The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  And then the man on the radio said, “Nicaragua …” Esteban stayed hidden in his own thoughts at first, as if it was himself who’d spoken. But then he heard “Nicaragua” again: the man on the radio was saying that despite the Sapula agreement and the cease-fire, both sides were quibbling over terms and supposed violations, and then he heard a short burst of nasal-fulminating English, the U.S. president, quickly drowned out by Spanish translation requesting full renewed-funding-arming-training of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters. Esteban saw Capitán Elias’s long legs suddenly standing in front of him, and looked up and saw El Barbie poised behind el Capitán’s shoulder, still with a drink in each hand, his chubby, small-eared bat’s face, his eyes blearily alert, a queer, gaping dog grin, and the other Nicaraguans coming over, drawn to Nicaragua on the radio. Capitán Elias shouted, “That fucking idiot! Wants to start the war up again. I don’t see why we can’t leave Nicara-goo-wah alone. Such a fucking tiny country!” And then everyone was talking all at once, the usual mierda: the viejo was saying he didn’t approve of the war but the revolution a shitty betrayal. And el Capitán was loudly asserting that the United States caused the betrayal of the revolution’s ideals by suffocating it with an illegal war, saying, “That’s the problem with fucking Americans, can’t deal with being an imperial power and so they fucking deny they are one, just don’ fucking want to know, do they?” And now el Capitán looking down at Esteban again and saying that back in ’79 during the insurrection against Somoza he’d really wanted to join the Sandinista International Brigades fighting on the Southern Front but he’d had a business in the Amazon going, and then he said, “You were a soldier, Esteban? Is it true you were right in the middle of it?” I’m not going to say a word, thought Esteban, looking up at the fishy underside of el Capitán’s chin, but he nodded anyway. “I’m honored to have you onboard, Esteban,” said el Capitán. “Truly, I am. You muchachos kicked culo on an army backed and trained and led by the greatest military power on earth!” Sí pues, the viejo was saying, the cubs sent to do all the fighting are fine chavalitos, both sides full of wonderful young people fighting for democracy, so then why is there a war if la contra are for democracy and the Sandinistas are for democracy? How can there be this war, starving everyone who doesn’t fight, giving business only to the coffin builders? Because the leaders on both sides are liars, hypocrites, traitors, and puppets! “Do you feel betrayed, Esteban?” asked Capitán Elias. “No, señor,” said Esteban. He lived, didn’t he? Sí pues, kicked culo, so they say. It’s over. Came home to shitty ration cards and no work and his bocón uncles and his mother boiling shark bones or crab shells for caldo and moldy Polish potatoes—and democracy. “Wasn’t it la Revolución that taught you to read, Esteban?” Chocho, este capitán. “I went to school,” said Esteban, hitching his shoulders. Go outside and get some air even if it’s still raining, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. And El Barbie saying, “You can’t talk about politics with a piri, mi Capitán. He was just another brainwashed, rabid dog. That’s what the communists do, isn’t that true, Capitán?”

  “Comemierda,” said Esteban listlessly. Eat shit, Barbie.

  “Come muchísima mierda, Barbie,” said Panzón, jovially-clumsily clapping the new bosun on the back.

  “Oiga, mi purser, it was all fine with me, all those luscious young Nicaraguan whores flooding into Honduras.” And Barbie threw back his head, laughed up into the air like a whale.

  “Put you mother out of work, pendejo.” Roque Balboa giggled.

  And everyone laughing. And the group finally trudging away. And Esteban already chewing his gritty thumbnail until cold sparks shot through his teeth. Before turning away Capitán Elias put his big hand down on his head, ruffled his hair. Comemierda, Capitán …

  Now what’s going on? Howls of laughter. Something about a drinking game El Barbie used to play back in La Cieba. Some of the crew lying, sitting on the floor. So many staggering around it looked like real rough seas. Pínpoyo stumbling out the door to vomit. El Barbie almost fell down pulling the butane stove off the table, and now Barbie lining Oreo cookies along the edge of the table. “Rompe la galleta, mi Capi!”

  El Capitán protesting, “No no, Barbie, we have to go now.”

  And Mark slurring, “What? What’s going on?” while El Barbie explained about breaking the cookie. “What?”

