In the washroom of the Seaman’s Institute weeks before we had watched him shave. It had been a ritual lacking only incense. The glittering articles from his shaving kit, these had been blocks in the walls of his self-esteem. The careful lathering of his florid cheeks, the application of shaving lotion, these things had been steps in a ritual that never varied. We who were disciples of Gillette and dull blades watched him with something approaching reverence and went away to marvel.
Knowing what must have happened in the intervening weeks, I could see him going to the pawnshop with first one and then another of his prized possessions, removing bit by bit the material things, those glittering silver pieces that shored up his self-vision. Each time his purse would be replenished for a day or two, and as each article passed over the counter into that great maw from which nothing ever returns, I could see some particle of his dignity slipping away. He was a capitalist without capital, a conqueror without conquests, a vocabulary without expression. In the stove the fire crackled; on the wide bed the old man muttered, stirring in his sleep. It was very late.
He did not come again. Several times the following night I walked to the door, almost hoping to see his broad bulk as it labored up the hill. Even Copper looked uneasily out of the window, and Slim took a later walk than usual. We were a group that was closely knit, and though he had not belonged, he had for one brief night been one of us, and when he did not return, we were uneasy.
It was after twelve before Slim turned in. It had been another wet night, and he was tired. He stopped by my chair, where I sat reading a magazine.
“Listen,” he said, flushing a little, “if he comes—Old Doc, I mean—I’ll pay if he ain’t got the dime. He ain’t such a bad guy.”
“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”
He didn’t come. The wind whined and snarled around the corners of the house, and we heard the tires of a car whine on the wet pavement below. It is a terrible thing to see a man’s belief in himself crumble, for when one loses faith in one’s own illusion, there is nothing left. Even Slim understood that. It was almost daybreak before I fell asleep.
Several nights drifted by. There was food to get, and the rent was coming due. We were counting each dime, for we had not yet made the six dollars. There was still a gap, a breach in our wall that we might not fill. And outside was the night, the rain, and the cold.
The Richfield, a Standard tanker, was due in. I had a shipmate aboard her, and when she came up the channel, I was waiting on the dock. They might need an AB.
They didn’t.
It was a couple of hours later when I climbed the hill toward the shack. I didn’t often go that way, but this time it was closer, and I was worried. The night before I’d left the money for the rent in a thick white cup on the cupboard shelf. And right then murder could be done for five bucks. I glanced through the window. Then I stopped.
Old Doc Yak was standing by the cupboard, holding the white cup in his hand. As I watched, he dipped his fingers in and drew out some of our carefully gleaned nickels, dimes, and quarters. Then he stood there letting those shining metal disks trickle through his thick fingers and back into the cup. Then he dipped his fingers again, and I stood there, holding my breath.
A step or two and I could have stopped him, but I stood there, gripped by his indecision, half guessing what was happening inside him. Here was money. Here, for a little while, was food, a room, a day or two of comfort. I do not think he considered the painstaking effort to acquire those few coins or the silent, bedraggled men who had trooped up the muddy trail to add a dime or fifteen cents to the total of our next month’s rent. What hunger had driven him back, I knew. What helplessness and humiliation waited in the streets below, I also knew.
Slowly, one by one, the coins dribbled back into the cup, the cup was returned to the shelf, and Old Doc Yak turned and walked from the door. For one moment he paused, his face strangely gray and old, staring out across the bleak, rain-washed roofs toward the gray waters of the channel and Terminal Island just beyond.
Then he walked away, and I waited until he was out of sight before I went inside, and I, who had seen so much of weariness and defeat, hesitated before I took down the cup. It was all there, and suddenly I was a little sorry that it was.
Once more I saw him. One dark, misty night I came up from the lumber docks, collar turned up, cap pulled low, picking my way through the shadows and over the railroad ties, stumbling along rails lighted only by the feeble red and green of switch lights. Reaching the street, I scrambled up the low bank and saw him standing in the light of a streetlamp.
He was alone, guarded from friendship as always by his icy impenetrability but somehow strangely pathetic with his sagging shoulders and graying hair. I started to speak, but he turned up his coat collar and walked away down a dark street.
IT’S YOUR MOVE
The Seaman’s Institute in San Pedro was a place like a YMCA but for sailors. They had beds which you could get for fifty cents a night. They had showers and whatnot and they also had a library there and a big room where there were a lot of checker tables, and we had some of the finest checker players, I think, there ever was anywhere would come into that room.
OLD MAN WHITE was a checker player. He was a longshoreman, too, but he only made his living at that. Checker playing was his life. I never saw anybody take the game like he took it. Hour after hour, when there was nobody for him to play with, he’d sit at a table in the Seaman’s Institute and study the board and practice his moves. He knew every possible layout there could be. There was this little book he carried, and he would arrange the checkers on the board, and then move through each game with an eye for every detail and chance. If anybody ever knew the checkerboard, it was him.
