“That’ll be the good part of being paid all at once, no? When I get back, I’m going to buy the pink horse, just like that.”
“What are you going to name it?” asks Esteban, fascinated despite his impatience; he’s never conversed with a sleepwalker before.
“The Pink Horse.” Cabezón shrugs. “It’s a good name. Like I told you, Natalia’s mother’s cousin owns it. But he’s moving to Roatán. Said he’d sell it to me cheap and give me plenty of time to pay. Natalia and I can live in the back and run it together and I can still work as a mechanic in the day. Pues, why not?”
“It’s a cantina or something?”
Cabezón looks at Esteban a moment and, keeping a straight face, says, “What are you talking about? It’s a pink horse. You’ve never seen one?”
Esteban waits by the rail awhile after Cabezón has plodded chuckling off to his cabin. Then he walks swiftly back to the foredeck, steps over the rail, and hangs on in a crouch, looking down between his legs at the rope emerging from the mooring pipe and the black water underneath and in one motion pushes off and grabs the rope to his chest as he falls and wraps his legs around it, finding a center of balance after a few scary lurches. He slowly shimmies backwards down the mooring line, descending the wall of the hull, pausing several times to shove restless tools back down into his pockets. At the end he turns himself around to pull himself up onto the pier.
He stands looking up at the ship, lungs and hands tingling, trying to picture himself still up there, lying awake in his cabin near the viejo as he has night after night. If he climbs back up, will everything stay the same? It will be like cutting a person out of a group picture in a newspaper, one you can take out or put back in whenever you want.
Now what? The whole unknown city. The pale gold skyscrapers on the horizon. What if by this time tomorrow I already have a job? Can I go looking for a job dressed like this? Where will I sleep? In that park with the horses that’s always in the movies. I’ll find the United Nations, and then the Nicaraguans there, tell them I fought in a BLI and ask them for clothes. But will they think I’ve done something wrong? Send me back?
A white slice of moon hangs over the breakwater forming the harbor side of the cove. In between, sequined wavelets ride the current, licking pilings. Someone else might come out on deck. He walks swiftly off the pier and around the grain elevator and into the lot behind, and hesitates there as if at a confusing crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Pues, he can go anywhere now. What will they say in the morning, when they see he’s gone, and the ladder still up?
But instead of into Brooklyn, his footsteps pull him towards the ocean. It isn’t fear, more like a self-protective yearning leading him this way. He doesn’t want to lose what he feels in himself right now, wants to get to know it instead of taking the chance of squandering or ruining it in some disastrous adventure he hasn’t thought through.
The immense old terminal of mouse gray wood, shaped like an airplane hangar, stands on a stretch of beach and tumbled pilings and rubble, between the road and a field of high weeds. He crosses the field, a fried landscape of dry stalks and brittle, silvery leaves, towards the terminal, hears the faint tinkling of buoy bells out in the harbor night. A brambly tumbleweed suddenly lifts across his path like the ghost of a porcupine. Inside, the terminal feels as spacious and empty as a gutted cathedral with a floor made of sand, a dizzying sensation of airy pitch darkness soaring up all around. He hears the beatings of invisible wings and cooing high above, looks up through the dark at the muted glow of night sky through tatters in the roof. And he sits down right in the cool sand; it’s as if a flood tide had carried the sand inside and, receding, left it smoothly and evenly distributed over the terminal floor. The solitude, this sudden fact of himself, of being Esteban Gaitán and all that he’s lived through and kept pent up inside for so many months, he could almost weep from this bewilderment and wild mix of emotion he suddenly feels. He stares straight ahead like some campfire-stunned jungle animal at the edge of a clearing, through the terminal’s immense pier gates at night sky over the blackened harbor. He lies back in the sand. It was raining softly in Quilalí the first time he saw her—she and her sister, waiting outside the church door in the rain-misted glow from the light inside, she sitting on the steps facing him and her sister standing at the edge of the doorway watching the yanqui padre with the