  “With your dick, Mark,” said Capitán Elias. “The game is called Break the Cookie.”

  El Barbie standing unsteadily over the table undoing his fly, pulling out his pija, shouting, “Winner gets the last beer!”

  And he leaned against the table with his pija in his hand, waggled it up and down as if taking aim, closed his eyes, opened them again, and then he forcefully slapped it down onto an Oreo cookie and the cookie jumped in the air but didn’t break, El Barbie shrieked, with hilarity or pain, spun away, and barely got out the words “Your turn, mi Capitán!”

  “No fucking way,” he answered.

  And then this happened: Mark moving towards the table as if wading against a waist-high river current, undoing his pants, pulling it out, expression strenuously wide eyed with brutish concentration, and he thwacked his doughy pene down hard onto the table, missed the cookie completely, and stumbled backwards, two, three crumpling steps, and landed on his ass and then lay back with his arms out laughing.

  And everyone who hadn’t passed out yet grinning and gaping with stuporous amazement at Mark, while the dog came and sat sturdily by el Primero, panting over his face, and Capitán Elias shaking his head, his smile contemptuous and bemused, saying, “Well fucking done, Mark. Well done! Willy full of splinters now, isn’t it. That’s going to feel good in the morning.”

  El Capitán helped wobble-legged Mark out the mess door, looking back over his shoulder, saying, “Take the day off. Take tomorrow off, güeys. Fue una gran fiesta!” No one went out to raise the ladder that night; and the next day the mess was covered in rat-shredded husks and cobs and other barbecue debris and stank of rancid beer and vomit, and Mark’s Honda was still parked on the pier, and it was at least a hundred degrees out, the low tidewater in the cove stinking and bubbling like some rank cow pasture puddle in the tropics, and the smashed wooden terminals seeming to sigh in the steam heat; nothing to bury the queasiness in their stomachs and their hangovers with but sardines and rice fried in cooking oil, nothing to drink but water from the spigot on the pier …

  4

  WITH A GLANCE AT HIS LEDGER BOOK, PANZÓN CAN TELL EACH CREWMAN what he’s owed down to the last cent: the mechanics, electricians, and cook earn $1.33 an hour for a sixty-hour workweek, $0.33 more per hour of overtime; the “able” ordinary seamen earn $1.22 an hour, $0.22 more for overtime, and the waiter earns $1.06 an hour, with no fixed overtime rate, since why should a mess waiter have to work overtime? (Despite the promotions, of course, no one received a raise.) Capitán Elias and Mark wear wristwatches, but when they aren’t there, there are no watches around, no working clocks onboard: everyone on the crew who’d worn a watch had it stolen that night in los proyectos, except for Esteban, who’d left his back in his cabin. Canario has a clock radio with an electric cord attached, and the cook’s clock has to be plugged in too, so these are useless. But Roque Balboa had brought a battery-operated clock, and Pínpoyo a somewhat larger plastic wind-up clock that ticked like an angry skeleton dementedly pounding its hollow skull over and over against the inside of a coffin lid.

  At first Roque Balboa’s clock was kept next to the stove on the table in the mess so that everyone could know what time it was, but Desastres—still a kitten really, a skinny runt with orange fur that had just appeared in the mess one day and been adopted by Bernardo, who said she was a female and would be good for hunting rats and named her Desastres to rolling eyes—pawed it off the table, the little clock shattered against the iron floor, and that was that. Then Pínpoyo’s windup clock was brought into the mess, but they put it up on the high shelf with the water tank where Desastres wouldn’t be abl
e to get at it; for about a week the clock’s ticking ate at José Mateo’s nerves like termites. Until one afternoon the cook and waiter heard Desastres meowing desperately in the mess and found the cat crouched on the high shelf anyway, panic-stiffened tail swatting back and forth, batting-twirling the clock closer towards the edge with every swat right before their horrified eyes. Bernardo jumped on a crate and reached up just as the clock toppled over into his hands. So José Mateo put the clock inside one of the two walk-in food lockers whose refrigeration doesn’t work and where he would no longer have to endure its maddening, hollow-plastic ticking. Whenever anyone wanted to know what time it was, he had to go to the food locker, yank with all his strength on the handle until the door opened in a burst of hot, rancid air and flaky debris, and there was the clock, on the rotted wood-planked floor, loudly ticking away, phosphorescent green hands and numerals faintly glowing in the dark. But one morning Panzón opened the food locker and saw the clock lying on its side near the back wall, and when he went inside and picked it up, he saw that it was exactly five past one, which was impossible, the workday was just beginning, the morning sun low in the sky. The clock’s hour hand was missing.