He wasn’t a big man, but he was keen-eyed, and had a temper like nobody I ever saw. Most of the time he ignored people. Everybody but other checker players. I mean guys that could give him a game. They were few enough, and with the exception of Oriental Slim and MacCready, nobody had ever beat him. They were the best around at the time, but the most they could do with the old man was about one out of ten. But they gave him a game and that was all he wanted. He scarcely noticed anybody else, and you couldn’t get a civil word out of him. As a rule he never opened his face unless it was to talk the game with somebody who knew it.
Then Sleeth came along. He came down from Frisco and began hanging around the Institute talking with the guys who were on the beach. He was a slim, dark fellow with a sallow complexion, quick, black eyes, and he might have been anywhere from thirty to forty-five.
He was a longshoreman, too. That is, he was then. Up in Frisco he had been a deckhand on a tugboat, like me. Before that he had been a lot of things, here and there. Somewhere he had developed a mind for figures, or maybe he had been born with it. You could give him any problem in addition, subtraction, or anything else, and you’d get the answer just like that, right out of his head. At poker he could beat anybody and was one of the best pool shots I ever saw.
We were sitting by the fireplace in the Institute one night when he came in and joined us. A few minutes later, Old Man White showed up wearing his old pea jacket as always.
“Where’s MacCready?” he said.
“He’s gone up to L.A., Mr. White,” the clerk said. “He won’t be back for several days.”
“Is that other fellow around? That big fellow with the pockmarked face?”
“Slim? No, he’s not. He shipped out this morning for Grays Harbor. I heard he had some trouble with the police.”
Trouble was right. Slim was slick with the cards, and he got himself in a game with a couple of Greeks. One of the Greeks was a pretty good cheat himself, but Oriental Slim was better and cashing in from the Greek’s roll. One word led to another, and the Greek went for a rod. Well, Oriental Slim was the fastest thing with a chiv I ever saw. He cut that Greek, then he took out.
Old Man White turned away, growling something into his mustache. He was a testy old guy, and when he got sore that mustache looked like a porcupine’s back.
“What’s the matter with that guy?” Sleeth said. “He acts like he was sore about something.”
“It’s checkers,” I said. “That’s Old Man White, the best checker player around here. Mac and Slim are the only two who can even make it interesting, and they’re gone. He’s sour for a week when he misses a game.”
“Hell, I’ll play with him!”
“He won’t even listen to you. He won’t play nobody unless they got some stuff.”
“We’ll see. Maybe I can give him a game.”
Sleeth got up and walked over. The old man had his book out and was arranging his men on the board. He never used regular checkers himself. He used bottle tops, and always carried them in his pocket.
“How about a game?” Sleeth said.
Old Man White growled something under his breath about not wanting to teach anybody; he didn’t even look up. He got the checkers set up, and pretty soon he started to move. It seems these guys that play checkers have several different openings they favor, each one of them named. Anyway, when the old man started to move, Sleeth watched him.
“The Old Fourteenth, huh? You like that? I like the Laird and Lady best.”
Old Man White stopped in the middle of a move and looked up, frowning. “You play checkers?” he said.
“Sure, I just asked you for a game!”
“Sit down, sit down. I’ll play you three games.”
Well, it was pitiful. I’m telling you it was slaughter. If the old man hadn’t been so proud, everything might have been different, but checkers was his life, his religion; and Sleeth beat him.
It wasn’t so much that he beat him; it was the way he beat him. It was like playing with a child. Sleeth beat him five times running, and the old man was fit to be tied. And the madder he got, the worse he played.
Dick said afterward that if Sleeth hadn’t talked so much, the old man might have had a chance. You see, Old Man White took plenty of time to study each move, sometimes ten minutes or more. Sleeth just sat there gabbing with us, sitting sideways in the chair, and never looking at the board except to move. He’d talk, talk about women, ships, ports, liquor, fighters, everything. Then, the old man would move and Sleeth would turn, glance at the board, and slide a piece. It seemed like when he looked at the board, he saw all the moves that had been made, and all that could be made. He never seemed to think; he never seemed to pause; he just moved.
Well, it rattled the old man. He was sort of shoved off balance by it. All the time, Sleeth was talking, and sometimes when he moved, it would be right in the middle of a sentence. Half the time, he scarcely looked at the board.
Then, there was a crowd around. Old Man White being beat was enough to draw a crowd, and the gang all liked Sleeth. He was a good guy. Easy with his dough, always having a laugh on somebody or with somebody, and just naturally a right guy. But I felt sorry for the old man. It meant so much to him, and he’d been king bee around the docks so long, and treating everybody with contempt if they weren’t good at checkers. If he had even been able to make it tough for Sleeth, it would have been different, but he couldn’t even give him a game. His memory for moves seemed to desert him, and the madder he got and the harder he tried, the more hopeless it was.
It went on for days. It got so Sleeth didn’t want to play him. He’d avoid him purposely, because the old man was so stirred up about it. Once Old Man White jumped up in the middle of a game and hurled the board clear across the room. Then he stalked out, mad as a wet hen, but just about as helpless as an Armenian peddler with both arms busted.
