The Ordinary Seaman (15 page)

He walks all the way back to the makeshift toolshed between the smokestack and the engine room pit aft, roughly hammered pine walls and door and a corrugated polyurethane roof; inside it’s pitch dark. Standing unsteadily on coils of rope and chain and winch cable and bundled tarps, he gropes along the loose shelves.

A paint scraper. A knife for splicing wire. A short, heavy mar-linespike. He puts the knife in one pocket, the spike in another.

Walking back he sees Cabezón across the deck at the rail, pissing soundlessly over the side. No jodas, he wants to get going; maybe he can sneak past before Cabezón sees him, but Cabezón turns his big head and looks at him over his shoulder. “Qué onda?”

“Pues, nada.”

Cabezón is already zipping up. All their pisses are this brief. Their bladders are turning to rust. Esteban always finds himself pushing and pushing, trying to get a little more out, yet he feels a swollen itch to piss all day long. Sometimes he dreams that he’s urinating as abundantly as an elephant.

Cabezón’s head looks necklessly propped in the collar of his grease-stained sweatshirt like a fortune-teller’s big crystal ball, magnified, hair-fringed face sleepily and convexly peering out. Esteban slides his hands into his pockets to hide the tools as Cabezón crosses the deck towards him and then leans on the rail with folded arms.

“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the other night,” says Cabezón, sounding almost drunk.

What had they talked about?

“You were right, vos. I’m going to buy the pink horse.”

“Ajá,” says Esteban. He’s never heard of any pink horse. Delirium. Or else Cabezón must be sleepwalking, dreaming about a pink horse. Is this the perfect final conversation to be having on a phantom ship or what?

“That’ll be the good part of being paid all at once, no? When I get back, I’m going to buy the pink horse, just like that.”

“What are you going to name it?” asks Esteban, fascinated despite his impatience; he’s never conversed with a sleepwalker before.

“The Pink Horse.” Cabezón shrugs. “It’s a good name. Like I told you, Natalia’s mother’s cousin owns it. But he’s moving to Roatán. Said he’d sell it to me cheap and give me plenty of time to pay. Natalia and I can live in the back and run it together and I can still work as a mechanic in the day. Pues, why not?”

“It’s a cantina or something?”

Cabezón looks at Esteban a moment and, keeping a straight face, says, “What are you talking about? It’s a pink horse. You’ve never seen one?”

Esteban waits by the rail awhile after Cabezón has plodded chuckling off to his cabin. Then he walks swiftly back to the foredeck, steps over the rail, and hangs on in a crouch, looking down between his legs at the rope emerging from the mooring pipe and the black water underneath and in one motion pushes off and grabs the rope to his chest as he falls and wraps his legs around it, finding a center of balance after a few scary lurches. He slowly shimmies backwards down the mooring line, descending the wall of the hull, pausing several times to shove restless tools back down into his pockets. At the end he turns himself around to pull himself up onto the pier.

He stands looking up at the ship, lungs and hands tingling, trying to picture himself still up there, lying awake in his cabin near the viejo as he has night after night. If he climbs back up, will everything stay the same? It will be like cutting a person out of a group picture in a newspaper, one you can take out or put back in whenever you want.

Now what? The whole unknown city. The pale gold skyscrapers on the horizon. What if by this time tomorrow I already have a job? Can I go looking for a job dressed like this? Where will I sleep? In that park with the horses that’s always in the movies. I’ll find the United Nations, and then the Nicaraguans there, tell them I fought in a BLI and ask them for clothes. But will they think I’ve done something wrong? Send me back?

A white slice of moon hangs over the breakwater forming the harbor side of the cove. In between, sequined wavelets ride the current, licking pilings. Someone else might come out on deck. He walks swiftly
off the pier and around the grain elevator and into the lot behind, and hesitates there as if at a confusing crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Pues, he can go anywhere now. What will they say in the morning, when they see he’s gone, and the ladder still up?

But instead of into Brooklyn, his footsteps pull him towards the ocean. It isn’t fear, more like a self-protective yearning leading him this way. He doesn’t want to lose what he feels in himself right now, wants to get to know it instead of taking the chance of squandering or ruining it in some disastrous adventure he hasn’t thought through.

