Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  I looked for marks on her arms but she didn’t have veins. We went to a table. Quong and Suzi left to find short-term happiness.

  What I found so winning about Alina was her combination of unearthly reflexes with a deathlike pallor. “Must be on muggles,” I thought. But where could she hide a pipe beneath her dress without poking out some honest seaman’s eye? If she weren’t sniffing cocaine she must be taking heroin in her earlobes. It would have been nice to have found an opium-eater; but old-fashioned girls are hard to find.

  Yet it has to be admitted that Kleenex, flesh-colored talcum and sixteen-gauge hypodermic needles have improved hygiene in free-trade ports. A girl who used to have to sneak down to a dirty opium pad at risk of her social standing, can now carry a sixteen-gauge hypodermic needle manufactured in New Jersey, in tissue manufactured in Ohio, and keep herself presentable on heroin brought in by American seamen. The exchanging of the poppy for the hype has brought the Orient closer to the Free World. More than one opium den has been swept out and now boasts a neon sign, saying MOM’S GOOD EATS; where you can get anything from redbirds to yellow jackets.

  “Me Nepal gel,” my ghost informed me. I had to keep an eye on the door for Concannon.

  “Nepal gel very strong,” she added, “make good pong-pong.”

  “You don’t look too strong,” I had to tell her.

  “In Nepal me no make The Bad Busyness,” Alina explained, “Bad Busyness no good for Nepal gel.”

  “How long you do Bad Busyness?” I asked just to get a line on her age. She looked so young yet so old.

  She studied her fingers and finally held up two: “By Railroad Station, Madras, two year.” She held up another: “By Suklaji Street, Bombay, one year. Me get sick, go home Nepal, one year.” Now all she had left was one thumb.

  “You tell,” she asked me, “in your country, do priest kiss priest?”

  “Why do you ask that?” was all I could think to answer.

  She took it for confirmation of what must have been an old suspicion. “My country best,” she decided, “there we don’t know anything.”

  When who walks through the door but The Unacknowledged Champion of Everything, Ship’s Fink W. McAdoo Manning. And headed right for our table.

  “Meet Miss Sumatra,” I invited him.

  Nobody laughed again.

  “The ship-launch leaves in an hour,” Manning informed me. “I just wanted to check it out with you.”

  He just wanted to get me out of the Lion of Kowloon, that was all.

  “I’m waiting for the radio officer,” I explained.

  “Do you consider him reliable?” he asked me at the precise moment that Concannon, loaded with boxes, bottles and bags, loomed in the doorway.

  “Very reliable,” I told Manning.

  Concannon began ambling about in the dimness—his eyes were weak even in the light of day. I guided him to our table. Manning waited until Concannon had dumped his packages on the table. I knew he hadn’t yet seen Manning.

  Suzi and Quong returned. That had been really short-term.

  “Loot!” Alina cried happily. “Loot! Loot!”

  “You’re going to get the ship in trouble, Concannon,” Manning spoke at last.

  Concannon surveyed him without surprise.

  “Are you coming?” Manning asked me sternly. He couldn’t get over the idea that I was his charge.

  I didn’t answer. Yet he waited.

  Sparks embraced both girls and kissed each in turn. Revulsion shadowed Manning’s face like a wind rippling water. Why didn’t the man leave?

  A waiter came whizzing around the bar with a tray of drinks. Alina poured the gin.

  Concannon extracted a transistor from one of the boxes, pulled out the aerial, and a hillbilly voice came droning in from some army base—All the good times are past ‘n gone

  All the good times are o’er

  Manning left in a high-wheeled huff. He actually thought the good times were o’er.

  Concannon didn’t think so. The whores of Ho-Phang Road didn’t seem to think so. I’m sure I didn’t think so. Alina sat on my lap.

  “You look out,” Quong told me, smiling his everlasting smile, “you not wait to foat in River Tsangpo—you foat, here.”

  I didn’t know what Quong was driving at.

  “He means the slouch at the bar,” Concannon informed me casually, “that’s his old lady on your lap.”

  The Slouch, across Alina’s shoulder, looked like one of those men so ineffectual you think he’s English until his accent sounds Greek; and sure enough, he turns out to be Italian. I rotated Alina’s skull toward him.

  “Who him?” I inquired fluently, and unrotated the head.