unpronounceable last name finishing up the evening mass. Across the street, in an adobe-walled poolroom lit by a single weak bulb, men in white cowboy hats leaned over their cue sticks. An old man on a white horse with long, rickety legs lightly cantering down the dirt street and on into the dark leading out of town. Esteban and his friend Arturo were in uniform, AKs slung over their shoulders. Their BLI had spent the last three weeks moving through the mountains in a triangle between there and Wiwili and the Río Coco, mostly in coordinated pursuit of a contra column finally caught in a pincer, driven back across the border; his and another company were now bivouacked just outside the town, waiting for the battalion to re-form. He and Arturo weren’t really looking for girls when they decided to take a walk into town, though of course they’d said they were. Quilalí was unlikely to offer much but awkward campesinas who wouldn’t even be fun to talk to after the first few minutes, and though militarily secure, it was supposed to be full of contra sympathizers anyway. But then they saw the girls in green fatigues in front of the church, and the one sitting on the steps looked up as they approached, long, black hair falling around her shoulders, and her luminously large eyes saw right into him with the swift, soft tumble of a twirled open lock, seemed to reach in and lay invisible, soft hands around his heart. At first he thought she looked owlish, but then he realized she was beautiful, her soft, round face was beautiful, so melancholy and serious, and she met his gaze as if she knew him and wasn’t at all surprised to see him. The other compita, curly and short haired, lighter skinned, hand propped on one hip, buttocks swelling her fatigues, turned and looked at them over her shoulder. He looked at the first one again. What was she doing here? He asked her that.
“Waiting to talk to the padre,” she said.
“Why?” He didn’t have any special reason for asking, just couldn’t think of anything else to say. He noticed that there was a piece of thread tied around her little finger, and that the thread led up to the unbuttoned opening in her shirt and disappeared into the triangle of softly swelling skin inside.
She looked at the other girl, and then back at him, and shrugged. “We have to talk to him,” she said.
Arturo butted in. “Who are you with?”
“BON Seventy-seven-Sixty-five,” answered the other girl.
“What’s that?” asked Arturo.
“It’s a Batallón Voluntario Juventud Sandinista from León,” she said. “We’re from León.”
“I didn’t think they still had those,” said Arturo.
“They do.”
Esteban’s girl—she was already his girl—cupped a hand over her shirt between her breasts, and looked down at her hand.
“What do you do? Coffee harvesting? Medical work?” asked Arturo.
“No, we’ve been in the mountains,” said the short-haired girl.
“Going after la contra?” Arturo said it as if that couldn’t be what they’d been doing.
“Sí. Pues… To tell you the truth, they’ve been going after us. It’s been more like that.”
“They let women fight?”
“Sí. Bueno, except for us, it’s all compañeros.”
“I’m Arturo, this is Esteban. We’re with a BLI.”
And the girl standing said, “I’m Amalia, and that’s Marta. We’re sisters.”
They sure seemed serious. Well, joining a volunteer battalion, what did he expect?
“What’s that thread, Marta?” asked Esteban. He wanted her to lift her eyes and look at him again.
But she only seemed to peer even more intently down at her shirtfront, just her nose protruding from the waterfall of hair over her
face. Her hands nudged something up from inside her shirt, cupping over the open collar, and then she was holding a small squirrel, thread fastened around a rear leg. The squirrel had silky, red fur and crouched tremblingly in her palms, then wrestled itself around so that its tail was raised towards Esteban. She held the squirrel out to him, and he stepped forward and bent down and cupped his hands over hers and took the animal into his, her tied finger crooked as she lifted her hand a little, following the thread.
“Qué tal,” said Esteban to the squirrel, feeling his voice quaver as if he felt exactly the same way the squirrel seemed to. He asked her where she’d found it.
“In the mountains,” she said.
“Did you kill many contra?” asked Arturo.
“No. Not one, to tell you the truth,” said Marta after a moment, her eyes on Esteban’s hands, her hand still raised as if offering it as a perch to a flying bird.
“But they killed … well, they killed a great many of us,” said Amalia, her voice rising. “The day before yesterday they killed the compa leading us. We’re here waiting for a new officer, supposedly.”
