The Ordinary Seaman (9 page)

They retraced their steps back to the ship, Cebo and El Barbie, the two strongest, making a seat for Bernardo with clasped arms and his arms around their shoulders. They cut across the withered futbol field and small park kitty-corner from a corner of los proyectos; and then down a short, brick warehouse-lined street blocked at the end by a chicken-wire fence with an open gate, which led past brick walls and a canal lined with liquid storage tanks and desiccated trees on the opposite bank until the road curved away, running directly behind their cove and the lot: it was the same road they’d taken that first night with El Pelos in the van, but from the opposite direction.

They washed around the spigot and barrel on the pier. The others silently waited their turns while Bernardo lay propped back on his elbows with his head directly under the splashing water, looking like some ancient polychrome saint who’d climbed off his church pedestal and flung off his robes to wash two-millennium-old martyr’s wounds, blood-dyed water running in a sheet over his face and thin, bony chest, dividing around his small, cannonball belly and bladed hips, pooling under driftwood thighs and wrinkled old man’s testicles sagging onto the pier. Canario came running down the ladder and onto the pier, twittering “Qué pasó? Qué pasó?” but knew as soon as he saw. Some went to bed that night holding the blood-soaked rags that had been their best shore leave clothes to cuts on their heads, grateful, for the first and last time, for the torrid shelter of iron bulkhead walls. Bernardo had a muddy bump on his head for the rest of the summer, and the cook limped for weeks from a blow to his knee. El Faro had lost his eyeglasses, and Tomaso Tostado two bottom teeth, but not the gold one on top.

The next day unfathomable sadness and listlessness and shame disabled the crew even more completely than the stomach ailments from
drinking rat water not even a week before. They put down their tools and went and sat stuporously in the shade under the deckhouse.

Capitán Elias and el primero Mark saw their bruised and cut faces and figured out what had happened right away, of course. So impatient he was jittery, talking at them in a fast, terse tone of righteous concern, Capitán Elias demanded that they tell him exactly how it had happened. But the crew had already agreed not to tell him a thing. No sé. Nada. No pasó nada. They stared down at the deck.

“You see? Didn’t I tell you?” He laughed with exasperation and looked from one crewman to another with rapidly blinking eyes, his nose probing the air like an offended ostrich’s beak. “Are you muchachos expecting to get paid for today? How many days have we spent just lying around now?”

But the rat in the drinking water was
his
fault, and el Capitán
knew
it. What had he and el Primero done, filled it without looking inside first, was it a Japanese rat? They’d gulped down water constantly and heedlessly those first sun-susurrated days, and when they’d taken it down to refill it for the first time, there it was, an eyeless and earless rat evaporated to its skeleton, teeth, and claws, scraps of wet fur clinging to bone like the last shreds of a disintegrated shroud.

“Take it easy today, OK?” said el Capitán. “No work, we’ll start again tomorrow. Vaya, muchachos, now you know where you are. Stay in Panama from now on, it’s safer, despite what you read in the newspapers.”

Qué
qué?
What newspapers? Moments later capitán, primero, and Miracle drove off the pier in the Mazda.

And Bernardo said, “Chavalos, when that statue walks, this ship will sail.”

And no one even said, Shut up, viejo.

AT FIRST THE EARNEST GULLIBILITY WITH WHICH THE CREW PLUNGED INTO
the slave labor of repairing the
Urus
appalled Bernardo. From the very first night onboard he’d cursed himself for not even having the money to buy a plane ticket home, bitterly told himself he would’ve gotten back into the van with El Pelos and headed right back to the airport if only he’d had a few hundred dollars to his name. At night he indulged fantasies of strangling the smug young capitán, worms exploding from that smirking baldie’s eyes and ears, out his nose and mouth. As fervently as any praying child he wished for amnesia to come and erase all memory of the life which had brought him only to this; but perhaps, he thought, amnesia never comes to the rescue of old men who want to forget, its hungry mists enfolding only those with so much they want to remember, like vultures preferring a fat cow to a withered mole.

The muchachos didn’t know what a true ship, a true capitán, was like and acted as if they had no choice but to believe that when the ship was fixed, she’d sail. Look at all the tools onboard! The hundreds of cans of antirust solvents, primers, and paints! What’s it all for, viejo? Why else are we here?

