The Ordinary Seaman (42 page)

Elias told a few more stories like that. Easiest way to make money with a ship like this one, he said, was to fix her up cheap, insure her for
much more than you’d paid, and sink her. Easy to get rich, all you need is the imagination and cojones. Cheerfully, playfully, they all drank to that.

Later Mark leaned on the ledge beneath the wheelhouse windows, staring ahead through the tinted glass, sipping a scotch. Already, after a few hours, darkened ocean seemed a pretty monotonous sight. Wasn’t like they were going to see any whales. Elias and Yoriko were out on a bridge wing now, chatting and laughing away. Elias was entertaining her with a sextant and his knowledge of the stars. Haley had drunk too much and was sitting at the charts table with his head rested on folded arms. The ship’s progress felt steady and sturdy through the tranquil ocean, so why did he feel nauseous? He was jealous of Elias and Yoriko, not of their affair per se, perhaps, but of Elias’s easy way with women. Mark was a little obsessed with Elias and Kate’s marriage, was always studying it for edification about what had gone wrong between himself and Sue. Elias and Kate just got along so damned well. Elias was never too lazy or self-preoccupied or overtly egotistical to be inattentive to Kate, and he seemed always to get a great kick just out of amusing her. It was always almost as if they’d both just met and wanted to present each other with their best sides—well, what Elias and Kate thought of as their best sides. Elias was Kate’s best friend, and though Elias knew how to act like almost any woman’s best friend, with Kate it really seemed believable. Since Sue had left him, and even before, Elias was always saying, Mark, don’t do
this
with women, Mark, try to do
that
next time you’re hooked up to a woman. Elias said once, Mark, you made a common but stupid mistake with Sue, thinking that just because you’d been living together for so long, that meant you could be as nakedly
yourself
as you were as a little boy in the bosom of your psychotic family. That you could whine and emotionally overindulge yourself. That you didn’t have to try to pull yourself up for her. So Sue had to suffer through your every little trauma about your video store. But, Mark, if you were just starting to go out with Sue, would you let yourself sit there all night in a depressed gloom about your video store? Would you try to make her want to share a life with you by telling her how hopeless you felt about your situation? Mark, mommies, not even yours, don’t
throw you out when they’ve had enough of you, they don’t banish you from the family when you get boring, but women certainly do. Especially when they’re still fairly young and attractive and justifiably dying to be appreciated and have some fun, like Sue. (Had Elias slept with Sue too?) Elias said that the thing about women was that you had to win them over to your side every day. You have to be
gallant,
Mark. And even kind of formal. He said the nice thing about that was that it didn’t preclude sincerity, and actually got easier, not harder, as time went by. He said to save that sorry-ass, sad-sack stuff for a real crisis, when you’ll really need her—whoever she’ll be, Mark. I’m sure there’ll be someone coming along soon.

One day not long after Sue left, when Mark felt like he was
really
falling apart, he said to Elias: I feel like I’m lugging a thousand-pound lead weight around in my chest, Doc. That Cumpashin, does he have a shaman cure for heartbreak?

Absolutely, Mark, said Elias. You take a stone and boil it. And when the water cools, you drink it. Makes your heart hard.

Mark went out onto the other wing, the one Elias and Yoriko weren’t on, to get some air. He stayed out there for a long time with the cold ocean wind in his face, blaring in his ears, filling his lungs. He looked up at the thickly blazing stars, and down at the churned water fanning away from the ship, the swells slightly flecked with glowing foam now, and then at the warm light of the Little Tug That Could way up ahead, like a solitary cabin in the middle of a great wilderness.

