Home Fires

REFLECTION 17: Looking Over the Rail

Down there, four decks below me, five tugs prepare to bring us up to the wharf. They are long and rather narrow craft with fifty oars a side. One hundred and one men in each tug, including the tug’s captain. Five hundred and five men, five hundred of whom are certainly making the Union Employment Administration wage—forty-three noras a week, enough to support a couple with one child (no more than one child) in subsidized housing, if both parents work.

Forty-three noras a week keeps these strong men busy and tired, too tired to riot. Too tired to steal, at least in theory. Our seamen mock them, although it seems good-natured. What is it the seamen get? The captain told me. Seventy noras a week, so one thousand per hundred-day. With a thousand noras every hundred-day, plus food and a bed, they have a right to mock.

I wonder how much he makes? He looked grim at dinner last night, though a part of that may have been the thought of losing Virginia.

That dinner … It will haunt me for a long time, I’m afraid—our last dinner on the Rani. We’ll be going ashore in what? An hour? More like two, I imagine. We may get lunch before we go ashore.

But that dinner … What was it Mick wanted? He got it, Virginia said, whatever it was. Whatever information or confirmation he was after.

One possibility is that he wanted to find out whether I blamed him for bringing Rick. Another, and this one’s my favorite, is that he wanted to see how complete my recovery was. Certainly he seemed happy when he left. And then there’s the real reason, about which he was quite wrong.

Hooked up now, a suggestive phrase. The Rani moves slowly through the water, sidewise. The gulls wheel and shriek, the rowers strain at their oars, and we move—how fast? Two hundred meters per hour, perhaps. Certainly no more than that.

So much to think about, and so little to reason with. Coal is black and Mr. Blue was Mr. White. Chelle Sea Blue—Shell Sea Blue. He likes to play games with colors. He’s playing a deep game now, and I may be better off not knowing what it is. Someone had talked to Don while I was unconscious. Was it Charles? More probably, it was Chelle herself.

Someone paging me. She wants to go to lunch. She doesn’t want me to see her naked. Was it the same with Jerry? Is it the same with Mick?