THE LOG b.u.mped again and Joe mentally cursed. No one seemed to be standing watch. Gorson and Cookie had already pulled half the crew on deck. The log b.u.mped a third time and Joe forced himself between it and the stern. The breeze kept pushing it toward them but he couldn"t cast it adrift until everyone was aboard. He wondered why the Alice stood stern to the breeze until he came aboard and saw that she had drifted round and round until the bow line was hope- lessly snarled. The pinnacle was grinding paint away from the bow. "Women!" he muttered.
The deck was deserted. Gorson went forward with half the men while Joe led the remainder to the after scuttle. With rocks at ready they oozed down both hatchways and converged on the galley.
The forecastle was dark. The only light aboard glowed dimly in the curtained galley. Joe stood in the after hatchway and saw Gorson staring aghast from the fore- castle. Between them the galley was stuffed with girls.
Not nude-naked was the only word.
Facing a bulkhead, Howard McGrath cringed in one corner. He had both arms firmly over his face. Raquel, still wearing a dress, sat with the other girls, listening intently to an enormously fat woman dressed in the remains of a flowing, Grecian style garment. She squatted crosslegged on the settee and spoke in an un- known language.
When she glanced up and saw Joe her bulging cheeks rearranged themselves into a smile which exposed sev- eral gold teeth. "Tell me, sonny," she said, "did Al Smith win or are we still stuck with Prohibition?"
I"m going nuts, Joe thought dazedly. But he realized he was cutting no ice with the crew by standing there looking stupid.
"Cat got your tongue, sonny?" the fat woman asked.
"From the looks of the still I"d say we"re still in pro- hibition." A tremendous sigh rippled up and down her abdomen. "It"s been a h.e.l.l of a while since I had a drink of good stuff."
"Wha- What year are we in?" Joe finally managed.
"Couldn"t say, sonny. When I first hit town I looked for a Salvation Army soup kitchen. Near"s I make it, there ain"t a Christer in town."
Gorson elbowed through the ma.s.s of naked femininity.
"Where you from?" he asked the fat woman.
"Windy City," she wheezed. "You can call me Ma Trimble. Sorry about making you swim, sonny-I wasn"t expecting the navy.
"Why didn"t you come back for us?"
"We were going to if we ever got untangled from this danged rock. h.e.l.l, sonny, I never could drive a flivver, much less a boat."
McGrath squirmed in his corner. Still hunched with arms over eyes, he turned. "Mr. Rate," he asked, "is that you?"
"Sorry about him," Ma Trimble said. "One of my girls chunked a rock at him when we came aboard.
When he came to-"
McGrath peeped out cautiously. He immediately ducked his head between his knees again. "I thought I"d gone to h.e.l.l," he said m.u.f.fledly.
Red Schwartz stepped over a couple of blondes and lifted the befuddled puritan to his feet, half carrying him into the forecastle.
Joe surveyed the packed galley helplessly. "What did you intend to do with my ship?" he asked.
Ma Trimble shrugged. "Anything beats starving to death on a rockpile. How was I to guess you were Americans?"
"But how are we all-don"t you have beds or any- thing ash.o.r.e? And d.a.m.n it, Mrs. Trimble, you"re going to have to get some clothes on these girls."
"Look who"s talking," the old woman laughed.
Joe glanced down at his shorts. "We can"t all sleep here," he said. "How did you happen to land on this island, anyhow?"
Ma Trimble waved a pudgy hand. "That, sonny," she warned, "is a long story."
It was indeed, and Ma Trimble told it complete with expansive gestures and colorful expressions that set Mc- Grath to trembling anew. What it all boiled down to was that Ma Trimble had grown a bit desperate when three of the best customers at her establishment had gone blind from the booze she served. The booze was
sold to her in accordance with what the mob politely called an "exclusive contract," and Ma had no desire to cause the boys to lose their politeness-but if only there were some way to make the stuff drinkable!
A friend came to the rescue. He knew, he said, a guy who"d "studied chemistry down at Joliet," and this unworthy gentleman thought he could rig up a rectify- ing still to salvage the stuff. Ma Trimble grasped at the straw, the still was constructed on a houseboat out on Goose Island, and- WHAM!.
