“Nice rust bucket.” Haley sneered-smiled, putting out his hand.
“Watch out for the holes in the deck, Mark,” said Elias. “Wouldn’t want you falling through, all the way down to where we won’t be able to hear you calling for help.”
“I didn’t think it would be so rusted,” said Mark.
“They were really running this thing on the cheap,” said Elias. “Mainly just the coastal trade up here, working her like a truck, running cargo to and from Halifax. There was money even in that. But she used to sail all the way from Japan, through the Panama, believe it or not. Found the manifest of the last crew up on the bridge. Polish officers, mainly Chinese crew.”
Everything had been arranged for towing the ship to New York. The only problem was that the ship’s classification society, Nippon Kaiji Kyokia, upon being informed of the sale, was refusing to declare the ship seaworthy even to be towed until an inspector could come from Halifax to conduct the required survey. Elias’s attitude was, Fuck that, they were going anyway. He’d foreseen the problem and knew they could get away with it. The tug company was charging two thousand dollars a day for the slow three-day voyage to New York. Setting his checkbook on the rail, Mark wrote out his share of the payment. He looked out at the placid harbor and the Bay of Fundy, the spread, shimmering tautness of the outgoing tide. It was late afternoon. He’d never been so far north and told himself that he’d never breathed air so fresh and clean. Wooden fishing boats were chugging into the harbor, trailed by thick flocks of gulls, and the moon was out, pale as a smudge of soap against a mirror in the limpid blue sky.
While the tug’s deckhands prepared the towlines, Mark, Elias, and Yoriko climbed dark stairs to the wheelhouse. Mark grasped the spoked ship’s wheel mounted on the Gyropilot and gazed out over the long, cluttered deck and complicated masts to sea. Elias briefly explained the radar equipment—fairly primitive, he said—the loran and echo sounder, the VHF radio, all of it needing electrical power to run. This button sets off the ship’s horn, dead right now too, of course. There was a charts table, narrow drawers still filled with nautical charts. On the wall, a windup chronometer set to Greenwich mean time, a barometer, and a yellowing poster illustrating the Beaufort wind-force scale.
Elias and Yoriko had already gone out and procured mattresses and bedding for the voyage, two mattresses in two of the stripped officers’ cabins and one in the two-room suite of the captain’s quarters, which Elias had of course taken for himself and Yoriko. In St. John, Elias, with their new corporate credit cards—Achuar Corp. of Panama City (named for Cumpashín’s tribe)—had bought Coleman lamps, plenty of spare batteries and cassette tapes for the boom box, coolers stuffed with food and beer, bottles of liquor, barrels of drinking water, a small barbecue grill, and a two-burner gas grill, which they’d transfer later down to the galley for their eventual repair crew to cook on. He’d even bought a little camping toilet. It was like they were going on a three-day camping trip in a floating mountain cave.
They went and looked at the individual steam baths behind their newly polished mahogany, brass-handled doors, the only remaining touch of luxury onboard. The baths’ black-and-white tiles gleamed.
“Someday soon,” said Elias, “these will be working. We’ll take herbal steam baths.” He squeezed his arms tighter around Yoriko’s waist and smiled dryly. “Oh Yoriko, my love, what emotion.”
Yoriko, nestled into Elias’s frame, said, “They are beautiful. I can see that this is going to be a beautiful ship.” She smiled up at Elias. “Though it’s pretty squalid now.” Then she looked at Mark, shut her eyes, and said, “This macho thug had me cleaning up here all day.”
The Canadian tugboat men did them the favor of pulling up the accommodation ladder—winches would raise the ladder automatically when they had electrical power again—and then climbed over the side, down to the pier, on a Jacob’s ladder. Then Elias, Haley, and Mark hauled in the mooring lines—like real sailors, thought Mark, laughing from the excitement of it, pulling with all his strength on the fat, slimy, kerosene-smelling rope, while Yoriko snapped photographs.
