The Ordinary Seaman (44 page)

And then he corked what was left of the wine, got into the barber chair, and arranged the blanket over himself. He fell asleep thinking about the story Gonzalo had told him about his days as a Tropicana dancer, which had made the world sound more unstable than ever. Gonzalo and a legendary dancer named Lisette used to star together in a number where she played a woman fleeing her savage jungle tribe
because they wanted to punish her for loving someone from another tribe, climbing up onto a catwalk high above the stage, and hurling herself to her death, except her lover surprises her by catching her in his arms: that’s the image in the photograph, Gonzalo just after he’s caught her. She’d performed her famous swan-diving leap into Gonzalo’s arms from balconies and rigging high above stages all over the world and always to thundering ovations, though the one Gonzalo would never forget happened one night in La Habana, when El Líder himself shocked them by leaving his table full of visiting dignitaries and government officials and climbing up onstage, in his pressed military uniform, to deliver an armful of white roses to Lisette and embrace the two stars. Gonzalo was surprised by the feminine softness of his hand when he shook it, and when he was embraced to receive a kiss on the cheek, Gonzalo said he almost swooned from the silkiness of his beard, the pampered satin of El Líder’s cheek against his, and the overwhelming scent of baby powder and cologne that wafted off his skin. Es tan regia! Gonzalo had exclaimed to Esteban. That fat jota queen! He’s as regia as any of us! Yet
he’d
thrown him out of Cuba for being homosexual and for no other reason, sent him to Florida in a boat crammed with lunatics, criminals, and all the pajaritos they’d been able to round up. And what do you think happened, chico? The first time Lisette had to perform her leap with a new partner he mishandled the catch and she cracked her skull on the stage and fractured her neck and spent a year in the hospital and never danced again. Gonzalo said that whenever he meets someone who’s traveling to Cuba, usually a European or rich South American, he sends Lisette a present: the expensive chocolates she’d become addicted to during the long run their Tropicana traveling troupe had in Rome, and once, though this had cost him a fortune, the very latest in lifelike falsies built into a fancy brassiere. Pues Lisette has the tiniest tetitas, he said, and likes to wear them.

The voices of the drunken revelers outside briefly woke him—the infamous urinators. Through the lowered gates he could see the shadows of men huddled together, hear their boisterous laughter; voices in English, and then someone asking in Spanish about what had just been
said, and then someone else translating, “He said he stabbed the fucking Jew!” And more laughter. Puta, like any bunch of friends reminiscing about some old prank, except they were reminiscing about murder!

When he wakes again it’s morning, and the lights are on in the salon, and for a moment he doesn’t know where he is except he’s still frightened and depressed by the voices and he sits up in the barber chair and sees Joaquina in the mirror sitting in a chair along the wall, drinking coffee. Their eyes meet in the mirror a moment, and then she says, Buenos días, and asks him if he wants a cup of coffee and he says yes and thanks her, his voice croaking. She’s in another smocklike dress though this one has no sleeves, and underneath she’s wearing the same white, lacy blouse she had on the morning he met her.

“I realized after I left that you probably didn’t have anywhere to sleep,” she says. “I was so worried about you. Ni modo, Gonzalo took care of it.”

“Sí pues.”

She comes over to him with a cup of coffee. She’s wearing the same earrings as yesterday.

“You look a lot different.” She smiles. “But I still think you should wear your hair long.”

He frowns. “Vos, I don’t like this tail in back. Can you cut it off?”

She stands there looking at him appraisingly. Finally she shrugs. “Ahorita?” And he nods. She puts down her coffee and opens a drawer and takes out a pair of scissors.

She stands close to him. His nose is still stuffed, and he wishes that he could smell her.

“Bueno, chamaco,” she says. “Lean your head forward.” He feels her warm hand on the back of his neck. “Don’t move,” she says, and for a moment she stands there shaking with silent giggles. “I don’t know why I think this is so funny!” she says, barely able to get it out.

“Just cut it,” he says. “I hate it!”

Hágalo! he tells himself. You have to do it. His heart pounds. Right now!

Then she’s leaning against him, smiling and holding up the cut strands of hair, about five inches long. Hágalo! He reaches up and takes
her pinkie between his thumb and finger and holds it. They look at each other, and her expression is suddenly serious.

