The Ordinary Seaman (7 page)
Capitán Elias and el Primero always lock up the generator and compressor on their pier and take the keys with them when they drive off at night with Miracle in the back of the Mazda. Mark, when he and Miracle come alone—Miracle is Mark’s dog—drives a maize-colored Honda. Where do they go at night? Where do they live? They live
in the city.
Capitán Elias says his wife is an artist and a university professor—“An artist first,” Esteban heard him say once, “a professor second, and a wife, though she does love me, a distant third, soon to be an even
more distant, over the horizon let’s say, fourth”—el Capitán’s wife is “expecting a baby.” El Capitán says his wife’s belly “is like a melon.” Hmmmm, qué rico. Why doesn’t el Capitán ever think to bring them a few melons? Even one melon. It would be great to eat a melon.
Sometimes, when he’s in the mood, Capitán Elias becomes curious about the crew and politely asks them all sorts of questions about themselves, his tender sheep eyes so attentively fixed on their faces as they answer. And sometimes they question him. Capitán Elias says his father is British and his mother Greek, and mainly he’s lived in London, right here in New York, and all over Latin America, in the Amazon even, that’s why his Spanish is so good. He studied mechanical engineering, engine room mechanics, and ship design before switching to navigation and officer’s training at a nautical academy in Greece. He also studied medicine in London for a while. He’s tried his hand at lots of things, he’s very educated and worldly. This is the second time he’s been hired as a shipmaster. He says that someday he would like to open up a first-class Greek restaurant in New York, and own his own small fleet of cargo ships, and spend part of every winter in the Aegean and summers in Wiltshire, which is in the English campo. Personal questions always make Mark grimace; he never tells them anything about himself, hiding easily behind his lack of Spanish. Though Mark’s private life seems to be a constant topic of conversation between him and Elias, with el Capitán always seeming to give advice, which Mark eagerly or miserably accepts, nodding, ruefully smiling, frowning, or wincing. When Capitán Elias talks to Mark, he talks very fast, one hand hatcheting up and down, his vivid eyebrows fusing close together over his suddenly narrowing eyes, and sometimes, when he seems excited about the point he’s about to make, he pauses, then launches it in a surprisingly high, almost whinnying voice while his eyebrows arch up too. A few times el Capitán has turned to whichever crewmen might be standing nearby to translate what he’s been telling Mark and to ask what they think, and then laughed at Mark in a delightedly mocking way, while Mark scowled and rolled his eyes or grinned with embarrassment. Esteban was standing nearby the time Capitán Elias said that about
women not wanting to hear a man’s resentments, jealousies, and crazy bad thoughts: “Mark has to learn not to whine in front of his women, no matter how much they love him, am I right, Esteban?” el Capitán asked. And Esteban taciturnly agreed, then spent the day pondering the advice. Though it didn’t seem to apply to any way he’d ever yet behaved, it seemed worth remembering. There’s something very unrelaxed and unhappy about el Primero, even though he smiles a lot and doesn’t ever seem mean-spirited the way el Capitán occasionally does.
Capitán Elias keeps access to the bridge, officers’ quarters, and wings locked at night too, though they’ve all been up there in the day, where everything has been stripped bare of the teak paneling and brass fittings Bernardo says would usually cover the walls of the officers’ quarters on such a ship. Capitán Elias and Mark keep a table, a few chairs, a radio-cassette player, and two mattresses up on the bridge, though they never stay the night. The only remnant of the officers’ quarters’ presumed former luxury are three black-and-white tiled, nearly square, sunken bathtubs, each in its own cabinetlike little room. These are Japanese, Capitán Elias has explained, they work something like steam baths. Let’s fix the electrical problem, muchachos; once we have plumbing again we’ll get these baths going and then we can all sink our bodies down into those boxes of hot water and steam, have Japanese baths. Won’t that, el Capitán adds in English, exaggerating his usual accent, be bloody fucking marvelous. So the ship’s previous owners and officers, according to Capitán Elias, were Japanese. That explains the leftover sacks of roach-infested rice and the musty box of chopsticks they found in the galley, the rotted crates of rusting sardine cans left behind in a deep corner of the hold.
From the starboard bridge wing they can see all the way across the harbor to the opposite shore: ships and fragile-looking cargo cranes in the ocean-hazed distance, oil refinery and storage tanks, factory smokestacks, bridges, church steeples, smoky hills beyond; looking south over waterfront warehouse and terminal roofs and trees, they can see the upper portion of the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor, green, oxidized arm in the air.
