Esteban sleeps through the day and no one disturbs him, not even when Capitán Elias and Mark both come to the ship in separate cars. Later the crew hear capitán and primero heatedly shouting at each other up on the bridge, though no one can understand the words of their argument.
José Mateo boils the shrimp that night. Look, the case’s lid says, “Producto de Honduras,” the catrachos’ native dish. Claro, many along the coast get work on those ships that stay out on the ocean for months, collecting shrimp from trawlers and deep-freezing them in their holds. And others, like Cebo used to, free-dive for lobster—so many of the divers ending up crippled, feebleminded, and sometimes drowned, from the bends—lobsters that go to the big freezer ships too. But how many ever get to actually eat them, brother? Bueno, never a feast like this, not even on the most special occasions! There’s enough shrimp for every member of the crew to have thirty-three or thirty-four. Este Esteban, que cabrón! Tomaso Tostado leads a round of whistling cheers for Esteban, and he sits there nodding, feeling filled with a happy glow, thinking, Yes, this is a special night!
They have a chance to regain their appetite midway through the feast when the butane container under the stove runs out of fuel. Then a wood fire has to be hastily built on deck, the water boiled again.
This abundance of shrimp, it reminds Caratumba of another time he got to gorge himself like this, not with shrimp but with river fish, mainly perch. La guerrilla had attacked the oil exploration camp he was working in, in El Petén, on the Río Usamacinta—
“It’s a long story,” he says, dismissively waving the shrimp tail pinched between two fingers, “but el ejerci,” and he pauses to suck on it, pushes it into his slotlike mouth, thin, straight lips pursed as he seems to knead the shrimp tail between his front teeth. Ejerci is what he calls the army. No longer chewing, Caratumba sits on the coaming with his hands on his knees, ignoring the pink-shrimp-heaped plate on his lap, his expression stilled. Coarse, straight, black hair dangles over his forehead like one ragged crow’s wing, partially hiding piercing eyes deeply embedded in prominently hollowed sockets.
“Y los soldados, qué?” asks Pínpoyo.
“Nobody wanted them there.” Caratumba grimaces, as if he’d just been asked his opinion of the army rather than to continue his story.
“Sí pues, ‘mano. But what did they have to do with stuffing yourself with fish?”
“They came to guard the camp against another raid because they were afraid la guerrilla would steal the rest of our dynamite, use it against them.” Caratumba shrugs. Half the workers in the camp informed for la guerrilla anyway, he explains, and half informed for el ejerci, and some for both. The gringos suspected that, but what could they do? La guerrilla had really only attacked the camp to destroy the helicopter, so that they could extort money from the oil company in exchange for a promise never to attack again. But the gringos were especially preoccupied because although la guerrilla had promised not to attack the oil camp anymore, they hadn’t promised not to attack the soldiers now guarding it.
“One evening these two soldaditos get into the dynamite anyway, vos,” says Caratumba. “Steal three sticks, cabrones wanted to use them to go fishing, vos. And they go a little distance from the camp, along the riverbank. They light the dynamite. Hijos de puta throw the dynamite upstream instead of down.”
Caratumba smiles, just a tight spreading of his lips that shows his crooked teeth. He lifts another shrimp to his mouth.
Esteban giggles deeply; others smile, as if not sure …
“And then what?” asks Pínpoyo. “Hombre, no jodas!”
“Bueno, it worked,” says Caratumba, chewing. “Fish everywhere. Looked like it had been raining fish.”
And Esteban, laughing through his words, “Y esos hijos de puta…”
“Wasn’t our problem, the soldiers had to pick up their pieces. And we gathered up the fish. Why waste all that fish?”
“Ahhhhhhh!” exclaims El Faro.
“And they didn’t run, seeing the dynamite floating towards them?” asks Bernardo, looking horrified. “Pobres.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference, the current was fast,” says Caratumba, “and there they were, right down on the riverbank. Must have exploded right in front of them. They were so ignorant, vos, they’d tossed in three sticks of dynamite when even one would have been too much. Pum Pum Pum—three explosions, shaking the earth. Everyone thought it must be la guerrilla attacking. The gringos were all running around screaming, Get down! Get down! crawling under their platform tents and cabins. This was very powerful dynamite; they’d drill these deep holes and drop the dynamite down and set it off, take sonic soundings, and the gringo geologists would study the results on their computers, to see what kind of layers of rock were down there. Once they found a very ancient Maya pyramid buried deep under the earth, there it was, perfectly outlined on a computer screen. I saw it, qué maravilla, no? So you can imagine, vos. Fish everywhere, all over the banks and floating away belly up down the river. Those hijos de puta del ejerci, perdóneme Dios, but I wish they’d all gone down there to the river with those two clowns.”
