Refiner's Fire (39 page)

H
E ROLLED
south into dotted desert flashing with the larcenous grins of gila monsters. The track bed was nearly gone, necessitating a pace slow enough to permit hopping on and off for exercise and pleasure. Instead of panning to the east at the base of New Mexico, the train halted on a siding at a deserted crossing point near the border. In the bright light of a silver midnight, a triple-edged party of U.S. Border Patrol, Mexican Federals, and railroad bulls began to work down the long line of dusty cars, opening every door. At first, Marshall didn't know what to do. He had no desire to travel into Mexico, and yet, to set off in the desert without water was not attractive either. Finally, he decided to go with the train, and he hid in the brush until they passed.

The diesel started up in oily sparking convulsions, and Marshall headed into the Mexican desert in the deep of night. He could not believe that it was so brown and never-ending. For days the empty train beat south with hardly a stop. He ran out of food early on and there was no water anyway. Soon he was sallow and starved, with the complexion and demeanor of a hermit. The endless flats were most discouraging until, finally, he saw a palm. It looked as if it were dead from arthritis, but it was a palm. Then a few more appeared, and eventually he saw stagnant rivers and ragged fields bordered by uneven rows of banana trees. Marshall left the train for a minute to steal bananas, but the trees were stripped. Leaning out of the boxcar, he checked ahead for farmhouses. If one appeared in the distance, he jumped off the train and raced past the locomotive and its Mexican engineers (who seemed not to notice or care), until he came to the farmyard. With only two or three minutes to spare, he shot out the few words of Spanish he knew, trying to communicate his urgent need for food.
“Frijoles! Tacos! Enchilada! Tortilla!”
he screamed loudly, as if he were introducing himself to someone who could not hear. Faced with a breathless American waving his arms up and down, reciting a list of foods, and pointing to a handful of U.S. money, the farmers wife and her sweet smooth-faced nut-brown children were thrown into panic. The white-suited peon began his dash from nearby fields to confront the intruder, and only once out of a dozen times were food ready, the train slow enough, the peasants sharp enough, and a container present, so that Marshall got a substantial meal. He ate it with his fingers while his legs dangled over the dust and the steel wheels.

Mountains framed the far distance with cool icy crests like a bird's crowning plumage. The food was hot and it burned his mouth. He was full of grease and had not washed or brushed his teeth for days. He had no idea of where he was going; he realized that he had forfeited his degree and that all his friends were just then entering medical or law schools; he did not particularly like the way he smelled; and just a few hours after the chili and hot peppers, he began to feel his stomach catch fire. It was so hot even in September that sawdust in the boxcar began to smolder. He lay on the hard vibrating floor in great physical pain, staring at the mountains.

He did not speak Spanish. He thought that he might come to a violent end or, what is worse, end up in a Mexican prison. But despite his seemingly horrendous position he was ecstatically happy and even whimsical. With nothing left and all opportunities missed, he was standing on pure nerves, and he felt lean, strong, and alive. He liked the rough growth of beard, which was quite different from times when he had simply forgotten to shave. He liked the dirt on his face and hands, his dusty gnarled boots, and the expression he imagined that he had—as open and clear as the mountain plateaus to the southwest, as if whatever he was had begun to come out after years of submersion in a life of supplements, adjuncts, opportunities, and provisions.

He discovered that his arms were badly cut from charging through ranks of thorns and cactus in his sprints to beat the train each time he saw a farmhouse, but it was all right. The train slid eastward into a hot grainy landscape and at night he sweated and could not sleep, but it was all right. He held up his cut and infected arm and swept it across the brightness of the Milky Way, moving his fingers in a wave. He could feel the muscles in his fingers, his arm, and his side, and he moved his hand back and forth over the stars as if to music. It was not the first time that he had been electrified by a soundless shower of stars, infinitely distant and untouched. It was not the first time that love had arisen from nowhere and given him strength, sustenance, and peace. He was hungry but not hungry, hurt but untouched, tired but full of paced movement. There was a sweet smell of cane and mangoes, just as in Jamaica. Looking up at the stars from that southern track he remembered courage on the White Water, and all was clear. He was carried over rivers and through many miles of greenery toward Vera Cruz and the Gulf. Although he thought that he was low and tangling in his raw wits, it was just a practice run, and he had survived rather easily. After all, in Mexico, or anywhere else, the stars were always high and the heavens an inviolable, unconquerable blue.

