The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [304]
Oh, he cried. Me too. All of us. Me with the safety still in my pocket. What do you think? Everybody is some kind of tricker. Even me. "Then my wife and kid took me to the station. I still hadn't made it with that girl and probably she forgot all about it and started with another guy. My little daughter said, 'Daddy, I got to take a pisst.' She'd heard the boys talk. We had to laugh. But then, good-by. My heart weighed a ton. So long, honey. She was cryin' away by the train window, and I felt the same. And meantime that safety was in my vest pocket. I didn't throw it away." This man's face was flat, slender, rosy, bony-nosed, gray-eyed, and his mouth was small. I passed out advice in moderate amounts; nobody is perfect. I advocated love, especially. Some terribly strange personalities came forward. Griswold, for instance, one of the stewards. A former undertaker and also zoot-suiter and cat. A light Negro, extremely handsome and grand, short beard full of graceful glitters, hair rich and oiled; a bum on his cheek gleamed with Unguentine. His pants flowed voluminous and stripy down to a two-strap shoe. He smoked tea for his quiet recreation and studied grammar in a number of languages for kicks. Griswold handed me the following poem of his own writing: " How much, you ask me, do I suffer. Now, baby, listen, I am not a good bluffer. My ambitions and aspirations don't leave me no rest; I am born with a high mind and aim for the best. His knee went up and down rapidly while I read this, and his eyes were dark and anxious. If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it's in the nature of a memorial. For on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam Mac Manus was sent down by a torpedo. It happened while I was hearing one of these unofficial confiteors, in fact. It was night, and we must have been making twelve knots, when suddenly there came a crushing great blow on the side; we were flung down. There were bucklings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion. We rushed for the outer deck, fast. Already hairs of fire came up through the busted plates, and the superstructure was lighted clear by the flames. Patches of water also burned close by, and the bright water approached. Hungry yells and steam blasts, plunges; the huge rafts swooped over the side, released, and the boats crashed from the davits. We scrambled up to the boats, this guy and I, and started to wind one out. It hung caught and crooked. I shouted to him to jump in and see what was fouling. He didn't seem to get this, his eyes looking wildly at me. "Get in there!" I yelled, weirdly hoarse with the terror. Then I hopped in myself to free the boat, whereupon, the winch letting go, unbraked, the boat slammed fast and hard on the water, knocking me overboard. My thought when I went under was that the ship would suck me with it as it sank. The fear squeezed and milked the strength out of my arms and legs, but I tried to fight, hearing grunts and Orpheus pulls of string from the deep bottom, and then all the consciousness there was to me seemed a hairlash in the crushing water universe. I came up wanting to howl but unable to; my jaws tore open only to breathe. And where was the lifeboat? Well, there were boats and rafts here and there in the water-fires. I was spitting, vomiting up sea, weeping, and straining to get distance from the flaming ship from which, in the white of the fire, men were still jumping. I made for a boat that floated a hundred yards or so off. I labored after it in terror lest it pull away. However, I saw no oars out. I couldn't have hollered after; my voice seemed to have gone. But it only drifted, and I made it. I grabbed the painter and called to whoever might be lying inside, for I was too beat to get in. But the boat was vacant. Then the Mac Manus went down. The sudden quench of the white light was how I knew it. Fire still burned all over the surface, but the current was carrying fast. I saw a loaded raft in the torn light of flames. Then I had another go at climbing into the boat. I worked my way to the