Hemingway

Round 4: "Winner Take Nothing"

Floyd Gibbons and i were down in Florida in the spring of '36. Gib was another former Chicago reporter who had made the big time. He was dragging down three grand a week for talking fast on the radio. He had a swell motor yacht called The Adventurer. One day we cruised down from Miami to Key West.

The Overseas Highway that connects up the Florida Keys had not yet been built. Key West was still an island. You had to go there by water. So Ernest had his island home and his boat just like he had said he was going to have ten years before in Paris. Some fortune teller. I was anxious to see his boat. Bet it's a honey, now that he has the dough, I thought.

We tied up at the fishing docks on the Gulf and the old Adventurer stood out like the Queen Mary; all brass and gleaming white, among the local fishing craft. And the first thing we did was to ask where we could find Hemingway.

"God only knows," the dockmaster said. "We got a lot of bars in this town. His boat's Pilar, but he's not aboard."

So we went up to the La Concha Hotel. They've got a good bar there. (continued on page 70)Hemingway(continued from page 67) But the bartender seemed nervous. He looked around carefully and lowered his voice. "Mr. Hemingway never comes in here," he said.

That's funny, I thought. Looks like the nicest place in town.

"Where can we find him?" Gib asked.

"I don't know where you can find him," the barkeep said, "but any taxi can take you to his house."

So we grabbed a cab and sure enough the driver knew just where it was. He kept looking at us in the mirror as we circled through the narrow streets. We finally stopped in front of an eight-foot stone wall with forbidding looking iron gates. The place looked like a medieval fortress. The only thing missing was the moat. The grounds covered a square block in the most thickly populated part of the town and the walls were on all four sides with broken bottles on top to keep you from climbing over. I knew who had furnished the bottles all right.

Looking through the iron gate all you could see were palm trees set close together with a glimpse of an ancient mansion in the middle. It was a bright sunny day outside but inside those walls it was black as night and the few pieces of ground you could see between the dense trees looked damp and mysterious. Bet there's a lot of pirate bones buried there, I thought.

When Gib pulled the bell cord by the gate a mournful dirge could be heard in the distance. It sounded like that lone church bell they ring in Spain for the dead. We waited a bit but not a sound came from the house. We rang it again and again. But nobody came to the door. That is, nobody in that house came to the door. But across the street every door in the block opened to pour out women and kids. They all stood silently watching us. The houses were mostly small unpainted shacks tied down with wires against the hurricanes. The scene reminded you of the old chateaux you see in Europe with the huts of the peasants grouped around the Monseigneur's castle for protection. The neighbors themselves looked like they had just stepped out of old paintings. The kids were mostly naked and the women wore brightly colored shawls over their heads like you see in small towns in Southern Spain today or maybe Cuba. Gib cupped his hands over his mouth and gave them that fast radio line of his.

"Hello everybody," he said. "Is Mr. Hemingway in town?"

Nobody answered. Nobody even moved. They just stared. The driver called out in Spanish and a couple of them nodded. But nobody said anything. The Lord of the Manor has them well trained, I thought. He's probably peeking out of some hidden window in his bastion right now. Dodging us the way he dodged me that day in his town house by the cemetery. Some isolationist.

Still running true to form, I thought. He lives in a cemetery in Paris and in a tomb in Key West. The driver told us the place was all modern inside and a show place of the town. But try and get in. We rang the death knell again but got only a dismal echo.

Anyway we knew he was in town. So we told the driver to take us any place he might be. That was a bigger order than we thought. We must have hit twenty bars in an hour. We started at the Ocean end of Duval street. That's the Broadway of Key West. It runs from the Ocean to the Gulf and is only about a mile long. But in that miracle mile there are more bars than you will find in two miles on Broadway. Every other store is one. We didn't go into them all; just the ones with sawdust on the floor. I asked the driver why and he explained.

He said, "The Señor Hemingway is very democratic. He does not wear the shoes when he visit the bar. Perhaps he like the feel of the sawdust on the bare feet. Who knows?"

Barefooted, I thought. What next? You'd think that it would have made it easier to find him. But it didn't. The Conks, that's what they call the natives on the Keys, go barefooted too. Anyway in every spot we visited it was the same story. We would ask for Señor Hemingway and everybody would clam up. You could tell they all knew him. But they just weren't talking.

"They think you the police," our driver said.

"What's the trouble?" Gib said.

"Quien sabe?" the driver said. But he looked like he did know.

