All right.”

“That’s all.”

“All right, Big Shot.”

“Don’t you big shot me.”

“However you like.”

“I’ll be there from four o’clock on.”

“Anything else?”

“They got to take me by force, see? I know nothing about it. I’m just working on the engine. I got nothing aboard to make a trip. I’ve hired her from Freddy to go charter fishing. They’ve got to hold a gun on me to make me start her and they’ve got to cut loose the lines.”

“What about Freddy? You didn’t hire her to go fishing from him.”

“I’m going to tell Freddy.”

“You better not.”

“I’m going to.”

“You better not.”

“Listen, I’ve done business with Freddy since during the war. Twice I’ve been partners with him and we never had trouble. You know how much stuff I’ve handled for him. He’s the only son-of-a-bitch in this town I would trust.”

“I wouldn’t trust anybody.”

“You shouldn’t. Not after the experiences you’ve had with yourself.”

“Lay off me.”

“All right. Go out and see your friends. What’s your out?”

“They’re Cubans. I met them out at the roadhouse. One of them wants to cash a certified check. What’s wrong with that?”

“And you don’t notice anything?”

“No. I tell them to meet me at the bank.”

“Who drives them?”

“Some taxi.”

“What’s he supposed to think they are, violinists?”

“We’ll get one that don’t think. There’s plenty of them that can’t think in this town. Look at Hayzooz.”

“Hayzooz is smart. He just talks funny.”

“I’ll have them call a dumb one.”

“Get one hasn’t any kids.”

“They all got kids. Ever see a taxi driver without kids?”

“You are a goddamn rat.”

“Well, I never killed anybody,” Bee-lips told him.

“Nor you never will. Come on, let’s get out of here. Just being with you makes me feel crummy.”

“Maybe you are crummy.”

“Can you get them from talking?”

“If you don’t paper your mouth.”

“Paper yours then.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Harry said.

Out in front the three tourists sat on their high stools. As Harry came up to the bar the woman looked away from him to register disgust.

“What will you have?” asked Freddy.

“What’s the lady drinking,” Harry asked.

“A Cuba Libre.”

“Then give me a straight whiskey.”

The tall tourist with the little sandy mustache and the thick-lensed glasses leaned his large, straight-nosed face over toward Harry and said, “Say, what’s the idea of talking that way to my wife?”

Harry looked him up and down and said to Freddy, “What kind of a place you running?”

“What about it?” the tall one said.

“Take it easy,” Harry said to him.

“You can’t pull that with me.”

“Listen,” Harry said. “You came down here to get well and strong, didn’t you? Take it easy.” And he went out.

“I should have hit him, I guess,” the tall tourist said. “What do you think, dear?”

“I wish I was a man,” his wife said.

“You’d go a long way with that build,” the green-visored man said into his beer.

“What did you say,” the tall one asked.

“I said you could find out his name and address and write him a letter telling him what you think of him.”

“Say, what’s your name, anyway? What are you doing, kidding ,me?”

“Just call me Professor MacWalsey.”

“My name’s Laughton,” the tall one said. “I’m a writer.”

“I’m glad to meet you,” Professor MacWalsey said. “Do you write often?”

The tall man looked around him. “Let’s get out of here, dear,” he said. “Everybody is either insulting or nuts.”

“It’s a strange place,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Fascinating, really. They call it the Gibraltar of America and it’s three hundred and seventy-five miles south of Cairo, Egypt. But this place is the only part of it I’ve had time to see yet. It’s a fine place though.”

“I see you’re a professor all right,” the wife said. “You know, I like you.”

“I like you too, darling,” Professor MacWalsey said. “But I have to go now.”

He got up and went out to look for his bicycle.

“Everybody is nuts here,” the tall man said. “Should we have another drink, dear?”

“I liked the professor,” the wife said. “He had a sweet manner.”

“That other fellow—”

“Oh, he had a beautiful face,” the wife said. “Like a Tartar or something. I wish he hadn’t been insulting. He looked kind of like Ghengis Khan in the face. Gee, he was big.”

“He had only one arm,” her husband said.

“I didn’t notice,” the wife said. “Should we have another drink? I wonder who’ll come in next!”

“Maybe Tamerlane,” the husband said.

“Gee, you’re educated,” the wife said. “But that Ghengis Khan one would do me. Why did the Professor like to hear me say nerts?”

“I don’t know, dear,” Laughton, the writer, said. “I never did.”

“He seemed to like me for what I really am,” the wife said. “My, he was nice.”

“You’ll probably see him again.”

“Any time you come in here you’ll see him,” Freddy said. “He lives in here. He’s been here for two weeks now.”

“Who’s the other one who speaks so rude?”

“Him? Oh, he’s a fellow from around here.”

“What does he do?”

“Oh, a little of everything,” Freddy told her.

“He’s a fisherman.”

“How did he lose his arm?”

“I don’t know. He got it hurt some way.”

“Gee, he’s beautiful,” the wife said.

Freddy laughed. “I heard him called a lot of things but I never heard him called that.”

“Don’t you think he has a beautiful face?”

“Take it easy, lady,” Freddy told her. “He’s got a face like a ham with a broken nose on it.”

“My, men are stupid,” the wife said. “He’s my dream man.”

“He’s a bad-dream man,” Freddy said.

All this time the writer sat there with a sort of stupid look on his face except when he’d look at his wife admiringly. Anyone would have to be a writer or a F.E.R.A. man to have a wife look like that, Freddy thought. God, isn’t she awful?

Just then in came Albert.

“Where’s Harry?”

“Down at the dock.”

“Thanks,” said Albert.

He went out and the wife and the writer kept on sitting there and Freddy stood there worrying about the boat and thinking how his legs hurt from standing up all day. He had put a grating over the cement but it didn’t seem to do much good. His legs ached all the time. Still he was doing a good business, as good as anybody in town and with less overhead. That woman was goofy all right. And what kind of a man was it would pick out a woman like that to live with? Not even with your eyes shut, thought Freddy. Not with a borrowed. Still they were drinking mixed drinks. Expensive drinks. That was something.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Right away.”

A tanned-faced, sandy-haired, well-built man wearing a striped fisherman’s shirt and khaki shorts came in with a very pretty dark girl who wore a thin, white wool sweater and dark blue slacks.

“If it isn’t Richard Gordon,” said Laughton, standing up, “with the lovely Miss Helen.”

“Hello, Laughton,” said Richard Gordon. “Did you see anything of a rummy professor around here?”

“He just went out,” said Freddy.

“Do you want a vermouth, sweetheart?” Richard Gordon asked his wife.

“If you do,” she said. Then said. “Hello,” to the two Laughtons. “Make mine two parts of French to one Italian, Freddy.”

She sat on a high stool with her legs tucked under her and looked out at the street. Freddy looked at her admiringly. He thought she was the prettiest stranger in Key West that winter. Prettier even than the famous beautiful Mrs. Bradley. Mrs. Bradley was getting a little big. This girl had a lovely Irish face, dark hair that curled almost to her shoulders and smooth clear skin. Freddy looked at her brown hand holding the glass.

“How’s the work?” Laughton asked Richard Gordon.

“I’m going all right,” Gordon said. “How are you doing?”

“James won’t work,” Mrs. Laughton said. “He just drinks.”

“Say, who is this Professor MacWalsey?” Laughton asked.

“Oh, he’s some sort of professor of economics I think, on a sabbatical year or something. He’s a friend of Helen’s.”

“I like him,” said Helen Gordon.

“I like him, too,” said Mrs. Laughton.

“I liked him first,” Helen Gordon said happily.

“Oh, you can have him,” Mrs. Laughton said. “You good little girls always get what you want.”

“That’s what makes us so good,” said Helen Gordon.

“I’ll have another vermouth,” said Richard Gordon. “Have a drink?” he asked the Laughtons.

“Why not,” said Laughton. “Say, are you going to that big party the Bradleys are throwing tomorrow?”

“Of course he is,” said Helen Gordon.

“I like her, you know,” said Richard Gordon. “She interests me both as a woman and as a social phenomenon.”

“Gee,” said Mrs. Laughton. “You can talk as educated as the Professor.”

“Don’t strut your illiteracy, dear,” said Laughton.

“Do people go to bed with a social phenomenon?” asked Helen Gordon, looking out the door.

“Don’t talk rot,” said Richard Gordon.

“I mean is it part of the homework of a writer?” Helen asked.

“A writer has to know about everything,” Richard Gordon said. “He can’t restrict his experience to conform to Bourgeois standards.”

“Oh,” said Helen Gordon. “And what does a writer’s wife do?”

“Plenty, I guess,” Mrs. Laughton said. “Say, you ought to have seen the man who was just in here and insulted me and James. He was terrific.”

“I should have hit him,” Laughton said.

“He was really terrific,” said Mrs. Laughton.

“I’m going home,” said Helen Gordon. “Are you coming, Dick?”

“I thought I’d stay down town a while,” Richard Gordon said.

“Yes?” said Helen Gordon, looking in the mirror behind Freddy’s head.

“Yes,” Richard Gordon said.

Freddy, looking at her, figured that she was going to cry. He hoped it wouldn’t happen in the place.

“Don’t you want another drink?” Richard Gordon asked her.

“No.” She shook her head.

“Say, what’s the matter with you?” asked Mrs. Laughton. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“A dandy time,” said Helen Gordon. “But I think I’d better go home just the same.”

“I’ll be back early,” Richard Gordon said.

“Don’t bother,” she told him. She went out. She hadn’t cried. She hadn’t found John MacWalsey either.

Chapter Sixteen

Down at the dock Harry Morgan had driven up alongside of where the boat lay, seen there was no one around, lifted the front seat of his car, skidded the flat, web, oil-heavy case out and dropped it down into the cockpit of the launch.

He got in himself and opened the engine hatch and put the machine gun case below out of sight. He turned on the gas valves and started both engines. The starboard engine ran smoothly after a couple of minutes, but the port engine missed on the second and fourth cylinders and he found the plugs were cracked, looked for some new plugs, but couldn’t find them.

“Got to get plugs and fill gas,” he thought.

Below with the engines, he opened the machine gun case and fitted the stock to the gun. He found two pieces of fan belting and four screws, and cutting slits in the belting rigged a sling to hold the gun under the cockpit floor to the left of the hatch; just over the port engine. It lay there, cradled easily, and he shoved a clip from the four held in the web pockets in the case up into the gun. Kneeling between the two engines he reached up to take the gun. There were only two movements to make. First unhook the strap of belting that passed around the receiver just behind the bolt. Then pull the gun out of the other loop. He tried it and it came easily one-handed. He pushed the little lever all the way over from semi-automatic to automatic and made sure the safety was on. Then he fastened it up again. He could not figure out where to put the extra clips; so he shoved the case under a gas tank below, where he could reach it, with the butts of the clips lying toward his hand. If I go down a time first after we’re underway, I can put a couple in my pocket, he thought. Be better not to have it on but something might jar the damn thing off.

He stood up. It was a fine clear afternoon, pleasant, not cold, with a light north breeze. It was a nice afternoon all right. The tide was running out and there were two pelicans sitting on the piling at the edge of the channel. A grunt fishing boat, painted dark green, chugged past on the way around to the fish market, the Negro fisherman sitting in the stern holding the tiller. Harry looked out across the water, smooth with the wind blowing with the tide, gray blue in the afternoon sun, out to the sandy island formed when the channel was dredged where the shark camp had been located. There were white gulls flying over the island.

“Be a pretty night,” Harry thought. “Be a nice night to cross.”

He was sweating a little from being down around the engines, and he straightened up and wiped his face with a piece of waste.

There was Albert on the dock.

“Listen, Harry,” he said. “I wish you’d carry me.”

“What’s the matter with you now?”

“They’re only going to give us three days a week on the relief now. I just heard about it this morning. I got to do something.”

“All right,” said Harry. He had been thinking again. “All right.”

“That’s good,” said Albert. “I was afraid to go home to see my old woman. She gave me hell this noon like it was me had laid off the relief.”

“What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?”

“You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.”

“Listen, AI,” Harry told him. “Take my car and this and go around to the Marine Hardware and get six metric plugs like this one. Then go get a 20-cent piece of ice and a half a dozen mullets. Get two cans of coffee, four cans of cornbeef, two loaves of bread, some sugar and two cans of condensed milk. Stop at the Sinclair and tell them to come down here and put in a hundred and fifty gallons. Get back as soon as you can and change the number two and the number four plugs in the port engine counting back from the flywheel. Tell them I’ll be back to pay for the gas. They can wait or find me at Freddy’s. Can you remember all that? We’re taking a party out tarponing and fishing them tomorrow.”

“It’s too cold for tarpon,” Albert said.

“The party says no,” Harry told him.

“Hadn’t I better get a dozen mullets?” Albert asked. “In case the jacks tear ’em up? There’s plenty jacks now in those channels.”

“Well, make it a dozen. But get back inside an hour and have the gas filled.”

“Why you want to put in so much gas?”

“We may be running early and late and not have time to fill.”

“What’s become of those Cubans that wanted to be carried?”

“Haven’t heard anything more from them.”

“That was a good job.”

“This is a good job too. Come on, get going.”

“What am I going to be working for?”

“Five bucks a day,” said Harry. “If you don’t want it don’t take it.”

“All right,” said Albert. “Which plugs was it?”

“The number two and the number four counting back from the flywheel,” Harry told him. Albert nodded his head. “I guess I can remember,” he said. He got into the car and made a turn in it and went off up the street.

From where Harry stood in the boat he could see the brick and stone building and the front entrance of the First State Trust and Savings Bank. It was just a block down at the foot of the street. He couldn’t see the side entrance. He looked at his watch. It was a little after two o’clock. He shut the engine hatch and climbed up on the dock. Well, now it comes off or it doesn’t, he thought. I’ve done what I can now. I’ll go up and see Freddy and then I’ll come back and wait. He turned to the right as he left the dock and walked down a back street so that he would not pass the bank.

Chapter Seventeen

In at Freddy’s he wanted to tell him about it but he couldn’t. There wasn’t anybody in the bar and he sat on a stool and wanted to tell him, but it was impossible. As he was ready to tell him he knew Freddy would not stand for it. In the old days, maybe, yes, but not now. Maybe not in the old days either. It wasn’t until he thought of telling it to Freddy that he realized how bad it was. I could stay right here, he thought, and there wouldn’t be anything. I could stay right here and have a few drinks and get hot and I wouldn’t be in it. Except there’s my gun on the boat. But nobody knows it’s mine except the old woman. I got it in Cuba on a trip the time when I peddled those others. Nobody knows I’ve got it. I could stay here now and I’d be out of it. But what the hell would they eat on? Where’s the money coming from to keep Marie and the girls? I’ve got no boat, no cash, I got no education. What can a one-armed man work at? All I’ve got is my cojones to peddle. I could stay right here and have say five more drinks and it would all be over. It would be too late then. I could just let it all slide and do nothing.

“Give me a drink” he said to Freddy.

“Sure.”

I could sell the house and we could rent until I got some kind of work. What kind of work? No kind of work. I could go down to the bank and squeal now and what would I get? Thanks. Sure. Thanks. One bunch of Cuban government bastards cost me my arm shooting at me with a load when they had no need to and another bunch of U. S. ones took my boat. Now I can give up my home and get thanks. No thanks. The hell with it, he thought. I got no choice in it.

