Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  “Somethin’s wrong,” Caskie said right away. The end line was skidding and laboring in the sheaves. It came up slowly. Caskie had brought Gannet’s bow up into the wind, and she was bucking like a bronco in a rodeo with burrs under its saddle. Each time her fat forefoot crashed down into a trough, a ton of spray flew up over the pilothouse and cascaded down on us, icy and stinging, like deliberate and repeated warnings from an ocean scandalized by our folly.

  When the last twenty feet came up, we saw that the end line had somehow become tangled and twisted with the bottom trawl line, so that the bucket of cement that had anchored the end line and one of the pots had risen together. No sooner had they cleared the waves than those two lethal objects began spinning around each other as the ropes they were hanging from worked to untwist themselves.

  Seeing the danger to his men at once, Caskie braked the lift and, depending on a friend he had worked with through many a hazard, shouted, “Pawk! Get the long gaff and try to hook the pot.”

  “No!”

  It was not a shout, it was a roar. We all froze—or at least, as I look back, I see us immobilized in a still picture of that terrible moment of disobedience. Benson had his hands raised in a stopping gesture, as if to beat back the captain’s command. Pawkie already had the gaff, with its murderous hook lifted and aimed out over the bulwarks, in his two hands. Drum was in a kind of crouch, as if to dodge some physical blow against the accepted way of doing things that he could sense but could not believe. Caskie stood with his hands on the conning controls, his face all too readable for the first time I could ever remember. I saw rage there, and I saw knowledge, and I saw defeat—the defeat of a quiet man whose calmness had its footing on a set of old, old rules of the sea, always accepted on Gannet until that very instant, the most important of which was that a word from the commanding officer in a tight moment is not to be questioned. The first law of the sea: The captain is the ship. He had yielded once, and I saw on his face that he would give in now. In the still picture that hangs on in my mind, Gannet herself was poised in a tremble of horror on a high crest, and the concrete weight and the lobster pot, spinning around each other, were making a dreadful blur of the reality to which the big mate had attached his defiance.

  Then Ben made his move. With a lunge he snatched the gaff from Pawkie’s hands and threw it away on the deck. Next, with breathtaking disregard for the danger, he leaned his body out over the rail and snatched the end line in his left hand, just above the fast-moving handle of the bucket of concrete. He was very nearly pulled overboard by the momentum of that hurtling weight, but he managed to hook himself to the rail with his right hand and a bent knee. The spinning stopped. The deck lurched on the crest of a big wave. Ben took advantage of Gannet’s plunge and heaved the weight over the rail and onto the deck. The lobster pot came in easily then. It had several big ones in it.

  We got in four more pots, and that was all. The trawl had been cut. We headed for home.

  In a marvel of balance in the galley as Gannet steeply lurched up each wave and then dropped in what seemed a free-fall until it hit the rock bottom of the ensuing trough, then rose shuddering again on the next vicious sea, Drum fried four eggs for each of us. Pawkie was on watch. Caskie sat down to his lunch across from Big Ben. I was at the end of the table, and Drum was cleaning up. As if we were floating on a dead calm, Caskie began to speak in a quiet and respectful voice to the man who had countermanded his order and made a success of it, and my heart sank as I listened to his appeasement of Benson. Big Ben gave no answers; eating, he made grunting sounds.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Caskie said. “The Company says, ‘Keep on lobsterin’,’ and you’ve got no choice. They own you, don’t you know. I told Persons, I said, ‘It’s all over for lobsters out there this year, we ought to go to draggin’,’ but he says, ‘We got to have lobsters, we’re gettin’ all the yellowtail an’ fluke and scup we can handle from the other boats, we need lobsters.’ If I say my gang can’t make a livin’, he says well, it’s tough titty, he can get other skippers, he can get other guys for crews. I said I’d been on my boat for nineteen years, I didn’t like that kind o’ talk, and believe me, Mr. Benson, he blew up, he used language I wouldn’t repeat to you. He was extremely definite, you know. Extremely.”

