The Western Limit of the World

by David Masiel

  “¿Quién es más macho?” said Bracelin, with a surprisingly passable Spanish accent. “¿Roberto Duran? ¿Harold Snow? ¿O Jorge Maciel?”

  “How long you been here? I didn’t see you when I came in,” said Snow.

  “Just got here. We knocked back a few at Lu-Lu’s, and I thought I’d come to cover your backside just in case.”

  “Well, no just-in-case required,” said Snow. “What the hell you doing at that place anyhow?”

  “Just seeing how the other half lives. I saw your kids out there on the floor when I come in. I don’t believe I ever seen Lisa looking quite like she looks tonight.”

  “I picked them jeans out.” Jesus, he felt like an ass.

  “Oh, I’m just sure you did. Looks to me like you’re losing your seat on the old horse, Snow. That is, if you ever had a seat.”

  “If you got something to say, maybe you should just say it.”

  “Well, I got this feeling come over me, a kind of idea that got stuck in my head that she ain’t been fucking you at all. Like not even once.”

  Snow let out a long slow breath, glanced at the Panamanian guy, tried to figure his age—late teens, maybe early twenties. “You can think what you want, Brace, don’t make a difference to anything like reality.”

  “Reality’s a funny thing. You just can’t tell what’s what sometimes.”

  “Amen to that.” Snow pulled the door open, glancing back over his shoulder where he caught the Panamanian man staring at him in the mirror.

  “¡Los griegos!” The guy shook his head. “¡Son muy fácil!”

  He heard Bracelin say, “Facile? Facile? That what you think? Huh?” and then laughing, and a struggling growl, followed by the younger man saying, “Stop, stop—” and then words Snow couldn’t make out, and then scuffling and the muffled voice of the Panamanian, as if someone had a hand over the guy’s mouth. Snow thought he might go back inside, but he wanted nothing to do with Bracelin’s sideshow, whatever the hell it was about.

  In the dim hallway, cigarette smoke wafted out of the bar and up through the ventilation system. When he broke free of the hall and saw the dancers again, he caught sight of the kids, dancing belly to belly to a fast song called “American Girl,” their movements like hard and furious fucking, and he thought, well, that was one thing Beth wasn’t.

  He slid his way onto a bar stool and ordered a gin and tonic, sat watching the kids dance until he noticed a burly-shouldered guy at the end of the bar doing the same. Snow caught a glance in the mirror, an Aussie ordering a Foster’s lager, dressed like an AB with a belt knife and a thick gold shipwreck earring, staring at the kids like he wanted to move in himself. When the song ended and the dancers took a break, the kid moved off for the head. The Aussie looked at the bar keep, said, “Where’s your loo?” And while the bartender motioned to the hall, the Aussie was talking about Arenal, saying, “I hear you got a volcano going off up-country.” Then he moved down the corridor where Maciel had gone not thirty seconds before. But Snow was distracted by Beth, moving toward him with a sweating smile and a deep breath, fanning herself with her face tilted down, eyes looking up from underneath toward Snow. He was transfixed even as a local boy took her and turned her into a new dance, and she was gone in a smiling shrug.

  Between the encounter with Bracelin and his little friend, and the sight of Beth now, Snow felt a finger to his chest, prodding the aching underside, as if it might flick him with a middle finger and stop his heart dead in a beat. He had meant to check in with Beth, had meant for this night to be a lot of things it wasn’t about to be. He made his way along the bar and out the front door into the soft Panamanian night, that Tyvek envelope tucked tight up under his arm.

  A low mist hovered at daylight, sun glow spreading up east over the canal as Snow stepped to the bridge wing, watching the pilot boat make up alongside their starboard stern. The ship lay west of the Bridge of the Americas, the steel structure arching before them like a giant clasp holding two continents together. The Miraflores Locks sat dead ahead, open and ready to receive them, escort tugs swinging into place, heaving lines arching through the morning air.