With a big tug—4,300 horsepower, said Elias—called the Lilly leading the way, pulling the two thick cables of the towlines, wrapped around bitts on the prow and faked down through the bulwark, and two smaller tugs bumped up alongside, one at the stern and another out of sight under the flare of the bow, the ship began to move, slowly maneuvered out of her berth and into the Bay of Fundy, the water dappled with the soft pastels of sunset, stars already coming out in the clear, deep blue of the sky. The Lilly, captained by a middle-aged Scotsman with a walrus mustache named Maurice, who liked to be called Captain Mo, blasted her horn. Elias gave Yoriko the honor of smashing a bottle of champagne against the gunwale on the foredeck, and then he brought out four glass goblets and two more bottles of Moët & Chandon and popped the corks. They sat on the black iron bitts and leaned against the rail, sipping champagne, making toasts.
“To my first mate,” said Elias, tapping Mark’s glass.
“Oh yeah? Let me guess who the captain is.”
And Elias, in his best attempt at a thick Long Island accent said, “I bet you wish youu could be the cap-tinnn of some-thinnggg.”
Mark cracked up, and Elias explained the old joke: back in college there’d been this guy, captain of the golf team or some-thinnggg, and once, when Elias was dumping on him, this girl had gotten pissed and said that, and he and Mark had picked it up as a goofy refrain—
“Oh boy,” said Yoriko. “I’d say you guys have known each other too long.”
And then they were out in open ocean, peacefully wavelet rippled and moonlit under the night sky, and the two smaller tugs fell away hooting their whistles, and the tug up ahead—the Little Tug That Could, they called her, though she was the big one—headed south beneath Nova Scotia, the tug’s wake foaming back towards the ship like a luminous, lacy bridal train trailed all the way from New York.
They barbecued hamburgers outside on a bridge wing. And Elias told stories about ways of making money through shipping fraud:
“Say someone in Brazil has ordered a cargo of, say, vacuum cleaners through a West German dealer …” That fellow in Brazil pays his money for the sale to a bank, said Elias. And the dealer arranges the transaction, insures the vacuum cleaners, gets the proper invoices, sees that it’s all loaded onto a ship, then takes the shipping documents to an appropriate bank, and is paid. Everything hunky-dory. But what none of them suspects is that the captain of the ship is also her owner, and the name of this ship is just one in a series of names he’s been sailing her under over the last few months. He sets off for Brazil, with more than a million dollars’ worth of cargo in the holds, and hits a storm, a storm which doesn’t show up on any weather satellite photo or anything, but what the hell, it’s far out to sea, they can’t track every little sudden typhoon, can they? The ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean. But most of the crew survive. They’re picked up in a well-provisioned lifeboat and tell their terrible tale of the storm and sinking and the tragic fate of their captain, chief engineer, and a few others, who’d set out in the other lifeboat. But they’d lost sight of that lifeboat in the storm, and then that other lifeboat’s radio suddenly went dead, and now they hadn’t seen or heard a peep from them in days. Oh well, the vacuum cleaner buyer in Brazil, he just collects on his insurance, as does everyone else who had cargo on that ship. While that ship, already under a new name, slips quietly into a small Guyanese port, manned by its anonymous skeleton crew, takes on more crew, and sets off to, say, Cuba or Mexico, or maybe all the way to the Middle East, where the captain sells off everything he was carrying in the ship’s holds, pocketing all the money, dividing it, unequally, among his loyal coconspirators.
Elias told a few more stories like that. Easiest way to make money with a ship like this one, he said, was to fix her up cheap, insure her for much more than you’d paid, and sink her. Easy to get rich, all you need is the imagination and cojones. Che
erfully, playfully, they all drank to that.
