The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  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?

  Some of los blacks seemed to come to the pier every night, and others came now and then or maybe even just once; they never came when it rained. The crew didn’t recognize anyone from the night they’d been attacked while crossing los proyectos—the one Esteban watched for was fat and wore a small gold loop in each earlobe. But now that they’d been discovered, los blacks grew more and more interested in the crew, actually seeming to absorb the crew’s silent, fu
rtive presence up there on a darkened ship into what they came to the pier to do at night. Almost nightly at least someone took a turn shouting taunts up at them, usually incomprehensibly, though sometimes they understood, “You fucked you fucked you po mothuhfucksfucked …,” on and on like a chant. Then at least El Barbie shouting back that they could go fuck their putamadres and suck on their putamadres’ farts, always something elegant like that. Los blacks seemed to know something about the Urus; it was as if they’d somehow figured out what the crew’s situation was. They spray-painted DEATH SHIP on the grain elevator, and skulls over crossed bones, and another night someone even wrote, CAGUERO DE LA MUERTE, which seemed to mean “Shitter of Death,” though they probably meant “Cargo Ship of Death,” leaving out the r in carguero, but, the grain elevator being the crew’s latrine, maybe they did mean that. They scribbled with spray paint all over the generator and compressors’ shields.

  Esteban and the others talked it over at length one night. “This thing that is happening to us here,” said Esteban, trying to imitate the slow, somber, reasoning-out-loud tone of his political officer in the BLI, “seems funny to them. But it also seems to make them angry. Why? Bueno…,” and his index finger froze pensively over his lips—chocho, there was an impressive word his political officer might have used to explain this situation, what was it?

  “Because what is happening to us here, vos Piri”—El Barbie sneered—“is very funny, but it also makes them sick to live on the same planet with a bunch of helpless losers who don’t know how to fight back. The stone fits the frog, no?”

  The cook growled, “That is unjust.” And El Faro, squinting around at everybody without his eyeglasses and excitedly nodding, exclaimed, “Sí pues! Fight back!” While Bernardo glared at El Barbie the way he always does whenever anyone taunts Esteban with the name Piri.

  But Esteban was sitting on deck with his index finger still curled against his upper lip, because he’d suddenly remembered the words lumpen proletariat, and they had made him feel even more apathetic and pointlessly far away from himself.

  “All this fucking broken glass everywhere! It just doesn’t go with me, to do nothing back,” said El Barbie. “Omar Usareli doesn’t take shit from anybody!” El Barbie’s name is Omar Usareli.

  “That’s why you live with your tongue up el Capitán’s culo, eh?” said Bernardo. “Who are you to talk about fighting back?”

  El Barbie stared threateningly at Bernardo, and Tomaso Tostado put up his hands and said, “Ya! Stop talking babosadas! Hijo de la gran puta, we’re all in this together!”

  And sweet-natured Cebo suggested lowering the ladder and inviting los blacks up for a talk, and everyone gaped at him.

  “Why not, why not try and talk to them?” said El Faro.

  “Hombre, are you crazy?” said Roque Balboa. “Remember what happened en los proyectos? You’ve already forgotten how you lost your glasses?”

  “Qué mariconada,” said El Tinieblas, picking up a length of rusted chain. “Look at all the shit we have up here to hit them with. And that night, we didn’t have anything.”

  “And if one of them has a gun?” said Pínpoyo. “Remember that scene in Indiana Yones, the guy with the big sword is ready to cut off his head and Indiana Yones pulls out a gun and shoots him!”

  “It’s true, vos,” said Caratumba, the terse Guatemalteco. “Some of them will probably have guns.”

  “Why don’t we just send El Buzo down to talk to them?” said El Barbie. “He’s a mandingo.”

  El Buzo, leaning on the rail with his curly goat’s beard and chin resting in his hand, looked at El Barbie with a deadpan gaze for a moment, then said, “Brother, yo no me meto con nadie.” That’s one of El Buzo’s favorite refrains: even when playing a double domino he always says that he doesn’t get in anyone’s way.

  “They’re just cruel delinquents,” said Bernardo.

  “Vos, son lumpen!” Esteban suddenly exclaimed, and everyone looked at him curiously, waiting for him to say something more.

  “Lumpen jodido,” he added. “Fucked lumpen, just like us.”

  “Y qué?” said Roque Balboa.

  “Y qué,” said Esteban. “I know.”

