The Ordinary Seaman (22 page)

The other young man, who’ll turn out to be a Swiss investment banker with a Ph.D. in German literature, will suddenly get up and do a handstand, one hand on each armrest, over the mermaid, who’ll smile and kiss him while he’s upside down like that, one hand on each of his cheeks.

“… Fast as can, custom of the port,” the Ship Visitor will find himself explaining, having hit upon without even really trying to a certain gruff and drawling intonation that isn’t really his, in response to this unprecedented interrogation from Ariadne’s friends about the nature of his work, which will have been going on for quite some time already, prompted by his observations on how the sudden breakup of the East Bloc was affecting ships from those countries …

“F.a.c.c.o.p.,” Ariadne will interject, anxiously leaning forward, hands on knees, slightly chewing her lower lip.

“Ships just don’t stay in port as long as they used to, it’s too expensive, and with containerization, roll on and roll off and everything else, they don’t have to. It used to take days to unload and load a ship, but now they’re in and out in less than twelve hours if they can be. So there’s not so much of that old kind of port life, not in a big, modern port like we have here. The people who crew ships now, apart from the captains, some of the deck officers, just don’t get to go ashore nearly as much as they used to. It’s a drearier life for them now. Cooped up on their ships.”

And then the Swiss investment banker will remark on Plato’s dislike of sailors and the sea: A bitter and briny neighbor, he’ll say, quoting Plato, breeding shifty and distrustful souls, the hucksters, usurers, rip-off merchants of ports, and so on. (Will make a mental note to tell Reverend Roundtree about Plato.) And then that Roberto will say, “But
there’s still a great deal of truth to that, isn’t there? Aren’t ports especially home to the criminal element?”

“Sure, there’s crime,” he’ll answer. “Contraband. Drug smuggling. All kinds of fraud. Also a new kind of pirate, truck hijackers. Containers get loaded onto trucks, and they drive out of the port and bang, sometimes within minutes, they get hit. A lot of the stuff you see getting sold on the streets of New York? Comes from stolen containers—”

“No, no, I don’t arrest anybody,” he’ll answer again. “I guess I mainly deal with crimes, if you want to call them that, against seafarers. People working on ships have so few laws protecting them, really. Every flag has its own laws. Every port has its own laws. And there’s no really strong or consistent or enforceable set of international maritime labor laws. Middle of winter, you’ll get a ship in with a Bangladeshi crew, ice and slush all over the deck, and they’ll be going around in just sandals—”

“Johnny brings them shoes and socks,” Ariadne will interrupt, glumly. “And sweaters.”

And he’ll answer, “No, I wouldn’t call it charity work, though, sure, that’s a part of what we do. Interceding, negotiating, mediating, I do a lot of that. Trying to figure out what’s going on between, say, a Greek captain and officers, Punjabi Sikh engine room guys, maybe a Filipino or Latino crew. Maybe there’s been brutality by the officers. Or even a murder the Yugoslav captain and shipowner want hushed up—what’s it to them what their Egyptian ranks do to each other? and supposedly the dead guy was asking for it, and they don’t want to be held up in port. Or an arrest has to be made, and I’ll end up liaisoning between the feds or the Coast Guard, the captain and ship’s agent, whichever national authorities have jurisdiction, and the seafarer who’s going to be arrested, extradited, whatever. Though it’s hardly ever that dramatic. Their pay’s being stolen, or not sent home to their families like it’s supposed to be. Or some seaman’s been ripped off by a fraudulent shipping agency in Tuvalu, has paid a fee for his job and all his savings to fly to New York to meet a ship that doesn’t even exist. Or a guy really needs to see a doctor and the captain won’t let him off the ship, doesn’t want to have to pay for it. Abandoned crews sometimes, like the one I found today. Or the ship isn’t seaworthy—maybe
no ventilation, or plumbing for the crew. Stowaways. Or something simple but important to the crew, like bad food. Or religious problems. When the second engineer hired on, he was promised a Muslim diet, and now they just laugh at him when he demands it. Or something to do with beliefs and superstitions a crew from Kiribati has but their Polish captain just doesn’t get, thinks they’re a bunch of sissies and shirkers. Political tensions. Sometimes you’ll get six nationalities, all speaking different languages, on one ship. Maybe they’ve come in from a bad crossing, been through some awful storm, whole ship’s totally stressed, and every potential problem that was there before breaks out all at once. All kinds of things come up. And we get in there and do what we can.”

“… Actually,
we’re
supposed to use the term
seafarer.
Well, some of the reverends decided, you know how things are now,
seaman
just doesn’t cut it like it used to.”

“Uh-huh. People
do
always think you’re saying semen. On the phone you’re always having to go, sea
man
—you know, as in sailor?
Ha-ha.”