W
ANDERING HALF-DEAD
among the river-colored mud walls of Vera Cruz, Marshall wanted only to sleep on a bed of clean sheets. He found a hotel for a dollar a day, and checked in. He was given a steel locker for his bag, and led to a small room with French doors which opened on the plaza. It wasn't a bad room, but there were eight beds in it jammed up one against the other. Marshall climbed over soldiers and whores to the center cot, where he pushed a bunch of rifles, whisky bottles, and pornography to the edge and lay down.

He slept for twenty hours, his face resting on the barrel of a Belgian automatic rifle with an atrocious French accent. When he awoke it was dark, his jaws were sore, and a new and different set of soldiers had come in. Marshall left to wander through the decay and the wharves, where he found a shrimp boat headed for New Orleans. Despite rumors that the captain was notoriously storm-prone, Marshall paid him $100 for passage.

Then he wandered back to the plaza and sat in a straw chair, drinking Japanese beer and listening to the marimbas and electric gourds. In a place like Vera Cruz, people always seem to be living their very last day. This was especially true concerning the prostitutes. As if they were suffering from advanced beriberi or kwashiorkor, they appeared obviously starved of love. It could be easily seen in their eyes. Even the hardest among them felt the tick of every second like a dull pain—deficiency of love, inner leprosy, a profession only for those with organs of porcelain, and the rest beware.

He stayed in the plaza until dawn. Even near the wharf, the sea was blue, green, white, and loaded with glossy swells. Marshall went to his berth on the
Louisa,
and when he awoke they were in the center of the Gulf, with a burning sun, no birds, and whitecaps as crisp and foamy as sugar. They plowed across midsized swells, and gathered for a meal.

Although 110 feet long and properly provided with bowel-like chugging and tugging machinery—winches, pinchers, grinders, obloons, balugas, concors, and glackpoven—their African Cape shrimp sloop was toylike in its roll and appearance. The shrouds were as tight as harp strings and the gleaming machinery was coated with special dirtless oil. Mounted amidships near the machines were recreation slats for gazing at the moon. A sailor put his head and neck in a slat and, as the ship rolled and pitched, his eyes danced like bouncing balls to follow the bright undulations of the moon, thus providing recreation. The crew was composed of Jamaicans, Mexicans, and Americans. Of course, the Jamaicans had familiar Jamaican-style names—Ambrose, Dexter, Wilson, Birdie, Evans, Harlan, and Sterling. The Mexican names were too long to remember (and thus the Mexican crew was numbered from one to ten), and those of the Louisianans, if not as engaging as those of their island neighbors, were at least somewhat striking—Tough-mello, Pinckney, Starbuck, Crispin, Belchasseur, Close, and Duckworth. They paired up in strange conflagrations—Close and Crispin, Belchasseur and Pinckney, Starbuck and Duckworth.

They were heading straight for New Orleans at full speed to disgorge a frozen cargo of Giant Gulf Shrimp. The holds were as icy as Greenland, and the sailors went about with rubber boots and shovels, adjusting the shrimp. So it was a leisurely voyage except for some routine shrimp shifting and machine cleaning. Everyone was happy, and when they gathered for Sunday dinner abaft they looked delightedly at a blue sea as smooth as oil and as rolling as West Texas grasslands. A steel barrel cut in half from top to bottom and laid sideways on metal legs held a bed of white coals. The cook was grilling shrimp as thick as a boxer's fist. Occasionally, he threw quartered Mexican lemons on the grid to sizzle with the shrimp and scallions. They had water biscuits, beer, and Vera Cruz mangoes, and they sat in a ring around the fire and took what they wanted. Marshall asked if there were any soy sauce. “Any what?” asked the cook.

“Forget it,” answered Marshall.

The captain, whose name was Grafton Burnwhite, questioned Marshall carefully, thinking that he had taken on either a fugitive or a drug addict. Upon discovering that Marshall was sound, upright, and innocent, he wanted to aid him.

“How much money ya got, Mowshil?”

“About three hundred and fifty dollars, Captain.”

“That cain't last lawng.”

“I know.”

“Wha done yew wake whin ya git ta Niew Orlien?”

“Ah thowt Ah would,” replied Marshall, swayed by the rolling speech.

“Wha done yew becalm a god?”

“A god?”

