Bernardo had first found the cat, an orange female stray with a white chest and a nose the color of raw steak, standing in the middle of the mess one afternoon in July, meowing as if complaining over not having been fed yet. The cat must have stealthily scaled the ladder, unseen, while everyone was busy working. A ship should have a cat, he’d thought right away. Shipboard cats, these are practically a tradition. They hunt mice and rats. There are even those who believe they frighten shipboard ghosts away. Bueno, something soft to touch, a fleeting diversion for callused hands and hearts, nada más.
In the afternoons, Bernardo and José Mateo usually sat on crates outside the mess with pots on their laps sifting rice for dinner from the sacks the Japanese had left behind, plucking out live cockroaches and the husks of dead cockroaches and dropping them into a pile by their feet, carefully crushing the live ones under their heels, sweeping and wiping the viscous mess up when they were done. Desastres usually hovered nearby craving a handout; she was always in the mood to toy with and eventually eat a cockroach. Desastres had a habit of jumping up onto Bernardo’s or José Mateo’s lap to rake her paws through the rice, and once, when the cook swatted her away too brusquely, she scratched him, leaving vivid red stripes on the back of his hand.
So Bernardo began patiently teaching the cat to obey the command to sit: “Siéntate, Desastres!” and he’d push down on her haunches with his hand. In less than two weeks, the cat was responding just as Miracle would to the same command in English, anyone only had to say “Sit!” to the dog and it would; but Desastres obeyed only Bernardo, and not only that but would remain seated for the longest time, at least until fed a cockroach, or a pinched little ball of bread—when they had bread—soaked in sardine oil. Mark and Capitán Elias said they’d never seen or heard of a cat that could do that, said cats aren’t supposed to obey like dogs, or even like lions and tigers, said that’s why you never see a troupe of common house cats jumping through hoops at the circus; they even spoke of putting Desastres on television to perform this “stupid,” they called it, trick. Sometimes just the sight of Desastres obeying the command to sit and then primly holding the posture was enough to make Mark double over with squealing laughter, arms folded over his stomach, laughter that seemed to gnaw deeper into his stomach the longer the cat sat.
Once Capitán Elias asked Bernardo why he’d named the cat Desastres.
“Because I couldn’t think of any other name, mi Capitán,” Bernardo answered. It was the first time the old waiter had ever referred to him by that respectful formality, mi Capitán.
Desastres liked human company—why else had she come to the Urus, hardly a perpetual banquet for a cat, when out there around the cove there must be mice, moles, baby birds and squirrels, bits of fish dropped by gulls, all manner of insects?—liked sitting on the crewmen’s laps, playing roughly with their hands, chewing at the base of thumbs, leaving small scratches and bite marks; liked planting herself between their legs as if trying to trip them. Cebo, the former lobster diver, paced the deck with Desastres cuddled in his muscular arms, hand tucked gently over the vibrating pebbles of her purr, or rubbing her padded little paws between his fingers, lullabying over and over,
Mira la niñita,
ninguna más bonita …
