by David Masiel
The calms held out through that night, when they passed Ilha do Príncipe under a moon that backlit the rugged southern end of the island. Viewed from the west, it took on fantastic shapes, a series of gnarled hillocks and obelisks that took human form—an old man there at the top on Pico Príncipe, and by his side a boy, and off left, a woman, shrouded in greenery like a shawl—like God, Jesus, and Mary. Looking out to sea where the ship steamed through flat water, Snow hoped the seas ahead would stay that way—he welcomed the calms.
Flat water held into the next day, the boiled sun rising, steam drifting from the still-wet decks. The crew worked until noon ballasting the forward tanks, and the ship leveled out like the beauty she wasn’t. They pumped the last barrel of inhibitor into the midship tanks of monomer, but in the equatorial heat, plastic formed around the mouths of the expansion trunks and bubbled up through a crack in the ship’s deck. The ship swelled and creaked as they made south into the horse latitudes. It fit Snow’s mood to imagine their naming, picturing old Spanish horse traders, sailing on dead and dying airs to jettison their horses rather than compete with their own cargoes for fresh water. The seas over the Angola Basin were as desolate as anywhere, islandless from Annobón to the Cape of Good Hope, and now took on the green-gray reflection of boiling sky.
Snow practically crawled topside to stand a wheel watch, thinking he’d do better to stay close to Bracelin just now. On the bridge, the mate was silent and scanning, and Snow held to the wheel just to keep from falling over, even on flat water. He kept imagining those Spaniards heaving their horses off the poop deck of some old merchant galleon. Snow could see the scene as if he’d filmed it with his Brownie, how the horses plunged with their stick legs pumping, eyes wide and white in terror, noses up, reaching for air and sky until only their flared nostrils were left, huffing and snorting until they finally drew under. He never liked the name horse latitudes, preferred the softer Calms of Capricorn, and he never could understand why the Spaniards hadn’t just eaten the horses instead of pitching them.
Snow held to the lathed round knobs of the wooden wheel while the afternoon sun swung dead overhead and boiled the waters, his eyes watering incessantly. He took to wiping them on his shirt, already dripping in the heat. Bracelin trained his binoculars aft for some time, but it was all Snow could do to stare at the gyro. Then the mate went forward and started playing with the radio, tuning to different channels, then checking the Sailing Directions and tuning to Channel 71 VHS and 1785 kilohertz on the sideband. Snow finally turned around and saw the ship.
“How long that been there?” he asked.
“Six hours. She’s not gaining on us.”
“Just a ship? Any radio traffic?”
“Nothing. I got it tuned to Nigerian Navy work channels.”
“You think there’s any chance that private dick survived that?”
“Survived having his neck broken? Be a pretty tall miracle.” Bracelin nodded toward the radio. “You hear anything, let me know.” Then he went down the internal stairs.
Paynor awakened soon after, and Snow pointed out the ship just as Danny came back on the bridge to stand the wheel. “You’re telling me you got no idea who that is?” said Paynor.
“None.”
“You try to hail them?”
“No response.”
“Well fuck if I like that business. Who the hell could it be?”
“Nigerians, probably. We need another storm to lose them. On the other hand, if it were a speed vessel they’d have caught us by now. I don’t know, Payne. Could be anybody.”
Paynor looked aft with binoculars then shook his head. “I’ll keep a lookout.”
Snow took the chance to hit the medicine cabinet, see if they had some Sudafed left over from the time they actually had a medic on board. As he passed through the stair tower he looked out a porthole to see Leeds crawling into the wing tank, which had apparently been emptied sufficiently to find something worth welding on.
On the main deck sick bay, Snow popped three Sudafeds chased by metallic water. He was walking topside when the Sudafed kicked in, cleared up his watering eyes and nose, but then wired him, made him shaky. He gripped the railing on the stairway but felt little strength in his hands. His choice to hit his bunk was an easy one. He took his own sweet time up the stair tower to the second deck, pausing at every other step. Down the muggy internal passageway, he entered his room and lay back on the lower bunk with the little trucker’s fan going full blast. The room still smelled vaguely of urea, ether, and rotten eggs. He thought maybe it was his birthday today, he’d forgotten to notice. In 1942 he had spent his birthday on a lifeboat with third-degree burns over half his body.
