by David Masiel
Snow held out a cup for Beth to pour a little scotch, and she frowned but did it anyway. He watched her long black fingers where they held the bottle, nails worn to the nub, the ends blunt and rounded by callus, and her forearms scarred by work. And he saw the way the kid looked at her, and all at once it just flooded from him, how could the kid not see it was all just Catholic guilt come to take a man in the end, just that, fucking brainwashed by his pious good girl for fifty-odd years and you too by the look of you. And how the kid looked at Snow. Like right at him. I don’t think you know anything about my grandmother. His deep-set eyes incapable of concealing malice. He wanted to lunge at the old man, he wanted to strike out and kill him, thrash him. “Lemme tell you something about your gramps,” Snow said. “Truth is, he was an angry fuck. Great boat operator, shitty skipper. The master of the single screw.” Then it melted and spread between the two of them, expressions played out to acid rock, and the two staring through a veil of smoke and hatred. They both hated him now. Didn’t bother or surprise the kid that his old gramps was a bastard, just so long as he wasn’t an incompetent one. “See, your gramps had a little problem with needing a whipping boy.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“Too bad, I got some good stories. I can tell you all about Dutch Van Sickle too, if you want.”
Maciel’s face rotated upward in fear. He stammered, “’Course I want to know. Why do you think I’m here? He never mentioned Van Sickle until the end.”
“Guess that makes sense. He died in 1948. I know ’cause I saw him die. Stood there on the afterdeck of the San Luis and watched your gramps beat him to death with a marlin spike, then dump his body in the river up near Decker Island. So I guess I can see where old Joaquin might have been a little overcome by memories of Van Sickle.”
Snow enjoyed watching the kid’s face, enjoyed making him look like a little boy before Beth, stammering with his tiny little mouth, trying to find something to say about the kind of man his grandfather was.
“I wouldn’t take it too hard, Georgie. There’s a little killer in all of us.”
The both of them turned to Snow, Beth’s eyes like dead lumps of ash, pink tongue licking chapped lips. The kid’s eyes turned to slivers on his face the more pissed off he got, and then he stood up and walked out. Beth stood up after him—said calmly, “What the bloody fuck was that about?”—and left Snow in her room to stew in the juices of conflict and an altered mind.
When it was clear no one was about to return, Snow climbed his way up one deck to his own cabin and opened the lower left drawer of his desk to pull out a map of the world. Every man needed a map of the world. To know its limits, where the earth ends and something else begins. Snow spread the oversized sheet out on the flat carpeted deck and then lifted it whole to the steel bulkhead, fumbling with the awkward size of it but finally stretching it to cover the mirror there. In the glass, he caught glimpses of his own scary hair and squinted eyes, all cut up by the movement of paper, which he taped and brushed flat with the back of his hand.
Once he’d hung it on the wall, he pulled out a sheet of round stickers in two colors, blue and red, and went over the various letters from Australia, putting blue dots for males and red dots for females. He figured there was a story behind each dot. He remembered when his father had first admitted he might have “one or two bastards” floating around. Snow wondered, given the names—all those Harolds—if maybe all of them hadn’t thought of themselves as first families. He’d never had more than one child with any woman, near as Snow could tell. Snow took a ballpoint pen and clicked it open, and in a careful script he wrote the names of every one of them. Manwaring-Snow had tracked thirty-seven of the sixty. Harold Sr. had scattered his seed on the seven seas and let it drift ashore. Thirty-seven. They were the only family Snow had left, yet he didn’t know a single one of them.
Then the kid came in and Snow drew the deepest breath he could, shoving his belly out to accommodate the air, and stood upright. “Hey there, buddy.” His brain spun from the sauce.
“Do me a favor and quit calling me that.”
“Come on now. Life’s too short to dwell on moods. At sea you’re stuck with each other.”
“That’s obvious.” The kid looked around darkly, then went to his locker and shoved some clothes around, like he might actually have planned on changing his shirt or something. He was rummaging around in there for quite a while when Snow pointed at the map of the world. “See there, what I put up.”
Maciel pushed around inside his locker as if putting something back in place, then looked over at the map. “Yeah? What is it?”
“Those dots—well, I guess you could say they’re my family. This half brother I got, he sent along this list. Seems my old man not only had a woman in every port, he had a kid to go with her! Now me? I got my nuts clipped after one. Got me a son by my ex-wife.”
The kid stared at the map a moment. Snow couldn’t tell if he was still pissed off at him or just brooding over his grandpa being a killer. “Are you Mormon or something?” the kid asked.
Snow laughed. “Do I look like a Mormon to you? I’m more like an old Greek Pagan. I like all them gods whoring around and living like people do.”
Snow nodded at the map. A cluster of red dots around Panama City and one blue in Colón, and on up to Puerto Limón in Costa Rica; two sisters up there. “This Digger’s a real resourceful guy. Why, I got half sibs spread out all over the frigging world. African, Indian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Pakistani—Jesus Christ, you name it: white, black, brown, yellow—I got it all. My family’s like a walking UN.” He paused an instant as the image settled. “Lucky bastard!”