  She giggled Chineasily.

  “Him nutty-nut,” she told me. The Slouch came over with a slouching motion.

  “I am sea-man,” he told us, and we had to take his word even though he looked like he’d been putting in more time trailing John Gielgud than swabbing decks. Nonetheless I asked him to sit down and nonetheless he coldly declined. It wasn’t, apparently, roaring good fellowship he was after in the Lion of Kowloon.

  “May I have con-were-sation?” he requested me politely—putting this down with an injured air.

  “Sure,” I let him know.

  “Private con-were-sation, if you please,” he asked me.

  I put Alina down and followed The Slouch into a stockroom back of the bar. I let him slouch in first. It was dark in there.

  I followed.

  “I am not offended,” he assured me, “I wish all Americans to have joyous time.”

  I’ll just bet you do.

  “Good time, happy time”—and he gave me his hand as though he’d completed his message. Then he choked up, twitched, clasped his hands and unclasped them.

  “My fiancée,” he finally came out with it, “good woo-min.”

  “Alina?” I asked. “You wish me to enjoy myself but not with Alina?”

  That I’d gotten the message relieved him; while his admission of jealousy left him more miserable than ever.

  I didn’t tell him that I’d invited her to have a drink only because I feel sorry for ghosts in need of somebody to haunt. I’d had no idea she was haunting him. He held my arm.

  “A great woo-min!” He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper—“Do not offer her money—you will only wound her feelings.”

  By making a determined effort, I felt I could suppress the impulse to hand Alina my wallet and watch. My lust for his hipless, breastless, stenciled, penciled, pseudo-Caucasian heroin-head was also governable.

  “Our ship leaves in an hour,” I informed him, putting my hand on his shoulder reassuringly, “may the shoes never be made that’ll walk over your grave.”

  “The past is done,” he announced as if, were it not for him, it would still be here. “What she once was she no longer is!” If it was Alina he was talking about that was a change for the worse, it seemed to me.

  We returned to our table linked arm in arm.

  “Wheee-skee!” he demanded loudly, “whee-skee!” and a waiter came whizzing with a bottle and glasses.

  “To Alina!” The Slouch raised his glass, and we all raised ours but Alina.

  “Me no drink longside nutty-nut,” she told us.

  “He’s jealous of you,” I urged her, “he wants to marry you.”

  The thin crimson line of Alina’s lips broke into a grin.

  Her teeth had gone bad.

  “Me no marry nutty-nut. Him no give Alina money. Him all the time say pong-pong, pong-pong—but him no pay one goddamn dollar! Me say, ‘Go longside ship, nutty-nut, I make busyness—him say ‘love, pong-pong, love, pong-pong’”—she threw a slanty glance at him with sufficient fury—then drank to him all the same.

  Concannon began heaping the packages. We had just time to make the ship.

  The Slouch liked the idea of our leaving so much he helped to speed us to the dock. When Alina picked up a shopping bag, he took its other
handle. He wanted to be certain we wouldn’t abduct her.

  This pair were leading the loot parade, Concannon toting the gin, Quong the Scotch and Suzi and I bringing up the rear with the transistors, when the door opened from the outside and here was Manning blocking our way again.

  “I can’t let you get the ship in trouble, Concannon,” he announced.

  Concannon put his bottles down and, with ominous care, rested his hands on Manning’s shoulders.

  “That won’t do you any good,” Manning assured him confidently.

  Concannon spun him aside, picked up the bottles, and again led us forth. It had done some good after all.

  “The old man is going to hear about this!” Manning warned us. “This isn’t the end of this!”

  We fell inside the cab every which way. I had Alina on my lap and Concannon had Suzi Sumatra upon his and Quong was sitting on somebody that couldn’t be anybody but The Slouch.

  “To the docks!” our leader ordered and toward the docks we wheeled.

  “Looooot!” my mascaraed ghost cried out, her head poking out of the window to the throngs of Ho-Phang Road—“Looooot! Looooot! ”—while The Slouch fingered the hem of her skirt secretly, poor slouch.

  “I hope the sonofabitch misses the ship,” was Concannon’s only reference to the purser we’d left behind us.