He wanted to tell Freddy so there would be someone knew what he was doing. But he couldn’t tell him because Freddy wouldn’t stand for it. He was making good money now. There was nobody much in the daytime, but every night the place was full until two o’clock. Freddy wasn’t in a jam. He knew he wouldn’t stand for it. I have to do it alone, he thought, with that poor bloody Albert. Christ, he looked hungrier than ever down at the dock. There were Conchs that would starve to death before they’d steal all right. Plenty in this town with their bellies hollering right now. But they’d never make a move. They’d just starve a little every day. They started starving when they were born; some of them.

“Listen, Freddy,” he said. “I want a couple of quarts.”

“Of what?”

“Bacardi.”

“O.K.”

“Pull the corks, will you? You know I wanted to charter her to take some Cubans over.”

“That’s what you said.”

“I don’t know when they’ll be going. Maybe tonight. I haven’t heard.”

“She’s ready to go anytime. You’ve got a nice night if you cross tonight.”

“They said something about going fishing this afternoon.”

“She’s got tackle on board if the pelicans haven’t stole it off her.”

“It’s still there.”

“Well, make a good trip,” Freddy said.

“Thanks. Give me another one, will you?”

“Of what?”

“Whiskey.”

“I thought you were drinking Bacardi.”

“I’ll drink that if I get cold going across.”

“You’ll cross with this breeze astern all the way,” said Freddy. “I’d like to cross tonight.”

“It’ll be a pretty night all right. Let me have another, will you?”

Just then in came the tall tourist and his wife.

“If it isn’t my dream man,” she said, and sat down on the stool beside Harry.

He took one look at her and stood up.

“I’ll be back, Freddy,” he said. “I’m going down to the boat in case that party wants to go fishing.”

“Don’t go,” the wife said. “Please don’t go.”

“You’re comical,” Harry said to her and he went out.

Down the street Richard Gordon was on his way to the Bradleys’ big winter home. He was hoping Mrs. Bradley would be alone. She would be. Mrs. Bradley collected writers as well as their books but Richard Gordon did not know this yet. His own wife was on her way home walking along the beach. She had not run into John MacWalsey. Perhaps he would come by the house.

Chapter Eighteen

Albert was on board the boat and the gas was loaded.

“I’ll start her up and try how those two cylinders hit,” Harry said. “You got the things stowed?”

“Yes.”

“Cut some baits then.”

“You want a wide bait?”

“That’s right. For tarpon.”

Albert was on the stern cutting baits and Harry was at the wheel warming up the motors when he heard a noise like a motor backfiring. He looked down the street and saw a man come out of the bank. He had a gun in his hand and he came running. Then he was out of sight. Two more men came out carrying leather brief cases and guns in their hands and ran in the same direction. Harry looked at Albert busy cutting baits. The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thompson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop-bop- bop, small and hollow sounding in the wail of the siren. The man turned and ran, stopping to fire once more at the bank door, and as Albert stood up in the stern saying, “Christ, they’re robbing the bank. Christ, what can we do?” Harry heard the Ford taxi coming out of the side street and saw it careening up onto the dock.

There were three Cubans in the back and one beside the driver.

“Where’s the boat?” yelled one in Spanish.

“There, you fool,” said another.

“That’s not the boat.”

“That’s the captain.”

“Come on. Come on for Christ sake.”

“Get out,” said the Cuban to the driver. “Get your hands up.”

As the driver stood beside the car he put a knife inside his belt and ripping it toward him cut the belt and slit his pants almost to the knee. He yanked the trousers down. “Stand still,” he said. The two Cubans with the valises tossed them into the cockpit of the launch and they all came tumbling aboard.

“Geta going,” said one. The big one with the machine gun poked it into Harry’s back.

“Come on, Cappie,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “Point that someplace else.”

“Cast off those lines,” the big one said. “You!” to Albert.

“Wait a minute,” Albert said. “Don’t start her. These are the bank robbers.”

The biggest Cuban turned and swung the Thompson gun and held it on Albert. “Hey, don’t! Don’t!” Albert said. “Don’t!”

The burst was so close to his chest that the bullets whocked like three slaps. Albert slid down on his knees, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He looked like he was still trying to say, “Don’t!”

“You don’t need no mate,” the big Cuban said. “You one-armed son-of-a-bitch.” Then in Spanish, “Cut those lines with that fish knife.” And in English, “Come on. Let’s go.”

Then in Spanish, “Put a gun against his back!” and in English, “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll blow your head off.”

“We’ll go,” said Harry.

One of the Indian-looking Cubans was holding a pistol against the side his bad arm was on. The muzzle almost touched the hook.

As he swung her out, spinning the wheel with his good arm, he looked astern to watch the clearance past the piling, and saw Albert on his knees in the stern, his head slipped sidewise now, in a pool of it. On the dock was the Ford taxi, and the fat driver in his underdrawers, his trousers around his ankles, his hands above his head, his mouth open as wide as Albert’s. There was still no one coming down the street.

The pilings of the dock went past as she came out of the basin and then he was in the channel passing the lighthouse dock.

“Come on. Hook her up,” the big Cuban said. “Make some time.”

“Take that gun away,” Harry said. He was thinking, I could run her on Crawfish bar, but sure as hell that Cuban would plug me.

“Make her go,” said the big Cuban. Then, in Spanish, “Lie down flat, everybody. Keep the captain covered.” He lay down himself in the stern, pulling Albert flat down into the cockpit. The other three all lay flat in the cockpit now. Harry sat on the steering seat. He was looking ahead steering out the channel, past the opening into the sub-base now, with the notice board to yachts and the green blinker, cut away from the jetty, past the fort now, past the red blinker; he looked back. The big Cuban had a green box of shells out of his pocket and was filling clips. The gun lay by his side and he was filling clips without looking at them, filling by feel, looking back over the stern. The others were all looking astern except the one that was watching him. This one, one of the two Indian-looking ones, motioned with his pistol for him to look ahead. No boat had started after them yet. The engines were running smoothly and they were going with the tide. He noticed the heavy slant seawards of the buoy he passed, with the current swirling at its base.

There are two speedboats that could catch us, Harry was thinking. One, Ray’s, is running the mail from Matecumbe. Where is the other? I saw her a couple of days ago on Ed. Taylor’s ways, he checked. That was the one I thought of having Bee-lips hire. There’s two more, he remembered now. One the State Road Department has up along the keys. The other’s laid up in the Garrison Bight. How far are we now? He looked back to where the fort was well astern, the red-brick building of the old post office starting to show up above the Navy yard buildings and the yellow hotel building now dominating the short skyline of the town. There was the cove at the Fort, and the lighthouse showed above the houses that strung out toward the big winter hotel. Four miles anyway, he thought. There they come, he thought. Two white fishing boats were rounding the breakwater and heading out toward him. They can’t do ten, he thought. It’s pitiful.

The Cubans were chattering in Spanish.

“How fast you going, Cappie?” the big one said, looking back from the stern.

“About twelve,” Harry said. “What can those boats do?”

“Maybe ten.”

They were all watching them now, even the one who was supposed to keep him, Harry, covered. But what can I do? He thought. Nothing to do yet.

The two white boats got no larger.

“Look at that, Roberto,” said the nice-speaking one.

“Where?”

“Look!”

A long way back, so far you could hardly see it, a little spout rose in the water.

“They’re shooting at us,” the pleasant-speaking one said. “It’s silly.”

“For Christ’s sake,” the big-faced one said. “At three miles.”

“Four,” thought Harry. “All of four.”

Harry could see the tiny spouts rise on the calm surface but he could not hear the shots.

“Those Conchs are pitiful,” he thought. “They’re worse. They’re comical.”

“What government boat is there, Cappie?” asked the big-faced one looking away from the stern.

“Coast guard.”

“What can she make?”

“Maybe twelve.”

“Then we’re O.K. now.”

Harry did not answer.

“Aren’t we O.K. then?”

Harry said nothing. He was keeping the rising, widening spire of Sand Key on his left and the stake on little Sand Key shoals showed almost abeam to starboard. In ten more minutes they would be past the reef.

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you talk?”

“What did you ask me?”

“Is there anything can catch us now?”

“Coast guard plane,” said Harry.

“We cut the telephone wire before we came in town,” the pleasant-speaking one said.

“You didn’t cut the wireless, did you?” Harry asked.

“You think the plane can get here?”

“You got a chance of her until dark,” Harry said.

“What do you think, Cappy?” asked Roberto, the big-faced one.

Harry did not answer.

“Come on, what do you think?”

“What did you let that son of a bitch kill my mate for?” Harry said to the pleasant-speaking one who was standing beside him now looking at the compass course.

“Shut up,” said Roberto. “Kill you, too.”

“How much money you get?” Harry asked the pleasant-speaking one.

“We don’t know. We haven’t counted it yet. It isn’t ours, anyway.”

“I guess not,” said Harry. He was past the light now and he put her on 225°, his regular course for Havana.

“I mean we do it not for ourselves. For a revolutionary organization.”

“You kill my mate for that, too?”

“I am very sorry,” said the boy. “I cannot tell you how badly I feel about that.”

“Don’t try,” said Harry.

“You see,” the boy said, speaking quietly, “this man Roberto is bad. He is a good revolutionary but a bad man. He kills so much in the time of Machado he gets to like it. He thinks it is funny to kill. He kills in a good cause, of course. The best cause.” He looked back at Roberto who sat now in one of the fishing chairs in the stern, the Thompson gun across his lap, looking back at the white boats which were, Harry saw, much smaller now.

“What you got to drink?” Roberto called from the stern.

“Nothing,” Harry said.

“I drink my own, then,” Roberto said. One of the other Cubans lay on one of the seats built over the gas tanks. He looked seasick already. The other was obviously seasick too, but still sitting up.

Looking back, Harry saw a lead-colored boat, now clear of the Fort, coming up on the two white boats.

“There’s the coast guard boat,” he thought. “She’s pitiful too.”

“You think the seaplane will come?” the pleasant- spoken boy asked.

“Be dark in half an hour,” Harry said. He settled on the steering seat. “What you figure on doing? Killing me?”

“I don’t want to,” the boy said. “I hate killing.”

“What you doing?” Roberto, who sat new with a pint of whiskey in his hand, asked. “Making friends with the captain? What you want to do? Eat at the captain’s table?”

“Take the wheel,” Harry said to the boy. “See the course? Two twenty-five.” He straightened up from the stool and went aft.

“Let me have a drink,” Harry said to Roberto. “There’s your coast-guard boat but she can’t catch us.”

He had abandoned anger, hatred and any dignity as luxuries, now, and had started to plan.

“Sure,” said Roberto. “She can’t catch us. Look at those seasick babies. What you say? You want a drink? You got any other last wishes, Cappie?”

“You’re some kidder,” Harry said. He took a long drink.

“Go easy!” Roberto protested. “That’s all there is.”

“I got some more,” Harry told him. “I was just kidding you.”

“Don’t kid me,” said Roberto suspiciously. “Why should I try?”

“What you got?”

“Bacardi.”

“Bring it out.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. “Why do you get so tough?”

He stepped over Albert’s body as he walked forward. As he came to the wheel he looked at the compass. The boy was about twenty-five degrees off and the compass dial was swinging. He’s no sailor, Harry thought. That gives me more time. Look at the wake.

The wake ran in two bubbling curves toward where the light, astern now, showed brown, conical and thinly latticed on the horizon. The boats were almost out of sight. He could just see a blur where the wireless masts of the town were. The engines were running smoothly. Harry put his head below and reached for one of the bottles of Bacardi. He went aft with it. At the stern he took a drink, then handed the bottle to Roberto. Standing, he looked down at Albert and he felt sick inside. The poor hungry bastard, he thought.

“What’s the matter? He scare you?” the big-faced Cuban asked.

“What you say we put him over?” Harry said.

“No sense to carry him.”

“O. K.,” said Roberto. “You got good sense.”

“Take him under the arms,” said Harry. “I’ll take the legs.” Roberto laid the Thompson gun down on the wide stern and leaning down lifted the body by the shoulders.

“You know the heaviest thing in the world is a dead man,” he said. “You ever lift a dead man before, Cappy?”

“No,” said Harry. “You ever lift a big dead woman?”

Roberto pulled the body up onto the stern. “You’re a tough fellow,” he said. “What do you say we have a drink?”

“Go ahead,” said Harry.

“Listen, I’m sorry I killed him,” Roberto said. “When I kill you I feel worse.”

“Cut out talking that way,” Harry said. “What do you want to talk that way for?”

“Come on,” said Roberto. “Over he goes.”

As they leaned over and slid the body up and over the stern, Harry kicked the machine gun over the edge. It splashed at the same time Albert did, but while Albert turned over twice in the white, churned, bubbling back-suction of the propeller wash before sinking, the gun went straight down.

“That’s better, eh?” Roberto said. “Make it shipshape.” Then as he saw the gun was gone, “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

“With what?”

“The ametralladora!” going into Spanish In excitement.

“The what?”

“You know what.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“You knocked it off the stern. Now I’ll kill you, now.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “What the hell you going to kill me about?”

“Give me a gun,” Roberto said to one of the seasick Cubans in Spanish. “Give me a gun quick!”

Harry stood there, never having felt so tall, never having felt so wide, feeling the sweat trickle from under his armpits, feeling it go down his flanks.

“You kill too much,” he heard the seasick Cuban say in Spanish. “You kill the mate. Now you want to kill the captain. Who’s going to get us across?”

“Leave him alone,” said the other. “Kill him when we get over.”

“He knocked the machine gun overboard,” Roberto said.

“We got the money. What you want a machine gun for now? There’s plenty of machine guns in Cuba.”

“I tell you, you make a mistake if you don’t kill him now, I tell you. Give me a gun.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re drunk. Every time you’re drunk you want to kill somebody.”

“Have a drink,” said Harry looking out across the gray swell of the gulf stream where the round red sun was just touching the water. “Watch that. When she goes all the way under it’ll turn bright green.”

“The hell with that,” said the big-faced Cuban. “You think you got away with something.”

“I’ll get you another gun,” said Harry. “They only cost forty-five dollars in Cuba. Take it easy. You’re all right now. There ain’t any coastguard plane going to come now.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Roberto said, looking him over. “You did that on purpose. That’s why you got me to lift on that.”

“You don’t want to kill me,” Harry said. “Who’s going to take you across?”

“I ought to kill you now.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “I’m going to look at the engines.”

He opened the hatch, got down in, screwed down the grease cups on the two stuffing boxes, felt of the motors, and with his hand touched the butt of the Thompson gun. Not yet, he thought. No, better not yet. Christ, that was lucky. What the hell difference does it make to Albert when he’s dead? Saves his old woman to bury him. That big-faced bastard. That big- faced murdering bastard. Christ, I’d like to take him now. But I better wait.

He stood up, climbed out and shut the hatch.

“How you doing?” he said to Roberto. He put his hand on the fat shoulder. The big-faced Cuban looked at him and did not say anything.

“Did you see it turn green?” Harry asked.

“The hell with you,” Roberto said. He was drunk but he was suspicious and, like an animal, he knew how wrong something had gone.

“Let me take her a while,” Harry said to the boy at the wheel. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Emilio,” said the boy.

“Go below and you’ll find something to eat,” Harry said. “There’s bread and cornbeef. Make coffee if you want.”

“I don’t want any.”

“I’ll make some later,” Harry said. He sat at the wheel, the binnacle light on now, holding her on the point easily in the light following sea, looking out at the night coming on the water. He had no running lights on.

It would be a pretty night to cross, he thought, a pretty night. Soon as the last of that afterglow is gone I’ve got to work her east. If I don’t, we’ll sight the glare of Havana in another hour. In two, anyway. Soon as he sees the glare it may occur to that son of a bitch to kill me. That was lucky getting rid of that gun. Damn, that was lucky. Wonder what that Marie’s having for supper. I guess she’s plenty worried. I guess she’s too worried to eat. Wonder how much money those bastards have got. Funny they don’t count it. If that ain’t a hell of a way to raise money for a revolution. Cubans are a hell of a people.

