The Ordinary Seaman (19 page)
He leaves the cabin and walks out on deck, sits on the crate again, though he is finished with the rice. His shoulder still aches, the back of his shirt drenched with cold sweat. How can it be? What sign is this? His hands are trembling as if from palsy. And after a while his fright feels mixed with a sensation of muted joy, almost of relief, because why, after fifty-one years, would a restless soul come to him again, now, to provide this proof that there is something after this life on earth after all?
What a day this has been, viejo lobo. He won’t tell anybody about this, not even Esteban; they’ll think his brain has finally flown off like a bird. He should set some food out for Desastres, but what? How do you set out a plate of live cockroaches? He’ll leave an empty sardine can out later, in a corner of the mess, maybe Desastres will come and lick out the oil before the rats do. But why didn’t I think to say, Siéntate, Desastres?
For the next ten days, with the same commingling of eerie joy and dull dread that makes everything seem like a portent during these last, crisp days of limpid October light and yellowing leaves and frosty mornings and mountaintop nights, he won’t be able to rid himself of the otherworldly sensation the shock seems to have let inside him. He won’t see Desastres’s ghost again, but he’ll feel the cat’s presence, will be certain he can smell cat urine in random corners of the ship, though no others will mention that they smell it too.
I
N ANOTHER SIX WEEKS, IN DECEMBER, AFTER A NIGHT OF FREEZING RAIN
, the Ship Visitor will find them. He’ll board a ship whose name and port of registration will have recently been painted off the prow and stern. As a ship visitor he boards some twenty or thirty ships a week, will have been doing so for almost two years, he knows how to size a situation up right off. He’ll have seen abandoned crews and ships before, but this will be the first time he’ll be struck by the image of a rusted old freighter whose sole cargo is dead autumn leaves. Beyond the enclosed basin where the ship is berthed stand trees that will have been stripped of leaves by the night’s storm, and looking up, he’ll see a few still tumbling against the overcast sky. Just like in
The Birds,
he’ll think, those last ominous birds still up there in the sky. He’ll see wet, brown leaves snared in the conning tower and pressed flat to the bridge windows; clinging to stays and shrouds running from the masts as if caught and shriveled by high-voltage jolts in the galvanized wire. He’ll see ice-stiffened wads of leaves amidst haphazardly massed garbage and litter in every windward nook and cranny of the deck; leaves scattered over the flooded and icing bottom of an open hold, and, looking down through an uncovered hatch aft into the deep pit of the engine room, leaves over and around the machinery and boilers; blown into the abandoned cabins. Here and there, inside shiny, slightly indented spots on deck where grinding tools have demolished rust, a flattened leaf inside a shadow-thin puddle of ice. Be nice to bring one home to her, he’ll think, a leaf inside a slice of frozen puddle, hold it out to her in a gloved hand like some rare jewel, let her lick it, lay it on her brightly bare, arched belly and watch it melt until just the tawny, wet leaf is there like the shadow of a small hand on her glistening skin … He’ll not so much will her from his thoughts—because he can’t—as snap her off like a piece of candy or dry stick.
“Oyen, ustedes.” Look at them, the poor fucks.
But look at them.
“Cuanto tiempo llevan aquí?”
“How long? Six months!” he’ll nearly shout. And he’ll stare out at the bombed-looking cove opening onto a channel streaming out into Gowanus Bay …
The crew members who’ll have lowered the ladder and then met him up on deck, after the Ship Visitor called up from the pier, will strike him, on first impression, as strangely incurious, or maybe just shy, or totally lost in benumbed stupors. Smoky smelling, black-smudged khaki blankets tugged around their shoulders for warmth over torn and stained clothing, and for all the boyishness of their faces, grimy and unshaven, with soft little beards. A few hard-eyed stares, others vacant, dazed. Almost mutely they’ll follow the Ship Visitor as he strides the ripped up deck, inspecting as a ship visitor must while futilely bantering away in banal Spanish, the situation already explicit, appalling. Central Americans. Young. Practically boys! Just a bunch of filthy, fate-stunned boys! They won’t smile, won’t laugh at anything he says. And they’ll seem to be losing their footing, almost falling down, with every step they take on the ice-sheened, dangerously ripped apart deck, not even the calcareous ridges of frozen gull droppings everywhere providing traction. Torn, colorless sneakers, a few cheap work boots, ragged loafers with thin, hard soles. Almost obstinately, humorlessly, no bemused or even embarrassed smiles, they’ll be slipping and sliding all over the place as if in some show of belated or purposeless pride they refuse to adjust their manner of walking for ice, twisting their feet sideways like skaters into chocks.
