Two Bits Each Way

by Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The State of California paid eleven dollars a day for a boat and a pilot, and it paid in advance, which nobody on the Santa Monica pier had ever done before.

Signe Haldorsen took the money at a card table at the foot of the pier, from a clerk with a cash box and a list. The clerk counted it twice. Behind him the sun came off the bay like hammered tin, and the gulls stood on the rail in a row with their eyes half shut, and there were more cops on the planks than there were gulls. Sheriff's men in their tan shirts, city men in blue, men from the Attorney General's office in grey suits that were already sweating through under the arms. It was the first of August, 1939, and it was going to be hot.

"Sign here, Mr. Haldorsen," the clerk said, and looked up, and kept looking up, because she was six foot in her deck shoes. "Oh," he said. "Miss."

"Here?"

"Yes. Miss."

She signed. Two bits each way, the sign on the taxi stand had said for six years: TO THE SHIPS, 25¢. The quarters went into the ships' cages, and the ships paid the pilots by the run, every other Friday, and in six years they had never paid Signe Haldorsen eleven dollars for a day. But the ships were finished, everybody knew they were finished, the newspapers had been saying so since spring, and there was a note on the Ragna at the Ocean Park Savings and Loan that came due on the fifteenth.

She folded the bills into her shirt pocket and buttoned it and went down the ladder to her boat.

---

The Ragna was forty-one feet of Douglas fir on oak, built in San Pedro in 1922 for a man who wanted to fish albacore and drowned doing it, which had been her father. Signe had borrowed against her to put a cabin on her and benches down both sides and a canvas awning over the stern, and painted out the fish hold, and she would carry thirty-four paying passengers in a flat sea and twenty-eight in anything else. She smelled of gasoline and creosote and, in the heat, very faintly still of fish, and no amount of paint had ever got that out.

Ike Pruitt was on the next float down, with the Lucky Lady, wiping his hands on a rag.

"You take it?" he said.

"I took it."

"Lew'll hear."

"Lew's out there," Signe said. "Lew'll see."

Ike spat over the side, thoughtfully, and watched it go. "Sixteen boats, they got. Every boat on the pier but Amador's, and Amador's got a busted shaft."

"Then Lew's going to see sixteen of us," she said, and went forward to look at her bilge.

---

They put eight deputies aboard her and a man from the A.G.'s office with a megaphone, and she took them out in a line of boats with the Fish and Game cutters going ahead, across a sea as flat and blue as a gas flame. The deputies sat on the benches with their hats on their knees. Two of them had shotguns. One of them, a long-necked boy with a sunburned nose, was green before they cleared the breakwater, and she told him to sit on the lee side and look at the horizon and not at the water, and he did, and it didn't help.

Three miles out the ships stood up off the sea.

You saw the Texas first, because she was nearer, an old hull with a dance floor built over her and the paint going on her sides. Beyond her, sitting alone in the glare, the Rex. Even by daylight she looked like money. She had been a sailing ship once, back in the last century, and they had taken her masts out and her guts out and put in chromium and red neon and a casino, a salon, a dining room with white tablecloths, an orchestra; three hundred people worked aboard her and three thousand came out every night to lose to them. She had no engine. She could not have gone anywhere if she wanted. She sat on her anchor chains in the oily swell three miles and a little more from the end of the Santa Monica pier, which was the point, and sunlight came off her portholes in rows.

The Texas gave up without a word. Signe held the Ragna off her landing stage while the deputies went up the ladder, and then for an hour she lay off and watched them throw the casino into the Pacific Ocean.

They came out of the big doors on the upper deck carrying things. A roulette wheel went over the rail flashing gold and spun once in the air and hit flat and sank. A crap table, green felt, legs in the air, floated a while and then filled. Slot machines went over two men to a machine, swung by the arms, and went into the blue water bright as trout and then darker and then gone, and people on the other boats cheered every time, and the deputies on the Texas began to cheer too, and to lean out to see each splash, like boys at a swimming hole. Somebody threw a stack of chips and they spread on the swell, red and white and blue, and floated in a long tail past the Ragna's bow.

