4
ELIAS ASSEMBLES THE CREW AS SOON AS HE COMES OUT OF THE ENGINE ROOM. They can’t be too surprised that he went right down into the engine room carrying the two circuit breaker boxes as soon as he arrived, can’t be surprised that he flipped out when they didn’t fit. But now he has to pull himself together. Casual, he tells himself. Smooth, this is no big deal. Of course, you feel a little hurt, a little humiliated that your remedies didn’t work, that the old man had to resort to the allopaths, and so, adopt an air of wounded but generous dignity, cabrón. Anyway, it was their fault … Some of these kids are starting to look pretty bad, completely spaced and lethargic.
“Bernardo is doing very well, and sends all of you his regards and an abrazo,” Elias says. “He’s cured of his infection. I’m afraid the infection was caused by those dirty rags you cleaned him with the night it happened, güeyes. But luckily, no lasting harm was done, aside, por supuesto, from the hospital bills. These are astronomical! The health system in this country is mierda. They didn’t have to amputate, thank God, another day and they might have. But Bernardo is still quite weak, and we’ve decided that it’s best that he go home to Nicaragua. He’ll be flying home as soon as the doctors think he’s well enough to, in another few days, hopefully. So, if some of you could collect and pack his things, including his passport, very important, and bring them to me, please.”
Necessary touch, that—leave the possibility of a few days, in case the old man suddenly comes back to the ship. And then he’ll have to make something else up.
Esteban says he wants to visit Bernardo in the hospital. Where did he get that haircut?
“Esteban, you can’t, cabrón.” He smiles. Keep it casual, Elias. Don’t get uptight. Remember, this is good news: the old guy’s OK. No big deal, an injured seaman going home, happens all the time. “I’ve told you over and over, you are an illegal alien whenever you set foot onshore. Bernardo has permission because of his injury. You want to go on and off the ship like you’ve been doing, Esteban, it’s your risk. But if they catch you at the hospital, I’ll be in trouble too. Nice haircut.” He smiles. “Muy guapo!”
See? A few of them even grin. They seem relieved to hear that the old waiter is going to be OK, maybe even jealous that he gets to go home.
“What hospital is he in?” asks Esteban.
“New York Hospital. But you’re not going there. That’s an order from your capitán.”
“Are you going to pay him before he goes home?” asks Esteban.
“I should think so,” says Elias. “The owner will have to pay him, yes.”
“He won’t take the hospital expenses out of his pay?” asks Esteban.
“No. Look, I won’t lie to you, I’m sure he’d like to! But I’ll make sure that he doesn’t. OK? Really, don’t worry about it, Esteban,” and he claps the kid on the shoulder.
“Maybe the hospital wouldn’t have charged so much if you’d taken him there right away instead of trying to cure him yourself,” says Esteban, eyes smoldering. “It should come out of your pay.”
“I didn’t clean his leg with a dirty rag! Maybe it should come out of all of your pay!” he says vehemently, trying to stare the kid down. Christ! Stay cool, Elias.
“We have an inspection in a few days…,” Elias continues, changing the subject. Which is true. The Panamanian Registry is sending someone by for the annual checkup, left a message on Miracle Shipping’s answering machine, time to disconnect that thing. The guy at the shipyard thought the breaker boxes would probably match but he couldn’t guarantee it. But they didn’t fit. If it weren’t for this other problem, he probably would have started weeping right there in the engine room. As it was, he practically kicked in the control panel. He’ll tell the inspector the ship’s still under repair, nowhere near ready to sail.
When he’s finished telling them about the inspection and what needs to be done beforehand, Elias leans on the rail, stares out at the cove. Two black grebes have settled on the water, they dive under like seals, stay under for such a long time, bob back up fifty yards away. A smell of charred steak somehow lingering in the air. Where’s it coming from? The swept, blackened circle of soot on the deck from their cooking fires seems to have widened.
Where the hell is Mark? Sue hasn’t heard a thing from him, nor has Moira. Maybe he killed himself, the little wanker. Which fucking hospital, Mark, you cunt. After he got back from L.A. last night and heard the wanker’s message, he phoned every hospital in Brooklyn to ask if they had a patient named Bernardo Puyano, in for a burn. Luckily he still had the crew list Constantine Malevante had faxed him (used a stationery store’s fax), had all their last names and passport numbers (still owes Malevante the hiring fees). And then he started in on the Manhattan hospitals.