He’ll find the rest of the crew still sleeping or lying awake in hunched postures under blankets on the floor of the rust- and smoke-darkened mess, skin showing through rips in blackened socks.
All of them kids, except for one, a middle-aged guy—not really elderly, like that Argentine lady will have said. A Sagittarius, she’ll have said. Sixty-eight years old, she even knew his birthday. Well, she’s a nut anyway. With her wacky, stilted English: My good man, some weeks
ago my husband and I happened upon a most peculiar ship, and a most distraught elderly man was down on the pier …
Christ, six months! And if it hadn’t for the nutty Argentine—“Good thing she found you, huh?” he’ll say to the older guy, the one just introduced to him as the cook.
But the cook and the others gathered around will gape blankly, and finally the cook will narrow his eyes and grunt, “Quién?”
“Tu sabes, the Argentine señora, the one who—an Argentine woman who met you down on the pier?”
And everyone will keep looking at him like that, and some will shake their heads no.
“She said she met a man, an older man, doing laundry on the pier.”
And suddenly one of the kids will smile, displaying a gold tooth over a gap of missing teeth.
“Bernardo,” he’ll say. “Sí pues. Bernardo. No. Ya no está.”
“He’s gone?”
“Sí pues. He was taken to the hospital, and that’s the last we saw of him.”
“The last you saw of him?”
“Se fue, pues. Pa’ Nicaragua. El Capitán sent him home, right from the hospital. And that’s the last we saw of him.”
“He was lucky, no?” another kid will say, shrugging hulking shoulders. “He got to go home, sí pues.”
Later that morning the Ship Visitor will drive his van off the pier again and into Brooklyn to do some quick shopping for the crew: food, heavy-duty plastic sheeting to put over the open mess portholes and doorway, and six packages of tube socks. And then he’ll spend the rest of day onboard, listening, huddled with them in the frigid mess and then around a small wood fire on deck until the daylong wintry dusk finally begins to darken to night. He’ll politely decline their offer to stay for dinner. And then the gold-toothed kid will make a ceremonious little
speech, thanking him, “our estimable new friend,” for the pork chops and peas and Coca-Colas and plastic sheeting and socks. And all but a few of the crew will stand and look at the Ship Visitor with solemn expressions, briefly but intensely applauding. The Ship Visitor will have been spending his days, five days a week, amidst men and boys almost always more or less like these—if hardly ever as fucked over: men and boys, also women and girls, from the poor continents, on the move, crewing ships that sail all the world’s oceans and seas and that occasionally stop at this great port, where he has a job visiting ships. But he’ll still feel touched and surprised, a little disturbed, by the earnest solemnity of that round of applause.
And then he’ll drive his van off the pier and through the marine terminal yard, headed out of Brooklyn and through the tunnel under the river to the Seafarers’ Institute in Port Elizabeth, thinking, It really is much easier to get away with hiding a ship out here than over on our side. The newer New Jersey container terminals and tank farms are thriving. But the Brooklyn waterfront’s hundred-year-old wastes, its massive brick ruins and miles of collapsed piers and rust-devoured train tracks going nowhere and rank barge canals just don’t look remote enough from present-day energies to be so abandoned and empty now. Hard to believe nothing more apocalyptic than just time has happened here.
It will have been a long day, like most days. The day before yesterday it will have been the suicidal Filipina cruise-liner laundress threatening to guzzle a bottle of Clorox, hysterically repeating over and over that she has a high school degree, that she’s a singer, that she’d been hired as a shipboard
entertainer
and then they put her in the laundry! Some kind of sexual harassment apparently going on too. Of course the cruise liner will have been sailing to the Caribbean that very evening, usual story. No time to be of real help, to do much of anything but coax the bottle of Clorox away and calm her a little, then go back to the office and log it. Phone ahead in the next few days to the port chaplaincy or seamen’s center in the liner’s next port of call to ask them to look in
on her, if they can. Hope she didn’t just take a nighttime dive off the deck—happens, and no one ever knows or cares. Anonymous as mice.
Not bad work if you can get it, being a ship visitor. Well, this might be different. These muchachos are here for a while. Maybe there’ll be time to do
something.