The sick boy had come up beside her in the wheelhouse door.

"Gee," he said.

She didn't say anything. She was thinking about the tablecloths. There had been a girl on the Texas who ironed the tablecloths, a Mexican girl named Dolores with burn scars on the backs of her hands, who rode out every afternoon at four on the Ragna and back every morning at five, and always paid in nickels. Signe wondered whether anybody would throw the tablecloths in, and whether Dolores would be standing there to watch them.

---

The Rex was different.

They came at her from the landward side in a line, the cutters first and the taxis behind, and the man from the A.G.'s office stood up on the Ragna's cabin top with his megaphone and read something off a paper in a high clear voice that carried on the water. Nobody on the Rex answered. Her rail was lined with men in white jackets, waiters and cooks and bartenders, standing very still. Up on the boat deck there were others in shirtsleeves, and they were holding something.

"Pull in on her stage," the A.G. man said.

"They've got hoses," Signe said.

"Pull in, please, Miss Haldorsen. That's what we're paying for."

She pulled in.

The first jet hit the cabin top at forty feet and took the A.G. man off it as neatly as you'd brush a fly off a table. He went down into the stern well among the deputies with his megaphone and his paper and a sound like a slapped dog. The second jet came through the wheelhouse windows. Glass went everywhere. The water came in like a wall, cold, green-white, so hard it was not water at all but something solid that hit her across the chest and the face and slammed her back into the bulkhead, and she could not breathe, she could not see. She found the wheel with both hands by feel. She found the throttle. She put the Ragna full astern and hard over and held her there blind, with the sea coming in on her through the windows and running out round her ankles, and she felt the old boat shudder and dig and swing, and then the weight of it was off her face and she could see.

The sick boy was on the floor of the wheelhouse holding his shotgun out of the wet as if it were a baby. The A.G. man was sitting in the stern well with his hat gone. The Rex was a hundred yards off and the hoses had gone quiet, the water dribbling out of the nozzles and falling down her black side in two long silver threads.

Somebody up on her rail shouted something. It carried well on the water.

"Pirates!"

Signe wiped her face with her wet sleeve, and spat salt, and throttled back to idle. There was a cut on her cheekbone; she felt it sting. Her shirt pocket was soaked through. She opened it and looked at the State's eleven dollars, a wet green wad, and buttoned it shut again.

"Miss Haldorsen," the A.G. man said. He had got up. He had a long scrape across his forehead. "I believe we'll stand off a while."

"I believe we will," Signe said.

---

They stood off all afternoon. The sun went over and the swell came up a little in the evening, the way it does, and the Rex sat in the middle of a ring of boats with her lights coming on, row on row, as if it were any night and the taxis would be running. Music came across the water. They had the orchestra playing. Signe could hear the trumpet, very thin, doing "Moonlight Serenade."

There were six hundred people aboard her. That was the trouble. Six hundred customers who had come out for a night's play and were not going home, and some of them were husbands of somebody, and somebody was going to call the newspapers. A little after ten the cutter came round with word, shouted across: the passengers were coming off. A deal had been made. The taxis would take them in. No arrests.

The Ragna went alongside the Rex's stage at a quarter to eleven, with the hoses quiet and the men in the white jackets watching.

They came down the ladder in their good clothes. Men in dinner jackets with their ties undone and their faces grey; a woman in a long silver gown, carrying her shoes; two sailors off a destroyer at San Pedro, very drunk and very cheerful; a fat man who stopped on the stage and said to Signe, confidentially, "I was eighty dollars ahead." She counted them aboard. Twenty-eight. The woman in the silver gown had nowhere to put her shoes and Signe took them and set them on the chart shelf.

Lew Garrity was at the head of the ladder, with a flashlight.

