The Ordinary Seaman (5 page)

Capitán Elias said, “The
Urus,
I have to acknowledge, was delivered to its new owner in less than ideal shape. But Mark and I wouldn’t have accepted our commissions, hard as maritime work is to come by these days, if we hadn’t felt confident about this ship. The engine, the hull and holds, the cargo gear, this is all in excellent condition. If it hadn’t been for that fire…” and he held out his hands and shrugged. “As soon as she’s repaired, we’ll sail, with the usual complement of additional officers and crew, who have already been hired and are waiting for us. So this is
our
job, caballeros. The
Urus
is a ship we’re all going to feel proud of.”

From far out in the harbor came the long blast of a ship’s horn, and Capitán Elias paused, seemingly relishing the sound and then the silence, suddenly interrupted by the rising and subsiding yauling of cats coming from somewhere out there amidst the rubble of the cove. Miracle whined. And el Capitán said:

“One more thing. I know you’re all tired and want to get to bed, but I think this has to be explained. The
Urus,
of course, has a Panamanian registry …”

And he told them to think of it like this:
onboard
they were in Panama, contracted seamen protected by that country’s sovereign laws.
Onshore
they were in the United States, where, of course, for the next four days, until their seamen’s transit visas expired, they were perfectly
legal. But they all knew what rough places port cities could be, and this was one of the most dangerous, especially once they left the port yard and entered the streets around “los proyectos.” They didn’t know how often the police found murdered seamen on the sidewalks and in the alleys or in abandoned warehouses or floating down some harbor channel at dawn, stripped of wallets and papers, no way for the police to know who they were or where they came from or how to contact their families, they ended up buried in an anonymous pit on a paupers’ cemetery island in the harbor while their ships sailed away without them, their crewmates and officers probably assuming their missing mates had just jumped ship, certainly a common enough circumstance.

Capitán Elias said, “Oiga! If you want to jump ship, try your hand at life in New York City, go right ahead, I’m not going to try to stop you.” And then he laughed, one of those brief, lugubrious titters. “But please leave us a note or tell somebody if you do, OK? Just so we’ll know what happened.”

Then el Capitán quickly translated what he’d just said for Mark, and Mark grinned down at his shoes, shaking his head. Some of the crew, including Esteban, forced themselves to smile too.

“Los proyectos,” said Capitán Elias, “son problemáticos.” The projects ran parallel to this end of the waterfront, on the other side of the wall beyond those trees over there, block upon block of government housing for the very poorest people, with different heavily armed drug gangs controlling different blocks of buildings and stretches of street. They didn’t like strangers wandering through, said el Capitán, though of course they saw a foreign seaman as the Golden Goose, wads of shore leave money stuffed into his pockets and not knowing where in hell he was going. Capitán Elias said he would avoid los proyectos entirely if he were them. Drugs onboard, of course, would result in immediate termination of employment. And if you pick up a woman, be sure to use a condom. He looked forward to six months of profitable tramping, hopefully more, who knew where they’d be headed, all over the Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Mediterranean, ports a lot livelier, with a lot more to offer and a lot cheaper, than Brooklyn’s.

Then Capitán Elias said that was enough for now, Mark would show them to their cabins. And Mark switched on his flashlight and began to walk towards the deckhouse, the dog following.

As soon as Bernardo and Esteban were alone in their sweltering cabin, the viejo said, “This isn’t a miracle. It’s a disaster.” Later, when the old waiter would adopt the stray cat and teach it to sit like a dog by his side while he sat at his daily chore of sifting and plucking roaches and roach shit from rancid rice, he would even counterbalancingly name the cat that, Desastres. But Miracle would live on, and Desastres would end both disastrously and somewhat miraculously …

Mark’s flashlight had briefly illuminated a scarred steel box with paint-peeling bulkheads, mattresses laid on the floor, bedding folded on top. Their deck-level cabin, like all the cabins and everything else in the first two stories of the deckhouse anyway, had been stripped of all furnishing or decoration. Even watertight doors and many of the porthole covers had been removed. In the galley and mess el Primero had beamed his flashlight into the dense darkness of an iron cave, showing the cook and waiter a butane gas two-burner stove on a table, some pots and pans and utensils, a hefty wood-paneled water tank mounted on a high steel shelf.

They heard the Mazda start up and drive off the pier, taking their officers and Miracle back to wherever it was they spent their nights. Mosquitoes whined around Esteban’s head.

“El Capitán wears a wedding ring,” said Bernardo as they made up their beds, both sweating profusely in the airless dark. Esteban, kneeling, leaned back for a moment and laid his palm into a warm puddle where the dog had drooled.