We finally hit the last joint on the street. The driver refused to go in with us this time. You couldn't blame him, I thought. It sure looked plenty tough. Had a kind of stockade all around it with a lot of gaudy posters of Cuban belly dancers all over the unpainted front. It backed right up on the Gulf and Gib said that's how they got rid of the bodies. Just tossed them over the fence to the sharks. It was strictly a night joint, you could see. And you know how awful those joints look in the daytime. It had a Spanish name but we called it The Bucket of Blood.

We started in the door but a large dusky gentleman with a handle-bar mustache and a dirty apron suddenly barred the way. His huge body filled the doorway. "No open. Come tonight," he said. But when we asked the usual question about Hemingway a strange thing happened. Instead of clamming like the rest of them he stood aside and bowed us in.

And you should have seen the interior of the joint. It looked like a hurricane had hit it. Broken glass and broken chairs littered the floor. A couple of tough looking Conks were cleaning it up. Our host, with amazing agility for such a big man, vaulted over the bar and came up with a bottle of goad Scotch. The best we had had in Key West. I noticed the bar mirror over his head was broken in two places. There were no customers and, in an unbroken spot on the mirror, I could see the two Conks leaning on their brooms and staring at us. The big man, you could see, was the boss. He smiled ingratiatingly and announced that the drinks were on the house.

"Is it that the Señor Hemingway is a fran' to you?" he said.

Oh, oh, I thought. There's something screwy about this. I didn't like the way he was playing up to us. Better say we don't even know Ernest. Maybe our barefoot boy has been playing rough in the joint. I was going to warn Gib but he admitted that the Señor was our good friend before I could tip him off. Our host's next remark nearly floored us. He was a very, very tough looking hombre.

"Please, please," he said, with his hands together as though he were praying. "Please tell your good fran' to come no more to my place. Look what happen las' night. I am afraid."

Better take the ball away from Gib. I thought. After all I had had a place of my own and knew how to talk to the guy.

"Don't worry about Señor Hemingway," I said. "He can take care of himself."

"I am not afraid for him," he answered, "I am afraid of him. I am afraid he will hurt somebody in my place."

Get a load of that, I thought. The tough owner of the toughest joint in town was afraid Ernest might hurt one of his customers? Some barefoot boy!

I ordered another drink. This we gotta hear, I thought.

"Was he hurt?" I said.

"No, no," he said, "the Señor never get hurt."

"Start it?"

"No, no," he said, "he no start trouble. He just finish it. He win."

Winner take nothing, I thought. That's the title of one of his books. But the story I heard that day in The Bucket of Blood was a lot better than the book, in my opinion. We got it straight from the horse's mouth too; from the owner of the joint. And night club owners don't lie.

It seems that the Señor H. had dropped in alone to the establishment about four A.M. He had just wrapped up a book (continued on page 84)Hemingway(continued from page 70) and, as usual on those festive occasions, was wearing his bare feet and what he calls his "drinking shorts." That's all he had on. He enjoys hobnobbing with the key-hopping waterfront Conks who consider shirts and shoes an affectation. They know him and they like him.

But, it appears, there were three (3) largish rum-runners out of Nassau who did not know him and who did not like his looks. They had been imbibing some of their own poison and resented the Senor's bare feet and unshaven features. The Senor only grinned at their verbal insults.

But it seems that La Belle Conchita, who does the star strip-tease according to the posters, precipitated matters innocently by tossing the Señor a rose. The gesture was resented by the rumrunners. One of them playfully broke his glass on the edge of the bar and, while retaining the jagged stem as a weapon of sorts, he had laughingly tossed the small pieces of glass under the Señor's bare feet.

That's when the trouble started. When the Señor stepped on one of them. "And," our host said, "you never see a big man move so fas' in all your life. Bottles, chairs and tables fly around him like the rain. The furniture miss him. His punches, they do not miss."

It had all ended as quickly as it had begun, we learned, with the three rumrunners going by air through the front door, which, by the looks of it, must have been closed at the time. The Señor won by three KOs. But he paid for everything. Winner take nothing.

No wonder we couldn't find him around town. He was waiting for the heat to cool down. Afraid somebody might want to congratulate him or something. That's why he wasn't home either. Better get out of here ourselves, I thought.

We got out of there fast. You could tell the driver was relieved to see us on our feet. He knew about it all right. Just wasn't talking. Gib thought we ought to take a little run in the yacht to get the morning-after smell of the joint out of our lungs. So we headed for the dock.

