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The Great Offshore Grounds

Page 29

by Vanessa Veselka


  Sarah put the lamp back down.

  “Does Livy know you’re going to be in Seattle?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I told the friend I texted on the ship not to tell her.”

  “Are you going to try to see her?”

  “She wouldn’t give me her address.”

  Coward, thought Cheyenne, you know you love this woman.

  Sarah traced a wall switch to the living room overhead. “Do you think your mom would give me her address?”

  “Not a chance in hell. Why can’t you just wait for her to get off the ship?”

  “Ships like that don’t exactly have a docking time. I could easily miss her.” Sarah paused. “Would you give me her address?”

  “I can’t do that either.”

  Sarah nodded and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Cheyenne followed and conversation turned to how to back-time leaving for the airport when Sarah blurted out, “That bastard lives here. That captain. Just up the street.”

  Cheyenne felt the hairs on the back of her neck ruff like a dog. “I want his name. Tell me where he lives.”

  “I can’t,” said Sarah. “I guess his daughter’s kind of a mess.”

  “I’ll trade you.”

  “She would kill me.”

  Cheyenne wrote the address of Kirsten’s apartment on a piece of paper and handed it to Sarah. “Livy doesn’t need to know a thing.”

  * * *

  —

  Cheyenne sat across from the captain’s house. The lights were on but the blinds were drawn. A teenage girl came out and Cheyenne followed her to a coffee shop. The girl was waiting for someone, drawing on her jeans with a Sharpie, her hair cut into uneven chunks, maybe hacked off that morning. A man in his late twenties joined her. He had eyes in the back of his head like all the petty dealers Cheyenne had known, and from the way he ruffled the girl’s hair like she was a Yorkie she could tell they were having sex. Cheyenne wanted to unfold her harpy wings and scour him with fire.

  He asked the girl to buy him a hazelnut latte with extra hazelnut and an extra shot. Cheyenne studied the girl as she went to get the coffee. Her desire to be invisible was obvious. Then she saw what Livy must have seen, that every half inch up to the elbow of the girl’s arm was scarred with deep cuts in various stages of healing.

  Cheyenne dialed the base at Lejeune that night. She told them it was a family emergency and she needed to speak to her husband. Two hours later he called.

  “That asshole is running around. It kills me. His daughter is the saddest kid I ever saw. Way worse than either of us at that age.”

  “Livy might be right to leave it alone,” said Essex.

  “Oh yeah? Tell me what all the real cutters you know had in common. Ten to one that kid hates her dad more than we do.”

  “There’s a lot in the world that can’t be fixed.”

  “Livy didn’t file a report. There’s nothing official.”

  Essex paused and the weirdness of what happened buzzed on the line.

  “We’re going into work up soon they say,” he said. “I’ll be overseas probably.”

  “This is not about you, what’s happening. I don’t mean the deployment—that’s all about you and your stupid decisions—but this is about Livy.”

  Cheyenne felt like a jerk. Her frustration collapsed.

  “It was sweet of you to marry me,” she said. “Very thoughtful.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She laughed.

  “You’ll go to the doctor for a checkup?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And the dentist?”

  “And the dentist.”

  The line went quiet.

  “Cheyenne, you’ll do the right thing about the captain.”

  “I’m not famous for doing the right thing.”

  “You are to me.”

  “I wish I could talk to Livy.”

  “I don’t know if it helps,” he said, “but I’ve always thought of you as the scarier sister.”

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t hard to find out a few things about the captain. He had a pleasure boat and a truck. He used the gym at the Alaskan Club and hung out downtown when he wanted to drink.

  Cheyenne hit the hardware store for traffic paint and grease markers. At 10:00 p.m. she went out. She spray-painted the dock by his pleasure boat, the dock by the harbormaster’s office, the parking lot in front of Fish and Game, and the sidewalk in front of his house. On the capitol steps in highway-yellow she wrote: CAPTAIN MARLIN JENKINS RAPED MY SISTER. Just as she had everywhere else. She hit the bathrooms, men’s and women’s, in the bars with a grease marker. She paid for a movie ticket to get into those bathrooms, then she dialed 911 and said she’d witnessed a rape and gave them the captain’s address.

