by David Masiel
“Now what the hell are we going to do?” Beth said.
“How about getting ashore at the first civilized port?” said Maciel.
“Only one problem. There are no civilized ports.”
“There’s bound to be one. And from there we head home.”
“Don’t have one of those.”
“You can come with me to mine.”
“You’re mad.”
“I have my grandfather’s house in Richmond.”
Snow could just see it, the two of them all set up and domestic.
The Liberians let out a choral “Ooooohhh!” and pointed toward a skirmish of firearms that snapped from a cluster of homes on a knobby rise of Capitol Hill. Then a crowd flowed out past the Old Executive Mansion and streamed onto the beach, a mix of civilians and green-clad military pushing prisoners ahead of them. The prisoners were lined up along the beach, their backs to the sea, as automatic weapons fire flew from the soldiers and scattered past the prisoners, wild and helpless, rifling and slapping the Atlantic Ocean. The soldiers stepped up point-blank then, so they couldn’t miss, and the bodies of prisoners fell in a teetering heap and lay haphazardly on the sand.
“Oh, praising Jesus! Praising Jesus we got the hell from there!” said one of the Liberians, whose name nobody had bothered to learn.
“Fucking cannibals,” said Bracelin. Then he barked at the Liberians to go clean their rooms.
“Clean rooms?” they said. “We ain’t been in ’em.”
“Then go clean the toilets,” said Bracelin. “Just get doing something if you want to go praising Jesus!”
The kid stepped over and held out his hand. “I’m George. This is Lisa.”
“Me, I am Jimmy. This my brother Danny.”
Jimmy and Danny were twins who had lived in Monrovia all their lives, had worked five years running forklifts on the docks, but had no experience at sea. To them it was a grand adventure and a timely departure rolled into one.
“Let’s go, scoot it!” said Bracelin. “Snow, find them a room.”
Snow didn’t pay any attention to Bracelin. He kept staring at the beach, alternating with glances at Beth, thinking this was it for her: she’d be gone first chance she got.
Jimmy and Danny went off, scowling back behind them. Bracelin sidled up next to Beth and pulled a can of Copenhagen from his pocket and dipped his tongue into a mound of fine-grain tobacco, licking a thick wad of it and stuffing it into his lower lip until it bulged like some kind of Ubangi. “Isn’t that attractive,” said Beth.
The beach was a random jumble of bodies flopped over one another just beyond the line of surf. As the ship steamed toward open sea, the dry season ended for real. Rain and dust congealed into thick drops of mud that spattered out of the sky. The kid reached his hand along the deck and felt it between his thumb and finger; rolled it; brought it to his nose and smelled it. “That’s what they found in my father’s lungs,” he said. “When he drove into the slough.”
Snow took a deep breath. He shook his head to clear his thoughts of asphyxiation, imagining a man’s last heaving breath of river mud. To clear his mind of faces. To fill it with the job ahead. Then he went topside, to the bridge to plan for Nigeria, then into the dayroom where a wool blanket was stretched. He lay down there, motionless for a long time, hypnotized by the sounds of the ship’s bridge—radio chatter and instructions to the helm.
THE BIGHT OF BENIN
They made coastwise past Buchanan and Harper and finally rounded the rocky peninsula of Cape Palmas and into the coastal waters of Ivory Coast, but instead of turning east directly they headed straight out for two hundred miles into the Gulf of Guinea, in a big looping arc bound for Nigeria. Snow awakened stiff-kneed, and hobbled below to prepare the body of Kairos for burial at sea. In the walk-in reefer he heard Momo clanging pots and pans and wondering if it was right to do such a thing as carry a body in a refrigerator that carried food as well. Momo was an old-fashioned man, a Liberian of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and seventy, diminutive and unshaven, but he knew his way around the galley of a merchant ship. Momo had shipped out since he was fourteen, as a steward aboard Liberian-flagged ships from here to Canada. He also had a morbid fear of cannibalism and was convinced he’d somehow mistake Kairos for meat and wind up serving the man for dinner.
