by David Masiel
“I’m not stupid, I know you got some side action, bos’n. Frankly I don’t want to know more than that, but you better keep that Bracelin away from me. I got enough to think about trying to keep this ship afloat.”
“Done.” Snow looked over the chem lab and now saw a new feature: a ragged piece of tissue in a jar, pale, with a plastic luminosity, save for human hairs sprouting out one side. “What the hell is that?”
“Don’t freak out, it ain’t what you think.”
“What do I think?”
“You think I carved a chunk out of the captain’s leg for some nefarious purpose. But I’m testing for fat soluble compounds. I’m talking poison. We need to know.”
“Sure thing, Leeds.” Snow decided what he needed most was to get the hell away from Leeds and stay there. He was about to go out when he heard something from the radio room, behind the closed door on the opposite side of the head. He stopped and for a strange jealous instant he imagined Beth hiding in there, imagined that Beth was secretly doing Leeds too. “Who you got in there?”
“Oh that’s probably just the ordinary.”
“That right? What the fuck he doing in the radio room?”
“He likes to listen to the radios. He comes in all the time. Boy’s a pugilist, he tell you that? You ever look at his knuckle ridge? I showed him some things.”
“How long this radio thing been going on?”
“Week or so, something like that.”
“Since Panama City.” Snow looked at the door and couldn’t hear anything then. “You sure he just listens?”
“I don’t ever hear him talking any. He’s got some radio fetish or something. Into listening in at night when the world’s asleep and only work boats are moving.”
“That right.” Snow reached for the railing by the door and steadied himself, thinking he felt some seas beneath them for a minute, then grasped the door handle and went out, shutting the door behind him and staring down the passageway to the radio room door. Somehow it came off too silent in there, like the kid was hiding behind the bank of dials and frequency bands. Snow guessed it was possible he had a night obsession with voices on waves, but he didn’t like it much.
He went down a level to his room where he sat in front of the trucker’s fan and read about the invasion of Guadalcanal, all blood, fear, and Marines crapping their pants. Between the fan stirring hot air and the book stirring bad memories, Snow thought he might boil alive. He went for the coolest place on board, the walk-in reefer just off the galley at the first deck below. There Snow stood in the blow of cool air for two or three minutes before he noticed, on the deck tucked under a shelf, the captain, wrapped in Visqueen, the outline of his old dead body like a ghost behind the translucent plastic. It made the cool reefer feel like a dark tomb. He couldn’t help but look at the captain’s leg to see if a chunk was missing, and sure enough, there it was on his right thigh. Three days later, the heat drove Snow into the cold-storage walk-in yet again, only this time he found the captain’s body gone. He stood there in the cold, wondering what Bracelin had done with him. He imagined overboard, adrift and naked, with a hole in his thigh.
Up in the room that night, he found the kid doing push-ups, punctuating each thrust like he was delivering a hard body blow. Then he started playing with his knife, oiling the hinge so he could flick it open fast, the way Leeds had taught him. “Them things cut both ways,” said Snow, and got ready for bed.
“My grandfather taught me how to take care of myself.”
“I figured.”
With his half-glasses on and a book propped on his chest, Snow tried to forget about the kid’s preparations and paranoia. He read about how old Homer dug into his symmetry-craving soul and mapped out a River of Ocean that flowed all around the flat disk of the earth with Olympus at its center. At the western limit lay the Fortunate Isles, there at the gateway to the Underworld. Beyond that lay the land of the dead. Snow supposed you’d cross the River Styx there and pay the ferryman and go right into the Elysian Fields or left into Hades, and only the Fates decided which way you’d go. Odysseus sailed there with his men and performed blood sacrifice to conjure and communicate with the dead, to help him make his way home.
That night Snow couldn’t sleep at all. He heard whispers among the crew and muffled stories inside the clicking hollow of his deaf ear. The voices said things like you’re doomed, and watch out, and port left, starboard right.