That’s a mean boy, that Roberto. I’ll get him tonight. I get him no matter how the rest of it comes out. That won’t help that poor damned Albert though. It made me feel bad to dump him like that. I don’t know what made me think of it.

He lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.

I’m doing all right, he thought. I’m doing better than I expected. The kid is a kind of nice kid. I wish I could get those other two on the same side. I wish there was some way to bunch them. Well, I’ll have to do the best I can. Easier I can make them take it beforehand the better. Smoother everything goes the better.

“Do you want a sandwich?” the boy asked. “Thanks,” said Harry. “You give one to your partner?”

“He’s drinking. He won’t eat,” the boy said. “What about the others?”

“Seasick,” the boy said.

“It’s a nice night to cross,” Harry said. He noticed the boy did not watch the compass so he kept letting her go off to the east.

“I’d enjoy it,” the boy said. “If it wasn’t for your mate.”

“He was a good fellow,” said Harry. “Did anyone get hurt at the bank?”

“The lawyer. What was his name, Simmons.”

“Get killed?”

“I think so.”

So, thought Harry. Mr. Bee-lips. What the hell did he expect? How could he have thought he wouldn’t get it? That comes from playing at being tough. That comes from being too smart too often. Mr. Bee-lips. Good-byee, Mr. Bee-lips.

“How he come to get killed?”

“I guess you can imagine,” the boy said. “That’s very different from your mate. I feel badly about that. You know he doesn’t mean to do wrong. It’s just what that phase of the revolution has done to him.”

“I guess he’s probably a good fellow,” Harry said, and thought, Listen to what my mouth says. God damn it, my mouth will say anything. But I got to try to make a friend of this boy in case—

“What kind of revolution do you make now?” he asked.

“We are the only true revolutionary party,” the boy said. “We want to do away with all the old politicians, with all the American imperialism that strangles us, with the tyranny of the army. We want to start clean and give every man a chance. We want to end the slavery of the guajiros, you know, the peasants, and divide the big sugar estates among the people that work them. But we are not Communists.”

Harry looked up from the compass card at him.

“How you coming on?” he asked.

“We just raise money now for the fight,” the boy said. “To do that we have to use means that later we would never use. Also we have to use people we would not employ later. But the end is worth the means. They had to do the same thing in Russia. Stalin was a sort of brigand for many years before the revolution.”

He’s a radical, Harry thought. That’s what he is, a radical.

“I guess you’ve got a good program,” he said, “if you’re out to help the working man. I was out on strike plenty times in the old days when we had the cigar factories in Key West. I’d have been glad to do whatever I could if I’d known what kind of outfit you were.”

“Lots of people would help us,” the boy said. “But because of the state the movement is in at present we can’t trust people. I regret the necessity for the present phase very much. I hate terrorism. I also feel very badly about the methods for raising the necessary money. But there is no choice. You do not know how bad things are in Cuba.”

“I guess they’re plenty bad,” Harry said.

“You can’t know how bad they are. There is an absolutely murderous tyranny that extends over every little village in the country. Three people cannot be together on the street. Cuba has no foreign enemies and doesn’t need any army, but she has an army of twenty-five thousand now, and the army, from the corporals up, suck the blood from the nation. Everyone, even the private soldiers, are out to make their fortunes. Now they have a military reserve with every kind of crook, bully and informer of the old days of Machado in it, and they take anything the army does not bother with. We have to get rid of the army before anything can start. Before we were ruled by clubs. Now we are ruled by rifles, pistols, machine guns, and bayonets.”

“It sounds bad,” Harry said, steering, and letting her go off to the eastward.

“You cannot realize how bad it is,” the boy said. “I love my poor country and I would do anything, anything to free it from this tyranny we have now. I do things I hate. But I would do things. I hate a thousand times more.”

I want a drink, Harry was thinking. What the hell do I care about his revolution. F— his revolution. To help the working man he robs a bank and kills a fellow works with him and then kills that poor damned Albert that never did any harm. That’s a working man he kills. He never thinks of that. With a family. It’s the Cubans run Cuba. They all double cross each other. They sell each other out. They get what they deserve. The hell with their revolutions. All I got to do is make a living for my family and I can’t do that. Then he tells me about his revolution. The hell with his revolution.

“It must be bad, all right,” he said to the boy.

“Take the wheel a minute, will you? I want to get a drink.”

“Sure,” said the boy. “How should I steer?”

“Two twenty-five,” Harry said.

It was dark now and there was quite a swell this far out in the Gulf Stream. He passed the two seasick Cubans lying out on the seats and went aft to where Roberto sat in the fishing chair. The water was racing past the boat in the dark. Roberto sat with his feet in the other fishing chair that was turned toward him.

“Let me have some of that,” Harry said to him.

“Go to hell,” said the big-faced man thickly. “This is mine.”

“All right,” said Harry, and went forward to get the other bottle. Below in the dark, with the bottle under the flap of his right arm, he pulled the cork that Freddy had drawn and re-inserted and took a drink.

Now’s as good as any time, he said to himself. No sense waiting now. Little boy’s spoke his piece. The big-faced bastard drunk. The other two seasick. It might as well be now.

He took another drink and the Bacardi warmed and helped him but he felt cold and hollow all around his stomach still. His whole insides were cold.

“Want a drink?” he asked the boy at the wheel.

“No, thanks,” the boy said. “I don’t drink.” Harry could see him smile in the binnacle light. He was a nice-looking boy all right. Pleasant talking, too.

“I’ll take one,” he said. He swallowed a big one but it could not warm the dank cold part that had spread from his stomach to all over the inside of his chest now. He put the bottle down on the cockpit floor.

“Keep her on that course,” he said to the boy.

“I’m going to have a look at the motors.”

He opened the hatch and stepped down. Then locked the hatch up with a long hook that set into a hole in the flooring. He stooped over the motors, with his one hand felt the water manifold, the cylinders, and put his hand on the stuffing boxes. He tightened the two grease cups a turn and a half each. Quit stalling, he said to himself. Come on, quit stalling. Where’re your balls now? Under my chin, I guess, he thought.

He looked out of the hatch. He could almost touch the two seats over the gas tanks where the seasick men lay. The boy’s back was toward him, sitting on the high stool, outlined clearly by the binnacle light. Turning, he could see Roberto sprawled in the chair in the stern, silhouetted against the dark water.

Twenty-one to a clip is four bursts of five at the most, he thought. I got to be light-fingered. All right. Come on. Quit stalling, you gutless wonder. Christ, what I’d give for another one. Well, there isn’t any other one now. He reached his left hand up, unhooked the length of belting, put his hand around the trigger guard, pushed the safety all the way over with his thumb and pulled the gun out. Squatting in the engine pit he sighted carefully on the base of the back of the boy’s head where it outlined against the light from the binnacle.

The gun made a big flame in the dark and the shells rattled against the lifted hatch and onto the engine. Before the slump of the boy’s body fell from the stool he had turned and shot into the figure on the left bunk, holding the jerking, flame-stabbing gun almost against the man, so close he could smell it burn his coat; then swung to put a burst into the other bunk where the man was sitting up, tugging at his pistol. He crouched low now and looked astern. The big-faced man was gone out of the chair. He could see both chairs silhouetted. Behind him the boy lay still. There wasn’t any doubt about him. On one bunk a man was flopping. On the other, he could see with the corner of his eye, a man lay half over the gun- wale, fallen over on his face.

Harry was trying to locate the big-faced man in the dark. The boat was going in a circle now and the cockpit lightened a little. He held his breath and looked. That must be him where it was a little darker on the floor in the corner. He watched it and it moved a little. That was him.

The man was crawling toward him. No, toward the man who lay half overboard. He was after his gun. Crouching low, Harry watched him move until he was absolutely sure. Then he gave him a burst. The gun lighted him on hands and knees, and, as the flame and the bot-bot-bot-bot stopped, he heard him flopping heavily.

“You son of a bitch,” said Harry. “You big-faced murdering bastard.”

All the cold was gone from around his heart now and he had the old hollow, singing feeling and he crouched low down and felt under the square, wood-crated gas tank for another clip to put in the gun. He got the clip, but his hand was cold-drying wet.

Hit the tank, he said to himself. I’ve got to cut the engines. I don’t know where that tank cuts.

He pressed the curved lever, dropped the empty clip, shoved in the fresh one, and climbed up and out of the cockpit.

As he stood up, holding the Thompson gun in his left hand, looking around before shutting the hatch with the hook on his right arm, the Cuban who had lain on the port bunk and had been shot three times through the left shoulder, two shots going into the gas tank, sat up, took careful aim, and shot him in the belly.

Harry sat down in a backward lurch. He felt as though he had been struck in the abdomen with a club. His back was against one of the iron-pipe supports of the fishing chairs and while the Cuban shot at him again and splintered the fishing chair above his head, he reached down, found the Thompson gun, raised it carefully, holding the forward grip with the hook and rattled half of the fresh clip into the man who sat leaning forward, calmly shooting at him from the seat. The man was down on the seat in a heap and Harry felt around on the cockpit floor until he could find the big-faced man, who lay face down, felt for his head with the hook on his bad arm, hooked it around, then put the muzzle of the gun against the head and touched the trigger. Touching the head, the gun made a noise like hitting a pumpkin with a club. Harry put down the gun and lay on his side on the cockpit floor.

“I’m a son of a bitch,” he said, his lips against the planking. I’m a gone son of a bitch now. I got to cut the engines or we’ll all burn up, he thought. I got a chance still. I got a kind of a chance. Jesus Christ. One thing to spoil it. One thing to go wrong. God damn it. Oh, God damn that Cuban bastard. Who’d have thought I hadn’t got him?

He got on his hands and knees and letting one side of the hatch over the engines slam down, crawled over it forward to where the steering stool was. He pulled up on it, surprised to find how well he could move, then suddenly feeling faint and weak as he stood erect, he leaned forward with his bad arm resting on the compass and cut the two switches. The engines were quiet and he could hear the water against her sides. There was no other sound. She swung into the trough of the little sea the North wind had raised and began to roll.

He hung against the wheel, then eased himself onto the steering stool, leaning against the chart table. He could feel the strength drain out of him in a steady faint nausea. He opened his shirt with his good hand and felt the hole with the base of the palm of his hand, then fingered it. There was very little bleeding. All inside, he thought. I better lie down and give it a chance to quiet.

The moon was up now and he could see what was in the cockpit.

Some mess, he thought, some hell of a mess.

Better get down before I fall down, he thought and he lowered himself down to the cockpit floor.

He lay on his side and then, as the boat rolled, the moonlight came in and he could see everything in the cockpit clearly.

It’s crowded, he thought. That’s what it is, it’s crowded. Then, he thought, I wonder what she’ll do. I wonder what Marie will do? Maybe they’ll pay her the rewards. God damn that Cuban. She’ll get along, I guess. She’s a smart woman. I guess we would all have gotten along. I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I wish I could do something about Marie. Plenty money on this boat. I don’t even know how much. Anybody be O. K. with that money. I wonder if the coast guard will pinch it. Some of it, I guess. I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. There’s no honest money going in boats anymore. If the bitch wouldn’t only roll. If she’d only quit rolling. I can feel all that slopping back and forth inside. Me. Mr. Bee-lips and Albert. Everybody that had to do with it. These bastards too. It must be an unlucky business. Some unlucky business. I guess what a man like me ought to do is run something like a filling station. Hell, I couldn’t run no filling station. Marie, she’ll run something. She’s too old to peddle her hips now. I wish this bitch wouldn’t roll. I’ll just have to take it easy. I got to take it as easy as I can. They say if you don’t drink water and lay still. They say especially if you don’t drink water.

He looked at what the moonlight showed in the cockpit.

Well, I don’t have to clean her up, he thought. Take it easy. That’s what I got to do. Take it easy. I’ve got to take it as easy as I can. I’ve got sort of a chance. If you lay still and don’t drink any water.

He lay on his back and tried to breathe steadily. The launch rolled in the Gulf Stream swell and Harry Morgan lay on his back in the cockpit. At first he tried to brace himself against the roll with his good hand. Then he lay quietly and took it.

Chapter Nineteen

The next morning in Key West Richard Gordon was on his way home from a visit to Freddy’s Bar where he had gone to ask about the bank robbery. Riding his bicycle, he passed a heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blonde hair showing under her old man’s felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size. Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn’t she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific.

He was almost home now. He left his bicycle on the front porch and went in the hallway, closing the front door the termites had tunnelled and riddled.

“What did you find out, Dick?” his wife called from the kitchen.

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I’m going to work. I have it all in my head.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

He sat down at the big table in the front room. He was writing a novel about a strike in a textile factory. In today’s chapter he was going to use the big woman with the tear-reddened eyes he had just seen on the way home. Her husband when he came home at night hated her, hated the way she had coarsened and grown heavy, was repelled by her bleached hair, her too big breasts, her lack of sympathy with his work as an organizer. He would compare her to the young, firm- breasted, full-lipped little Jewess that had spoken at the meeting that evening. It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true. He had seen, in a flash of perception, the whole inner life of that type of woman.

Her early indifference to her husband’s caresses. Her desire for children and security. Her lack of sympathy with her husband’s aims. Her sad attempts to simulate an interest in the sexual act that had become actually repugnant to her. It would be a fine chapter.

The woman he had seen was Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, on her way home from the sheriff’s office.

Chapter Twenty

Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, 34 feet long, with a V number out of Tampa, was painted white; the forward deck was painted a color called Frolic green and the inside of the cockpit was painted Frolic green. The top of the house was painted the same color. Her name and home port, Key West, Fla., were painted in black across her stern. She was not equipped with outriggers and had no mast. She was equipped with glass windshields, one of which, that forward of the wheel, was broken. There were a number of fresh, wood-splintered holes in the newly painted planking of her hull. Splintered patches could be seen on both sides of her hull about a foot below the gunwale and a little forward of the center of the cockpit. There was another group of these splintered places almost at the water line on the starboard side of the hull opposite the aft stanchion that supported her house or awning. From the lower of these holes something dark had dripped and hung in ropy lines against the new paint of her hull.

She drifted broadside to the gentle north wind about ten miles outside of the north-bound tanker lanes, gay looking in her fresh white and green, against the dark, blue Gulf Stream water. There were patches of sun-yellowed Sargasso weed floating in the water near her that passed her slowly in the current going to the north and east, while the wind overcame some of the launch’s drift as it set her steadily further out into the stream. There was no sign of life on her although the body of a man showed, rather inflated looking, above the gunwale, lying on a bench over the port gasoline tank and, from the long seat alongside the starboard gunwale, a man seemed to be leaning over to dip his hand into the sea. His head and arms were in the sun and at the point where his fingers almost touched the water, there was a school of small fish, about two inches long, oval-shaped, golden-colored, with faint purple stripes, that had deserted the gulf weed to take shelter in the shade the bottom of the drifting launch made in the water, and each time anything dripped down into the sea, these fish rushed at the drop and pushed and milled until it was gone. Two gray sucker fish about eighteen inches long, swam round and round the boat in the shadow in the water, their slit mouths on the tops of their flat heads opening and shutting; but they did not seem to comprehend the regularity of the drip the small fish fed on and were as likely to be on the far side of the launch when the drop fell, as near it. They had long since pulled away the ropy, carmine clots and threads that trailed in the water from the lowest splintered holes, shaking their ugly, sucker-topped heads and their elongated, tapering, thin-tailed bodies as they pulled. They were reluctant now to leave a place where they had fed so well and unexpectedly.

