Departure by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

ate.”
    Now he brooded over the matter, tossed a mental coin finally, took a small sifter, and put a heaping tablespoon of curry powder through it, spreading it evenly over the fat. Then he separated the onions into rings and added them. The mountain of onions fried slowly, the purser perched on a stool and poking at it now and then with a long fork. While he sat there, the carpenter brought him a sandwich, which he munched thoughtfully. He had been sailing for five years now; suppose he came home and found that the war was over? Would he go on sailing? Where do old sailors go? He looked at the carpenter.
    An A.B. came in, a lad of twenty-eight or so, nodded at them and then studied the onions. “You got a lot a fat,” he said appraisingly.
    â€œI drain it off after a while,” the purser said, “and I let it dry out on the pan.”
    â€œI hear you’re making onion soup,” the A.B. remarked.
    The purser grinned. “It gets around.”
    The A.B. stayed until the fat was drained off and the onions nursed back on the pan. “I’ll need some bread,” the purser said to the carpenter. “About thirty slices. Cut them about half an inch thick, shape them round with a cake cutter or something, and then sprinkle them over with garlic salt. Pack them up like six-decker sandwiches and let them sit.” The onions were finished now, and the purser let them simmer on a very low flame. Then he crushed the dry bacon with a pestle and put it in with the onions, mixing it slowly.
    â€œIt don’t make sense about the bread,” the carpenter said. “What in hell’s name will you do with it?” Scrunching through the great icebox, he had found two shriveled survivors of the apples they had taken on at Sydney. They hitched up on the table and chewed the apples.
    â€œThat’s the one thing I know,” the purser answered. “There was a slice of toasted bread on the soup, and it was done with the garlic salt, packing it, and letting it soak through. It does it, if the bread is fresh.”
    â€œA guy as crazy about food as you,” the carpenter said, “he ought to be pretty fat. You’re not fat.”
    â€œI like good food,” said the purser, “but it doesn’t depend on how much I eat.”
    â€œIf a guy likes dames—”
    â€œI got to put that mess through a sieve,” the purser sighed. “A ricer wouldn’t be any good.” The steward came in while they were searching through the cupboards and he found them a huge iron cone, threaded through with holes, like a helm out of the Middle Ages, and he stayed to hold it as the purser pounded through the onions and bacon, which emerged as a purée. Two oilers who had heard about the soup joined the carpenter.
    To the purser, one of the oilers said, “I been in Normandy. I never ate onion soup there.”
    The other had an ache behind his left ear that had been bothering him all day, and since the ship carried no pharmacist’s mate, the purser dispensed medicine and sometimes surgery out of three large books. He went to the cabin with the oiler, looked into his ear, looked into the book, and then gave him two aspirin and some sulfa gum to chew. With afternoon, the sun had emerged, and the purser stood on the boat deck for a while, craning his neck to watch them paint and bed down the twenty-millimeter guns. The steward was waiting for him when he returned to the galley. They put the puree into an eight-quart pot and then drew the stock, while the whole galley steamed with the strong smell of twenty pounds of meat, bones and gristle that had thirty hours of cooking behind it.
    When the stock was drawn, the purser mixed it slowly and gently. The second mate joined the oiler, and the carpenter, who was opening cans of peaches for dessert, said, “Why don’t you taste it?”
    â€œFirst, the roux .”
    It had become ritualized. A wiper and the first