The Ordinary Seaman (3 page)

“You know what we learned to drink in the jungle? We called it refresco.”

“You were in the army? A cipote like you?”

“Can you guess what we drank?” He felt really irritated by this viejo now, his soft eyes intently fixed on him as if he’d asked him something much more personal.

“From coconuts, imagino pues.”

“That far in from the coast?” Esteban laughed. “No, the juice inside a monkey’s stomach. You kill a monkey and take out its stomach and poke a hole in it”—and he lifted his hands to his lips and mimed holding a wobbly sphere, which he slowly deflated in his long, spread fingers. Monkey stomach juice tasted like sweet fruit pulp blended with urine and grass.

Bernardo zipped an angry line in the air with a finger. “To send young muchachos like you off to die, brother against brother. How can it be?”

“Muchachas too,” said Esteban matter-of-factly, staring down at his tray. Now this annoying viejo was going to want him to explain war too.

“No sé.” Esteban sighed. He picked up a sugar packet, bit off a corner with his teeth, and poured some sugar on his tongue.

After a long moment, Bernardo said, “The first time you get seasick, you know what to do? … Go forward, and bite the anchor.”

“Bueno.”

“Or drink gasoline.”

They didn’t talk much after that, though neither pretended to sleep either. The movie was eliciting an almost unbroken riot of yelping laughter and swooning squeals of
Ay qué Undo
from the passengers. Esteban put on his headphones. A huge, slobby dog was in love with another huge, slobby dog wearing a pink bow in her collar, and because the two dogs didn’t want to be apart, the smiling, teary-eyed families who owned each dog had to decide what to do about this awkward situation, but then the dogs ran away together. They all lived in that usual America-land of big white houses, each in the middle of its own tree-shaded park. The enemy is the government and its warring policies, not the American people, no? When Esteban removed his headphones, Bernardo immediately turned to him and asked: “Have you fathered any children?”

“Pues, no.” Esteban scowled.

Eventually even the light in the window had paled. Esteban forced himself into a long, methodical daydream of female flesh and love-making. It didn’t work; he felt miserable, not at all aroused, trying to remember her and the way it had been in Quilalí, the last girl he’d fucked and one of only three he’d ever fucked but the only one who’d ever let him do it up the culito, buried in jungle earth now, something of him still inside her scientifically if invisibly still inside her mixing into the rotting earth, verdad? In another half century he’d be this old waiter’s age. Puta, would it have stopped by then? This death blotting out love whenever he tries to conjure love, totally fucked up: like with that whore in Corinto last week, when she was naked on her burdel bed
and suddenly all he could think of was
her
perfumed, satiny flesh and blood ripped apart sprayed through green underbrush while on her bed she rolled over on her belly like a dog thrusting hard round smooth little buttocks up at him,
No te preocupas, amorcito, no pasa nada chúpame aquí
—smiling! If that putita had known what he was thinking, it would have been
her
getting the hell out of there as fast she could, no?
No pasa nada.
Ni verga. No pasa nada, mi amor … Was there a girl in one of the ports they’d be stopping at, maybe even someone he’d meet over the next few days in New York, or someone out there in their voyage along that part of the world where city and ocean air intermix, where people live caressed inside and out by opposite kinds of air and breezes, which is why they’re incapable of keeping things in, of keeping love hidden, no? Was there a girl who was going to bring love back to him, fill him with love as he swallowed the warm breath of her kisses, who was waiting for him right now in a shimmery haze of hot city and ocean air without even knowing him yet? He sat purposefully and suspensefully still, trying to imagine her. Should I make her older or younger? Rich or poor? Light or dark? What’s her name? What language does she speak? Should she pull her shirt off over her head herself, her chichis suddenly blooming and bouncing from under her elbows going up in a band of cloth, or will I unbutton … He turned his head away, staring down at the aisle so the viejo wouldn’t see the hot, wet stinging in his eyes—I’m ruined, no good for anything …

Later, when there was turbulence, Bernardo told him about chairs lashed to the legs of the officers’ mess dining table during rough seas and that the way to keep plates and glasses and silverware from sliding off was to soak the tablecloth with water, and even better than that, water that rice had been boiled in, if the galley cook had had the discipline and foresight to save it.

“A man who plans ahead is worth two, muchacho. But not this one. This cook drinks too much. First day on the job, and look, he’s arriving drunk. Have you seen how many rum and cokes he’s already taken?”

