The Ordinary Seaman (41 page)

“Guess how old he is,” said Elias.

“As old as the father of all the great waters,” guessed Mark.

“At least fifty. Can you believe it?”

“Well, this is a pretty good health club.” He just couldn’t stop being the lame New Yorker.

Mark felt nervous around Cumpashín. Whenever the shaman stared at him for such a goddamned long time, Mark sensed that somehow his
aura
and ineffable
core
were on display—quills of tainted spirit radiating out through all his mosquito bites—and tried to summon Lorca’s long-lost light to his eyes.

Cumpashín and Elias would talk baby talk all day, a mixture of the little Spanish Cumpashin knew and the little bit of the shaman’s Amazonian language that Elias had picked up; except Cumpashin spoke in a whirring, nearly whispered way that sounded as free of consonants as his home terrain had been of rocks, Mark didn’t see how Elias could understand any of it. But they’d roar with laughter, and stamp their feet, and call
each other
Cumpashín, which Mark didn’t get at all. The first morning that Mark woke up in Cumpashin’s palatial hut, he looked out from his hammock and saw a wild boar’s head in one plastic tub on the floor, and another tub filled with a boar’s entrails, and boar’s meat hung in red, ropy clumps all over the place, all of it clouded with
flies. Cumpashín hunted with blowguns and only sometimes used the shotgun, ammunition being hard to get. He fished using just a sapling trunk, string, and a hook with no bait, dancing the hook over the water, and somehow caught thirteen fish in half an hour and put them whole into his fire to cook like baked potatoes. When Mark had used up all the mosquito repellent they’d brought, Elias taught him to rub red ants into a rudimentary paste between his palms and smear it on his skin to keep mosquitoes away.

The next night Mark watched Cumpashin cure a patient who seemed to be suffering from, Mark would have guessed, a gallbladder attack, he so painfully writhed and groaned on his palm-sapling floor, clutching himself above the groin. The whole thing was crazy: Cumpashín drank from gourd bowls filled with wild garlic root shavings and aguardiente, and smoked wild tobacco while Mark quaked with nicotine fits. And then Cumpashin pulled a little stone out of a leather pouch, a smooth little egg-shaped stone, cupped it in his palms, and spoke conversationally and sweetly to the stone for about an hour, going, Sí… No … Ahá … Sí… No, no. Sí! Looks like a gallbladder problem to me too!—who knew what he was saying? It was his magic stone, Elias solemnly whispered. He’d found it as a boy apprentice shaman: the stone had been hopping around on a jungle path. Through it Cumpashín was consulting with the spirits of all the medicinal plants in the forest. These spirits told the shaman what to do: apparently they told Cumpashín to suck the illness out of his patient’s body. The shaman placed his mouth against the guy’s belly and made loud sucking noises, got to his feet holding his hands over his mouth and making horrible retching sounds, staggered over to the side of the hut, and then theatrically spat the illness out into the darkness of the forest. (Every time Mark gets up in the middle of the night needing to vomit, staggering to the bathroom with his mouth already filling, he remembers that.) And then Cumpashín went away and came back about an hour later, gave the guy something to drink brewed from a tree bark.

Later that night Cumpashin offered to treat Mark for whatever was ailing him. He tapped his temple in such a way as to indicate that he’d cure Mark of mental illness; Elias and the shaman had a good laugh over that.

Mark said, “He’s not sucking on me no matter what.” And then he said, “I don’t know. I’d like to quit smoking, I guess.”

Cumpashín asked if Mark had a photograph of himself. A photograph? Well, yeah, he did, an extra passport picture in his wallet. Cumpashín put Mark’s picture into his little leather pouch with the magic stone and looked at Elias and said something like “Done.”

Mark had been out of cigarettes for days, and the one puff he’d tried of Cumpashín’s wild, leaf-rolled tobacco had him practically coughing his brains out through his ears. By the time he and Elias were back in Iquitos, Mark had already been more than a week without smoking, and the cravings had passed. Mark hadn’t smoked another cigarette since, not one—until just about a month ago. Now he’s up to two packs a day. At dinner parties like the one last night, Elias used to enjoy telling people about how Cumpashín cured Mark of smoking.

