The Western Limit of the World

by David Masiel

  Kairos was a lanky black man of forty, with prematurely white hair and a wide smiling face. He was a war vet, a boonie rat in Nam during the early years, and also a Christian. He was converted while in Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was awestruck and moved to spiritual revelation by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bombed bodies of children riled his hatred while the measured reactions of great leaders made him realize how goodness and righteousness could prevail even in the face of evil. Somehow he managed to learn to turn the other cheek, even as the Army was teaching him how to shoot his enemies in the head.

  Snow wiggled his way into a chemical suit and air pack while Kairos went on about his primary obsession: what cargoes they were really carrying in their holds. “I’d like one look at that binder,” said Kairos, in his booming preacherlike voice. “I have a right to know what we’re carrying. A man’s got to protect himself!”

  The two waddled off down the side deck looking like extras from a biowarfare movie. Snow felt a line of sweat start at his armpit and run down the length of his torso until it snuck into his jeans. “Best thing you can do to protect yourself is work like a dog and stay quiet as a mouse,” he said.

  “I always worked like a dog, all my life I worked like a dog. When you going to let me see the skipper so I can tell him what Bracelin done to me?”

  “See, it ain’t really the cargo manifest you’re interested in, is it, Stephen?”

  “No man got to stand for the disrespect of being called nigger.”

  “Stephen, you’re a big boy, you heard worse in the war, I’m sure. Besides, he apologized for that, I heard him,” Snow said.

  “All the same, he uses the word niggerhead even though I told him time and again it’s offensive. He could say cathead or capstan just as easy and he knows it, he just calls it a niggerhead to get my goat. Looks my direction like he’s daring me to say something about it. Apology or not, he’s got prejudice running in his veins. He don’t see men as men. We’re the Malay this, the Panny that—he’s a bigot, Snow, and I ain’t gonna take his cracker-ass shit on the job. I shouldn’t have to. I want to talk to the captain.”

  That was all Snow needed, Kairos talking to the captain. Snow moved past one hatch and saw a white rim of plastic material showing around the rim of two tanks carrying monomers, the self-reactors. With the weather growing hot in the tropics, he made a mental note to check their supply of inhibitors and add more as the temperature rose. He arranged the hood and got set to pull the mask up over his face with a sense of enclosing dread. “I don’t know what’s going on. He’s sick. I don’t see him.”

  “Yeah, I heard that for going on six weeks now. If he’s so sick how come he ain’t been shipped home?”

  “I don’t know, Stephen. He’s biding his time for his pension,” Snow said. “You got a problem, take it up with the union steward.”

  “The union?” Kairos’s face scrunched up in a pinch-faced, angry confusion that Snow swore only a black man could muster. “What union is that?”

  “The International Brotherhood of Gripers and Complainers,” said Snow, and managed to squeeze a laugh out of the pumpman.

  “I like you bos’n, I got no beef with you. But Bracelin’s one sick cat, you ask me. And he’s got that binder!”

  Now he was back on the binder again. Snow was almost glad when they pulled the hoods down over their heads and started breathing bottled air. “Knowledge is power!” Kairos shouted, his voice muffled behind the mask.

  Snow carried a portable oxygen sensor and something called an Explosimeter, which measured combustible gas in the atmosphere. He checked levels all the way down, and found the tank clean and gas-freed as they reached bottom. The two men no sooner saw it safe to breathe than they tore their faces free of the confining masks and peeled back the hoods. “Save air this way anyway,” said Snow. The tank smelled vaguely of garlic, but they saw no evidence of leaks. With the butt end of a ratchet handle, they tapped along the center bulkhead and then back toward the side along a wall of steel that separated them from what should have been an empty coffer dam. “Check this out, bos’n,” said Kairos as he tapped.

  Snow went over and put his ear to the steel, tapped once himself, and sure enough he heard none of the vacant reverb you normally got from a void space. A coffer dam had one purpose: to separate tanks of incompatible cargoes and allow you more flexibility in what cargoes you shipped. They worked, by and large, unless you got leaks from two tanks at once, in which case the coffer dam might contain some volatile mixtures. Snow had seen such multiple leaks blow a chemical carrier in half and kill five men in Rodeo, California, in 1971. He furrowed his brow in worry.