She awoke alone, afloat on an endless blue sea. Lake Michigan"s sky could not possibly be this blue. Besides, Ma suspected Lake Michigan was not salty.
Four days pa.s.sed before a trader from Britain took her off the sagging houseboat. Despairing of ever realiz- ing a plugged denarius from this fat old savage, he deposited her bedraggled and friendless on Tyre"s wa- terfront.
Ma Trimble was the type who would land on her feet anywhere, and that included ancient Tyre. Even so, there were several terrible months while she learned the language, the angles, and the local law"s blind spots. It was nearly a year before she acquired a tiny crib and stocked it with a sloe-eyed, shopworn Syrian bint of some fourteen winters. She taught the girl a couple of Midwest tricks which hadn"t as yet caught on in the Middle East, and the establishment flourished, adding four more girls in the course of time.
One of her most frequent customers was one Publius Suilius Libellus, the Roman Colonel of this gook gar- rison town. He was, in fact, such a good customer that when Ma Trimble pointed out the many advantages he could gain by taking Ma and her girls to the Big City- as opposed to the disadvantages of Ma"s confiding all she knew to Publius" wife, the daughter of his com-
manding officer-Publius then and there decided he"d always wanted to get back to Rome.
The Astarte was still in sight of Tyre"s chalk cliffs when it began blowing, and there wasn"t much the crew could do about their course, which was now in the general direction of Athens. By the fourth day out, though, a cone-shaped island thrust itself inexorably out of the sea before them. A wreck was obviously un- avoidable, so Publius, a Roman soldier to the end, had himself and his wife lowered in a boat along with the crew, abandoning Ma and her girls along with the doomed Astarte as he made for sh.o.r.e.
It was a small boat which went under, however, swamped by a huge wave. Four of Ma"s girls continued pumping water from the Astarte"s bilges with the ship"s bucket and chain apparatus, while one of them prom- ised a white rooster to Hecate. Without pressure on her helm the ship wallowed straight for vertical cliffs. The girl upped her offer to two roosters. When the cliffs were a hundred paces away she made her final firm bid of five roosters.
The ship slipped easily into a small, horsehoe-shaped harbor.
They got some wine ash.o.r.e and removed their sup- plies up to the spring. Next day they"d return to the half-sunk hulk and dive for their clothes. That night the storm front collapsed and sea level raised two inches.
The hulk floated gently away.
Joe stretched and looked around the Alice"s crowded galley. McGrath had returned to the galley doorway and permitted his eyes to rest for longer intervals on the naked blondes, an odd, almost calculating expres- sion on his face.
Now that he had his ship back, Joe wondered what he was going to do with the women. "We"ll, maybe we
can give you a lift someplace where you can catch a boat for Rome," he said hopefully.
Ma Trimble gave a short, hard laugh. "Not on your tintype, sonny. It would"ve been rough enough with protection. You won"t catch me going there without old Publius."
"But what can I do?"
"You"re navy, sonny. You can take a distressed Ameri- can citizen home where she belongs."
"But what about these-" He groped for a word to describe the girls.
"It"ll look awful funny if you leave "em behind," Ma Trimble said. "Mr. Hoover"d call "em refugees."
Joe looked helplessly around the Alice. Freedy and Rose focused their attention on the ceiling. McGrath studied Joe with an odd, eager look. Guilbeau and Vil- legas were silently communicating with a couple of girls. So was Schwartz. Dr. Krom and his civilian as- sistant studied the cabin sole. Cook glanced at Joe and shrugged. Gorson added his own shrug. "I think we"re stuck, sir," he said.
The imam and his boys understood nothing so Joe ig- nored them. Raquel had picked up some English; he wasn"t sure how much. Remembering all the dresses she"d taken from the Viking women, he said, "How about getting these girls covered up?"
Raquel nodded and visibly thawed toward him.
"All right," Joe said. "Gorson, take a couple of men and get that bow line untangled." The moon was high, so they had little trouble warping the Alice back ash.o.r.e.