He’ll take some of them in to see a lawyer tomorrow, get the process going to take out a lien on the ship for unpaid wages. See where it leads, hope for the improbable best…
At the Seafarers’ Institute, amidst silent offices—everyone but the night service staff having already gone home and Reverend Bazan out to the inexpensive little Uruguayan-Italian restaurant nearby, treating five homesick seafarers from the Maldives to dinner—he’ll phone Reverend Roundtree at home, leaving a message on her answering machine, and then log a brief report into the computer. On the Seafarers’ Institute’s ground floor there’s a cocktail lounge for seafarers—there’s a chapel too, and in the basement, a cafeteria, and on the second floor, a gym and a TV-VCR room and a small library and a dozen dorm rooms, and up another flight, the offices—and after pausing in the cocktail lounge for his Absolut martini on the rocks, he’ll ride the PATH train from New Jersey to Manhattan and take a subway uptown to the university, to Ariadne’s apartment. (The Ship Visitor has an apartment in Brooklyn, but she doesn’t like it there, finds it, logically enough, inconvenient.) Well, I’ve sure as hell got a story for her tonight anyway, the Ship Visitor will think. And he’ll feel glad about that, arranging himself on his long evening journey home to Ariadne around his anticipation and relief of having a story to bring her (if not an ice-encased leaf).
But when he finally gets there, he’ll let himself into her little apartment in the sky and find her not home. A note on the living room’s only chair, asking him to meet her “F.a.c.c.o.p.”—Fast as can, custom of the port—in a certain bar downtown, though no later than 11:30. Ariadne will lately have developed a thing for shipping terms. Christ, he’s exhausted. He’ll sit in the chair facing the night-sheened glass of the sliding glass doors at the small living room’s front, staring through at the glowing white rail of the little balcony out there. By day these glass doors
provide an unobstructed view of the Hudson River, the cliffs of New Jersey, the George Washington Bridge to the north. Ariadne’s apartment, which she won in the university housing lottery, is on the penthouse floor of an eighteen-story graduate-student dormitory. Here the thirty-five-year-old Ship Visitor will have been living since August with his love, thirteen years younger than he (at the edge of the very campus where visiting professor Kate Puerifoy, this past term, has been conducting her twice-a-week course in postmodern conceptual photography and theory, The Eye That Doesn’t See, though she’s recently given birth to a baby boy, just in time for the long winter break. The Ship Visitor won’t know that or have any reason to know. Though today one of the Central American seafarers will have mentioned that their capitán’s wife “es una profesora y una artista, así dijo el Capitán, pues,” a bit of information that would have seemed totally unremarkable had the ship been in less scandalous shape. Instead the Ship Visitor will have skeptically asked the gold-toothed Central American to tell him what else he knows. She and el Capitán just had a baby, Gold Tooth will have replied. No, has never come out to see her husband’s ship. And will have had nothing else to add.)
Hard December winds will be buffeting the glass. Nightly these winds off the river thrash and howl around the exposed building while he and Ariadne grip each other under the white quilt in the bedroom, which is barely larger than the bed. Movie winds, she calls them. Making the world sound ominous and lonely, helping to turn a familiar tight embrace into something that feels both cozier and like a solemnly accepted fate. Winter is going to be good for love in an apartment like this. The polluted sunsets across the river will fill the glass wall even more lividly, in starker contrast to the wintry landscape underneath. He’ll imagine billowy gray skies and purplish winter twilight, lamps coming on in the park below; a wall of wind-whipped snow. If there’s a blizzard, they’ll pull ships in from the harbor and anchor them in a long line up the river. And if the river freezes, the ships will be stuck there for a while, and maybe Ariadne will get to watch him through the glass
doors on a polar expedition of mercy, making his way to a ship aboard a Coast Guard ice cutter.
Poor kids, he’ll think, must be hell out on that ship tonight. But they have their fires, and plenty of firewood around, they won’t freeze to death; and they seem to have been getting their hands on a bit of food. Not much even the Coast Guard can do unless conditions onboard are immediately life threatening. Probably just be bringing them warm clothing, blankets, more food, as usual, until it all gets legally resolved, hope it doesn’t drag on too long. The most humane thing to do, of course, would be to take them off the ship and fly them home, let them wait there for whatever a court action might bring. A couple of times in the past that’s what the reverends have pushed for, but the Seafarers’ Institute’s very secular and conservative board has refused to set a precedent by shelling out the money. Having just struck a match, the Ship Visitor will suddenly yawn, pulling the cigarette away from his mouth, yawn for so long and so deeply the burning match singes his fingers—“Ouch!”