The immense old terminal of mouse gray wood, shaped like an airplane hangar, stands on a stretch of beach and tumbled pilings and rubble, between the road and a field of high weeds. He crosses the field, a fried landscape of dry stalks and brittle, silvery leaves, towards the terminal, hears the faint tinkling of buoy bells out in the harbor night. A brambly tumbleweed suddenly lifts across his path like the ghost of a porcupine. Inside, the terminal feels as spacious and empty as a gutted cathedral with a floor made of sand, a dizzying sensation of airy pitch darkness soaring up all around. He hears the beatings of invisible wings and cooing high above, looks up through the dark at the muted glow of night sky through tatters in the roof. And he sits down right in the cool sand; it’s as if a flood tide had carried the sand inside and, receding, left it smoothly and evenly distributed over the terminal floor. The solitude, this sudden fact of himself, of being Esteban Gaitán and all that he’s lived through and kept pent up inside for so many months, he could almost weep from this bewilderment and wild mix of emotion he suddenly feels. He stares straight ahead like some campfire-stunned jungle animal at the edge of a clearing, through the terminal’s immense pier gates at night sky over the blackened harbor. He lies back in the sand. It was raining softly in Quilalí the first time he saw her—she and her sister, waiting outside the church door in the rain-misted glow from the light inside, she sitting on the steps facing him and her sister standing at the edge of the doorway watching the yanqui padre with the unpronounceable last name finishing up the evening mass. Across the street, in an adobe-walled poolroom lit by a single weak bulb, men in white
cowboy hats leaned over their cue sticks. An old man on a white horse with long, rickety legs lightly cantering down the dirt street and on into the dark leading out of town. Esteban and his friend Arturo were in uniform, AKs slung over their shoulders. Their BLI had spent the last three weeks moving through the mountains in a triangle between there and Wiwili and the Río Coco, mostly in coordinated pursuit of a contra column finally caught in a pincer, driven back across the border; his and another company were now bivouacked just outside the town, waiting for the battalion to re-form. He and Arturo weren’t really looking for girls when they decided to take a walk into town, though of course they’d said they were. Quilalí was unlikely to offer much but awkward campesinas who wouldn’t even be fun to talk to after the first few minutes, and though militarily secure, it was supposed to be full of contra sympathizers anyway. But then they saw the girls in green fatigues in front of the church, and the one sitting on the steps looked up as they approached, long, black hair falling around her shoulders, and her luminously large eyes saw right into him with the swift, soft tumble of a twirled open lock, seemed to reach in and lay invisible, soft hands around his heart. At first he thought she looked owlish, but then he realized she was beautiful, her soft, round face was beautiful, so melancholy and serious, and she met his gaze as if she knew him and wasn’t at all surprised to see him. The other compita, curly and short haired, lighter skinned, hand propped on one hip, buttocks swelling her fatigues, turned and looked at them over her shoulder. He looked at the first one again. What was she doing here? He asked her that.

“Waiting to talk to the padre,” she said.

“Why?” He didn’t have any special reason for asking, just couldn’t think of anything else to say. He noticed that there was a piece of thread tied around her little finger, and that the thread led up to the unbuttoned opening in her shirt and disappeared into the triangle of softly swelling skin inside.

She looked at the other girl, and then back at him, and shrugged. “We have to talk to him,” she said.

Arturo butted in. “Who are you with?”

“BON Seventy-seven-Sixty-five,” answered the other girl.

“What’s that?” asked Arturo.

“It’s a Batallón Voluntario Juventud Sandinista from León,” she said. “We’re from León.”

“I didn’t think they still had those,” said Arturo.

“They do.”

Esteban’s girl—she was already his girl—cupped a hand over her shirt between her breasts, and looked down at her hand.

“What do you do? Coffee harvesting? Medical work?” asked Arturo.

“No, we’ve been in the mountains,” said the short-haired girl.

“Going after la contra?” Arturo said it as if that couldn’t be what they’d been doing.

“Sí. Pues… To tell you the truth, they’ve been going after us. It’s been more like that.”

“They let women fight?”

“Sí. Bueno, except for us, it’s all compañeros.”

“I’m Arturo, this is Esteban. We’re with a BLI.”

And the girl standing said, “I’m Amalia, and that’s Marta. We’re sisters.”

They sure seemed serious. Well, joining a volunteer battalion, what did he expect?

“What’s that thread, Marta?” asked Esteban. He wanted her to lift her eyes and look at him again.