So what else to do but wait? A crisis. Separates the man from the boys. Rapid response. Deal with it, cabrón. Been in worse scrapes. Well, no, probably haven’t. Police or harbor authorities might come driving onto the pier any moment. Maybe he should get to work on trying to sell the ship, as is, where is, whatever he can get. Maybe there’s no time even for that. Tell Kate that Mark absconded with all the money. He can file for bankruptcy when the old man talks and sues. Oh, someone will tell him he can sue, someone will. Confess all to Kate, hire a good lawyer himself. Or take off too. Then, when the old man talks and sues, maybe they won’t be able to find him, even if they want to. A lot depends on what Mark told at the hospital. But if he takes off too, he loses everything. Baby coming in December. Otherwise, he’d cut out. Maybe I should fly to Japan and scour scrap yards …
Driving home that night with Bernardo’s suitcase on the seat beside him, he thinks of pulling over to throw it into the harbor, like he did with some of their mail, months ago now. But Bernardo will probably turn up back at the ship—unless he can find him first, send him home, bribe him, I don’t know. Think! The prudent thing is to keep it. Yes, keep the suitcase. When he parks the car, he locks the battered cowhide suitcase in the trunk. But what if Kate looks inside? Better steal her copy of the trunk key.
Elias sits in his lab late into the night, phoning hospitals, looking for a patient with a burned leg named Bernardo Puyano. Finally he gives up and sits staring at the floor between his feet with his head cradled in his hands.
5
THE GERMAN TRACKING DOG IS LEADING THE LONG COLUMN OF TROOPS through the jungle. The chavalo is telling him about it: how they had to move along so slowly, how they were used to relying on their own senses and intuition but now they were dependent on this hija de puta dog named Ana, and so everyone was in a bad mood. Every half hour or so, and even more frequently when the compa holding Ana’s leash said the enemy must be close, the entire column had to stop while soldiers fanned out into the dense jungle and crept ahead, searching for ambushers. So they moved through the jungle slowly, but la contra were moving slowly too, because they were carrying wounded. A campesino admitted to having seen them go by, and to having given them platanos. They found the scattered sticks of lean-tos they’d built the night before, a single, wet rolling paper draped over a weed. Then it rained, and they marched all day, grateful for the coolness of rain, and like always when it rained like that they marched along feeling made of jungle and rain, the rain vibrating off broad leaves, vibrating inside them too, following the dog that followed the scent. Up ahead in a small clearing, a wounded contra sat up on his dropped litter and Ana broke the boy’s grip on her leash and charged the poor hijo de puta—those near the front of the column who survived said later they’d just had time to see the blood spurting from the contra’s neck when the shooting broke out and the dog fell away dead from his neck.
And Bernardo is shouting, “Ya! Basta! Puta, qué bárbaro! Brother killing brother is bad enough! And now letting this foreign cannibal dog loose on your brothers—”
He wakes on his gurney, staring up at tubes of sizzling, grayish fluorescent lighting in a dark ceiling, barely radiating. He looks over at Esteban’s bed and sees nothing b
ut darkened wall painted a dull shade of yellow. Where is Esteban? And then remembers this: Esteban with a haircut leaning over him. And he raised his arms and clasped the chavalo’s head in his hands, pulled him towards him and gave him a kiss on the cheek, and then everything went dark … Or was that just another delusion?
Now, with great effort, he lifts his head a little and sees gurneys like the one he’s on lining both sides of the long corridor, some with IV bottles and rigging at their sides. He drops his head from the pain in his neck. Santísima Virgen, where am I? He hears screaming, the most horrible screams ever, and then scolding, angry voices answering the screamer in English.