The first time he climbed up there for a look Bernardo said, “When that statue walks, chavalos, this ship will sail.”
The viejo never passes up an opportunity to remind them.
Throughout the hot summer months, until just a few weeks ago, noisy groups of teenage morenos often came late at night to sit at the end of the pier, under the
Urus’s
prow. Los blacks was what Capitán Elias called them, and soon most of the crew began calling them that too. They were the only people during all those months that the crew saw from the ship at night, though sometimes cars drove into the lot behind the grain terminal’s ruins, stayed awhile, drove off into their own wobbling tunnels of light. Usually los blacks had two or more music boxes, all tuned to the same radio station; they drank beer from quart bottles and passed marijuana cigars, listening to their booming, shouted music. Sitting well out of sight up on the darkened deck, the crew always felt aroused by the sweetly pungent smoke—sometimes marijuana smelled like deliriously roasting meat—it made their taste glands tighten, faintly drifting up through harbor rot mixed with burning tobacco leaf, radio music and deejay crowing, laughter and shouted speeches. City life and sexiness happening just under their noses, down there on the pier! The crew tried to avoid any mention of the one night they’d left the ship and cut through los proyectos on their way into Brooklyn and Capitán Elias’s warning had come true; it was too depressing to talk about, the humiliation and their own cowering terror still popping away like camera flashes inside them whenever they thought about it or even imagined the possibility of lowering the ladder and trying to join the parties on the pier. Sometimes los blacks smoked something else in little stems they held like toy whistles to their lips, though the odor didn’t seem to reach them. Capitán Elias said it was “crack,” and in the mornings he’d often pause to idly kick the little glass vials this drug came in off the pier.
When los blacks left the pier at night, walking off with music boxes carried on their shoulders like high-caliber machine guns, they liked to
stop and hurl their empty beer bottles against the hull. Whether they were still out on the darkened deck or already in bed, the crew heard the soft smashes far below as if from a mountaintop; the sounds recalled them to the immense emptiness of iron their deck rested on. And the silence after somehow left them feeling even more left alone.
The afternoon’s blazing sun and heat languished in the mess and cabins at night like an invisible fever patient, so they ate dinner outside, sitting along the four raised coamings of the cargo hatch closest to the deckhouse, backs to the open hold, most of them shirtless and barefoot, oblivious of mosquitoes. But they rarely took off their heavy, paint-sweat-grease-and-grime-saturated pants: they looked down a little on men who wore shorts—though Mark and even el Capitán sometimes wore shorts—never mind those who went around in rotting underwear, and anyway, most had stopped wearing underwear. They still had razor blades to share then but used and reused them sparingly, shaving with cold water and soap down on the pier—only twice since has Capitán Elias remembered to bring them a bag of plastic, disposable razors. Blood dribbled constantly from chins cut by worn blades. They washed every day, but it was as if their skins were becoming unwashably filmed over. By late summer they were no longer taken by surprise by the sight of one another: increasingly sad eyed, shaggy, and dirty as young corpses risen from graves.
They’d worked until well after dark one night, and by the time dinner was ready, los blacks were already out on the pier. Bernardo carried the metal plates out from the mess two at a time, finally bringing out his own and the cook’s. Rice and canned peas fried in cooking oil, sardines mashed in, that was what they were eating, plates on their laps, the night the first bottle smashed into the deck near where they were sitting. They stared at the spray of barely glimmering shards. Some stood up with plates in their hands, cursing softly. Seconds later another bottle shattered like a handful of hard-flung coins against a wheelhouse window.
So now, along with the usual bombardments of gull shit, this new problem of bottles falling out of the sky. And now they had to keep their
shoes and boots on at night too, their burning, suffocated toes and feet infuriated.