  Then he tapped again, saw a flake of rust and reached with his thumbnail to pop it loose, and all at once a ten-foot chunk of rusted steel folded down off the wall. Then he was inundated by a flood of bulk liquid chemicals, the constitution of which was unknown but the effect immediate and unavoidable.

  Kairos backpedaled against the flow, crying out, “Jesus dear Lord!” before he choked on the vapors. Snow spun and tripped over a longitudinal support beam, falling face forward while the flood of liquid chemicals washed over his back. Then he tried to breathe, gagged instantly, and vomited, disgorging his last meal. Stomach acid hit the fluid at the base of the tank and churned, emitting a chemical smoke just as he yanked his air mask hard onto his face, sucking on the respirator to activate the flow of air. Then he turned for the distant light of the tank hatch, the stair-step ladder seeming too far off. He crawled, scrambled, and finally got himself to his feet and ran for his life.

  Kairos was right behind him, yelling the whole way, until he too pulled his respirator mask on and they hit the stairs, climbing. They hauled themselves out to the open deck and peeled off their masks, coughing, eyes burnt to the color of ripe cherries. Next thing they knew they were being tugged at and prodded to crawl their asses toward a decontamination shower set up at midships. Ali was shouting, “They got the dousing!”

  The cool water rained down on Snow’s head, and by the time he caught his breath he felt his lungs burn with each pull of air.

  “Fucking morphodite motherfucking ship,” said Kairos. “Fucking morphodite bastard-ass fuckall of a ship!”

  Snow lay there, his chest heaving, and saw the boots and legs of Bracelin standing over him. “I think it’s safe to say we got leaks down under,” said Snow.

  “What’d you do?” said Bracelin. “Try to take a bath in it?”

  Kairos pulled himself upright, stripped out of the chemical suit and threw it against the bulkhead. “Mother-fucker! Mother-fucker!” he raged.

  “Why don’t you calm down, Kairos?” said Bracelin.

  “Don’t you tell me, Mate!” said Kairos. “This ship got sold three times in the last two years, why don’t you tell me what you make of that? Huh?”

  “Ain’t it obvious?” said Bracelin. “She’s making her way down the ladder of maritime outfits and the one who owns her now is probably gonna run her until she sinks. You just better hope you ain’t aboard when it happens.”

  “And who is this latest outfit? SeaStar Inc. I ain’t never heard of them and I been shipping for fifteen years.”

  “You trying to make trouble for yourself, keep moving your mouth.”

  “Ain’t no man can demand I shut up.”

  The two stood face-to-face, Kairos an inch or so taller than Bracelin but only half as wide. Maciel was practically hopping up and down, figuring the two were about to tear into each other. For a few seconds, Snow thought it might get to that. He sat with his back against the bulkhead and peeled his chemical suit down his body and off his legs. Maciel turned to Snow. “You all right, Harold?”

  “I’m okay.” He looked up, saw that most of the crew had gathered.

  Ali stooped down over the boatswain. “Bos’n man! You got something nasty in your eyeballs. Tst-tst-tst. What fuck this lah?”

  Beth bent over and peered into his ey
es, then pulled a bottle of saline solution from a plastic first-aid kit, washing out both eyes until he felt water draining down his neck and into his shorts. “You never looked lovelier,” Snow said.

  Beth put the saline back into the kit and shut it. “Blurred vision.”

  Kairos reached into his pocket and came up with a piece of welder’s soapstone, then marched long-legged to the coffer dam tank lid and scrawled DNE!! across it—for DO NOT ENTER. He marched over to the tank they’d just come out of, slammed the hatch cover shut and spun the wheel to dog it tight, then wrote the same thing on that. Bracelin scowled, then went over and scraped his boot across the letters, scratching them out. “We got Panama Canal transit,” he said. “We won’t be advertising this, got it? Nobody open either of them up! Got that?”