“Shuwa. Ah know the chief god a the Nut Shoal frayt yawd. Whin we reach pote, Ah'll give'm a cawl.”

“What does it pay?”

“Pays good, but you wake awl nat on a trayin. Yew eva wake awl nat on a trayin?”

“Yup, but not for pay.”

“Nut Shoals is the biggest yawd in Morka, an ma fren is the chief god.”

“Oh.”

“Now yew wrat doun his naminadress: Meesic Simmons, Chief God, Nut Shoals. Tell him that Grayafton Boyinwhat sintya.”

“What kind of name is Meesic?”

“Ah thank it's a bee name.”

“Oh.”

After a few days of skidding down friendly swells, they passed over the continental shelf. Production and drilling platforms covered the sea like dragons astride dragons. Monstrously orange, they spat smoke and vast skeins of conical flame, red and blond in daylight, burnished gold at night. Weaving amid the fiery towers, the crew of the
Louisa
watched flamelights reflected on their faces. The sea was thick with these steel cliffs and the rumbling and rhythmic booming of their massive flywheels and pumps.

“When I came to America for the first time,” said one of the Jamaicans, “I could not help but shake. I was thinkin, what kind of country this, that even a hundred miles in the sea before it there are factories and steel towers ablazin' high an' mighty.”

T
HEY WONDERED
why the sea was urgently green. Water and waves came directly from the north in parallel lines as straight as polarizing glass, as if they were traveling an infinite warp of loom cloth. The wind grew steadily stronger and smelled like almonds and uprooted cane. Grafton Burnwhite went to the radio and tried to raise the Texas coast but could garner only a white falls of static. The barometer was palsied, and by the time Burnwhite had gone over his charts and weather maps, and finally stood at the door of the pilot house, he was faced by most of the crew. They knew his reputation for running into storms, and they looked at him accusingly. “Theyas gonna be a mahty big one,” he said sheepishly, and put them to work under Starbuck and Belchasseur.

All the machines were covered with flexible pastaglese which locked tight to the deck, assuring waterproofness and buoyancy. The flat rattling hatches were fastened with turnbuckle catches, and the half barrel full of coals was tossed into the sea, where it went down with a dying hiss.

After an hour they faced a great emerald storm wall, a frozen wall of green cloud, in appearance as solid as a rock cliff. Driving toward them in horseshoe shape, it was miles high, disciplined not to exceed the front of its power, marching steadily, preceded by winds which sung in the stays and made open lines into the terror harps once thought by oarsmen under decks to be sirens. “We goin' backwahds,” said Burnwhite, even though it seemed as if they were racing forward. “It's just the wind and wowta. We makin' boat tracks a fifteen knots on the suface, but the suface is movin' south 'bout tweny!” The horseshoe closed, and they found themselves in the center of a ring on a tranquil sea. They began to move north, charging the wall.

Others cowered sternward and amidships, but Marshall decided to stick on the prow. He chained himself to the bow cleats, thinking to find protection in the natural strength of a sharp arch. Though it would be the scene of exploding white water, and though it would travel the greatest distance to complete pitches and turns, it might be the best place, he thought, because its knifelike shape would cut the blows and pass them out to the flanks. It had the smallest area to be pounded, and he could get good holds on the narrow bulkheads, cleats, and chocks.

He passed several lengths of chain through a foul-weather harness, and secured himself to the deck. The emerald wall approached. Grafton Burnwhite was determined and rigid of face. Sailors lay about the decks with stares upturned at the roll of fleece about to break upon them. The wall was threaded with veins of lightning like a tangled wood. The swells were five, ten, twenty times the height of the boat. When they entered, those astern could see the prow disappear as if the boat were being fed into a grinder or passing through a dark curtain. It had been broad daylight, but Marshall could no longer see. Every few seconds, a flash of lightning revealed the deck full of terrified men, and Grafton Burnwhite, locked in the pilot house, steering by compass.

The prow was lifted with the force of rocketry. They hesitated at the summit, and heard the disheartening slench of water falling away from the hull. They flew, propellers spinning free, and then crashed onto the sea with splintering shock. Marshall was battered about and thrown like dough onto the hard deck. He ached, and could not get hold or stand stable. The bow dipped into the waves, and, for a minute or more, the ship became a submarine. Just as Marshall brayed out the last of his air and was about to take in a column of water, they shot upward in a concussion of foam, white sides, bubbling breakers, and cries from those who had been able to hold their breath.