  Snow’s hair was combed, work clothes clean, new suspenders, shirt tucked in. He looked fit, healthy, robust, and hoped that anyone would say the same about the ship. But looking around now he thought it might have been an error to grind and prime the ship too soon. Normally he was not one to dwell on people imagining the worst, but for some reason he thought Tarshish looked suspicious, as if anyone with half a wit would see that primed funnel and know a name change was in the offing. But damned if the pipeline didn’t look fine. Snow leaned out over the railing to spy where the pilot had already exited the boat’s wheelhouse and now climbed the Jacob’s ladder. Snow straightened himself and watched the man stride up the external stairs—all business, all-American, his eyes casting about the ship as he made his way topside toward the bridge and past Snow with a perfunctory nod, then inside to the helm. “A fine day for transiting,” he said, and settled in to make radio contact with the escort tugs.

  It wasn’t until they were approaching Miraflores, and the shoreside line handlers were gearing up the “mules”—small locomotive engines that would pull them through the actual locks—that the pilot stepped outside for a look over the side and then nodded toward Snow. “You bos’n? I’m Captain Davies.”

  He stuck out his hand for a real squeezer of a shake. For some reason, Snow didn’t want to say his own name. “I’m bos’n.”

  This Davies had wandering eyes but an appreciative air. “You look like you’re working hard on this ship,” he finally said. “That’s a good sign—compliments on keeping an old scow together like a real crew.”

  “Thank you, sir. We been working hard on her.”

  “She’s a T-2, converted. Class of ’45, that right? Rare breed these days.”

  “Aren’t we all,” said Snow.

  “I figured you were too. Where’d you serve?”

  “South Pacific. Fleet oiler Puget Sound.”

  “I know that ship. You’ve been in it then.”

  Then the pilot focused on nothing save his job of piloting the vessel to Colón, and his job had nothing to do with worrying over the ship’s identity or even talking to the old boatswain, even if he did know all about what happened thirty-eight years before. Snow felt optimism rise inside him, like a bubble swelling. They were three for three in Panama, and for the first time since Salina Cruz he began to believe that all would work out for them in the end, and he kept saying to himself what a big ocean lay out there to the east, beyond the Caribbean, and how maybe he could learn to not hate the kid so bad, like he did when he saw the two of them out there on the bow huddled forward of the anchor windlass as if no one could see them.

  Snow decided to keep his mind on something useful, so he went below to the captain’s quarters, where he peeked in on the old man to find him sleeping, then sat down at the desk in the outer office and opened the Tyvek envelope to slide out the new registry papers. He laid them all out and, with a blank stack of cargo manifests, began filling in false dates and false cargoes dating back ten years. The work was laborious, and he would get Paynor and Bracelin to do their share as well, if only so the records weren’t all in the same hand. It took forty-five minutes, but he filled in two dozen or more, using old forms and new forms both, tracing a ship’s history as if writing his own story. He played games with it, imagined transatlantic journeys and Far Eastern runs, carrying exotic chemicals that he knew by heart: chloroacetic acid, chlorosulfonic acid, phosphoric acid, known variously as the nasties, the hat tricks, the triple 4’s—the last in honor of their 4-4-4 rating—the highest on the health hazard scale according to the Chemical Data Guide. If they didn’t burn you up or choke you out, they’d be sure to give you cancer down the road. After that he wrote in some standard bulk chems just so he wouldn’t appear too exotic.

  When he finally finished his first batch, he stacked all the papers in a single pile w
ith the COI on top, the name Elisabeth there written out in a plain type. His chest tickled him, beset by the beating wings of a thousand moths. He wondered how Beth would react to the naming, and when he thought about that the moths all died in a pile somewhere in his belly, wing dust turned to mud.

  Snow needed air, figured now was a good time for a tour of the deck, see where the kids were and make sure no line handlers had robbed them blind. First he went to look for Leeds but found him in the midship tankerman’s locker applying a wooden ax handle to a metal grinder. Oddly enough the grinder spat a steady stream of metal sparks onto Leeds’s work boots, a paradoxical sight to be sure, and when he looked up, Snow could see he wasn’t wearing his teeth. “What the hell happened to your choppers?”

  “Oh, man. I’ve lost weight, you know? They rattle around in there, drives me whacko.” He held out the ax handle then. “How’s that there. One nimble little bludgeon.”