  “I got that all right, yes!” said Ali, and pushed Maciel in the chest. “We don’t need no priest on board for this lah!”

  And the crew nodded at that too. Somehow they all managed to blame the kid for this—for Delacroix, for the storm, for the break in the bulkhead down below, maybe for Bracelin too. From then on the Christians, Kairos included, refused to call Maciel by name, preferring Jonah instead and threatening to feed him to a sperm whale if only they could find one.

  That night Snow lay in his bunk with his chest tingling and itching, and finally he slept hard straight through the dark hours, his dreams hallucinatory and varied, dreams of bombs falling and sprouting into palm trees that grew from tropical waters. For a while there it was 1945 again, and he was aboard ship at the Bikini atoll H-bomb tests, donning his flimsy atomic sunglasses for a little Operation Sunshine and feeling the bright raging ball of fusion as it rose off the waters of the South Pacific. No palm trees remained. Later he ran the launch boat that ferried scientists back and forth to the island after the blast. He dreamed of sitting in a conference room with the lights low and an overhead projector showing the charts and graphs of all those rads he and the other launch operators had absorbed, tenfold what the others had taken. In the dream he kept pushing his fingertips up under his ribs like he wanted to dig something out of there, like one of those charlatan doctors pulling chicken guts from sick people. He couldn’t quite fathom it. He had lived the clean life without booze or smoke these past ten years; it didn’t set right to imagine some ball of growth had taken root thanks to nuke tests from thirty-five years back. To make it worse, when he woke up he found it was half past three in the afternoon and he’d slept eleven hours, over twice his norm, and no one, not even Beth, had awakened him.

  As ship’s boatswain, Snow oversaw multiple watches, so he didn’t stand a regular watch himself. He worked 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. so he could manage the day watches comprised of able seamen and ordinaries. He then stood a night watch that straddled those of his crew—spending at least a couple of hours on the bridge between 2200 hours and 0200. The only other person with such a schedule was the chief mate, and the result was simple: they were the only two people aboard who knew what was going on.

  But now it was midafternoon, and for the first time since he had sailed boatswain, Snow realized he knew little of what was happening on deck. His brain felt absurdly fuzzy. He shook his head trying to eradicate the ringing in his left ear. The freak of it was, he hadn’t heard so much as an inside tapping from that ear in thirty-eight years, when it was damaged on the wings of a 250-kg bomb dropped by the sons of Nippon. He shook his head and tried to think about what they would do next and in what order they’d do it. He thought about Beth. He wanted to find her and have her over to the room. He kept flashing on that first time he’d ever seen Beth, walking up the docks at Rotterdam, striding like she knew where she was going, wearing bell-bottom dungarees and two layers of sweatshirts and carrying two seabags. He had greeted her at the top of the gangway and charmed her into helping with her bags, which were loaded down with a regular commissary. Turned out one way she got along on board ships was to provide minor contraband; anything you couldn’t get from the cooks you could get from Beth: every kind of whiskey and smoke on earth, whacky tobaccy, the occasional hashish, prescription drugs, and those weird Indian smokes called bidis that tasted like Turkish tobacco and smelled like a chocolate sundae.

  They had shared a joint in his room later, and she told him in her strange accent—one part Sierra Leone English and one part London middle class—about the other way she got along aboard ships. “It’s quite simple, really. I come aboard, and without their knowing it I interview the crew. I pick the best and most strategic one and take him as a lover. Then the rest leave me alone. It’s that simple, really. Men are quite territorial about sex, you know.”

  Snow did know. “So is this one of those interviews?”

  “No, no. First of all, a man must never know he’s being interviewed. I’ve spilled the beans on that one. Second of all—well, you aren’t my type.”

  He didn’t ask what was her type; maybe he was afraid to, or maybe he could guess that he was too old and scarred up. “Well, there’s always friendship,” he said. “Hell, the crew’ll probably think we’re screwing just ’cause I’m here tonight.”

  “That could be useful, actually,” she said, with a wry smile. “It gets a tad wearing to be constantly doing interviews.”