“Comunista,” says El Barbie, chuckling.
“Not just because of that,” says Caratumba coolly, and he eats another shrimp. “No tanto, vos.”
“Vos, Piri,” says El Barbie later. “Why don’t you find beef next? Some big, fat cuts of steak.”
And Tomaso Tostado says, “And those chunches, those Parcheesi. Don’t you think we can sell them?”
The next night’s booty is a carton packed full of men’s underpants folded in plastic bags, three to a bag. All size extra large, though, they don’t come close to fitting anybody, not even Panzón. But they put them on anyway. They joke that the underpants feel like diapers under their pants. But at least they’re clean! And the next night, carajo, Esteban brings back a carton of swimming goggles. Why is it so hard to find food?
Every night he walks, not knowing the names of the neighborhoods he walks through, though that week he ranges as far as Sunset Park and Owl Point in one direction, through Red Hook to the petering waterfront edge of Cobble Hill in the other. But street names quickly become familiar enough to orient himself by: Columbia, Halleck, Coffee, Lorraine, Pilgrim, Bush, Second and Third Avenues. The elevated expressway and the avenue underneath enclose a long stretch of the waterfront, marking a kind of border: on the other side numbered streets ascend into hilled Brooklyn.
Los proyectos don’t frighten him anymore. Coming and going that week, he walks right past them, on all sides, though never cuts through. During the hours he’s out, los proyectos seem quieter and darker than the night the crew tried to cross; hefts of wind fill the gaps between buildings with the sparks of yellow leaves. He cuts across the park, the withered futbol and baseball fields, a few men even more ragged than he is sleeping on benches under tattered blankets and flattened cardboard boxes; when they call out to him in harsh or rumbling voices, breath steams up over their faces.
Sometimes he passes an all-night tiendita locked away behind dark, greasy glass, the rare customer doing business from the sidewalk, paying and retrieving his goods through a small, sliding window. Sometimes the tiendas’ signs are in Spanish—what does Quisqueya mean? A crowd of men standing in front of a lit-up tienda far up a darkened street, he hears their urgent clamor, watches people drifting back and forth across the street as if disoriented by some great calamity as he cautiously walks towards them, half-expecting to see someone just murdered on the sidewalk, the crowd waiting for police, agitated and excited by the crime. But as he draws even with the tienda he realizes that nothing has happened there; the crowd is just milling out front, shouting and arguing, though dawn is only an hour or two away. Now there’s a messy, gray-haired man reeling after him with his hands held out, calling, “Papi! Papi! Un peso para algo a comer, Papi, por favor! Just for something to eat,” and Esteban says he doesn’t have any money and keeps walking as if he knows where he’s going, and turns
the corner … On the horizon, behind the expressway, there’s another bridge, and sometimes he sees long trains sliding across it like liquid light through a clear tube.