Inside the cockpit of the launch there were three other men. One, dead, lay on his back where he had fallen below the steering stool. Another, dead, lay humped big against the scupper by the starboard aft stanchion. The third, still alive, but long out of his head, lay on his side with his head on his arm.

The bilge of the launch was full of gasoline and when she rolled at all this made a sloshing sound. The man, Harry Morgan, believed this sound was in his own belly and it seemed to him now that his belly was big as a lake and that it sloshed on both shores at once. That was because he was on his back now with his knees drawn up and his head back. The water of the lake that was his belly was very cold; so cold that when he stepped into its edge it numbed him, and he was extremely cold now and everything tasted of gasoline as though he had been sucking on a hose to syphon a tank. He knew there was no tank although he could feel a cold rubber hose that seemed to have entered his mouth and now was coiled, big, cold, and heavy all down through him. Each time he took a breath the hose coiled colder and firmer in his lower abdomen and he could feel it like a big, smooth-moving snake in there, above the sloshing of the lake. He was afraid of it, but although it was in him, it seemed a vast distance away and what he minded, now, was the cold.

The cold was all through him, an aching cold that would not numb away, and he lay quietly now and felt it. For a time he had thought that if he could pull himself up over himself it would warm him like a blanket, and he thought for a while that he had gotten himself pulled up and he had started to warm. But that warmth was really only the hemorrhage produced by raising his knees up; and as the warmth faded he knew now that you could not pull yourself up over yourself and there was nothing to do about the cold but take it. Be lay there, trying hard in all of him not to die long after he could not think. He was in the shadow now, as the boat drifted, and it was colder all the time.

The launch had been drifting since 10 o’clock of the night before and it was now getting late in the afternoon. There was nothing else in sight across the surface of the Gulf Stream but the gulf weed, a few pink, inflated, membranous bubbles of Portuguese men-of-war cocked jauntily on the surface, and the distant smoke of a loaded tanker bound north from Tampico.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Well,” Richard Gordon said to his wife.

“You have lipstick on your shirt,” she said. “And over your ear.”

“What about this?”

“What about what?”

“What about finding you lying on the couch with that drunken slob?”

“You did not.”

“Where did I find you?”

“You found us sitting on the couch.”

“In the dark.”

“Where have you been?”

“At the Bradleys’.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Don’t come near me. You reek of that woman.”

“What do you reek of?”

“Nothing. I’ve been sitting, talking to a friend.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“No.”

“Did he kiss you?”

“Yes, I liked it.”

“You bitch.”

“If you call me that I’II leave you.”

“You bitch.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s over. If you weren’t so conceited and I weren’t so good to you, you’d have seen it was over a long time ago.”

“You bitch.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not a bitch. I’ve tried to be a good wife, but you’re as selfish and conceited as a barnyard rooster. Always crowing, ‘Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve made you happy. Now run along and cackle.’ Well, you don’t make me happy and I’m sick of you. I’m through cackling.”

“You shouldn’t cackle. You never produced anything to cackle about.”

“Whose fault was that? Didn’t I want children? But we never could afford them. But we could afford to go to the Cap d’Antibes to swim and to Switzerland to ski. We can afford to come down here to Key West. I’m sick of you. I dislike you. This Bradley woman today was the last straw.”

“Oh, leave her out of it.”

“You coming home with lipstick all over you. Couldn’t you even wash? There’s some on your forehead, too.”

“You kissed that drunken twerp.”

“No, I didn’t. But I would have if I’d known what you were doing.”

“Why did you let him kiss you?”

“I was furious at you. We waited and waited and waited. Y au never came near me. You went off with that woman and stayed for hours. John brought me home.”

“Oh, John, is it?”

“Yes, John. JOHN. John.”

“And what’s his last name? Thomas?”

“His name is MacWalsey.”

“Why don’t you spell it?”

“I can’t,” she said, and laughed. But it was the last time she laughed. “Don’t think it’s all right because I laugh,” she said, tears in her eyes, her lips working. “It’s not all right. This isn’t just an ordinary row. It’s over. I don’t hate you. It isn’t violent. I just dislike you. I dislike you thoroughly and I’m through with you.”

“All right,” he said.

“No. Not all right. All over. Don’t you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t guess.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Helen.”

“So I’m melodramatic, am I ? Well, I’m not. I’m through with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I won’t say it again.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I may marry John MacWalsey.”

“You will not.”

“I will if I wish.”

“He wouldn’t marry you.”

“Oh, yes, he will. He asked me to marry him this afternoon.”

Richard Gordon said nothing. A hollow had come in him where his heart had been, and everything he heard, or said, seemed to be overheard.

“He asked you what?” he said, his voice coming from a long way away.

“To marry him.”

“Why?”

“Because he loves me. Because he wants me to live with him. He makes enough money to support me.”

“You’re married to me.”

“Not really. Not in the church. You wouldn’t marry me in the church and it broke my poor mother’s heart as you well know. I was so sentimental about you I’d break anyone’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.”

“You little mick slut.”

“Don’t call me names. I know the word for you.”

“All right.”

“No, not all right. All wrong and wrong again. If you were just a good writer I could stand for all the rest of it maybe. But I’ve seen you bitter, jealous, changing your politics to suit the fashion, sucking up to people’s faces and talking about them behind their backs. I’ve seen you until I’m sick of you. Then that dirty rich bitch of a Bradley woman today. Oh, I’m sick of it. I’ve tried to take care of you and humor you and look after you and cook for you and keep quiet when you wanted and cheerful when you wanted and give you your little explosions and pretend it made me happy, and put up with your rages and jealousies and your meannesses and now I’m through.”

“So now you want to start again with a drunken professor? “

“He’s a man. He’s kind and he’s charitable and he makes you feel comfortable and we come from the same thing and we have values that you’ll never have. He’s like my father was.”

“He’s a drunk.”

“He drinks. But so did my father. And my father wore wool socks and put his feet in them up on a chair and read the paper in the evening. And when we had croup he took care of us. He was a boiler maker and his hands were all broken and he liked to fight when he drank, and he could fight when he was sober. He went to mass because my mother wanted him to and he did his Easter duty for her and for Our Lord, but mostly for her, and he was a good union man and if he ever went with another woman she never knew it.”

“I’ll bet he went with plenty.”

“Maybe he did, but if he did he told the priest, not her, and if he did it was because he couldn’t help it and he was sorry and repented of it. He didn’t do it out of curiosity, or from barnyard pride, or to tell his wife what a great man he was. If he did it was because my mother was away with us kids for the summer, and he was out with the boys and got drunk. He was a man.”

“You ought to be a writer and write about him.”

“I’d be a better writer than you. And John MacWalsey is a good man. That’s what you’re not. You couldn’t be. No matter what your politics or your religion.”

“I haven’t any religion.”

“Neither have I. But I had one once and I’m going to have one again. And you won’t be there to take it away. Like you’ve taken away everything else.”

“No.”

“No. You can be in bed with some rich woman like Helène Bradley. How did she like you? Did she think you were wonderful?”

Looking at her sad, angry face, pretty with crying, the lips swollen freshly like something after rain, her curly dark hair wild about her face, Richard Gordon gave her up, then, finally:

“And you don’t love me anymore?”

“I hate the word even.”

“All right,” he said, and slapped her hard and suddenly across the face.

She cried now from actual pain, not anger, her face down on the table.

“You didn’t need to do that,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “You know an awful lot, but you don’t know how much I needed to do that.”

That afternoon she had not seen him as the door opened. She had not seen anything but the white ceiling with its cake-frosting modeling of cupids, doves and scroll work that the light from the open door suddenly made clear.

Richard Gordon had turned his head and seen him, standing heavy and bearded in the doorway.

“Don’t stop,” Helène had said. “Please don’t stop.” Her bright hair was spread over the pillow.

But Richard Gordon had stopped and his head was still turned, staring.

“Don’t mind him. Don’t mind anything. Don’t you see you can’t stop now?” the woman had said in desperate urgency.

The bearded man had closed the door softly. He was smiling.

“What’s the matter, darling?” Helène Bradley had asked, now in the darkness again.

“I must go.”

“Don’t you see you can’t go?”

“That man—”

“That’s only Tommy,” Helène had said. “He knows all about these things. Don’t mind him. Come on, darling. Please do.”

“I can’t.”

“You must,” Helène had said. He could feel her shaking, and her head on his shoulder was trembling. “My God, don’t you know anything? Haven’t you any regard for a woman?”

“I have to go,” said Richard Gordon.

In the darkness he had felt the slap across his face that lighted flashes of light in his eyeballs. Then there was another slap. Across his mouth this time.

“So that’s the kind of man you are,” she had said to him. “I thought you were a man of the world. Get out of here.”

That was this afternoon. That was how it had finished at the Bradleys’.

Now his wife sat with her head forward on her hands that rested on the table and neither of them said anything. Richard Gordon could hear the clock ticking and he felt as hollow as the room was quiet. After a while his wife said without looking at him: “I’m sorry it happened. But you see it’s over, don’t you?”

“Yes, if that’s the way it’s been.”

“It hasn’t been all like that, but for a long time it’s been that way.”

“I’m sorry I slapped you.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. That hasn’t anything to do with it. That was just a way to say good-bye.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll have to get out,” she said very tiredly. “I’ll have to take the big suitcase, I’m afraid.”

“Do it in the morning,” he said. “You can do everything in the morning.”

“I’d rather do it now, Dick, and it would be easier. But I’m so tired. It’s made me awfully tired and given me a headache.”

“You do whatever you want.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “I wish it wouldn’t have happened. But it’s happened. I’ll try to fix everything up for you. You’ll need somebody to look after you. If I hadn’t of said some of that, or if you hadn’t hit me, maybe we could have fixed it up again.”

“No, it was over before that.”

“I’m so sorry for you, Dick.”

“Don’t you be sorry for me or I’ll slap you again.”

“I guess I’d feel better if you slapped me,” she said. “I am sorry for you. Oh, I am.”

“Go to hell.”

“I’m sorry I said it about you not being good in bed. I don’t know anything about that. I guess you’re wonderful.”

“You’re not such a star,” he said.

She began to cry again.

“That’s worse than slapping,” she said.

“Well, what did you say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I was so angry and you hurt me so.”

“Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter.”

“Oh, I don’t want it to be over. But it is and there’s nothing to do now.”

“You’ll have your rummy professor.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Can’t we just shut up and not talk anymore?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll sleep out here.”

“No. You can have the bed. You must. I’m going out for a while.”

“Oh, don’t go out.”

“I’ve got to,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she said, and he saw her face he always loved so much, that crying never spoiled, and her curly black hair, her small firm breasts under the sweater forward against the edge of the table, and he didn’t see the rest of her that he’d loved so much and thought he had pleased, but evidently hadn’t been any good to, that was all below the table, and as he went out the door she was looking at him across the table; and her chin was on her hands; and she was crying.

Chapter Twenty-Two

He did not take the bicycle but walked down the street. The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, inter-breeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses, shacks whose only romance was their names; The Red House, Chicha’s, the pressed stone church; its steeples sharp, ugly triangles against the moonlight; the big grounds and the long, black-domed bulk of the convent, handsome in the moonlight; a filling station and a sandwich place, bright-lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew stores, three poolrooms, two barbershops, five beer joints, three ice cream parlors, the five poor and the one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, four second-hand joints (one of which made keys), a photographer’s, an office building with four dentists’ offices upstairs, the big dime store, a hotel on the corner with taxis opposite; and across, behind the hotel, to the street that led to jungle town, the big unpainted frame house with lights and the girls in the doorway, the mechanical piano going, and a sailor sitting in the street; and then on back, past the back of the brick courthouse with its clock luminous at half-past ten, past the whitewashed jail building shining in the moonlight, to the embowered entrance of the Lilac Time where motor cars filled the alley.

The Lilac Time was brightly lighted and full of people, and as Richard Gordon went in he saw the gambling room was crowded, the wheel turning and the little ball clicking brittle against metal partitions set in the bowl, the wheel turning slowly, the ball whirring, then clicking jumpily until it settled and there was only the turning of the wheel and the rattling of chips. At the bar, the proprietor who was serving with two bartenders, said “‘Allo, ‘Allo. Mist’ Gordon. What you have?”

“I don’t know,” said Richard Gordon.

“You don’t look good. Whatsa matter ? You don’t feel good?”

“No.”

“I fix you something just fine. Fix you up hokay. You ever try a Spanish absinthe, ojen?”

“Go ahead,” said Gordon.

“You drink him you feel good. Want to fight anybody in a house,” said the proprietor. “Make Mistah Gordon a ojen special.”

Standing at the bar, Richard Gordon drank three ojen specials but he felt no better; the opaque, sweetish, cold, licorice-tasting drink did not make him feel any different.

“Give me something else,” he said to the bartender.

“Whatsa matter? You no like a ojen special?” the proprietor asked. “You no feel good?”

“No.”

“You got be careful what you drink after him.”

“Give me a straight whiskey.”

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

A tall, very thin young man with a sparse stubble of blonde beard on his chin who was standing next to him at the bar said, “Aren’t you Richard Gordon?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Herbert Spellman. We met at a party in Brooklyn one time I believe.”

“Maybe,” said Richard Gordon. “Why not?”

“I liked your last book very much,” said Spellman. “I liked them all.”

“I’m glad,” said Richard Gordon. “Have a drink?”

“Have one with me,” said Spellman. “Have you tried this ojen?”

“It’s not doing me any good.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Feeling low.”

“Wouldn’t try another?”

“No. I’ll have whiskey.”

“You know, it’s something to me to meet you,” Spellman said. “I don’t suppose you remember me at that party.”

“No. But maybe it was a good party. You’re not supposed to remember a good party, are you?”

“I guess not,” said Spellman. “It was at Margaret Van Brunt’s. Do you remember?” he asked hopefully.

“I’m trying to.”

“I was the one set fire to the place,” Spellman said.

“No,” said Gordon.

“Yes,” said Spellman, happily. “That was me. That was the greatest party I was ever on.”

“What are you doing now?” Gordon asked.

“Not much,” said Spellman. “I get around a little. I’m taking it sort of easy now. Are you writing a new book?”

“Yes. About half done.”

“That’s great,” said Spellman. “What’s it about?”

“A strike in a textile plant.”

“That’s marvellous,” said Spellman. “You know I’m a sucker for anything on the social conflict.”

“What?”

“I love it,” said Spellman. “I go for it above anything else. You’re absolutely the best of the lot. Listen, has it got a beautiful Jewish agitator in it?”

“Why?” asked Richard Gordon, suspiciously.

“It’s a part for Sylvia Sidney. I’m in love with her. Want to see her picture?”

“I’ve seen it,” said Richard Gordon.

“Let’s have a drink,” said Spellman, happily. “Think of meeting you down here. You know, I’m a lucky fellow. Really lucky.”

“Why?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I’m crazy,” said Spellman. “Gee, it’s wonderful. It’s just like being in love only it always comes out right.”

Richard Gordon edged away a little.

“Don’t be that way,” said Spellman. “I’m not violent. That’s is, I’m almost never violent. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

“Have you been crazy long?”

“I think always,” said Spellman. “I tell you it’s the only way to be happy in times like these. What do I care what Douglas Aircraft does? What do I care what A. T. and T. does? They can’t touch me. I just pick up one of your books or I take a drink, or I look at Sylvia’s picture, and I’m happy. I’m like a bird. I’m better than a bird. I’m a—” he seemed to hesitate and hunt for a word, then hurried on. “I’m a lovely little stork,” he blurted out and blushed. He looked at Richard Gordon fixedly, his lips working, and a large blonde young man detached himself from a group down the bar and coming toward him put a hand on his arm.