He stopped and just looked at the kid. “Listen, I’m sorry about all that in Bethy’s room. Truth is, I got jealous. See, I told you Bethy was my girlfriend and—well, it rankled me that you was there.”
“Nothing was happening.”
“Oh, now, don’t say that. A whole lot was happening. I can see; I got two eyes and one good ear left.”
“We were just listening to music and having a smoke. Besides, she told me she isn’t your girlfriend.”
Snow heard the clicking and popping in his bad ear again.
Maciel went over to the map as if to physically change the subject. He looked it over from one end to the other, then turned around and said, “Bracelin gave me what he called a contract job. Paint prep. He wants me to do it with Lisa.”
“With Lisa! Is that right? I don’t like that name much.”
“It’s how she introduced herself to me.”
“She hates when I call her Lisa.” Snow went to put another sticker up on the map, but for the life of him he couldn’t get the dot peeled off. “Contract job you do on your own time, off watch. You’ll have till Panama City to get her done. Bethy’s good aloft. You’ll be doing the funnel.”
“What’s the funnel?”
“The housing around the exhaust stacks. You get to hang down from the top like a rock climber. Wash and chip and grind. Then paint. Hope you don’t mind heights.”
“I think I can manage.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t look up. They always say don’t look down, but I say don’t look up. World spins out from underneath you. Don’t want your thoughts too high in the sky, Georgie. And another thing: don’t do what Bethy does, that girl has no fear.”
“I don’t get it,” said the kid. “It looks like it was just painted.”
“Ship’s been sold, what I heard. We’ll do the stack and the names.”
Snow remembered the last repainting. Beth did the contract job solo that time, hanging in the boatswain’s chair, running sideways like a real climber, dusting her brown knees with the oxidized white paint, and dripping sweat in the afternoon sun.
Snow moved over to the writing desk and picked up the letters. He started to tell the kid something about them, but anything significant seemed to evaporate from his head. He felt a blank where his anonymous half siblings were con
cerned. He tried to conjure some image of them, but all he could manage was versions of himself in color. In his mind, even the sisters looked like him.
CLEFT
Along the palm shores of the isthmus country, Tarshish ran coastwise, steaming east into the Gulf of Panama, past the light at Punta Mala, which sat amid a few clustered buildings on a steep, rocky point, a low sweep reaching north, past a series of river mouths to a tongue of sandstone called Punta Lisa. All the way along, the crew worked feverishly, dangling over the side to scrape the hull free of barnacles, and on the weather deck to stem the flow of vapors and liquids. Snow anticipated an on-board inspection to gain entry to the Canal Zone. Marty and Ali put down fifty-three soft plugs and used ten gallons of Red Hand to cover the patches, and then the entire crew attacked the pipeline and weather deck with the only paint they had aboard: deck red. By the time they took their place in line for the canal, the ship looked pristine in the pipeline and like a burn victim on the exterior of the funnel, where the kids had done their contract job with admirable zest.
But the good news about Panama was radio practique. For reasons known only to Canal Zone authorities, the ship was cleared via radio and informed that no inspector would come aboard. Snow rejoiced—he felt his luck turning. They were halfway over their final transit hurdle, and now he could legally go ashore in a boat, do his business, and take an evening out with Beth in Panama City, work and play at the Rojo y Negro. They had planned it way back, pre-Frisco, but now when he was set to go in, he couldn’t find her anywhere. He searched all over, found Katie the Baker sleeping, found Leeds brewing up something of a chemical type, and finally on the bridge Paynor said Beth had signed out a Zodiac and gone into PC about an hour earlier—with Maciel. Snow’s head twitched in response.
Carrying fifty grand in large bills, his Z-card, and his reading glasses, Snow caught a water taxi into the old quarter, pulling away from the ship to the sound of Frank Zappa singing from an upstairs porthole: My ship of love, my ship of love, is ready to attack.
The Rojo y Negro lay at the end of a blind street off Calle 4, where a mix of battered Fords and sparkling Mercedes-Benzes bunched up on the cobbles outside the stone facades of the old quarter. Inside, Snow surveyed the early late crowd, the half dozen or so languid dancers weaving and grinding to a Latin beat, the swerve of lights, the long bar to the left with a cascade of glass and gold liquids behind, where a bartender stood leaning over the bar. Snow nodded. “Necesito hablar a Quirarte.”
The bartender stretched his arm out and pointed toward a staircase, with a cigarette dangling at the end of two fingers. The music’s beat pulsed inside Snow’s skin as he climbed along a staircase that overlooked the dance floor and disappeared into a dark hallway, where he came to a room marked OFICINA. He knocked once, cocking his good ear toward a door painted gloss black, and still heard only the thump of music from the disco below, until he cupped his good ear and heard a distinctly impatient “¡Pasale!” Snow pushed in to find the man seated behind a broad wooden desk, as neat and orderly as an accountant’s.
“I’m from the ship.”
“Of course, please sit—” Quirarte was a lithe little man, with childlike hands, the left bearing a tattoo arching over the back in the shape of an octopus clinging to his wrist. He reached into his desk with the same hand, and for just an instant Snow thought he’d miscalculated, that he’d been caught napping and now would pay a big tab as the man pulled a badge or a weapon or both.
Instead he came up with a Tyvek envelope, white and unsealed. Snow took it, pulled the papers up slightly, and saw the Certificate of Inspection and the registry papers, signed off by a Venezuelan classification society. “Do you want to buy a flag also?” said the manager.
“We got that, thanks.”
“The name is as you requested,” he said. “You’ll note the paperwork is all in order. There are blank records dating back, for you to fill in. Did you need cargo manifests?”
“No, we have them also, thanks.”
“Bueno. Ahora.” He paused, regarding Snow with his eyebrows lifted, as if Snow should know what he was about to say. “Tiene que pagar.”
“Right. Truer words never spoken,” and Snow straightened his legs out and lifted up on his haunches to slide the billfold from his front pocket. “The ol’ tango que pagar.” He laughed at his own joke, then felt the bone of his hip sticking out—focused for a second on lost weight. He pulled a wad of bills from the pocket, an inch thick at least, folded once and tied by a rubber band. He tossed it to the desk and watched the octopus hand creep over it, withdrawing like a sea predator.
“Would have preferred to do that by wire, you understand,” Snow said.
“All ships carry cash; this is nothing. I don’t like records of certain transactions. I’m sure you understand.”
“It’s all very discreet when you know who you’re dealing with.”
“Well, that is just it. I do not know you from anybody. It is only because of our Malaysian friend that I am even doing this now.”
Snow clutched the Tyvek envelope, stood up, and turned for the door. He thought as he reached the handle he should have offered his hand to shake, but by the time he decided it was never too late for politeness, it in fact was: the door had closed unceremoniously behind him. As he made his way down the hallway, the music reverberated in the confines and opened out as he hit the top of the stairs. He felt a spooky kind of mistrust lurking behind him like dangerous fog, and it felt good to be going down the stairs again into the open room.
As he made his way down the steps he clutched the Tyvek envelope and wished he’d been more thorough in checking through it, thinking Bracelin would have him for lunch if Quirarte had screwed something up. He thought he’d hit the head right off, do a double-check on the documents, but then, halfway down, he caught sight of Beth on the dance floor and felt his heart sink just as blood rushed his groin, and he stopped for fear he might trip and fall head first to the base of the stairs.
He had never seen her dressed for a club. She wore skin-tight blue jeans, unbuttoned on top to reveal her bare tummy and the top of white panties, and though this was apparently a style in the Rojo, he confessed it was enough to make his entire lower half go into fits of spasm. A black light shone from the corner, and though other light competed to reveal the truth of the dance floor, this light dominated her, made everything white on her glow like moonlight, made everything dark on her appear like velvet. She danced close with Maciel, too close for Snow to watch, astride his thigh and moving in circles with her hips. Snow turned and made for the head, a clean modern facility that told you how much money they brought through here.
He stepped into the first toilet stall, turned and sat on the open industrial toilet seat, and felt his ass sag downward toward the water. He peeled open the white envelope and withdrew the papers, studied them carefully, and found nothing amiss. They were first rate, not forged photocopies of documents but the actual documents themselves, and the raised seal of the Venezuelans appeared authentic in every detail. He kept staring at the name of the vessel, a name he had chosen out of some romantic brain snap, what felt like a grand idea at the time, but now seemed useless and even dangerous. Elisabeth. A ship called Elisabeth. Then he heard someone step through the bathroom door, causing him to hold his breath as footsteps drew near and the door rattled in front of him.
“Está occupado,” he said.
“I can hear that,” said the voice of Bracelin. “The question is, bos’n, what are you occupado doing?”
Snow slid the papers back into the envelope and turned as he stood off the pot, shoving his left foot against the flush lever, causing the toilet to explode with a sucking sound of rushing water. “What the hell you doing here?” Snow said.
“I asked first.”
Snow pushed out and faced him. Bracelin was with some Panamanian, some coifed nancy-boy staring at himself in the mirror. Snow had no clue what these two were about, and part of him didn’t want to
know.
“What’s shaking, Popeye?” Bracelin said.
“Just taking care of business,” said Snow.
“Everything in order?”
“Looks good. They do good work out of here.”
“They should, for all we paid for it.”
Snow leaned over to the cloth roll of towel and pulled down sharply, drying his face and hands against the rough fabric. He glanced back at the mirror and caught the Panamanian eyeing him by reflection, then standing straight, slicking his hair back. Snow resisted the urge to hide the envelope and, instead, stood upright and turned to face Bracelin, whose head rose above the stall’s upper rim, smiling over toward Snow, his piss stream sounding more like a horse than a human. “Ahhhh,” Bracelin said. “Feels good to finally get some of that Panny beer outa my system. Now you being from Panama got no sense of how crappy your beer really is.”
“I am proud to be Panamanian,” he said, still eyeing himself in the mirror but glancing over at Snow. “Roberto Duran viene de Panama.”