Esteban, lying on his back, watches the sky slowly lightening through the tattered terminal roof. He’s been listening to their cooing all night but now he can see mourning doves perched like mauve bowling pins on the rafters under the ruined ceiling. Now and then one of the doves flies into the graying air, wings beating, circling under the roof before landing on another rafter.
He kissed her for the first time that night, hours after the sisters went in and talked to the padre while he and Arturo waited outside. He held her tightly against him while she sobbed against his chest, soaking his shirt with salty tears and drool, the squirrel back inside her shirt, tucked between her breasts. By the end of that week everyone in the battalion was calling him Ardilla, for that squirrel.
“Three nights in a row,” she said. “We set pickets out on the perimeter of our camp. And found them in the morning with their throats slit, all stabbed up, mutilated. The third night they got Beto. Amalia and I had known Beto since, ufff—before primary school. He’d made the decision to join up with us. And when he was told it was his turn to stand guard, he cried, he knew. But he did it. They scooped out his eyes, as if with spoons. They have this instrument, Esteban, it’s as if they can light up the jungle at night, see through trees. But they’d just shout insults and threats at us, say things about us so that we’d know they could see us, shoot off a few rounds …”
“Vos, they don’t try that mierda with us,” he said finally. “Their toys. They run from us. We chase them.”
“They could have finished us off,” she said. “All of us. But they didn’t. Instead they just followed us around. They were playing with us. We were their toy.”
Later she told him that if their officer had insisted on posting guards the fourth night they were prepared to kill him themselves if they had to. But then that very day, out of nowhere, a bullet had smashed through jungle, splintering branches and leaves, and killed him, taken away a piece of his head. And they’d left him there, hiked out to a road, and walked all the way to Quilalí.
When Marta and Amalia’s new commanding officer arrived in Quilalí a few days later, he put a hand-lettered cardboard sign up over the door of their temporary quarters in some old stables: THE GREATEST VICTORY IS THE BATTLE WE AVOID HAVING TO FIGHT. No training can prepare you for death, though war does that almost better than it does anything else, until finally you realize you have a good enough chance to get through it alive and your body turns into terror and joy. After his battalion left Quilalí a week later, he thought about that little cardboard sign every day, fervently trusting in la Marta’s new officer, formerly a mailman and militia leader from León, to keep his cautious or noble or whatever they fucking were words.
After a while he gets up and walks towards the wide pier gates at the front of the terminal and sits down on the cracked timber frame, looking at the double row of blackened, barnacle-coated pier stumps extending into the pink-tinged expanse of flowing, rough, gray water. He can see the whole statue now, standing on her own island. Close to shore the water is almost the same shade of green as the statue, and sudsy-foamy, the bank a piled rubble of stone, driftwood, broken pier debris, litter, a length of rotted yellow mooring line winding through it all like a giant princess’s braid. The ringing buoys, lights glowing palely in the dawn, run in a diminishing line across the harbor. Two long barges cut slowly, in opposite directions, across the buoys. The skyscrapers immensely walling one end of the harbor. A tugboat passes so close he can hear the loud chugging of its engines and the water parting around it and see a man at the wheel behind greasy glass. He watches it plowing towards the long bridge at the other end of the harbor. Out there, just beyond the bridge, waits a huge ship with an orange-and-black hull, a tanker probably. Gulls swooping and skimming the water with their grinning cartoon-villain faces, wings out as if wired to coat hangers.