Maybe I’ll get a tattoo, thought Esteban. Should I get a tattoo? Up on my arm, not all over like prisoner tattoos. Elegant, with meaning, a
sailor’s tattoo. Something that says, I’m leaving the earth to be reborn. A skeleton climbing a ladder up into the stars. Or navigating a ship through the stars. Otilio de la Rosa has a yellow fish outlined in red tattooed on his chest and a hummingbird on his arm and at the beach that chavala said, What are you, a pet store? and just like that he learned what a mistake he’d made.

On the way to Miami, where they cleared customs and immigration, the plane had stopped in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where among the passengers who boarded and filled the remaining seats were ten more young seamen on their way to New York to meet the
Urus.
But they wouldn’t all come together until Kennedy Airport, gathering around the gargantuan, hairy-shouldered American in basketball shorts who met them in the arrivals area, a cardboard sign that read
“Urus”
in scratchy black marker held from the bottom in two hands against his chest. After that day they’d never see him again, but whenever the crew had cause to recall him, they’d refer to him as El Pelos, The Hairs, or just Pelos. He had black hair cut short like a yanqui soldier, wore work boots with bright orange laces and a sleeveless T-shirt with his shorts, and his muscular arms and broad shoulders were totally matted with bristly black hair. “Hi. How are ya,” he said over and over as they gathered around, scrutinizing them with gray eyes as quiet and watchful as a mistrustful child’s. When he’d finally counted to fifteen he said, “All here? OK, let’s go.”

He led them outside, this odd and uneasy American, into a late afternoon heat as stupefying as any which mundanely withers Nicaragua’s coastal plains, and left them, faces burning, standing on the sidewalk while he went for the van. A moreno porter wheeling an empty cart back inside shouted at them, “Qué vaina? Son equipo be béisbol, no? Campeones!” and raucously laughed. Is that what they looked like, a baseball team? Sun and clouds had dissolved into a haze the color of boiled, yellowing cauliflower. The airport, a vastness of sooty concrete and glass and traffic, was all by itself the biggest, noisiest, and most unfamiliar city Esteban had ever been in, though it wasn’t as if he’d never seen such places on television or in movies. He stood gaping at the endless
clamor of yellow taxis pulling up in a flurry of shouts, doors and trunks flapping open, slamming shut, roaring off—yet the air, for all the commotion, the constant, ripping thunder of takeoffs and landings overhead, felt utterly still; humid, petrol-fumed air and a faint rankness of old crab shell, the ocean somewhere nearby.

Behind the open trunk of a radiantly polished red car, a blonde stewardess in a crisp white blouse was tightly entwined in a ravenous kiss with a handsome young man, mouths deeply tunneling. Her honey-hued elbows and arms shifted around his neck; she seemed to be trying to press herself ever more tightly against him, hip to hip, head tilted back, hair falling down like poured, shimmering grain. The man dropped a hand from her waist to her nalgas, her starched skirt denting like soft tin around his big-knuckled fingers, cheeks underneath springing back, wobbling the shimmering fabric around those flagrant indentations. They went on kissing while the crew watched, each in his own way sharing the sweltering heat between the two clamped bodies, running their tongues over their own sweat-salted lips, feeling their own humid shirts clinging to their skin. Then the lovers broke apart as if they’d agreed to do it for exactly so many minutes and seconds; he shut the trunk, they walked to opposite sides of the car, got in, and the car drove off. “Hijo de la gran puta,” one of the crew inevitably growled, others clucked impressed assent, they stood marveling and grinning as if they’d all just had their first providential taste of life at sea.

They shook hands, exchanged names; there really wasn’t much more to say, they’d be spending the next six months together and maybe more, so what was the hurry? Nearly everyone struck a pose of friendly reserve, serious and casual, as if to say, I’m a good guy, but don’t think I can’t be a cabrón. Though a few seemed stuck in wary surliness, or seemed to think they were superior. The cook, squinting through swollen, reddened eyes, stinking of sweat and rum, put out his hand to everyone. “José Mateo Morales. Soy el cocinero.” “Marco Aurelio Artola, electrician.” “Tomaso Tostado, ordinary seaman”—Tomaso Tostado had a gold tooth. Bonnie Mackenzie, the one moreno on the crew, a wiry and cherubic costeño from Puerto Cortés, was an ordinary seaman too,
and, despite his name, said he doesn’t speak much English, bueno, un poco,
mon, fock, brother;
knows the words to eight Bob Marley songs, but, brother, take the lyrics apart, try to use a word here and a word there to speak his own thoughts in English, it comes out sounding like a parrot making senseless noise. Regarding Esteban’s qualifications as an ordinary seaman, Adela Suárez had asked him if he was literate and if he knew how to use a paintbrush, and that was almost all she’d wanted to know.

The van was like a small bus with four rows of seats, hot and airless despite the air-conditioning. The cook sat up front with El Pelos, whose shoulders rose over the back of his seat like the tops of folded, hairy wings. Esteban sat by a window, with the irritating viejo squeezed in beside him.

Marco Aurelio Artola, the Honduran electrician, a freckled, twenty-year-old mulatto whom they’d nickname Canario because of his high, twittering voice, said he’d thought New York City was going to be pretty flat,
planito planito,
with just one building rising over everything, the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower. All his life he’d been seeing the Watchtower on the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness publications a proselytizing barber in his pueblo was always pressing on customers.

So that was funny, the crew’s first shared laugh: how could he be so bobo? “What, you never watch television?” one of them scoffed. “You never watch
Kojak?”
When the teasing subsided, Bernardo turned to the fuming electrician and asked if he’d ever been to sea before, as if such unworldliness were impossible in a seaman.

“No. I’m an electrician, I worked in Tela. Y qué?”

“And for that you were hired to work on a ship, chavalo?”

“Bueno, what’s a ship, a building that floats, no?”

“Pues, no.”

“Last month we fixed this old hotel, so fucked up the wires still had cloth insulation, all shredded, worn out. We rewired it top to bottom, ve?”

The one they would call Cabezón because of his immense, gourdlike head, had been hired as an engine room mechanic, but in
Honduras he’d worked as a mechanic in a fish canning factory that also produced fish bouillon cubes from offal: turbines, boilers, diesel engines, there wouldn’t be such a difference. Except on the ship he’d be earning more than a dollar an hour and saving every cent, while in Honduras he’d earned five dollars a day. The moreno from the coast said that wasn’t so bad, he’d earned three. And in Nicaragua? No jodas, grumbled the cook from the front, people weren’t even paid with real money anymore, even frijoles had become rich people’s food.

It turned out that everyone but Bernardo and the cook had been hired based on qualifications only conjecturally related to shipboard ones. The crew included two electricians, two mechanics, a cook, a waiter, and nine ordinary seamen; nine Hondurans, five Nicaraguans, and one Guatemalan. The Guatemalan was the other electrician, his last job with an oil exploration company in the jungles of the Petén—like so many chapines, he had a reserved demeanor, and because of that and also because it’s a well-known joke all over Central America that Guatemaltecos are only born to give their army more people to murder, his nickname onboard would be Caratumba (Tomb Face). The other mechanic, the pretty boy they’d call Pínpoyo, had worked with heavy construction equipment, Caterpillar diesel engines. While everyone in the van chattered on, Esteban saw Bernardo looking worriedly at the back of the cook’s head, as if willing him to turn around and say something about this.

“It’s having experienced officers onboard, a good chief engineer, that matters,” said Bernardo firmly. “Everyone else just does what they’re told.”

The van rushed along the elevated expressway, bounced and vibrating. Esteban had only felt this way in helicopters before, not even in IFA trucks, sweating and slightly nauseous and trying to see everything. He saw a cemetery so vast and withered it looked like a whole miniature, firebombed city. How could anyone be happy here, living in an endlessness of factories, refineries, windowless slabs, who knew what it all was? He peered down into side streets as if into the bottoms of suddenly snatched away boxes, dirty brown brick, yellow tienda signs,
figures walking along serenely like drunks at dawn through yellow-brown air; he saw people sitting in chairs by sidewalk cooking fires, some in their underwear apparently like at home, but they were so quickly past. Was that corn growing on that rooftop? He would never walk down those streets at night, never. The expressway curved, and skyscrapers filled the van’s window on the other side; he rocked and craned trying to see, glossy gray skyscrapers looking like they’d be blinding in the sun. The van swerved, El Pelos hit his horn, shouted, “Fucking Chinese,” words Esteban understood, though the rest of Pelos’s sullenly muttered invective was lost on him. Bernardo murmured in his ear, “They’re going to have to be good teachers, these officers, chavalo. It’s lucky the Atlantic doesn’t make itself truly dangerous until October, bueno, generally.”