The Western Limit of the World

by David Masiel

  The Jacob’s ladder unraveled with a clatter down the side shell. The ship heaved in a slow easy rhythm, but the small boat pitched and bucked all over. The kid hefted his navy-blue seabag and tried to keep his balance as the boat thumped and slammed the side of the ship, scraping free a swath of barnacles that flew upward like popcorn. Snow could see the crew-boat skipper going ballistic behind the wheelhouse glass, his face glowing green in the light from his control console, shouting, “Get your ass off my boat and on that ladder!”

  The kid was reaching for the ladder. All bundled up the way he was—plus lugging that heavy bag—made him none too nimble. He grabbed and jumped onto the rope ladder. He barely got his boots on the lower rung when the crew boat powered off to avoid a beating, waiting a hundred feet off while the kid dangled. Then a big swell came along and swallowed him to his neck. When it fell away, the sea dragged him off the ladder entirely. He was floating in the swell, getting scraped along the hull with all those barnacles biting into his overcoat. He pushed himself off, keeping one arm hooked through the strap of the seabag. A flailing right hand grabbed hold of the ladder and hung on. As the swell receded, he clung there, tendons lifted and taut.

  On deck the crew was screaming Man overboard! in five languages. By the time the new man hauled himself up the ladder, he was soaked through. Delacroix helped the kid over the bulwarks and then proceeded to get face-to-face with him, his one eye staring to shore while the other glowed fiercely. “Are you stupid? Is that the problem? You’re stupid, aren’t you?”

  Snow stepped over to rescue the kid. He was standing there dripping, prying himself out of his sopping overcoat. He was somewhere in his twenties, a gangly thing about Snow’s height, six-two. But his arms appeared devoid of muscle. “Let him alone now,” Snow said.

  The kid was blue at the lips, the pale skin of his face and shaved head shining in contrast to his clothes, which were black from collar to boots, and Snow knew at a glance he’d never been to sea in his life.

  While the coastie backed down the ladder to board the crew boat, Delacroix’s good eye looked over the sopping float vest like he’d never seen a greater affront to a sailor’s dignity. “For Christ’s goddamned sake, kid.”

  “Croix,” said Snow, “I been listening to your crap for two months. If you worked your arms half as hard as you worked your jaw, you’d be a decent enough ordinary. You might even make AB before you turn sixty.”

  “Fuck you and your scow, bos’n.”

  “Just get your ass ashore.”

  “Poison ship! Poison goddamned bastard ship!” Delacroix swung his leg over the railing, calling out complaints that sounded like warnings and warnings that sounded like complaints. “Nobody speaks any goddamned English! Nobody knows what anybody else is saying!”

  The kid showed little reaction to this tirade, like he’d heard his share.

  Then, as Delacroix backed down, something flat-out strange happened. His bum eye righted itself an instant and he made full eye contact. Snow felt all squirrelly inside, like he’d been hexed. Delacroix’s eyes disappeared down the ladder as he shouted out to the city, “This is what comes from having no union, by God! Flags of convenience! It’s the working man takes it up the rear!” His voice faded away.

  Snow turned to the kid. “Don’t listen to him. We got a first-rate crew.”

  The kid wavered over his legs, so Snow grabbed his arm and felt someone else take him by the other shoulder—Beth.

  “Are you the boatswain?” the kid asked. He said the word the way it looked.

  “That’d be me. So’s you know, it’s pronounced bos’n, not boat-swayne.”

  “Leave it to English,” said the kid, his lips quivering with cold.

  They led him up an external ladder to the poop deck, where Snow heard a yell and a curse, followed by a splash. Then the sickening crunch. The man overboard shouts began again, the crew all dancing like fools save for Marty and Ali, who had come from the bow and were scampering down the Jacob’s ladder. The voice of the Coast Guard ensign crackled over the crew boat’s loudhailer: “We have a man overboard! An injured man overboard!”

  Snow turned with Beth and they marched right back down with the kid between them. By the time they hit bottom the kid was moving under his own power, and Snow stepped fast to the bulwark and looked over the side to where the lighted body of Delacroix floated face down in the black water, his arm broken backward at the elbow, his body crushed all down his left side. Snow knew what had happened, knew the sound of a human body getting the quick crunch.

