The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [305]
middle, where the gunwale was lower. From that position I saw a guy who held on to the stem. poor bastard. I yelled to him, thrilled, glad, but his head hung back. I frantically swam behind him to see what was wrong. "You hurt?" I asked. "No, bushed," he muttered. "Come, I'll boost you over and then you give me a hand. We've got to see if we can pick up any other guys." We had to wait until he had the strength to try. Finally I gave him a hand-stirrup, and he made it. I waited for his assistance but it didn't come. He let me trail for I don't know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap. At last I threw a leg over the side and toiled and dragged myself astride the gunwale. He was sitting on a thwart, there, hands between his knees. Furious, I drove my fist down on his sodden back. He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-theheadlights eyes. "Le' me drown, you sonofabitch? I'll bash your brains out!" I yelled. He didn't answer, only covered me with his cold eyes and his face twitched. "Grab an oar and let's go pick up survivors," I said. But there was only one oar to grab. The rest were gone. There was nothing to do but sit and drift. I gazed and called over the water in case there should be someone carried out this way. But there wasn't anybody. The fires were receding and going out. I half expected the sub to surface and take stock, and I half wanted it to. It was around, all right, beating it down in the sea. What did I think-- that I'd get a chance to holler and give them a piece of my mind? No, they went away, no doubt, continuing their supper perhaps, or playing cards. And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light of boat or raft to be seen anywhere. I sat and waited for daylight, when I hoped there'd something show on the horizon. Nothing showed. At dawn we were in a haze like the swelter of an old-fashioned laundry Monday, with the sun a burning copper-bottom, and through this air distortion and diffused color you couldn't see fifty yards. We sighted some wreckage but no boats. The sea was empty. I was awed by the death of those guys and the disappearance of the survivors, swept away. Down in the engine room they couldn't have had much of a chance. Glum and bitter, I started to take stock. There were smudgepots and flares for signaling, and there was no food or water problem for the time being, since there were only two of us. But who was it that fate had billeted on me? This guy sitting on the thwart whom I had beaten last night, as far as my strength permitted, what trouble would I have with him? He was the ship's carpenter and handyman, and from one point of view I was in luck, having no manual skill or ingenuity myself. He rigged up a kind of sail by stepping up the oar; and he claimed we couldn't be more than two hundred miles west of the Canaries, and that if we had any luck at all we'd sail right into them. He told me that every day he'd gone and looked at the charts, and so he knew exactly where we were and what the currents were doing. He figured it out with great satisfaction and self-confidence, and he seemed absolutely untroubled. About my beating and cursing him, not a single word. He was of broad, stocky build, carrying a judicious big ball of a head, cut close. Many of his bristles were white, but not with age; he had a dark mustache that followed the corners of his mouth calmly downward. His eyes were blue and he wore specs. A pair of bleachedat-the-knees overalls dried slowly on his wide calves. I took a flier of imagination at his past and saw him at age ten reading Popular Mechanics. Even as I sized him up, he did me, of course. "You're Mr. March, the purser," he said at last. He commanded, when he wanted to, a very cultured deep voice. "That's right," said I, surprised by the sudden viola tone. "Basteshaw, ship's carpenter. By the way, aren't you a Chicagoan too?" Basteshaw, after all, was a name I had heard before. "Wasn't your dad in the realestate business? Around Einhorn's, back in the twenties, there w. as a man named