When he went back inside Haley was snoring on the charts table and the door to the other wing had been slid shut and he thought Yoriko and Elias must have gone to bed, until he heard a muffled, sharp yelp of laughter out there, Yoriko’s. He took a flashlight and went to explore the pitch dark ship. Elias had advised against such wandering at night; it was dark and there were lots of carelessly fastened objects around, the ship might suddenly pitch and roll and you could break a leg. With one hand on the stair rail, he went down past the floor their cabins were on, then pushed the door open into a corridor on the floor below. He found himself swaying unsteadily as he made his way down it, shining his flashlight into the bare, scarred little cabins where their crew was going to
sleep—on this floor and the one below—the ocean murkily framed in the portholes. Down here, he could hear the hollow ship sighing and creaking like a haunted house from the strain of its pulled-along forward motion. He heard the faraway clangs of metallic objects falling as if to the bottom of a deep iron well. He went down another floor, following his flashlight through the dark, feeling fascinated by his own uneasy sensation of being all alone in an utterly alien and spooky environment—one that was half
his
now, after all. Recently, a man had died on this ship. He felt drawn towards the engine room, where it had happened. He found the handle to the steel door leading into it at the end of the corridor, cranked it down and pushed the door open, and made his way down a steel stairway and through another door into the control room and stood there bouncing his flashlight beam around the catwalk-hemmed, two-level steel box of the engine plant. The reek of diesel oil, machine grease, and doused burning was strong. He shined his flashlight on a grease-blackened metal table covered with tools and old papers, at the smoke-smudged control panel and breaker boxes, at the boiler forward, at thick pipes, scorched cables, and stems of packed wiring. He edged out onto the catwalk, holding tightly to the rail, shining his light on enginery whose purpose was a mystery to him, then aimed it down into the bottom level, at the immense engine in the middle, with its six faintly glowing turbine cylinders, and the machinery and pumps arrayed around it. He sat on the catwalk in the dark with his legs dangling, thinking that just a few months ago someone had died somewhere down there. He switched off his light and sat in the absolute darkness. He thought he could hear wind moaning in the cavernous, empty holds on the other side of the engine room, the deep, muffled roar of ocean parting heavily around the hull. He sat swaying side to side, his unsettled stomach making him feel a little dizzy again. He felt sad. He really wasn’t used to hope. He’d had a mistrustful relationship with hope for years now. He thought, Please let this work out. Please let this lead to something good.

He woke in his cabin the next morning, pitched off his mattress and onto the floor. He got to his feet, and the floor receded under him again, his feet stepping backwards like falling dominoes until his back
thudded against bulkhead. He danced forward across the floor and landed with his hands on the porthole, and he looked out at gray fog and slate gray swells, rising and sluggishly collapsing under crests of sprayed foam. The wind sounded desolate, an unwavering, low howl through an endless iron tunnel. He got back onto his mattress and clasped both sides, just lay there hanging on for who knew how long. He heard the clatter of unfastened objects falling and colliding everywhere.

Later, when he went down onto the deck to throw up, it was raining hard. He saw a cargo hook swinging wildly back and forth at the end of its loosened whip. He clutched the rail and vomited over the side, letting the wind carry it away, watching the waves rising against the side of the ship and breaking in broad swaths of hissing foam, rocking the ship and him backwards.

Soaking wet, he went back inside, and holding on to the stair rail with both hands, slowly made his way all the way up to the wheelhouse. Yoriko and Haley were sitting side by side on the floor against the bulkhead under the rain-lashed forward windows, swaying to and fro. Haley smiled weakly. Elias stood near them, one hand clasping the rail under the windows, and even he looked paler than usual. “Of course if we were under our own propulsion, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Elias said, as if mitigating his own responsibility for the weather. “It’s at most a five on the wind-force scale. Nothing.”

Mark stood beside him, looking ahead through the rain at the tug pounding through and over the swells.

“Go, Little Tug That Could,” he said listlessly. Talking incited another wave of nausea. He sat next to Yoriko.

Only Elias ate that day. Once he called them to the portside windows and they watched another ship, its long deck stacked with containers, bucking past on the fuming horizon. They could see the ship’s forward weight rocking her downwards, waves breaking over her prow and onto her deck in great bursts of water and spray.

The rain and winds, the ceaseless pitching and rolling, went on with stupefying monotony all that day and night and into the next morning. It was the longest day and night Mark had ever known, time
turned into a sluggish element you were dunked in and out of, in and out of, light and darkness an irrelevancy. And then the weather began to calm.

By nightfall they were approaching New York, the outer waters off Sandy Hook and the Ambrose Channel running into Lower New York Bay. Already they could see faraway, thin stripes of light along Staten Island’s shores, and the faint lights of ships up ahead, waiting for passage into the harbor, for the tide to rise high enough to allow their drafts to clear the mud-shoaled channels.

Empty of cargo and riding high, pulled along behind the Little Tug That Could like an immense iron box kite, and without power of her own, the
Urus
would be allowed directly into the harbor. They stood out on the starboard wing, the night air warmer now, the humid, heavy breeze like a premonition of the stagnant summer lying just ahead. They cheered when the pilot boat came out and the pilot stepped across bumping bulwarks to board the
Lilly.