“Esteban,” she says, finally. “There’s someone else, I told you. I don’t want to lie to you. It’s just that I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I’m glad you told me. But to me, that has no importance.”

Then he puts a hand on either side of her face and raises his head and kisses her and her eyes widen. Her lips are so chapped under her lipstick he almost pulls away, but soon they become wet and soft from kissing. They keep on kissing, and then he feels her tongue slip into his mouth against his. She lifts her arms around his neck.

And then they stop kissing and she rests against him, a hand on each of his shoulders, his snipped-off hair still sprouting between her fingers.

“Let’s go in back and make love right now,” he says. Though he begins to panic, because he remembers the last time, in the burdel in Corinto, when she took off her clothes and her damp nudity and fragile, childish skin made him think of what had happened to la Marta and she turned over on the bed and thrust her nalgas at him and grinned over her shoulder and told him to suck her there, amorcito. He hates himself! Don’t think about it! No pasa nada. Except, puta, it’s like having uncontrollable lunatic voices in your head! He’s trembling.

“Estás loco, güey,” she says. “With Gonzalo coming in any second? We shouldn’t even be kissing, I don’t want to catch your cold.”

He feels relieved that they aren’t going to do it right now.

“I want to make love right now,” he insists.

They start to kiss again, and he feels momentarily swirled away from his panic by the caresses of her lips and tongue. He slides his hands inside her dress and feels her small breasts through her blouse.

“Esteban, qué haces?” she murmurs, slowly pulling herself back. “Don’t be naco. There are people out on the sidewalk.”

She takes a step back and looks at him a long time with a dark-eyed cat’s mesmerized stare. “I feel good with you,” she says. “But we can’t do it now.” Then she smiles. “When we do it, güey, it’s not going to be in front of an audience.”

“Bueno.”

“Because I’m going to eat you alive,” she says. “You’ll see, guarrito.” His pija climbs even higher. He has to swallow just to say, “Ah sí?” She grins and gives him a skeptical, sideways look. “The little soldier, no?” And then she takes his hand and slaps his hair into his palm. “I cut off your tail!”

She picks up her coffee and walks back to the chairs against the wall and primly sits herself down.

She sits in silence a moment while he tries to compose himself in the chair, and then she astonishes him again with her frankness: “The only question is where. We can’t do it where I live, not with all my brothers around. Your ship?”

“Olvídalo. Here. In the middle of the night.”

“Está bien.” She shrugs. “If there’s nowhere else.”

“Vos, Joaquina,” he says after a moment. “If you ever come here alone at night and those hijos de puta are out there, whatever you do, don’t give them any of your mouthiness.” He pauses, he was about to tell her they’re murderers, but he doesn’t want to terrify her. “I know how you are, Joaquina. But be careful with them. They’re dangerous.”

Esteban leaves the salon that morning before Gonzalo has arrived, but he’s arranged to come back in the evening, so that he, Joaquina, and Gonzalo can make some plans, try to figure out where he can live, where he might look for work. Before leaving, he took off his new sweater and T-shirt, folded them, and put them on a shelf in back. He’s wearing his old clothes. He doesn’t want to get his sweater dirty: he’s going back to the ship. In his elation, he’s conceived a plan, not well thought out yet, of confronting Capitán Elias to try to collect his pay, formally quit even. With the more than a thousand dollars he’s owed, Joaquina says he could easily rent a room and not even have to share it like she still shares hers with one of her brothers. If only he can think of some way of pressuring Capitán Hijueputa, something to threaten him with.

He’s on his way back to the waterfront when he sees the truck parked on a side street, alongside a corner butcher shop. Its rear doors are open, and inside it’s full of giant slabs of beef. Entire sides of beef, legs and thighs, marbled with fat, hang from the roof inside, and against the back are long racks of ribs that look like bloody, grotesquely wrenched piano keyboards. The only person he sees is a morena woman pushing a baby stroller on the opposite sidewalk, far down at the end of the street. An aluminum-sheeted side door in the butcher shop’s concrete wall stands open a crack. Maybe they’re inside lingering over coffee. He’d promised himself not to steal anymore but feels now as if he’s soaring on spirit and luck towards an act of duty. If anyone comes out he’ll just drop it and run like crazy: he leaps up into the back of the truck, positions himself under a hanging leg and thigh, pushing up against it with his back and hands until the wire comes unhooked and the side of beef falls down onto his back while he grabs and wrestles it onto his shoulder. He jumps down from the truck onto the pavement with the enormous slab of beef over his shoulder, both hands wrapped around the shank just over the hoof, and starts walking.