“Come on, Harold,” he said. “We’d better be getting home.”

Spellman looked at Richard Gordon wildly. “He sneered at a stork,” he said. “He stepped away from a stork. A stork that wheels in circling flight—”

“Come on, Harold,” said the big young man. Spellman put out his hand to Richard Gordon.

“No offence,” he said. “You’re a good writer. Keep right on with it. Remember I’m always happy. Don’t let them confuse you. See you soon.”

With the large young man’s arm over his shoulder the two of them moved out through the crowd to the door. Spellman looked back and winked at Richard Gordon.

“Nice fella,” the proprietor said. He tapped his head. “Very well educate. Studies too much I guess. Likes to break glasses. He don’t mean no harm. Pay for everything he break.”

“Does he come in here much?”

“In the evening. What he say he was? A swan?”

“A stork.”

“Other night was a horse. With wings. Like a horse on a white horse bottle only with pair a wings. Nice fella all right. Plenty money. Gets a funny ideas. Family keep him down here now with his man- ager. He told me he like your books, Mr. Gordon. What you have to drink? On the house.”

“A whiskey,” said Richard Gordon. He saw the sheriff coming toward him. The sheriff was an extremely tall, rather cadaverous and very friendly man. Richard Gordon had seen him that afternoon at the Bradleys’ party and talked with him about the bank robbery.

“Say,” said the sheriff, “if you’re not doing anything come along with me a little later. The coast guard’s towing in Harry Morgan’s boat. A tanker signalled it up off Matacumbe. They’ve got the whole outfit.”

“My God,” said Richard Gordon. “They’ve got them all?”

“They’re all dead except one man, the message said.”

“You don’t know who it is?”

“No, they didn’t say. God knows what happened.”

“Have they got the money?”

“Nobody knows. But it must be aboard if they didn’t get to Cuba with it.”

“When will they be in?”

“Oh, it will be two or three hours yet.”

“Where will they bring the boat?”

“Into the Navy Yard, I suppose. Where the coast guard ties up.”

“Where’ll I see you to go down there?”

“I’ll drop in here for you.”

“Here or down at Freddy’s. I can’t stick it here much longer.”

“It’s pretty tough in at Freddy’s tonight. It’s full of those Vets from up on the Keys. They always raise the devil.”

“I’ll go down there and look at it,” Richard Gordon said. “I’m feeling kind of low.”

“Well, keep out of trouble,” the sheriff said. “I’ll pick you up there in a couple of hours. Want a lift down there?”

“Thanks.”

They went out through the crowd and Richard Gordon got in beside the sheriff in his car.

“What do you suppose happened in Morgan’s boat?” he asked.

“God knows,” the sheriff said. “It sounds pretty grizzly.”

“Didn’t they have any other information?”

“Not a thing,” said the sheriff. “Now look at that, will you?”

They were opposite the brightly lighted open front of Freddy’s place and it was jammed to the sidewalk. Men in dungarees, some bareheaded, others in caps, old service hats and in cardboard helmets, crowded the bar three deep, and the loud-speaking nickle-in-the-slot phonograph was playing “Isle of Capri.” As they pulled up a man came hurtling out of the open door, another man on top of him. They fell and rolled on the sidewalk, and the man on top, holding the other’s hair in both hands, banged his head up and down on the cement, making a sickening noise. No one at the bar was paying any attention.

The sheriff got out of the car and grabbed the man on top by the shoulder.

“Cut it out,” he said. “Get up there.”

The man straightened up and looked at the sheriff. “For Christ sake, can’t you mind your own business?”

The other man, blood in his hair, blood oozing from one ear, and more of it trickling down his freckled face, squared off at the sheriff.

“Leave my buddy alone,” he said thickly. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I can take it?”

“You can take it, Joey,” the man who had been hammering him said. “Listen,” to the sheriff, “could you let me take a buck?”

“No,” said the sheriff.

“Go to hell then.” He turned to Richard Gordon.

“What about it, pal?”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Gordon.

“Come on,” said the Vet, and took hold of Gordon’s arm.

“I’ll be by later,” the sheriff said.

“Good. I’ll be waiting for you.”

As they edged in toward the end of the bar, the red-headed, freckle-faced man with the bloody ear and face, gripped Gordon by the arm.

“My old buddy,” he said.

“He’s all right,” the other Vet said. “He can take it.”

“I can take it, see?” the bloody-faced one said. “That’s where I got it on them.”

“But you can’t hand it out,” someone said. “Cut out the shoving.”

“Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?”

“Listen,” the other Vet said as they finally reached the beer-wet bar, “You ought to have seen him at noon at the commissary at Camp Five. I had him down and I was hitting him on the head with a bottle. Just like playing on a drum. I bet I hit him fifty times.”

“More,” said the bloody-faced one.

“It didn’t make no impression on him.”

“I can take it,” said the other. He whispered in Richard Gordon’s ear, “It’s a secret.”

Richard Gordon handed over two of the three beers the white-jacketed, big-bellied nigger bartender drew and pushed toward him.

“What’s a secret?” he asked.

“Me,” said the bloody-faced one. “My secret.”

“He’s got a secret,” the other Vet said. “He isn’t lying.”

“Want to hear it?” the bloody-faced one said in Richard Gordon’s ear.

Gordon nodded. “It don’t hurt.”

The other nodded. “Tell him the worst of it.”

The red-headed one put his bloody lips almost to Gordon’s ear.

“Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?”

At Gordon’s elbow was a tall, thin man with a scar that ran from one corner of his eye down over his chin. He looked down at the red-headed one and grinned.

“First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.”

“You make sick easy,” the first Vet said. “What outfit were you in?”

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you, punch drunk,” the tall man said.

“Have a drink?” Richard Gordon asked the tall man.

“Thanks,” the other said. “I’m drinking.”

“Don’t forget us,” said one of the two men Gordon had come in with.

“Three more beers,” said Richard Gordon, and the Negro drew them and pushed them over. There was not elbow room to lift them in the crowd and Gordon was pressed against the tall man.

“You off a ship?” asked the tall man.

“No, staying here. You down from the Keys?”

“We came in tonight from Tortugas,” the tall man said. “We raised enough hell so they couldn’t keep us there.”

“He’s a red,” the first Vet said.

“So would you be if you had any brains,” the tall man said. “They sent a bunch of us there to get rid of us but we raised too much hell for them.” He grinned at Richard Gordon.

“Nail that guy,” somebody yelled, and Richard Gordon saw a fist hit a face that showed close to him. The man who was hit was pulled away from the bar by two others. In the clear, one man hit him again, hard, in the face, and the other hit him in the body. He went down on the cement floor and covered his head with his arms and one of the men kicked him in the small of the back. All this time he had not made a sound. One of the men jerked him to his feet and pushed him up against the wall.

“Cool the son-of-a-bitch,” he said, and as the man sprawled, white faced against the wall, the second man set himself, knees slightly bent, and then swung up at him with a right fist that came from down near the cement floor and landed on the side of the white-faced man’s jaw. He fell forward on his knees and then rolled slowly over, his head in a little pool of blood. The two men left him there and came back to the bar.

“Boy, you can hit,” said one.

“That son-of-a-bitch comes in to town and puts all his pay in the postal savings and then hangs around here picking up drinks off the bar,” the other said. “That’s the second time I cooled him.”

“You cooled him this time.”

“When I hit him just then I felt his jaw go just like a bag of marbles,” the other said happily. The man lay against the wall and nobody paid any attention to him.

“Listen, if you landed on me like that it wouldn’t make no impression,” the red-headed Vet said.

“Shut up, slappy,” said the cooler. “You’ve got the old rale.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You punchies make me sick,” the cooler said.

“Why should I bust my hands on you?”

“That’s just what you’d do, bust your hands,” the red-headed one said. “Listen, pal,” to Richard Gordon, “How’s to have another?”

“Aren’t they fine boys?” said the tall man. “War is a purifying and ennobling force. The question is whether only people like ourselves here are fitted to be soldiers or whether the different services have formed us.”

“I don’t know,” said Richard Gordon.

“I would like to bet you that not three men in this room were drafted,” the tall man said. “These are the elite. The very top cream of the scum. What Wellington won at Waterloo with. Well, Mr. Hoover ran us out of Anticosti flats and Mr. Roosevelt has shipped us down here to get rid of us. They’ve run the camp in a way to invite an epidemic, but the poor bastards won’t die. They shipped a few of us to Tortugas but that’s healthy now. Besides, we wouldn’t stand for it. So they’ve brought us back. What’s the next move? They’ve got to get rid of us. You can see that, can’t you?”

“‘Why?”

“Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try to do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.”

“Are there many Communists in the camp?”

“Only about forty,” the tall man said.

“Out of two thousand. It takes discipline and abnegation to be a Communist; a rummy can’t be a Communist.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed Vet said. “He’s just a goddamn radical.”

“Listen,” the other Vet who was drinking beer with Richard Gordon said, “let me tell you about in the Navy. Let me tell you, you goddamn radical.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed one said. “When the fleet’s in New York and you go ashore there in the evening up under Riverside Drive there’s old guys with long beards come down and you can piss in their beards for a dollar. What do you think about that?”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said the tall man, “and you forget that one. I don’t like to hear that one.”

“I don’t forget anything,” the red-headed one said. “What’s the matter with you, pal?”

“Is that true about the beards?” Richard Gordon asked. He felt a little sick.

“I swear to God and my mother,” the red-headed one said. “Hell, that ain’t nothing.”

Up the bar a Vet was arguing with Freddy about the payment of a drink.

“That’s what you had,” said Freddy.

Richard Gordon watched the Vet’s face. He was very drunk, his eyes were bloodshot and he was looking for trouble.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” he said to Freddy.

“Eighty-five cents,” Freddy said to him.

“Watch this,” said the red-headed Vet.

Freddy spread his hands on the bar. He was watching the Vet.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” said the Vet, and picked up a beer glass to throw it. As his hand closed on it, Freddy’s right hand swung in a half circle over the bar and cracked a big saltcellar covered with a bar towel alongside the Vet’s head.

“Was it neat?” said the red-headed Vet. “Was it pretty?”

“You ought to see him tap them with that sawed-off billiard cue,” the other said.

Two Vets standing next to where the saltcellar man had slipped down, looked at Freddy angrily. “What’s the idea of cooling him?”

“Take it easy,” said Freddy. “This one is on the house. Hey, Wallace,” he said. “Put that fellow over against the wall.”

“Was it pretty?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon. “Wasn’t that sweet?”

A heavy-set young fellow had dragged the salt-cellared man out through the crowd. He pulled him to his feet and the man looked at him vacantly. “Run along,” he said to him. “Get yourself some air.”

Over against the wall the man who had been cooled sat with his head in his hands. The heavy-set young man went over to him.

“You run along, too,” he said to him. “You just get in trouble here.”

“My jaw’s broken,” the cooled one said thickly. Blood was running out of his mouth and down over his chin.

“You’re lucky you aren’t killed, that wallop he hit you,” the thick-set young man said. “You run along now.”

“My jaw’s broke,” the other said dully. “They broke my jaw.”

“You better run along,” the young man said. “You just get in trouble here.”

He helped the jaw-broken man to his feet and he staggered unsteadily out to the street.

“I’ve seen a dozen laying against the wall over there on a big night,” the red-headed Vet said. “One morning I seen that big boogie there mopping it up with a bucket. Didn’t I see you mop it up with a bucket?” he asked the big Negro bartender.

“Yes, sir,” said the bartender. “Plenty of times. Yes, sir. But you never seen me fight nobody.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” said the red-headed Vet. “With a bucket.”

“This looks like a big night coming on,” the other Vet said. “What do you say, pal?” to Richard Gordon. “O.K. we have another one?”

Richard Gordon could feel himself getting drunk. His face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, was beginning to look strange to him.

“What’s your name?” he asked the tall Communist.

“Jacks,” the tall man said. “Nelson Jacks.” “Where were you before you came here?”

“Oh, around,” the man said. “Mexico, Cuba, South America, .and around.”

“I envy you,” said Richard Gordon.

“Why envy me? Why don’t you get to work?”

“I’ve written three books,” Richard Gordon said. “I’m writing one now about Gastonia.”

“Good,” said the tall man. “That’s fine. What did you say your name was?”

“Richard Gordon.”

“Oh,” said the tall man. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

“Nothing,” said the tall man.

“Did you ever read the books?” Richard Gordon asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you like them?”

“No,” said the tall man.

“Why?”

“I don’t like to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I thought they were shit,” the tall man said and turned away.

“I guess this is my night,” said Richard Gordon. “This is my big night. What did you say you’d have?” he asked the red-headed Vet. “I’ve got two dollars left.”

“One beer,” said the red-headed man. “Listen, you’re my pal. I think your books are fine. To hell with that radical bastard.”

“You haven’t got a book with you?” asked the other Vet. “Pal, I’d like to read one. Did you ever write for Western Stories, or War Aces? I could read that War Aces every day.

“Who is that tall bird?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I tell you he’s just a radical bastard,” said the second Vet. “The camp’s full of them. We’d run them out, but I tell you half the time most of the guys in camp can’t remember.”

“Can’t remember what?” asked the red-headed one.

“Can’t remember anything,” said the other.

“You see me?” asked the red-headed one.

“Yes,” said Richard Gordon.

“Would you guess I got the finest little wife in the world?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I have,” said the red-headed one. “And that girl is nuts about me. She’s like a slave. ‘Give me another cup of coffee,’ I say to her. ‘O.K., Pop,’ she says. And I get it. Anything else the same way. She’s carried away with me. If I got a whim, it’s her law.”

“Only where is she?” asked the other Vet.

“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “That’s it, pal. Where is she?”

“He don’t know where she is,” the second Vet said.

“Not only that,” said the red-headed one. “I don’t know where I saw her last.”

“He don’t even know what country she’s in,”

“But listen, buddy,” said the red-headed one. “Wherever she is, that little girl is faithful.”

“That’s God’s truth,” said the other Vet. “You can stake your life on that.”

“Sometimes,” said the red-headed one, “I think that she is maybe Ginger Rogers and that she has gone into the moving pictures.”

“Why not?” said the other.

“Then again, I just see her waiting there quietly where I live.”

“Keeping the home fires burning,” said the other.

“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “She’s the finest little woman in the world.”

“Listen,” said the other, “my old mother is O.K., too.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s dead,” said the second Vet. “Let’s not talk about her.”

“Aren’t you married, pal?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon.

“Sure,” he said. Down the bar, about four men away, he could see the red face, the blue eyes and sandy, beer-dewed mustache of Professor MacWalsey. Professor MacWalsey was looking straight ahead of him and as Richard Gordon watched he finished his glass of beer and, raising his lower lip, removed the foam from his mustache. Richard Gordon noticed how bright blue his eyes were.

As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for.

“What’s the matter, pal?” asked the red-headed Vet.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t feel good. I can tell you feel bad.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon.

“You look like you seen a ghost.”

“You see that fellow down there with a mustache?” asked Richard Gordon.

“Him?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?” asked the second Vet.

“Nothing,” said Richard Gordon. “Goddamn it.

Nothing.”

“Is he a bother to you? We can cool him. The three of us can jump him and you can put the boots to him.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

“We’ll get him when he goes outside,” the red- headed Vet said. “I don’t like the look of him. The son-of-a-bitch looks like a scab to me.”

“I hate him,” said Richard Gordon. “He’s ruined my life.”

“We’ll give him the works,” said the second Vet.

