The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  It’s easy to hide. Ayahuasca can make you feel invisible. In the rain forest people saw ghosts, the spirits of the ancestors, tunshi they called them: elongated shapes of pale mist floating out of the jungle at night. And if you see one, it can give you a case of manchari—fright. Long-lasting fright, inside you like a wasting disease. Children, especially, can die of it. They can catch manchari from a reflection in a puddle, especially the reflection of a rainbow; or from a shock, or from suddenly falling down—that initial moment of fright billowing inside them and staying, a sickness. Unless you go to a shaman. Cumpashín could cure children of manchari, blowing wild tobacco smoke all over them, the magic smoke wafting their fright away. People came to Cumpashín from all over, to cure their children of fright. The river people were especially afraid of rainbows. Clothes left out to dry when a rainbow came out had to be washed again. That’s the world they live in, the world they know and understand. Terrified of rainbows. And he lived there, among them, for many years.

  And now he’s afraid to look his baby in the eye. He’s afraid of giving him fright. He worries that he has mal de ojo.

  So don’t look over at Daddy, Hector, whatever you do, because he suspects he has the evil eye, he could give you fright—but Hector never does. His wrinkled little prune face is buried in Kate’s breast, and her head is bent over him, and she’s cooing.

  In a truly legitimate business, he thinks angrily, there are rules, very definite rules to follow, which create accountability. Such as malpractice suits. Such a threat keeps a güey out of trouble, doesn’t it?

  The other day he went by Mark’s apartment, climbed the dark stairs, six flights, feeling full of fright. He was remembering a girl he’d known long, long ago, back when he’d just met Kate and was still living on Mark and Sue’s couch. She’d lived in a depressing little apartment like Mark’s, and she owned a German shepherd, like Mark’s, named, he’ll never be able to forget, Spoon. She died of a heroin overdose and for days no one knew, until the smell, and when they broke down the door because of the smell, they discovered that Spoon had eaten a portion of her body. Her dog had eaten her face. That gave him fright. But outside the wanker’s depressing, caca-hued apartment door, there was no smell. And he went downstairs and knocked on Mark’s super’s door, and spoke to him in Spanish, except the super turned out to be Moroccan. The super said that Mark didn’t live there anymore. That just days ago movers had come by and taken everything away in a truck, and the super didn’t know where to, and no, Mark hadn’t been there, it was just the movers. And Mark hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  I suppose I could trace him through his credit card receipts or cash machine withdrawals, thinks Elias, if I were the law. But I’m not the law. Not that kind of law. The Law of Similars. But he can’t even look into his own baby’s eyes. Kate thinks he’s just having one of those new-father freak-outs—mortality, the end of youth, that sort of thing.

  He gets up and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door and looks at himself in the mirror. He looks into his own reddened and wounded—yes, wounded—eyes, which others have always found so—well, his best feature—tender and intelligent. His best feature, his eyes. He can hear Hector crying now, and Kate’s low, soothing murmurs.

  It’s too easy to hide. But you I won’t be able to hide from, Hector. He wonders if he’s just being sentimentally overwrought, or appropriately overwrought—isn’t it appropriate for a father to look at his two-week-old-son and think, From you, I won’t be able to hide? Not until you’re old enough, Hector, to start hiding from yourself, anyway. Which is why all guilty souls fear the open gaze of little children.

