The Ordinary Seaman (52 page)

And he leaves the bathroom and crosses the big, empty space of the loft and looks out the window at the clean, snowy street, feeling the cold through the glass, listening to the cold-muffled shouts of teenagers, watching them having a snowball fight—a very
ironic
snowball fight, no doubt, given the character of the barrio. They’re still out there, on the ship, in the snow, all those poor güeyes. Where the fuck is Bernardo? Where did Mark really take him? How could he be dead? I keep waiting to see his
tunshi.
I’m wasting away with fright.

He turns and looks at his wife, her bare shoulder whitely smoldering above the slipped-down black robe, her long, twirly black hair falling over her chest, her head bent over the baby snuggling there.

“Kate, my sweet,” he says. And she looks up at him, with a slim smile, a tender, Madonna smile, of course. “I’m going to be a good father to Hector. I hope I will be. I’ll give it every effort, Kate. That’s one thing, being a father, that I’m never going to let you down on.”

And Kate’s dark eyes hold his for so long, so long, as if she knows that’s just what he needs, as if she’s drawing his fright out of him like
smoke with her own invulnerable gaze, as if she’s telling him with her eyes that of course he doesn’t have the evil eye; he feels a sob welling in his throat, though he never, ever weeps.

Kate says, “Oh honey, of course you will be.” Oh honey! He’s full of honey, not fright!

And he walks right up to Kate and takes the baby from her arms and holds him up in his little white jammies, his hands spread around his fragile little ribs, and he looks right into his tiny, squinty, unrecognizing, raisin eyes and he says:

“Be fearless, Hector. Be a big-hearted, fearless cabrón!”

FOR THE LAST TIME, ESTEBAN MAKES THE LONG WALK DOWN TO THE
waterfront and to the ship, his boots squeaking through the snow. When he comes into the lot behind the grain elevator, he realizes that the sound he’s been following from a long way off is the chugging of the generator on the pier. But the black Mazda isn’t parked there, nor is any other car. The generator’s yellow steel, locked shield has been crowbarred off, cables run from it up onto the darkened ship. He climbs the ladder and looking around the deck, sees no one. He looks into the mess, into the cabins, and sees no one, and follows the cables over the deck, behind the deckhouse, and sees them descending into the open hatch over the engine room, and hears the louder chugging coming up out of it, distinct from the noise of the generator on the pier. The open hatch is a square of soft, diffuse light. He looks down over the coamings and sees Cabezón, Canario, and Caratumba hurrying back and forth across the wet, leaf-strewn bottom of the engine room’s lower level, and José Mateo standing there beside them holding Elias and Mark’s yellow flashlight. There are a few of the plumber’s lamps hanging. He sees the rest of the crew arrayed along the catwalk, sitting and standing in dark shadows.

“Vos, we’re going home!” Tomaso Tostado shouts over the noise of the generator when Esteban has come into the engine room, onto the catwalk.

He sees the stereo that Elias and Mark had always kept locked up on the bridge set down on the catwalk too. The red eye is glowing, but you can’t hear anything for the noise. He looks dumbly at Tomaso Tostado, who now shouts, “You know about Bernardo?”

Esteban nods. And then Tomaso shouts, “That’s why we’re stealing this fucking ship! Get that hijo de puta capitán in even more trouble!”

Stealing the ship?

He sees Panzón laughing his lugubrious laugh, though he can’t hear him. And now Panzón shouts, “Cabezón thinks he can get this thing going. He’s built a bridge!”

“We’re going home!” shouts Tomaso Tostado again, laughing, his gold tooth glinting.

Cabezón is hot-wiring the engine. He’s built a bridge: bypassing their nonexistent main circuit breakers by wiring one of the ship’s generators directly to the copper bus bars at the back of the switchboard, connected to the smaller circuit breakers powering the pumps. Everything else on the ship that uses electricity will stay dead. He’s started up the engine room generator with power from the portable generator on the pier. Bypassing the main circuit breakers means that there’s no modulation of the amperage, the output of electricity is constant and uncontrolled. It could even start a big fire. But he thinks it will work. There’s still water in the boilers and tanks and easily enough fuel. Everything’s been properly maintained, the pipelines drained, we’ve tinkered with this thing for months. There
won’t
be a fire. It should take a few hours before the engine cranks over. Fuel pump settings set. The transfer pumps sending diesel fuel now to the settling tank, and then through the system until purified and heated to flash point. All he has to do now is go up into the control room and throw the lever. Eventually the rods will start moving up from the crankshaft, the pistons will fire off in order. And finally the propeller will begin to turn. A ship with no one at the controls and without any steering mechanism, with no one at the helm …