  It was horrible. The sweet sap of command had been drained right out of Caskie, and now all he had left was his impressive New England decency, which was taking the form of groveling. Benson didn’t even look up at his captain. He had egg on his beard. I felt seasick and had to go up on deck.

  I don’t know what happened after that. I asked Drum, when we got ashore, but he just shook his head. We tied up in New Bedford after midnight, and Benson heaved his backpack up on the dock and climbed ashore and walked off. When we got back to Menemsha, Pawkie quit. I hated to do it after six trips, but I had to tell Caskie that I thought I wasn’t going to make it at sea, I didn’t have good sea legs, I thought I’d try carpentry.

  Caskie said, “Good luck, son. Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I couldn’t for the life of me tell from his face whether he was glad or sorry to have me go.

  Mr. Quintillian

  One morning in late April of a year toward the end of the Depression, I decided to walk to work. The sky was blue, and the early light was pressing against the buildings with the urgency of the sun when May and June are coming soon, as if the buildings were dormant and could be brought by warmth of the right sort to bud and to leaf. When I stepped out of the damp entryway of my walk-up, I saw this importunate sunlight against the structures higher up, probing the brick and sooty stone as though there must surely be life hidden in the winter-deadened walls. I paused on the corner to catch my usual bus, and there, as I turned to face the curb, this sunlight flooded my forehead and cheeks—I wore no hat—and I felt a burst of energy, and I decided to walk. I started across town.

  I was not, strictly speaking, elated. Money and Mr. Quintillian were on my mind.

  The sunlight may have impelled my walking to begin with, but I am bound to say that my pace was quickened, as I moved along the sidewalks, less by a feeling that the sap was rising in me than by a satisfaction that I was saving a nickel by not taking a bus. The last thing before going to bed each night, I jotted in a book my outlay for the day, and each evening the little pattern of figures made me sad, as if I had drawn a picture of a wreck. I loved money and I wanted much more of it than I had: I had very little at all. My idea of beauty was the engraving on the margins of a dollar bill, the delicate curves swelling and petering out like luck itself. As I walked I glared at the costly stuff in the store windows. The second button was off my topcoat, and I pulled at the threads that just the day before had given up their long, weary grip on the disk of imitation bone, but I could not work them free of the cloth, so I rolled them into a tight swirl and hoped that as the other buttons held the coat in place the threads would not be seen. I slowed my pace, remembering that this was only the second day I had worn the shirt I had on, and that an incautious pace might make it unwearable another day; laundry money was my despair.

  Mr. Quintillian was my ultimate despair because he stood, as it were, between me and money. Our floor at the office was arranged as a sort of honeycomb of stalls, or cubicles, with waist-high plaster walls topped by barriers of crinkled glass that did not reach the ceiling. The noises of typewriters and adding machines and men and women talking on telephones rose from these glass boxes and hovered and mixed overhead in a low-hanging vapor of confusion. It was my fate to share a cubicle with Mr. Quintillian, the head of our department. Each Friday afternoon he opened the big strongbox on his desk and began counting out and putting into envelopes the week’s wages for all the people on our floor, and I had to sit there listening to the dry whisper of bills and the tinkle of coins as with the dexterity and apparently absentminded swiftness of a woman knitting he went through the roster of payees and doled out the right sum for each. A
t last he put all the envelopes in a wire basket. There were no names on them. He knew which was which, and he never made a mistake. He started with me as being nearest at hand, flicking his long fingers into the basket and pulling my envelope out and handing it to me with his lips pursed and not a word, as if spending salary money on the likes of me would surely mean the decline and end of a solid old business to which he had given thirty-four years of his thin-blooded life. He would shake his head and leave our stall and begin the round of the floor, handing out company money and looking as though it devastated him to do so.

  The despair that any thought of Mr. Quintillian stirred up in me was that there might never be enough money. He was my opposite, I thought—old, desiccated, and futureless—yet he was also the spectacle of a future I might, if I was not wary, have to confront myself one day. In my mind I was just a kid passing through his department, training, getting the experience that would go into the broad view of some sort of manager who would have an office on a higher floor, so I resented Mr. Quintillian as a reminder that I might, to the contrary, become stuck in his noisy honeycomb, that in fact I might be training to become another he. On his side, he resented me, I am sure, because he saw my arrogation, saw that I was not dedicated to the picayune life of his department. He knew that I thought I was too big for his britches; this led to a definite coolness.