• • •

The Adventurer sure looked clean and inviting. Wonder if we will ever see Ernest, I thought. I knew he hadn't gone to bed. All that excitement would keep anybody up. Besides, sleep wasn't very important to him. Working or playing he liked to stay awake for days. I was sorry we had missed him. So was Gib.

We got on board and were all set to pull out when the Coast Guard started running up small craft warnings. That's the way it is down there. One minute the sun is shining brightly and the next minute they are telling you to stay off the ocean. Bad weather hits fast on the Keys and a storm on the Caribbean is no joke.

We were helping the captain tie things down on deck and running out extra lines for the coming blow when a passing boat caught our eye. It was just one of those ordinary motor fishing boats you see all over the Keys but instead of runing to shelter it was headed straight out to sea. There was a big man at the wheel and a Cuban boy standing beside him with a tray. The big man had a glass in his hand which the boy was filling from a bottle. The boat moving slowly on its motor was only a few feet from our bow. We looked at the man.

Round 5: "The Three Day Blow"

He was an Old Man and he had not taken a fish in many days. That was because he had not been fishing. He had been playing. When he fished he took a fish. When he played he took a drink. You could see that he had not taken a shave or a sleep in many hours. The Boy looked at him admiringly.

Everything was young about the Old Man except his eyes which were the color of seaweed which has been up too long. But they were cheerful and undefeated. The hand which held the glass had the deep creased scars which came from handling schooners across the bars. Some of them were as old as erosions on a fishless desert. Others at his knuckles were fresh; as though he had barked them recently on the rough thwarts of a sea-going chin. There was another fresh scar on his cheekbone; as if it had been brushed lightly by a passing fist or a flying chair. His bare toes gripped the deck the way his strong fingers gripped the glass; as though somebody were going to take it away from him. When he saw us his raucous laugh broke the spell. He shut down his noisy motor and drifted alongside. It was The Pilar.

"Blow me down," he said, "if it ain't the adventurers. What you doing? Tying her down? You sissies afraid of getting your feet wet?"

Just like that, I thought. You don't see the guy for years and he talks like he had just seen you yesterday. Maybe he had, I thought. Through one of those hidden peekholes in the castle of his.

"Tie up and come aboard," Gib said. "Big blow coming."

"No can do," Ernest said. "Got a date in Bimini. Come on over when the naughty storm dies down and go fishing. It's only a one-bottle cruise. I'll be there by noon tomorrow."

"You'll be in Davy Jones' Locker by noon," I said.

He looked at the sky and sniffed the air. The wind was rising and it was getting darker every minute. He said something in Spanish and the boy turned the motor over. He pushed off and waved. "See you sissies when you get there. So long," he said. And he headed that tub of his straight for the Atlantic.

Well, I thought, he's still the same anyway. Still looking for trouble. And the big dough doesn't seem to have changed him. He looks worse than he did when he was broke. And you couldn't call that boat of his a yacht by any means. Guess he can take it all right, I thought.

"The man's crazy," the captain said.

"You can say that again," I said.

The sea around the Florida Keys is a graveyard for ships. In the old days the Key Westers made their living out of wrecks. The wind piled the ships up on the saw-toothed reefs and the breakers did the rest. They say the natives used to put out the lighthouses when business was bad. The bones of thousands of ships lie buried in the shallow waters. The sudden storms, the shallow water and the reefs still make them the most dangerous waters in the world.

And this was no small squall. It was the real thing. The Conk fishermen were all streaking for port before the wind. Even the birds were ganging up and heading inland the way they do when a hurricane is coming.

The island of Bimini, the captain told us, is just a speck in the Caribbean and hitting it in a spell of bad weather is like finding a needle in a haystack. Our friend, he said, would come limping back to Key West in a few days or we would never hear of him again. "You don't know these waters," he said. You don't know Hemingway, I thought.

As his boat went by the Coast Guard Station a siren let loose that sounded like an air-raid signal. His was the only boat headed out to sea so it must have been for him. That ought to bring him back, I thought. But it didn't. He just stood up and waved with one hand and thumbed his nose at the Station with the other. The last we saw of him was his little boat, heading straight into the weather. Then it faded out suddenly in the dark like a Hollywood cut.

The storm was a bad one. It hit us a minute later. You couldn't see your drink before your face. We grabbed a taxi and just made the La Concha. The palm trees were bowing low to us as we tore through the wind-swept streets. The cab itself felt like it was going to turn over any minute. The rain was hitting it like a fire hose. It wasn't the hurricane season but it felt like one to me.

