U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [202]
-55-walking past the open door of a florist's in winter. It made him feel soft and funny inside like he had a girl standing right beside him on the bridge, like he had Del there with her hair al smel y with some kind of perfume. Funny, the smel of dark, girls' hair. He took down the binoculars but he couldn't see anything on the horizon only the curdled scud drifting west in the faint moonlight. He found he was losing his course, good thing the mate hadn't picked out that moment to look aft at the wake. He got her back to E.N.E. by 1/2E. When his trick was over and he rol ed into his bunk he lay awake a long time thinking of Del. God, he wanted money and a good job and a girl of his own instead of al these damn floosies when you got into port. What he ought to do was go down to Norfolk and settle down and get married.
Next day about noon they sighted the grey sugarloaf of Pico with a band of white clouds just under the peak and Fayal blue and irregular to the north. They passed be-tween the two islands. The sea got very blue; it smel ed like the country lanes outside of Washington when there was honeysuckle and laurel blooming in the runs. The bluegreen yel owgreen patchwork fields covered the steep hil s like an oldfashioned quilt. That night they raised other islands to the eastward.
Five days of a heavy groundswel and they were in
the Straits of Gibraltar. Eight days of dirty sea and chil y driving rain and they were off the Egyptian coast, a warm sunny morning, going into the port of Alexandria under one bel while the band of yel ow mist ahead thickened up into masts, wharves, buildings, palmtrees. The streets smelt like a garbage pail, they drank arrack in bars run by Greeks who'd been in America and paid a dol ar apiece to see three Jewishlooking girls dance a bel y dance naked in a back room. In Alexandria they saw their first cam-ouflaged ships, three British scoutcruisers striped like zebras and a transport al painted up with blue and green water--56-markings. When they saw them, al the watch on deck lined up along the rail and laughed like they'd split. When he got paid off in New York a month later it
made him feel pretty good to go to Mrs. Olsen and pay her back what he owed her. She had another youngster stay-ing with her at the boarding house, a towheaded Swede who didn't know any English, so she didn't pay much at-tention to Joe. He hung around the kitchen a little while and asked her how things were and told her about the bunch on the Montana, then he went over to the Penn Station to see when he could catch a train to Washington. He sat dosing in the smoker of the daycoach half the night thinking of Georgetown and when he'd been a kid at school and the bunch in the poolroom on 4 1/2
Street and trips on the river with Alec and Janey.
It was a bright wintry sunny morning when he piled out at the Union Station. He couldn't seem to make up his mind to go over to Georgetown to see the folks. He loafed around the Union Station, got a shave and a shine and a cup of coffee, read the Washington Post, counted his money; he stil had more'n fifty iron men, quite a rol of lettuce for a guy like him. Then he guessed he'd wait and see Janey first, he'd wait around and maybe he'd catch her coming out from where she worked at noon. He walked around the Capitol Grounds and down Pennsylvania Ave-nue to the White House. On the Avenue he saw the same enlistment booth where he'd enlisted for the navy. Kinder gave him the creeps. He went and sat in the winter sun-light in Lafayette Square, looking at the little dressed up kids playing and the nursemaids and the fat starlings hop-ping round the grass and the statue of Andrew Jackson, until he thought it was time to go catch Janey. His heart was beating so he could hardly see straight. It must have been later than he thought because none of the girls com-ing out of the elevator was her, though he waited about an hour in the vestibule of the Riggs Building until some
-57-lousy dick or other came up to him and asked him what the hel he