Then Bracelin was pounding on his door. “I need you down under, old man. We got something sour in the number-three cofferdam.”
“I ain’t going into no cofferdam,” Snow called back. “Just keep it battened down and forget about it. We ain’t got a way to fix things down there.”
“We got a problem that throws them cargoes off spec, and we won’t get squat for them.” Bracelin pushed through the door. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I ain’t feeling well. Picked up a head cold or something there in that storm.”
“You dying on me?”
“Just give me a minute.”
Bracelin stood in the room’s middle and gazed over at Snow with complete disinterest, then turned and started eyeing the old man’s locker, glancing down as if scoping a broad on a dock in Rio.
“We gotta take advantage of flat water while we got it. I’ll give you one minute. Then I’ll have the ordinary crawl tanks. Keep the girl with me, that way I can keep an eye on her.”
“You know you’re gonna be a lot better off to just keep your eye on the ball.”
“What’d you do with the rocks?”
“I got them in a safe place. Why, you want to divvy now?”
Bracelin narrowed his eyes, like he figured he was being played but didn’t know how. “Naw, we’ll do that when the time comes.”
Snow figured as much. Bracelin didn’t want to look selfish or paranoid. He was playing it calm. Not a care in the world. Not a care save the worry of ships following them—real and imagined—and the fact that when the time came there’d be no divvying.
“Meantime we got a shitload to do. You seen the girl?”
“No, I ain’t seen anything but the inside of my eyelids.”
“I got Leeds welding a strap inside that port wing, and Maciel’s been setting ballast pumps, but I ain’t seen the girl. You and the girl are the only ones fucking the dog.”
“I’m sick, goddamnit!” Snow found something in his voice. “We all work hard here, so why you gotta say crap like that?”
“’Cause I don’t like their little thing. It just fucking bugs me to think of him getting her and not me. You know? Don’t it just get under your skin, Snow?”
“What say you give me that minute?”
After Bracelin finally left, Snow closed his eyes and kept seeing those bygone horses. He could imagine just how it felt, the ocean closing over them. The sea here was desolate and hot—he hated the south Atlantic almost as much as he hated the south Indian. Ugly oceans. And no place to swim if the chief mate decided to jettison you. No place to run if a following ship turned out to be the law. He tried hard—unpleasant as it was—to stuff himself into Bracelin’s tall Red Wing lace-ups. Only one thought cycled inside: the mate’s mood was way too good for the circumstance.
He pulled himself out of his bunk and went to the locker, where he changed his underwear to a pair of tight whites and then pulled the diamond sack from his backpack, dumped half out, and stuffed it back into his pants, running silver tape there to keep it from moving around and chafing him. He strapped his money belt on with all the cash he had plus the other half of the diamonds. Subdivide, he thought. Subdivide and conquer. He tucked his boot knife into the top of his boot, all the while wondering why the hell he couldn’
t just give up.
With considerable effort he hauled himself out to the passageway, water dripping off his brow. He wanted to shower. His body sweated a chemical odor, and he tasted lead in his mouth. He took two steps along the railing, paused, breathed, and wondered where Beth was. He could use her arm. Straight ahead lay a door leading out to a Texas deck catwalk that led inboard to the centerline catwalk, and outboard to a corner platform and then up the third deck to another door, and then farther, to the bridge wing. Snow tried to place everybody aboard, but his mind couldn’t seem to work toward it. He stalled out on the barbs of a rising headache. He kept seeing Beth’s face in his mind. Her head tipped down, eyes looking at him on that night in Okinawa. When he felt her lips and thought maybe, just maybe.
He went out the door, turned right along the balcony and then up the catwalk past the stairs to the poop deck. As he stepped from the grated catwalk to the solid metal deck of the poop, he saw Bracelin hunched over the door of the bullet raft with a knife, prying up and pulling out the dried cracked seal, which came out in a cloud of decayed rubber. Then he came up with a fresh seal and ran a bead of glue and started running the black rubber into the slot with a narrow roller.
Snow paused a moment and watched him, and wondered if he shouldn’t just kill him now. Wondered if he shouldn’t just see where everything would head. It reminded him of his father, who once said that the man who wins a fight is the first to realize he’s in one. He knew he was in one. He withdrew back behind the corner of the ship’s house and onto the catwalk balcony and pressed himself backward against the steel house and felt for his locking knife, down deep in the pocket of his jeans, gripping and regripping, thinking it would be no small matter to step up there right now. Step up there and drive the tip of that Buck knife between the man’s shoulder blades, past the bone of his vertebrae and into his beating heart.
He had no real understanding of what stopped him. Fear of failure, or a dark pathetic judgment weighing on him. The coming of the surrogates. The girl, the boy. He had never seen himself a man before. It only now occurred to him, he’d never really been responsible to anybody, even as a parent. Snow came back into the sun, beating down, with a sea rising. The ship began rocking through the soft round swells, and Snow thought about Bracelin and how he’d want the cover of storm. The following ship held position astern, maybe fifteen miles. Snow held the knife and resolved to step around the house. He’d go to hell anyway, if there was a hell. Maybe in the end he could do something to save someone. You slept with men like Bracelin, and you sealed yourself into a dank poison box. Little pieces of the man sloughed off, like scales of dry skin breathed deep into the lungs of anyone who occupied space with him. Snow clutched the knife and started to move around the corner with a ball of fear choking off his throat, and looked to the aft railing and the bullet raft there alone, door shut tight and locked, and Bracelin nowhere in sight.
Just as well. He didn’t think he could have done it anyway. He moved back along the side and around the forward corner of the house and looked out over the foredeck. Clouds rose like columns of smoke on some invisible burning horizon. At first they were all haze and white, but even as he stood there he felt the cooling as the sun slipped behind the thunderheads, and then darker, until lightning crackled the air and a line of waterspouts appeared, first scattered dead ahead, then all around the ship in clusters of threes and fours.
The seas lifted the ship and brought her down with a rolling shudder. Wind pulled at his scruff of hair, and the rain spattered in thick drops across the weather deck. With added ballast, the ship now sat down to her load lines, and Snow could feel her hunkering in for the shit. He made his way forward along the catwalk, pulling himself along and listening to the ship creak and rattle. Spray hit him from the bow, first a wisp of spume and then the thump of a real trough, and white water cascaded through the bulwarks and up and over the railing, fanning up and back over the fo’c’sle deck like hard surf on a rocky shore. From the midship tankerman’s locker, up on the catwalk, Snow thought he saw someone out there on the bow, was thinking they ought to come in before it got too much rougher. Bracelin wanted them separated. One at a time, Snow thought, he’d come one at a time.
Busy workers, easy marks.
Rain flooded the pipeline network, waves sheeting off the deck as the ship rolled through the squall, a wave breaking over the bow and tearing through the pipeline thrashing chaotic around valves, hitting an obstruction to pop skyward and then rush toward gravity. A wave tore loose the padding around one hole and ran past the hose and down into the tank in a swirl, the hoses continuing to emit their paltry ballast. Snow felt the tingling wash over him again, beginning at his head, paralyzing him. He stood holding the railing, looking toward the bow for signs of anyone, for life, but he saw no one. He turned back. There was nothing he could do out here. The railing vibrated under his hand. Someone shouted in his ear in Hindi. At least he thought it was Hindi, it sounded like Hindi. He caught movement out the corner of his eye and turned to find nothing. Saw something back the other way, sensed someone behind him, but no matter how fast he turned he caught nary a glimpse. The catwalk stretched a long way aft, seemed longer now than coming out. The ship slammed a trough and seemed to thud to a standstill. He stood up as the bow lifted, and ambled aft as fast he could, one hand sliding along the railing, going downhill, his feet trying to adjust to the heeling of the vessel as it swung through the waves. He could see that the ship was no longer sagging, but hogging. The hunched back of the weather deck was pronounced, and he could hear fatigued steel.
