The Beach Girls Read Free

mess. I got four batches last summer, and this summer it will be five. Six to eight females in each batch. Maybe they’re just fine up there, but they go crazy down here in the summer. They get drunk and they get seasick and they get sunburned so bad they get chills and fever. They run from twenty-five to fifty-five, and they aren’t hired for looks. You should hear them all squeal at once when somebody hooks a fish. The better-looking ones sometimes seem willing enough, but I know damn well that if word ever got back to Pennsylvania that Captain Derr messed around with one of them, good-by job. I did take a chance one time last summer, on a little gal in the last batch, when I was wore down by it all. Red-headed, with hair the exact same shade as mine. She was so scared about me ever saying a word about it, I figured it was safe enough. She snuck aboard
Mine
three times and it was fine. She wrote one long sloppy letter about how she was going to be married three days after the day I got the letter, but I didn’t answer it.
    On Monday, the fourth, I was due for a new batch, the third of this season. The boys over in charterboat row think it’s funny as hell telling me how good I have it, and will I change jobs and all that. The hell of it is, I like things neat. And it would make you cry to see what one batch of them can do to the
Lullaby
in just one day of cruising. Women are mostly so damn untidy.
    It had been Christy’s turn to buy the groceries, so when it was time she walked up to girl’s town—Joe Rykler had named it that. It’s just two houseboats moored side by side on the shore side of Rex Rigsby’s ketch. Christy lives aboard the
Shifless
with Helen Hass, the sour little brunette job who runs the office and books for Alice Stebbins,and goes out to classes every night improving herself. Just beyond the
Shifless
is the twin houseboat, the
Alrightee
, where Anne Browder lives with Amy Penworthy.
    Christy brought the food back and she and I unwrapped it under one of the feeble dock lights and then started the hamburgers cooking. Meat spitting over the fire, and that
pfisst
sound when a beer can is opened, and quiet talk there in the night.
    Old Gus Andorian told us some funny steel mill stories we hadn’t heard before. He’s lived in an old motorless scow tied to D Dock for the past four years. He must be getting close to seventy, but he’s big and thick and solid as a tree. He worked all his life in the mills. His wife died five years ago. From what he tells, she was a little bit of a thing, and she had strong ideas about drinking, swearing, spitting and gambling. She kept the lid on Gus. They raised six daughters, all married, and their first names all begin with A. Proper like their ma, I guess. Every one of them wants Gus to come live with them. And every once in a while one of them will make a trip down to talk him into living on shore. They don’t have any idea how good a time Gus is having. He is making up for the sober years.
    And there’s one thing that every one of us regulars knows about, but never hints about. Gus and Alice. Alice Stebbins was Jess Stebbins’ third wife. He buried the other two. He married Alice ten years ago, when she was about forty, I’d say. She’d come down on the insurance money from her husband, killed on a construction job in Ohio. And stayed, like so many do. Married Jess and buried him three years later. Was going to get the marina all fixed up but somehow never got around to it.
    So she’s fifty, and you never see her in anything but jeans and a man’s shirt, and she’s big without being soft. But the way she moves, soft and light like a lion, the way she can look at you, you know she’s all woman, more woman than plenty of them half her age. She and Gus bad-mouth each other in public a lot, but there’s a warmth under it. And everybody knows that every so often Gus will sneak up into that cramped old apartment over the marina office, clumsy and sneaky as a