“The yellow rat. Listen Red, get a hold of a couple of bottles. We’ll beat him to death. Listen, when did he do it, pal? O.K. we have another one?”

“We’ve got a dollar and seventy cents,” Richard Gordon said.

“Maybe we better get a pint then,” the red- headed Vet said. “My teeth are floating now.”

“No,” said the other. “This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let’s go and beat this guy up and come back drink some more beer.”

“No. Leave him alone.”

“No, pal. Not us. You said that rat ruined your wife.”

“My life. Not my wife.”

“Jese! Pardon me. I’m sorry, pal.”

“He defaulted and ruined the bank,” the other Vet said. “I’ll bet there’s a reward for him. By God, I seen a picture of him at the post office today.”

“What were you doing at the post office?” asked the other suspiciously.

“Can’t I get a letter?”

“What’s the matter with getting letters at camp?”

“Do you think I went to the postal savings?”

“What were you doing in the post office?”

“I just stopped by.”

“Take that,” said his pal and swung on him as well as he could in the crowd.

“There goes those two cell mates,” said somebody. Holding and punching, kneeing and butting, the two were pushed out of the door.

“Let ’em fight on the sidewalk,” the wide-shouldered young man said. “Those bastards fight three’ or four times a night.”

“They’re a couple of punchies,” another Vet said. “Red could fight once but he’s got the old rale.”

“They’ve both got it.”

“Red got it fighting a fellow in the ring,” a short chunky Vet said. “This fellow had the old rale and he was all broke out on the shoulders and back. Every time they’d go into a clinch he’d rub his shoulder under Red’s nose or across his puss.”

“Oh, nuts. What did he put his face there for?”

“That was the way Red carried his head when he was in close. Down, like this. And this fellow was just roughing him.”

“Oh, nuts. That story is all bull. Nobody ever got the old rale from anybody in a fight.”

“That’s what you think. Listen, Red was as clean a living kid as you ever saw. I knew him. He was in my outfit. He was a good little fighter, too. I mean good. He was married, too, to a nice girl. I mean nice. And this Benny Sampson gave him that old rale just as sure as I’m standing here.”

“Then sit down,” said another Vet. “How did Poochy get it?”

“He got it in Shanghai.” “Where did you get yours?” “I ain’t got it.”

“Where did Suds get it?”

“Off a girl in Brest, coming home.”

“That’s all you guys ever talk about. The old rale. What difference does the old rale make?”

“None, the way we are now,” one Vet said. “You’re just as happy with it.”

“Poochy’s happier. He don’t know where he is.”

“What’s the old rale?” Professor MacWalsey asked the man next to him at the bar. The man told him.

“I wonder what the derivation is,” Professor MacWalsey said.

“I don’t know,” said the man. “I’ve always heard it called the old rale since my first enlistment. Some call it ral. But usually they call it the old rale.”

“I’d like to know,” said Professor MacWalsey.

“Most of those terms are old English words.”

“Why do they call it the old rale?” the Vet next to Professor MacWalsey asked another.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody seemed to know but all enjoyed the atmosphere of serious philological discussion.

Richard Gordon was next to Professor MacWalsey at the bar now. When Red and Poochy had started fighting he had been pushed down there and he had not resisted the move.

“Hello,” Professor MacWalsey said to him. “Do you want a drink?”

“Not with you,” said Richard Gordon.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Did you ever see anything like this?”

“No,” said Richard Gordon.

“It’s very strange,” said Professor MacWalsey. “They’re amazing. I always come here nights.”

“Don’t you ever get in trouble?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Drunken fights.”

“I never seem to have any trouble.”

“A couple of friends of mine wanted to beat you up a couple of minutes ago.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I would have let them.”

“I don’t think it would make much difference,” said Professor MacWalsey in the odd way of speaking he had. “If I annoy you by being here I can go.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon. “I sort of like to be near you.”

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

“Have you ever been married?” asked Richard Gordon.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“My wife died during the influenza epidemic in 1918.”

“Why do you want to marry again now?”

“I think I’d be better at it now. I think perhaps I’d be a better husband now.”

“So you picked my wife.”

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

“Damn you,” said Richard Gordon, and hit him in the face.

Someone grabbed his arm. He jerked it loose and someone hit him crashingly behind the ear. He could see Professor MacWalsey, before him, still at the bar, his face red, blinking his eyes. He was reaching for another beer to replace the one Gordon had spilled, and Richard Gordon drew back his arm to hit him again. As he did so, something exploded again behind his ear and all the lights flared up, wheeled round, and then went out.

Then he was standing in the doorway of Freddy’s place. His head was ringing, and the crowded room was unsteady and wheeling slightly, and he felt sick to his stomach. He could see the crowd looking at him. The big-shouldered young man was standing by him. “Listen,” he was saying, “you don’t want to start any trouble in here. There’s enough fights in here with those rummies.”

“Who hit me?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I hit you,” said the wide young man. “That fellow’s a regular customer here. You want to take it easy. You don’t want to go to fight in here.”

Standing unsteadily Richard Gordon saw Professor MacWalsey coming toward him away from the crowd at the bar. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody to slug you. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do.”

“Goddamn you,” said Richard Gordon, and started toward him. It was the last thing he remembered doing for the wide young man set himself, dropped his shoulders slightly, and clipped him again, and he went down, this time, on the cement floor on his face. The wide young man turned to Professor MacWalsey. “That’s all right, Doc,” he said, hospitably. “He won’t annoy you now. What’s the matter with him anyway?”

“I’ve got to take him home,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Will he be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Help me to get him in a taxi,” said Professor MacWalsey. They carried Richard Gordon out between them and with the driver helping, put him in the old model T taxi.

“You’re sure he’ll be all right?” asked Professor MacWalsey.

“Just pull on his ears good when you want to bring him to. Put some water on him. Look out he don’t want to fight when he comes to. Don’t let him grab you, Doc.”

“No,” said Professor MacWalsey.

Richard Gordon’s head lay back at an odd angle in the back of the taxi and he made a heavy, rasping noise when he breathed. Professor MacWalsey put his arm under his head and held it so it did not bump against the seat.

“Where are we going?” asked the taxi driver. “Out on the other end of town,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Past the Park. Down the street from the place where they sell mullets.”

“That’s the Rocky Road,” the driver said.

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

As they passed the first coffee shop up the street, Professor MacWalsey told the driver to stop. He wanted to go in and get some cigarettes. He laid Richard Gordon’s head down carefully on the seat and went into the coffee shop. When he came out to get back into the taxi, Richard Gordon was gone.

“Where did he go?” he asked the driver.

“That’s him up the street,” the driver said.

“Catch up with him.”

As the taxi pulled up even with him, Professor MacWalsey got out and went up to Richard Gordon who was lurching along the sidewalk.

“Come on, Gordon,” he said. “We’re going home.” Richard Gordon looked at him.

“We?” he said, swaying.

“I want you to go home in this taxi.”

“You go to hell.”

“I wish you’d come,” Professor MacWalsey said. “I want you to get home safely.”

“Where’s your gang?” said Richard Gordon.

“What gang?”

“Your gang that beat me up.”

“That was the bouncer. I didn’t know he was going to hit you.”

“You lie,” said Richard Gordon. He swung at the red-faced man in front of him and missed him. He slipped forward onto his knees and got up slowly. His knees were scraped raw from the sidewalk, but he did not know it.

“Come on and fight,” he said brokenly.

“I don’t fight,” said Professor MacWalsey. “If you’ll get into the taxi I’ll leave you.”

“Go to hell,” said Richard Gordon and started down the street.

“Leave him go,” said the taxi driver. “He’s all right now.”

“Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Hell,” the taxi driver said. “He’s perfect.”

“I’m worried about’ him,” Professor MacWalsey said.

“You can’t get him in without fighting him,” the taxi driver said. “Let him go. He’s fine. Is he your brother?”

“In a way,” said Professor MacWalsey.

He watched Richard Gordon lurching down the street until he was out of sight in the shadow from the big trees whose branches dipped down to grow into the ground like roots. What he was thinking as he watched him, was not pleasant. It is a mortal sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. The poor stupid man. The poor homeless man. I ought to stay with him, but I know that is too much for him to bear. I am ashamed and disgusted with myself and I hate what I have done. It all may turn out badly too. But I must not think about that. I will now return to the anesthetic I have used for seventeen years and will not need much longer. Although it is probably a vice now for which I only invent excuses. Though at least it is a vice for which I am suited. But I wish I could help that poor man whom I am wronging.

“Drive me back to Freddy’s,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Coast Guard cutter towing the Queen Conch was coming down the hawk channel between the reef and the Keys. The cutter rolled in the cross chop the light north wind raised against the flood tide but the white boat was towing easily and well.

“She’ll be all right if it doesn’t breeze,” the coast guard captain said. “She tows pretty, too. That Robby built nice boats. Could you make out any of the guff he was talking?”

“He didn’t make any sense,” the mate said. “He’s way out of his head.”

“I guess he’ll die all right,” the captain said. “Shot in the belly that way. Do you suppose he killed those four Cubans?”

“You can’t tell. I asked him but he didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Should we go talk to him again?”

“Let’s have a look at him,” the captain said.

Leaving the quartermaster at the wheel, running the beacons down the channel, they went behind the wheel house into the captain’s cabin. Harry Morgan lay there on the iron pipe bunk. His eyes were closed but he opened them when the captain touched his wide shoulder.

“How you feeling, Harry?” the captain asked him. Harry looked at him and did not speak.

“Can we get you anything, boy?” the captain asked him.

Harry Morgan looked at him.

“He don’t hear you,” said the mate.

“Harry,” said the captain, “do you want anything, boy?”

He wet a towel in the water bottle on a gimbal by the bunk and moistened Harry Morgan’s deeply cracked lips. They were dry and black looking. Looking at him, Harry Morgan started speaking. “A man,” he said.

“Sure,” said the captain. “Go on.”

“A man,” said Harry Morgan, very slowly. “Ain’t got no hasn’t got any can’t really isn’t any way out.” He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke.

“Go on, Harry,” said the captain. “Tell us who did it. How did it happen, boy?”

“A man,” said Harry, looking at him now with his narrow eyes on the wide, high-cheek-boned face, trying now to tell him.

“Four men,” said the captain helpfully. He moistened the lips again, squeezing the towel so a few drops went between them.

“A man,” corrected Harry; then stopped.

“All right. A man,” the captain said.

“A man,” Harry said again very flatly, very slowly, talking with his dry mouth. “Now the way things are the way they go no matter what no.”

The captain looked at the mate and shook his head.

“Who did it, Harry?” the mate asked.

Harry looked at him.

“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. “Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.” He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry’s lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.

“A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”

He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.

He lay there his eyes open again.

“Come on,” said the captain to the mate. “You sure you don’t want anything, Harry?”

Harry Morgan looked at him but he did not answer. He had told them, but they had not heard.

“We’ll be back,” said the captain. “Take it easy, boy.” Harry Morgan watched them go out of the cabin. Forward in the wheelhouse, watching it get dark and the light of Sombrero starting to sweep out at sea, the mate said, “He gives you the willies out of his head like that.”

“Poor fellow,” said the captain. “Well, we’ll be in pretty soon now. We’ll get him in soon after midnight. If we don’t have to slow down for that tow.”

“Think he’ll live?”

“No,” said the captain. “But you can’t ever tell.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

There were many people in the dark street outside the iron gates that closed the entrance to the old submarine base now transformed into a yacht basin. The Cuban watchman had orders to let no one in, and the crowd were pressing against the fence to look through between the iron rods into the dark enclosure lit, along the water, by the lights of the yachts that lay moored at the finger piers. The crowd was as quiet as only a Key West crowd can be. The yachtsmen pushed and elbowed their way through to the gate and by the watchman.

“Hey. You canna comein,” the watchman said.

“What the hell. We’re off a yacht.”

“Nobody supposacomein,” the watchman said. “Get back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said one of the yachtsmen, and pushed him aside to go up the road toward the dock.

Behind them was the crowd outside the gates, where the little watchman stood uncomfortable and anxious in his cap, his long mustache and his deshevelled authority, wishing he had a key to lock the big gate and, as they strode heartily up the sloping road they saw ahead, then passed, a group of men waiting at the Coast Guard pier. They paid no attention to them but walked along the dock, past the piers where the other yachts lay to pier number five, and out on the pier to where the gang plank reached, in the glare of a flood light, from rough wooden pier to the teak deck of the New Exuma II. In the main cabin they sat in big leather chairs beside a long table on which magazines were spread, and one of them rang for the steward.

“Scotch and soda,” he said.

“You, Henry?”

“Yes,” said Henry Carpenter.

“What was the matter with that silly ass at the gate?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Henry Carpenter.

The steward, in his white jacket, brought the two glasses.

“Play those disks I put out after dinner,” the yachtsman, whose name was Wallace Johnston, said.

“I’m afraid I put them away, sir,” the steward said.

“Damn you,” said Wallace Johnston. “Play that new Bach album then.”

“Very good, sir,” said the steward. He went over to the record cabinet and took out an album and moved with it to the phonograph. He began playing the “Sarabande.”

“Did you see Tommy Bradley today?” asked Henry Carpenter. “I saw him as the plane came in.”

“I can’t bear him,” said Wallace. “Neither him nor that whore of a wife of his.”

“I like Helène,” said Henry Carpenter. “She has such a good time.”

“Did you ever try it?”

“Of course. It’s marvellous.”

“I can’t stick her at any price,” said Wallace Johnston. “Why in God’s name does she live down here?”

“They have a lovely place.”

“It is a nice clean little yacht basin,” said Wallace Johnston. “Is it true Tommy Bradley’s impotent?”

“I shouldn’t think so. You hear that about everyone. He’s simply broad minded.”

“Broad minded is excellent. She’s certainly a broad if there ever was one.”

“She’s a remarkably nice woman,” said Henry Carpenter. “You’d like her, Wally.”

“I would not,” said Wallace. “She represents everything I hate in a woman, and Tommy Bradley epitomizes everything I hate in a man.”

“You feel awfully strongly tonight.”

“You never feel strongly because you have no consistency,” Wallace Johnston said. “You can’t make up your mind. You don’t know what you are even.”

“Let’s drop me,” said Henry Carpenter. He lit a cigarette.

“Why should I?”

“Well, one reason you might is because I go with you on your bloody yacht, and at least half the time I do what you want to do, and that keeps you from paying blackmail to the busboys and sailors, and one thing and another, that do know what they are, and what you are.”

“You’re in a pretty mood,” said Wallace Johnston. “You know I never pay blackmail.”

“No. You’re too tight to. You have friends like me instead.”

“I haven’t any other friends like you.”

“Don’t be charming,” said Henry. “I don’t feel up to it tonight. Just go ahead and play Bach and abuse your steward and drink a little too much and go to bed.”

“What’s gotten into you?” said the other, standing up. “Why are you getting so damned unpleasant? You’re not such a great bargain, you know.”

“I know,” said Henry. “I’ll be oh so jolly tomorrow. But tonight’s a bad night. Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights? I suppose when you’re rich enough there isn’t any difference.”

“You talk like a school girl.”

“Good night,” said Henry Carpenter. “I’m not a school girl nor a school boy. I’m going to bed. Everything will be awfully jolly in the morning.”

“What did you lose? Is that what makes you so gloomy?”

“I lost three hundred.”

“See? I told you that was it.”

“You always know, don’t you?”

“But look. You lost three hundred.”

“I’ve lost more than that.”

“How much more?”

“The jackpot,” said Henry Carpenter. “The eternal jackpot. I’m playing a machine now that doesn’t give jackpots anymore. Only tonight I just happened to think about it. Usually I don’t think about it. Now I’m going to bed so I won’t bore you.”

