U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [280]
When he was taking Nedda up to bed up an outside
staircase in the courtyard he could see the flare of the tanker burning outside of the harbor on the blank wal s and tiled roofs of the houses.
Nedda wouldn't get undressed but wanted to see Joe's money. Joe didn't have any money so he brought out the silk stockings. She looked worried and shook her head but she was darn pretty and had big black eyes and Joe wanted it bad and yel ed for Charley and Charley came up the stairs and talked wop to the girl and said sure she'd take the silk stockings and wasn't America the great-est country in the world and tutti aleati and Presidente Veelson big man for Italia. But the girl wouldn't go ahead until they'd gotten hold of an old woman who was in the kitchen, who came wheezing up the stairs and felt the stockings, and musta said they were real silk and worth money, because the girl put her arm around Joe's neck and Charley said, "Sure, pard, she sleepa with you al night, maka love good."
But about midnight when the girl had gone to sleep
Joe got tired of lying there. He could smel the closets down in the court and a rooster kept crowing loud as the dickens like it was right under his ear. He got up and put
-235-on his clothes and tiptoed out. The silk stockings were hanging on a chair. He picked 'em up and shoved them in his pockets again. His shoes creaked like hel . The street door was al bolted and barred and he had a devil of a time getting it open. Just as he got out in the street a dog began to bark somewhere and he ran for it. He got lost in a mil ion little narrow stone streets, but he figured that if he kept on going down hil he'd get to the harbor some-time. Then he began to see the pink glow from the burn-ing tanker again on some of the housewal s and steered by that.
On some steep steps he ran into a couple of Americans in khaki uniforms and asked them the way and they gave him a drink out of a bottle of cognac and said they were on their way to the Eyetalian front and that there'd been a big retreat and that everything was cockeyed and they didn't know where the cockeyed front was and they were going to wait right there til the cockeyed front came right to them. He told 'em about the silk stockings and they thought it was goddam funny, and showed him the way to the wharf where the Appalachian was and they shook hands a great many times when they said goodnight and they said the wops were swine and he said they were princes to have shown him the way and they said he was a prince and they finished up the cognac and he went on board and tumbled into his bunk.
When the Appalachian cleared for home the tanker was stil burning outside the harbor. Joe came down with dose on the trip home and he couldn't drink anything for sev-eral months and kinda steadied down when he got to Brooklyn. He went to the shoreschool run by the Shipping Board in Platt Institute and got his second mate's license and made trips back and forth between New York and St. Nazaire al through that year on a new wooden boat built in Seattle cal ed the Owanda, and a lot of trouble they had with her.
-236-He and Janey wrote each other often. She was over-seas with the Red Cross and very patriotic. Joe began to think that maybe she was right. Anyway if you believed the papers the heinies were getting licked, and it was a big opportunity for a young guy if you didn't get in wrong by being taken for a proGerman or a Bolshevik or some goddam thing. After al as Janey kept writing civilization had to be saved and it was up to us to do it. Joe started a savings account and bought him a Liberty bond.
Armistice night Joe was