  Snow looked the ax handle over. It was maybe a foot long, and Leeds had drilled out the center and filled it with molten lead. Snow wondered what anyone needed with a bludgeon—nimble or not—when he had dim mak. Then Leeds took off his welder’s glove and Snow saw the pink lesions of psoriatic arthritis again, flexing his knuckles in a way that made Snow’s neck twitch. Snow decided not to dwell on any of it, not even to chastise Leeds for stealing lead sinkers out of his tackle box.

  For now he hightailed it to the bow, where Maciel refused to look at him, all guilty about moving in on his turf, maybe, but nervous too, in a way that got under Snow’s skin. They were already in the midst of some plan or another to head inland during the loading at Moín, and Snow was reeling trying to figure out what to do, reeling for most of the transit trying to figure out how he could take control of this little trip the kids had planned, how he could keep them from going off together for all to see. When Maciel did finally start looking at him, his eyes held a new kind of suspicion, like he had a road map to all Snow’s dark places, knew all about ulterior motives in love and maybe a whole lot more than that. Snow felt his neck twitch.

  He stayed out there on the bow feeling like a third wheel as the ship passed into the Gaillard Cut, what had once been called the Culebra Cut. The high earthen walls sloped fast down to the water as the ship steamed past a dredger and then a cruise ship, people bouncing off a high dive on the ship’s top deck. Snow stood alone with the kids, thinking of all the workers who had died building the canal, particularly the first time around, when the French had tried back in the 1800s, when thousands died of malaria and yellow fever, their corpses sold and stuffed into drums filled with formaldehyde and shipped to medical schools and research labs all over Europe. He thought of all those poor-ass Indians curled up in preservatives. Nobody liked to talk about that, but that was the truth of the canal, the truth of linking East and West, the truth of the profession he’d chosen back in ’42.

  At Gatún Lake the ship navigated through clouds of mosquitoes, pushing along the earthen dam, and Snow thought of places they could go to get off the ship together so he could manage some control. Friends close, he thought, enemies closer, though in truth he couldn’t tell which were which around here. The kid kept up with his furtive glances, dark brows, and a half-trembling, half-snarling upper lip like he’d never mistrusted anybody so much in his life, like some accusation might be forming there in his righteous mouth. “What’s got into you?” Snow said.

  “Nothing’s got into me,” he said, and looked away.

  After the hyacinth patrols motored past, small boats with giant hedge clippers lowered down off the bow end, to cut back the flowering water weeds that forever threatened to overcome the man-made lake and tie up the screws of the big ships that ran through. Around here, trees cropped up out of the water. In the midst of the upper branches people had built tree houses, had laundry hanging out and boats tied off at the base of a ladder at the water’s surface. Snow waved to a child dangling a foot over the side. Beth said how she’d die to be sitting there right now; even a tree over water would beat where she was.

  “I got an idea,” Snow said. “How’d you two like to see a volcano go off? It’s a bit of a hike, but we could do it out of Moín.”

  “I could go for a little volcanism,” Beth said, and pushed against Maciel’s shoulder in a suggestive way that made Snow remember that time after Okinawa, when she’d put her hand on his leg in the bar and then kissed him a soft gentle good night to the mouth. Memories of light touch and earthen scent boiled through him in the tropical heat. He couldn’t look at the kids now, so he just stared at the Gatún Locks. They appeared like stair steps, a liquid escalator to the Caribbean.

  Two days after the pilot descended the ladder in Colón, the ship docked at the long wharf of the Moín refinery, where they had contracted for av gas, petroleum solvents, and turpentine. As the loading process went on, Beth and Maciel finished tank cleaning to free them for their trip inland, and Snow ventured topside to the bridge, where he watched the kids emerge from an expansion trunk hatch looking hot and dusted white by the dry chem residue they’d been sweeping from the base of the tank. Snow found Bracelin in the midst of filling out his share of bogus cargo manifests. Snow studied the equations on his right forearm. They read:

  HA = L – alpha + 180 + 15 × UT + LONG ALT [degrees]

  and on and on, more than Snow had a clue about.

  “Just to let you know, we’re heading inland this afternoon,” Snow said.

  “Inland? What the fuck’s inland?”

  “Going to go see Arenal light off. I heard in PC it’s happening.”

  “Who the hell is we?”

  “Me and the kids,” Snow said.

  Bracelin squinted at him, his face doing a flex thing that Snow had seen before. “We’re at a critical point here, Snow. Seems to me your mind ain’t in it.”