So here on the Urus, according to Capitán Elias and Mark, was a cat that could do what no other cat on earth could do. If the officers said so, was it true? But el Capitán is a knowledgeable young man, full of worldly experience, and the cat clearly thrilled him: no one doubted that if el Capitán could only have coerced Desastres into obeying him as she did Bernardo—and he tried, bent over cooing, “Siéntate! Siéntate, Desastres!” wagging a cockroach pinched between his fingers while the cat sniffed and pawed at it and finally darted away—he’d have claimed the cat for himself, whisked her off to that television show, brought his treasure home to live, shown the cat off to his wife’s artist and professor friends. So that was another of the cat’s wonders: minus Bernardo, Desastres was just another trickless, scrawny waterfront stray, though one unusually friendly to humans. No one could recall ever having seen a cat that obeyed the command to sit before, though in uncertain asides most admitted to never having paid that much attention to cats anyway, cats which, after all, inhabit every dark nook and cranny of the tropics, scratch any shadow and a cat will come slinking or scampering out. Here on the Urus! You’d think that the first time the cat sat for Bernardo the sky would have opened and a long, silvery beam would have shot down and anointed them both in miraculous light. Pues, argued Bernardo, when St. Joseph of Cupertino flew up to the rafters of his church in Italy, there was no such light, people mainly said, Look, there goes that fat, smelly, retarded little priest flying again; they laughed at his fat, hairy ass from under his cassock, and that was a far greater miracle than this. And when the Madonnas in Nicaraguan churches weep actual tears over the country’s dishonor and mounting dead, where is this ray of light or any other celestial fanfare? So what’s a cat that sits? It’s not as if she flies. Even if she is the only cat in the world that can do it. But imagine that, the only cat out of how many trillions of cats in the world, puta Bernardo! Just think of all the thousands of merchant ships plying all the waterways of the world at any given moment and all the cats on those ships and that here, in this shitty little corner of Brooklyn on this shitty ship that doesn’t move, this one cat—like the rarest gem set into a flip-top ring! Yes, that’s miracle enough, vaya pues, enough. And so the small pop of giddy delight that materialized as if from a silent firecracker in the very air every time Desastres obeyed Bernardo’s command to sit and then just sat was even more thrilling than an extraordinary run of luck and skill at dominoes, which could be happening on any other ship out there at the very same time and in the very same sequence and would still be less remarkable than the singularity of this cat; and was pleasing in a way oddly similar to—yet different from, by virtue of being shared—a happy dream recalled in the morning and silently savored for days until the sandpaper of longing wore that away to nothing too. The crew especially liked saying the cat’s name, “Desastres! Desastres! Ven gatito! Psst! Ven!” liked that it obviously and increasingly annoyed el Capitán. Bernardo smiled to himself whenever he heard the name echoing from far reaches of the ship like some subversive war cry, “Desastres! Desastres! Desastres! Desastres!” liked to think the chanted name woke Capitán Elias sweating and gasping from his sleep at night…
But, after all, men shouldn’t allow themselves to get too attached to a cat—cats come and go; nor should anyone feel too sorry when, just as someone is in the surliest mood, the cat gets tangled in his legs and he kicks her away, sends the cat sliding and hissing across the deck … though luckily, never down a hole. There are countries, José Mateo reminded them, where people eat cats; he’d heard of Chinese ships that carried cat carcasses frozen in their food lockers just like any other meat. All the Nicaraguans had heard stories of hungry neighbors eating cats, dogs, even pet parrots, arroz con loro, sí pues, the revolution’s sole contribution to the national kitchen, no?
Desastres was a wanderer, a prowler, like most cats. A clever and independent cat, for hadn’t Desastres broken away from mother and brood?—the cats they heard raising such a hysterical, incestuous clamor almost nightly from the wreckage around the cove like demon souls fighting and reveling in a haunted cemetery. Sometimes Desastres disappeared for a day or two at a time—lost in the bowels of the ship, hunting water bugs, other insects, baby rats, who knew what?