But she only seemed to peer even more intently down at her shirtfront, just her nose protruding from the waterfall of hair over her face. Her hands nudged something up from inside her shirt, cupping over the open collar, and then she was holding a small squirrel, thread fastened around a rear leg. The squirrel had silky, red fur and crouched tremblingly in her palms, then wrestled itself around so that its tail was raised towards Esteban. She held the squirrel out to him, and he stepped forward and bent down and cupped his hands over hers and took the animal into his, her tied finger crooked as she lifted her hand a little, following the thread.

“Qué tal,” said Esteban to the squirrel, feeling his voice quaver as if he felt exactly the same way the squirrel seemed to. He asked her where she’d found it.

“In the mountains,” she said.

“Did you kill many contra?” asked Arturo.

“No. Not one, to tell you the truth,” said Marta after a moment, her eyes on Esteban’s hands, her hand still raised as if offering it as a perch to a flying bird.

“But they killed … well, they killed a great many of us,” said Amalia, her voice rising. “The day before yesterday they killed the compa leading us. We’re here waiting for a new officer, supposedly.”

Esteban, lying on his back, watches the sky slowly lightening through the tattered terminal roof. He’s been listening to their cooing all night but now he can see mourning doves perched like mauve bowling pins on the rafters under the ruined ceiling. Now and then one of the doves flies into the graying air, wings beating, circling under the roof before landing on another rafter.

He kissed her for the first time that night, hours after the sisters went in and talked to the padre while he and Arturo waited outside. He held her tightly against him while she sobbed against his chest, soaking his shirt with salty tears and drool, the squirrel back inside her shirt, tucked between her breasts. By the end of that week everyone in the battalion was calling him Ardilla, for that squirrel.

“Three nights in a row,” she said. “We set pickets out on the perimeter of our camp. And found them in the morning with their throats slit, all stabbed up, mutilated. The third night they got Beto. Amalia and I had known Beto since,
ufff
—before primary school. He’d made the decision to join up with us. And when he was told it was his turn to stand guard, he cried, he knew. But he did it. They scooped out his eyes, as if with spoons. They have this instrument, Esteban, it’s as if they can light up the jungle at night, see through trees. But they’d just shout insults and threats at us, say things about us so that we’d know they could see us, shoot off a few rounds …”

“Vos, they don’t try that mierda with us,” he said finally. “Their toys. They run from us. We chase
them.”

“They could have finished us off,” she said. “All of us. But they didn’t. Instead they just followed us around. They were playing with us.
We
were their toy.”

Later she told him that if their officer had insisted on posting guards the fourth night they were prepared to kill him themselves if they had to. But then that very day, out of nowhere, a bullet had smashed through jungle, splintering branches and leaves, and killed him, taken away a piece of his head. And they’d left him there, hiked out to a road, and walked all the way to Quilalí.

When Marta and Amalia’s new commanding officer arrived in Quilalí a few days later, he put a hand-lettered cardboard sign up over the door of their temporary quarters in some old stables:
THE GREATEST VICTORY IS THE BATTLE WE AVOID HAVING TO FIGHT
. No training can prepare you for death, though war does that almost better than it does anything else, until finally you realize you have a good enough chance to get through it alive and your body turns into terror and joy. After his battalion left Quilalí a week later, he thought about that little cardboard sign every day, fervently trusting in la Marta’s new officer, formerly a mailman and militia leader from León, to keep his cautious or noble or whatever they fucking were words.

After a while he gets up and walks towards the wide pier gates at the front of the terminal and sits down on the cracked timber frame, looking at the double row of blackened, barnacle-coated pier stumps extending into the pink-tinged expanse of flowing, rough, gray water. He can see the whole statue now, standing on her own island. Close to shore the water is almost the same shade of green as the statue, and sudsy-foamy, the bank a piled rubble of stone, driftwood, broken pier debris, litter, a length of rotted yellow mooring line winding through it all like a giant princess’s braid. The ringing buoys, lights glowing palely in the dawn, run in a diminishing line across the harbor. Two long barges cut slowly, in opposite directions, across the buoys. The skyscrapers
immensely walling one end of the harbor. A tugboat passes so close he can hear the loud chugging of its engines and the water parting around it and see a man at the wheel behind greasy glass. He watches it plowing towards the long bridge at the other end of the harbor. Out there, just beyond the bridge, waits a huge ship with an orange-and-black hull, a tanker probably. Gulls swooping and skimming the water with their grinning cartoon-villain faces, wings out as if wired to coat hangers.