Now the uproar in the engine room is deafening, all along the catwalk they hold their hands over their ears, but no one leaves, even the solvent sniffers are mesmerized. This rhythmic, iron clanging and clatter. This entire iron cavern of a ship beginning to vibrate. And when Cabezón finally orders them out, they can even feel the icy deck vibrating under their feet as they cross it, sliding, falling, some of them charging down the ladder to the pier to undo the mooring lines, they’ll leave the lines trailing in the water. By the time they’re back on deck, the ship is already drifting away from the pier on the current.

They make their way up the foredeck to watch. Esteban stands at the rail, looking around at the cove, the ruins transformed by snow. The smashed pier extending from the old terminal, snow layered over its collapsed and broken slanting timbers, looks like a long line of Chinese writing against the black water.

Water rumbles against the ship’s faraway bottom, the whole ship seems to shiver and groan as the propeller begins to churn more than four hundred feet aft, beneath the stern. The ship moves forward, so indiscernibly at first it feels like a slight dizzy spell. But suddenly Esteban sees the pier sliding away behind them. And then the ship begins slowly to turn sideways inside the tide.

WHEN THE SHIP VISITOR COMES AROUND THE GRAIN ELEVATOR IN HIS VAN
, this is what he sees: an empty pier. The shock of that moment will remain inside him like a silent explosion forever. For a split second, he thinks that somehow some great and mysterious fraud has been perpetrated on him; the ship never had anything wrong with her, and has just sailed away. He glances in the side mirror at the graffitied walls of the grain elevator behind and then out across the gray-green water at the ship run aground, her immense, rusted prow driven up over the pilings and against the collapsed wooden terminal, the top of her mud-caked black propeller sticking up through the water. Her mooring lines dangling, and the accommodation ladder hanging down the hull like a broken prosthetic arm. He sees the wreckage and debris of the now utterly smashed old spice terminal’s pier floating in the water, driven up against pilings, bobbing around the hull. And on this now empty pier, he sees the generator with its shield torn open, cables running off it, across the pier, down into the water …

He gets out of the van and slowly begins to pick his way around the snow-covered ruins of the basin. When he reaches the other side, he stands beneath the immense wall of the prow, trying to comprehend the tidal wave that has somehow driven the ship up over the pilings. A drop ladder hangs from the rail midship, descending to the rubble. This ship, he thinks, already owes nearly fifty thousand dollars in berthing fees alone. And now the cost of hauling her out of here? She’ll bring in seventy thou, sixty-five, if she’s lucky, when she’s auctioned for scrap. They can say good-bye to their pay. Losers, a completely mediocre situation, I just don’t see how, Johnny, you can spend your life around people like that, complete dupes, people so incapable of helping themselves—that’s what Ariadne said the other night, when he was telling her the story of the
Urus
and her abandoned crew and the kid who’d found a novia.

He calls up, and no one answers. He waits awhile. And then he grabs onto the drop ladder, and with much leaping, grunting, and effort finally hoists himself up onto its bottom rung and begins to climb to the rail. The slanted deck is treacherous, and he makes his way along it clutching the rail with both hands, calling out. And then he sees one of the crew, one of the smaller kids who always look worse than even the others do, sitting against the back of the deckhouse, sobbing, a little rag clutched in his hand.

“Qué pasó?” he asks.

The kid squints up at him through his small red eyes, his dirty little face tear streaked. He shakes his head.

“He wouldn’t take me,” he says breathlessly, and then he starts sobbing again, falling over on his side.

He goes around to the side of the deckhouse, past the plastic sheeting stretched over the mess doorway, looks in through the one open porthole, and sees the tattooed kid and two more—the kind of handsome, hollow-eyed guy who’d raved at him in front of the gangway—sitting against the wall, blankets wrapped around them.

“Qué pasó?” he asks. “Where’d everyone go?”

One of the kids responds with some sort of unintelligible muttering. And then he hears someone calling to him from above, and he looks up at the wing, and sees the older guy, the slit-eyed cook, waving to him.