He waited for a trough to pass and then stepped down slowly to the weather deck and turned into the midship locker to find Maciel in there pulling on an air pack with its sealed mask respirator. “What you got going?” Snow asked.
“Do any of these tanks have air left in them?”
“Not to my knowledge. Listen, Georgie.” He tried to form the words first, so they’d come out right. “There’s things you don’t understand. Things between me and Bracelin that go way back. Not only that, but this ship.”
Maciel strapped the buckle across the front of the shoulder straps and then stared at Snow. “Well, thanks for telling me, but Leeds nailed that one somewhere around the Amazon.”
“We got a ship on our stern end for better part of two days. The thing you gotta know is, the more Bracelin feels cornered the more you want to watch your backside.”
Maciel let out an exasperated breath and breathed into his hands as if praying, or blowing on lucky dice. Then he looked up. “So let’s kill him,” he said. “Let’s get Leeds and we’ll kill him.”
Snow shook his head. They were thinking on similar lines anyway. “You got no clue about him, George. He ain’t your average guy.”
“Fuck it, there comes a moment, Harold. It isn’t a matter of right and wrong anymore.”
Snow’s lips parted, but he couldn’t quite express to the kid how slippery that killing slope was, even if you did have a pretty good idea where the conflict would all end up. He saw the face of Dutch Van, saw his body like a knife edge moving toward him with that marlin spike tucked back up. He saw Joaquin Maciel emerge from the house to the afterdeck. He saw the marlin spike striking human flesh, the meat and bone giving way under the force of blows, something brutal and immediate about the closeness of it. Snow reached back behind himself to steady against the workbench. “I can’t help you. I’m too fucking sick. What you do, and when you do it—that’s your choice, George. I’m here to tell you if you stick him in the back out of nowhere, it ain’t gonna feel like self-defense. You’ll have to live with it. And if you believe in your God, you’ll have to die with it too.”
Snow felt the pain rising up from the center of his skull. All this talk of guilt was wearing him out. He leaned back against the bulkhead and tried to roll with the seas. “I gotta get to my rack. Help me up.”
Maciel gave him a hand and Snow stood up, holding to the chemical suits hanging from their ho
oks. He waited for a wave to pass, then went out, leaving the kid behind, and grasped along the handrail through the rolling sea as he went up the stairs to the catwalk, then started aft as a new wave roared up and over the bow. He didn’t think about where the kid was now, back behind him somewhere. Off to do his deed. Off to take control, maybe, off to dive like all the others he’d known into the abyss of the killing sea. He found himself in a stumbling run, a futile sense coursing through him, as his right hand caught on something as the ship hogged over another wave. He stopped, felt it pinch, jerked his hand away without thought and felt the flesh tear. He looked down to see the catwalk railing popped open at a weld, flexing open and closed with the movement of the ship.
When the bow rose upward, making for a downward slope leading aft, his feet moved on automatic, and he held to the railing with his left hand now, dodging bottles of nitrogen, and felt the ship roll sideways some. Once to the house, he went down the stair tower to the sick bay, where he pulled off his glove to find a chunk of flesh missing from the meaty part of his right hand, just below the baby finger. The blood was unbelievably dark, almost black, as it oozed from the hole there. He shivered at the sight of it, rummaged through medicine drawers until he found a thick wide Band-Aid to cover the cut on his hand, then set about hauling himself topside for the room. When he got there, the room was empty, his locker door clanging open and closed and the contents strewn about the deck. He knew Bracelin was into it now, knew the fight had begun. The kid knew that too, Snow hoped, since he himself had missed his chance. That’s just what moralizing did for you, drew you off the practical side. He lay flat on his back. The mattress of his bunk had never felt so pointed and hard, like a bed of nails.