The Western Limit of the World

by David Masiel

  “Oh, now, I know you been talking to someone. I never told you anything about Vietnam.”

  The kid’s mouth froze, hung open slightly. He looked at Beth.

  “Who you been talking to?” Snow asked.

  Maciel closed his mouth. He stared at Snow like he’d just been pulled over half drunk and was gearing his mind for a roadside sobriety test. “Nobody. I have ears. I listen.”

  “Well you’re listening to the wrong people, George, and you better start listening to me or it’s all going to bite you in your skinny ass.”

  “You think I’m going to leave her to you and yours? You think that, you’re crazy. I don’t know what you’ve got going on this ship, I don’t even care. But I’m not going to leave her to you.”

  “Go be noble somewhere else. She got along fine without you.”

  “I can get along without you too, Harold.” Beth sat looking at her shoes, like she couldn’t say a thing like that and hold eye contact at the same time. “I don’t need any of this shit.”

  Snow felt like two clammy hands had just crept around his neck from behind. “And what about Bracelin?” he choked out, the words garbled. He tried to clear his throat. “There’s only one way to get along with Charlie Bracelin! You prepared for that? Is he?” He jerked his thumb at the kid.

  Beth rotated her face up toward him, her eyes honest and dark, her voice softer than he’d expected, softer than he could have managed just then. “Let’s drop it, Harold. Just drop it.”

  Snow wished he could drop himself, give himself the old hook from backstage. He wished the cabbie would hurry his ass. They should get back to the ship now. Out of the blue he thought how didn’t he have a sister or something in Puerto Limón, some Harolda or Hally or another? How damned weird that would be to show up at her door and ask for safe harbor, like you could ever bank anything on blood relations. He wished he could gather all them lost siblings together in one place right now and take Beth there, so she could see them all in one place. So she could see he had people. For the life of him, though, the only family he felt he had, painful as it was, stood before him now. The kid, with all his moral judgments and looks and suspicions, and who the hell was he talking to anyway? Was this what he got for sticking in the kid’s corner? For feeling something beyond just shipmates? He couldn’t hate him much as he tried, it was too late for that. And the girl with her cold remoteness, her dead soul turned toward Snow now. Truth was, he felt sorry for the kid. The Christians had it wrong. God wasn’t love, he couldn’t be. All Snow’s experience led to the opposite conclusion. Love was hell.

  NATAL

  Snow returned to the ship frantic to put to sea and get back to running his crew, working six to six plus his midnight bridge watch, and knowing what the hell was going on for a change. Tarshish steamed east, down coast through Venezuela and Guyana and into Brazil. They took on whatever cargoes they could find, paused at tank farms with piers angling into five-fathom water. They loaded liquid urea, an organic fertilizer that smelled like old piss mixed with kitchen ammonia. Snow had crewed on tugs to Alaska towing urea barges, what Puget Sound towboaters called the “diarrhea run.” Snow didn’t even know that anybody made liquid urea, it seemed a foul thing to put such a chemical into a more volatile state, and the stench permeated the ship for three days after the loading. They sealed the tank, which was closed save for the vent stack thirty feet up, but on a tail wind even that didn’t help.

  Then came the freshwater effluent of the Amazon.

  While they put down anchor in the silt bottom, Snow stood at the porthole in his room and watched Beth and the kid doing stevedore work out there in the stink. A small rig tender delivered stores. The kids unhooked crane loads of shrink-wrapped pallets of food. He could sense their recklessness building, the way they worked touching hips even when they didn’t have to, the way they traded looks from underneath when they thought no one would notice. But people did notice. They were there in full view of the bridge. Snow watched them laughing as they walked aft to the fantail, and he made his way down in time to see them plunge overboard into the freshwater of the Amazon.

  The crew gathered to watch, drifting over there on smoke breaks to lean over the railing and stare. Beth disappointed nearly everyone by going over with all her clothes on, minus only her steel-toed boots. Somehow, being fully dressed made her all the more the focus of their attention, as if they had to look extra hard for fear they might miss something.