  The crew boat idled fifty feet away, spotlight fixed on Delacroix, held off for fear of popping the man a second time. Snow turned to Beth, but before he opened his mouth she was saying, “I’ll ride,” and moved into the open locker and came out already climbing into a harness while Bracelin called out, “You, Leeds! Boom op!”

  Leeds climbed into the open cockpit of the deck crane, pulled the main hydraulic lever and swung the boom out of its cradle and over toward Beth, where Snow snapped the karabiner onto the crane hook. A second later she was in the air, her fatigues bunched up her ass and riding up to show her brown calves as she spun gently in a circle. Leeds swung her out as far as he could and lowered her straight down into the seas, where she floated, still wired up to the crane, and turned Delacroix’s floating body over. Snow saw the wet blankness of his face and the bleeding out his eyes and ears, and he thought, that’s one hundred two thousand and one.

  THE WHOLE DAMNED CREW

  Inside the passageway, Snow heard competing strains of music filtering through the house as he ushered the kid topside, Indian sitars and wailing Arabic singers and den-den drums going lickety split, and Charlie Parker going off like a mad goose, all to the beat of wet boots squishing behind Snow. The kid dragged that soaked-through seabag with his grandpa’s name and address stenciled on it, JOAQUIN J. MACIEL, 610 33RD STREET, RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA 94802, though what he was doing with his gramp’s seabag, Snow had no clue.

  Beth watched them go as the kid looked back, and something in their traded look made Snow walk faster. The whole scene brought black spots to his eyes. He decided then to do something he hadn’t done in fifteen years, not since he’d started sailing boatswain: he’d share his room, bring the kid in to live with him, so he could keep an eye out. Then he felt dread about giving up his privacy. He held out hope that the girl would come to visit him, and listen to Artie Shaw with Billie Holiday and the Count and the Duke, and let him swing her in a circle. But Beth hadn’t come in two weeks. She’d sat alone in the crew’s mess. She’d brooded, sullen in her tasks.

  In the room, the kid dug into his seabag, pulling out wet books and a metal strongbox with a key lock, and finally a black tee shirt that had been stuffed so far down as to escape the seas.

  “That girl back there,” Snow said, “the one helped you. Just so you know, she’s my girlfriend. Hands off that one, you don’t mind.”

  “I wasn’t planning on putting my hands on her,” the kid said. He had an edge of attitude, like a smart guy, a regular book boy.

  Snow wanted to like him. “Just so you know.”

  The kid’s upper body was both frail and severe. His chest was dead flat, fists swollen in a flat ridge across the knuckles. He wore a tattoo on his left upper arm, a blue-ink sign of the cross—simple, just a cross, no fancy parlor job—and a silver earring in his left ear. Snow saw him for the first time all the way around, saw the scars on his backside where he’d been walloping himself a good one. Snow knew a bit about self-abuse, not because he’d ever engaged in any of the painful kind, but because he’d seen plenty who did, in ways countless and varied. One ordinary he knew way back had gone to sea straight from the rainforests of Borneo. Apparently in his tribe you weren’t all man until you’d carved two holes under your ribs for the purpose of hanging yourself from a tree. He’d considered it his religious prerogative to hook himself up by chain fall in the fo’c’sle generator room. He hung in there for two hours someti
mes, earplugs shoved into his ears, zoned off in religious ecstasy to the tune of a Cat 343 diesel generator set.

  The kid pulled the dry black tee shirt on over his head.

  “Me, I never saw the point in a tattoo,” said Snow. “All them fucking salty dogs with their tattoos turn my stomach. I ain’t got even one. I got scars, though, wanna see?”

  “Sure,” said the kid.

  Snow’s eyebrows turned up at the end like miniature horns. He tugged his sleeve up to reveal the first dripping shine of burn scars. “Jap Zero blew me thirty feet across deck. Lit my hair on fire. You ever seen a man with his hair on fire? God awful sight.” He turned to get a look at himself in the mirror. Snow liked his war scars. “Your granddad was the saltiest bastard I ever sailed with. You don’t look even a bit like him.”

  “I look like my mother, I think.” The kid flashed an old black-and-white taken about 1956. She was a tall woman, angular, with a face like Audrey Hepburn. She was holding a baby, presumably young George. Seeing it made Snow think of his own son, the first time he ever saw the boy, an infant no more than four weeks old. Home from sea, first time in his life he’d ever touched a baby. Squeezing the boy’s fat little arm, his breath all sweet with that newborn smell you couldn’t describe or forget.