  Moira Meer has no idea where Mark is either, and neither does Sue. He does love sweet Moira. He loves Moira Meer and couldn’t ever bear to hurt her and so will go on loving her until she finds the right man, someone who can replace him well enough in her heart, and who, of course, will be free to give Moira so much more of himself. Certainly not Mark. She never thought so for a second, poor deluded wanker. But she’s not interested in Phil either. He went to see Yoriko the other night—turned out to be the night before the day Kate went into the allopaths’ maternity ward. Yoriko was leaving for Japan with her boyfriend in another few days, bringing him home to spend Christmas with her parents. With the baby expected any day, he’d figured it was his last chance to see Yoriko, and so he’d told Kate he was going to the health club and gone over. She showed them those snapshots she’d taken, him and Mark and Haley out on the deck of the Urus during the tow to New York, hoisting their champagne glasses to the future, high times! high hopes! Really, just having tried to make it work nearly excuses everything, doesn’t it? Nearly. Because trying to get ahead, to innovate, to make something of yourself, güey, is honorable. There’s an implicit honor in just the bloody fucking effort, that’s all. And if that doesn’t quite excuse everything, it ties you, binds, connects you to all those who’ve come before who’ve made such an effort also, the successes as well as the failures. Because it’s what the world’s been fucking built on. So if there’s no honor in that, even in failure, then there’s nothing at all. Because success and failure are bonded by effort and risk. And what’s the difference between a failure and a success? Maybe just the slightest alteration in one’s DNA, a lucky break here, an unlucky one there, a stupid decision that was almost brilliant, a ruthless decision that, had it worked, would have been seen as fair and even uplifting (what if they had sailed? If the crew had been paid every cent they were owed, every cent!)—basically the effort, the intention, are the same. I’ve been successful, he thinks. I’ve married Kate. I’m not some spineless wanker who’s taken the easiest, most obvious path, who’s never done or seen anything. But I’m sorry I’ve disappointed Kate.

  And he leaves the bathroom and crosses the big, empty space of the loft and looks out the window at the clean, snowy street, feeling the cold through the glass, listening to the cold-muffled shouts of teenagers, watching them having a snowball fight—a very ironic snowball fight, no doubt, given the character of the barrio. They’re still out there, on the ship, in the snow, all those poor güeyes. Where the fuck is Bernardo? Where did Mark really take him? How could he be dead? I keep waiting to see his tunshi. I’m wasting away with fright.

  He turns and looks at his wife, her bare shoulder whitely smoldering above the slipped-down black robe, her long, twirly black hair falling over her chest, her head bent over the baby snuggling there.

  “Kate, my sweet,” he says. And she looks up at him, with a slim smile, a tender, Madonna smile, of course. “I’m going to be a good father to Hector. I hope I will be. I’ll give it every effort, Kate. That’s one thing, being a father, that I’m never going to let you down on.”

  And Kate’s dark eyes hold his for so long, so long, as if she knows that’s just what he needs, as if she’s drawing his fright out of him like smoke with her own invulnerable gaze, as if she’s telling him with her eyes that of course he doesn’t have the evil eye; he feels a sob welling in his throat, though he never, ever weeps.

  Kate says, “Oh honey, of course you will be.” Oh honey! He’s full of honey, not fright!

  And he walks right up to Kate and takes the baby from her arms and holds him up in his little white jammies, his hands spread around his fragile little ribs, and he looks right into his tiny, squinty, unrecognizing, raisin eyes and he says:

  “Be fearless, Hector. Be a big-hearted, fearless cabrón!”

  4

  FOR THE LAST TIME, ESTEBAN MAKES THE LONG WALK DOWN TO THE waterfront and to the ship, his boots squeaking through the snow. When he comes into the lot behind the grain elevator, he realizes that the sound he’s been following from a long way off is the chugging of the generator on the pier. But the black Mazda isn’t parked there, nor is any other car. The generator’s yellow steel, locked shield has been crowbarred off, cables run from it up onto the darkened ship. He climbs the ladder and looking around the deck, sees no one. He looks into the mess, into the c
abins, and sees no one, and follows the cables over the deck, behind the deckhouse, and sees them descending into the open hatch over the engine room, and hears the louder chugging coming up out of it, distinct from the noise of the generator on the pier. The open hatch is a square of soft, diffuse light. He looks down over the coamings and sees Cabezón, Canario, and Caratumba hurrying back and forth across the wet, leaf-strewn bottom of the engine room’s lower level, and José Mateo standing there beside them holding Elias and Mark’s yellow flashlight. There are a few of the plumber’s lamps hanging. He sees the rest of the crew arrayed along the catwalk, sitting and standing in dark shadows.

  “Vos, we’re going home!” Tomaso Tostado shouts over the noise of the generator when Esteban has come into the engine room, onto the catwalk.

  He sees the stereo that Elias and Mark had always kept locked up on the bridge set down on the catwalk too. The red eye is glowing, but you can’t hear anything for the noise. He looks dumbly at Tomaso Tostado, who now shouts, “You know about Bernardo?”