  Panzón carried the still loudly ticking clock out on deck, into the sunlight; the crew crowded around. Who would do that, snap off the hour hand? Why would anyone do a thing like that? The thin, flat metal ring that had been the hour hand’s base was slightly wrenched forward, minusculely jagged and glinting where the hand had broken off. The minute hand still ticked along, though its base was slightly scarred too; the middle of the plastic clock face was scratched. It was as if, instead of just snapping off the hand, someone had mutilated the clock with a fork or bottle opener, something like that. But who would have gone into the food locker and, even in a lonely fit of nerves and angry fidgeting, done that to the clock? (Esteban? The sulky thumb chewer?) The crew was stupefied. Someone had broken their only working clock. Someone had done something very peculiar. They looked around at one another, feeling bewildered and miserable. (Had Esteban—?) How fragile their confidence in each other was after all! It all depended on a person not doing strange, upsetting things like this—who knew what a pendejo like that might do next?

  When Capitán Elias and el primero Mark arrived, Panzón showed the officers the clock. “Well, it’s just a shitty old clock,” said Capitán Elias unflappably. “I’ll bring you a new one.” Mark said, “Wow. That’s totally weird.” El Capitán frowningly studied the clock for a moment, then plucked the minute hand against the clock face as if it was a banjo string. Pulled on it, let it slap back. He pulled on it again, and this time the minute hand snapped off—it really was a slender, brittle thing. “You see?” said Capitán Elias. “Piece of shit.” Then Cabezón had to go and open his mouth and say that he could repair it; maybe if he hadn’t said anything el Capitán really would have brought them a new clock. Cabezón did try to fix it, at his workbench down in the engine room he soldered the minute hand back on, then the new hour hand he’d sheared and shaped from a strip of hammered tin, and the hands did move, though not to the tempo of time, not even close.

  But even Capitán Elias, apparently, couldn’t get it out of his head, going home at night and pondering why anyone would have broken the hour hand off his crew’s clock, searching for an answer in his vast library of technical and nautical manuals and encyclopedias, no doubt. Because the next morning he took Panzón aside and said he thought he knew now what had happened, said, “Panzón”—el Capitán liked using the nicknames the crew had given one another—“abordo tenemos algunas ratas, no?”

  A ridiculous understatement. Lying awake in their cabins they often heard rats scratchily moving behind bulkheads, under floors, and over ceilings. They flooded into the mess late at night when no one was there, ate any food left out, they’d torn at their already roach-infested sacks of rice until cook and waiter found some steel tool lockers to store them in, scattering rice mixed with rat droppings all over the floor, which Bernardo had swept up and thrown overboard, miserable about the waste of food and his own wasted and ill-fated life, the two calamities seeming hideously connected … Very late one night the rats had even flooded into Bernardo’s insomnia. Tormented by the idea that the rats were going to eat Desastres, he got out of bed, hurried to the mess, and stood at the doorway gawking in horror at the revolting black shapes and minutely sparking eyes swarming like lumpy, rippling black lava all over the floor. Even in his anxiety over Desastres he hadn’t imagined there were that many rats! And then he found the cat’s glowing eyes blinking on and off in the dark: Desastres was sitting untouched in the middle of the floor like some miraculous rat deity, turning her head this way and that, observing her loathsome worshipers groveling all around. He called out, “Desastres!”—and the cat gave a little chirp and ran out of the mess, tail straight up with a live cockroach the size of a man’s thumb clamped in her mouth. After that even the cat seemed to know to stay away from the mess late at night, cuddling up against Bernardo’s feet to sleep, confining her nocturnal prowling to the deck. Who wanted to look at so many rats! But of course they’d told el Capitán about the rats at night. Capitán Elias was always saying something like, You know, before we sail, we’ll have to get those rats exterminated, don’t want rats nesting in the cargo, do we? So when Capitán Elias brought up the clock and suggested that they had a few rats onboard, Panzón said, “Sin duda, Capitán, hay ratas. Bastantes.”