WHEN MARK BOARDS THE
URUS
, THE FIRST THING HE SEES IS A WHOLE SIDE
of beef on the deck with seagulls all over it: red and fat-marbled, a wire hook over the hoof. Just lying there, like it fell out of the sky, and gulls stripping pieces of fat away in their beaks, stretching their black-tipped wings, pecking at one another and at the hunk of cow, screeching and laughing, flapping up into the sky, landing, spattering the beef with shit. Miracle is even more stunned by the sight than he is, barking, charging it, and dodging back, while the gulls shriek and flutter up, hovering over the dog and the beef, soaring and circling. And then some of the crew are standing around the side of beef, flapping their arms up at the gulls and shouting in Spanish and others pushing Miracle away and Mark’s asking where it came from and “Qué pasa?” but they’re pulling him towards the deckhouse and into the cabins, saying something about Bernardo.

They lead him into one of the dingy cabins where he never goes, and he sees the kid who supposedly fought in a war sitting cross-legged with his chin in his hands by the mattress the old man is stretched out on, the old man naked from the waist down, dirty gauze bandages heaped around his legs, one leg swollen and discolored and covered with oozing liquid sores. There’s a putrid smell. The old man’s eyes roll blankly, his lips look blistered and dry. He’s shivering and shaking. And the kid is standing in front of him now, screaming something, screaming,
“Hospital.”
Other words and that one word over and over,
“hospital!”
And something else is strange, so strange that he stands there pondering it a moment, as if he’s wondering where he’s seen the kid before, and then he realizes what it is, the kid has a new haircut.

“Sí!” says Mark. “Sí. OK!” And he walks out of the cabin and onto the deck. The side of beef isn’t there anymore. They’ve carried it away
somewhere, and Miracle is sniffing and licking at the spot where it had been lying. His hands are trembling and his heart is thudding with fear. What’s he going to do? Well, he has to get the old man to a hospital. He has to, doesn’t he? What, Elias would want to just leave him there? It’s a burn, probably an infection, hospital can cure that, and then the old man’ll talk, and they’ll be in deepest shit. What’s the alternative, wait for him to die and dump him in the harbor? Not even Elias—Elias is out in L.A., it’s not his decision.

The big smiley guy, though he’s not smiling now, has carried Bernardo out on deck in his arms, they’ve pulled these big, baggy underpants onto him. And the kid with the haircut is screaming at him again and shoves him up against the side of the deckhouse and Mark grabs the kid’s hands off his chest and pushes them down and screams, “Get your fucking hands off of me! I’m taking him to the hospital. Carry him down to the car!” He points and shouts, “The car! We’re going to the hospital!”

And Gold Tooth is trying to calm the kid with the haircut. And he sees that the kid’s shoulder, his dirty outer T-shirt, is bloodstained and slicked down with grease, a few little bits of fat clinging to the fabric; the sight almost makes him retch.

Mark leads the way down the ladder, the big guy carrying the old man and all the others and Miracle following him to the pier and the car. He opens the door, pulls out the groceries, sets the bags down on the pier, and adjusts the passenger seat so it’s all the way back.

“Put him in there!” The big guy and Barbie lay Bernardo into the front seat, and Mark goes around to the other door, calls, “Miracle, get in!” and the dog climbs into the back and Mark gets in behind the wheel. The kid with the haircut wants to go.

“No!” shouts Mark. “There’s no room!” Well, there isn’t. “I’m taking him right to the emergency room, they’ll carry him in!” He looks up at the kid almost pleadingly. “We’re going right to the emergency room. Everything’s going to be OK!”

They seem to understand. They fall silent now, standing around the car, almost all of them, watching.

“I’m going to the hospital now, OK?” And he looks from face to face. “OK?” He shuts the door and starts the car and drives off with the old man prostrate and silent and his horrible stench; he rolls down his window, lights a cigarette.

Where to? Doesn’t know any Brooklyn hospitals, doesn’t have any idea where one rs. A hospital that takes indigents. A Manhattan hospital. That’s better, get him far away from the ship. As if then it will take longer for the shit to come down. As if the shit that comes down can get stuck in traffic trying to get across the Brooklyn Bridge too.