He walks back through the terminal, early morning sunlight slanting at awry angles through the roof. What do the doves feed on? Mice? He imagines doves roasting on a spit over a fire on deck. Would it make his crewmates sick? He’d have to catch at least a dozen anyway. Bueno, he’s eaten pan-fried hummingbirds, each no more a mouthful than a peanut inside a grease-soaked shell. Make a net and build some wings and float around up there snagging doves, vos, ni verga …
6
CLARO, ESTEBAN’S BED IS EMPTY, HIS BLANKET A JUST VISIBLE KICKED-OFF lump in the cold, grimy cabin, the same leaden gray dawn he’s just watched from his barstool on deserted Bourbon Street filtering through the cracked porthole along with the sobbing of gulls. What a dream this is, chavalito, it just goes on and on, but what does it mean? And why does he feel that he’d rather not wake up from it? The ghost ship stone silent, but isn’t it time to leave, shouldn’t the engines be running? It would be comforting if he could get up and look out the porthole, see shifting furrows of foam-striped, gray, empty ocean all the way to the horizon, know that the dream would last at least as long as an Atlantic crossing. Then he could go about his work serenely, setting the officers’ saloon table three times a day for no one, serving no one, mopping the floor in the officers’ quarters corridor for no one, diligently sewing a lost button onto the uniform shirt of his invisible capitán, polishing his empty shoes. But then who would pay him? Bueno, if it’s true that on this ship, as on the other, no one ever comes to pay you, then, all things considered and weighed, I’ll stay on this one, muchísimas gracias …
Except, as every morning, every part of his body asserts its own distinct ache or chilly discomfort. Kidneys left out over night in a cold iron pan. Fingers made of chalk. Crushed can knees, and swollen ankles—every morning, until his ankle joints begin to loosen, he shuffles around as if his feet are serving trays. Chest heavy as a dead elephant lying on its side in a pit of wet talc. Dios mío, what desolation. But at least long stretches of this dream have been peaceful and even pleasurable, an untroubled journey, bringing me closer to something, knowledge, a recognition, algo.
There are three color snapshots propped against the bulkhead by his mattress on the floor, images blurred behind the fogged plastic he keeps each tightly wrapped in. Right now a giant cockroach is crawling up the veiled ladder of the cargo freighter Mitzi—that is, crawling up the plastic over the picture of himself holding Clara’s hand in front of the Mitzi’s ladder, her hair, skin, and dress bright as a daisy in the eternal tropical sunlight; in another split second a now forgotten crewmate will lower his camera, while he himself will let go of Clara’s hand and climb the ladder with a taste of her lips on his which will have to last nearly a year. Another snapshot is a fairly recent one of his and Clara’s daughters and grandson on their front porch in Managua—his motherless daughters impossibly grown up now, glad to have him out of the way, but expecting him home in another year or so, their unconsoling investment in his airfare to New York having paid off, his pockets wadded with redemptive dollars.
The third snapshot is of Esmeralda, his daughter from his first marriage, when she was a beauty queen in Haifa. He hasn’t heard from Esme in thirteen years now, and as far as he knows neither has Florencia, her mother, remarried now to an evangelical Protestant pastor, moreno like herself, in Greytown. Not a single letter. He has no address for her.
Santísima Virgen! so many years ago! when he was little older than Esteban is now, and Esmeralda was a baby, a grinning chocolate elf with freckles and dimples, living in Managua with Florencia, her sister and grandfather, Don Peter Cooper, from Bluefields, a tailor who worked at home, people would ask, “Where’s your papi, Esme?” or “Who is your papi, Esme?” and Esmeralda would point at a hat, any hat that happened to be nearby, a souvenir capitán’s hat from Veracruz, a baseball hat, one of her abuelo’s straw fedoras hanging from a peg. She would point at that hat. Whenever she sees a hat now, does Esme still think of her papi?
Her papi el viejo lobo de mar, a hat lying in bed, dreaming with eyes open, waiting to wake up on a dead ship named Urus.
Bueno, if you believe that the earth, everyone and everything in it, just as it all is, really is proof of God’s will, does that help you make sense of anything? Because at least you can tell when Luck is out to fuck you, but who can bear to think that God is? God treats each person’s life like a tedious game of solitaire, indifferently laying down the cards but determined to reach the end, no? Or maybe it’s more like this: God and Luck are two old friends drinking in a cantina, taking turns buying, growling like two pompous Spaniards, “Yo invito ahora,” after every round.
For example, let’s say God brought Esmeralda to Haifa to be a beauty queen, knowing what that would probably mean in the long run. But then Luck decided that Esme’s crown, rather than being the prelude to a long career as just another fading dockside, exotic dama, should serve to entice a lonely Israeli policeman.
The Ordinary Seaman Page 12