He couldn’t answer. Bernardo racked his brain and couldn’t think of why else. As the weeks, and then months, dragged on, Bernardo would become ever more aware of the black wind of disaster gathering invisible force in the night, getting ready to sweep them away like crumbs off a table, until finally he’d stop trying to figure out
why else.
While the crew would grow even more reluctant to relinquish their belief in the promise. It was as if their stranded hope and his pessimism would finally bring them to the same conclusion: as if they too would feel ready to die on this ship rather than go home, still in debt, with nothing to show for their months at sea but their own blameless gullibility gaping like gory holes gnawed open in their breasts by sharks.

There wasn’t even a dining table in the mess. Down on the pier, inside the grain elevator, through a smashed little doorway in back, was their toilet. No washing machine and dryer for clothes, no work boots or overalls for the crew, never mind a waiter’s uniform—yes, two dozen pairs of work gloves were supplied, but most of these soon wore out, were never replaced. Capitán Elias hadn’t even given them shipping articles to sign, which he should have done their first day onboard. But the muchachos didn’t even know about shipping articles, didn’t understand that the contracts they’d signed in Nicaragua and Honduras were merely like baggage claim tickets accompanying them to New York, saying, Here is the crew Constantino Malevante has procured, here are the more or less standard terms of employment the shipmaster will need to legitimize through shipping articles if he wishes, legally, in keeping with the custom of the sea, to claim his bags. But not even the cook had complained, telling him, “You haven’t been to sea in twenty years, viejo, everything has changed. Corner cutting everywhere, the profits aren’t the same, and you don’t even
expect
to know your ship owner’s name anymore. Certainly I’ve never seen anything this bad, but owners can get away with a lot now.” He shrugged in his hard-eyed, laconic way. “But we’re not here working to turn a ship into a bus, eh? It’s a ship, there’ll be inspections, and they still have to pay us if they want to sail.”

Their third Friday onboard Capitán Elias let them quit work before dusk, announcing a meeting and—surprise!—a barbecue. While tools were being stored, cables hauled up and coiled, capitán and primero went down to the Mazda and Honda—each had driven his own car that day—and carried a wheeled barbecue grill up the ladder, and then brown paper bags full of groceries. Slim, fatty, red cuts of steak in bloody supermarket packaging, fresh corn still in husks, plastic tubs of “potato salad,” long loaves of bread, Oreo cookies, three bottles of green chili habanero sauce from Mexico, and two ice-packed coolers filled with soda and beer. Usually, in those days, the officers still provided the crew with meat for their dinners: packages of thin, graying pork chops, hot dogs, chicken liver or thighs, small fish, heads still on, packed with bones and guts. Canned vegetables. The refrigeration in the food lockers didn’t
work, of course, these were boxes of fetid heat, so anything perishable had to be eaten the same day it was brought onboard. Food left out went to the rats, who scoured the mess for crumbs at night, eating through anything, even clock hands apparently, that wouldn’t break their teeth.

So the barbecue was special, and the crew took it as a sign that Capitán Elias was pleased with their progress after the slow start. The meeting, they thought, was going to be an upbeat assessment of the work left to be done, and would undoubtedly address the matter of their salaries. They knew they should have been paid, in a combination of bank checks and cash, at the end of their first two weeks; when payday had passed without the officers even mentioning it, the crew had assumed that they weren’t going to be paid for the days lost to rat-water poisoning and the beating after all. When they were talking it over amongst themselves that night, Bernardo had said that was unjust, and most of the crew had agreed, if silently; but who was there to protest to? After all, el Capitán had warned them not to go into los proyectos, and they all still felt ashamed and chastened over what had happened there.