“Johnny gets invited into the galley to taste every kind of food,” Ariadne will say.

“Well no, usually it’s not very good. But you do get to taste a lot of different foods.”

“Sometimes I’ll drive a bunch of them back to the institute so they can phone home from there. A simple thing like that means a ton. Though, of course, so many of them don’t have phones at home, not where they come from.”

“A ship is a ship is a ship? Not at all. Soviet ship’s a whole different world from, say, a Korean one. Russian captains almost always invite you up to their cabin for a vodka; they like to shoot the shit. There’s this one container ship comes in about three times a year, flies a Maltese flag, captained and crewed entirely by women, women from everywhere, a very well run ship—”

“No, not especially good looking. Some are. The most striking is the chief engineer, oddly enough. There’s this other ship crewed by criminal fugitives. And another entirely by Portuguese monks, though
I’ve never seen it, was home with the flu when it came in last winter, Reverend Roundtree went—”

“Johnny and his colleagues make sure that every seafarer on every ship that comes into New Jersey and New York around this time of year gets a Christmas present,” Ariadne will interrupt. “Even Islamic ships and Israeli ships.”

“… Hah! They
wish.
No. Socks, slippers, gloves, wool caps, mainly stuff like that.”

“No, I don’t have to wrap the presents myself. Volunteers from local churches—”

“Dress up like Santa Claus? … No.”

“What I like about the job is getting to make a difference in the lives of people that hardly anyone ever even thinks about. We’re doing important things, we’re organizing a center for seafarers’ legal rights that, well, if we get the right kind of international cooperation, can become a world center and advocate for a new, and we hope more enforceable, international maritime labor code. We organize conferences, forums. But what I like is being out in the van, out on the docks, boarding ships. The detective part of it, you might even say. Kind of like being a cop without having to deal with other cops, or having to shoot anybody. The freedom of it. This sense that you’re getting to deal with the whole rest of the world, that in a hands-on way you’re experiencing something about the way the rest of the world is now. It’s a great job. Sometimes I really think I have one of the best damned jobs in the world …”

He’ll feel, God, frustrated. How can he make them see? A thousand stories and images moiling inside him, and they want to giggle snootily over Christmas presents. Will have met a pair of stowaways from Hong Kong just last week, an old man and his eleven-year-old granddaughter, they’ll have been traveling the world on this ship nearly two years already, at every port the authorities will have turned them away, and the Moroccan crew and Turkish officers, they’ll have practically adopted the pair, the old man helping in the galley, the little girl becoming fluent in Arabic, she had a pet pigeon, fattest pigeon he’ll have ever seen, nearly as big as a turkey, kept it in a cage one of
the crew will have made for her from tar-stiffened rope. But the captain will have wanted it resolved, getting worried for the girl, her effect on the crew, this no environment for a little girl on the cusp of puberty: why tempt fate? Will have almost felt like a betrayal but it had to be done, getting in touch with people from UNESCO, convincing them to get the paperwork done and foot the bill for their repatriation without port authorities fining the ship for bringing in stowaways, no one else was going to do it. Captain Kemal will have even let himself be held over in port six extra hours to see it all through, invited him to the going-away dinner, broke out some not at all bad Moroccan claret. During the dinner the little girl will have stood on her chair and made a deft speech in Arabic and then sung a song in Cantonese … See what he gets to see? The girl took the obese pigeon with her, all the way back to Hong Kong.

Something will feel wrong. He’ll have noticed it even in the bar, but later, alone with her on the sidewalk, he’ll feel sure of it. As if the air has been let out of the complicity that usually binds them, that lets their inner gravity swagger elbow to elbow. She’ll be walking slowly, hands in the pockets of her leather coat, brooding down at the shadow-strewn sidewalk. And when he’ll say, “Ariadne?” she’ll glance up at him as if surprised to see him there, her eyebrows slightly raised, and then she’ll look away and keep walking. A typhoon of temper could be coming any second now. “You want to get a cab?” he’ll ask. She’ll say nothing, keep walking. Finally, two blocks later, she’ll suddenly step off the curb and put her arm up for a cab, and he’ll get into it beside her but she’ll slide to the far side of the seat and look out the window. This distance between them like an unraveling. Caused, he’ll anxiously decide, by his having blabbed on too long about his job, having carelessly let them in on something that Ariadne—unreasonably, of course—thinks of as solely their own. Well, he won’t have told them much about the
Urus,
her abandoned crew and all the stories he heard from them today. Maybe that’ll make it better, when he tells her …

She’ll turn her head and look at him coldly as the cab hurtles and rocks over the West Side Highway, along the blackened river.