Truck-loading docks are most vulnerable when there’s a way in from the harbor shore. He wends up and down the streets, back to the harbor, probing for weak points. Using wire cutters, Esteban snips two cases loose from a packed pallet on a loading dock before he knows what they hold. But he figures it must be food. There are piled cartons marked “tomatoes” too close to the back of the truck to risk trying to steal. He’s already slipping away into the dark when he hears the first shout of a man who’s just come out of the trailer, the man shouts, “Hey! Hey you! What the fuck—” and Esteban dashes into the wooded wastes behind the warehouse lot. Hearing haranguing voices somewhere behind, he runs, following a skinny, winding path up and down mud-slippery rises through pitch dark trees and slapping branches, past piled garbage, the skeletons of wrecked cars, feeling the ridiculous underpants sliding down over his nalgas and thighs, bunching loosely under his crotch. He follows the path all the way to the shore of the harbor and stands there listening for voices, but the crackling surf drowns everything out. Are they following? Will they have guns? He waits and listens, crouching in the brush with the two cases on his lap, staring into the darkened woods… Finally, he stands and looks around. From the shore, a narrow spit of mounded dirt, stone, rubble, and brush extends far out into the water. What’s in this case? He wrenches the lid open, finds it packed with square little boxes, cellophane tops secured with rubber bands. Tears one open, scoops a handful of plump, surprisingly weighty little berries into his hand, then into his mouth. Hmmmm, rico. Tangy, juicy, sweet. Studies the lid, where the key word seems to be blueberries. Saber. Sucking on weedy little bits stuck to the back of his teeth. Sets the case down and lifts out the little box he’s been eating from. Carrying it in one hand, he picks his way along the debris-strewn peninsula, through high, wheatlike weeds and brush and chunks of concrete piling, hopping and stepping out among detached boulders and concrete to the very tip. Long, cresting combers roll in around him like real ocean here. He stands atop a concrete slab slanting down, surf breaking against it, flinging water up, spattering him; wind pushes against him. He eats another handful of berries; he can taste briny ocean mixing with the berry juice. But, chocho, these are good. The harbor looks wider here. The night an immense sticky-windy blackness, hollow at the core, that’s been rolled around in multicolored spangles of light. The illuminated stanchions of the immense bridge. When he’s eaten all the berries he tosses the empty little box up into the wind and turns back.
He feels a little nauseous. The next day several of the crew come down with diarrhea from stuffing themselves with berries.
That next night, underneath the expressway overpass, he suddenly hears the rising jabbering of ducks and smells a putrid stench. He turns and sees a truck moving slowly through the intersection, headed into the dark streets of the waterfront, its long flatbed neatly stacked with hundreds of square, wire cages holding yellow-beaked white ducks. He jumps up onto the tailgate just as the truck, gears grinding, straightens out of its turn, stays calm despite the duck nipping at his fingers as he clasps a wire cage with one hand, fumbling in his pocket for the wire cutters, nearly gagging from the duck-shit smell. He cuts the wire open quickly, reaches in, and grabs one duck, clutches it tightly to his chest while it flails, squawks, and bites at his head and ear, and makes a grab for the other, catches it by the neck and pulls it from the cage just as he’s jumping backwards off the truck—and he lands hard, feet and legs buckling under, falling on his thigh, ribs, and elbow, still holding on to the ducks amidst a tumult of frantic wings, quacks, and snapping bills as the clamorous truck rolls off into the dark. He snaps one duck’s neck between his hands while the other waddles away, flapping useless wings, drops the dead duck and chases the other down, snaps its neck against kicked-up knee except it’s still alive, kicks his knee up again, slamming the neck down between both fists, feels it break like a stick, the duck instantly limp, like a heavy sack in his hand. Stands there panting. His fingers are bleeding; blood warmly trickles down his neck from a bite on his ear rim, his elbow bloody, his thigh throbbing.
Two moreno men have stepped out of the dark, suddenly they’re out in the street, in long coats and wool caps, laughing and excitedly shouting at him in English. He stands there studying them, wiping his ear with the short sleeve of his outer T-shirt, his elbow with the shirt, wiping his stinging, bleeding, duck-bitten fingers against his pants. Decides they look harmless, happy drunks. Carrying one duck, he walks back up the street, looking for the dropped wire cutters, finds them and puts them in his pocket, and goes back for the other duck. The two morenos are standing over it now. The duck prostrate on its belly, soft and white, crooked neck and head on its side, big, rubbery feet heels up, like the elephantiasis-swollen feet of a beggar. The men are laughing, boisterously joking. He looks into their yellowed, brimming eyes, smells stale liquor. Deep creases in their faces, skin scarred and bumpy, one with a short, ragged beard, one with huge lips and missing teeth. “Yo,” they say, “yo,” some “fucks” and “ducks” and mainly words he doesn’t understand. It turns into a little English lesson. “Duck. Duck. Yo, it’s a duck, man …” Booming voices, laughter like jets taking off in their phlegmy throats. “Duck’s fucked.”
Esteban repeats, “Duck… Ajá. Sí. Duck. En español, pato.” Prods the duck on the pavement with his foot. “Duck. Gracias.”
