“I met the broker when he was leaving for the consulate and told him I was going.”
“God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below.
I made some coffee down below and then I came up and took the wheel.
“There’s coffee below,” I told him.
“Brother, coffee wouldn’t do me any good.” You know you had to be sorry for him. He certainly looked bad.
About nine o’clock we saw the Sand Key light just about dead ahead. We’d seen tankers going up the Gulf for quite a while.
“We’ll be in in a couple of hours now,” I said to him. “I’m going to give you the same four dollars a day just as if Johnson had paid.”
“How much did you get out of last night?” he asked me.
“Only six hundred,” I told him.
I don’t know whether he believed me or not.
“Don’t I share in it?”
“That’s your share,” I told him. “What I just told you, and if you ever open your mouth about last night I’ll hear of it and I’ll do away with you.”
“You know I’m no squealer, Harry.”
“You’re a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.”
“I’m a good man,” he said. “You oughtn’t to talk to me like that.”
“They can’t make it fast enough to keep you a good man,” I told him. But I didn’t worry about him any more because who was going to believe him? Mr. Sing wouldn’t make any complaints. The Chinks weren’t going to. You know the boy that sculled them out wasn’t. He wouldn’t want to get himself in trouble. Eddy would mouth about it sooner or later, maybe, but who believes a rummy?
Why, who could prove anything? Naturally it would have made plenty more talk when they saw his name on the crew list. That was luck for me, all right. I could have said he fell overboard, but it makes plenty talk. Plenty of luck for Eddy, too. Plenty of luck, all right.
Then we came to the edge of the stream and the water quit being blue and was light and greenish and inside I could see the stakes on the Eastern and the Western Dry Rocks and the wireless masts at Key West and the La Concha hotel up high out of all the low houses and plenty smoke from out where they’re burning garbage. Sand Key light was plenty close now and you could see the boathouse and the little dock alongside the light and I knew we were only forty minutes away now and I felt good to be getting back and I had a good stake now for the summertime.
“What do you say about a drink, Eddy?” I said to him.
“Ah, Harry,” he said, “I always knew you were my pal.”
That night I was sitting in the living room smoking a cigar and drinking a whiskey and water and listening to Gracie Allen on the radio. The girls had gone to the show and sitting there I felt sleepy and I felt good. There was somebody at the front door and Marie, my wife, got up from where she was sitting and went to it. She came back and said, “It’s that rummy, Eddie Marshall. He says he’s got to see you.”
“Tell him to get out before I run him out,” I told her.
She came back in and sat down and looking out the window where I was sitting with my feet up I could see Eddy going along the road under the arc light with another rummy he’d picked up, the two of them swaying, and their shadows from the arc light swaying worse.
“Poor goddamned rummies,” Marie said. “I pity a rummy.”
“He’s a lucky rummy.”
“There ain’t any lucky rummies,” Marie said. “You know that, Harry.”
“No,” I said. “I guess there aren’t.”
Part II Harry Morgan, Fall
CHAPTER SIX
They came on across in the night and it blew a big breeze from the northwest. When the sun was up he sighted a tanker coming down the Gulf and she stood up so high and white with the sun on her in that cold air it looked like tall buildings rising out of the sea and he said to the nigger, “Where the hell are we?”
The nigger raised himself up to look.
“Ain’t nothing like that this side of Miami.”
“You know damn well we ain’t been carried up to no Miami,” he told the nigger.
“All I say ain’t no buildings like that on no Florida keys.”
“We’ve been steering for Sand Key.”
“We got to see it then. It or American shoals.”
Then in a little while he saw it was a tanker and not buildings and then in less than an hour he saw Sand Key light, straight, thin and brown rising out of the sea right where it ought to be.
“You got to have confidence steering,” he told the nigger.
“I got confidence,” the nigger said. “But the way this trip gone I ain’t got confidence no more.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It hurts me all the time.”
“It ain’t nothing,” the man said. “You keep it clean and wrapped up and it’ll heal by its-self.”
He was steering to the westward now to go in to lay up for the day in the mangroves by Woman Key where he would not see anybody and where the boat was to come out to meet them.
“You’re going to be all right,” he told the nigger.
“I don’t know,” the nigger said. “I hurt bad.”
“I’m going to fix you up good when we get in to the place,” he told him. “You aren’t shot bad. Quit worrying.”
“I’m shot,” he said. “I ain’t never been shot before. Any way I’m shot is bad.”
“You’re just scared.”
“No, sir. I’m shot. And I’m hurting bad. I’ve been throbbing all night.”
The nigger went on grumbling like that and he could not keep from taking the bandage off to look at it.
“Leave it alone,” the man who was steering told him. The nigger lay on the floor of the cockpit and there were sacks of liquor, shaped like hams, piled everywhere. He had made himself a place in them to lay down in. Every time he moved there was the noise of broken glass in the sacks and there was the odor of spilled liquor. The liquor had run all over everything. The man was steering in for Woman Key now. He could see it now plainly.
“I hurt,” the nigger said. “I hurt worse all the time.”
“I’m sorry, Wesley,” the man said. “But I got to steer.”
“You treat a man no better than a dog,” the nigger said. He was getting ugly now. But the man was still sorry for him.
“I’m going to make you comfortable, Wesley,” he said. “You lay quiet now.”
“You don’t care what happens to a man,” the nigger said. “You ain’t hardly human.”
“I’m going to fix you up good,” the man said. “You just lay quiet.”
“You ain’t going to fix me up,” the nigger said. The man, whose name was Harry Morgan, said nothing then because he liked the nigger and there was nothing to do now but hit him, and he couldn’t hit him. The nigger kept on talking.
“Why didn’t we stop when they started shooting?”
The man did not answer.
“Ain’t a man’s life worth more than a load of liquor?”
The man was intent on his steering.
“All we have to do is stop and let them take the liquor.”
“No,” the man said. “They take the liquor and the boat and you go to jail.”
“I don’t mind jail,” the nigger said. “But I never wanted to get shot.”
He was getting on the man’s nerves now and the man was becoming tired of hearing him talk.
“Who the hell’s shot worse?” he asked him. “You or me?”
“You’re shot worse,” the nigger said. “But I ain’t never been shot. I didn’t figure to get shot. I ain’t paid to get shot. I don’t want to be shot.”
“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him. “It don’t do you any good to talk like that.”
They were coming up on the Key now. They were inside the shoals and as he headed her into the channel it was hard to see with the sun on the water. The nigger was going out of his head, or becoming religious because he was hurt; anyway he was talking all the time.
“Why they run liquor now?” he said. “Prohibition’s over. Why they keep up a traffic like that? Whyn’t they bring the liquor in on the ferry?”
The man steering was watching the channel closely.
“Why don’t people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?”
The man saw where the water was rippling smooth off the bank even when he could not see the bank in the sun and he turned her off. He swung her around, spinning the wheel with one arm, and then the channel opened out and he took her slowly right up to the edge of the mangroves. He came astern on the engines and threw out the two clutches.
“I can put an anchor down,” he said. “But I can’t get no anchor up.”
“I can’t even move,” the nigger said.
“You’re certainly in a hell of a shape,” the man told him.
He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting, and dropping the small anchor but he got it over and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.
All night after he