Parties like the one last night used to seem like the most interesting thing Elias had been doing during his three plus years as kept husband of the Imperial Loft: posturingly reliving his Amazon exploits for a very captive audience. There was something poignant about Elias; there was a restless greatness of spirit in his friend, Mark began to believe during those years, that was slowly being laid waste. Who knew what Elias would have talked about instead, if all that rain forest stuff hadn’t become so trendy? Well, perhaps not the
most
interesting thing Elias had been doing: all his secret women. He kept saying he was going to go back to school to become licensed as a master herbalist, naturopath, or homeopath or some combination of all three, then open up a practice. But, really, back to school, at his age?

Then Elias found their ship. Three weeks later, and sixteen years after he and Elias had first imagined sharing in such adventures, Mark put Miracle in the kennel and flew to St. John, took a taxi to the shipyard, and climbed the ship’s ladder onto the iron-and-rust manifestation
of a dream finally made real. A ship, and he was part owner. Mark had never even owned a car. A dead ship, dumped by an owner too impatient and cheap and unimaginative and law-abiding to know how to make her seaworthy again; a ship that was only acting dead, just waiting for someone to come along, recognize her true worth, and rescue her from scrap. Haley, Elias’s big, hairy ex-soldier friend—he’d been attached to a U.S. Marine and DEA outfit based in Iquitos that monitored Sendero Luminoso’s narcotics trafficking in the Upper Amazon basin—and Yoriko, dressed in black, a pretty, willowy, twenty-something Japanese girl Elias had been secretly seeing, were already onboard. Haley was a nightclub bouncer now; Mark and Elias had hired him to help out in getting things under way.

“Nice rust bucket.” Haley sneered-smiled, putting out his hand.

“Watch out for the holes in the deck, Mark,” said Elias. “Wouldn’t want you falling through, all the way down to where we won’t be able to hear you calling for help.”

“I didn’t think it would be so rusted,” said Mark.

“They were really running this thing on the cheap,” said Elias. “Mainly just the coastal trade up here, working her like a truck, running cargo to and from Halifax. There was money even in that. But she used to sail all the way from Japan, through the Panama, believe it or not. Found the manifest of the last crew up on the bridge. Polish officers, mainly Chinese crew.”

Everything had been arranged for towing the ship to New York. The only problem was that the ship’s classification society, Nippon Kaiji Kyokia, upon being informed of the sale, was refusing to declare the ship seaworthy even to be towed until an inspector could come from Halifax to conduct the required survey. Elias’s attitude was, Fuck that, they were going anyway. He’d foreseen the problem and knew they could get away with it. The tug company was charging two thousand dollars a day for the slow three-day voyage to New York. Setting his checkbook on the rail, Mark wrote out his share of the payment. He looked out at the placid harbor and the Bay of Fundy, the spread, shimmering tautness of the outgoing tide. It was late afternoon. He’d never
been so far north and told himself that he’d never breathed air so fresh and clean. Wooden fishing boats were chugging into the harbor, trailed by thick flocks of gulls, and the moon was out, pale as a smudge of soap against a mirror in the limpid blue sky.

While the tug’s deckhands prepared the towlines, Mark, Elias, and Yoriko climbed dark stairs to the wheelhouse. Mark grasped the spoked ship’s wheel mounted on the Gyropilot and gazed out over the long, cluttered deck and complicated masts to sea. Elias briefly explained the radar equipment—fairly primitive, he said—the loran and echo sounder, the VHF radio, all of it needing electrical power to run. This button sets off the ship’s horn, dead right now too, of course. There was a charts table, narrow drawers still filled with nautical charts. On the wall, a windup chronometer set to Greenwich mean time, a barometer, and a yellowing poster illustrating the Beaufort wind-force scale.

Elias and Yoriko had already gone out and procured mattresses and bedding for the voyage, two mattresses in two of the stripped officers’ cabins and one in the two-room suite of the captain’s quarters, which Elias had of course taken for himself and Yoriko. In St. John, Elias, with their new corporate credit cards—Achuar Corp. of Panama City (named for Cumpashín’s tribe)—had bought Coleman lamps, plenty of spare batteries and cassette tapes for the boom box, coolers stuffed with food and beer, bottles of liquor, barrels of drinking water, a small barbecue grill, and a two-burner gas grill, which they’d transfer later down to the galley for their eventual repair crew to cook on. He’d even bought a little camping toilet. It was like they were going on a three-day camping trip in a floating mountain cave.

They went and looked at the individual steam baths behind their newly polished mahogany, brass-handled doors, the only remaining touch of luxury onboard. The baths’ black-and-white tiles gleamed.