MEFLOQUINE DREAMS
As if they needed paranoia fuel, five days out of West Africa, Lucy the Third issued malaria meds, mefloquine that caught dreams in a jar and fed them to you all through the next day until you couldn’t tell dreams from memories. Snow refused to use the stuff. He was haunted enough by the things that really had happened. But halfway across the Atlantic, mosquitoes appeared, hovering in the passageways around the engine room and galley. Snow ran into a regular cloud of them on his way to chow one night, and though he had no idea where the hell they came from, he did what he always did in the tropics: wore long-sleeved shirts, endured the sweat, and smeared 90 percent DEET solution on every exposed patch of skin, and then on his clothes for good measure.
Ten minutes later he broke into a bubbling red rash everywhere he’d swiped his hands, including two hand prints where he’d tried to slap some on his upper back. Lucy the Third stated the obvious—it was some kind of allergic reaction. “Maybe your body can’t take any more chemicals,” she suggested.
The mosquitoes on board could take that and more. Leeds’s theory was simple. These mosquitoes constituted a shipboard subspecies. For countless mosquito generations they’d been breeding and hatching and feeding in the engine room of a ship awash in toxic chemicals, much of which resided in the blood they sucked from the necks of engineers and oilers. As far as Snow knew, nothing came from Leeds’s experiments with human flesh, but he was hell-bent to figure out something useful about insects. “They’re super skeeters, immune to the base chemicals,” said Leeds, and swept a jar through the passageway air to capture five, which he promptly carried off to his room for further experimentation.
Snow figured the real culprits were two banana plants and a lemon bush that Gino had brought aboard back in Puerto Limón to save the crew from scurvy, or so he said. Regardless, DEET did nothing to deter the beasts, did nothing save turn Snow’s skin into a blistered welt.
He was only mildly concerned about going without protection. He had been semi-immune to malaria since ’59, when he’d contracted P. vivax and P. falciparum strains in the same six-month voyage. He was sick for over a year, during which time doctors treated him with quinine, and he finally beat them both, but quinine didn’t work anymore. Among all the ingenious ways the Brits had screwed the Third World, one of the more insidious was the practice of treating “a touch of malaria” with quinine water. There wasn’t a finer drink in the world than Bombay gin and Schweppes Indian Tonic Water, but a small dose at a time left Plasmodium falciparum bathing in the stuff to no consequence. Pharmaceutical companies had been chasing their parasitic tails ever since. Now, the only thing that worked was mefloquine, aka Larium, and unfortunately it worked a little too well in directions you’d rather avoid.
Given his newfound sensitivity to DEET and his hatred of psychotic nightmares, Snow found an old rusty can of Off! spray and figured he’d use that. But the kid did as directed, started the weekly Larium regimen by washing down the white pill with a bottle of rust water. Two days later Snow was reading in his rack when Maciel came in from watch looking rattled and fidgety, like his skin was trying to crawl right off his frame. He went into the head and leaned on the sink, bending over to splash water on his face. Snow could see him reflected in the mirror as he rolled and jerked his head around. His hair had grown out to a short dark stubble. He ran his hand over it like he was trying to rub his hair off, and then he fingered his earring. Someone walked past outside and he started, his hand flinching toward his face.
Snow asked about his dreams. “Having
any weird ones?”
“I don’t know,” said the kid. He shook his head and glared at Snow as if to say don’t pretend to be my friend. Then he went into his locker and started fishing around in there until he seemed to get a grip of something, which he held on to but didn’t pull out.
“What the hell you doing in there? You stroking the flog?” Snow asked.
Maciel blanched and pulled both his hands out. “You been going through my things? Is that how it is?”
Snow shook his head evenly, peering out over half-glasses. “You think I ain’t seen your scars? I know a self-abuser when I see one. Besides that, you look sorta unnerved. Why I asked about the dreams.”
“What do my dreams have to do with anything?”
“Gotta watch for that Larium, there, buddy. Makes your night world real, some ways. Think about all these chems you got running around in your blood too. Chicken noodle soup around here tastes like ether. Toss this psychoactive fucker drug on top of it, and you got a demon pot. When Larium first came out, I took one dose and dreamed I had homosexual congress with the master of the vessel. I believed it was true. Took me two weeks to look the man in the eye again.”