About six weeks after Desastres first appeared in the mess, she vanished again, and didn’t come back. As the days went by, the mood of quiet desolation the cat’s disappearance caused was palpable. It felt a bit like the days after the beating in los proyectos, that fragile, helpless, bewildered mood again. They searched the ship, every corner of the two-level engine room, went down into the hold, looked behind the ballast tanks, climbed the steel rungs of the narrow ladders inside the masts; Cabezón even descended into
the keel duct with the officers’ flashlight, crawled along the long, dark, flooded tunnel at the very bottom of the ship calling out, “Desastres,” climbed into the propeller shaft. But Bernardo knew Desastres was dead. When cats don’t come back, he told himself, it’s because they’re dead or have found someplace more hospitable to live, not likely out here. Well, you can’t let yourself get too upset about losing a cat. We’re grown men after all—or, in some cases, nearly grown, anyway, and growing much older by the day, poor chavalitos. For all we know, one of those hawks or falcons in the sky dive-bombed when none of us was looking, snatched Desastres up, and took her to some rank lair of fish and rodent bones. Or the rats got her after all… One more thing to grieve over, make you sigh in the night, nada más. Bernardo missed the cat, that was for sure, and so did everyone else. But it was just a cat, one with a singular talent that had cheered everyone up, though it couldn’t really be called miraculous, could it? A cat qualified to go on television to do her stupid trick. More than once Capitán Elias had said he was going to bring a video camera to film Desastres sitting, because otherwise no one would believe it, and he was visibly frustrated with himself for not having done so before the cat disappeared.
5
JUST THIS EVENING PANZÓN TOLD ESTEBAN THAT SO FAR, FOR HIS hundred and eleven days onboard, he’s owed one thousand and seventy-three dollars and forty-four cents—more than enough to pay his tíos back for the airfare and the hiring fee. Gracias, tíos.
Capitán Elias always says that he and Mark haven’t been paid yet either. But Capitán Elias talks on the telephone to the owner, who tells him that as soon as the ship is up to class, as soon as the cargo is chartered and she’s ready to be on her way, they’ll be paid. Anyway, el Capitán sometimes reminds the crew, they’re free to go when they want, the U.S. Immigration Service has nothing against illegal aliens leaving. They’ve voted on it a few times, why don’t we all just leave? But who wants to go home after all these months of work without a cent and still in debt? And who has the airfare? Who wants to turn himself in to Immigration, sit in prison until they finally make up their minds whether to foot the bill for your deportation or not? At the beginning some sent letters home, giving them to el Capitán and el Primero to mail, letters in which they for the most part disguised their plight, until it became impossible to do so—how to explain letters still mailed from New York after so many months?—so they stopped writing, and hardly anyone has even the money to buy a stamp. Esteban has a handful of Nicaraguan coins and no one he really wants to write to anyway. The other day Cabezón and Panzón risked carrying letters they’d written to their novias all the way down to the working end of the port yard until they met up with some Chinese—or Korean, or Japanese, how were they supposed to know?—marineros strolling back to their ships and tried to give them the letters to mail from wherever they were going next, communicating with sign language: the sailing hand with raised-thumb smokestack, swooping backhand gesturing towards “far away,”—who knows what the Chinese or whatever they were understood? They just smiled stiffly as if at a couple of ragged beggar lunatics, turned on their heels, and walked away.
The Urus does look better now. The entire deckhouse has been newly painted—white, with patches of red primer still awaiting coatings—though not the hull, or portions of the deck where months of work with sanders, chipping hammers, grit blasters, and portable grinders have been demolishing layers of old paint and rust down to new gleaming steel; many of the holes in the deck have been plated and welded. And new cables and wiring have been threaded up and down the ship’s length like a whole new set of veins in an old body. But the ship still has no self-generating electrical power. Something about hard to replace circuit breakers, ordered but somehow lost en route from Japan, new ones supposedly arriving any day. But maybe it’s still the wiring after all; they’re working on that again too.
The leaves on the summer-parched trees beyond the port yard walls and the cove are turning yellow, and the other morning the deck was frosty. They build fires on deck every night now, collecting wood from the ruins around the cove. The chilly morning air makes everything smell different, sharper, the cold smoke in their clothes, their own skins, they hold their arms and bare shoulders to their noses and breathe it in. A cool, swampy odor billows up from the holds. Even their garbage and their shit loosely covered over with dirt and lime and petrified grain dust inside the grain elevator has a newly refrigerated smell. Supposedly, when the weather gets really cold, the rats will leave the ship, el Capitán says they’ll look for someplace warmer. Capitán Elias and Mark come to the ship less frequently now, and not always together. They say they spend their days scouring scrap yards for circuit breakers. They never bring enough food, though there are still sardines, and rice.