  Maciel had found a pair of old swim trunks in the boatswain’s locker, World War II–vintage tight black trunks like Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. He took the warm plunge feet first, and there below him, Snow imagined the smells of their cargo disappearing on airs. Above, Snow stood among all those staring males, their hard-ons poking their jeans outward.

  Snow wondered if he oughtn’t strip down to his skivvies and join in. There’d been threesome rumors that he’d heard in the whispered Spanish of the Panamanians. But Snow was caught above. He might have been able to pull it off with sufficient gusto, but somehow he lacked the energy. They’d all know it wasn’t his scene. Maciel righted himself and began to tread water, his feet reaching for hers underneath. “Freshwater, this is amazing!” he cried. “I can’t even see land!”

  “You’re swimming in the Amazon, George!” Beth cried.

  Her oiled skin gave off a slick all her own, vague rainbows trailing behind her where she swam. Maciel slipped his feet up the skin of her legs, reaching his toes up inside the billowing underwater fabric of her fatigue cutoffs, and from above, the scene was obvious to all. Lining the aft railing, the crew smoked and watched in silence save for a few grunts and groans when they saw Beth’s ass arch out of the water and dive.

  The crew laughed then, leering and hooting, glancing at one another for affirmation that they’d all seen the same thing, sharing the momentary fantasy. Marty snarled and lit a cigarette. “Cubiche,” he said, meaning Maciel.

  “Puto y puta,” said another, and everybody laughed.

  “Makes you wonder just who’s fucking who, doesn’t it?” said Paynor, who along with Snow and Bracelin stood on the poop deck overlooking the show.

  Bracelin remained silent on the subject of fucking, but said, “That’s whom, not who. You fucking academy grads really crack me up. You can’t even fucking spell, but sure as shit, you’re the ones always get the ships!”

  “Poor guy, Brace. What’s it matter to you now?”

  “Matters ’cause I could out-skipper anybody in this fleet, academy or not.”

  “Don’t lose sight,” said Snow, “of the fundamental realities.”

  Snow liked that term; he’d read it in a magazine, an article on military history.

  Bracelin snarled. “Don’t fucking give me a lecture on realities when you got your dick in your hand and your heart squirreling around on some fucking cloud.”

  Snow didn’t know what the hell to say, so he went below and lowered the Jacob’s ladder for the kids to climb back aboard, motioning to Beth with an insistent nodding of his head, like an impotent dad goading his daughter out of some boy’s car. They were no sooner up than the crew was hooting down at them from the poop deck, leaning out over the railing. They were laughing and passing it off as teasing good humor, but it wasn’t that. Someone spit, a long hard hock job that went over everybody’s head, but wasn’t lost on a soul. Beth looked up and made a gesture with her hand, then called out, “Oi! Sibodoh! Anak haram!”

  “Pelacur!” one shouted back, calling her a whore, and “Berapa?” wanting to know how much she charged. The Malays laughed their asses off and flicked their cigarette ashes over the railing, some of it trailing into Snow’s eye.

  “Goddamn you fucks! Work!” Snow rubbed at his eye.

  Their laughter faded and they just stared at Snow with malice he’d never felt from his crew. Up ahead, Maciel moved toward the external stairs, climbing in his swim trunks right into the crowd instead of taking the internal stair tower to the room. The
crew stepped aside on the stairs and made kissing sounds, and someone grabbed his ass. When he slapped at their hands, and jumped and turned and walked on, dark-faced, they were reduced to riotous laughter, slapping their knees and snapping their fingers.

  “You see what’s happening here?” Snow asked.

  “I see it.”

  “So maybe you should start thinking about wise choices.”

  She blew a droplet of water off her upper lip with a huff. “Well…there’s always Bracelin. He could be my new best friend.”

  He felt a chill, not just what she was suggesting but how her voice held it, like she was flat-shoveling roadkill off the pavement and taking it home for dinner. But she was naïve too. She operated under the belief that all men were seduceable, but she didn’t know Charlie Bracelin. Snow had made sure of that.

  “You think you invented me, Snow? How do you think I’ve gotten along, really? You fancy it’s all reefers and Count Basie.”