Soon they could see the lights off Coney Island and the blue lights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. They passed an immense tanker, lit up like a power facility at night, off-loading oil onto a barge. Pulled along against the slack tide, the
Urus
slid under the bridge, through the narrows, and into the Upper Bay between Staten Island and the Bay Ridge Anchorage Flats. Now the lights of the harbor simmered all around them. Haley poured scotch into their cups. At the mouth of the Kill van Kull, where most merchant ships turn off to run between Staten Island and Bayonne to the terminals and tank farms of Newark Bay and the Arthur Kill, two tugs came out to meet them, bumping up on either side of the hull, gently jolting the whole ship; up ahead they saw the pilot stepping off the heroic
Lilly,
reboarding the pilot boat, which sped off towards his next assignment. They cheered, touched their glasses, and hugged like old-fashioned immigrants when the illuminated Statue of Liberty came into view, the narrow cluster of gold-lit skyscrapers at the tip of Manhattan behind.

They proceeded past the long, darkened shores of Sunset Park’s dead piers and into Gowanus Bay and down a nearly darkened channel past a tank farm and a barge port, through the mouth of an enclosed
basin; the tugs danced around the hull, ruddering and propelling her almost like a weather vane against the tide, finally pinning her by stern and bow against a long finger pier overlooked by a tall, concrete, rectangular structure, surrounded by darkened terminal ruins and collapsed piers.

“Cheapest berth in the whole damned port,” said Elias, while Mark, Haley, and Yoriko gaped at the silhouettes of the ruins.

There were two parked vans on the paved pier, and union dockworkers spread out along the wooden stringpiece, standing by the bitts (they’d be
billed
for that). Elias led them down to the deck and said, “I have to toss them the hawsers. Haven’t had any practice in years.”

He held a coil of thick mooring line over his thighs, then whirled almost like an Olympic hammer thrower and released it, the rope’s monkey fist sailing out into the air and plummeting down to the pier. Elias did it again, and again, and again, and then let Haley have a go, the four of them marching down the length of the ship.

And then Elias showed them how to lower the accommodation ladder by walking out along it, and Mark’s first and last ocean voyage came to an end.

Now Mark’s the Little Tug That Couldn’t, turned into a slug. Lying in bed with a hangover, ashtray on the night table overflowing with filthy butts. Little Tug better get up and move his car if he doesn’t want it towed. Walk his dog. Go grocery shopping for his “crew.” Little Tug went to Kate and Elias’s dinner party last night, and what a night he had. But at least he got to sit next to Moira Meer—who’s Elias’s, and if not Elias’s, Phil’s. Uh-huh. So here’s an amusing little riff he thinks he’ll sit down and compose over breakfast (coffee, two-day-old refrigerated fried rice from a carton), send it in to “Talk of the Fucking Toy Town”: How to comport your soul at a dinner party with wealthy young artistes, liberal do-nothings and the really wonderful, remarkable girl innocently seated next to you, when you happen to own a secret slave ship in New York Harbor. Hire the Little Tug to drag that soul and dump it with all the other garbage, right?

First draft needs work, but he better get going, Little Tug has to bring food to his
crew,
check on the injured old guy. Our little brown guys, property of Capitán Elias Cortés and First Mate Mark Pizarro. When he says that, Your Honor, he’s not being racist, naw, he’s using self-mocking irony to serve honesty, bitter humor to get to the heart of what he acknowledges is a horrible situation now and his own culpable but initially well-meaning—well, at least not slave owner—meaning—position vis-à-vis. Not all of them are little anyway, they’re not
all
even brown. He’s sick of being reminded, of feeling angry and guilty everywhere he goes, that’s all, because everywhere he goes he sees them: bus-boys, McDonald’s, even working in pizza parlors now instead of Italians and Greeks, lined up outside that taco truck on the corner of Ninety-fourth and Broadway, in the subways, working in delis, the Koreans always sending them down into basement to bring up your bag of ice and they come up holding it, dark eyes anxiously scanning customers for someone who
looks
like he’s just standing around waiting for his bag of ice because they don’t even know enough English to ask, Who’s waiting for ice?—little brown guys but hardly ever any little brown females, yackety-yacking in Spanish, dark glare of their eyes, squat Napoleon builds and proud, serious Aztec (whatever) faces. By now there’s not a Korean Deli owner in New York who doesn’t know how to say, at least,
Qué pasa?
(Mark has noticed.) Which is about all the Spanish
he
knows … All those rich babes at the dinner party so entertained by Elias’s magic shamans of the rain forest stories: why no magic Central American seamen-slave stories, eh, Elias? You don’t see these guys levitating or vomiting butterflies or doing voodoo or communing with ghosts and spirits, just a bunch of fucked-over guys like fucked-over guys anywhere and they know it. (With, for a while, that Cat That Sat.)