“They both seem buena onda,” he said, furtively wiping his hand along the bottom of his mattress. They seemed cheerful, sincere, no?

Their porthole held a broken slice of dirty pane, though no breeze or soft ray of diluted light penetrated its open half. Bernardo pushed the porthole cover all the way open. Then they lay on their beds, unable to see each other. Esteban felt the longing for sleep throbbing through his body, but his mind stayed wide awake. How strange, he thought.
This morning we were all in Nicaragua or Honduras, and now here we are, left alone on a ship with no lights or plumbing on the other side of the world, in the middle of nothing, in
Bruklin,
Nueva York, not far from people supposedly disposed to murder us for money we don’t have. He listened for some far-off sound of malignant life from los proyectos, but what he mainly heard was the viejo’s dilapidated breathing and heavy sighs.

After a while Bernardo, as if he were talking out loud sadly and only to himself, said, “But luck is this way, verdad? It’s not for everybody, no?”

“When the ship is fixed, we’ll sail,” said Esteban vehemently. “We’re still getting paid. Vos, we’re getting paid to work, y qué?” It was stifling! And the mosquitoes!

“This ship is a broken eggshell,” repeated the viejo flatly. “It’s ready for scrap. No lights or plumbing or fans! And el Capitán, I see no capitán there, he’s just a deluded niñote, with the air of a pervert no less.”

“Why would they have us come all the way up here to work on a ship that’s a broken eggshell? Where is the logic in that… Bernardo?”

A pervert? He couldn’t bear him! He shut his eyes and then opened them again and stared into the darkness and didn’t even look over when he heard the old waiter’s quiet, wheezy weeping. Why did they have to share a cabin! He clenched his teeth, listened to the silence that wasn’t silence at all, to faint scrapings and pattering through the fathomless expanse of floating iron—iron and not, hijueputa, a floating eggshell!

Well, at least the viejo isn’t a pato, he thought. His tíos had warned him, but he already knew that ships’ crews were supposed to be full of hardened patos. Years of long, lonely voyages leaving them twisted, still wanting women on land, boys at sea. A muchacho like you has to be ready to fight like a cornered tiger in defense of his
physical integrity,
his tío Beny had warned. Watch out for the patos buying you a beer in the mess, dropping a sleeping pill in. But it didn’t look like there was going to be any beer for sale on this ship—and no one had ever even been to sea before, except the cook and this weepy old waiter.
Chocho,
viejo! Tranquílase, you’ll get your chicken incubators!

In the morning Esteban was the last to wake. He went out on deck and found the rest of the crew gathered at the portside rail, drinking the instant coffee that José Mateo and Bernardo had brewed in the mess and served in plastic cups. There was nothing to eat, Bernardo informed Esteban in a portentous tone, because rats had gotten into the carton of donuts their officers had left them the night before. The coffee burned their fingers through the plastic, so everyone was gingerly balancing his cup on the rail while they stared out in appalled, sleepy silence at the blighted landscape surrounding them. A pile-lined earthen barrier, topped with gravel, enclosed one side of the cove, but to portside the cove was lined with the abandoned, wrecked shells of old warehouses, offices, and shipping terminals—one terminal, its blue paint eroded by age and salt, looked like a giant circus tent, sky showing through its broken slats, faded lettering in English, French, and Arabic over its broad doorways: “Wienstock Spice Co.” They saw gulls balanced on one leg atop the stumps of collapsed piers. To stern stood the defunct grain elevator with its cracked, discolored whitewashed facade, and the rubble of the old grain terminal behind.

N
OW, ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN NIGHTS LATER, ESTEBAN LIES
awake shivering in two rank T-shirts and jeans and rotted socks under his thin blanket on his mattress on the floor, thinking, Oye? What if he just takes the lifeboat? Rows away somewhere. Vos, like that Dutchman who fled Corinto in a rowboat. Row where? Row away or run away. Where?

The cabin’s mine-shaft darkness hides the viejo, but Esteban can hear him sleeping or waiting to sleep, his steady but softly sputtering breathing like barely percolating coffee in an old enamel pot. Often Bernardo sleeps with his eyes open, like a mule. The October night’s damp chill fills the pitch dark cabins like wet smoke. But only Esteban, though he doesn’t realize it, has the beginnings of an asthmatic respiratory condition, caused by so many months of breathing paint fumes and solvents and powdered rust and steel and wet weather and bad, sparse food and that soaring September fever and croupy cough. He doesn’t wheeze, his throat doesn’t close, and though at times his breathing feels terrifyingly shallow, he exhales freely, so it isn’t that kind of asthma. Every time he starts to drift off to sleep, a rebellious spasm in his breathing wakes him to quivering lungs that feel full of cold, bright light, spreading from there into all his nerve endings with a tingling phosphorescence …

Chilled nerves aglow and tingling, he thinks, Tonight I escape. Then, hijueputa, why doesn’t he get up and move? He needs to visualize this escape in a practical and encouraging way, except he’s missing the details, he might as well be planning an escape into the Milky Way as into the city; and so it’s just another insomniac fantasy, not even soothing, though few of his nighttime fantasies, thoughts, scenarios are ever soothing. Where will he go in the city?