  “Don’t forget Billie!” He tried for a teasing smile and it fell flat.

  “Billie’s a trifle closer to the mark, I’m afraid.”

  “Hey there—this is me now. You don’t gotta play me.”

  “Play you? Who plays you, Snow? Aren’t you the one doing the playing?”

  He focused on the beads of water clinging to her hair. He surveyed her features and tried to find a flaw somewhere, maybe her nose was a little too wide, or her lips too round and full, or her eyes too vacant black. Most people got ugly when they got angry. Not Beth. Bracelin’s new best friend? Maybe she was just beautiful and wily enough to manage that without losing limbs in the process. Somehow, Snow couldn’t see it.

  She went off wet, her green fatigue shorts clinging to her ass and showing her panties, Snow all the while unable to think of anything but how it would feel to have her naked on his lap, how it would feel to look her in the eyes and slide up inside her with his hands floating over the turn of her waist to grip her round hard bottom. Beth wisely ducked inside and took the stair tower up to avoid the crew. She knew that much.

  “Ohhh, bos’n on the outs lah—no get play-play from girl AB no more!” said Ali.

  Snow looked up to see the man dangling down from the railing with a smoke in his fingers. “You’re just jealous you ain’t fucked her,” Snow snapped. Then he felt shame ripple through him, not only because of the lie but because maybe Beth was right. He never had thought about anybody but himself, at least not for very long.

  They were steaming toward Natal, Brazil, when Snow went up to stand the bridge watch and ran into the captain on the stairwell, wearing an old officer’s cap with his leaves on and about ready to fall down. He looked like a fleet admiral in a bathrobe. “You, son. I been meaning to talk to you.”

  Snow wondered if McFarland recognized him, wondered what the hell he could possibly be seeing to call Snow son. The captain had five years on him at most. “How you feeling, Captain?”

  “I need help, boy, I need help!”

  “What you need help with, Captain?”

  The old man leaned forward and reached for Snow’s arm, but he missed and stumbled downward, nearly bowling Snow over as they both grabbed the stair railing to keep from going ass over teakettle. The old man’s breath smelled like gum disease, right there in Snow’s face. “That Bracelin’s trying to bugger me! And I don’t mean maybe. It’s too late for me but you gotta take this, you gotta take this and take the right action when the time comes. You got me? The right course, you gotta decide the right course, and I can’t help you with that ’cause I’m not gonna be around.”

  Snow felt that quivering in his vertebrae again and wished the old guy would let him go. He had a scary strength in his old bony hands, and he gripped Snow’s arm like a crab. “Sure, Cap, I gotcha,” Snow said, then felt the old man press an envelope into his hand, a long business-size envelope folded over once.

  Just then Bracelin appeared at the top of the flight. “Captain, come on now,” he said in the closest he could come to a soothing voice. “Room’s this way, let me help you up.”

  “Sure you want to help me,” said the captain. “You’re trying to bugger me, admit it for all to hear! For once in your goddamned life admit what you got going!”

  Bracelin reached down and tugged gently on the old man’s arm, then came down another step and put his arm around him and led him up, turning at the first landing to cast a flat-eyed glance at Snow.

  Up on the bridge, Snow stood before the radar and the engine room gauges and the wheel itself. In the red light of the chart table, he unfolded the envelope to see block printing in the captain’s hand, OPEN IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

  Snow figured you could never tell about emergencies, sometimes you were in one and didn’t know it and this might be one of those times. He tore open the envelope and pulled out a sheet of yellow paper, again with the captain’s handwriting, a note that read Port Left, Starboard Right across the middle of the page, as if stating some profound truth. On the other hand, there was a simple elegance in it. Came times when the shit rained down so hard you really did have to be reminded of your left and your right. He knew it too as they departed Natal on a fine moonlit night, Snow on the bridge wing, and Maciel standing lookout on the bow, and Beth weaving her way through the pipeline to join him. Snow couldn’t help it. He imagined her on her knees in front of him, blocked from view.