  Esteban nods. And then Tomaso shouts, “That’s why we’re stealing this fucking ship! Get that hijo de puta capitán in even more trouble!”

  Stealing the ship?

  He sees Panzón laughing his lugubrious laugh, though he can’t hear him. And now Panzón shouts, “Cabezón thinks he can get this thing going. He’s built a bridge!”

  “We’re going home!” shouts Tomaso Tostado again, laughing, his gold tooth glinting.

  Cabezón is hot-wiring the engine. He’s built a bridge: bypassing their nonexistent main circuit breakers by wiring one of the ship’s generators directly to the copper bus bars at the back of the switchboard, connected to the smaller circuit breakers powering the pumps. Everything else on the ship that uses electricity will stay dead. He’s started up the engine room generator with power from the portable generator on the pier. Bypassing the main circuit breakers means that there’s no modulation of the amperage, the output of electricity is constant and uncontrolled. It could even start a big fire. But he thinks it will work. There’s still water in the boilers and tanks and easily enough fuel. Everything’s been properly maintained, the pipelines drained, we’ve tinkered with this thing for months. There won’t be a fire. It should take a few hours before the engine cranks over. Fuel pump settings set. The transfer pumps sending diesel fuel now to the settling tank, and then through the system until purified and heated to flash point. All he has to do now is go up into the control room and throw the lever. Eventually the rods will start moving up from the crankshaft, the pistons will fire off in order. And finally the propeller will begin to turn. A ship with no one at the controls and without any steering mechanism, with no one at the helm …

  Now the uproar in the engine room is deafening, all along the catwalk they hold their hands over their ears, but no one leaves, even the solvent sniffers are mesmerized. This rhythmic, iron clanging and clatter. This entire iron cavern of a ship beginning to vibrate. And when Cabezón finally orders them out, they can even feel the icy deck vibrating under their feet as they cross it, sliding, falling, some of them charging down the ladder to the pier to undo the mooring lines, they’ll leave the lines trailing in the water. By the time they’re back on deck, the ship is already drifting away from the pier on the current.

  They make their way up the foredeck to watch. Esteban stands at the rail, looking around at the cove, the ruins transformed by snow. The smashed pier extending from the old terminal, snow layered over its collapsed and broken slanting timbers, looks like a long line of Chinese writing against the black water.

  Water rumbles against the ship’s faraway bottom, the whole ship seems to shiver and groan as the propeller begins to churn more than four hundred feet aft, beneath the stern. The ship moves forward, so indiscernibly at first it feels like a slight dizzy spell. But suddenly Esteban sees the pier sliding away behind them. And then the ship begins slowly to turn sideways inside the tide.

  5

  WHEN THE SHIP VISITOR COMES AROUND THE GRAIN ELEVATOR IN HIS VAN, this is what he sees: an empty pier. The shock of that moment will remain inside him like a silent explosion forever. For a split second, he thinks that somehow some great and mysterious fraud has been perpetrated on him; the ship never had anything wrong with her, and has just sailed away. He glances in the side mirror at the graffitied walls of the grain elevator behind and then out across the gray-green water at the ship run aground, her immense, rusted prow driven up over the pilings and against the collapsed wooden terminal, the top of her mud-caked black propeller sticking up through the water. Her mooring lines dangling, and the accommodation ladder hanging down the hull like a broken prosthetic arm. He sees the wreckage and debris of the now utterly smashed old spice terminal’s pier floating in the water, driven up against pilings, bobbing around the hull. And on this now empty pier, he sees the generator with its shield torn open, cables running off it, across the pier, down into the water …

  He gets out of the van and slowly begins to pick his way around the snow-covered ruins of the basin. When he reaches the other side, he stands beneath the immense wall of the prow, trying to comprehend the tidal wave that has somehow driven the ship up over the pilings. A drop ladder hangs from the rail midship, descending to the rubble. This ship, he thinks, already owes nearly fifty thousand dollars in berthing fees alone. And now the cost of hauling her out of here? She’ll bring in seventy thou, sixty-five, if she’s lucky, when she’s auctioned for scrap. They can say good-bye to their pay. Losers, a completely mediocre situation, I just don’t see how, Johnny, you can spend your life around people like that, complete dupes, people so incapable of helping themselves—that’s what Ariadne said the other night, when he was telling her the story of the Urus and her abandoned crew and the kid who’d found a novia.