  The kid looked all morose though, pulling out wet photos and peeling them apart to dab them dry with the tee shirt. He brought more pictures over and laid them out across the tight wool blanket of his upper bunk. Snow caught a glimpse: they were old black-and-white snapshots of riverboats, the old man, and the kid’s grandmother—family scenes. Faces smeared and smudged by water damage. Snow recognized the grandmother—he’d met her once, a mousy, pious woman. The kid kept blotting at the photos with the shirt, but only smeared them more. “The guy at the outfitter said this was waterproof.”

  “Nothing waterproof in the end.”

  Snow looked over at the portrait of a crew posing on the afterdeck of a small river tanker, a boat Snow knew all too well. He could picture stepping aboard it like he’d done so this minute, an old belching steamer called San Luis Rey. Back row stood the grandfather, with black Portagee eyes and bushy brows, in the uniform of a working captain, a man of the deck. There was the chief engineer too, a man called Van Sickle. In the front row, the scar on Harold Snow’s twenty-five-year-old forehead had only just healed, his hair just starting to grow back normal, his hands thick and folded on his lap and the war still playing in his eyes.

  The war was ancient history and then some, but heading back out to work, Snow couldn’t get it out of his mind. His career at sea had begun from war, when he made his way from the mountains of Washington State to Pearl Harbor on December 5, 1941, lived through the torpedo bombs two days later, and five months after that celebrated his twenty-second birthday aboard a fleet oiler in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He knew well the feel and look of aerial bombardment, how bombs started round from the underbellies of Zeros, singing as they fell toward him, then elongating suddenly and winging past to explode in the water beyond. But one stayed round all the way, diving straight for his head. He ducked instinctively, felt hot air as the bomb flew three feet over his head and drove two levels down before detonating. The deck erupted upward and Snow was blown out of his shoes. His mind tried to process the reality of being blown from his shoes. He felt his body turn momentarily to gelatin, and his feet just slipped right out. When he came down an instant later, a man’s shoulder came down with him, landing on his lap with the arm still attached. He pitched the thing off, smelled cordite and barbecued flesh, could hear nothing in either ear, but felt a rush of wind and looked up to see a Zero fly past and merge silently into the ship’s deckhouse.

  The kamikaze attack unfolded like a silent film until a wall of flame blew him laterally thirty feet across the deck. He felt himself burning, smothering the fire on his head with bare hands, searing his palms. Out across the deck, amid the pipelines and valves of the oiler, Snow saw a burned lump of coal that a minute before had been one of his shipmates, smoldering now, unrecognizable as anything human save for a high sweet sound, a moan of Ooooooooooooh-ohhhhhhhhhhh. Snow was unsure if some life didn’t still reside in there, moaning out in hellish pain, or if expanding gas in the lungs was simply activating the larynx. But at least he could hear again, out of one ear anyway.

  Sometime later, after the battle, the attackers shot down or driven off, Snow and four others dug down into the wreckage of the engine room and found the kamikaze pilot. They dragged his charred remains out on deck, heaving him over the bulwarks. Weakened by battle, they couldn’t heave him far enough, and the body bounced off the outboard edge of the deck and cleaved open. Their cheer was muted by the sight. Fatigued and barely vocal, one sailor said “Hibachi barbecue,” and another managed a croaking “Fuck you!” before the body hit thwap on the water.

  After that he spent a day and a half on a lifeboat next to a burned sailor who kept falling against Snow’s blistered arm. Snow would push the man off, saying, “Watch it there, buddy,” gentle as he could. They were all in sad shape, no point dwelling on misery, but the man kept leaning against that arm and Snow finally snapped and cursed and shoved him off, only to watch him roll and flop to Snow’s lap, face up. Snow stared at his dead eyes for quite a while before he shook him off and watched him roll into the bottom of the boat. Then Snow passed out himself. When he woke up he was on an aircraft carrier, watching Corsairs dive-bomb and sink the ship they’d saved. Then he was in that burn ward at Pearl. “You won the Navy Cross, sailor,” the nurse said. “You saved your ship from the Japs.”

  “And got it bombed by Americans.”