Later Mark leaned on the ledge beneath the wheelhouse windows, staring ahead through the tinted glass, sipping a scotch. Already, after a few hours, darkened ocean seemed a pretty monotonous sight. Wasn’t like they were going to see any whales. Elias and Yoriko were out on a bridge wing now, chatting and laughing away. Elias was entertaining her with a sextant and his knowledge of the stars. Haley had drunk too much and was sitting at the charts table with his head rested on folded arms. The ship’s progress felt steady and sturdy through the tranquil ocean, so why did he feel nauseous? He was jealous of Elias and Yoriko, not of their affair per se, perhaps, but of Elias’s easy way with women. Mark was a little obsessed with Elias and Kate’s marriage, was always studying it for edification about what had gone wrong between himself and Sue. Elias and Kate just got along so damned well. Elias was never too lazy or self-preoccupied or overtly egotistical to be inattentive to Kate, and he seemed always to get a great kick just out of amusing her. It was always almost as if they’d both just met and wanted to present each other with their best sides—well, what Elias and Kate thought of as their best sides. Elias was Kate’s best friend, and though Elias knew how to act like almost any woman’s best friend, with Kate it really seemed believable. Since Sue had left him, and even before, Elias was always saying, Mark, don’t do this with women, Mark, try to do that next time you’re hooked up to a woman. Elias said once, Mark, you made a common but stupid mistake with Sue, thinking that just because you’d been living together for so long, that meant you could be as nakedly yourself as you were as a little boy in the bosom of your psychotic family. That you could whine and emotionally overindulge yourself. That you didn’t have to try to pull yourself up for her. So Sue had to suffer through your every little trauma about your video store. But, Mark, if you were just starting to go out with Sue, would you let yourself sit there all night in a depressed gloom about your video store? Would you try to make her want to share a life with you by telling her how hopeless you felt about your situation? Mark, mommies, not even yours, don’t throw you out when they’ve had enough of you, they don’t banish you from the family when you get boring, but women certainly do. Especially when they’re still fairly young and attractive and justifiably dying to be appreciated and have some fun, like Sue. (Had Elias slept with Sue too?) Elias said that the thing about women was that you had to win them over to your side every day. You have to be gallant, Mark. And even kind of formal. He said the nice thing about that was that it didn’t preclude sincerity, and actually got easier, not harder, as time went by. He said to save that sorry-ass, sad-sack stuff for a real crisis, when you’ll really need her—whoever she’ll be, Mark. I’m sure there’ll be someone coming along soon.
One day not long after Sue left, when Mark felt like he was really falling apart, he said to Elias: I feel like I’m lugging a thousand-pound lead weight around in my chest, Doc. That Cumpashin, does he have a shaman cure for heartbreak?
Absolutely, Mark, said Elias. You take a stone and boil it. And when the water cools, you drink it. Makes your heart hard.
Mark went out onto the other wing, the one Elias and Yoriko weren’t on, to get some air. He stayed out there for a long time with the cold ocean wind in his face, blaring in his ears, filling his lungs. He looked up at the thickly blazing stars, and down at the churned water fanning away from the ship, the swells slightly flecked with glowing foam now, and then at the warm light of the Little Tug That Could way up ahead, like a solitary cabin in the middle of a great wilderness.
When he went back inside Haley was snoring on the charts table and the door to the other wing had been slid shut and he thought Yoriko and Elias must have gone to bed, until he heard a muffled, sharp yelp of laughter out there, Yoriko’s. He took a flashlight and went to explore the pitch dark ship. Elias had advised against such wandering at night; it was dark and there were lots of carelessly fastened objects around, the ship might suddenly pitch and roll and you could break a leg. With one hand on the stair rail, he went down past the floor their cabins were on, then pushed the door open into a corridor on the floor below. He found himself swaying unsteadily as he made his way down it, shining his flashlight into the bare, scarred little cabins where their crew was going to sleep—on this floor and the one below—the ocean murkily framed in the portholes. Down here, he could hear the hollow ship sighing and creaking like a haunted house from the strain of its pulled-along forward motion. He heard the faraway clangs of metallic objects falling as if to the bottom of a deep iron well. He went down another floor, following his flashlight through the dark, feeling fascinated by his own uneasy sensation of being all alone in an utterly alien and spooky environment—one that was half his now, after all. Recently, a man had died on this ship. He felt drawn towards the engine room, where it had happened. He found the handle to the steel door leading into it at the end of the corridor, cranked it down and pushed the door open, and made his way down a steel stairway and through another door into the control room and stood there bouncing his flashlight beam around the catwalk-hemmed, two-level steel box of the engine plant. The reek of diesel oil, machine grease, and doused burning was strong. He shined his flashlight on a grease-blackened metal table covered with tools and old papers, at the smoke-smudged control panel and breaker boxes, at the boiler forward, at thick pipes, scorched cables, and stems of packed wiring. He edged out onto the catwalk, holding tightly to the rail, shining his light on enginery whose purpose was a mystery to him, then aimed it down into the bottom level, at the immense engine in the middle, with its six faintly glowing turbine cylinders, and the machinery and pumps arrayed around it. He sat on the catwalk in the dark with his legs dangling, thinking that just a few months ago someone had died somewhere down there. He switched off his light and sat in the absolute darkness. He thought he could hear wind moaning in the cavernous, empty holds on the other side of the engine room, the deep, muffled roar of ocean parting heavily around the hull. He sat swaying side to side, his unsettled stomach making him feel a little dizzy again. He felt sad. He really wasn’t used to hope. He’d had a mistrustful relationship with hope for years now. He thought, Please let this work out. Please let this lead to something good.