Then he’d come back. He’d always come back and insist Sleeth play him some more. He followed Sleeth around town, cornering him to play, each time sure he could beat him, but he never could.
We should have seen it coming, for the old man got to acting queer. Checkers was an obsession with him. Now he sometimes wouldn’t come around for days, and when he did, he didn’t seem anxious to play anymore. Once he played with Oriental Slim, who was back in town, but Slim beat him, too.
That was the finishing touch. It might have been the one game out of ten that Slim usually won, but it hit the old man where he lived. I guess maybe he figured he couldn’t play anymore. Without even a word, he got up and went out.
A couple of mornings later, I got a call from Brennan to help load a freighter bound out for the Far East. I’d quit my job on the tug, sick of always going out but never getting anyplace, and had been longshoring a little and waiting for a ship to China. This looked like a chance to see if they’d be hiring; so I went over to the ship at Terminal Island, and reported to Brennan.
The first person I saw was Sleeth. He was working on the same job. While we were talking, another ferry came over and Old Man White got off. He was running a steam winch for the crew that day, and I saw him glance at Sleeth. It made me nervous to think of those two guys on the same job. In a dangerous business like longshoring—that is, a business where a guy can get smashed up so easy—it looked like trouble.
It was after four in the afternoon before anything happened. We had finished loading the lower hold through No. 4 hatch, and were putting the strong-backs in place so we could cover the ’tween-decks hatchway. I was on deck waiting until they got those braces in place before I went down to lay the decking over them. I didn’t want to be crawling down a ladder with one of those big steel beams swinging in the hatchway around me. Old Man White was a good hand at a winch, but too many things can happen. We were almost through for the day, as we weren’t to load the upper hold ’til morning.
A good winch-driver doesn’t need signals from the hatch-tender to know where his load is. It may be out of sight down below the main deck, but he can tell by the feel of it and the position of the boom about where it is. But sometimes on those old winches, the steam wouldn’t come on even, and once in a while there would be a surge of power that would make them do unaccountable things without a good hand driving. Now, Old Man White was a good hand. Nevertheless, I stopped by the hatch coaming and watched.
It happened so quick that there wasn’t anything anyone could have done. Things like that always happen quick, and if you move, it is usually by instinct. Maybe the luckiest break Sleeth ever got was he was light on his feet.
The strong-back was out over the hatch, and Old Man White was easing it down carefully. When it settled toward the ’tween-decks hatchway, Sleeth caught one end and Hansen the other. It was necessary for a man to stand at each end and guide the strong-back into the notch where it had to fit to support the floor of the upper hold. Right behind Sleeth was a big steel upright, and as Old Man White began to lower away, I got nervous. It always made me nervous to think that a wrong move by the winch-driver, or a wrong signal from the hatch-tender spotting for him, and the man with that post at his back was due to get hurt.
Sleeth caught the end of the strong-back in both hands and it settled gradually, with the old winch puffing along easy-like. Just then I happened to glance up, and something made me notice Old Man White’s face.
He was as white as death, and I could see the muscles at the corner of his jaw set hard. Then, all of a sudden, that strong-back lunged toward Sleeth.
It all happened so quick, you could scarcely catch a breath. Sleeth must have remembered Old Man White was on that winch, or maybe it was one of those queer hunches. As for me, I know that in the split second when that strong-back lunged toward him, the thought flashed through my mind, “Sleeth. It’s your move!”
And he did move, almost like in the checker games. It was as if he had a map of the whole situation in his mind. One moment he was doing one thing and the next…
He leaped sideways and the end of that big steel strong-back hit that stanchion with a crash that you c
ould have heard in Sarawak; then the butt swung around and came within an eyelash of knocking Hansen into the hold, and I just stood there with my eyes on that stanchion thinking how Sleeth would have been mashed into jelly if he hadn’t moved like Nijinsky.
The hatch-tender was yelling his head off, and slowly Old Man White took up the tension on the strong-back and swung her into place again. If it had been me, I’d never have touched that thing again, but Sleeth was there, and the strong-back settled into place as pretty as you could wish. Only then could I see that Sleeth’s face was white and his hand was shaking.
When he came on deck, he was cool as could be. Old Man White was sitting behind that winch all heaped up like a sack of old clothes. Sleeth looked at him then, grinned a little, and said, sort of offhand, “You nearly had the move on me that time, Mr. White!”
AND PROUDLY DIE
Everything that’s loose drifts down to the sea eventually. Driftwood and drift people, the same way.
WE WERE ALL misfits, more or less, just so much waste material thrown out casually at one of the side doors of the world. We hadn’t much to brag about, but we did plenty of it, one time or another. Probably some of us had something on the ball, like Jim, for instance, who just lacked some little touch in his makeup, and that started him off down the odd streets. We weren’t much to look at, although the cops used to come down now and again to give us the once-over. As a rule they just left us alone, because we didn’t matter. If one of us was killed, they just figured it was a break for the community, or something. And probably they were right.
Yondering: Stories Page 4