The Western Limit of the World

by David Masiel

  It took half the kid’s first watch, but finally they got down to hard labor. Snow had him on hands and knees grinding the deck with a pneumatically driven wire wheel. He was prepping for paint they didn’t have aboard, but that didn’t matter. The kid didn’t flinch, he just worked. “He pushes it, I’ll give him that,” said Bracelin, as he passed by on his rounds. “For an ordinary semen wiper.”

  The mate took this appellation from the kid’s rating on his Z-card, which was ORDINARY SEAMAN/WIPER, but which Bracelin said in such a way that it invariably sounded like the kid was willing to wipe semen, so long as it wasn’t of an extraordinary type.

  In Maciel’s case he didn’t even get that much respect from the rest of the crew. When Snow assigned him to train with Marty and Ali in the finer points of creative repairs, the able seamen waited until Snow had gone and then chased the kid off. “Go work girl,” said Ali. “Clean number-three tanks lah.”

  So the kid went off to “work the girl,” a spontaneous reassignment that Snow didn’t learn about until after the fact, when he saw Beth and the kid climb out of the tank for a coffee break, the both of them glowing orange with ferruginous dust. When Snow confronted Marty and Ali, they just shrugged and waved and talked in tongues. “What the hell’s eating you two?”

  “That new man,” said Marty. “He’s bad news, bos’n. And Delacroix the one has to pay. Tenía que pagar.”

  “The kid wasn’t anywhere near Delacroix,” Snow said. “He works hard, give him a chance.”

  “Work stupid lah,” said Ali. “Don’t know shit lah.”

  It had taken Snow a month to figure out Ali’s peculiar version of Malay English, a salad of lahs and aaas that put pronouns all in a jumble and only made sense if you stopped thinking about it. While it was true the kid didn’t know shit, Snow figured what he lacked in knowledge he made up for with basic sense, and what he lacked in sense he made up for with youthful energy. Besides that, off watch he was a good shipmate. All he did was sit on his bunk and read from religious books and write in a small spiral notebook, or listen to a miniature cassette player over small foam headphones that sat lightly on his ears, and out of which Snow could hear something akin to music.

  “He can’t learn if we don’t teach him,” Snow insisted.

  “Like syaitan can’t teach nothing him!” said Ali.

  “Satan? What the fuck, Ali? He prays like a fucking monk. Reads religious books and writes reflections or some such crap.”

  “Siapa nama anda?”

  “Name’s Maciel. George Maciel.”

  “What kind name that lah?”

  “Sounds Mexican,” said Marty. “I know a Mexican named Maciel.”

  “I believe it’s Portagee. His family’s from the Azores.”

  “Maybe we change this one’s name lah,” said Ali. “Call him syaitan.”

  Moments like this, Snow understood why Bracelin hated the foreign crew. But Snow couldn’t hate them, maddening as they were. He loved their work, the way they could repair leaks in the pipeline on a paper clip and a prayer. They ran better soft plugs than anybody he’d ever seen, covered a breach with a piece of inner tube, ratcheted down an iron screw to make it seal, then covered the whole thing over with epoxy patch compound called Red Hand. Marty and Ali were goddamned artists with the Red Hand, could smooth out an illegal patch job just right. There were a hundred jobs they could do that way, and besides that they didn’t care how Snow butchered their languages. Snow was a graduate of what one old French pumpman used to call le petit nègre school of languages—the little nigger. The little nigger was never erudite or refined but always hustling, could always communicate his business. That was Snow, the little nigger, and to him it was no racist thing, either, but a title of grudging respect. The crew knew he was no kind to put on airs, was one of their own through and through, and all because of that he carried the chief mate—if not the skipper—right there in his brain, if not his pocket.

  Ali shook his head, lamenting the state of affairs now that the new ordinary had come aboard. “Catholics all around now. Ship need more Muslim!”

