was wrapped in the shack, in Remi’s battles with Lee Ann, and in the middle of the night at the barracks.

Remi was gone off in the dark to get another box. I struggled with him on that old Zorro road. We piled up the groceries a mile high on Lee Ann’s kitchen table. She woke up and rubbed her eyes.

“You know what President Truman said?” She was delighted. I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked. The other cops were getting suspicious of us; they saw it in our eyes; they understood with unfailing instinct what was on our minds. Years of experience had taught them the likes of Remi and me.

In the daytime Remi and I went out with the gun and tried to shoot quail in the hills. Remi sneaked up to within three feet of the clucking birds and let go a blast of the .32. He missed. His tremendous laugh roared over the California woods and over America. “The time has come for you and me to go and see the Banana King.”

It was Saturday; we got all spruced up and went down to the bus station on the crossroads. We rode into San Francisco and strolled through the streets. Remi’s huge laugh resounded everywhere we went. “You must write a story about the Banana King,” he warned me. “Don’t pull any tricks on the old maestro and write about something else. The Banana King is your meat. There stands the Banana King.” The Banana King was an old man selling bananas on the corner. I was completely bored. But Remi kept punching me in the ribs and even dragging me along by the collar. “When you write about the Banana King you write about the human-interest things of life.” I told him I didn’t give a damn about the Banana King. “Until you learn to realize the importance of the Banana King you will know absolutely nothing about the human-interest things of the world,” said Remi emphatically.

There was an old rusty freighter out in the bay that was used as a buoy. Remi was all for rowing out to it, so one afternoon Lee Ann packed a lunch and we hired a boat and went out there. Remi brought some tools. Lee Ann took all her clothes off and lay down to sun herself on the flying bridge. I watched her from the poop. Remi went clear down to the boiler rooms below, where rats scurried around, and began hammering and banging away for copper lining that wasn’t there. I sat in the dilapidated officer’s mess. It was an old, old ship and had been beautifully appointed, with scrollwork in the wood, and built-in seachests. This was the ghost of the San Francisco of Jack London. I dreamed at the sunny mess-board. Rats ran in the pantry. Once upon a time there’d been a blue-eyed sea captain dining in here.

I joined Remi in the bowels below. He yanked at everything loose. “Not a thing. I thought there’d be copper, I thought there’d be at least an old wrench or two. This ship’s been stripped by a bunch of thieves.” It had been standing in the bay for years. The copper had been stolen by a hand that was a hand no more.

I said to Remi, “I’d love to sleep in this old ship some night when the fog comes in and the thing creaks and you hear the big B-0 of the buoys.”

Remi was astounded; his admiration for me doubled. “Sal, I’ll pay you five dollars if you have the nerve to do that. Don’t you realize this thing may be haunted by the ghosts of old sea captains? I’ll not only pay you five, I’ll row you out and pack you a lunch and lend you blankets and candle.”

“Agreed!” I said. Remi ran to tell Lee Ann. I wanted to jump down from a mast and land right in her, but I kept my promise to Remi. I averted my eyes from her.

Meanwhile I began going to Frisco more often; I tried everything in the books to make a girl. I even spent a whole night with a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success. She was a blonde from Minnesota. There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer