by David Masiel
“I don’t even speak fucking Spanish,” said Paynor. “This is insane, Mate, you realize that. I am so far out of my league here. I’m a goddamned navigator, and I’m a goddamned good one. But all this other shit is insane.”
“You know the routine,” said Bracelin.
“I got me a Berlitz phrase book in my room. I’ll drop it by,” said Snow, and at that he and Bracelin shared a laugh, Snow’s high-pitched and childlike, Bracelin’s mechanical and lifeless. Bracelin pulled his binocs back up and started scanning the white beaches of El Salvador.
“Now I got to get out on deck and find out what’s going on,” said Snow.
Bracelin didn’t so much as pull the eyepiece away from his field glasses. “You better start by keeping an eye on that little girl of yours.”
Snow stopped just as he was heading out the side door to the bridge wing. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t know. You tell me.”
“Mind your own business.”
“Yeah yeah, old man, like you ain’t my business. Say hi to Lisa for me.”
It irritated Snow no end that Bracelin called her Lisa. He hated that name, Lisa. She was Beth or Elisabeth, but not goddamned Lisa. His headache felt like a thousand seeds of pain all sprouting at once inside his brain.
Then he heard the ring of the ship’s bell signaling the watch change.
Snow went down the bridge wing and took the external ladder to the poop deck, then down through the internal door to his room, where he stepped in, expecting the kid to be there getting ready for supper. But the room was empty, which was just as well, since Snow had begun to wonder if now wasn’t the time for drastic action on the personal front. He pulled open a drawer on the metal writing desk and shuffled through envelopes from that Aussie half brother of his, found a pack of Rolaids, peeled back the foil in a broad strip, and chewed down three.
A big part of him thought Paynor was right; this was all insane. He put himself back in that moment steaming the Strait of Malacca when he’d manned the helm on the midnight watch with Bracelin alone on the bridge, listening to the man’s frustrations with Petrochem, how he’d sailed with them for going on ten years, had been by god Supermate. “You know,” Snow had said. “There’s other options.” And he went on to tell him about the people he knew in Port Kuleng, Malaysia, and similar people in Panama City, Panama, who could procure certain documents to turn one ship into another.
“So if we did such a thing—and I ain’t saying we should—how we gonna pull that off with McFarland aboard?” Bracelin had said.
“Two choices there,” said Snow.
“We kill him or we kill him.”
“No, no. That’s the beauty of it. We don’t kill him. We convince him his ship’s been sold and the new company wants to keep him on.”
Bracelin had snorted so loud Snow thought he might have injured himself. But Snow had it all figured. They actually would start a company, open an account, pay off the crew. They could control the captain just fine—Beth had a two-month supply of Valium to feed the old man’s fondness for the stuff and contacts to get more in PC. Bracelin only nodded, muttered, “Hmmm,” and went away.
Two days later, with Port Kuleng appearing on their port side, the mate came through the door while Snow was reading in his rack, shut the door behind him and stood there like a steel I-beam set upright. “I been thinking about your idea,” he said.
So with a few hundred keystrokes on an old typewriter, fifty gallons of new paint, and some cash exchanged for paperwork in Port Kuleng, the Petrochem Mariner out of Rotterdam, Netherlands, became Tarshish out of Monrovia, Liberia. The captain had been retained and the mate stayed in control. The rest of the crew, save for a half dozen, had been fired and sent home, and then along came the Malays and the Panamanians—a motley crew that could barely communicate with one another, much less the officers, a linguistic confusion that suited Snow’s purposes to a T. For the first time since he got out of the Navy, Snow felt prospects in the offing.
Now he knelt in front of his locker and dug into the lower drawer and looked at everything he’d stuffed there in the years since he’d been aboard. In place of home, Snow had film. He shuffled through the yellow Kodak boxes, 8mm footage he’d been collecting since the fifties, boxes marked BANGKOK 1952 and INDIA 1958 and so on. Silent footage playing snake charmer along the banks of the River Ganges, guiding for steelhead up the Skykomish, good times with Jill—he wouldn’t show anybody that one. She’d been just shy of half his age then, and while some thought her damaged and him perverted (or vice versa), he’d had laughs with Jill, laughs and real solid good times. After a particularly vigorous night together, she allowed as how she would never again miss the drink or boys her own age. Still, she’d gone off with one, one who could still father a child, and now they lived like a happy family somewhere in the Bitterroots.
On the floor before the box of movies, Snow sat cross-legged, proud he could still do that. He lifted the old Brownie camera with the turret lenses and loaded it up with fresh film—or, rather, blank film, since he’d bought it four years before in bulk and had no idea if it could hold an image. He sat there cranking the windup, thinking if he took film of Beth now he’d have that to retire with, even if she did turn him down. A pathetic thought, complete with visions of a geriatric head case holed up in a moss-bound cabin jerking off to movies of what might have been. He set the camera aside and pulled out the plain box, unmarked by any particular jewelry retailer, containing the diamond propped on a gold mount, a stone he knew personally since he’d practically mined it himself. It was well over two karats, in a setting of white gold, bound to a white gold necklace. Nothing so silly and romantic as an engagement ring, even though in his mind it meant the same thing.
He felt the easy seas beneath him. The sun blasted in a straight cylindrical shot through the porthole. There on the floor, he folded the box closed and lifted himself to his feet, a pain searing up his hip flexors to where he thought he might not be able to walk. Just his luck he’d pull a groin on his way to propose marriage to a girl half his age. He tucked the air mail letter from Thorson into his pocket and figured he’d use that too, if he got desperate, tell her straight out he’d found her long-lost father and was even now in the midst of arranging a meeting, a regular family reunion. It was dicey business, but he knew it might get to that.
He walked carefully down a level to the O-1 deck, to the room Beth shared with Katie the Baker, paused a moment to gather what he thought might be strength, and rapped on the door three times. When she swung the door open, he saw past to where Maciel sat on the floor, cross-legged on the rug Snow had made for her, smoking a cigarette and listening to music, that same garbage the kid listened to in his bunk. Near as Snow could tell the kid’s music was to real music what a root canal was to glorious sex, but Beth seemed to like it.
“Well, my my, if it isn’t Harold Hardrada,” she said, and something in her manner struck him, that she was talking to him but flirting with the kid.
“Hey there,” said Snow, but he felt his mouth hanging a bit—an odd sense of déjà vu, like walking into his own nightmare, and it damned well showed.
Then something inside him clicked over, maybe something about keeping your friends close and your adversaries closer, or maybe just because in truth he liked the two of them, and knew full well that acting all jealous would do nothing for his cause. He had to suck this one up, there was no other way. “Hey—I am sorry to interrupt,” he said. He felt the cardboard box in his pocket and smiled genuine now, his own presence tall and strong as he stepped inside like it was his room after all. “Just wondered if anybody was up for a party!” he said. “Thinking on one of them bottles of single malt you got stashed in your footlocker.”
“But you don’t drink, Harold.” She eyed him. “You haven’t been tapping off my stores, have you?”
“I wouldn’t pilfer. I told you I’d let you stash it in my room. I’m just feeling festive!”
he said, sitting on the lower bunk as if he’d sat there often enough to call it his own chair, elbows on his knees. Maciel sat on the floor below. “Either that or we could smoke a little whacky tobaccy—more my style.”
“You know the rule,” Beth said. “No pay no play.”
“Sure. I’ll pay.” He fished into his pocket and brought out a twenty. “How much for this?”
“That’ll get you two joints,” she said, and she went into the locker beneath her bunk, her head practically between his legs amid all the items of her business, and pulled out two rolled ones.
“That’s all? My day that’d get you four joints and a blow job!”
“Be good, Harold,” and she handed it up to him and took the money at the same time. She got up and moved across the floor with the frayed bottoms of her pants sliding along the deck below dusty bare feet. She was goddamned cool, dragging on one of those Indian smokes of hers, squinting and holding it in her lips as she turned the music up—some heavy guitar concoction or another. To Snow it all sounded the same, like a collision on the London underground set to a reggae beat.
“God, I love this song!” she cried, and set the smoke in an ashtray and started to dance all frantic—like her limbs might fly off, or her clothes. He enjoyed the dark skin of her hips just above the waist of her green fatigues, worn like hip-huggers to where he could see just barely the band of her underwear and wish for more. He enjoyed the tight hair of her head, bristly as a scrub brush, making her look like a boy. That’s what she meant to do, divorce herself from her very gender, not realizing that half the crew of half the ships she’d ever been on would like her better that way.
