Well, that's one thing I knew Perry could tell me. Then there were the beautiful beaches near the city where you could swim all year round. The water was always warm—well, those were the main points. I was not convinced that beachcombing, sleeping in the parks, begging your grub from galley cooks, pimping for some independents, etc., etc., was the perfect Utopia. But I had another reason for skipping ship. About that time there was a grand upsurge in contemporary architecture down in Rio; a lot of the functionalists had built some fine new shapes down there, and there was a general liveliness about all the modern buildings throughout Brazil. I thought I might get a chance to work sculpture in some of the newer mediums, so I packed my stuff to skip with the rest of them as soon as wt tied up in Rio.
And if we didn't make that port—say, we picked up cargo from the big bone hill in Santos—still we could go ashore then and easily work our way back around to Rio—but what's the "bone hill in Santos"? According to Perry and Joe and the rest of the crew that had seen it there's a lot of bleached bone from all the slaughterhouses down that way piled up in one big pile within sight of the harbor at Santos. And it makes so big a hill you can see it from out at sea. It was higher than the tip of our mast by a good bit. It's cheap cargo—this bone— and it's taken up to the States for fertilizer. Wait'll you see it, I was told when Perry gave up hopes for our tying up in the beautiful harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
But we didn't see Santos and that big bone hill either. After a spell of idling out there, we weighed anchor and steamed out again sans cargo, sans ballast, sans hope—with our hatches yapping wide open to dry out our empty holds.
WE HAD BEEN PUMPING OUT THE HOLD AS WE LAY THERE waiting for cargo, and there were only a few puddles left and a lot of slime on the exposed metal bottom of our ship when we followed the Swede Mate down the thin iron ladder and he introduced Mush and me to the bilges. Al, the fat Sailing Man, and the Bos'n trailing along knew what the bilges of a ship were—they had met them before.
For the uninitiated then, the bilges are the sewers. They run along the length of a ship from prow to stern and catch the drip, seepage, fuel oil, decayed cargo, collar buttons, filth and everything else that happens to slop over, roll away, or ooze down—like any other sewers—the only difference being bilge sewers—perhaps because of the sea water mixed throughout— smell worse.
The ship's pump outlets were in the bilges and they were to be cleared. We lifted a long narrow plate and uncovered one length of the narrow bilge. The ribs of the ship cut it up into a series of narrow compartments about four feet long. Each of these was full to the brim with a thick, black (a warm-colored black—there was brown in it) greasy portion of bilge soup— a poisonous greenish and yellowish-looking stuff floated on the surface in spots.
The Mate's shiny front collar button glistened in the soft light of the hold as he lifted his head and turned toward us.
"Dat's it. All right, you men, turn to—and start clearing those bilges."
We knelt down on the slimy metal plates of the hold and started bailing out that stinking mess with the small cans we'd all brought ddwn with us and poured them into a couple of larger pails. The opening to the bilge was only about ten inches wide. We couldn't dip the large pails into it.
The Mate watched us with his fists on his hips for a moment. Then he hollered, "What d'hell you going to do, take all year about it? Come on, come on, get down into those bilges. What d'hell you think this is—a tea par-rty—?"
Al and the Fat Man just grunted and got up off their knees and started to strip. They had known—that was the proper way to clean a bilge. They were just putting off the inevitable, but Mush and I didn't know and I protested.
"You mean get into that stinking—?"
"Yah, get into it. You can't empty them out kneeling down there praying they dry up. Get down in them."
So Mush and I stood up too. We stripped down to our shoes and we each picked one of those narrow tureens of bilge soup and we miserably eased ourselves down into the cold greasy black, green and yellow drek right up to our quivering chins!
The ship's hull curved down along our backs and met up with a straight metal plate that made the inner side of the bilge. We couldn't stand upright. We'd rest our butts against the ship's hull, brace our knees against the plates, then we'd fill our little cans, bring it up past our nose (the narrow opening was just about wide enough for our head and the passage of the can), and fill the large pails with the filth. I marveled how the fat old Sailing Man could squeeze his belly down or up through the bilge opening.