  “Sure. You can just tell them you’re my girlfriend—that’ll keep the wolves away, guaranteed. Around here, Chief Mate is Chief Wolf. We got an understanding.”

  “Could be complicated.”

  “Could beat the alternative. But I’m high, so what do I know?”

  They had giggled together, even as he reached out and held her hand and said, “Girlfriend.”

  But all along Snow had been hoping, thinking if he did the right thing and remained a man in her life like no other, someone she could trust, then she might warm to him and see some affection there. Now he didn’t know. Or maybe he did.

  He tried to make a map of the crew, where they’d be, and what they’d be doing. Leeds would be on his day watch in the engine room. Beth and Maciel would be in the last hour of their afternoon watch. Marty and Ali would be sleeping. The cooks would be making dinner. Paynor and Bracelin would both be on the bridge.

  Snow climbed.

  He made his way via the internal stair tower, emerging in the chart room, stepping forward into the afternoon light of the wheelhouse, where he found Bracelin and Paynor looking out at the palm shores of the Central American coast. Snow was unsure just where they were, but soon he saw the refinery at Acajutla in El Salvador, and knew they were still a day’s sail from Panama.

  “Where the fuck you been, old man?” said Bracelin.

  “I think there was sleeping pills in them chemicals I run into,” said Snow.

  “Either that or your days are catching up to you. Got your old body in a jammie twist,” said the chief mate. He was scanning the shore with binoculars. Snow didn’t feel much like wasting time, so he relieved the helmsman and took the wheel. No sooner were they the only three left on the bridge than Paynor turned and let loose. “If one Mexican CG officer has us made, what makes you think more haven’t?”

  “Because we bribed his ass,” said Bracelin. “If he weren’t working alone he wouldn’t be extorting us, he’d be arresting us.”

  “In Mexico? You can guarantee that in Mexico? Give me a break!”

  Snow fought through his headache and the ringing in his ear and said, “Let’s not miss the real point here, gents. It changes nothing we gotta do, just maybe when we got to do it. We got papers waiting for us in Panama City. The only question is how we run the canal. On that we got two choices: we paint her now and I go ashore in a boat for the papers, and we transit the canal under new flag and new COI. Or we try to run her as is and change her on the other side after Moín, like we planned all along.”

  “No, no, no.” Paynor ran his hand through his thick black hair until it boiled straight up off his head. “There’s a third choice. You go ashore, get the papers, and we don’t stop here. We head straight down the coast, pick up
cargo in Valparaiso et cetera, and round the Horn for Freetown.”

  “Two problems with that,” said Snow. “First, that adds two weeks to Freetown, and I ain’t sure we can afford two weeks. Second, we need more product. We ain’t full yet, and we might get contracts out of Venezuela.”

  “Not only that,” said Bracelin. “But you seriously want to run the Strait of Magellan in this piece of shit? ’Cause personally, that gives me visions of little chunks of rust floating around and not much else.”

  “I’ll take my chances with that over prison in Panama,” said Paynor. “I’m serious. I do not want to go to prison in Panama.”

  Snow could see that choice working on Bracelin, and he understood it: if both fates could be assured they would all rather die going around the Horn than live in a Panamanian prison. But Snow didn’t think they would go to prison. He thought they’d make it without trouble, and he said so. “It gets back to whether you believe that Mexican capitán put out an alert. I don’t think he did. I think he was operating solo and he’s gonna take his ten G’s and not say a peep. I met the guy. I looked in his eyes. I’ll bet my freedom on it.”

  “I agree with him,” said Bracelin.

  “Fine,” Paynor said. “Fine fine fine. You two make your bet. Goddamn bullshit is what this is. This is stupid goddamned bullshit and I never should have let you two talk me into this.”

  “We need you, Payne,” said Snow.

  “Yeah, like fuck you do. First new need you get, you’ll dump my ass.”

  “Guess you better make yourself indispensable,” said Bracelin.

  “You’re our agent,” said Snow. “Get us goddamned product to move and we’re gonna love you.”