  Mr. Quintillian owned an ancient green celluloid eyeshade, which he wore as though he worked not under the most up-to-the-minute egg-crated fluorescent lighting, which our office had, but rather under the down-thrown stare of ancient, primitive naked bulbs of clear glass with little spikes where the vacuum had been sealed off. We swam about in a bath of warm, benign luminosity, but his eyes seemed to need a private home in shadows. His head was bald and had a sharp glistening bump at the top, and his forehead above the eyeshade was sallow and deeply lined. Mr. Quintillian was precise. He drew clean, tidy lines with a steel ruler as he worked; he had a huge, clanking adding machine with a crank, on which he checked computations after doing them in his head; and he made neat little stacks of papers on his desk, which he all but aligned with a carpenter’s square. He kept his records in longhand, in minute calligraphic figures. He seemed to want to be a machine; he was one jump ahead of automation, practicing it in his inner works. He had lost a tooth too far back in his mouth for the gap to be seen when he talked, and occasionally he sucked audibly at its socket as if that were where he stored the sweetmeats of his life.

  A stoplight held me at a corner. A cabbie wearing a dirty plaid cap and tremendously thick glasses, which made his eyes look like toy headlights, shouted from his window at a starchy, pale motorist from out of town who had crowded him: “Look what drives cars around these days.”

  The visitor to the city clamped his teeth tight, biting an answer, and looked straight ahead.

  What an angry city!

  As I walked on, anger turned over in its sleep in me; I felt myself blush, thinking again of Mr. Quintillian, because I had overheard him talking unkindly about me at the office two or three days before. This was not something I had imagined. It had been out at the typists’ bullpen, where Mr. Quintillian hovered, as thin and twitchy as a dragonfly, beside the heaped desk of Miss Parch, the head typist, a co-survivor with himself of many long years in the firm and the only person he was ever seen to honor with a smile—a drawing back of the lips, that is, which seemed to express some marvelous satisfaction he shared with her, such as “Well! Things are certainly going badly today, aren’t they?” I came up to him from behind, my gum-rubber soles squeaking on the waxed floor no louder than the space bar of one of the typewriters, and Mr. Quintillian was hissing to Miss Parch that I would not last long, and he specified a reason: slovenly. Mind, body, and desk. He seemed very glad. I put down my papers in Miss Parch’s in-basket, and when he saw me his eyebrows shot up under his green eyeshade like a pair of park squirrels startled to cover by a dangerous intruder. He bared his amber teeth to Miss Parch and turned away.

  I knew that he might be right. I had heard that Mr. Quintillian’s past cubicle-sharers had been famous for nothing but the speed with which they got fired. No one in that cramped little glass box ever seemed to “measure up.” If I couldn’t measure up to a Quintillian’s standards, how in the world would I ever acquire “enough” money?

  Money such as Charley Force had. He was one of my two apartment-mates. He was younger than I, yet he seemed to buy something of quality every day, while I pressed my mind for ways of not buying anything. We three, on the top floor of a creaky old house in the East Thirties, were recent college graduates, getting started, vaguely expecting to marry sometime and, as they would say, settle down. We had two rooms, and because Force was the longest-standing tenant, he drew one of them in which to sleep alone. He was heavy-bearded and, despite morning shaves, looked dissolute by suppertime. A few days before, he had bought a new item on the market, an electric razor, and now every time I cut my face shaving with razor blades dulled by economizing, I cursed Charley Force’s unearned, as well as his earned, income.

  In the next block, I thought of the face of the new girl who had recently come to work in Mr. Quintillian’s department. She seemed sympathetic; her smile was timid, and I fancied that she had looked sorry for me, for some reason, the one time our eyes had met. She wore her bright hair in braids coiled like a coronet. I had a feeling she was not a sound sleeper, because the places under her eyes were faintly bluish and seemed almost transparent. In a week I had not heard her voice, and in a whole year to come, I realized, I might not—she was off at a far corner of the floor. Someone had said her name was Miss Tammer.