They all went down to the pier to wash, Capitán Elias and el primero Mark too. The crew in naked clusters around the spigot and barrel, scooping water over themselves from the barrel and kneeling by the spigot, soap passed hand to hand. The grain elevator looming over them, a bleak, malodorous windmill without arms, increasingly graffitied with the night’s snake-tongued messages. This was always a melancholy time of day: the workday washed off but left their skin still tinged, ever grayer, as if with exhaustion and unease. At night they woke to their darkest worries and fears, and washing on the pier, it was always as if they were trying to hold night off a bit longer, mainly with jokes and banter to entertain el Capitán. Meanwhile Miracle lapped thirstily at the soap-foamed, pooling water full of whatever had washed off them, while Mark kept saying, “No, Miracle,” rolling his eyes with exasperation and pushing the dog away with his foot. Mark always kept his underpants on when he washed and often didn’t undress at all, an inhibition the crew, without giving it much thought, ascribed to el Primero’s rigid and unsurprising sense of hierarchy more than to anything
else. It seemed normal enough for him to endure his griminess until he got home. He was not a boss who bathed naked with his workers, like Capitán Elias. He didn’t want to touch the insect-and-soap-scummed water in the barrel. Mark tended to keep his distance and in this way, Bernardo often reflected, behaved more like a true capitán than Elias, though this did little for el Primero’s air of authority. Capitán Elias, perhaps without even meaning to, undercut Mark’s authority every day, simply by the way he treated him, affectionately teasing as if to a younger brother, a little haughty or impatient, a certain tightening of el Capitán’s lips when he listened to his primero, the suddenly speeded up jackhammer way he had of answering him sometimes. Bernardo had his own nickname for Mark: El Hipnotizado. Something faraway and soft in his eyes, for all his automatic and boyish smiling. As if his private thoughts were like a long, slow-moving train he rode on all day, gazing unseeingly out the window. Often they heard him humming broken bits of jingles to himself, over and over.

Capitán Elias, like Mark, got to go home at night, bathe in hot water, change into clean underwear and clothes. But Capitán Elias always stripped naked to wash with the crew anyway, even when it rained. He towered over them like a huge plucked stork, rubbing himself all over with soap as if trying to cover himself with a new coat of sudsy feathers. Down on all fours, he held his nearly hairless head under the spigot, exaggeratedly snorting, loudly fluttering water in and out of his mouth, long fingers groping along his scalp.

“… You tie a rooster to the bed,” El Barbie was saying that evening, supposedly advising Cabezón with a well-known prescription for his wedding night, but really performing for el Capitán, “and the first time it crows, you sit up, wave a finger at it, and say, Va uno, eh? And the second time it crows, Van dos, eh? The third time you get out of bed and kick it to death. And the first time your woman gives you any shit, look at her, wave a finger, and say, Va uno, eh?”

The naked capitán giggled; he folded his sinewy arms across his hair-shagged chest, lowered his chin, giggled some more. El Barbie beamed proudly while Capitán Elias translated the story into English
for Mark, wagging his finger in the air, practically shouting that last Va uno, eh!

And Mark shook his head skeptically and said, “Yeah, right, Elias. Tell it to Kate.” And then, looking around at the crew with an amazed expression in his eyes, his face suddenly a jumpy-browed mask of exaggerated mirth, he pointed at Elias and exclaimed,
“Tell it to his wife!”
and laughed all by himself.

El Buzo said that his older brother had tried that. Except the rooster didn’t die, and his brother spent the next two weeks nursing it himself, feeding it popcorn, peanuts, even shrimp by hand, and little spoonfuls of milk. “Ay mon, he was sick to his heart about that rooster,” said El Buzo.

And Capitán Elias said, “And that güey’s wife’s been walking all over him ever since!”

He’d said that in Spanish, but Mark shook his head again and grinned down at his own feet, said, “Yeah, right, Elias. Gimme a break.” And this time el Capitán briefly glared at him, his lips tightening.

Capitán Elias and Mark, in his underwear, carried their work clothes to the trunks of their respective automobiles and changed into T-shirts and jeans. And the crew carried their clothes back on deck, where some put them back on, and those who had something cleaner to change into left them in muddy clumps outside the mess for Bernardo to launder. At least, during those summer months, the clothes Bernardo laundered down on the pier and laid out on the rear deck dried quickly; eventually it would come to seem nearly meaningless whether their saturated rags were laundered or not.

On deck, in front of the deckhouse, Capitán Elias filled the barbecue grill with charcoal and balled up scraps of brown paper bag, doused them with lighter fluid, lit a match, and danced it over the mixture. Flames rose with the sound of flags flapping in a stiff wind, quickly subsided. While Capitán Elias and Mark fanned the coals with flaps of cardboard and bent down with puffed-out cheeks to blow over them, the crew milled around watching and sipping from cold cans of Budweiser, wincing at the cold bubbles of flavor tearing deliciously at
their parched tongues and mouths; it was as if they’d never tasted beer before, just a few sips left them dizzy, faces pleasantly numbing.