He was the taxi master. He had been the taxi master on the Rex since she came, and on the ships before her, and before that he had run rum in a Liberty engine boat out of Redondo for men whose names he never said. He was sixty-something, small and dry and bowlegged, with a face like an old saddle, and in 1933 when Signe Haldorsen was twenty-one and too big for everything and had a dead father's boat and nobody on the waterfront who would let a girl run it for hire, Lew Garrity had stood on the Ragna's deck for one minute and looked at the way she had tied up, and said, You'll start Thursday. Six years.

He came down three rungs, so they were eye to eye.

"State boat," he said.

"State boat."

"How much?"

"Eleven a day."

Lew nodded slowly, as though she'd told him the price of fish. He looked at the broken wheelhouse windows, and at the cut on her face, and he looked a little longer at that.

"Smart of you," he said.

"I didn't think so."

"No. It was smart." He shone the light down on the water between the stage and the hull, black and slopping. "You want to make two bits tonight, Signe? Two bits, the old rate."

"Lew—"

"Starboard quarter. Two o'clock, about. No lights. Line comes down off the fantail." He clicked the flashlight off. "Or you don't. Up to you. You're on the State's dime."

"What's on the line?"

He was already going back up the ladder, slow, an old man's knees.

"Nothing that'll sink you," he said.

---

She landed her twenty-eight at the pier at half past eleven and the newspapermen were waiting under the lights, a solid crowd of them with their cameras, and the flashbulbs went off in the faces of the men in dinner jackets like gunfire. The woman in the silver gown went up the ladder barefoot. Signe found her shoes on the chart shelf an hour later and set them on the float, side by side, where somebody might see them.

The A.G. man came down to the float at one, with a sticking plaster on his forehead.

"We'll want the boats on station in the morning," he said. "Seven o'clock. There'll be a picket overnight; the cutters can manage that." He looked at the wheelhouse. "The State will pay for the glass, naturally."

"Naturally."

"You handled her very well. This afternoon." He seemed to want to say something else and not know how. "I'll mention it."

"Mention the glass," Signe said.

When he was gone she sat in the stern well a long time with her elbows on her knees. The fog was coming in. It always came in, these August nights, along about one: a grey wall that came up off the water with no sound at all and walked in over the breakwater and took the pier lights one by one. Out on the bay the Rex's lights went soft and then went out, all at once, as if somebody had pulled a switch, though nobody had.

She thought about the bank. She thought about the eleven dollars, dried now, flat and stiff in her pocket. She thought about the man in the grey suit saying I'll mention it.

At twenty to two she cast off.

---

There is a way of running a boat in fog without lights. You go slow. You keep the engine low, so the exhaust only mutters. You steer by compass and by the clock, and you listen, because the fog takes your eyes away and gives you your ears back sharper. She heard a bell buoy off to port, the slow, drunken clank of it. She heard a cutter somewhere ahead, its engine idling, and voices on it, talking about baseball, so clear and close that she throttled right down and drifted with her heart in her throat until they faded. The fog was cold and wet and it smelled of kelp and of the oil on the water. It beaded on her face and her eyebrows and dripped off the awning.

She came on the Rex by her smell first: cooking grease and cigar smoke and wet canvas, a big warm human stink sitting out on the sea. Then the sound of her, a creak of chain. Then a black shape over her head, bigger than the night, going up and up.

She brought the Ragna under the fantail and put a hand on the hull. It was sweating, cold. She knocked twice with her knuckles.

A line came down out of the fog and touched her shoulder.

There was a canvas bank sack on the end of it, the kind with a brass padlock, heavy, the size of a loaf of bread. She took the weight of it and unhooked it, and gave the line two tugs, and it went back up into the fog. Nobody said anything. Then a voice did, from up there, low.

"Two bits."

"You owe me," Signe said.

"I always did." A pause. "Go on, kid."

She went.

---

She was halfway in when the searchlight found her.

It came out of the fog off the starboard bow like a blow, a white solid bar of light with the fog boiling in it, and swung, and came back, and stopped on her. She could see nothing. A voice behind it, through a megaphone: Boat ahoy. Heave to. State of California.

