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 walls 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 yelled 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 greatest 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 all night, maka love good.”
But about midnight when the girl had gone to sleep Joe got tired of lying there. He could smell 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 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 hell. The street door was all 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 million little narrow stone streets, but he figured that if he kept on going down hill he’d get to the harbor sometime. Then he began to see the pink glow from the burning tanker again on some of the housewalls 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 till 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 still burning outside the harbor. Joe came down with dose on the trip home and he couldn’t drink anything for several 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 all through that year on a new wooden boat built in Seattle called the Owanda, and a lot of trouble they had with her.
He and Janey wrote each other often. She was overseas 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 all 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 in St. Nazaire. The town was wild. Everybody ashore, all the doughboys out of their camps, all the frog soldiers out of their barracks, everybody clapping everybody else on the back, pulling corks, giving each other drinks, popping champagne bottles, kissing every pretty girl, being kissed by old women, kissed on both cheeks by French veterans with whiskers. The mates and the skipper and the chief and a couple of naval officers they’d never seen before all started to have a big feed in a café but they never got further than soup because everybody was dancing in the kitchen and they poured the cook so many drinks he passed out cold and they all sat there singing and drinking champagne out of tumblers and cheering the allied flags that girls kept carrying through.
Joe went cruising looking for Jeanette who was a girl he’d kinder taken up with whenever he was in St. Nazaire. He wanted to find her before he got too zigzag. She’d promised to couchay with him that night before it turned out to be Armistice Day. She said she never couchayed with anybody else all the time the Owanda was in port and he treated her right and brought her beaucoup presents from L’Amerique, and du sucer and du cafay. Joe felt good, he had quite a wad in his pocket and, god damn it, American money was worth something these days; and a couple of pounds of sugar he’d brought in the pockets of his raincoat was better than money with the mademosels.
He went in back where there was a cabaret all red plush with mirrors and the music was playing The Star Spangled Banner and everybody cried Vive L’Amerique and pushed drinks in his face as he came in and then he was dancing with a fat girl and the music was playing some damn foxtrot or other. He pulled away from the fat girl because he’d seen Jeanette. She had an American flag draped over her dress. She was dancing with a big sixfoot black Senegalese. Joe saw red. He pulled her away from the nigger who was a frog officer all full of gold braid and she said, “Wazamatta cherie,” and Joe hauled off and hit the damn nigger as hard as he could right on the button but the nigger didn’t budge. The nigger’s face had a black puzzled smiling look like he was just going to ask a question. A waiter and a coupla frog soldiers came up and tried to pull Joe away. Everybody was yelling and jabbering. Jeanette was trying to get between Joe and the waiter and got a sock in the jaw that knocked her flat. Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head held with both hands. He tried to swing around but he didn’t have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out.
Newsreel XXIX
the arrival of the news caused the swamping of the city’s telephone lines
Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas-a-a-a-a-yallez
BIG GUNS USED IN HAMBURG
at the Custom House the crowd sang The Star Spangled Banner under the direction of Byron R. Newton the Collector of the Port
MORGAN ON WINDOWLEDGE
KICKS HEELS AS HE SHOWERS
CROWD WITH TICKERTAPE
down at the battery the siren of the fireboat New York let out a shriek when the news reached there and in less time than it takes to say boo pandemonium broke loose all along the waterfront
Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
WOMEN MOB CROWN PRINCE FOR
KISSING MODISTE