He closes his eyes. He’s never had such a headache. But his leg feels numb. He has no strength in his limbs. Pitaya juice cools his parched, caked mouth. He hears someone treading by softly like a walking breeze and tries to call out, but he can’t, his throat feels full of hot sand. Clarita always merely said, “Qué tal, Bernardo,” when he came home from the sea, as if he was a friend she hadn’t seen for a few days instead of a husband away nearly a year; and then he’d have to ignite her love again. Qué tal! Ve? I’ve brought back two chicken incubators! From now on I’m just going to sit in this chair on my porch and be old. I made a friend, a good chavalo, he was my cabin mate on the Urus, you should try to get him to marry you, Freyda, bueno, he’ll be by one of these days … Pues, qué tal, Clarita. He left the ship at Puerto Cabezas and boarded a bus, setting out on one of those journeys that lasted days, through stifling heat, by bus and then the Rama ferry and bus to Managua just to hear Clarita say, Qué tal, Bernardo. There was an old Indian woman on the bus, Miskito probably, and she stank so badly, like rotted cheese. The hijueputa cobrador wanted to eject her, and the passengers wanted him to, because of the way her smell filled the packed oven of the bus. The Indian woman didn’t seem to speak Spanish, seemed unable to explain or defend herself. She was terrified. They were in the middle of nowhere, and this hijo de cien mil putas cobrador and the driver were going to throw her off the bus because she was just a poor indita who stank. He was gagging from the smell and airless heat too, felt nauseous from the smell and the bus’s rattling over rutted dirt roads. But it was abominable to throw an old woman off a bus, he would not permit it, he’d get off here in the jungle with her if it came to that, though he was willing to come to blows first. He rose from his seat to defend her. First, he spoke gently to her, said, I’m not going to let them, mamita. That was all it took! The old Indian woman whisperingly confided that she smelled like that because that was what she did for money, she made cheese, pues. And he turned to the other passengers and shouted, She only smells like that because she makes cheese!
6
THE HOSPITAL IS SO OVERCROWDED THAT DR. OFORI, FROM GHANA, WITH A trim, black beard and a coppery, bald head, spends half his shift making his rounds in gurney-crowded corridors like this one. Now he stands over the blankly staring old man on the gurney—yet another anonymous indigent, dirty, with messy, sweat-matted hair and stubbled chin, well shaped though smudged and fungused bare feet, and a jungle tiger’s long toenails. And he starts shouting in a commanding baritone that rises querulously with outraged emphasis, and brings exhausted nurses running, “How long has this patient been lying here? No one has even cleaned his leg! There is dead tissue here all the way down to the bone! Clearly an infection has formed, I see signs of gangrene, of clostridium! This man’s leg is rotting, and he has just been left to lie here! The infection may have already entered his bloodstream! Is this a hospital or a charnel house!” And then he notices. He waves a hand over the staring eyes. He checks the pulse, and drops the cold hand. “Take this man down to the morgue,” he says, his voice flat with drained fury. Another corpse destined for Potter’s Field, the indigents’ cemetery on Hart Island. God speed you, old man. And Dr. Ofori, trembling, moves on to the next gurney, thinking, Whichever God that might be.
SCRAP
1
WHEN THE NIGHTS BEGIN TO FALL BELOW FREEZING, THE CREW drag their mattresses and blankets into the iron cave of the galley and mess. Every night, in the mess, they light fires inside a rusted barrel sheared in half. The weathered scraps of wood gathered from the ruins, paint and creosote scabbed, burn slowly, smokily, spitting and popping: instead of flowing up and out through the open porthole the barrel sits under, the smoke often spreads over the sleeping and trying-to-sleep crew, causing coughing and cursing.
“Putísima madre, saca esa bestia jodida de aquí,” Cabezón suddenly shouts out one night, as if it’s just come to him in a dream, the revelation that they don’t always have to put up with the barrel. From then on, almost nightly, after the fire has peaked, someone gets up and drags it spitting and fuming out on deck, burning his fingers, cursing, stamping back in through the cold. No one sleeps much, or well. No one really has for months.
