The Ordinary Seaman (46 page)

THE HOSPITAL IS SO OVERCROWDED THAT DR. OFORI, FROM GHANA, WITH A
trim, black beard and a coppery, bald head, spends half his shift making his rounds in gurney-crowded corridors like this one. Now he stands over the blankly staring old man on the gurney—yet another anonymous indigent, dirty, with messy, sweat-matted hair and stubbled chin, well shaped though smudged and fungused bare feet, and a jungle tiger’s long toenails. And he starts shouting in a commanding baritone that rises querulously with outraged emphasis, and brings exhausted nurses running, “How long has this patient been lying here? No one has even cleaned his leg! There is dead tissue here all the way down to the bone! Clearly an infection has formed, I see signs of gangrene, of clostridium! This man’s leg is rotting, and he has just been left to lie here! The infection may have already entered his bloodstream! Is this a hospital or a charnel house!” And then he notices. He waves a hand over the staring eyes. He checks the pulse, and drops the cold hand. “Take this man down to the morgue,” he says, his voice flat with drained fury. Another corpse destined for Potter’s Field, the indigents’ cemetery on Hart Island. God speed you, old man. And Dr. Ofori, trembling, moves on to the next gurney, thinking, Whichever God that might be.

WHEN THE NIGHTS BEGIN TO FALL BELOW FREEZING, THE CREW
drag their mattresses and blankets into the iron cave of the galley and mess. Every night, in the mess, they light fires inside a rusted barrel sheared in half. The weathered scraps of wood gathered from the ruins, paint and creosote scabbed, burn slowly, smokily, spitting and popping: instead of flowing up and out through the open porthole the barrel sits under, the smoke often spreads over the sleeping and trying-to-sleep crew, causing coughing and cursing.

“Putísima madre, saca esa bestia jodida de aquí,” Cabezón suddenly shouts out one night, as if it’s just come to him in a dream, the revelation that they don’t always have to put up with the barrel. From then on, almost nightly, after the fire has peaked, someone gets up and drags it spitting and fuming out on deck, burning his fingers, cursing, stamping back in through the cold. No one sleeps much, or well. No one really has for months.

Whenever Esteban comes back to the ship in the mornings, he changes into his old clothes, he doesn’t want to get his few new ones dirty. Esteban now has a wool jacket, with red and black checks, bought secondhand, and a wool cap to pull over his head. He has a new blanket; he dragged his mattress into the mess too, but when he comes back to the ship, usually during the day, he still sleeps in his cabin, on the mattress that used to be Bernardo’s. Esteban has a night-shift job in a small chair factory. And he has a novia, la Joaquina: he’s saving his money to live with his novia. But he spends some of his money on the crew, bringing food, sacks of potatoes and rice and beans, and, claro, he spends some on his novia. He brought some old sweaters from a church charity to the ship for those without sweaters. And bought Vicks VapoRub and a bottle of aspirin
for those with colds. Esteban spends too much of his money, he doesn’t earn nearly enough to provide for a crew of fourteen. The chair fábrica is owned by a Colombian, and he makes a little more than two dollars an hour there. But it’s risky, because if the immigration authorities ever find it, nearly everyone who works there will go to prison to wait to be deported. Esteban never brings la Joaquina to the ship.

Esteban has many nicknames now, a new one almost every day: El Patrón. El Millionario. El Capitán. Don Joaquina. El Manicurista. El Niño Mimado, the pampered kid, or just El Mimado. Cazapatos, duck hunter, especially whenever El Barbie wants to prove that he still can’t take a little joke.

It’s been eight days since Capitán Elias last came out to the ship. So, at last, it seems they’ve been abandoned once and for all. El Capitan has taken his defeat home to his wife and new baby. Pues, what now? They’ve been waiting to see what happens next. It seems unlikely that a ship can just sit there forever without somebody coming to assert some authority over the hulk. The generator and compressor are still down on the pier. They’ve been trying to come up with a plan. At least the ship is a place to sleep, Esteban has shown them that. Until yesterday morning, when John the Ship Visitor came, everyone but los drogados, the paint solvent sniffers—who can barely hold a coherent conversation anymore—has been talking about trying to find a job, the way Esteban has.