Snow could laugh at it now, but the kid barely registered the story. He refused to disclose anything about his dreams or his life. Not about Beth, or voluntary radio watch, or Panama City. Snow got the worst feeling that the kid knew everything about him, all the bad shit, every ounce of it, like he could see through the years. How could he know anything when Snow himself didn’t? To him the past was unknowable. All the same, he felt the weight of judgment, like he had with Beth, from the first he’d known her, like they could see it all and didn’t approve. Made Snow feel weak and squirrelly. Like he gave a shit. Like he wanted the kid to love him or something.
George closed the locker and vaulted up into his bunk with his clothes on, stripped down to his boxers up there, and put on his headphones, went for the wall-of-sound method of eradicating dreams. He listened to Lou Reed at full volume. Then he lit a smoke. Snow wondered about the kid’s panic—the mefloquine maybe, dreams of the crew preying on him, cannibalizing him, heaving his ass overboard on a midnight crossing halfway to the Old World. To see the mother ship steam away from you. To wake up for your next watch in your rack, with the only salt water soaking your clothes being that of your own sweat. From there, mistrust lay like a seed in soil, with tropical heat and psychoactive fertilizers to help it grow.
After a few minutes of unrestrained guitar frenzy, the kid got down out of his bunk, went into his locker, and pulled out the leather flog, not looking at Snow once, not caring fuck-all what Snow or anybody else thought of him, and in that act he gained a measure. He took it up into his bunk with his headphones, caressing the thing in his lap like a pet. Snow put his glasses and book aside on his shelf, turned out his light, and listened to the ship’s engines. Next he knew he had awakened to the sound of slapping coming from up there. And over the ventilation hum, barely, he heard the whimpering groans of the kid against the snap of leather tails.
Aberdeen, Sierra Leone, lay like a cluster of brown buildings on a green wedge, shaped like the forward half of a ship turned upside down and beached to form Cape Sierra Leone. From Snow’s watch on the bridge wing, it loomed as the only rising promontory against an otherwise bright band of green vegetation. Africa lay like a green and orange mystery to the east. With the pilot aboard, the closer they came to the oil terminal at the port of Kissy, the more Snow smelled burning wood mixed with trash. It had a sour edge to an otherwise pleasant smell that reminded him of burn days as a boy, in his uncle’s backyard at the old incinerator, the smoldering scent of food on paper, of meat on wood. A haze hung over Freetown and extended offshore, a haze of whited sand fog blown from the inland Sahara on Harmattan winds.
After the mooring operation was finished, Snow came around the corner of the tankerman’s locker and saw Ali had cornered Maciel, saying, “Oh boy you got the worry look, you got the scared look lah. Jump ship you. Jump ship now lah.”
“I’m not jumping ship,” said Maciel.
Ali licked his lips and leaned even closer to the kid. “You got be sure what you doing lah. Try help you. This serious business. That mate no kind of man to trust. We leave—all of us leave. And that girl she never leave old bos’n no way.”
“Never know,” said Maciel.
“Ahh, you all lovesick puppy, just like bos’n. Girl AB got salt in her. No love nobody. She hard but she ain’t leave old bos’n lah. They got bond like Red Hand. He like bahpah, she like anak.”
Snow got a queasy feeling and retreated back around the pipeline. He stepped toward the gangway, could see out the corner of his eye how Ali leaned close, like he was offering earnest counsel. Bahpah and anak: father and daughter. Snow moved down the gangway and met the pumpman making his way back up.
“What the hell’s matter with you, bos’n?” said Kairos. “You look like you’re about to upchuck!”
Snow looked back at the two, still standing up by the midship square, Maciel staring over the Malay’s shoulder toward the bos’n like he was taking that father-daughter talk literally. He heard the grind of trucks then, and a line of tankers came driving up through the terminal and parked at the midship line in preparation for off-loading. “Gonna take a week to off-load all this,” said Kairos.
“They might get more trucks running,” said Snow.
“You sure you all right?”
