Departure by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

children.
    â€œSlice me about five pounds of bacon, thin,” he said. And then added, “You don’t learn to cook.”
    The cook and the second cook joined the carpenter and the purser. The ship was a condition of perpetual hunger, and even if this was the day of the steward’s department, three meals had to be cooked and served. But a lunch of potato salad and cold cuts and supper of baked macaroni with cheese and ham was recognized and admitted as a bow to the special nature of the day. The top of the long galley stove belonged to the purser and the carpenter, and the cook, a fat, pock-marked mountain of a Greek, and the second cook, yellow-haired and skinny, from southern Oklahoma, both recognized this fact, adopting a deliberate and somewhat mawkish dilettantism. It pleased them that they were strangers in the galley on this day, and having little enough work, what with the cold cuts and the one huge casserole, they snooped around like tourists.
    â€œOnion soup?” the cook asked.
    â€œWith filet mignon and fried potatoes,” the carpenter added. “You won’t starve.”
    â€œI don’t see a potato again in this life, I won’t shed no tears,” the second cook said.
    â€œBut onion soup—” the cook said, and then, fearful that he had hurt the purser’s feelings, added, “I got some gallon cans of bouillon if you need it.”
    â€œBouillon,” the purser said softly. “Mother of God, bouillon!”
    â€œYou leave him alone,” the carpenter said. “What in hell are you guys doing here anyway? Take your stinking cold cuts into the pantry. Take them to the head. Here we are slaving away over a hot stove and you got no appreciation, only an interest like a couple of marks in a summer carnival.”
    He shouldered them out, and the purser selected a frying pan thirty inches in diameter, laid out the bacon on it, and set it to fry. As the bacon began to sizzle and blister, he mentioned to the carpenter:
    â€œWhy do you suppose he ships out as cook?”
    â€œIt’s a living,” the carpenter said. “I’m an old man, but if I was a young feller, I’d learn me to cook. I wouldn’t be no deck hand.”
    The purser hung over the frying pan, guiding the strips of bacon, lifting out each piece as it browned and laying it on a big sheet of Manila he had spread on the table. As the fat in the pan increased, the remaining strips of bacon danced merrily. It was a long and tedious process, but he carried it through until he had a pan of fresh, bubbling lard, not burned and not smoking, and all of the bacon crisp and browned evenly.
    â€œYou going to eat lunch?” the carpenter wanted to know.
    The purser shook his head. For the first time in months, the loneliness, the awful combination of space and time, was falling away. Standing in his shorts, his big, brown, hairy body warmed to the heat of the stove and swayed to the gentle roll of the ship. The onion soup became more than a soup, more and beyond his explaining to anyone.
    When the last of the bacon was finished, the purser added salt to the fat and ground down peppercorns, which he spread through it evenly. He set it on a low light and tried to think of spice. After he had eaten the Normandy onion soup, that single time, he had gone in to the cook and asked her. She was a wizened shred of a woman, with blue eyes as pale as the winter sky.
    â€œYou make it,” she said.
    â€œBut how—how do you spice it?”
    She put her hands on her flat dugs and rocked back and forth, gurgling with laughter. “You go to hell, huh?” she laughed, and then added, “ Tu peux m’embrasser quelque part. ”
    He went out and told his wife. “That’s a nasty old woman,” his wife had said. “It’s good soup, but I don’t see why you make such a fuss about it.”
    â€œIt’s the most wonderful soup a man ever