  Hiking up the hill at the end of the night she saw a shape crossing the street fifteen feet ahead. It saw her and stopped. Cheyenne had never been so close to a bear. She’d also never seen one this big. The bear turned in her direction and sniffed. In Cheyenne’s backpack was an open package of smoked salmon. She’d forgotten all about it. The bear raised herself up on her hind legs. Her head was so big it blocked the moon. She gave another sniff then fell heavily onto her forepaws and trundled over to the unlocked garbage cans behind the hippie grocery store.

  It was a sign. The great mother bear had given her a pass. They were sandblasting traffic paint off the sidewalk for days after she left the state. It was the least she could do for Livy.

  54 Aurora

  LIVY’S FIRST DAYS after getting off the dock in Juneau were hellish. Working without gloves, her hands were soon rope-burnt, and her blisters all torn. She didn’t know where to be or what to do. She’d never felt so useless. None of the commands made sense and everyone was moving too fast to explain. When they heaved, she heaved. When they stopped, she stopped.

  Handsomely on the bow. Dig in and hold. Come up!

  “That means drop it!” someone yelled at her.

  She let go like the line was a viper.

  Marne took her on boat checks where they crawled around belowdecks on their hands and knees, lifting up boards to look for water.

  “How many places do we check under this floor?”

  “This is the sole. We don’t have a floor. This isn’t a fucking house.”

  In the mates’ quarters Marne lifted another panel.

  “Hole in the sole!” she yelled.

  “Hole in the sole,” muttered a half-asleep sailor.

  “Say hole in the sole,” said Marne.

  “Why?”

  “So I know you heard it.”

  “You’re a foot away from me.”

  Marne waited.

  “Hole in the sole,” said Livy.

  Marne clicked her headlamp back on and ducked under the raised board.

  When they came above Marne took her over to the pinrail and tugged on a line Livy had secured earlier.

  “Too tight.”

  “It was fine an hour ago,” said Livy.

  “It’s not nylon. This is what rain does to real rope. I know you think it’s bullshit to not wear gloves. But we have two hundred lines belayed to deck and every single one changes tension with the weather. We have a wood hull. It’s going to swell and bend with the torque of the lines, the masts, how the yards are braced, the wind. This ship is a living thing that contracts and twists and breathes. Living things need to be touched by living hands. So no gloves. Nothing we do is for show. There’s always a reason.”

  Marne eased out and coiled the line. Looking around she sighed.

  “You have to understand. Once we’re off dock the dog and pony show ends. Out here we’ve got nineteenth-century problems. The tractor motor in this thing gets you through still water but it won’t get you out of
a storm and a GPS is best at marking where you sank. If you’re going down and the radio goes, every now and then you can get out an e-mail to the Coast Guard. Life rafts fail to deploy and there’s no way to know if the CO2 canisters that inflate yours works until you’re in the water. So the best thing you can do, for all of us, is to forget what you think you know about being at sea.”

  “First mate’s got the con,” said a voice behind them.

  “First mate’s got the con,” said Marne without taking her eyes off Livy.

  Soon the next watch mustered and they went below. Hammocks were strung up tight between hooks in the overhead. Inside them sailors, wrapped like fruit bats, hung touching shoulder to ankle. Marne strung Livy’s hammock, then took it down and had her do it. Livy got in. Her nose was less than eight inches from the overhead. She had two hours to sleep before she’d be up for her dogwatch. Two hours on deck then below for another four then up at midnight for her full watch, mustering in the dark.