“Someday soon,” said Elias, “these will be working. We’ll take herbal steam baths.” He squeezed his arms tighter around Yoriko’s waist and smiled dryly. “Oh Yoriko, my love, what emotion.”

Yoriko, nestled into Elias’s frame, said, “They are beautiful. I can see that this is going to be a beautiful ship.” She smiled up at Elias.
“Though it’s pretty squalid now.” Then she looked at Mark, shut her eyes, and said, “This macho thug had me cleaning up here all day.”

The Canadian tugboat men did them the favor of pulling up the accommodation ladder—winches would raise the ladder automatically when they had electrical power again—and then climbed over the side, down to the pier, on a Jacob’s ladder. Then Elias, Haley, and Mark hauled in the mooring lines—like real sailors, thought Mark, laughing from the excitement of it, pulling with all his strength on the fat, slimy, kerosene-smelling rope, while Yoriko snapped photographs.

With a big tug—4,300 horsepower, said Elias—called the
Lilly
leading the way, pulling the two thick cables of the towlines, wrapped around bitts on the prow and faked down through the bulwark, and two smaller tugs bumped up alongside, one at the stern and another out of sight under the flare of the bow, the ship began to move, slowly maneuvered out of her berth and into the Bay of Fundy, the water dappled with the soft pastels of sunset, stars already coming out in the clear, deep blue of the sky. The
Lilly,
captained by a middle-aged Scotsman with a walrus mustache named Maurice, who liked to be called Captain Mo, blasted her horn. Elias gave Yoriko the honor of smashing a bottle of champagne against the gunwale on the foredeck, and then he brought out four glass goblets and two more bottles of Moët & Chandon and popped the corks. They sat on the black iron bitts and leaned against the rail, sipping champagne, making toasts.

“To my first mate,” said Elias, tapping Mark’s glass.

“Oh yeah? Let me guess who the captain is.”

And Elias, in his best attempt at a thick Long Island accent said, “I bet you wish
youu
could be the
cap-tinnn
of
some-thinnggg.”

Mark cracked up, and Elias explained the old joke: back in college there’d been this guy, captain of the golf team or
some-thinnggg,
and once, when Elias was dumping on him, this girl had gotten pissed and said that, and he and Mark had picked it up as a goofy refrain—

“Oh boy,” said Yoriko. “I’d say you guys have known each other
too long.”

And then they were out in open ocean, peacefully wavelet rippled and moonlit under the night sky, and the two smaller tugs fell away
hooting their whistles, and the tug up ahead—the Little Tug That Could, they called her, though she was the big one—headed south beneath Nova Scotia, the tug’s wake foaming back towards the ship like a luminous, lacy bridal train trailed all the way from New York.

They barbecued hamburgers outside on a bridge wing. And Elias told stories about ways of making money through shipping fraud:

“Say someone in Brazil has ordered a cargo of, say, vacuum cleaners through a West German dealer …” That fellow in Brazil pays his money for the sale to a bank, said Elias. And the dealer arranges the transaction, insures the vacuum cleaners, gets the proper invoices, sees that it’s all loaded onto a ship, then takes the shipping documents to an appropriate bank, and is paid. Everything hunky-dory. But what none of them suspects is that the captain of the ship is also her owner, and the name of this ship is just one in a series of names he’s been sailing her under over the last few months. He sets off for Brazil, with more than a million dollars’ worth of cargo in the holds, and hits a storm, a storm which doesn’t show up on any weather satellite photo or anything, but what the hell, it’s far out to sea, they can’t track every little sudden typhoon, can they? The ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean. But most of the crew survive. They’re picked up in a well-provisioned lifeboat and tell their terrible tale of the storm and sinking and the tragic fate of their captain, chief engineer, and a few others, who’d set out in the
other
lifeboat. But they’d lost sight of that lifeboat in the storm, and then that other lifeboat’s radio suddenly went dead, and now they hadn’t seen or heard a peep from them in days. Oh well, the vacuum cleaner buyer in Brazil, he just collects on his insurance, as does everyone else who had cargo on that ship. While that ship, already under a new name, slips quietly into a small Guyanese port, manned by its anonymous skeleton crew, takes on more crew, and sets off to, say, Cuba or Mexico, or maybe all the way to the Middle East, where the captain sells off everything he was carrying in the ship’s holds, pocketing all the money, dividing it, unequally, among his loyal coconspirators.