He never brings his novia to the ship, though one afternoon, a few weeks ago, he led everybody off the ship and everybody thought that at last they were going into Brooklyn to meet la Joaquina, get free haircuts and jobs. But they didn’t go far, only to the futbol field near los proyectos, and she wasn’t there. They stood on the sidelines watching a bunch of muchachos in uniforms playing futbol, and two referees running around in striped shirts. Most of them turned out to be guanacos, from El Salvador, though there were some catrachos and chapines too. Bueno, Centroamericanos, and Esteban was friendly with some of the players on one of the teams. There were some women there too, selling and cooking pupusas on a stove they’d set up, and some older men sitting
there in chairs, drinking rum. The futbol field was lined with trees full of brown leaves, the trees looking like the withered remnants of a burnt forest against the emptiness of the harbor behind, and the sky was full of wind-swirled leaves and litter. The crew stood on the sidelines watching the game on that weedy, pocked dirt field with the wind blowing dirt in everyone’s face, and cheered with so much passion for the team Esteban’s friends were on that they all felt depressed when they lost. Then they shared some pupusas that the women donated, the tortilla dough around the filling not quite as chewy as at home, with cabbage and salsa picante on top. They felt a little embarrassed by the way the futbolistas in their satiny uniforms and fancy long haircuts and the women and especially the children stood around staring at them: as if they were monkeys in a zoo, fighting over a few pupusas. The men sitting in chairs apparently didn’t want to share their rum, not even with José Mateo, the cook, who asked. One dollar, just for a little glass of rum, they told him. Stingy fucking guanacos. And Esteban said he wasn’t going to spend half an hour gluing seats to chair frames just so José Mateo could have a few drops of rum. Then they all walked back to the ship, feeling glad to know there were so many Centroamericanos living in Brooklyn and to have met some of them, and to have been treated so kindly.

Sometimes Cebo, El Buzo, or Caratumba goes into Brooklyn with Esteban, usually to buy potatoes or beans at the supermercado. Esteban never lets El Barbie, strong as he is, come with him to buy and carry back potatoes and whatever else. Pues, they all take little walks off the ship now, never going very far, embarrassed by their appearance and having no money to spend, and still a bit frightened of the neighborhood. These brief sojourns have increased everyone’s awe of Esteban’s resourcefulness and luck, because none of them ever meets anyone who seems even remotely friendly.

Pínpoyo, El Tinieblas, Roque Balboa, and blind-without-his-glasses El Faro have been wasting away from sniffing paint solvent fumes. (After the night Cebo punched him in the mouth, Canario never sniffed paint solvent again.) They don’t even try to hide it anymore. They
walk around with their little soaked rags in their hands, holding them over their noses. They say it keeps them from feeling hunger and cold. It’s best just to ignore them. Because if you try to talk to any of them now, they talk such crazy mierda, even poor little El Faro, and it just makes everyone feel angry and sad.

The other day the wind brought Cebo a woman’s hair: one long, fine strand of blonde hair landed against his burly chest, he looked down and found it sleeping there. Before he became a pathetic ghost of his former self from paint solvent fumes, maybe that hair would have chosen Pínpoyo. Typical of a beautiful woman’s hair, to choose the handsomest cabrón left!—that was the chiste. That Cebo refuses to lend the hair to anyone is another one. He calls the hair La Gringita. Cebo keeps his gringita inside a piece of plastic wrap in his pocket and is always taking her out and looking at her, running her through his fingers, putting her in his mouth, pinching La Gringita just below her end to tickle the inside of his nostril with her, trying to make himself sneeze. Who knows what he does with her at night, ties her around his pija no doubt.

Esteban has friends at a restaurant in Brooklyn who send food sometimes, mainly beans to put over the rice, sometimes a couple of roasted chickens, or some pork. And la Joaquina has a brother who tends the flowers, fruits, and vegetables outside an all-night grocery store owned by Coreanos. It seems they throw out food there as soon as it gets even a little bit old, and sometimes Esteban drops by at the right hour and, if his novia’s brother can get away with it because the Coreanos aren’t watching, he stuffs as much as he can into a large plastic bag and brings it back to the ship. On Panzón’s birthday, Esteban even brought him wilting gardenias. Though nothing Esteban has brought back since, or even before, rivaled the feast of the cow. A whole leg and thigh of bloody beef, sawed and hacked apart by Cabezón the Butcher with engine room tools, roasted out on deck over a bonfire, puta, how they stuffed themselves that night, the very night of the day Mark took Bernardo to the hospital—which was the last time the crew saw either
of them, el Primero or the old waiter, back in October, almost six weeks ago. El Capitán drove Bernardo directly from the hospital to the airport, pues, there wasn’t even time to come and say good-bye.