  Livy’s pride was built on her competence. Here she had none. There were at least four different commands for how to let go of a rope and she didn’t know one. She’d learned the names of things in books and did not recognize them contracted and strung together in commands—much less know what she was supposed to do to enact them. As the navigation got trickier, the commands came faster until they were an urgent, ambient barrage. Emphasis thrown from one syllable to another without apparent logic, she almost wondered if it was done on purpose to humiliate her. But of course this wasn’t true. Not because sailors wouldn’t do such things but because nothing on the ship was about her at all.

  Once she heard the commands in rougher weather, she understood. The bending of the words was not laziness; each dropped vowel was intentional, designed to cut through wind and be heard. Marne was right. There was always a reason. This was a language preserved, not degraded, and premised solely on the need to act as one. It had been handed from sailor to sailor, literate and illiterate, English speakers and non-English speakers, shouted, repeated, call-and-response from Raleigh to her, down through time.

  In her half-sleep on her forty-eighth hour out, cocooned in her canvas hammock, she saw Raleigh above in his velvet shoes and fur, stepping around the anchor rode. Beneath his soles, history. Gold and slaves, conquistadores and colonists, explorers, prisoners. Ships had carried all that. Crewed by poor people without better options, directed by those with only a little more, captained by second sons, driven by stockholders, seed-funded by merchants and queens—she was in the belly of all of it.

  * * *

  —

  They were three days out when Marne came over and told Livy they were going aloft.

  “Grab a harness. Check it for tears, empty your pockets, and come with me.”

  Livy followed Marne over to the portside rail. Stepping up and around to the outside of the shroud they began to climb. The first twenty feet were easy, Livy had been up a million ladders, but the higher they went, the narrower the ratlines she had to step on and the more slippery the shroud. She glanced down to find a better toehold and felt a wave of dizziness. Her boot slipped. She swung out but both hands were gripped to the shroud so she righted herself quickly, but a wave of fear rolled through her. She didn’t breathe until she made it to the fighting top.

  “I need to sit down.”

  “Just clip in,” said Marne.

  Livy wrapped one arm around the outer line of the shroud, her shaking hands fumbling with the clip. Marne casually dangled her legs over the edge. Livy kept her eyes on the yard.

  “How high up are we?”

  “About fifty feet. We can go higher.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  Marne nodded. “That’s right. Never let yourself get bullied into something you don’t think is safe. I had a friend who worked deep-draft container ships. He said there are these wells that fill with gas. They used to send sailors down to check them out. Guy goes down and keels over. They send another down. He keels over. Then they grab another sailor. Hey jackass! Go down and see what killed that other guy. No one wants to go but it’s do it or you’re fired. Meanwhile bodies are piling up. It’s kind of always like that. Nobody cares about sailors. We have to care for ourselves.”

  “That’s how it should be,” said Livy.

  “Well maybe you’ll make a sailor after all.”

  Aloft on the main! Aloft on the main.

  Lay to deck. Laying to deck.

  Going down was worse and Livy was visibly shaking by the time they got to the bottom of the shroud.

  “You shouldn’t feel weird,” said Marne once they got back down. “Scares the hell out of most people the first time.”

  Livy gave her a grateful look.

  “But it is the job,” said Marne and walked off.

  * * *

  —

  No one on the Neva pretended it was a good idea to sail down the Inside Passage in November in a knock-off 1800s sloop of war. They came apart with every nautical mile: the crew, the rigging, unspooling into dross. Livy got yelled at for things she couldn’t have known and there was no time to show her anything. As she slept, the language of the boat ran through her dreams, tarries and ballantines, halyards and sheet bends— Say again?

  The Russian oligarch who owned the Neva had grown bored with the idea of having his own tall ship, leaving it to float the oceans poorly maintained and under-crewed, ignored like a fallen satellite. Livy soon learned that people had been jumping ship since Yakutat. Unbeknownst to her, an ordinary seaman had jumped in Juneau. When they docked in Ketchikan, two of the better able seamen slipped off. Fuck this sprung-beam rotting future fish castle! Once back under way, the first mate just rebalanced the watches to compensate for their absence and not a word else was spoken.