  “Oh, now, don’t you worry a thing about that. Those things happen.”

  Her angelic face was framed by a starched and folded nurse’s cap, like a nun’s habit, and even after she flicked his erection and kept on washing like an old pro, he thought, damned if she isn’t the prettiest thing. I’ll dance with her, he said to himself. I’m gonna dance with this girl. And he did. Two weeks later, after he’d become ambulatory again, he sneaked in a Count Basie record and swung the nurse in circles to the hoots of sailors, their Navy Crosses bouncing, pinned to their bedsheets.

  Snow found himself sitting on the side deck next to the boatswain’s locker. He was aboard Tarshish again. He thought he heard the crackle of fireworks from the city. He stood up and went aft to the fantail. There he found Bracelin reading through the coastie’s citation sheets with a look of massive irritation. He folded the papers once and handed them to Snow. “Take care of these.” Snow folded them into his back pocket while Bracelin tucked a thick vinyl binder up under his arm, the binder that held all the ship’s paperwork, including cargo manifests and inspection papers. The mate stood upright and rigid. “So, this new ordinary. How is it he manages to go overboard before he ever gets on board to begin with? Sounds kinda—paradoxical.”

  “Now there’s a ten-dollar word for you.”

  “Ten dollars ain’t my worry. Ten million is my worry.”

  Snow straightened himself as casually as he could, imposing even at his age. His shoulders felt broad inside the lined mackinaw, and he could ignore now that tight ball under his right rib, not painful so much as knobby. He stared at the chief mate, who stood a couple inches taller than he did, but no thicker. In his time, Snow thought, he might have stood a chance against Charlie Bracelin.

  “I don’t like you calling manning agencies saying you’re me,” the mate growled. “It’s like you’re trying to usurp my authority.”

  Snow just stared at the goateed face, the shining scar tissue looping over his nose. Usurp. For the life of him he couldn’t figure out where a pigsticker like Bracelin learned a word like that. “You talk more like a Kings Point captain every day,” said Snow. “Keep your eye on the ball, Brace. We’ll make up for all this in Mexico.”

  “Don’t Brace me.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s all gonna work out. We got a month to get to Freetown.”

 
; “And now we’re gonna lose two weeks lining up new cargoes, and what do we get for it? We trade n-bute and chlorinated solvents for Pemex gas and ammonia water. We’re gonna lose five mil on that trade-off alone.”

  Snow didn’t see the point of all this. If there was anything weak about the mate, that was it: a tendency to go ape shit when things didn’t go his way. “Ain’t no problem, Mate. Ain’t no problem. Trust me on this one.”

  “Nothing personal, but I don’t trust anybody.”

  “Well, I’m surely glad to know that,” said Snow. “Seeing as how we’re partners. And since we are partners, there’s one more thing, Mate. Don’t go harassing Bethy about getting crank for you. In fact, don’t go harassing her at all.”

  Bracelin let out a grunting smirk. “Sure thing, old man.”

  “I got work,” Snow said, and moved around the house and started forward. He saw the crew boat motoring inside the Gate. He heard the clank of the anchor chain rocking up the hawse pipe, and the feeling they were heading to sea again buoyed him. He had no interest in wallowing in the disappointment of Frisco any more than he did the horrors of war. He’d known all along that trying to enter harbor here was a risk. He knew too it could have turned out a lot worse. He’d seen that darkness in the coastie’s eye, like the man had a feeling about things. He didn’t like the officers or the crew, and if only he could have found something wrong in the paperwork he’d have screwed them to the wall for sure. Maybe somewhere inside, the snotty prick had known the truth, that the ship wasn’t called Tarshish at all. She had another name, one Snow had purged from his mind like that of an old lover.

  The seas were flat calm and warming on their southern track when Snow took Maciel out to the weather deck in shirtsleeves to teach him his knots and splices like a real sailor. He taught the kid timely and necessary knots (bowline, half hitch, sheet bend), as well as some that had gone out of use with the advent of steam, including what Snow fondly regarded as the most useless knot of all: the sheepshank. To him the whole exercise had nothing to do with utility and everything to do with self-image. “A man who knows his craft knows himself,” he said, then got the kid going on weaving rope fenders, mending sails, and splicing line, the pinnacle of which was the venerable back splice, better known as a dog prick.