That night Esteban stands at the rail in the dark, looking down at the pier, the generator and compressor locked away under graffiti-smeared, yellow shields. He thinks, Lower the ladder and leave it down, walk away. Just walk away! Walk where? He crosses the beam to the other rail and leans forward on crossed arms, staring at the long, jagged outline of a collapsed pier, the black water swift and rippling in the incoming tide…
He yawns, begins absently to pace, down the long length of the ship to the stern and up through midships to the prow, and then back. Maybe if he had a bottle and some music, he’d dance. Dance and drink all by himself out here on deck until he felt tired enough for sleep. Or even, puta, just a bottle.
Pretty soon someone will be coming out to take a piss over the side. For a while last month, in September, most were too frightened to do even that. One night someone hiding in the wreckage across the cove fired three gunshots at the hull, the bullets hitting like iron hailstones, followed by the hull’s faint, half-imagined reverberation. The day after the next some were lowered over the side in bosun’s chairs to probe for where bullets had hit in the iron vastness, but they were able to find only one shiny dent, which looked like it had been left by a ballpeen hammer smashed into soft steel. There were no more gunshots fired at the ship after that, but at least a week went by before anyone could even joke about it. Even now everyone but Esteban and El Barbie is too frightened to shit out there at night, preferring to hold it in until morning, when they can go down into the grain elevator rather than hang like some obscene monkey by both hands from the rail, toilet paper or rag clutched in one hand, bare ass exposed to the cove …
Esteban clasps a mooring line tied tightly between gypsy head and bitts, synthetic rope thick as his arm, stands looking down at his hand closed over it through the vapor left by his shallow breathing in the chilly air. He can shimmy down it if he wants. It’s how the rats got onboard, presumably how they’ll leave when the temperature drops even more. Over the side the rope droops slackly, running midships towards the stern, down to the pier. Rope climbing is something he knows how to do, one of the first and only things taught to draftees in training before they were sent out to learn war by instinct. He walks to the foredeck. Here the length of rope is much longer but tauter all the way down, suspended over the gap of water opened by the prow’s curving away from the pier. This one. Why not?
He walks all the way back to the makeshift toolshed between the smokestack and the engine room pit aft, roughly hammered pine walls and door and a corrugated polyurethane roof; inside it’s pitch dark. Standing unsteadily on coils of rope and chain and winch cable and bundled tarps, he gropes along the loose shelves.
A paint scraper. A knife for splicing wire. A short, heavy mar-linespike. He puts the knife in one pocket, the spike in another.
Walking back he sees Cabezón across the deck at the rail, pissing soundlessly over the side. No jodas, he wants to get going; maybe he can sneak past before Cabezón sees him, but Cabezón turns his big head and looks at him over his shoulder. “Qué onda?”
“Pues, nada.”
Cabezón is already zipping up. All their pisses are this brief. Their bladders are turning to rust. Esteban always finds himse
lf pushing and pushing, trying to get a little more out, yet he feels a swollen itch to piss all day long. Sometimes he dreams that he’s urinating as abundantly as an elephant.
Cabezón’s head looks necklessly propped in the collar of his grease-stained sweatshirt like a fortune-teller’s big crystal ball, magnified, hair-fringed face sleepily and convexly peering out. Esteban slides his hands into his pockets to hide the tools as Cabezón crosses the deck towards him and then leans on the rail with folded arms.
“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the other night,” says Cabezón, sounding almost drunk.
What had they talked about?
“You were right, vos. I’m going to buy the pink horse.”
“Ajá,” says Esteban. He’s never heard of any pink horse. Delirium. Or else Cabezón must be sleepwalking, dreaming about a pink horse. Is this the perfect final conversation to be having on a phantom ship or what?
The Ordinary Seaman Page 11