He climbs the switchback stairs four flights to the bridge, and when he goes into the bare wheelhouse, he sees the kid with a big head stretched out on a mattress with his hands clasped behind his head, his arms and face and even recently donated clothes smeared with black lubricating grease. And the cook is standing there with one hand grabbing onto the helmsman’s wheel.

The pumpkin-headed kid on the mattress grins at him. And the Ship Visitor demands to know what has happened, and the kid tells him, while the cook just stands there chortling through his teeth. “We didn’t get very far,” says Cabezón. “Pero, bueno, we didn’t do too badly, no?”

“And where’s everybody else?” the Ship Visitor asks.

“They went with Esteban,” says José Mateo. “They all decided to take a chance, and if it doesn’t work, then they can still go home penniless
later, no? He has friends in the city who’ve offered to put them all up for a while. The drug addicts wanted to go too, but Esteban wouldn’t take them, pues. He said he couldn’t do that to his friends in the city.” The cook shrugs. “Me? I’m too old for that. I’ll go home for a little rest, and then I’ll look for another job.”

“Los drogados.” The mechanic who built a bridge to bypass the circuit breakers grins. “Pobres. Cómo sufren, no?”

And the cook impassively says, “They’re suffering, sí pues.”

“Cómo suuuuufren,”
the mechanic quietly sings out, and then he snaps his tongue against the back of his teeth.

“But what about you?” the Ship Visitor asks him.

“Me?” says Cabezón. “I have to go home. I’m getting married, pues.”

Riding the PATH train back to Manhattan and Ariadne from the Seafarers’ Institute that night the Ship Visitor replays that moment of utter surprise over and over in his mind: driving onto the pier and seeing the ship not there, and then looking over and seeing the ship run aground. And he thinks, Well, I’ve sure as hell got a story for her tonight … And I’ll begin it like this: Think of a pier, Ariadne, any old pier, maybe one as old as the century, but paved and sturdy. And no ship berthed there. And then think of what this so concrete object, a pier, represents, evokes: All the ships that have ever berthed there and all the ships that ever will, and all the faraway ports those ships have come from and are headed to, and all the hidden lives on those ships. And then think of that pier again when it’s empty. A pier with no ship berthed there. An emptiness, but a certain kind of emptiness. Kind of like love without lovers. Because in a way that’s what love’s like, Ariadne, like that pier, and you and I, our love, our love is just one of the ships that have called there. And this Esteban, his is another … Well, that’s what I think of when I stand on an empty pier. A ship visitor’s gotta find his poetry where he can get it, right? And today, when I drove onto that pier in the van to collect that abandoned crew, the ship was gone.

IN NOVEMBER OF 1982 A NEWS STORY BURIED IN THE INNER PAGES OF THE
New York
Daily News
caught my eye: “Sailors abandoned” was the headline. The reporter’s name was Suzanne Golubski, and her story reported: “Seventeen abandoned sailors have been living in a floating hellhole on the Brooklyn waterfront for months, aboard a rat-infested mystery ship without heat, plumbing or electricity, an international seamen’s organization charged yesterday… The sailors had been lured here from Central America with the promise of good wages but instead found themselves abandoned, unpaid and trapped on the ship of horrors … When they ventured off the ship to escape the nightmare situation … a number of the men were hit over the head with pipes and beaten up by neighborhood thugs.” And so on. The ship was registered under a flag of convenience, and the owner’s identity was unknown.

I was just back from a nearly two-year stay in Central America, balancing fiction writing with journalism and living in Manhattan, so it was the Central American connection that first drew my attention. A friend and I immediately drove out to the ship.

The crew had already been evacuated and were being temporarily housed at the Seamen’s Church Institute’s facilities in lower Manhattan. But when we reached the pier there was an automobile parked there, and the ship’s ladder was down. We went up onboard and found a middle-aged man in a blue windbreaker leaning on the rail, smoking. The man approached and asked what we wanted. I answered that we were interested in buying the ship. He shrugged and said that he was just the ship’s chief engineer, hired to oversee its repair. We explored the ship, and a while later he approached us again and confided that he
could
in fact sell us the ship and asked how much we’d be willing to pay. I must have answered with a ridiculous sum: he told us we had to leave the ship.