Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online Page B

everything with one straight shot to the jaw, Fatty dispatched the waiter to the research department to discover the hour at which the lobster’s heart had ceased to beat.
    This production so intimidated The Connecticut Child that she was afraid to order anything at all lest she be committing a misdemeanor. I told her she would impress everyone by ordering jellied eel, my thinking being that the kitchen might be working with a blacksnake who’d leap out of the jelly and sink its fangs into Goldbraid Fatty so deep we could tie a ribbon onto its tail.
    THE PLAN appealed to The Connecticut Child.
    â€œHow do I ask for one?” she wanted to know.
    â€œGo to the rail and holler—maybe one will give himself up,” I suggested. The waiter returned with good news for everyone—a lobster was just putting in his death throes under the auspices of the chef, after having gotten the latter’s promise that he wouldn’t be served to any but a first-class passenger. In that event, our right-wing progressive decided, he’d take lobster instead of red snapper. He’d had a choice, but what choice had the lobster had between being scalded or frozen to death? If you can live on contingency at sea you’ve got it made, men. That’s what it’s like when you’re traveling first class.
    Now it turned out that Goldbraid Fatty had fixed things with the kitchen for a surprise-du-chef. So long as I could defend myself, I resolved quietly, I wasn’t going to be taken by surprise by a seagoing fry-cook. “If you can keep your head when all about you,” I recalled, “are losing theirs and blaming it on you”—
    Soufflé Grand Marnier would be the surprise-du- fry-cook, Fatty announced. And taking up a deflated balloon, he began stretching it in a fashion that might not have been suggestive had he not shut his eyes and the balloon not been as pink as skin. With his mouth open and his tongue deriving pleasure from the touch of his own lips, the effect sustained was definitely one of minor rapture. I simply couldn’t see why it should be necessary to put all that into so simple a task as balloon-stretching.

    â€œI take it you’ve been at sea a long time, sir,” I suggested in a friendly tone, implying that nobody could have achieved such sureness of touch in handling balloons who had stayed on dry land.
    Fatty blew the balloon up, tied it, and volleyed it toward me in a taunt as contemptuous as it was gentle. I fought down an impulse to push half a banana into his puss and say, “Call this tangy.” As it was, I had no choice but to volley the object just as gently back. But if I didn’t get the hell out of there before that soufflé arrived, I realized, they would find me hiding in the hold writing “Catch me before I kill more” on the underside of a turbine. All I wanted was to be alone with the smoldering remains of my Smith-Corona.
    I fumbled with the belt that held me to my chair. The waiters were clearing the tables of dishes bearing the remains of haddock, eel, salmon, whale, sole, clam, whitefish, oysters, octopus, herring, crabs, and swordfish and here it was only the middle of the week. Would there be enough left out there to go around come Friday? Well, no news is good news.
    I was still trying to unstrap myself when the ship hit a long swell; the duke’s chair with the duke in it started sliding downgrade away from the duchess—yet how proudly the old man held his little dish of creamed spinach high as he went! Like a man who knows too well how much spinach is left in his life and being careful not to lose a drop. Two waiters rushed to retrieve him, though it struck me that they might just as well have walked. Then, as they almost had him, the back-swell took chair—duke, spinach and all, sliding him right back to where he belonged. The duchess didn’t look up.
    She didn’t know he’d been gone.
    But the