“You don’t bore me. But just try not to be rude.” “I’m afraid I’m rude and you bore me. Good night.

Everything will be fine tomorrow.”

“You’re damned rude.”

“Take it or leave it,” said Henry. “I’ve been doing both all my life.”

“Good night,” said Wallace Johnston hopefully.

Henry Carpenter did not answer. He was listening to the Bach.

“Don’t go off to bed like that,” Wallace Johnston said. “Why be so temperamental?”

“Drop it.”

“Why should I? I’ve seen you come out of it before.”

“Drop it.”

“Have a drink and cheer up.”

“I don’t want a drink and it wouldn’t cheer me up.”

“Well, go off to bed, then.”

“I am,” said Henry Carpenter.

That was how it was that night on the New Exuma II, with a crew of twelve, Captain Nils Larson, master, and on board Wallace Johnston, owner, 38 years old, M.A. Harvard, composer, money from silk mills, unmarried, interdit de sejour in Paris, well known from Algiers to Biskra, and one guest, Henry Carpenter, 36, M.A. Harvard, money now two hundred a month in trust fund from his mother, formerly four hundred and fifty a month until the bank administering the Trust Fund had exchanged one good security for another good security, for other not so good securities, and, finally, for an equity in an office building the bank had been saddled with and which paid nothing at all. Long before this reduction in income it had been said of Henry Carpenter that if he were dropped from a height of 5,500 feet without a parachute, he would land safely with his knees under some rich man’s table. But he gave value in good company for his entertainment and while it was only lately, and rarely, that he felt, or expressed himself, as he had tonight, his friends had felt for some time that he was cracking up. If he had not been felt to be cracking up, with that instinct for feeling something wrong with a member of the pack and healthy desire to turn him out, if it is impossible to destroy him, which characterizes the rich; he would not have been reduced to accepting the hospitality of Wallace Johnston. As it was, Wallace Johnston, with his rather special pleasures, was Henry Carpenter’s last stand, and he was defending his position better than he knew for his honest courting of an end to their relationship; his subsequent brutality of expression, and sincere insecurity of tenure intrigued and seduced the other who might, given Henry Carpenter’s age, have easily been bored by a steady compliance. Thus Henry Carpenter postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not of months.

The money on which it was not worthwhile for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more a month than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on at the time of his death three days before.

Aboard the other yachts lying at the finger piers there were other people with other problems. On one of the largest yachts, a handsome, black, barkentine rigged three-master, a sixty-year-old grain broker lay awake worrying about the report he had received from his office of the activities of the investigators from the Internal Revenue Bureau. Ordinarily, at this time of night, he would have quieted his worry with Scotch high balls and have reached the state where he felt as tough and regardless of consequences as any of the old brothers of the coast with whom, in character and standards of conduct, he had, truly, much in common. But his doctor had forbidden him all liquor for a month, for three months really, that is they had said it would kill him in a year if he did not give up alcohol for at least three months, so he was going to layoff it for a month; and now he worried about the call he had received from the Bureau before he left town asking him exactly where he was going and whether he planned to leave the United States coastal waters.

He lay, now, in his pajamas, on his wide bed, two pillows under his head, the reading light on, but he could not keep his mind on the book, which was an account of a trip to Galapagos. In the old days he had never brought them to this bed. He’d had them in their cabins and he came to this bed afterwards. This was his own stateroom, as private to him as his office. He never wanted a woman in his room. When he wanted one he went to hers, and when he was through he was through, and now that he was through for good his brain had the same clear coldness always that had, in the old days, been an after effect. And he lay now, with no kindly blurring, denied all that chemical courage that had soothed his mind and warmed his heart for so many years, and wondered what the department had, what they had found and what they would twist, what they would accept as normal and what they would insist was evasion; and he was not afraid of them, but only hated them and the power they would use so insolently that all his own hard, small, tough and lasting insolence, the one permanent thing he had gained and that was truly valid, would be drilled through, and, if he were ever made afraid, shattered.

He did not think in any abstractions, but in deals, in sales, in transfers and in gifts. He thought in shares, in bales, in thousands of bushels, in options, holding companies, trusts, and subsidiary corporations, and as he went over it he knew they had plenty, enough so he would have no peace for years. If they would not compromise it would be very bad. In the old days he would not have worried, but the fighting part of him was tired now, along with the other part, and he was alone in all of this now and he lay on the big, wide, old bed and could neither read nor sleep.

His wife had divorced him ten years before after twenty years of keeping up appearances, and he had never missed her nor had he ever loved her. He had started with her money and she had borne him two male children, both of whom, like their mother, were fools. He had treated her well until the money he had made was double her original capital and then he could afford to take no notice of her. After his money had reached that point he had never been annoyed by her sick headaches, by her complaints, or by her plans. He had ignored them.

He had been admirably endowed for a speculative career because he had possessed extraordinary sexual vitality which gave him the confidence to gamble well; common sense, an excellent mathematical brain, a permanent but controlled skepticism; a skepticism which was as sensitive to impending disaster as an accurate aneroid barometer to atmospheric pressure; and a valid time sense that kept him from trying to hit tops or bottoms. These, coupled with a lack of morals, an ability to make people like him without ever liking or trusting them in return, while at the same time convincing them warmly and heartily of his friendship; not a disinterested friendship, but a friendship so interested in their success that it automatically made them accomplices; and an incapacity for either remorse or pity, had carried him to where he was now. And where he was now was lying in a pair of striped silk pajamas that covered his shrunken old man’s chest, his bloated little belly, his now useless and disproportionately large equipment that had once been his pride, and his small flabby legs, lying on a bed unable to sleep because he finally had remorse.

His remorse was to think if only he had not been quite so smart five years ago. He could have paid the taxes then without any juggling, and if he had only done so he would be all right now. So he lay thinking of that and finally he slept; but because remorse had once found the crack and begun to seep in, he did not know he slept because his brain kept on as it had while he was awake. So there would be no rest and, at his age, it would not take so long for that to get him.

He used to say that only suckers worried and he would keep from worrying now until he could not sleep. He might keep from it until he slept, but then it would come in, and since he was this old its task was easy.

He would not need to worry about what he had done to other people, nor what had happened to them due to him, nor how they’d ended; who’d moved from houses on the Lake Shore drive to taking boarders out in Austin, whose debutante daughters now were dentists’ assistants when they had a job; who ended up a night watchman at sixty-three after that last corner; who shot himself early one morning before breakfast and which one of his children found him, and what the mess looked like; who now rode on the L to work, when there was work, from Berwyn, trying to sell, first, bonds; then motor cars; then house-to-housing novelties and specialties (we don’t want no peddlers, get out of here, the door slammed in his face) until he varied the leaning drop his father made from forty-two floors up, with no rush of plumes as when an eagle falls, to a step forward onto the third rail in front of the Aurora-Elgin train, his overcoat pocket full of un- saleable combination eggbeaters and fruit juice extractors. Just let me demonstrate it, madame. You attach it here, screw down on this little gadget here. Now watch. No, I don’t want it. Just try one. I don’t want it. Get out.

So he got out onto the sidewalk with the frame houses, the naked yards and the bare catalpa trees where no one wanted it or anything else, that led down to the Aurora-Elgin tracks.

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson , those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a night- mare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.

The men he broke made all these various exits but that never worried him. Somebody had to lose and only suckers worried.

No he would not have to think of them nor of the by-products of successful speculation. You win; somebody’s got to lose, and only suckers worry.

It would be enough for him to think about how much it would be better if he had not been quite so smart five years ago, and in a little while, at his age, the wish to change what can no longer be undone, will open up the gap that will let worry in. Only suckers worry. But he can knock the worry if he takes a Scotch and soda. The hell with what the doctor said. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepily, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death.

While on the next yacht beyond, a pleasant, dull and upright family are asleep. The father’s conscience is good and he sleeps soundly on his side, a clipper ship running before a blow framed above his head, the reading light on, a book dropped beside the bed. The mother sleeps well and dreams about her garden. She is fifty but is a handsome, wholesome, well- kept woman who looks attractive as she sleeps. The daughter dreams about her fiancé who comes tomorrow on the plane and she stirs in her sleep and laughs at something in the dream and, without waking, raises her knees almost against her chin, curled up like a cat, with curly blonde hair and her smooth- skinned pretty face, asleep she looks as her mother did when she was a girl.

They are a happy family and all love each other. The father is a man of civic pride and many good works, who opposed prohibition, is not bigoted and is generous, sympathetic, understanding and almost never irritable. The crew of the yacht are well-paid, well-fed and have good quarters. They all think highly of the owner and like his wife and daughter. The fiancé is a Skull and Bones man, voted most likely to succeed, voted most popular, who still thinks more of others than of himself and would be too good for anyone except a lovely girl like Frances. He is probably a little too good for Frances too, but it will be years before Frances realizes this, perhaps; and she may never realize it, with luck. The type of man who is tapped for Bones is rarely also tapped for bed; but with a lovely girl like Frances intention counts as much as performance.

So, anyhow, they all sleep well and where did the money come from that they’re all so happy with and use so well and gracefully? The money came from selling something everybody uses by the millions of bottles, which costs three cents a quart to make, for a dollar a bottle in the large (pint) size, fifty cents in the medium, and a quarter in the small. But it’s more economical to buy the large, and if you make ten dollars a week the cost is just the same to you as though you were a millionaire, and the product’s really good. It does just what it says it will and more besides. Grateful users from all over the world keep writing in discovering new uses and old users are as loyal to it as Harold Tompkins, the fiancé, is to Skull and Bones or Stanley Baldwin is to Harrow. There are no suicides when money’s made that way and everyone sleeps soundly on the yacht Alzira III, master Jon Jacobson, crew of fourteen, owner and family aboard.

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It’s great to be an Intrepid Voyager.

On the Irydia IV, a professional son-in-law of the very rich and his mistress, named Dorothy, the wife of that highly paid Hollywood director, John Hollis, whose brain is in the process of outlasting his liver so that he will end up calling himself a communist, to save his soul, his other organs being too corroded to attempt to save them, are asleep. The son-in-law, big-framed, good looking in a poster way, lies on his back snoring, but Dorothy Hollis, the director’s wife, is awake and she puts on a dressing gown and, going out onto the deck, looks across the dark water of the yacht basin to the line the breakwater makes. It is cool on the deck and the wind blows her hair and she smooths it back from her tanned forehead, and pulling the robe tighter around her, her nipples rising in the cold, notices the lights of a boat coming along the outside of the breakwater. She watches them moving steadily and rapidly along and then at the entrance to the basin the boat’s searchlight is switched on and comes across the water in a sweep that blinds her as it passes, picking up the coast guard pier where it lit up the group of men waiting there and the shining black of the new ambulance from the funeral home which also doubles at funerals as a hearse.

I suppose it would be better to take some luminol, Dorothy thought. I must get some sleep. Poor Eddie’s tight as a tick. It means so much to him and he’s so nice, but he gets so tight he goes right off to sleep. He’s so sweet. Of course if I married him he’d be off with someone else, I suppose. He is sweet, though. Poor darling, he’s so tight. I hope he won’t feel miserable in the morning. I must go and set this wave and get some sleep. It looks like the devil. I do want to look lovely for him. He is sweet. I wish I’d brought a maid. I couldn’t though. Not even Bates. I wonder how poor John is. Oh, he’s sweet too. I hope he’s better. His poor liver. I wish I were there to look after him. I might go and get some sleep so I won’t look a fright tomorrow. Eddie is sweet. So’s John and his poor liver. Oh, his poor liver. Eddie is sweet. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. He’s so big and jolly and marvellous and all. Perhaps he won’t get so tight tomorrow.

She went below and found her way to her cabin, and sitting before the mirror commenced brushing her hair a hundred strokes. She smiled at herself in the mirror as the long bristled brush swept through her lovely hair. Eddie is sweet. Yes, he is. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. Men all have something that way. Look at John’s liver. Of course you can’t look at it. It must look dreadful really. I’m glad you can’t see it. Nothing about a man’s really ugly though. It’s funny how they think it is though. I suppose a liver though. Or kidneys. Kidneys en brochette. How many kidneys are there? There’s two of nearly everything except stomach and heart. And brain of course. There. That’s a hundred strokes. I love to brush my hair. It’s almost the only thing you do that’s good for you that’s fun. I mean by your- self. Oh, Eddie is sweet. Suppose I just went in there. No, he is too tight. Poor boy. I’ll take the luminal.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She was extraordinarily pretty, with a small, very fine figure. Oh, I’ll do, she thought. Some of it isn’t as good as some of the rest of it, but I’ll do for a while yet. You do have to have sleep though. I love to sleep. I wish I could get just one good natural real sleep the way we slept when we were kids. I suppose that’s the thing about growing up and marrying and having children and then drinking too much and then doing all the things you shouldn’t. If you could sleep well I don’t think any of it would be bad for you. Except drinking too much I suppose. Poor John and his liver and Eddie. Eddie is darling, anyway. He is cute. I’d better take the luminol.

She made a face at herself in the glass.

“You’d better take the luminal,” she said in a whisper. She took the luminol with a glass of water from the chronium-plated thermos carafe that was on the locker by the bed.

I t makes you nervous, she thought. But you have to sleep. I wonder how Eddie would be if we were married. He would be running around with someone younger I suppose. I suppose they can’t help the way they’re built any more than we can. I just want a lot of it and I feel so fine, and being someone else or someone new doesn’t really mean a thing. It’s just it itself, and you would love them always if they gave it to you. The same one I mean. But they aren’t built that way. They want someone new, or someone younger, or someone that they shouldn’t have, or someone that looks like someone else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde. Or if you’re blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl I guess, and if they’ve had really enough they want Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what. I don’t know. Or they just get tired, I suppose. You can’t blame them if that’s the way they are and I can’t help John’s liver either or that he’s drunk so much he isn’t any good. He was good. He was marvellous. He was. He really was. And Eddie is. But now he’s tight. I suppose I’ll end up a bitch. Maybe I’m one now. I suppose you never know when you get to be one. Only her best friends would tell her. You don’t read it in Mr. Winchell. That would be a good new thing for him to announce. Bitch-hood. Mrs. John Hollis canined into town from the coast. Better than babies. More common I guess. But women have a bad time really. The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you. I suppose the good ones are made to have a lot of wives but it’s awfully wearing trying to be a lot of wives yourself, and then someone simple takes him when he’s tired of that. I suppose we all end up as bitches but whose fault is it? The bitches have the most fun but you have to be awfully stupid really to be a good one. Like Helène Bradley. Stupid and well-intentioned and really selfish to be a good one. Probably I’m one already. They say you can’t tell and that you always think you’re not. There must be men who don’t get tired of you or of it. There must be. But who has them? The ones we know are all brought up wrong. Let’s not go into that now. No, not into that. Nor back to all those cars and all those dances. I wish that luminol would work. Damn Eddie, really. He shouldn’t have really gotten so tight. It isn’t fair, really. No one can help the way they’re built but getting tight has nothing to do with that. I suppose I am a bitch all right, Jut if I lie here now all night and can’t sleep I’ll go crazy and if I take too much of that damned stuff I’ll feel awfully all day tomorrow and then sometimes it won’t put you to sleep and anyway I’ll be cross and nervous and feel frightful. Oh, well, I might as well. I hate to but what can you do? What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn’t, I’m sweet, yes you are, you’re lovely, oh, you’re so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn’t want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he’s not, he’s not even here, I’m here, I’m always here and I’m the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. And you’re me. So that’s it. So that’s the way it is. So what about it always now and over now. All over now. All right. I don’t care. What difference does it make? It isn’t wrong if I don’t feel badly. And I don’t. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I’ll do it again before I’m really awake.

