The Ordinary Seaman (30 page)

Later they heard Milton had left the country and was living in Miami, working as a nighttime security guard in a perfume warehouse. A perfume warehouse? That’s where arte militar finally got Milton. Pues, at least it isn’t a Parcheesi warehouse. Wonder if he’s still there. Maybe he should go to Miami and look for Milton …

José Mateo has cooked duck before. Once, when his ship docked in Shanghai, they went to the market and bought half a dozen. But then he had an oven. He says it’s too bad they ate all those berries, he could have made a nice sauce. But how was anyone supposed to know Esteban would bring back duck? Boiled duck, in a fatty broth filled with peas, potatoes, and rice. The broth poured into their plastic drinking glasses, layer of smoky, golden fat on top. Delicioso.

Esteban says, “Vos, you know what that truck sounded like? Like hundreds of honking little Cuban patos in cages all going
coño coño coño coño
!”

HE’S CROSSED UNDER THE EXPRESSWAY, CLIMBED INTO BROOKLYN. IN THIS
neighborhood, there are many signs in Spanish.
Paco Naco’s Tacos.
A place that arranges money transfers and telephone calls to Mexico and the Caribbean and all the Central American countries. There are people out on the streets, lots of men, many mestizo looking, wearing baseball hats, bulky, plastic-looking jackets of different colors, who seem to be in a hurry to get wherever they’re going, to work probably. Many descend stairs that lead beneath the sidewalk to the underground trains—he can feel and hear the pavement thundering under his feet. Nobody looks at him in a friendly way. It’s nearly dawn, but he finds a little corner restaurant that is open, drab blue walls, steam tables in the window, some of the dishes he recognizes—arroz con polio, looking like it’s been sitting there all night—and others he doesn’t. He wishes he had some money so he could go in, order a cup of coffee, get out of the cold. The greasy smell of food, a smell of sauce-saturated chicken, fish, and overripe fruit, makes his stomach rumble; mixing with bus exhaust and the chilly, faintly briny breeze channeling up the long street from the harbor.

He’s never stayed out this long. By now, they must be waking up on the ship, wondering where he is. On a side street he finds a puzzling sign, a white sheet of paper covered with photocopied handwriting taped to the glass behind the bars of a lowered shutter: someone has lost a cat named Dolores and is offering a fifty-dollar reward. There is a photocopied picture of Dolores, too smudgy and gray to help you distinguish this cat from most others. But here is the rare thing: the cat’s color is listed as “aceituna.” But olives can be black or green. If black olive, why list the cat’s color as olive and not black? And who’s ever heard of an olive green cat?

“Tu, güey!”

He turns and sees this golden-curly-haired muchacha glaring at him, slight and pretty, holding keys to the lock in the door to this place that has lost its cat. She has a soft, almost nougat-hued face, her eyes big, stormy pools framed by blue eyeliner and long, black lashes. Small, puffy nose. Pert, lipsticked mouth, pouting angrily at him. “You’re the güey that’s been urinating in this doorway, no? Pinche asqueroso!” And now her affronted brown eyes are
pulsing
at him.

“No!” exclaims Esteban. “I’ve never been here before!”

“Ah no?” accusingly.

“No!”

He can smell her perfume. How old is she? Young. About his own age, no? She’s wearing a long, blue wool coat with a collar that looks made of coarse lamb’s wool, skinny ankles in whitish tights descending from the coat, into glossy black, sturdy high heels. Now she’s looking him up and down.

“Qué triste, güey,” she says, with impassioned mockery. “Letting yourself go around looking like that. Güey, you’re too young to be homeless. Any güey can find
some
type of job. Bueno. What can you do? Otro desgraciado sinvergüenza.” She shrugs, looks at him with exaggerated pity, shakes her head. “En fin.”

He gapes at her. Her lips look blistered, chapped, through her lipstick—and the way she talks, hombre, it’s no wonder!

And she turns back towards the door, and stops, and then she starts up again, mouth working like an agitated choir singer’s, keeping her own temperamental rhythm with the keys in her hand, flopped up and down: “… Hijos de la chingada, patanes, come and stand in the doorway all night pissing, drinking beer, smoking marijuana, leaving their piggishness all over. Y la policia, qué hacen? Cabrones de mie
rrr
da. Absolutamente nada! No, no, I can’t take this anymore. It’s too much to ask. Starting your day having to step through
this
porquería. No! Pinche degenarados …”

She’s stepped backwards, for a moment isn’t even facing him anymore as she orates at the doorway, and then she spins around, glaring at him again. He laughs, he can’t help it, and she says, “Ah, sí,
güey? Go ahead and laugh. Laugh all the way to the homeless shelter, ándale.”

“Chocho,” he blurts, “Qué agresiva!”

“
Qué!
Vulgarote!”

“Bueno.
OK!”
—flinging his arms out. Amazed at himself, standing on a sidewalk in Brooklyn, arguing with this loca! A corner of her lower lip tucked between her teeth while she glares at him like some infuriated abuela again. But what eyes!

Finally, seemingly calmed down a little, she says, “Don’t you feel embarrassment, going around like that? Not to mention the cold. You’re going to catch something. Bueno, what’s it to me?… Except you could catch tuberculosis, gȍey, and give it to somebody else. That happens, you know. It’s been on the news.”

And he says, “I’m not a vago. I
have
a job. I’m a marinero. I’ve been stuck on this ship down in the harbor for almost four months now, with no pay, hardly anything to eat, working. The whole crew looks like this. Down there.” And he gestures towards the harbor.

“That doesn’t happen here,” she says flatly. “Four months with no pay? Güey, that’s not very intelligent. And I can tell you’re not stupid. It’s a story. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Va, pues, don’t believe me, what’s it to me?” he says, suddenly angry. “We thought we were going to be paid. Vos, we thought we’d be sailing in a few days. And instead they put us to work repairing this old, broken ship. They keep telling us that when the ship is fixed, we’ll sail and we’ll get paid. Puta, what were we supposed to do? No one has the money even to go home. We hardly even know where we are.” Suddenly he pulls some of the tools from his pocket, holds a wire-splicing pin and the wire cutters out to her. “What do you think these are?”

“Qué sé yo? Burglars’ tools. You break into parked cars, no? Police catch you with those, you’ll see what happens to you, güey”—and she shakes her head. “Just the pretext they’ll need to leave you in a bloody pulp.”

“These are mariners’ tools,” he says, thinking, Puta, I guess they
are
burglars’ tools.

She looks at the tools, and then up at him. “You have a funny accent,” she finally says. “What’s all that with the
vos?”

“Soy de Nicaragua,” he answers. “Esteban Gaitán. Mucho gusto. Y usted?”

“Joaquina,” she says warily. “Encantado,” she says with a certain sarcasm and a slight smile. “Bueno. En fin,” she says sternly, and lifts the keys towards the door again, grimacing as she steps towards it. “Hasta luego, marinero.”

“How can a cat be olive colored?” Esteban points at the sign in the window. “Why doesn’t it just say black?”

She steps back from the door again, smiling quizzically, a little slice of a smile that suddenly widens: her smile so lights up her face that suddenly she looks about eight years old.

“I’ve never thought of that,” she says. “Gonzalo thinks Dolores is olive green. Claro, she isn’t. More like muddy gray. Maybe he’s color blind and hides it. But imagine. You think women are going to come here to get their hair dyed if they know he’s color blind? But my jefe, bueno, that’s what he’s like, full of inventions.” She chuckles softly. “Like you, verdad?”

“This is where you work?”

“Pues, claro,” she says, as if suddenly annoyed by him again. “I’m the one who has to come and open it up in the morning. Can’t you read?” and she points at the sign over the door:
Salón de Belleza Tropicana
—
Unisex.

“I can read,” he says.

She’s looking at him thoughtfully now, not angrily like before. “You’re really a marinero?”

“Sí pues.”

“Then you must be good with a mop, no? Isn’t that what marineros are always doing, mopping the deck?”

“Sometimes.”

“Bueno, te propongo algo. If you mop and sweep the doorway here, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. Órale?” Her eyebrows go up.

He smiles. Doesn’t understand that word. “Órale?” he repeats.

“Papas!” she says. Potatoes? And she steps forward and opens the door, turning various keys in various locks. As she’s going inside, she looks at him standing dumbly on the sidewalk. “Ven!”

He follows Joaquina inside, into the almost noxiously sweet-smelling salon, the gray glow of mirrors in the dark; he stands inside the door while she crosses the room to the light switches. The light comes on, and she disappears behind a red-yellow printed curtain into the back. He hears water pouring against metal, filling a pail. He gapes at himself in the mirror, appalled at his beggar aspect of long, dirty hair and light beard, his hollowed face and frightened eyes: he looks like one of those boys raised by wolves. The water stops; she steps back out through the curtain, she’s taken off her coat and is wearing a pleated gray-black wool skirt, a pink cardigan sweater over a white blouse with a lacy collar. She gestures to him. “Ven,” she says.
“You
carry it out, güey.”