Then los blacks began holding contests, trying to hit different parts of the ship with bottles, aiming for the bridge or the masts. They heaved bottles as high into the air as they could, arcing them over the hull and onto the deck, shouting and disputing amongst themselves over how close they’d come to hitting their targets. It was strange to sit there, laconically staring off or talking quietly as usual, a few huddled around Pínpoyo’s dominoes, while others passed around the rice pot to scrape up a handful of el raspado, the crunchy rice seared to the bottom—in those months, they sometimes even had sugar to sprinkle over it—and then a bottle suddenly smashing and raining glass from above or hitting the deck, crew members jolted to their feet, covering their heads with crossed arms, Desastres the cat speeding off to hide. It plunged them into miserable silences and tirades of cursing, sent waves of adrenaline coursing through helpless limbs and spirits. The bottles always broke; they couldn’t even pick one up and hurl it back. What should they do, throw wrenches down at them instead? In the engine room they have wrenches as big as tennis racquets. Without even having to discuss it much, the crew knew that shouting, Oye, stop throwing bottles up here! would probably only incite even more bottle throwing. It was a good thing that los blacks usually drank beer by the quart and quickly ran out of bottles.
One night Tomaso Tostado and Cebo swore they saw a bottle plummet through a small, square hole in the deck, about two feet wide, one of those they hadn’t patched and welded yet, heard it simultaneously break and splash down in the boggy bottom of the hold, the sound so muffled that those who hadn’t seen the bottle fall through the hole didn’t even lift their heads or ask, What was that?
When los blacks were on the pier the crew avoided standing by the rail and spoke among themselves in near whispers. As far as they could tell, los blacks were unaware that there was anyone onboard, or at least they didn’t seem to care. The ladder was always up, the ship always silent and dark, a dead ship on its way to scrap, a target practice
ship, one more waterfront ruin. But there were also nights when los blacks didn’t throw bottles, not up on deck anyway.
Sometimes they lost themselves in long, nearly serene dance parties, trancing rhythm burning away the pumping, angry vehemence of much of the music like sun a layer of mist. Most of the crew, even Bernardo some nights but never the cook, would climb the nine rungs of the two steel ladders to the foredeck, get down on all fours, and crawl to the gunwales, raising their heads up under the rail just enough to watch. Spidery, beautiful, hypnotic, often wicked-looking dances. Girls slowly rubbing their own crotches to the music and letting everybody see, one arm extended and flapping, the boys taking on one powerful, sexual, or magically robotic pose after another; they looked like bodies endlessly stepping out of their own bodies to become other bodies. And dances that looked almost like extravagant games of hopscotch, dazzling footsteps, hopping sliding hopping and arms flailing. Some of them had amazing haircuts, with designs and even words that looked branded into shaved skulls; girls with hair braided into mop strings and tentacles. They wore big, loose, unbuttoned shirts that billowed like Arabian robes when they danced and sweatsuit tops unzipped over thin, muscular chests and stomachs; some went shirtless, flashes of gold, basketball sneakers like Mark’s, baseball hats worn sideways, backwards; some of the girls wore skintight, sleeveless tops or short dresses, the brown gleam of bare limbs and shoulders against black water and night. Sunglasses in the dark.
But one night when the crew was watching, a muchacho wearing a tight black T-shirt, fatigue pants, and combat boots suddenly broke away from the others and came silently and exaggeratedly high-stepping on tiptoes like a circus clown down the pier, then stopped directly underneath them and stared up, his muscular arm rigidly pointing. He held that outraged stare and statuelike posture, pointing up at them, for a long time. Some of the crew slid or rolled away backwards, but others, including Esteban, stayed in frozen crouches at the rail. And then this muchacho started to shout, enraged, crazy shouting, as if maybe he was just playing at being angry,
fucks
and
mothuhfucks
but otherwise they
couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Then some of the others—looking up from the end of the pier or walking slowly towards him, eyes up to see what he was pointing at—began to shout and laugh too. A bottle smashed against the anchor windlass, near where Canario and Roque Balboa were crouching, glass spraying over their backs. Everyone pulled back from the rail when another bottle whizzed overhead. Esteban had been trying to picture the facial features of this one muchacha down at the end of the pier. It was too dark and she was too far away for him to see what she really looked like, but she’d so prettily hopped and flopped around, awakening something inside him that was screaming for prettiness and hopping and flopping, her eyes bright, her braids flying, sí pues, she’d really gotten him going for a bit, imagining the love affair, inviting her up into his cabin and finally running away with her into a new city life of hopping and flopping and fucking and everything else—But look, there she is screaming up and laughing at us too, I could drop a wrench right down into her mouth, smash those white teeth like glass too. In Nicaragua we end up not just screaming and throwing bottles, we slaughter each other. And they give us the best weapons on earth to do it. Y qué? What does any of that have to do with this?