  Charley Force would savvy what to do about such a girl. Only the night before, he had packed me and our third fellow lodger, Manny Dran, out to the movies, so he could be alone with his current flame in our apartment. Charley actually used the word “flame”; the desire Manny and I had to burn the place down when he dealt with us that way was keen. Our rooms were like those of a dormitory in some shabby backwater college. One of the beds in the room Manny and I shared had a brass frame, and the other, on which I slept, was a lumpy day couch. We had two dark old oaken bureaus and always a heap of empty beer bottles in a wastebasket. Charley Force’s room was a sophomore heaven, with an elaborate Telefunken radio, whose bands, he said, would pick up Peking, Calcutta, and Sydney, and with two suffocating stuffed chairs, both pushed against clanking radiators, so that sitting in them was like reclining in a crater in a midsummer sand dune. On the two walls there were never-explained enlarged photographs of a barren hillside and of a Fall River night steamer, and in the windows hung dirty white curtains with bunting-like gathers at the tops that Charley Force, from somewhere in his fussy background, called “matching priscillas.” The apartment had brown walls. This miserable room of his filled me with envy.

  I walked along thinking these thoughts. But soon I eased up. What a promising day! The air was like ginger ale.

  * * *

  —

  I was astonished, on my arrival at work, to swing around the partition into the cubicle I shared with Mr. Quintillian and to surprise him in close and secretive conversation with the new girl. I surprised him, all right. At his first view of my refreshed face, Mr. Quintillian raised his hands somewhat as a desert horse lifts his forelegs at the shock a rattlesnake’s buzzer gives it, one above the other, very grandly, a caracole, and as he abruptly raised his head toward me with bared granivorous teeth, the green eyeshade slipped from it with a dry, thin rustling to the floor. Miss Tammer promptly bent over to pick it up, and I was struck by an aspect of her I had not before noticed, for she was wearing a thin dress in honor of the first warmish day of spring; she was plump in places. Her face had not particularly advertised this. Her blush when she straightened up, perhaps merely a consequence of her considerate plunge for the eyeshade, which must have thrown blood into her head, and the deference, subservience, with which she put into Mr. Quinti
llian’s blue-veined hand the glistening leftover from an era she and I could only have known through old silent movies—faithful stationmaster, with garters holding up his sleeves, tapping at the telegraph key to warn of the approach of Number 93, which has been mis-switched and is headed straight for the dynamited bridge at Simmons’ Gap—those signs, as well as his cursory nod when he took the eyeshade from her, a gesture not so much of thanks as dismissal, made me wonder what in the world had been going on. The whole swift transaction seemed to me to give fascinating hints of intimacy, if not, in fact, of conspiracy.

  The next thing I knew, her skirt was flicking out of there, and Mr. Quintillian was clearing his throat with a whole series of little laryngeal pushes, which I took as earnestly as if the words had been written in blood across Mr. Quintillian’s gleaming forehead, to utter this message: Young man, a shut mouth helps one to get ahead.

  It was very queer. I had had an impression of secrets between those two.

  Mr. Quintillian was now more than ever on my mind. One day I happened to take a coffee break at the same time as Miss Parch, and I sat beside her at the counter of the short-order luncheonette in the basement of our building, and I asked her a humble question or two about our department head. To my surprise (for they had seemed peas from the same pod), she was sharply critical of him. He had wasted his life, she said. Evelyn Parch was six feet tall and was made entirely of bones, gristle, and exquisite, diaphanous skin. She was a living shame. There just wasn’t enough softness for all that lovely integument of milk and honey to cover: she was like a gift-wrapped towel rack. Over her fine skin, besides, she hung knitted dresses, as if she had put a lot of thought into looking all stretched and droopy.

  “Willard Quintillian,” she said, “could have been president of Byron Carpets”—our firm.