They’d never realized how solely responsible Bernardo was for keeping order on the ship until he went home to Nicaragua. Bernardo used to sweep and mop everything. Now there’s wind-borne litter and leaves and garbage all over the slippery deck, everything covered, especially in the mornings, with a skin of ice. Bernardo used to do their laundry, but lately nobody has the initiative or the energy to go down to the pier and wash clothes in ice water.

The gulls circle the ship laughing and shitting all over and landing on deck to fight over garbage, and once one even swooped down and grabbed a sardine right out of Panzón’s fingers—one of the last sardines, from one of the last rusted cans.

But one night, about two weeks ago, Canario went out to piss at the rail and came running back into the mess, where everyone was trying to sleep without choking to death on the smoke from the fire in the barrel, shouting in his high, twittery voice, The rats are leaving! And everyone, even los drogados, staggered out on deck to watch the rats leaving the ship because finally the ship was too cold even for them. It was an unforgettable sight: so many rats swarming around the gunwales and mooring pipes, while over the side their black silhouettes emerged one by one from the mooring pipes and descended the mooring lines to the pier in such orderly progression they could have been tiny circus elephants on parade, holding each other’s tails in their trunks. Watching the rats leave like that, they’d all felt filled with the same revulsion. Instead of a relieved sense of release from a plague, the spectacle of the rats departing the
Urus
left them nearly speechless with shame and fear. As if the rats had been
their
fault and now were escaping from inside of
them
, and not from the ship. So no one even cheered, or said very much at all.

Though el Capitán was happy to hear the news. He’d predicted, back in the summer, that the rats would leave once it got too cold. That
was one of the last times el Capitán came to the ship, and he smiled and said, “Well, that saves us some money, eh, güeyes? At least we won’t have to pay exterminators.” But he must have known by then that he’d soon be abandoning the ship too, maldito hijo de puta.

Except some rats don’t mind a refrigerated ship. Now and then, they still hear a rat scratching along behind a bulkhead, or spot one splashing through the bog at the bottom of the hold, or squirming through garbage; and you still can’t leave food out. So there are still some rats, which is why every time they ask Esteban why he never brings his novia to the ship, he says, “Qué? With all these rats? What if she gets bitten?”

Esteban brought a pair of barber scissors to the ship. Everyone took turns sitting on a crate on deck, while José Mateo tried to cut their hair. José Mateo is not much of a barber, and they ended up looking not much better, though with their hair at least shorter. Everyone’s hair was left lying there on the deck and the wind carried it away. The chiste was that maybe one of Cebo’s hairs landed on La Gringita somewhere in Brooklyn. True love, eh?

Yesterday, early in the morning when most were still sleeping in the mess, after a night of icy rain and fanged winds, the coldest and wettest night yet, the few who were out on deck heard a voice calling up to them from the pier. And when they looked down over the rail, they saw a blue van parked there, and a tall gringo with reddish brown hair, wearing a pillowy green parka, standing there waving up at them.

They lowered the ladder, and he came up onto the icy deck: John, the Ship Visitor. He was clearly shocked by what he saw, by the condition of the ship and the crew. Esteban wasn’t onboard, he must have gone right from work to see la Joaquina, as he often does; he must not have wanted to walk back to the ship in the icy rain. They didn’t tell the Ship Visitor anything about Esteban and la Joaquina, or about Esteban’s illegal job in a chair fábrica. The Ship Visitor says he is not a policeman or government official, or anything like that. But they should be careful what they tell him, especially if it involves breaking any laws. The Ship Visitor brought them food and socks and plastic sheeting to
put over portholes and doors. He said he’d come to help them, that that’s his job.

The Ship Visitor had a strange conversation with José Mateo: Wasn’t he the older man a lady from Argentina had met down on the pier? Finally they realized, sí pues, that it must have been Bernardo the Ship Visitor was referring to. But Bernardo had never said anything about meeting anybody down on the pier, or anywhere else.