He woke in his cabin the next morning, pitched off his mattress and onto the floor. He got to his feet, and the floor receded under him again, his feet stepping backwards like falling dominoes until his back thudded against bulkhead. He danced forward across the floor and landed with his hands on the porthole, and he looked out at gray fog and slate gray swells, rising and sluggishly collapsing under crests of sprayed foam. The wind sounded desolate, an unwavering, low howl through an endless iron tunnel. He got back onto his mattress and clasped both sides, just lay there hanging on for who knew how long. He heard the clatter of unfastened objects falling and colliding everywhere.
Later, when he went down onto the deck to throw up, it was raining hard. He saw a cargo hook swinging wildly back and forth at the end of its loosened whip. He clutched the rail and vomited over the side, letting the wind carry it away, watching the waves rising against the side of the ship and breaking in broad swaths of hissing foam, rocking the ship and him backwards.
Soaking wet, he went back inside, and holding on to the stair rail with both hands, slowly made his way all the way up to the wheelhouse. Yoriko and Haley were sitting side by side on the floor against the bulkhead under the rain-lashed forward windows, swaying to and fro. Haley smiled weakly. Elias stood near them, one hand clasping the rail under the windows, and even he looked paler than usual. “Of course if we were under our own propulsion, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Elias said, as if mitigating his own responsibility for the weather. “It’s at most a five on the wind-force scale. Nothing.”
Mark stood beside him, looking ahead through the rain at the tug pounding through and over the swells.
“Go, Little Tug That Could,” he said listlessly. Talking incited another wave of nausea. He sat next to Yoriko.
Only Elias ate that day. Once he called them to the portside windows and they watched another ship, its long deck stacked with containers, bucking past on the fuming horizon. They could see the ship’s forward weight rocking her downwards, waves breaking over her prow and onto her deck in great bursts of water and spray.
The rain and winds, the ceaseless pitching and rolling, went on with stupefying monotony all that day and night and into the next morning. It was the longest day and night Mark had ever known, time turned into a sluggish element you were dunked in and out of, in and out of, light and darkness an irrelevancy. And then the weather began to calm.
By nightfall they were approaching New York, the outer waters off Sandy Hook and the Ambrose Channel running into Lower New York Bay. Already they could see faraway, thin stripes of light along Staten Island’s shores, and the faint lights of ships up ahead, waiting for passage into the harbor, for the tide to rise high enough to allow their drafts to clear the mud-shoaled channels.
Empty of cargo and riding high, pulled along behind the Little Tug That Could like an immense iron box kite, and without power of her own, the Urus would be allowed directly into the harbor. They stood out on the starboard wing, the night air warmer now, the humid, heavy breeze like a premonition of the stagnant summer lying just ahead. They cheered when the pilot boat came out and the pilot stepped across bumping bulwarks to board the Lilly.
Soon they could see the lights off Coney Island and the blue lights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. They passed an immense tanker, lit up like a power facility at night, off-loading oil onto a barge. Pulled along against the slack tide, the Urus slid under the bridge, through the narrows, and into the Upper Bay between Staten Island and the Bay Ridge Anchorage Flats. Now the lights of the harbor simmered all around them. Haley poured scotch into their cups. At the mouth of the Kill van Kull, where most merchant ships turn off to run between Staten Island and Bayonne to the terminals and tank farms of Newark Bay and the Arthur Kill, two tugs came out to meet them, bumping up on either side of the hull, gently jolting the whole ship; up ahead they saw the pilot stepping off the heroic Lilly, reboarding the pilot boat, which sped off towards his next assignment. They cheered, touched their glasses, and hugged like old-fashioned immigrants when the illuminated Statue of Liberty came into view, the narrow cluster of gold-lit skyscrapers at the tip of Manhattan behind.
The Ordinary Seaman Page 33