  “Knock that off,” Snow said. “I don’t give a damn what a man names his god, so long as he does his job. You Ali, quit superstitions. And Martín, next time we got inspectors aboard, don’t let Ensign Pulver see you running that soft plug. You see this?” He pulled out the sheaf of citations, still folded up in his pocket. “‘Below-code repairs!’ We get kapal to port or nobody gets rhing-rhing no way,” and Snow tore the citations into tiny pieces and tossed them overboard. The crewmen looked at each other and shrugged; they had no idea who the hell Ensign Pulver was anyway.

  Snow went down deck to the crew’s mess, grabbed a cup of coffee, and looked over at Gino and Katie the Baker. They hung out behind the steam table, white aprons and shirts and round chef’s hats to keep their hair from the food, their chubby hands chopping and stirring. A small TV with rabbit ears played news in the background, a reporter going on about the hostage crisis in Iran: Day 89, America Held Hostage. The goofy anchorman looked like someone had troweled his hair in place, but that didn’t concern the cooks. They too were still talking about the death in San Francisco, though apparently they weren’t sure of the dead man’s name, whether Patience or Delacroix.

  “It was Delacroix,” Snow said, barely able to overcome the din of the galley exhaust fan. “Patience was the one before him. Disembarked two months back.”

  “Poor wall-eyed sonuvabitch,” said Gino. Behind him the TV went all snowy while the Ayatollah Khomeini raised his hand to a crowd in downtown Tehran. “I hear the new guy let go of the ladder on him. I hear it got squashed like a pumpkin on a sidewalk.”

  “It?” said Katie. “You sound like you’re talking about a loaf of bread.”

  She wiped her wide heavy face with a hand dusted by baking flour, leaving a dash across her forehead. She and Gino spent so much time together they were starting to look like each other, the way an old married couple does, even though both were queer as pocket change at a carnival.

  “Come to think of it, he did look kinda like a loaf of bread,” said Gino.

  Listening to the cooks made Snow think of what Delacroix had told the kid about communication aboard ship. Snow decided then and there it wasn’t true: the crew knew what one another was saying, they just never said anything worth knowing.

  “Listen up,” said Snow. “You gotta set people straight here, be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. I saw the whole thing. The kid was nowhere near the ladder when Delacroix fell. He was up on deck with me.”

  “That ain’t what I heard.” said Gino. “Ho no!”

  “Well, I’m telling you straight.”

  “Ain’t what I heard either,” said Katie.

  Snow damned near heard his own synapses firing, making noise out his ears like speakers only he could hear. He took his coffee and climbed out to the weather deck, where he leaned against the railing and breathed the sea air, drank two swigs before he spit a mouthful overboard and tossed what was left, decided his bowels couldn’t handle coffee any more than they could handle booze. He wished he could drink alcohol still. The girl liked that, liked to party, as she put it. But Snow had quit drinking twelve years before, after a series of drunken blackouts he’d suffered on his way through Nam aboard a dry-cargo ship called Saigon. One time they spent a night with a crowd of Marines and Viet bar girls on the roof of the Hotel Da Nang, where they watched the war off in the bush nearby and drank until the girls couldn’t stand up. The next morning, back aboard ship, he woke up with blood all over his clothes, hands, and the sheets of his bunk. Scared the piss out of him, frankly. “You look like somebody opened you a new shit locker last night, Snow,” said one crewman, and the rest laughed. Truth was, Snow took a shower and found not a scratch on him, which scared him even worse. He hadn’t had a spot of alcohol since.

  Snow wasn’t the only one with a dark past. Turned out Maciel had come to sea direct from a place called the Jesuit
School of Theology in Berkeley. High atop a spot called Holy Hill, where they had all manner of denominations and religions competing for ethereal space above the decadent throngs of Radical Land. But Maciel having gone to college didn’t bug Snow nearly so much as studying religion for going on fifteen years. He kept wondering why the hell anybody would want to do that and what it meant—literally, how it looked to be holed up in a stone sanctuary in a state of spiritual awe. Snow never had much use for Christians or any other of the great religionists. All their monotheistic idealizing boiled down to convincing the world they were the chosen ones. Since the war, he’d felt chosen for very little, if anything. To him, life was a practical matter of survival and sex, and the two had always been tightly linked: he never felt sexless except when his life was in danger, and he never felt truly alive unless he was having sex.

