“Money! What’s the use o’ money when yuh can’t blow ’t in?” It was
the day after pay-day, and “Shine” had his pocket full. “I’d sooner
be deckin’ on three a week.” In the course of his varied career as
boot-black, wharf-rat, Bowery boy and member of the “Con. Scully
Association,” he had once held a “spring line” on a Coney Island
excursion boat. He remembered the cool breeze that had blown in a
porthole of the forward cabin when the deckhands sat playing pedro
there, of an afternoon. He remembered midnights on the Bowery, when
the boat had been tied up to her pier, and he had been free ashore with
his month’s wages in his pocket. “Yuh weren’t chained up to a doghouse
like this, all day an’ night,” he said.
Sturton grunted, unconvinced.
“Shine” chewed and swallowed sullenly, until his little puckered
eyes set in the open stare of a cow revolving its cud. He smiled. He
followed that expression with a scowl and bit into his apple; and,
the memory of strong drink being a thirst in his mouth, the mild
cider-juice of the bruised fruit came as an insipid aggravation to a
longing palate. He flung the apple overboard. “If it wasn’t fer th’ ol’
woman,” he said, “I’d chuck the damn job.”
Sturton’s jaw stopped. Whenever he had a nightmare, he dreamed that he
was discharged from the department. “What’d yuh _do_?”
“Do?” “Shine” cried. “I’d do anythin’. I’d go an’ make a pitch on Coney
fer the summer.”
“Make a what?”
“Take a front--set up a show--fake ’em, fake ’em! All the suckers ain’t
been stung yet.... An’ if I didn’t have the money fer that, I’d go
boostin’ fer a start. I had fifteen boosters ’n under me onct. Youse
guys that think th’ on’y way to collar the cush is to go sweat fer it,
like niggers--yuh make me tired!”
“Turk” shook his head darkly. “This ’s good enough fer mine.”
“Sure, it is,” “Shine” sneered. “Yuh don’t know any better. Yuh’ve
never _drew_ any better. If yuh’d been with me an’ Goldy Simpson when
we had the front on Tilyou’s Walk, we’d ’a’ showed yuh life--life!” He
polished another apple on his shirt sleeve and sank his teeth in it
savagely. Sturton did not reply. They ate in silence.
“Shine” was bare-footed. He had taken off his shoes to reach the
apples, standing on a stringer that was awash. He drew his knees up to
his chin now, to keep his feet within the narrow cover of the shade,
and he sat like a monkey in a cage, looking over the bulwarks enviously
at the free life on the open river.
When the steamboat _Leo_ of the Coney Island fleet came paddling
down stream towards him, he took her appearance at that moment as
a particular spite of fate. The captain was at a window of the
pilothouse; the first mate was standing over a group of deckmen who
were hauling on the rope that raised a fender; a waiter leaned on the
shutter of a forward gangway, idle. And “Shine” saw his past float by
him, in the sunlight, like a vision.
He watched it biliously. From a port of the forward cabin a thin curl
of smoke was drifting out, and he imagined a contented stoker lolling
on the warm deck within, sucking the reed stem of a corncob pipe. He
remembered a boat that had been set afire by the butt of a cigarette
thrown overboard from an upper deck and carried by the wind, through
that very port, into the ropes and rags and paint-pots of that cabin,
he hoped the smoker in there, now, would start a blaze. He hoped the
old tub would burn before his eyes.
“Gee!” he said. “He must be smokin’ a Dutchman’s pipe.”
When the steamer was abreast of them, Sturton suddenly jumped up.
“That’s afire, ain’t it?”
It was; and “Shine” came to his feet as if he had been lifted by the
yell of derision with which he greeted the fact that it _was_ a fire.
“Hi-yi! _Ca-a-ap!_ Mucka-hi! Ain’t y’ afire forrud?” He waved his arms
and pointed. “Yuh’re smokin’ in the peak!”
Sturton put his hands to his cheeks and bellowed, “Smoke up in front!”
Their voices drew the other firemen from the pierhouse; and while
these men shouted questions and “Shine” bawled replies, a cry was
raised on the _Leo_ and the passengers started a panic across her
decks. Almost immediately, her whistle shrilled the repeated signal of
distress; Captain Keighley ordered “Cast off, boys;” and “Shine” ran,
bare-footed, to his duty.