  “My mind’s in it. All’s in order. You got Kairos and Marty and Ali for the loading. She wants to see Arenal. I want to show her Arenal.”

  “And you can’t have her going off alone with the ordinary. So fine, I’ll tell the kid he has to stay. Or I’ll tell them both they have to stay.”

  “Sure you will. You been doing nothing but throw them together on jobs since he come aboard.”

  Bracelin grinned, and Snow couldn’t help noticing how whenever he smiled his eyes took on a blank look, like a man looking a thousand miles off. “I’m fucking with your head, old man.”

  “Like I need more of that.”

  “Forget about her, Snow. She’s just another piece of black ass. You’ve had plenty. I admit she’s a beautiful woman, but you’ve had them too.”

  “Not lately.”

  Bracelin stood there like he had an iron post for a spine and a four-by-twelve header board for a pair of shoulders, and Snow saw the whole thing flash on him like a flood. “You old grizzle dick. You ain’t had her. All this since the Med has been one fucking bullshit pose. I figured it, I figured it when we were in Okinawa! In that bar, when she had no reason to, I could tell she was giving you blue balls. She’s a fucking tease, ain’t she? There ain’t nothing I hate more than a fucking tease.”

  “She ain’t a tease, believe me.” Which was true.

  Bracelin just eyed him. “Sure thing, old-timer. Don’t matter. How about I kill him for you? How about you start cleaning the toilets instead of him?”

  “We’re a crew for now, and he’s a good kid.”

  “I don’t give a shit you knew his gramps. Means nothing to me.”

  “Well, it means something to me. Joaquin Maciel did stuff for me nobody else ever did. I was one fucked-up dude after the war, and he set me on the right path and gave me more than a second chance.”

  “The right path? You call the last thirty years of your life the right path? You slay me. You must hate the kid. I’d hate him. I’d kill him. I’d kill her too, while I was at it. But not before I fucked her in every hole she had.”

  “Well, that’s the difference between us, I guess.”

  �
��I know you, don’t give me that line of shit, save it for Lisa.”

  “Quit calling her that.”

  “What the fuck you going to do about it?”

  “How about I call West Africa?”

  Snow didn’t want to have to remind Bracelin that they needed his contacts in the W.A. It seemed to imply that Bracelin couldn’t figure it out on his own, or that he was half inclined not to care. Snow might have been screwed in the head about some things, but he had enough presence left to understand Bracelin. All life on ship was a ruse, not just the kid’s faith or the girl’s love but trust too, and Snow thought maybe he should take him up on that offer to keep them both close to home. Then he thought it might just make it worse and somehow more public. If they had to fuck, maybe they could do it someplace off ship, where they could get it out of their system and Snow could figure a way to keep it under control. Like the volcano, these things had a way of burning a path through the woods all their own.

  To the sound of Delta blues on a crappy old radio, they caught a bus from Moín to Puerto Limón, and there on the edge of Calle 6 on the outskirts of town they waited for a transfer up into the mountains. Somewhere south they heard a baseball game rising up and out of a semipro ballpark, the crack of a bat, and the humming of the crowd erupting into a wide and solid roar. The road before them was broken asphalt, the ground beneath seeming liquid where it dropped and split in rounded dips like broken eggshells, sections made worse by any traffic that happened by, most of which were Ford Pintos and AMC crap cars, Gremlins and Pacers, and VW Things. The buses that passed were all bound for San José to the west, and they wanted the northerly route to La Fortuna.

  They waited on that bench for two hours before anything resembling a regional bus showed up. Snow cried out “¡La pura vida!” as he climbed the steps and made his way through a crowded sleeping bus. Up front sat a Jesuit priest traveling alone, reading a book by the dim light of a portable reading lamp. Maciel paused alongside the padre, letting Beth catch up to Snow, who had found three seats, two on one side and one on the other. Snow felt magnanimous somehow and decided he’d let them sit together, so he took a seat alone and watched Maciel as the bus lurched forward. He knelt next to the priest, who leaned his head toward the young man and spoke to him in tones drowned out by the grind of diesel, the engine vibrating behind and below the back seats. “Looks like Georgie’s getting his confession heard,” said Snow.