“You too, brother, grass-yas …,” and more words he doesn’t understand, but now it seems they are mirthfully redescribing his duck-stealing exploit to each other, one of them flapping his arms and hands as if drowning and rasping, “Quack! Quack!” The one missing teeth lightly plucks his blood-streaked T-shirt between his fingers, gravely asks him something, must be about the way he’s dressed. The man says, “Ragmffn,” something like that, and crosses his arms, mimes shivering with cold, shaking his head to flutter lips and cheeks while he groans. Esteban shrugs helplessly, smiles. And the other, the one with the beard and a long, ash dark, lusterless face, asks, “You Rican?”
“Qué?”
“You Porta Rican?”
“Ah. No. Nicaragüense.”
“Mexican?”
“Nicaragua.”
“Yeah? Sandinistas, right? Watch out! Watch out! Sandinistis be comin. Presdent say the Sandinistis be comin right up through Texas! Ahwuuuul Kill us all!”
This Esteban has more or less followed—they laugh. Sandinista, sí pues, he nods. Touches his own chest. “Soy Sandinista.” Used to be, anyway. That makes them laugh too. They put out their hands, wrinkled palms up, they coax him into slapping their large, soft hands with his own.
“… duck? C’mon brothuh, jes one.” Are they asking him for one of the ducks? He’s sure they’re hungry too, but the ducks are for the crew. He picks up the other duck. He’s not wrong to keep both ducks.
“Bueno. Adios. Gracias.” Puta, qué locura, what else is he supposed to say? Lifts one duck in a gesture of good-bye. “Duck,” he says firmly, and they laugh some more, swiping hands down at him. He tucks one duck under each arm, says good-bye again, turns and walks off, grinning. These ducks are fat and heavy, not scrawny like chickens. Blocks later, he’s still chuckling to himself.
He sits in the terminal with the ducks beside him in the sand, his thigh aching, skinned elbow burning. Hugs himself against the damp cold. Wings thumping air up there, and sobbed cooing. He runs a finger up and down over a duck’s cracked neck, prodding for the fatal injury, over its hard skull, along its cold bill, touches an eye, it feels like a slimy snail’s shell, smooths his hand over a wing and presses down on the feathers, the resilient meat underneath. Remembers once holding a sick garza in his hands, up near the Río Coco, its feathers this white, how light that bird was, as weightless and hollow seeming as a feather hat, flurried heartbeats inside the frail cage of bones. La Marta wants to talk about when and
how she died tonight, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Really, he only spent that one week with her in Quilali. But she always gets her way. As she should. Whatever you want, Martita. Since she died he feels he hasn’t really talked to anyone. Not the way he talked to her. Not even to his compas. Not with Bernardo. He’s lived closed up inside himself in a way he never even knew about until after he met her and lost her, no? He discovered loneliness, which somehow he’d never really even known about until the day he found out la Marta was dead. He discovered a fear different from the fear of dying, a fear of what life looked like now, stretching out before him like harshest sunlight steaming down on a long, ugly, mud street. So it was a good decision, no matter what, to hire out on a ship. The way la Marta made him feel all that week—he did everything he could to preserve that inside him during the months after; he carried his love inside him like a cupped handful of springwater, which, miraculously, hardly leaks. He carried her voice like a cupped handful of water inside of him. She could make him suddenly break out laughing or smiling during the worst of it. He carried, inside of himself, la Marta saying, “Fíjate, Flaquito. Last night I dreamt I was back in León and a polar bear was loose in our house.”
He knew that modest mailman, new commander of hers, was keeping her alive. The Nightmare BON was just going to be stationed in Quilalí from now on—find something for them to do, plant an orchard, lay down pipes for potable water, build rabbit hutches, pull tics from donkeys’ ears for la Revolución. The little cardboard sign her new jefe put up promised: The greatest victory is the battle we avoid having to fight. And even the yanqui priest had promised to use his influence with the Comandancia in Wiwilí. He felt swept with superstitious relief and tenderness every time he saw a red squirrel in a tree, darting across a path. From a high ridge one night he watched a meteor streak through the star-bristling sky, suspensefully watched it fall all the way behind the hills of Honduras without going out—which meant she was alive, still loving him, thinking about him. Then his battalion came trudging through Quilali again nearly three months later, and the converted stables where Marta and Amalia had made their beds in the old hay, sleeping there terrified of rats and snakes, were deserted. And their jefe’s sign was a rain-washed flap of cardboard still hanging outside.
The Ordinary Seaman Page 22