"God help the sailors on a night like this," Gib said.

"Amen," I said.

And it went on that way for three days and nights. We stayed holed up in the bar and watched it through the windows. All you could see on Duval Street was a Yank sailor now and then bucking the wind and rain in snug oil-skins. Bet they were glad to be in port, I thought.

We pulled out for Bimini early in the morning of the fourth day. The wind and rain had stopped but there was a big ground swell. We asked about Ernest at the dock but he had not come back. We were worried. So I phoned the Coast Guard. When I mentioned his name a roar of laughter came back over the phone. "That guy knows those waters better than we do," a voice answered. The Dock Master did not share our fears either. "If that bird is ever lost at sea," he said, "it will be because they hanged him from a yard-arm."

We glimpsed Bimini at sunset. And what a sight. It looked like a little tropical tiara set in emeralds. The natives say that Columbus landed there on his first voyage. Named it San Salvador, they say. I wouldn't know about that but I'll bet Chris wasn't any happier to sight land than we were.

Bimini is the smallest of the British Bahamas group in the West Indies. It's really two islands but one is uninhabited. It lies about a hundred miles due east of Miami and, except for a small hotel, looked then pretty much as it did in Columbus' day. Has a population of about two hundred natives and they live and look pretty much the same as they did in the 15th Century except they listen to the fights and baseball on the radio. It's like one of those tropical islands you see in the movies; all coconut palms and white beach. The World Atlas gives it only a fly-speck and one line. "Bimini; a small island in the Bahamas, W.I. where Ponce de Leon is said to have discovered The Fountain of Youth."

I borrowed the captain's glasses and took a look. I picked up the dock, a long narrow jetty, but I couldn't see any signs of Hemingway's boat. There were about fifty natives standing on the jetty but not a white face in the lot. Must have come and gone, I thought. Hoped so anyway.

But he had not come and gone. We found that out while the natives were helping us tie up. The first thing they asked us was whether or not we had seen him. When we told them we had seen him start out for here four days ago they were all smiles. I couldn't see what was so funny about a man being out for days in a storm. But they did.

"No storm too bad for Papa," one of them said. "Storm over. He come sure now."

We hoped they were right but had our doubts. We spotted a little native bar at the foot of the jetty and headed for there. The going had been plenty tough all day and we were about ready for bed. A couple of the boys helped us walk and took us right to the bar without our telling them. Papa has them well trained, I thought. We made the bar and flopped down on a couple of bar stools. And after a few of those good Scotches you get on British islands we started to feel better.

But we were still worried about Ernest. Gib wanted to call up Key West and report him missing. They had a radio phone on Bimini and we might have done it but if we did and he turned up safe I knew he would be sore. He always hated any publicity about his private life. Sounds funny but it's true. Ask any newspaper man who knows him. Won't even talk about his own books let alone talk about himself. You got to give the devil his due. Look what he did when I gave him a write-up in The Boulevardier.

So we rolled up to the hotel and went to bed instead.

Came the dawn and we got some good news. The boy who brought our coffee was all smiles. Papa's boat had been seen limping into port, he announced. He would make the jetty in an hour or so and the whole island would be there to meet him. You'd think it was Christopher Columbus coming back again, I thought.

But Gib and I were right there with the rest when The Pilar chugged up to dock. The boat you could see had taken a bad beating. Some storm. But Ernest looked all right from where we stood. We weren't on the jetty. There wasn't room. We waited up in front of the bar. We knew where he would head for first. And you should have seen and heard the welcome the guy got. They even had a three piece band on hand. You'd think it was Lindbergh riding down Fifth Avenue except for the tune the band was playing. It was God Save the King. And they were treating him like a king, too. All laughing and smiling and yelling and as glad to see him as we were.

We were right about where he would head for first. He came on a beeline for the bar grinning and pushing his way through the half naked bodies like a conquering hero. He was half naked too and so wind-burned he looked like one of them. He walked in his bare feet over the nail and splinter infested jetty as though it were a thick carpet. Some feet. The soles must have been like leather. He looked pretty tired though, I thought. Still had his sea-legs and staggered from side to side. But he had plenty of friends to help him along. Seemed happy as a kid to see them. The Cuban boy who was his mate wasn't with him. He was already in his bunk, asleep. No wonder, after that day-and-night pounding. But it did not seem to have hurt Ernest much, I thought.

Next month:

Round 6: "After the Storm"

He thumbed his nose and headed straight into the storm.