  Maciel had no such outlook. He only wished he did. Snow figured him for a weird kind of virgin, like he’d been in fights but never fucked. He was bearing up under the burden of being orphaned. First came losing his mother to cancer when he was nine, alone in the sickness of her green room praying to God for some intervention that never came. Eight months later his father took him on a drunken bawling ride through the streets of Richmond, California, and deposited him on the battleship-gray porch of his grandfather’s house on 33rd Street. Without a word he tore off on blistered valves down Macdonald Avenue and never came back. Three nights later the kid was awakened after midnight to the sound of his grandmother wailing in the other room, “Dear God, dear God take my baby boy, take my baby boy,” and for a minute the kid thought she meant him, until it became obvious from the hushed presence of police in the front room that the boy’s father had managed to drive his Buick nose first into the Montezuma Slough. He buried it to the dashboard in silt mud, and no one ever knew if he meant to do it or was just too drunk to know the difference.

  This began the boy’s life with his grandparents, his grandma a Catholic girl who went to church three times a week and his grandpa a brawling boatman who might have been to church three times in his whole life. What the kid got from them was every bit as schizoid as Africans in a Christian missionary. He went to church with his grandma, prayed his Our Fathers and Hail Marys, and, with the host still glued to the roof of his mouth, drove with his grandmother to meet up with his grandfather’s ship for the last run of the week. The old man worked the Frisco harbor week-on week-off, and the final run was a Sunday ritual, from Richmond to Mission Rock, where the old man would hang with his crew and knock back some drinks at Kelley’s, while the boy would wait inside the fogged glass of his grandfather’s 1957 Pontiac wagon and watch the sailors stagger out and puke alone or wobble sideways with girls on their arms, pressing to the side of the building with tongues reaching and hands groping at the hems of dresses. He saw things there. Things he couldn’t get out of his boy’s mind. So he went to church, bathed in the glow and safety, prayed for salvation to the violet smell of his grandma’s powdered skin and the droning sound of priests who could read your mind. He went to Catholic schools all the way up to a degree in theology at USF, and then he entered the seminary, only to leave two years later after some vague scandal involving alcohol, a shovel, and his own grandmother’s grave. Apparently young Maciel was more fucked up than the ship’s average, and that was saying something.

  They were making south just outside Mexican waters when Snow climbed topside to find Bracelin eyeing the radar and Paynor finishing up plotting a course at the chart table. “Come to 130 degrees.”

  “One-three-zero,” chimed the helmsman.

  Snow got a view of the scope past Bracelin’s shoulder and saw a solid band of green clutter lying twenty-five miles south by west. “Looks nasty.”

  “Tropical storm Eleana,” said Bracelin. “A nasty little girl. I think I want to take her from behind.”

  Snow checked the chart: they angled on a westerly course, the storm’s brunt coming on their port side, heading downwind.

  “We’ll ride her out on the navigable half. It’ll take us offshore some.”

  “We don’t want to stress the hull more than we have to.”

  Snow checked the chart again. With his eyes he drew a circle around the eye of the storm. He ran a line through it, dividing it in half along the storm track. Cyclonic storms cut that way: they had a navigable semicircle and a dangerous one. On the dangerous half, winds blew in the same direction as the storm track. Not only were the winds stronger, but they tended to throw a ship into the path of the storm. On the navigable half you ran downwind, pitched out of the storm’s path, and because you ran against the motion of the storm, winds were 15 percent lighter. Still no Sunday breeze. Paynor watched the horizon with binoculars. He was an eastern boy, raised in Jersey or some such place, with a thick head of jet-black hair and a hairy birthmark that looked like a caterpillar clinging to his lip. “Hold on, gentlemen,” Paynor said. “Here she comes.”

  Over the next hour, the ship’s motions went from heaving and fluid to thunderous and blunt, and before long they had a report from the bow lookout, Ali, who was just on his way inside when he smelled something very wrong coming from the forepeak. “We got ammonia smell bad!” he said. On his way back in, a wave tore loose a bank of nitrogen bottles stored on the centerline catwalk, and from the bridge they watched them scatter and roll.