“What kind business you got on this scow?” he said.
“Nothing kind about our business!” Snow said. “Just trying to sell our last cargoes in Lagos. Nothing more than that.”
“Ahhh. I hear that Nigerians are our brothers.”
Snow went into the reefer to prepare Kairos, tightening the sheet that wrapped his long black body. Snow saw the blue-black lividity, where blood had pooled in the low spots within his body cavity. He fingered the lone bullet wound, now dried and blackened around its cornice. It’s nothing new around here, he thought, waiting for Bracelin to join him for the muscle end of the operation. Out the starboard side exit from the galley, they mounted the steep stairs to the weather deck, carrying the body by the knotted sheet.
“You’re just going to dump him overboard?” Beth said.
“Nothing else to do,” said Snow. “Momo’s all bugged out. We can’t have Momo bugged out about a body in the reefer.”
“I ain’t dealing with the questions when we get to Lagos,” said Bracelin.
“It’s all a trial by ordeal,” said Snow. “Life’s like that.”
“We could at least say a few words,” said Maciel.
“That’s what we just did,” said Bracelin. “Those were a few words.”
“If you want to, say some different words,” said Snow. “Just go light on the Christ thing. It offends us pagans.”
“He was a Christian,” said Maciel. “How am I supposed to go light on the Christ thing?”
“Just see if you can,” said Snow. “Like Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Think of it like the Holy Ghost part.”
Maciel stared at Snow for a long count. “Let me get his Bible, all right? The man should have a passage read for him.”
“Fuck that,” said Bracelin. “You ought to have some memorized.”
“I got one,” said Snow. “‘Make thee an ark of gopher wood!’”
“Good one,” said Bracelin. “Now you.”
Maciel stood there with his lips moving, giving it some thought. His hair had grown out enough to bend in four directions. “‘Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.’”
“Works for me,” said Snow.
“And you never mentioned ol’ Jesus Christ once,” said Bracelin. “Amen.” And they gave Kairos the heave, leaning out to watch the body fall, all four of them, watching the long form tight and wide at the shoulders, striking water.
The body scooted aft, skirting the thick deep prop wash, where it bobbed and rolled over, face down, the head and arms tight within the white sheet. Maciel stood there watching, staring overboard to where the sheeted body of Kairos receded on their stern wake, rolling in the waves somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea.
Even before he was out of sight, the ship turned east, then northeast, headed for Lagos, where they could sell off the six tanks of cargo they had remaining, as well as Snow’s diamonds. Snow dreaded Lagos. You could buy and sell anything in Lagos, but that didn’t make it easy. “It’s the worst city on earth,” he told Maciel. “Even Nigerians hate it.”
But he needed it—that was the worst part of the worst city.
Snow went topside to find Paynor and Bracelin steering their course northeast toward the Bight of Benin and the entrance to the harbor channel beyond, Bracelin claiming he’d as soon take entry on the run. “I don’t like anchoring off Lagos. I been on ships that got boarded by pirates while waiting for the pilot to come aboard,” he said. “So we’ll hang back at the twenty-mile mark until they’re ready for us.”
Snow barely contemplated the irony of their getting boarded by pirates at this stage, particularly since they had no weapon
s save an assortment of knives and bludgeons and one 9mm handgun that Bracelin now wore stuffed into the back of his pants. He got on the horn to the Nigerian Ports Authority, knowing the routine of entry was enough to frustrate him on a good day. The rules for entering the harbor here were a full page in the port guide, a vestige of the Brits, who had only given up their colonial hold on Nigeria in the last twenty years. Right off, the NPA agent told them they had to call seven days before ETA, then again at four, three, two, and one day out, but Snow explained as easily as he could that Elisabeth was a tramp chemical tanker with a recent contract to sell base chemicals to a plastics company in Lagos. “We got a schedule to keep in Cabinda in less than a week,” he said.