  The next day Bracelin stepped into the crew’s mess and announced that the captain had died quietly in his sleep. He said the ship had been sold and renamed and he himself had been made skipper. The crew murmured and whispered until Bracelin left, and then erupted in loud talk in countless patois. Most of it centered on the belief that they’d never be paid.

  “Say, bos’n man, we gonna get nothing for all our work lah, that’s how this one is gonna go!” said Ali.

  “You’ll get your dough. I’ll see to it.”

  “How about you give it to us now, then?” said Kairos. “You want some good faith, how about you walk us up there to the ship’s safe and settle up the SeaStar side of the payroll? While you’re at it, maybe we can get some pay from Petrochem too! You remember Petrochem, don’t you?”

  Ten faces turned toward Snow. They all voiced their agreement with Kairos, whatever the language. Marty and Ali stared out from behind crossed arms.

  “Why the hell you looking at me anyhow?” Snow said. “I get my money from the same till you do.”

  “We all know about you and the mate,” said Marty. “You don’t play dumb with us.”

  Snow felt fairly certain that what they thought they knew had little to do with the truth, but that didn’t mean their worries weren’t dangerous. “Listen, I’ll see what I can do. I ain’t in the know.” That much was true; if Bracelin was making a move, this was the first Snow knew of it. “I’ll talk to the mate about pay.” And he got up to bus his dishes. The dishwasher was back there working amid the steam, and though Snow could only see his midsection through the silverware slot, he could hear his Malay voice plainly. “Who is the kapal? Who is the kapal?”

  The question of who the ship was struck Snow as ludicrous, some kind of metaphysical statement rather than a practical one. Snow prided himself on the practical, on looking forward, reassessing, and not dwelling on what might have been. There was just one thing to do now: hold off an insurrection by getting their money and, come Freetown, set about dismantling the crew.

  Outside, Snow went topside and tried to convince Bracelin to give them a payday, or at least settle up the SeaStar accounts, but Bracelin wouldn’t have it. “They get paid when the voyage is through,” he said. “End of story.” Snow walked forward then, out the catwalk, where he found the kids dangling ass over the bow, stencil-painting the new name as they steamed across the mid-Atlantic, throwing porpoises out ahead of them, writing in white across each bow: ELISABETH…ELISABETH. And across the stern, yet again: ELISABETH. His romantic idiocy was now emblazoned across the ship for all to see. He could hear them already, Orangputeh
so stupid one lah! Bos’n no play-play with AB no more, all lovesick buddy!

  In the calms of open sea, the heat rising up around them, Snow went topside to do a postmortem sanitary on the captain’s quarters. He found sheets stripped from the bed and smelled the musty, closed odor of death. Death had its own smell. He didn’t find it repulsive, exactly; it was ill defined, as elusive as the newborn smell on his tiny son. Maybe there was something in that, some distinct aroma to birth and death, the one fresh and uncorrupted, the other stale in decay. Snow started by emptying the garbage, a small cylindrical trash can with tissues spilling out the top. Then he opened the portholes to let a hot moist breeze inside.

  When Bracelin nixed the idea of early pay, it was Snow who felt the mutinous ripples. That night the crew again crowded around him in the mess hall. Even Leeds was there, albeit an officer, stoking the crew’s paranoia. “What are they going to do with his body?” he wanted to know. “I want an autopsy.”

  “I heard his last wish was to be buried at sea,” Snow said.

  “I don’t know about that. I think his last wish was they not kill him.”

  Snow wondered who Leeds imagined this sweeping they to be. He wondered if he wasn’t considered a part of it. He shook his head emphatically before the pressing faces of the crew. “Listen, I got no information you don’t. When I learn something, you’ll be the first to know.” Leeds shook his toothless mug and walked out, Snow following with all eyes on his back. He figured Leeds was the de facto leader of some rapidly unifying movement toward mutiny. As he ducked into his room, Snow knocked crisply on the door and stepped inside to all the chem equipment. “I need your help, Leeds, not you making matters worse.”

  “I just don’t like this business with the captain,” Leeds said.

  “I need your help, and I’ll pay for it. You hang with me and don’t ask too much, I’ll be sure you get a bonus when the time comes.”