She went to sleep then, remembering, just before she was finally asleep, to turn on her side so that her face did not rest on the pillow. She remembered, no matter how sleepy, how terribly bad it is for the face to sleep that way, resting on the pillow.

There were two other yachts in the harbor but everyone was asleep on them, too, when the Coast Guard boat towed Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, into the dark yacht basin and tied up alongside the Coast Guard pier.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Harry Morgan knew nothing about it when they handed a stretcher down from the pier, and, with two men holding it on the deck of the gray-painted cutter under a floodlight outside the captain’s cabin, two others picked him up from the captain’s bunk and moved unsteadily out to ease him onto the stretcher. He had been unconscious since the early evening and his big body sagged the canvas of the stretcher deeply as the four men lifted it up toward the pier.

“Up with it now.”

“Hold his legs. Don’t let him slip.”

“Up with it.”

They got the stretcher onto the pier.

“How is he, Doctor?” asked the sheriff as the men shoved the stretcher into the ambulance.

“He’s alive,” said the doctor. “That’s all you can say.”

“He’s been out of his head or unconscious ever since we picked him up,” the boatswain’s mate commanding the Coast Guard cutter said. He was a short chunky man with glasses that shone in the floodlight. He needed a shave. “All your Cuban stiffs are back in the launch. We left everything like it was. We didn’t touch anything. We just put the two down. that might have gone overboard. Everything’s just like it was. The money and the guns. Everything.”

“Come on,” said the sheriff. “Can you run a floodlight back there?”

“I’ll have them plug one in on the dock,” the dockmaster said. He went off to get the light and the cord.

“Come on,” said the sheriff. They went astern with flashlights. “I want you to show me exactly how you found them. Where’s the money?”

“In those two bags.”

“How much is there?”

“I don’t know. I opened one up and saw it was the money and shut it up. I didn’t want to touch it.”

“That’s right,” said the sheriff. “That’s exactly right.”

“Everything’s just like it was except we put two of the stiffs off the tanks down into the cockpit so they wouldn’t roll overboard, and we carried that big ox of a Harry aboard and put him in my bunk. I figured him to pass out before we got him in. He’s in a hell of a shape.”

“He’s been unconscious all the time?”

“He was out of his head at first,” said the skipper. “But you couldn’t make out what he was saying. We listened to a lot of it but it didn’t make sense. Then he got unconscious. There’s your layout. Just like it was only that niggery looking one on his side is laying where Harry lay. He was on the bench over the starboard tank hanging over the coaming and the other dark one by the side of him was on the other bench, the port side, hunched over on his face. Watch out. Don’t light any matches. She’s full of gas.”

“There ought to be another body,” said the sheriff.

“That’s all there was. The money’s in that bag. The guns are right where they were.”

“We better have somebody from the bank to see the money opened,” said the sheriff.

“O.K.,” said the skipper. “That’s a good idea.”

“We can take the bag to my office and seal it.”

“That’s a good idea,” said the skipper.

Under the floodlight the green and white of the launch had a freshly shiny look. This came from the dew on her deck and on the top of the house. The splinterings showed fresh through her white paint. Astern of her the water was a clear green under the light and there were small fish about the pilings.

In the cockpit the inflated faces of the dead men were shiny under the light, lacquered brown where the blood had dried. There were empty .45 caliber shells in the cockpit around the dead and the Thompson gun lay in the stern where Harry had put it down. The two leather briefcases the men had brought the money aboard in, leaned against one of the gas tanks.

“I thought maybe I ought to take the money on board while we were towing her,” the skipper said. “Then I thought it was better to leave it just exactly like it was so long as the weather was light.”

“It was right to leave it,” the sheriff said. “What’s become of the other man, Albert Tracy, the fisherman?”

“I don’t know. This is just how it was except for shifting those two,” the skipper said. “They’re all shot to pieces except that one there under the wheel laying on his back. He’s just shot in the back of the head. It come out through the front. You can see what it did.”

“He’s the one that looked like a kid,” the sheriff said.

“He don’t look like anything now,” the skipper said.

“That big one there is the one had the submachine gun and who killed attorney Robert Simmons,” the sheriff said. “What do you suppose happened? How the devil did they all get shot?”

“They must have got fighting among themselves,” the skipper said. “They must have had a dispute on how to split the money.”

“We’ll cover them up until morning,” the sheriff said. “I’ll take those bags.”

Then, as they were standing there in the cockpit, a woman came running up the pier past the Coast Guard cutter, and behind her came the crowd. The woman was gaunt, middle-aged and bare-headed, and her stringy hair had come undone and was down on her neck although it was still knotted at the end. As she saw the bodies in the cockpit she commenced to scream. She stood on the pier screaming with her head back while two other women held her arms. The crowd, which had come close behind her, formed around her, jostled close, looking down at the launch.

“God damn it,” said the sheriff. “Who left that gate open? Get something to cover those bodies; blankets, sheets, anything, and we’ll get this crowd out of here.”

The woman stopped screaming and looked down into the launch, then put back her head and screamed again.

“Where they got him?” said one of the women near her.

“Where they put Albert?”

The woman who was screaming stopped it and looked in the launch again.

“He ain’t there,” she said. “Hey, you, Roger Johnson,” she shouted at the sheriff. “Where’s Albert? Where’s Albert?”

“He isn’t on board, Mrs. Tracy,” the sheriff said.

The woman put her head back and screamed again, the chords in her scrawny throat rigid, her hands clenched, her hair shaking.

In the back of the crowd people were shoving and elbowing to get to the dock side.

“Come on. Let somebody else see.”

“They’re going to cover them up.”

And in Spanish, “Let me pass. Let me look. Hay cuatro muertos. Todos son muertos. Let me see.”

Now the woman was screaming, “Albert! Albert! Oh, my God, where’s Albert?”

In the back of the crowd two young Cubans who had just come up and who could not penetrate the crowd stepped back, then ran and shoved forward together. The front line of the crowd swayed and bulged, then, in the middle of a scream, Mrs. Tracy and her two supporters toppled, hung slanted forward in desperate unbalance and then, while the supporters wildly hung to safety, Mrs. Tracy, still screaming, fell into the green water, the scream becoming a splash and bubble.

Two Coast Guard men dove into the clear green water where Mrs. Tracy was splashing in the floodlight. The sheriff leaned out on the stern and shoved a boat hook out to her and finally, raised from below by the two Coast Guardsmen, pulled up by the arms by the sheriff, she was hoisted onto the stern of the launch. No one in the crowd had made a move to aid her, and, as she stood dripping on the stern, she looked up at them, shook both her fists at them and shouted; “Basards! Bishes!” Then as she looked into the cockpit she wailed, “Alber. Whersh Alber?”

“He’s not on board, Mrs. Tracy,” the sheriff said, taking up a blanket to put around her. “Try to be calm, Mrs. Tracy. Try to be brave.”

“My plate,” said Mrs. Tracy tragically. “Losht my plate.”

“We’ll dive it up in the morning,” the skipper of the Coast Guard cutter told her. “We’ll get it all right.”

The Coast Guard men had climbed up on the stern and were standing dripping. “Come on. Let’s go,” one of them said. “I’m getting cold.”

“Are you all right, Mrs. Tracy?” the sheriff said, putting the blanket around her.

“All rie? “ said Mrs. Tracy. “All rie?” then clenched both her hands and put her head back to really scream. Mrs. Tracy’s grief was greater than she could bear.

The crowd listened to her and was silent and respectful. Mrs. Tracy provided just the sound effect that was needed to go with the sight of the dead bandits that were now being covered with Coast Guard blankets by the sheriff and one of the deputies, thus veiling the greatest sight the town had seen since the Isleño had been lynched, years before, out on the County Road and then hung up to swing from a telephone pole in the lights of all the cars that had come out to see it.

The crowd was disappointed when the bodies were covered but they alone of all the town had seen them. They had seen Mrs. Tracy fall into the water and they had, before they came in, seen Harry Morgan carried on a stretcher into the Marine Hospital. When the sheriff ordered them out of the yacht basin they went quietly and happily. They knew how privileged they had been.

Meanwhile at the Marine Hospital Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, and her three daughters waited on a bench in the receiving room. The three girls were crying and Marie was biting on a handkerchief. She hadn’t been able to cry since about noon.

“Daddy’s shot in the stomach,” one of the girls said to her sister.

“It’s terrible,” said the sister.

“Be quiet,” said the older sister. “I’m praying for him. Don’t interrupt me.”

Marie said nothing and only sat there, biting on a handkerchief and on her lower lip.

After a while the doctor came out. She looked at him and he shook his head.

“Can I go in?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he said. She went over to him. “Is he gone?” she said.

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Morgan.”

“Can I go in and see him?”

“Not yet. He’s in the operating room.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Marie. “Oh, Christ. I’ll take the girls home. Then I’ll be back.”

Her throat suddenly was swollen hard and shut so she could not swallow.

“Come on, you girls,” she said. The three girls followed her out to the old car where she got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“How’s Daddy?” one of the girls asked.

Marie did not answer.

“How’s Daddy, Mother?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Marie said. “Just don’t talk to me.”

“But—”

“Shut up, Honey,” said Marie. “Just shut up and pray for him.” The girls began to cry again.

“Damn it,” said Marie. “Don’t cry like that. I said pray for him.”

“We will,” said one of the girls. “I haven’t stopped since we were at the hospital.”

As they turned onto the worn white coral of the Rocky Road the headlight of the car showed a man walking unsteadily along ahead of them.

“Some poor rummy,” thought Marie. “Some poor goddamned rummy.”

They passed the man, who had blood on his face, and who kept on unsteadily in the dark after the lights of the car had gone on up the street. It was Richard Gordon on his way home.

At the door of the house Marie stopped the car.

“Go to bed, you girls,” she said.

“Go on up to bed.” “But what about Daddy?” one of the girls asked.

“Don’t you talk to me,” Marie said. “For Christ sake, please don’t speak to me.”

She turned the car in the road and started back toward the hospital.

Back at the hospital Marie Morgan climbed the steps in a rush. The doctor met her on the porch as he came out through the screen door. He was tired and on his way home.

“He’s gone, Mrs. Morgan,” he said.

“He’s dead?”

“He died on the table.”

“Can I see him?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “He went very peacefully, Mrs. Morgan. He was in no pain.”

“Oh, hell,” said Marie. Tears began to run down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh.”

The doctor put his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” Marie said. Then, “I want to see him.”

“Come on,” the doctor said. He walked with her down a corridor and into the white room where Harry Morgan lay on a wheeled table, a sheet over his great body. The light was very bright and cast no shadows. Marie stood in the doorway looking terrified by the light.

“He didn’t suffer at all, Mrs. Morgan,” the doctor said. Marie did not seem to hear him.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, and began to cry again.

“Look at his goddamned face.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

I don’t know, Marie Morgan was thinking, sitting at the dining room table. I can take it just a day at a time and a night at a time, and maybe it gets different. It’s the goddamned nights. If I cared about those girls it would be different. But I don’t care about those girls. I’ve got to do something about them though. I’ve got to get started on something. Maybe you get over being dead inside. I guess it don’t make any difference. I got to start to do something anyway. It’s been a week today. I’m afraid if I think about him on purpose I’ll get so I can’t remember how he looks. That was when I got that awful panic when I couldn’t remember his face. I got to get started doing something no matter how I feel. If he’d have left some money or if there’d been rewards it would have been better but I wouldn’t feel no better. First thing I’ve got to do is try to sell the house. The bastards that shot him. Oh, the dirty bastards. That’s the only feeling I got. Hate and a hollow feeling. I’m empty like a empty house. Well, I got to start to do something. I should have gone to the funeral. But I couldn’t go. I got to start to do something now though. Ain’t nobody going to come back anymore when they’re dead.

Him, like he was, snotty and strong and quick, and like some kind of expensive animal. It would always get me just to watch him move. I was so lucky all that time to have him. His luck went bad first in Cuba. Then it kept right worse and worse until a Cuban killed him.

Cubans are bad luck for Conchs. Cubans are bad luck for anybody. They got too many niggers there too. I remember that time he took me over to Havana when he was making such good money and we were walking in the park and a nigger said something to me and Harry smacked him, and picked up his straw hat that fell off, and sailed it about a half a block and a taxi ran over it. I laughed so it made my bellyache.

That was the first time I ever made my hair blonde that time there in that beauty parlor on the Prado. They were working on it all afternoon and it was naturally so dark they didn’t want to do it and I was afraid I’d look terrible, but I kept telling them to see if they couldn’t make it a little lighter, and the man would go over it with that orange wood stick with cotton on the end, dipping it in that bowl that had the stuff in it sort of smoky like the way it steamed sort of, and the comb; parting the strands with one end of the stick and the comb and going over them and letting it dry and I was sitting there scared inside my chest of what I was having done and all I’d say was, just see if you can’t make it a little lighter.

And finally he said, that’s just as light as I can make it safely, Madame, and then he shampooed it, and put a wave in, and I was afraid to look even for fear it would be terrible, and he waved it parted on one side and high behind my ears with little tight curls in back, and it still wet I couldn’t tell how it looked except it looked all changed and I looked strange to myself. And he put a net over it wet and put me under the dryer and all the time I was scared about it. And then when I come out from under the dryer he took the net off and the pins out and combed it out and it was just like gold.

And I came out of the place and saw myself in the mirror and it shone so in the sun and was so soft and silky when I put my hand and touched it, and I couldn’t believe it was me and I was so excited I was choked with it.

I walked down the Prado to the café where Harry was waiting and I was so excited feeling all funny inside, sort of faint like, and he stood up when he saw me coming and he couldn’t take his eyes off me and his voice was thick and funny when he said, “Jesus, Marie, you’re beautiful.”

And I said, “You like me blonde?”

“Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Let’s go to the hotel.”

And I said, “O.K., then. Let’s go.” I was twenty-six then.

And that’s how he always was with me and that’s the way I always was about, him. He said he never had anything like me and I know there wasn’t any men like him. I know it too damned well and now he’s dead.

Now I got to get started on something. I know I got to. But when you got a man like that and some lousy Cuban shoots him you can’t just start right out; because everything inside of you is gone. I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes all right.

And he was so goddamned good to me and reliable too, and he always made money some way and I never had to worry about money, only about him, and now that’s all gone.

It ain’t what happens to the one gets killed. I wouldn’t mind if it was me got killed. With Harry at the end there he was just tired, the doctor said. He never woke up even. I was glad he died easy because Jesus Christ he must have suffered in that boat. I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. I guess like that you don’t think about anybody. I guess it must have hurt too bad. But finally he was just too tired. I wish to Christ it was me was dead. But that ain’t any good to wish. Nothing is any good to wish.

I couldn’t go to the funeral. But people don’t understand that. They don’t know how you feel. Because good men are scarce. They just don’t have them. Nobody knows the way you feel, because they don’t know what it’s all about that way. I know. I know too well. And if I live now twenty years what am I going to do? Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. That’s what I got to do. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know.

How do you get through nights if you can’t sleep?

I guess you find out like you find out how it feels to lose your husband. I guess you find out all right. I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life. I guess you do all right. I guess I’m probably finding out right now. You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just about what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to. All right. I got a good start then. I’m way ahead of everybody now.

Outside it was a lovely, cool, sub-tropical winter day and the palm branches were sawing in the light north wind. Some winter people rode by the house on bicycles. They were laughing. In the big yard of the house across the street a peacock squawked.

Through the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light.

A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.