And then we thought that at last he really was sick. He worked all day long, coming to bed only after the rest of us were asleep and snoring, and I saw him in the night get up and go topside again, and I followed and saw him sitting on a windlass. He looked like a little boy, still, small, motionless in his underclothes.
But he was young, and even an old man can’t be sick very long with nothing but work to do and salt air to breathe; and so two weeks later we were watching him and George dancing again in their undershirts after supper on the after well deck while the victrola lifted its fatuous and reiterant ego against the waxing moon and the ship snored and hissed through the long seas off Hatteras. They didn’t talk; they just danced, gravely and tirelessly as the nightly moon stood higher and higher up the sky.
Then we turned south, and the Gulf Stream ran like blue ink alongside, bubbled with fire by night in the softening latitudes, and one night off Tortugas the ship began to tread the moon’s silver train like an awkward and eager courtier, and Carl spoke for the first time after almost twenty days.
“George,” he said, “do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure, bud,” George said, stamping on the deck each time the needle clucked, his black head shoulders above Carl’s sleek pale one, the two of them in decorous embrace, their canvas shoes hissing in unison: “Sure,” George said. “Spit it out.”
“When we get to Galveston, I want you to buy me a suit of these pink silk teddybears that ladies use. A little bigger than I’d wear, see?”
The End