  “What’s lumpen?” asked Canario.

  “Pobre Esteban.” Panzón chuckled, giving him a soft clap on the shoulder. “Still a communist.”

  One night El Barbie, obsessed with the idea of turning a bottle into a Molotov cocktail and pitching it back, stood on deck for hours with his eyes trained on the sky, hoping to catch one before it landed. He didn’t even come close, since there was no way of telling when or where the next bottle was coming, but he almost broke his face tripping over a chock. Esteban hoped Barbie would run right into one of the holes on deck and disappear.

  At first, in the mornings, Capitán Elias interrogated the crew about los blacks. What do they do, what do they want, what do they say? He seemed desperate for more information, but they had little to add to what they’d already told. Capitán Elias obviously didn’t like it that los blacks were coming to the pier at night, but Esteban noticed he didn’t seem to know what to do about it. He noticed, for example, that Capitán Elias didn’t mention calling the police or even port security. Then el Capitán stopped asking about los blacks altogether, though he still went out to the end of the pier every morning as soon as he arrived, kicking the glass vials into the water whenever he found some there; and whenever he found even a shard of glass on deck, he scolded the crew for not having swept up.

  Los blacks all came, they imagined, from los proyectos, that labyrinth of brown brick buildings that begins opposite the port yard walls and the trees and the block of mainly warehouse-lined streets parallel to the waterfront. Few streets cross los proyectos, though there are sidewalks and a grass mall and trees and park benches, and at night the brick buildings with their lights on seem to run on in serene, shadowy repetition forever. They’d only been “delayed in port for repairs” a little more than a week the night they’d decided to disregard el Capitán’s warnings. They wanted to see Brooklyn, they wanted to go for a walk, post some letters, buy some beers. José Mateo, the cook, had been in Brooklyn, years ago, must have been somewhere around here, he remembered a bar whose Puerto Rican owner would drive him and his crewmates back to their ship after the bar closed so they wouldn’t have to walk back; it was dangerous back then too. But who was going to attack fifteen marineros? They were more worried about running into Immigration Police, ending up in one of those underground cells el Capitán had told them about, put to work cracking walnuts open with their teeth.

  It was another humid, moon-smothering night. They stood around the spigot at the foot of the pier and a rusted barrel filled with water scummed by soap, grime, insects, their decrepit oasis, stripped down to wash, though Esteban felt that all soap did was grease the layers of stickiness all over himself enough to swirl them around a little. They jogged naked back up the ladder, clothing bundled in their hands. In their cabins, many dressed in their best. Pínpoyo’s cologne was called Siete Machos, and he splashed some into Esteban’s hands, stinging his blisters. Pínpoyo is handsome like a puppy-eyed pop star, like Chayanne, looks much younger than his nineteen years, carries himself like a baby-faced galán, that’s why the crew calls him Pínpoyo. The pressed white trousers and the shirt that looked like fireworks against black sky were still in dry-cleaning plastic when he unfolded them from his suitcase. His immaculate white leather cowboy boots had been kissed by lipstick-smeared lips over both narrowing tips. The woman and Pínpoyo had been in bed, both naked except for him in his boots, when she reapplied her lipstick and kissed his boots right there with her juicy chunche right in his face like this, that’s what he told Esteban in his cabin, smiling, hands out by both sides of his face grasping invisible nalgas, eyes bright with the memory and now the telling. Esteban stared at the kisses on the boots and exclaimed, “No jodas!” Pínpoyo said he’d only worn the boots that once; his idea was to have them completely cover
ed with kisses by the time their tour was up, collected one woman at a time, port by port, wouldn’t that be putamadre? “No jodas!”—he’d heard and seen a lot of crazy things in his life! But for some reason this reminded Esteban of Rigoberto Mazariego, who brought his novia’s childhood doll to war with him, a naked plastic doll with blue glass eyes and a wild tangle of reddish hair, took it everywhere, on patrol, into combat, charging up jungly slopes cradling the doll against his ribs with one hand and his AK out in his other, flopping down under fire, charging back up, calmly setting the doll down beside him when he needed both hands to aim and fire, he and the doll did great, neither ever wounded, not even during the ambush on the Zompopera Road, slept with it, ate with it, bathed it. But was Pínpoyo’s thing with his boots like that? Or was it more like Otílio de la Rosa’s fish and hummingbird tattoo, which was now an embarrassment to him?