  Capitán Elias leaned over Panzón’s hunched, sagging bulk, talking like a man in a panicky hurry to get his argument across before he lost its fragile thread: Rats liked shiny objects for their nests, and in the dark of the food locker the clock’s glowing hands must have looked especially shiny, no? And since the food locker has a musty wood floor that definitely must still smell like food to rats and probably even has bits of old food tamped down into its cracks, the food locker is definitely a place that would draw a rat wriggling up through those floorboards—Capitán Elias’s voice rose breathlessly: “No ves, Panzón? Qué chinga, cabrón! Fue una rata!” That rat, he said, had coveted those shiny clock hands for its nest, had gnawed, pulled on, and finally broken the hour hand off! So now the hour hand was part of a rat’s nest! Capitán Elias, tightly smiling to himself, went and got his flashlight, and Panzón followed him into the food locker.

  In the food locker el Capitán frowned and said, “Ve? Mierda de rata por todos lados. No lo hueles?” Must be one full-of-shit rat, shitting all over the place like a hundred rats, Panzón almost said out loud. But the rat droppings seemed to have dampened el Capitán’s mood. Without a doubt, he said almost forlornly, waving the flashlight’s beam in a slow circle over the floor, there are rats.

  Esteban knew that he should offer his wristwatch to Panzón so that he’d be able to keep track of the crew’s working hours. But he couldn’t bring himself to, didn’t want to. The watch was his secret. A strange secret to possess, “the time,” one wasted on him because what difference does it ever really make to him whether it’s 4:37 A.M. or P.M. or any hour? Vos, telling the time over her grave. A piece of the empty air over her grave folded inside his sock. Guilt burned through his blood whenever he thought of it. What kind of compañero was he, hoarding his watch, making a fetish of his watch like some religious old widow?

  Though Panzón quickly discovered, to Esteban’s relief, that he didn’t need a watch or clock to tell time by after all. Hadn’t he just spent a year on a hilltop outside Managua as an aircraft spotter, staring at the sky through binoculars, internally timing his staring to ninety-minute shifts? The habit was now so ingrained that Panzón just had to look at the sky and he knew how much time had passed since the last time he’d looked, practically down to the minute, even on overcast days, his sense of the sky innate as any ancient mariner’s. There was a clock inside him now, automatically counting ninety-minute hours, and that was all he needed for his bookkeeping.

  Panzón tries to be a diligent and accurate purser. But he counts the days w
hen neither of their officers comes to the ship and they do no work at all as full workdays now too—and even adds on overtime, trying to keep this within reason, no need to exaggerate, el Capitán knows how long their workdays tend to be. It was Bernardo who’d first suggested the measure to Panzón, arguing that given the conditions onboard and the fact that they’d yet to see even a centavo in wages, it was only fair that every day count as a workday whether they did any work or not since, vos—wasn’t it obvious?—it was work just being there.

  The crew passed Bernardo’s motion by unanimous vote, then unanimously agreed that the old waiter was entitled to as much overtime as everyone else. Just as Capitán Elias had said, Bernardo’s daily routine hadn’t changed now that he was “el segundo” too, though the joke went on reverberating through the old waiter’s hopelessly ingrained sense of shipboard order. As the highest ranking “officer” onboard when capitán and primero weren’t there, Bernardo should have served himself first at every meal; which of course he never even thought to do. Otherwise the only thing that bothered him about having to adjust his serving to rank—the engine room and electrical “officers” were decent chavalos, and insisted that he stop being so exagerado—was having to serve El Barbie, el contramaestre, fifth. Aside from the purser, who at least had an actual new job to do, El Barbie was the only one who took his elevation in rank seriously, posturing as boss of the ordinary seamen while ignoring their increasingly irritated disdain. As soon as Capitán Elias or Mark or both arrived in the mornings, El Barbie would ask if they had instructions for the crew that day—to which Mark would respond with a baffled grin or a flustered wave of his hand; El Capitán would usually tell Barbie to just have the crew finish whatever they were doing yesterday, or, if there was something new to be done, would explain it to them himself; then El Barbie would go around all day parroting whatever it was el Capitán had said.