“What I know about Cabinda?” said the agent, and proceeded to keep Snow on the radio telephone for a good twenty minutes while he said no chance, well maybe, there’d be extra fees, etc. Bracelin was sighing and running his hands through his hair saying, “This isn’t going to work, it’s not going to work….”
Then the agent left the phone for five minutes, during which time Bracelin stood over a sheet of paper calculating the value of their cargoes and the value of the ship itself if sold as scrap. “We can haul in a mil-point-five now,” he said, looking up. “Not including the rocks from up-country.”
“A mil-five to split three ways?” said Paynor. “That is not what you two told me when you sucked me into this mess!”
“Well, things change,” said Bracelin. “Deal with it. That fuck still got you on hold?”
Snow was about to answer when the agent came back on to say it would quite simply not be possible to enter Nigerian port unless the vessel had registered with port authority two months prior to ETA in order to obtain a Ship Entry Notice. “But your own rules say that isn’t necessary for a vessel carrying bulk petroleum products!” Snow said.
“What’s that about petroleum?” said the NPA agent.
“A SEN isn’t necessary for petroleum products in bulk.”
“What’s that you are saying? Send what?”
“S–E–N, Ship Entry Notice!” Snow said.
“Ahhhh, SEN—no, it is true, you do not need SEN for petroleum. You are carrying petroleum?”
“Bulk liquid chemicals,” said Snow. “Petroleum products, yes.”
“You should have said that from the first,” said the man on the phone. “Call back when you are one day out. You will proceed then to off-load at Ijora Wharf.”
“What is your name?” Snow asked.
“I am Albert Warri. Like the city.”
Then he signed off.
Snow tried not to focus on the fact that he had told the guy they were a tank ship from the start. Snow found Nigerians in general to be a disagreeable people. He had never been to a place where the line between normal discourse and violent confrontation was so thin and unpredictable. He had spent only a few nasty, hot, polluted nights in Lagos, during which time he’d usually run into a dead body on the side of the road somewhere with people stepping around it like it was a chuckhole, and ending in someone trying to rob him on the street outside his hotel. Still, he got his opinions less from personal experience than from the experience of his Liberian friends, who regarded Nigerians as the armed bullies on the West African block. And all this piled onto the fact that he had his own armed bully to contend with: Bracelin. Near as Snow could tell the man hadn’t slept in three days. Snow thought he should probably call back to tell the NPA they were already a day’s sail out, but the thought of talking to Albert Warri again made his scalp hurt.
Down two levels, he slipped into the room to wash up for dinner and found Maciel in there playing with his seaman’s knife. He snapped it open, gripped the handle in his fist with the blade facing down, and let loose with a flurry of fast boxing combinations.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
The kid was grunting and shadowboxing, and improvising with the knife. “Leeds showed me this,” he said. “He has a ton of knives. And he knows how to use them.” He threw three fast jabs, then a right and a slashing back fist that would have buried the blade in somebody’s carotid artery.
“Yeah, but why are you doing it?”
He closed the knife, locked it, put it in his belt holster and pulled it fast, snapped it open with a flick of his wrist, and went through the whole barrage again.
“Never know,” the kid said, breathing hard, “when you might need your knife fast.”
“George. Don’t get yourself on a hair trigger here.”
“You never know,” he said. “You have to be ready, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, sure, but—”
“No buts, Harold. You can’t trust anybody. You just have to be ready to do what’s necessary. I’m starting to get it—I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving Beth here. I don’t care what Ali said or Bracelin says. Or even what you say.”
He sounded like Leeds with his ax handles. Between pirates and the Nigerian Ports Authority and Bracelin and Beth—and now the kid, acting ready to open somebody’s veins—Snow felt like the dike boy with leaks all around, far more than he could plug with ten thick fingers.