He follows her through the curtain, into a corridor with three closed doors, a coat rack hung with her coat and blue smocks, supplies arrayed along shelves, an industrial sink. Joaquina is pouring ammonia from a plastic bottle into the metal pail, and when she’s done, she carefully twists the cap back on, holding the bottle away from herself. He notices an earring, a small, glassy-purple star, on her lobe. She hands him a mop and a broom, steps out through the curtain; he follows her out, carrying the broom between biceps and rib, the mop in one hand and the sloshing pail in the other.

“I could use a haircut,” he says, wanting to make a kind of self-dignifying joke. “And a shave, pues.”

“Pinche güey!” she exclaims, darting her eyes at him. “You’re out of luck. I’m just the manicurist.”

He’s walking to the door when he hears her say, “Bueno, I can also wax your legs. Even your bikini line, güey. Ja!”

He turns to look at her, her back to him as she fumbles with the coffee maker on a side table against the wall. She says, “Gonzalo will cut your hair for ten dollars.” The hem of her sweater falls like a soft bell over her slender rear. “Clean everything well, güey, and I’ll let you have a pastelito too.”

The reek of urine is strong in front of the door. He thinks, Bocona, mandona. He really doesn’t like the way she speaks to him, mouthy, bossy, patronizing, eh? He picks up two empty quart bottles of beer standing in paper bags between the salon’s door and another door with affixed buzzers and scrawled numbers on a battered metal sheet, carries the bottles to the trash cans on the curb, and laying them in, prods open the tear in a plastic bag, sees it full of hair, mainly dark hues of hair. Hairy wax, he remembers, la Marta. Sweeps cigarette butts, a few tiny marijuana butts in pinched pink paper, all the way across the sidewalk—people hurry around and past him on the sidewalk. He stares down at his boots with the broom in his hands. Thinks, This is totally strange, no? His scuffed, grease-stained black boots, made in the Soviet Union, laced with electrical wire, which accompanied him all the way through the war, which la Marta unlaced and tugged off his feet more than once, which that German tracking dog sniffed with its nose of sorrow, boots that stood in a pile of tumbling bullet cartridges as he returned blistering fire through truck planks during the Zompopera ambush and got soaked with the blood of compas while somehow he wasn’t killed; and then went home to Corinto with him and walked through the shitty, steaming, salty mud of its streets and which, oddly yet typically, his Tío Nelson and not his mamá used to like to clean and polish for him; boots which watched his pathetic freak-out with that puta in the burdel, standing empty by her bed, stinking up the already smelly little room and filling it with silent howls of fucked up grief, and then a week later went away to sea with him: and now, vos, here they are, while he sweeps up outside a beauty salon in Brooklyn, these boots like a last living witness to his life, like the only proof he has of the life of Esteban Gaitán … He gazes up the ramshackle row house-lined street—brick, wood, concrete, and aluminum-sided facades, some with tiny, littered gardens out front behind corroded gates—past trash cans and parked cars, at the avenue flashing busily with traffic and pedestrians now. These people passing, they’re probably thinking, Look at that dirty beggar, sweeping up in front of a salon, he must be mentally retarded or a drunk, working for just a few pennies. Puta. Y qué? He finishes sweeping, nudges the small pile between two trash cans. Then
he mops vigorously and thoroughly, wringing the mop out with his hands, breathing in the strong scent of ammonia, slapping water all over the place, from the door all the way out to the curb—

“Oye, chamaco,” Joaquina says, standing in the door. “Did I ask you to mop all of Brooklyn?”

Inside, they sit on folding chairs against the wall, a white cardboard box holding a few pastries on the chair between them, sipping their coffee. So how should he to talk to her? Like she’s his boss?

“Y usted, where are you from?”

“México,” she says, yawning, lifting the back of her hand to her mouth. “And you don’t have to say
usted.”
She gestures at the box. “These are left from yesterday, so they’re a little stale.”

She’s already explained to him about how she made the coffee in that machine over there, told him it’s real coffee. Sí pues, like the coffee he had on the airplane. The first of any kind in months, since their officers stopped bringing them jars of instant coffee, which apparently isn’t real coffee. He savors the strong, muddy taste, feels the warmth and caffeine hitting inside, feels his intestines cringe. He looks around at the salon, the glossy color photographs of men and women with different hairdos; a framed picture of La Virgen del Cobre against a red backdrop with lighthouse and palms painted in, seashells glued to it; and another framed photograph of a man dressed like Pedro Picapiedra, in a tunic that looks made of leopard skin, holding a spread-eagled, platinum blonde woman in a silvery leotard over his head in muscular arms.