“I guess I’m gonna have to be,” said Snow, holding to the railing. “You got a big payday coming for sticking this out, Kairos.”
“I better, hanging with this scrub-ass crew. That rookie’s balling your girl, ain’t he?”
Snow couldn’t reply, nothing made sense to say. His girl. Your girl. She was gone, he had to get used to that now. Didn’t matter what Ali had to say about it, he knew she’d go, and then they would be left with a scrub-ass crew. He could only hope that when the day came to make jetsam of the scrubs, Snow himself wouldn’t be mistaken for one, or worse yet, actually be one.
The bush taxi for Freetown was an open jeep frosted over with a layer of red dust, plates semi-obscured but legible so that Snow knew it had just come from the mountain country to the east and south. They gathered at the gate to the Kissy marine terminal before an oppressive line of diesel trucks. Wet heat drew sweat from their bodies, soaked into clothes, and beaded on skin.
“This place stinks,” said Leeds. “Worse than Nam ever thought of stinking.”
“Smells like life,” said Snow. “Opposite of that ship.” He looked at the driver and addressed him with a friendly smile. “Kou shay.”
The driver lifted his chin without returning the smile. “Eh bo.” One hand rested on the vibrating stick shift of the jeep, just inches from the stock of a weapon, half concealed there between the seat and the hump in the floorboard. Snow caught it all—saw the sedate hostility in the driver’s eyes, saw the mud-spattered gun, wondered what this one had been doing up-country.
“Ow mus Freetown?” Snow asked.
“Tin U.S.”
The driver eyed Beth suspiciously as the crew piled in: Snow in front, Bracelin, Leeds, and Beth crowding across the backseat, with Maciel folded into the cargo compartment at the back. The kid gripped the roll bar to keep from being pitched out by a chuckhole, and when Snow looked back he saw his face inches from Beth’s back. Snow kept his eyes on the road between Kissy and Freetown. It rounded north of Mount Aureol, then curved along the waterfront.
In the back, Beth sat on his right smoking hand-rolled Drum cigarettes, while Leeds sat in the middle talking about how much he missed the war, his fingertips sliding along Beth’s bare leg in a covert way. “Best time of my life.”
Beth turned to him, exhaled cigarette smoke, and looked down as if Leeds’s hand were a cockroach crawling up someone else’s leg.
Leeds laughed—toothless again—and pulled his hand away.
“You can have the war, all I care,” said Snow.
Then he heard automatic weapons fire slap from out of the trees in the mountains to the southeast, then a thud followed by a hissing rush. “Recoilless rifle,” said Leeds, nodding uphill.
“Ten miles, maybe,” Snow said. “Back southeast of Bunce.”
The explosion sounded metallic, a deep-down rush of hot steel. Snow didn’t like it much, nor the sound of the AKs, which came off metallic and cold, like real machine guns, not the toylike popping of an M-16.
“Damn, I miss the war,” said Leeds. “I mention that?”
“You mentioned that, Leeds,” said Bracelin, glaring back up the mountains toward Bunce. “Now why don’t you shut the fuck up about it?”
“Don’t you too, though? A little bit? Miss night patrols?”
“I do, Leeds, I admit it,” said Bracelin. “I miss being six-four and sneaking up on those little rice burners and dragging my knife across their squeaker before they knew what hit ’em.” Then he paused. “I was chief petty officer on a nuclear submarine, Leeds. I never went on night patrols.”
“Yeah. Squids,” said Leeds. “I was in the Corps.”
“Fuck Marines. I eat Marines for lunch,” said Bracelin.
“Sounds tasty,” said Beth.
Red-dirt alleys ran off the main road, dry as summer tinder, last season’s runnels etched into them and filled over by the powder of iron dirt, the afternoon air thick with the smell of smoke and laterite dust, the air glowing orange. Snow heard blues riffs, saw movies of old foot-stompin’ John Lee Hooker howling at the night, remembered the soft hand of Billie when they shook hands and she said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Snowman,” and how he missed his chance to ask if she wouldn’t sing that for him once, that Funny Little Snowman song.