  “I’ll call the ordinary,” Snow said. “We’ll take care of the nitro bottles.”

  “Rouse Leeds too, get him down into the forepeak,” said Bracelin.

  Snow didn’t much care for rousing Leeds, who had a nasty tendency to get his awakener in a choke hold before he himself had actually awakened. Fortunately, he’d never done this to Snow, and to Snow’s knowledge, he’d never choked anybody out all the way before coming to himself, saying, “Oh, man, I’m sorry, man, I’m so sorry.” Which was doubtless little comfort to the man attacked.

  The ship was rocking pretty good by the time Snow knocked on the door marked RADIO OFFICER, then pushed through to find Leeds snoring from a single bed set up in the corner. He slept in a fetal position but with his legs out as if running in his sleep, feet pressed to the wooden box frame to keep himself in place. He had pillows stuffed in all around his back and chest too, and looked snug.

  Snow shouted as loud as he could from the door. “Leeds! We got ammonia leak forward!”

  Leeds sat upright all in one piece. “Got it,” he said.

  Snow was grateful for no choke holds. Leeds got up out of bed and started pulling on his jeans. He had shocking blond hair, like a surfer boy from SoCal, and silver-blue eyes that radiated light, and a set of choppers that did the same. The whitest fake teeth Snow had ever seen, six of them in a plate that Leeds now shoved into his mouth, smiling like he’d gargled with a gallon of Clorox.

  His teeth weren’t his only replacement part; Leeds had a steel plate in his skull too, which he claimed expanded and contracted with the weather, making creaking sounds as they steered south into warmer climes. Somehow it didn’t surprise Snow that Leeds had something loose topside, but he was a valuable hand all the same, a second engineer who since Malaysia had been the de facto chief engineer, not to mention the only qualified welder and riveter on board. Outside of keeping the power plant going, his primary job was to keep the ship’s cargoes from enveloping the crew in a toxic cloud. Unfortunately, by the smell of things, he was failing.

  Snow hadn’t set foot in this room since it belonged to the old RO, a wispy-thin drug addict who was accidentally left behind in Kiel, West Germany, and never replaced. It was a double setup, with the radio room on the forward side and sleeping quarters on the aft side, with a head in between. On the sleeping side the old RO had made a workbench from wood and Masonite, and behind it glass tubing ran along a wooden shelf bolted into the steel bulkhead. One glass line led to a nitrogen tank strapped into the corner, and another led to the head sink where he had a vacuum branch, so all he had to do was run water past the valve to create suction. On the opp
osite end, wedged between his bunk and the chemical bench, he had oxygen-acetylene tanks standing upright and leading to a vise, where a torch handle was cinched down to form a Bunsen burner. A corner locker held glass beakers and brown bottles of chemicals.

  “What the hell you got going in here?” Snow asked.

  “I’m treating my affliction.” Leeds held up his hands and flexed them, the knuckles crackling and popping like a wood fire, with pink lesions spread over the knuckle ridge. The chemistry lab was rocking and clanking in the storm, and Snow could hardly imagine the thing surviving much more without collapsing in a pile of shards on the deck.

  “Sounds kinda gnarly.”

  “You got no idea. Psoriatic arthritis. Itches and hurts like a mother.”

  “It ain’t contagious, is it?”

  “Naw, man, it’s my body eating itself up from the inside out.” Leeds sat lacing up his steel-toed work boots, his knuckles curled knobby and scaled pink. “They don’t know shit about it. I was on this hard-core chemo agent called methotrexate, but my hair started to fall out and I lost another tooth. Now I’m trying to synthesize my own sulfazine.”

  “Sounds like a knucklehead notion to me.”

  Truth was, nothing about Leeds surprised Snow anymore, including how the hell he could clutch a welding rod with fingers that looked like his. Snow left and went down one level to the petty officer deck and into his own room, where he found Maciel spread-eagle with his feet hooked under the metal tube frame of his upper bunk, gripping with white knuckles and eyes wide, tape machine grinding out speed guitars. “Is this a bad storm? It feels like a bad storm.”