  By Petersburg they were short an able seaman, a bosun, and a mate, and of the three remaining mates, two had recently been promoted. The captain yanked a marginally qualified able seaman from the portside watch and promoted him to bosun. Livy came across the man botching a long splice and tried to help. Different ship, different long splice, he muttered, go away. In this manner, ill-maintained, abandoned by its backer, the ship, once a perfect technology of its time, transformed slowly into driftwood. For some of the crew that wouldn’t matter. They’d be on the next tall ship that passed. For others, the Neva was less a ship than a raft. An international no-man’s-land, a floating seedy youth hostel, a place where people used to being yelled at bartered their labor at a disadvantage. But to survive, the Neva needed money; to get money, it needed investors; and to get investors, it needed to look profitable, which is why in every port they called, they put on the funny clothes and did tours and day sails. An authentic maritime experience! Sail with the Neva, a piece of living history. But the Neva they sailed on had little in common with the original. It was a hack job cobbled together from several ship designs and muscled toward authenticity by Russian money and a lack of interest in historical detail. The rumor was that a real re-creation of the Neva was being built. Once a true replica was working the ports, they’d be done.

  “Whatever,” said Marne, “we’re the most authentic ship around. We’re miserable, they’re screwing us on pay, we’re doing stupid things for investors—that’s authentic.”

  “If people keep jumping, we won’t be able to sail.”

  “We just need to get her to Panama,” Marne said. “After that I don’t care.”

  In talking about Panama, Sarah’s name came up a few times, mostly in relation to PRAJNA and the work she and Marne had done last year. But every time Sarah’s name came up, Livy found other things to do. The doors Marne opened in the conversation, she closed, at first because she didn’t want her mind on Sarah, and then because she did but it was private. Marne realized it was a dead subject and stopped mentioning her, and Livy filled that silence with her own thoughts.

  * * *r />
  —

  Hard weather descended: There was nothing but dark and fog, and all conversations stopped. Sir Walter Raleigh appeared, pacing the quarterdeck, at home. His sea legs planted on the Douglas fir deck, his fists on his hips, he took a sharp intake of air then blew a cloud of hot breath back at the stars only he could see. He began to sing a song about a sun that had set and cedars, and a troubled ocean that beat its banks. Then in the middle of the verse he stopped.

  For days, the only words Livy heard from anyone living or dead were commands. The wind kept switching directions. Dying off then coming out of nowhere. They set sails only to strike them moments later. The waters got choppy and enough of the sailors got seasick to keep the remaining ones working almost around the clock with half the crew needed. Buckets of vomit, if not emptied fast enough, tipped over, and the watch slipped on the deck while sweating the lines in icy rain. In the red light belowdecks, in the hammocks between work shifts, they swung against each other with the rock of the ship. Every time the sailor on Livy’s left bumped her, she woke in terror, the Eliana fresh in her mind.

  A week out, Livy got her first regular period. She hadn’t known she’d been waiting for it. But it didn’t fix what was happening. Other things were growing in her, too, as a result of the rape. The world hit her—and didn’t notice. She noticed it now, but it blew by without a look back, a relationship that was no longer mutual. Once such a power differential, such a loss of reciprocal impact would have spurred in her a fierce drive for parity at all costs. Now the feeling bred no ambition; the part of her that touched the world spun without friction.

  The weather began to clear. She was on a dogwatch when Marne found her on lookout.

  “I told you never to do anything you didn’t think was safe but I need you to get over your fear and help me up on the t’gallant. I need to see why it’s not setting right.”

  Livy had gone aloft only once since her first trip. She had stayed close to the mast and clipped in and was in a fearful sweat the whole time, able only to look as far as the sail in her hands. She had never been up above the crosstrees.

 

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