“Boy,” she’ll say. “We let them make a couple of bores out of us, didn’t we?”

“You think?” He’ll force a smile. Come on, Ariadne, it’s no big deal. “Ariadne, if anyone was boring, it was them. Santa Claus? Gimme a break.”

And she’ll laugh softly, gloved hands folded on her lap, staring out the window again. “That Roberto,” she’ll say quietly. “He is such an
imp.”

For the rest of his life, the Ship Visitor will remember this moment as the one that foretold the end of their relationship—the dreary, heavy shock in his chest of a door kicked open and tabloid photographers in grungy black coats storming in to expose his hopeful, self-deluding heart mired in bed with a doomed love.

Though in the taxi the Ship Visitor’s first response will be defiant—four generations of Staten Island men who’ve made their living, in one way or another, from ships and the sea, speaking inside him, with the usual family metaphors. He’ll think, Stop loving my job, Ariadne, and you stop loving me. Because love comes and goes, Ariadne, just like ships do, coming and going over the horizon with all their secrets, and sometimes you don’t find out what a fucked up ship it is until you’re onboard and way into the voyage.

And he’ll think, But I have a will too. I refuse to dread spirit-hollowing loss. Try to manage only the present. Let love do its supernatural work.

“Ariadne, you wouldn’t believe this ship I found today, all covered in leaves … The crew came to New York six months ago, the very week we met, Ariadne, and they haven’t budged an inch since. It’s a fucking shipwreck, right here in Brooklyn harbor.”

The next afternoon, after visiting the
Urus
with Reverend Roundtree, he’ll take four of the
Urus’s
crew into Manhattan by subway to meet with a lawyer: when he returns to the Seafarers’ Institute in the evening, the Reverend will be waiting for him with the news that the
Urus
has recently, in the last few weeks, become a stateless vessel.

“The ownership didn’t pay the next round of fees and taxes, John,” she’ll say, “and claimed the ship wasn’t ready for a new inspection. So they were taken off the Panamanian registry. That’s why they painted off the name and home port. It’s a brass plate ownership. Listed as Achuar L.T.D. of Panama, no idea who or what’s behind it. And the ship’s agent, of last known record anyway, is Miracle Shipping, office at 19 Rector Street, lower Manhattan. Never more than an answering machine in a rented or borrowed cubicle, I bet. Telephone no longer in service.”

He’ll remain silent—it’s nothing he’ll not have expected.

“And another thing,” she’ll say. “The crew was never Panama’s responsibility anyway. They’re unlicensed seafarers, John. Apparently they never signed shipping articles.”

“Well, that complicates things.”

“Oh, John”—Reverend Roundtree will sigh—“what are we doing in this business?”

“The Lord’s work, I thought it was, Kathy,” he’ll say, more sympathetically, really, than glibly.

“Sure. Except nowadays any scum can hide from God. All you need is, whatever, a flag of convenience, brass plate incorporation. You don’t even have to be rich anymore.”

(OCTOBER 15—OCTOBER 25)

G
RIEF STAYS HIDDEN LIKE AN ALARM CLOCK WITH NO HANDS SET
to go off at the bottom of sleep. But desire lies awake next to boredom, doing everything it can to keep depression and deepest worry out of bed, pleading, Don’t fade, do that again, just like I first imagined it, Japonesa bella y sucia. For a while, after Capitán Elias told his story back in July, pilot boats plied darkened, rough seas to the
Urus
every night, on any given night as many as a dozen drop ladders lowered from the edge of sleep so that the provocative harbor pilot could climb up into a dozen separate insomnias and wriggle out of her jeans. It was el Capitán’s mention of holing up with her and Japanese porno that had really done it, incited this florescence of Yorikos. Japanese porno, what’s that like? And so they imagined … as much as they could. Well, they really hadn’t been introduced to anyone else. (As El Tinieblas often reminds them, even in prison there were women: conjugal visits, administration workers, smuggled in whores pimped by guards, and even other prisoners. But here, the closest thing to a live woman to look at are the few images of sexy women tattooed here and there on El Tinieblas’s body …) But that was three months ago. If you have hardly any idea of Japan, such dreams turn into Central American porno pretty quickly once the kimonos crumble, to universal porno, hard to keep even that going with someone you’ve never actually met. So tonight only four Yorikos visit the ship, two claimed by the same frenetic insomnia. The one being most patient and chaste in the production of his scenario is having the most success bringing her to life: he’s escorted Yoriko home to Puerto Cortés, he’s showing her around, introducing her to friends and relatives, he’s put her in a pretty dress that bares her shoulders and long, beautiful neck, hombre, she loves Puerto Cortés, loves El Faro for bringing her there!