He wished he could someday at least see her nude, touch the firm tight skin at the base of her back, where fine black hair grew like grass up hollow valley land, and where her body flared to her rounded bottom. But these were rare sights here, and he wondered if they weren’t for the kid’s benefit anyway.
Snow knew where to find sex anywhere in the world, and had. But to actually make love one last time before he died—he didn’t imagine he’d ever wish for something like that, something he’d had with his first wife just after the war, something he had lost while working the river because he’d screwed everything he could get his hands on. Inside, deep where the hot metal of the kamikaze had burned into him, he knew he would throw himself in front of a crane hook for Beth.
He watched the two now, trading smiling glances as they drew on their exotic smokes, moved like wild banshees to a music that left him behind, like they knew already what would happen later, after the old guy left. But they didn’t see the danger, didn’t fully understand that, as far as the crew thought, Beth belonged to Snow. If they thought of him as her father or her brother or her protective uncle, they’d try to move him aside, because those relations didn’t have the power of sex and sexual possession. He guessed it some strange and primal respect paid to a man of sixty who still inspired a kind of awe, or maybe just the outmoded stupidity of men who regarded women as property. Snow wondered if Beth got that at all, wondered if she had any idea how the tribe really worked.
He took out the Brownie and let the motor fly—“Smile for the camera!”—and then held the joint up with his other hand, saying, “Let’s fire this puppy up!”
Maybe it was the three Dixie cups of Glenfiddich combined with the joint, or maybe the music that raked through Snow’s skull like a road grader, but soon the ghetto blaster zoned from the Clash into Pink Floyd, and Snow was right back in a room in Da Nang with a bar girl in 1968, the Year of the Monkey, the eve of Tet and the Tet offensive, listening to the Doors and smoking dope. Only that was just memory, and bad memory at that, since now he wasn’t with a bar girl, he was watching these two, knowing exactly why Beth had failed to awaken him. Suddenly he hated everything that came from the kid’s mouth, a pouty little mouth at that. Beth and Maciel sat facing each other in the middle of Snow’s rug smoking bidis as if he weren’t there. And it wasn’t as if Snow didn’t want to hear about the death of the grandfather. He was curious to know how old Joaquin had gone in the end. He settled in and tried to listen. It turned out they were hard days, the worst kind of days in the shit, as the old-timers would say. Days in the shite, as Beth would say. Old Joaquin appeared there for Snow, right there in his eyeballs: batting his hands like a swarm of bees was trying to fly up his nose, lost in storms at sea—U-boats! U-boats!—attacks that ended with the old man trying to abandon ship by climbing out the window into his vegetable garden. He refused all that last-rites-and-unction nonsense, fighting some unseen menace on his own only to crap his pants while his grandson tried to help him make it to the john. He groaned For God’s sake, Georgie, for God’s sake, and as George cleaned him up he mumbled Dear God I never thought it would come to this. It was much later, well into the final vigil, that all the old man could say was Van Sickle. He must have said that name a hundred times. And it stuck at the kid then, wondering who this Van Sickle was.
Snow knew. He saw the man as clear as if he’d stepped aboard the San Luis Rey this second, a rowdy boiling red-bearded man with grease permanently pressed into the cracks of his calluses. Dutch Van. Chief engineer and third in a drinking triumvirate that included Snow because Snow was a war veteran and had the scars to prove it. Snow liked that—he liked the end to the formalities of deep water, the hierarchy of the military. He warmed fast to the inland boatmen, the river men, who on water never ventured more than a stone’s throw from land, who never got quite so crazy—he thought.
But all men everywhere got crazy, got old and scary. Young Maciel had never seen a man die before, never seen a man dive off down the spiritual storm drain dragged by ghosts and dead men. Old Joaquin was convinced of his fate, just as Snow was somehow grudgingly convinced of his own. There were things you did in your life that you couldn’t duck. Old Joaquin wanted one thing: to be buried next to his wife of fifty-four years, his beloved Marie. He pressed the kid to use contacts the kid didn’t have, pressed him to make a direct appeal to the bishop, as if anybody would let him, a lowly seminarian, a Jesuit at that. The monsignor crossed his sausage fingers over his fat robe and said, “You could always move her.” The thought alone was repellant. Buried six years before, after a life of good works, after a life of humility and suffering, a Christly life, Marie de la Rosa Maciel died and went to heaven and was buried in the hallowed ground of the archdiocese. To give his grandfather his last wish, George would have deprived his grandmother of hers.