  Riksha and trolley, bus and jeep swerved, skidded and reeled, beggars fled and an American seaman threw beer cans at us. “Big fis’ in river!” Quong threatened him. A policeman whistled, fire broke out in a tenement and a Chinese child waved goodbye to us with a blue balloon.

  Goodbye to the girls of Ho-Phang Road, goodbye to all wives left on the beach, goodbye to all Slouches madly in love and all Americans gone bamboo. Goodbye to Hum Hong Bay and the Chinese Y.M.C.A., the Kowloon Cricket Club and the Yaumati Vehicular Ferry. Goodbye to ancestral Kowloon and farewell to old Hongkong. I’m glad I saw your waxen whores may I never see them again.

  The shore-launch was rocking at the dock. Suzi and Alina rushed the bags into the launch—and then sat down for the shore-to-ship ride. The Slouch tried to climb in beside Alina.

  “Nutty-nut go home!” Alina cried out, so I shoved him back onto the dock—now here comes Manning breathing hard. As he clambered in he took command.

  “Let’s go! ” he demanded of the driver—yet the driver wouldn’t go.

  “Letty go!” Quong commanded him too.

  Yet he wouldn’t go.

  “What’s he waiting for?” Concannon asked.

  “He wants pay,” Quong explained.

  “Company pays for ship-to-shore transportation,” Concannon remembered.

  “The company launch went to Hongkong,” Manning reminded us, “you went to Kowloon.”

  Manning was right. Manning was always right. I paid the driver.

  “You fuckin’ purser,” Concannon told Manning.

  “Nobody calls me a fuckin’—” Manning began and Concannon hooked a short right to his face. Instead of pulling back, Manning doubled forward with his forearms across his head, leaving himself wide open. Concannon slammed his left into the stomach and Manning went face-down, his arms still quaintly protecting his ears. Bottom up and face bleeding onto the boards, Manning looked like a fish whose gills have been ripped.

  Concannon began kicking.

  Alina came at him with her spindling arms straight out, her face still a mask—the boat lurched and Concannon teetered.

  I got between him and Manning.

  “You won,” I announced. “See?” I asked Suzi and Quong, “See? Sparks won!”

  Suzi turned her face toward the dock as though regretting having left it. Quong looked solemn.

  “You stay out of this,” Concannon warned me. He was hot, but he couldn’t get at me because of Alina kneeling, in front of him, beside Manning. She gave Manning a handkerchief to hold to his face and had gotten him into a half-sitting position before Quong and I had the sense to see he was too heavy for her. We got him to the end of the boat and let him sit with his face toward the water. Alina held his head so he could throw up. Then she cleaned his mouth with her scarf and threw it over the side.

  She sat beside him, protectively, until we hove to the Malaysia Mail.

  Captain Karensen was hunched over the rail so mad he could spit: had it not been for not having anyone to replace Concannon he would have been gone half an hour. We let Manning get up first. He dimbed painfully. I let Sparks go up right behind him in case Manning should fall. Quong scrambled up after Concannon. Not one of these fools remembered our loot. Karensen didn’t look ready to delay his sailing hour in the interest of our black-market investment. I heard the anchor being raised.

  I shoved one transistor under my belt and got one under either arm. The hell with the booze. “You take,” I told Alina what to do with the rest of the loot. How a man could climb a two-story rope ladder with only teeth and fingertips I hadn’t figured out, yet I made it all the same. Bridelove and Muncie helped me over the rail.

  Manning was stretched on the deck. That had been a perfectly dandy shot to the stomach and a fairly good kick in the eye. It had started to bleed again. Well, that’s what comes of mixing with foreigners.

  Bridelove, Muncie, Smith, Danielsen and Chips were more interested in my shirt than Manning.

  “Wash it out with lukewarm water,” Chips advised, “hot water’ll shrink it.”

  When I looked at my bloodied shirt I understood: they assumed by it that it was myself who’d whipped Manning.

  “How’d it start?” Bridelove asked.

  “Ask Sparks,” I suggested.

  The launch below was wheeling about. Alina was at the rail no larger than a child, looking up. Only the mascara shadowing her eyes showed it wasn’t a child’s small face.

  I waved, but she didn’t wave back. Just stood looking up while I looked down; until I could no longer see her face.

  Her face so young yet so old.

  Manning opened the store for an hour that night just for the honor of the thing. But he was wearing dark glasses.