He knelt down before his locker, keyed open the padlock to the lower drawer, and hauled out the rocks. He sifted through them, his hand hot and sweaty as he rolled the rough-edged stones and weighed them in his mind. “Won’t get so much for these in Lagos,” he said. He rolled the bag into a sausage shape and taped it closed, then stuffed it into a money belt and tied it around his lower abdomen. He pulled his shirt down over them and tucked it in, looking now like he had two potbellies instead of one. He went to his own drawer and took out the boning knife his son gave him the last time they saw each other ten years before.
Watching the kid get himself all geared for a fight left Snow with a goading desire to protect him, even if he didn’t need it, even if he was the most dangerous man aboard somehow, even if he had taken the word of Favor, or some unknown Aussie trailing the play. No sooner would he think of his own son, and any sort of danger at all, than he thought of the kid. He thought of the girl too, and then, as if he’d conjured her, she stepped inside the room and let the door fall closed behind her. She looked at the kid with a pensive look, like they both had something to say.
“You two up for a party?” said Snow, as if there was any chance of that.
“Afraid not, Harold. Listen.” Her voice had a tone that told Snow his entire day was about to go down the toilet. “George and I have been thinking about it, and we’ve decided we’re going ashore in Lagos. I know what you’re going to say, that it’s a shit hole and no place to jump ship. I won’t disagree, but we’re going just the same.”
“That right?” Snow turned to the kid for confirmation.
“That’s right, Harold. We’re not staying around to the end just to say we stuck it out. It’s insane. This ship is insane. You know that, right?”
Snow felt something ugly rise up inside his throat, all that vomit and acid right there on the cusp, until some of it got into his mouth, and his lips recoiled from it and he stood there snarling. He looked over at all those religious books. He wished he could absorb some kind of Christian response to this thing, but the thought of Beth leaving him just hung there in front of his nose.
He thought of home, the clear cool of the Cascades, the northern air, out of the swamp to take off gliding on snowshoes on a flat stretch of glacier, or cresting a granite divide in midsummer to the crash of a waterfall and the smell of cedar and Doug fir, and climbing, always climbing, even when going downhill, effortless climbing down into the sky.
“There ain’t nothing I can do to stop you,” he said.
“No. There really isn’t,” said Maciel.
“But you’ll need money to get home.”
“We’ll manage.”
“But you know—I could go with you. Maybe we could all go together, you know? I ain’t trying to mess with your thing here, I just—I’ve got half a million in rocks here—”
They
just stared at him. He sounded so goddamned desperate.
He could see that too, the reflection of his own pathetic countenance in the chemical glaze of their eyes. “Fine then. Fine.”
“This ship is going down, Harold,” the kid said. “I’m not going with it.”
Beth stepped toward him, her hand out and lighting on his shoulder. She leaned into his ear, spoke softly—just between them. “You know it’s right, Harold. Time to leave this.”
“But you’re the whole point of it! Don’t you get that? I only did this whole thing for you.”
“Did what whole thing, Harold?”
Snow frowned at her. So the kid hadn’t told her either. He sure was a secret shit. Snow figured it for a Catholic thing, discipline of the secret and all that. He didn’t answer her, though. He looked at the kid instead. “Why don’t you tell me who that guy is. The Aussie. You at least owe me that. I’ve seen him. I know you been talking to him.”
The kid straightened, went dead a little, his mouth downcast and not even grim, just past caring. “His name is Slaney.”
As much as Snow knew he was right, the confirmation hit at him. “Slaney.” He elongated the word, as if it were somehow synonymous with eating bird shit. “Who’s he work for?”
“Some private security agency.”
“Like I thought—Petrochem’s the client.”
“Insurance. I think Lloyd’s is the client.”
Snow appreciated the honesty. Just like that he felt the kid had come back to him somehow, though he guessed that in the face of Bracelin, it only made sense. The kid was playing his angles like everybody else.