And what does Bernardo see, sleeping with his eyes open? Happy things or sorrowful? Though Esteban can’t see him in the dark of the
cabin, the viejo sleeps and dreams that way now, eyeballs like glimmerless frogs’ heads protruding from black, still water in a jungle-canopied bog. Bernardo is dreaming that he’s in the officers’ saloon pantry on a ship steadily approaching a great port; he’s finished washing up the officers’ silverware, and now he’s laying bananas into a wicker basket for the morning. Though the engines have been slowed, the ship’s bulkheads vibrate from the propeller’s churning the too shallow water of the channel. Tugs bump up alongside, softly jolting the ship. He lays out a new tablecloth on the officers’ dining table, sets it for breakfast. The officers’ smoking lounge, the gleaming galley are both deserted. He steps out into the corridor, and hearing the sound of dominoes slapped down on a tabletop coming from the crew’s mess, looks inside, sees dominoes arrayed over a table, four empty chairs. He climbs the stairs to his cabin to change for a night onshore, seeing no one. He goes outside onto a rear deck for a smoke, and glancing up at the bridge wings, he’s surprised to see no one there either, no harbor pilot or shipmaster or officers. He climbs the steps to a wing and finds the bridge completely empty too, wheelhouse panels and radar screens glowing, no one manning the quivering wheel, a lamp on over the nautical charts table and no one there. Directly beneath the wing a tug, at a skewed angle like a feeding pilot fish, churns alongside the hull. A long, narrowing, double row of red and white buoy lights marks the channel through the placid, wide waters leading to the city illuminated on the horizon… When the ship is finally settled alongside a pier, he sees mooring lines flung out from the deck, snaking through the air, but he sees no one tossing them, no one on the pier to catch them. Cargo cranes like long-necked, petrified dinosaurs rising in the quiet night over warehouse sheds, the cluttered yard, but he sees no stevedores, no parked vehicles that could belong to waiting shipping agents or immigration officials. Yet when he goes down on deck and descends the accommodation ladder to the pier, he finds a yellow taxi waiting there. There’s a driver at least, a moreno with a thick, wrinkled neck, though he never speaks or turns around to glance at him as they drive into the city, nor is there any reflection of the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. They drive through the poor people’s neighborhoods beyond the port, darkened, shabby buildings and streets, no
traffic, no one out walking. Suddenly they pass a small, whitewashed building with strung lightbulbs around the door and along the roof, the parking lot crowded with milling moreno men in white T-shirts holding paper cups and bottles in brown bags, and then it’s dark and deserted again, and there isn’t even a driver anymore, the taxi is driving itself, the driver must have gotten out to join the other men back there. Now quiet panic floods his chest. The taxi pulls over to a curb, and he opens the door, gets out, and the driverless taxi drives off. He’s on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans; of course he’s been here before. But everything looks closed, though here and there he sees illuminated neon signs protruding over the sidewalk, colors softened by the mist hanging over the street and the streetlights’ wreaths of silvery vapor. He walks down the long row of shuttered restaurants, bars, stores, signs displaying nude women. He feels neither happy nor sad now, neither frightened nor at ease. But he’s glad he didn’t have to pay for the taxi. And he has an adamant erection. The ship leaves in a few hours, he doesn’t have much time to enjoy his time onshore, that’s what he’s thinking. He finds a bar, its front open to the street, glowing beer signs, a jukebox, racked glasses and bottles behind the long, empty bar. He sits at the bar, but there’s no bartender. He sees himself sitting there in his clean, fresh clothes, with this unsated and hopeless though nonetheless pleasing erection in his pants, his expression satisfied and patient over having found at least this one place still open. After a while he gets up and goes behind the bar and pours himself a draft beer and carries it back to his stool and sits there slowly drinking it, looking out at the graying, neon-tinged street. He realizes he’s on the very verge of comprehending something, that there is something he’s always believed to be true that in fact is not, he feels it in his chest, this new yet still wordless certainty suspensefully dawning …