The Ragna had a Kermath gasoline engine her father had put in the year before he drowned, and it would give her eleven knots when it was in a good mood, and the cutters made fourteen. That was simple arithmetic. She knew it. She knew too that a cutter will not run hard into fog at night near a breakwater it can't see, and that she had run in past that breakwater in fog five hundred times, and that the pier's pilings were exactly four hundred and twenty feet from the end of the rocks, and the water between them was nine feet at low tide, and it was not low tide.

She put the throttle down.

The old boat stood up on her tail and went. The searchlight lost her, swung, found her again, lost her. The megaphone said something she didn't hear. She ran on the clock, counting. Three minutes. The swell changed under her, shortening, getting steep, and that was the breakwater, and she put the helm over without seeing anything, by the feel of the water on the hull, and the rocks went by to port so near she heard the surge sucking in them, and then she was in the flat, and she throttled right down and slid in under the pier among the pilings in the dark, where the barnacles were and the slow drip, and the planks overhead, and the smell of tar.

She shut the engine off.

Somewhere out past the breakwater the searchlight went back and forth over the fog for a while, very patient, like a man looking for his keys. Then it went away.

---

She opened the sack at the chart table with a hacksaw blade on the padlock, by a flashlight held in her teeth.

She had known it was money. She had thought—she didn't know what she'd thought. The night's take. The cage. Cornero's getaway stake. She had thought about what she would say if it was that, and what she would do, and she had not got far.

It was envelopes. Plain brown pay envelopes, the little kind, a stack of them with a rubber band round, and each one had a name on it in Lew's square hand, and a figure. Pruitt — 2 wks — $38.00. Amador — 2 wks — $31.50. Kolb. Esparza. Dutch Fenn. Sixteen of them. Seventeen. Every taxi man on the pier. The two weeks since the last payday, which nobody had been paid, which would have been in the Rex's safe when the State came aboard her, and gone into evidence, and stayed there until the lawyers were done, which would be never.

Hers was at the bottom. Haldorsen — 2 wks — $41.00.

Under the figure, in pencil, smaller:

+ 60. For the note. L.

She sat there a while with it in her hand. The Ragna moved under her a little on the swell coming in under the pier, and the pilings creaked, and water dripped on the deck from the planks above, one slow drop, then another.

Then she put the envelopes back in the sack, all of them, hers on the bottom where it had been, and stowed the sack in the old fish hold under the boards, and lay down on the bench under the awning in her wet clothes, and slept.

---

At first light she was up on the float with a bucket, washing the glass out of the wheelhouse. The fog was burning off. Out on the bay the Rex had come back with the sun on her, sitting in her ring of boats, white and gold, hoses coiled on her boat deck like sleeping snakes. You could hear the orchestra. They were playing for nobody, or for the cutters, or for themselves.

Ike Pruitt came down the ladder at half past six with a cup of coffee in each hand. He gave her one.

"Hear something went through the picket last night," he said. "Fog."

"That so."

"That's what they say."

She drank the coffee. Then she put the cup down on the float and went into the fish hold and came out with an envelope, and gave it to him.

Ike looked at the name on it. He looked at it a long time. Then he folded it once and put it inside his shirt, and picked up his coffee, and looked out at the Rex.

"Son of a bitch," he said softly.

They were coming down the pier by then, all of them, the taxi men, to be on station at seven for the State of California, and she stood at the head of the float with the sack and gave them out one at a time as they came, the way Lew always had on Fridays, and nobody said anything much. Amador. Kolb. Esparza. Dutch Fenn, who cried, and was ashamed, and went off down the float with his back to them. When they were gone there was one envelope left in the sack.

She did not open it. She put it in her shirt pocket on top of the State's eleven dollars and buttoned it shut.

At five to seven the A.G. man came down the ladder with his plaster on his forehead and a fresh shirt.

"Miss Haldorsen," he said. "Good morning. We'll be taking up station off the Rex's landward side."

"I know where she is," Signe said, and started the engine.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Leighā Brackett per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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