Joaquin lay in a hospital bed they’d rolled into his room, shades drawn and tubes up his nose, the kid unable to understand how the old man could profess not to believe in God yet believe so completely in Hell and the Devil. He clung to his desire, that the church might step aside and let him be laid to rest on their sacred turf. Worm food! Worm food anyhow! The old man clung to the matter of burial as if it meant something to the spirit world, as if it meant everything to this world.
Snow looked at the girl. His head started bobbing around like he didn’t know whether to nod his head or shake it. She was right there in it, into the kid, leaning into him and into the story because isn’t it so sad and romantic to imagine two people who loved each other so much they could forgive their differences and live together over five decades only to die separately and in such despair. A tragic love story expanded to the afterlife. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Snow wanted to blow chow. How could these people expect more? Knowing what had happened in the war alone stripped away all expectations of intervention. No Elysian Fields or Valhalla for Joaquin Maciel—or for Harold Snow either, war veterans or not. A pair bound for Hades if there ever was, while life slips past like fodder for ghosts, and whiskey slides straight down your throat to explode in your stomach and bounce back to a throbbing head. It was all chemicals on chemicals.
Snow knew about death, and old Joaquin, and the kid, how he’d fled to that church and how he’d censored the grandpa half, how he’d cut out that gene, or tried to,
sat on it, whatever. The dangerous semicircle of his own corkscrewing DNA, with a strange upbringing throwing in a kink or two. The kid ran from his own bad self for twenty-five years. Now he was here. At sea. Asea. Snow hated him for it. Wanted to slap him for it. Wanted to tell him about real death, about the truth behind death and how it came for everybody and none of them were special. He wished others could have seen what he’d seen. He wished they could see the humped charcoal bodies. He wished they could see Tet 1968 in Da Nang. Viet bar girls. Jarheads without a conscience. Why the fuck did he have someone else’s blood all over his body? But none of that was anything compared with the Bay of Bengal in 1970. That was it, you wanted to see the absurdity of death you only had to be there aboard a dry-cargo ship on the dangerous semicircle fifty miles from Chittagong, in East Pakistan, being blown aground on 140-knot winds and a sea surge.
As that storm got going, Snow had climbed topside to begin his standard watch on the helm, on a ship where the stair tower was set off the bridge deck, connected by a fifteen-foot catwalk of grated steel mesh and steel handrails. Rain flew across at 90 degrees, pulsing as the crests of waves were torn off at the top, lashing at the ship with spume and rain mixed like a thousand fire nozzles. Snow knew he’d be a wet rat by the time he crossed over, so he took off all his clothes, tucked them in a ball under his belly, and ran like a naked fullback through rain that felt like ten thousand needles piercing his skin. When he got to the other side he had dry clothes, and a good thing too, since he was the last man to make that run for the next twelve hours. He stood the wheel, steered the ship into a blunt force blast of wind and water, blowing them into the wall of the eye, where they hove to and put out two anchors and turned full ahead into the teeth of it and still got blown backward twelve and two-tenths miles. Up into the Ganges plume, where Snow watched the silt waters scour the ship. When they woke up the next day and walked out on deck they found the entire windward side sand-blasted. Shined like silver. Made you want to paint it. But that wasn’t all, that was just a vision of possibility, of life, because the reality was darker than silver; the reality came in that sea surge that ran up-delta and drowned a quarter million—a quarter million—men, women, and children. Half were Hindus, too many to cremate, so they said words over bodies and dropped live coals in their mouths to symbolize cremation and dumped them in the river to wash out to sea. Next morning, along with a silver ship, that dry-cargo ship called Nineveh, there floated a hundred thousand of the dead all around them, their black Indian hair waving in the water like seaweed and their mouths burned out like somebody had taken a blowtorch to them. All that night lying in his bunk he heard the sharks crunching on human flesh and bone, and that was horrible to hear, but there was no guilt. He’d had nothing to do with making tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal. But guilt came from other places, the old man’s wheezing refrain: Goddamn you Van Sickle you get the hell from my house you get the hell from my house!