  I didn’t ask him how he was feeling. I went down to see whether the crew had any questions they might care to ask.

  Smith was at his green-baize board, sitting slantwise to favor a boil he’d been developing on his behind, and shuffling a deck, but he had no players. A few seamen were sitting around, but none expressed curiosity about my bloodied shirt: my moment of glory, that had struck so brilliantly, had been too brief.

  “Believe me when I tell you,” Smith began, “the Marquis of Kingsbury, you can have him. Did you know his own son whipped him? I’m glad he did. I wish I’d whipped him myself. I could have, too. I beat better men than the Marquis of Kingsbury.”

  It wasn’t easy to visualize Smith, with his jaw jutting upward from a neck fixed at angle, maneuvering an opponent around a ring.

  “Did the bob-and-weave type of opponent ever give you any trouble, Smith?” I inquired tactfully.

  Smith stopped shuffling. “What you’re trying to ask is how could a man with his neck on one side be a fighter,” he read me—“I took it up after my career as a gas-smeller was ended. In fact I contracted this hitch from such a terrible blow in the Adam’s apple that it ruint another highly promising career.”

  “Were you really any good, Smith?” I asked.

  “To tell you the truth, no, sir, I wasn’t,” Smith admitted. “But I did have color.”

  “How do you mean?” I wanted to know.

  “Well one thing I done was I always wore a cap with the peak over my eyes into the ring. It worried my opponent not to see my face. I’d keep it on till the ref made me take it off just before the bell. Once a ref forgot and I had it so low I couldn’t see my opponent and he knocked me cold. After that I just depended on my natural skills of which I had only two.”

  “Which two were they?” I asked to be obliging.

  “One was how I never threw a low punch without following through with a fair one—they can’t ta
ke a knockout back, can they? No fight crowd would stand for a referee doing that even if he could. This also had the effect of making the fight look to be on the level. My other thing was how I never pulled my head back when I butted, so’s I wouldn’t get butted back.”

  I waited.

  “Once I was fighting a fellow with a skinny neck. He hit me low right off and, when I held, he hit me a short one in my neck. At the bell he had his entire glove in my eye. So I dropped my hands and he hit me a clean shot that nearly took my head off. I realized then he had the referee so I didn’t foul him back—I was afraid the ref would take the round away from me. And I didn’t want to lose because I wanted to buy a Chevrolet. I had to beat him fighting fair or lose the Chevvy.

  “When he came out for the second round he made as though to touch my gloves but I didn’t accept his offer. So he bent me over a ring-post and laid his full weight on me till I thought my spine would crack before his referee took him off. Then he banged both my ears at the same time and backed off with his gloves up as if he had just been boxing somebody.

  “I looked at the referee for help and that was another mistake, because this fellow immediately punched me in the neck again. It was the second fair punch of the fight and he had thrown both.

  “Wouldn’t you think the crowd would be proud of him for throwing two fair punches? They weren’t. They booed. They thought punching a man in the neck was a foul. ‘If he hits me in the neck a couple more times,’ I thought, ‘maybe the referee will take the round away from him.’ When I went back to my corner I knew I would never be able to finish on my feet. So I said ‘Goodbye Chevrolet.’

  “I went out head down and butted him in the stomach. He went ‘Oof.’ I brought my skull up against his right eye. He went ‘Jzzz.’ Then I got my left glove around his neck. It was so skinny I could feel his windpipe through my glove. While he was choking to death I stepped on his foot. ‘How does it feel?’ I asked him. ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ he told me. My butt hadn’t opened his eye so I dragged my laces across it and it opened fine. The referee noticed I’d changed my style. ‘If you boys want to fight like this it’s all right with me,’ he told us.

  “I pulled up my trunks and went to work. I butted him again and said, ‘O, Pardon Me.’ I scraped his back against the rope and said, ‘O, Pardon Me.’ ‘Stop saying “O, Pardon Me,”’ this fellow told me, and chopped me in the neck so hard I felt something come loose, so I drove my left five inches into his groin and I guess it must have stung him because he didn’t express disappointment. He just doubled over like he was looking for something. I straightened him up with an elbow and hooked a clean left to his jaw. It was the fairest, cleanest punch I ever threw in my whole life. He went out like a light.