Whenever Esteban comes back to the ship in the mornings, he changes into his old clothes, he doesn’t want to get his few new ones dirty. Esteban now has a wool jacket, with red and black checks, bought secondhand, and a wool cap to pull over his head. He has a new blanket; he dragged his mattress into the mess too, but when he comes back to the ship, usually during the day, he still sleeps in his cabin, on the mattress that used to be Bernardo’s. Esteban has a night-shift job in a small chair factory. And he has a novia, la Joaquina: he’s saving his money to live with his novia. But he spends some of his money on the crew, bringing food, sacks of potatoes and rice and beans, and, claro, he spends some on his novia. He brought some old sweaters from a church charity to the ship for those without sweaters. And bought Vicks VapoRub and a bottle of aspirin for those with colds. Esteban spends too much of his money, he doesn’t earn nearly enough to provide for a crew of fourteen. The chair fábrica is owned by a Colombian, and he makes a little more than two dollars an hour there. But it’s risky, because if the immigration authorities ever find it, nearly everyone who works there will go to prison to wait to be deported. Esteban never brings la Joaquina to the ship.
Esteban has many nicknames now, a new one almost every day: El Patrón. El Millionario. El Capitán. Don Joaquina. El Manicurista. El Niño Mimado, the pampered kid, or just El Mimado. Cazapatos, duck hunter, especially whenever El Barbie wants to prove that he still can’t take a little joke.
It’s been eight days since Capitán Elias last came out to the ship. So, at last, it seems they’ve been abandoned once and for all. El Capitan has taken his defeat home to his wife and new baby. Pues, what now? They’ve been waiting to see what happens next. It seems unlikely that a ship can just sit there forever without somebody coming to assert some authority over the hulk. The generator and compressor are still down on the pier. They’ve been trying to come up with a plan. At least the ship is a place to sleep, Esteban has shown them that. Until yesterday morning, when John the Ship Visitor came, everyone but los drogados, the paint solvent sniffers—who can barely hold a coherent conversation anymore—has been talking about trying to find a job, the way Esteban has.
He never brings his novia to the ship, though one afternoon, a few weeks ago, he led everybody off the ship and everybody thought that at last they were going into Brooklyn to meet la Joaquina, get free haircuts and jobs. But they didn’t go far, only to the futbol field near los proyectos, and she wasn’t there. They stood on the sidelines watching a bunch of muchachos in uniforms playing futbol, and two referees running around in striped shirts. Most of them turned out to be guanacos, from El Salvador, though there were some catrachos and chapines too. Bueno, Centroamericanos, and Esteban was friendly with some of the players on one of the teams. There were some women there too, selling and cooking pupusas on a stove they’d set up, and some older men sitting there in chairs, drinking rum. The futbol field was lined with trees full of brown leaves, the trees looking like the withered remnants of a burnt forest against the emptiness of the harbor behind, and the sky was full of wind-swirled leaves and litter. The crew stood on the sidelines watching the game on that weedy,
pocked dirt field with the wind blowing dirt in everyone’s face, and cheered with so much passion for the team Esteban’s friends were on that they all felt depressed when they lost. Then they shared some pupusas that the women donated, the tortilla dough around the filling not quite as chewy as at home, with cabbage and salsa picante on top. They felt a little embarrassed by the way the futbolistas in their satiny uniforms and fancy long haircuts and the women and especially the children stood around staring at them: as if they were monkeys in a zoo, fighting over a few pupusas. The men sitting in chairs apparently didn’t want to share their rum, not even with José Mateo, the cook, who asked. One dollar, just for a little glass of rum, they told him. Stingy fucking guanacos. And Esteban said he wasn’t going to spend half an hour gluing seats to chair frames just so José Mateo could have a few drops of rum. Then they all walked back to the ship, feeling glad to know there were so many Centroamericanos living in Brooklyn and to have met some of them, and to have been treated so kindly.
Sometimes Cebo, El Buzo, or Caratumba goes into Brooklyn with Esteban, usually to buy potatoes or beans at the supermercado. Esteban never lets El Barbie, strong as he is, come with him to buy and carry back potatoes and whatever else. Pues, they all take little walks off the ship now, never going very far, embarrassed by their appearance and having no money to spend, and still a bit frightened of the neighborhood. These brief sojourns have increased everyone’s awe of Esteban’s resourcefulness and luck, because none of them ever meets anyone who seems even remotely friendly.
The Ordinary Seaman Page 36