  He calls up, and no one answers. He waits awhile. And then he grabs onto the drop ladder, and with much leaping, grunting, and effort finally hoists himself up onto its bottom rung and begins to climb to the rail. The slanted deck is treacherous, and he makes his way along it clutching the rail with both hands, calling out. And then he sees one of the crew, one of the smaller kids who always look worse than even the others do, sitting against the back of the deckhouse, sobbing, a little rag clutched in his hand.

  “Qué pasó?” he asks.

  The kid squints up at him through his small red eyes, his dirty little face tear streaked. He shakes his head.

  “He wouldn’t take me,” he says breathlessly, and then he starts sobbing again, falling over on his side.

  He goes around to the side of the deckhouse, past the plastic sheeting stretched over the mess doorway, looks in through the one open porthole, and sees the tattooed kid and two more—the kind of handsome, hollow-eyed guy who’d raved at him in front of the gangway—sitting against the wall, blankets wrapped around them.

  “Qué pasó?” he asks. “Where’d everyone go?”

  One of the kids responds with some sort of unintelligible muttering. And then he hears someone calling to him from above, and he looks up at the wing, and sees the older guy, the slit-eyed cook, waving to him.

  He climbs the switchback stairs four flights to the bridge, and when he goes into the bare wheelhouse, he sees the kid with a big head stretched out on a mattress with his hands clasped behind his head, his arms and face and even recently donated clothes smeared with black lubricating grease. And the cook is standing there with one hand grabbing onto the helmsman’s wheel.

  The pumpkin-headed kid on the mattress grins at him. And the Ship Visitor demands to know what has happened, and the kid tells him, while the cook just stands there chortling through his teeth. “We didn’t get very far,” says Cabezón. “Pero, bueno, we didn’t do too badly, no?”

  “And where’s everybody else?” the Ship Visitor asks.

  “They went with Esteban,” says José Mateo. “They all decided to take a chance, and if it doesn’t work, then they can still go home penniless later, no? He has friends in t
he city who’ve offered to put them all up for a while. The drug addicts wanted to go too, but Esteban wouldn’t take them, pues. He said he couldn’t do that to his friends in the city.” The cook shrugs. “Me? I’m too old for that. I’ll go home for a little rest, and then I’ll look for another job.”

  “Los drogados.” The mechanic who built a bridge to bypass the circuit breakers grins. “Pobres. Cómo sufren, no?”

  And the cook impassively says, “They’re suffering, sí pues.”

  “Cómo suuuuufren,” the mechanic quietly sings out, and then he snaps his tongue against the back of his teeth.

  “But what about you?” the Ship Visitor asks him.

  “Me?” says Cabezón. “I have to go home. I’m getting married, pues.”

  Riding the PATH train back to Manhattan and Ariadne from the Seafarers’ Institute that night the Ship Visitor replays that moment of utter surprise over and over in his mind: driving onto the pier and seeing the ship not there, and then looking over and seeing the ship run aground. And he thinks, Well, I’ve sure as hell got a story for her tonight … And I’ll begin it like this: Think of a pier, Ariadne, any old pier, maybe one as old as the century, but paved and sturdy. And no ship berthed there. And then think of what this so concrete object, a pier, represents, evokes: All the ships that have ever berthed there and all the ships that ever will, and all the faraway ports those ships have come from and are headed to, and all the hidden lives on those ships. And then think of that pier again when it’s empty. A pier with no ship berthed there. An emptiness, but a certain kind of emptiness. Kind of like love without lovers. Because in a way that’s what love’s like, Ariadne, like that pier, and you and I, our love, our love is just one of the ships that have called there. And this Esteban, his is another … Well, that’s what I think of when I stand on an empty pier. A ship visitor’s gotta find his poetry where he can get it, right? And today, when I drove onto that pier in the van to collect that abandoned crew, the ship was gone.