The Ordinary Seaman (27 page)

Esteban walks off.

“Hey!” the man calls after him. “Hey you,
c’mere.”

Esteban turns and looks at him. The man is holding the pack of cigarettes out to him. Then he lowers the pack and draws out a cigarette like a tiny sword and holds that out to him. He’s saying something in English.

Esteban feels a nervy flutter of fear in his chest. He turns and walks off again. The man says something, he hears
another fuck you,
but this one in an almost plaintive tone; hears the door shut, the engine start up. Then the Jeep is beside him on the street, and the man, a lit cigarette in his hand on the wheel, looks at him with that scowling, pop-eyed curiosity, and tosses the pack of cigarettes out the window; it lands at Esteban’s feet.

“You don’ say thank-you?” asks the man.

Esteban nods. “Thenk you,” he says softly.

“You
hom-les
?” something like that, asks the man.

The man stares at him a moment longer, shrugs, and drives off. Vos, Nicas don’t accept handouts from yanquis who say fuck you to them. Pues, I don’t. But now these cigarettes are just lying there, the brand with a camel on the pack. He picks it up, the pack feels warm in
his chilled hands. There are matches shoved down inside the cellophane—only four matches left. He pulls out a cigarette, it has a filter. He smells it, running it up and down under his nose; lights it inside cupped hands. The first inhalation makes him cough. He puts the pack in his back pocket and walks down the street, gingerly inhaling. Everything is quiet again. He thinks, I’m no one anymore. Puta, I’ve vanished. I wonder where I’ll be a year from now? Ten years from now? Who knows, maybe in two years I’ll be in Italy. I’ll find work on another ship, get off and stay in Italy. Bernardo says Italy is estupendo. Once he met a woman there, a waitress in a tavern in the port, who took him to see that leaning tower; they went by train and drank a bottle of wine on the way. He has the impression, when he listens to Bernardo, that back then the world was more hospitable. Nothing like that could ever happen around here. One second anything seems possible, and the next, almost nothing does.

He tries to picture himself home in Corinto. Listening to the gray rain clattering off the corrugated zinc roof, splattering-simmering against the mud outside, lying on his bed with nothing to do, a war and la Marta to forget, or to remember, whichever, memory does whatever the fuck it wants. Plastic bags nailed to the planked wall instead of a wardrobe trunk, his belongings stuffed inside. His mamá and Tío Nelson sitting for hours in front of the rusted stove on the little concrete patio out back, rain overflowing the bent-up gutters of the zinc sheet over their heads, some of it flowing loudly through the aluminum trough aimed down at the water barrel. The stench of the outhouse, of low-tide beach rot. Tío Nelson weaving a casting net with his butter-fingers. Tío Nelson used to work as a shipping clerk, but nearly everyone is out of work now that so few ships call at Corinto. While the putas languish in a perpetual distemper waiting for the stingy Russians to arrive on ships from Vladivostok, or for the Russians posted at the big tent hospital in Chinandega. Mamá fanning herself with a woven-frond fan, fanning the dying coals in the stove, trying to interest her languid brother in the latest market women gossip, her soft, sagging, patient face of an aging Chinese sage with amnesia. Esteban doesn’t have the remotest
idea, not even a fantasy, of who his father might be. Claro, that’s not unusual in Corinto, though he was never able to claim anything as distinguishing as the green eyes of a Danish marinero, the flaxen hair of an Australian, the temptress gaze and falcon features of an Egyptian. His tíos like to joke that the new generation will be marked by the abundant nose hairs and six toes on each foot of the Basque priest, and by the three-nippled chests of pallid Russians.

Walking the waterfront streets at night, Esteban often passes fenced-off alleys or lots, and behind the padlocked gates, towards the rear of the alley or lot, he sometimes sees light over a loading dock and a truck backed up, men pushing hand trucks, tracing and retracing their own paths in and out of the light, or driving forklifts. There are lots of signs around warning against trespassers, or about dogs, in English and Spanish. Sometimes dogs run barking to these fences as he passes, stand like forlorn prisoners with forepaws resting on braided wire, barking—like these dogs now. There are five of them, running to the fence, barking.

He’s astonished when he sees one of the dogs wriggling through a rip in the fence about two feet over the pavement, followed by the other four—like a nightmare suddenly real, like wolves diving off a movie screen down into the audience. The dogs pour through the fence like a five-headed snake and charge him, barking and snarling, backing him onto the sidewalk and against the wall of a building across the street, bristling, crouching, lunging, nipping at air, click of snapping jaws, baring their fangs like El Barbie. He stands there shocked, helpless before this uproar. Why, everywhere on earth, these crazed, vicious dogs? Has to do something, take a chance, now—so he just turns and walks off, his body cringing against the first bite as the barking grows louder and more frenzied, but it doesn’t come. He just keeps walking with his heart pounding and blood flashing cold until the dogs, still barking but with less zeal, begin dropping away behind, pacing threatening little circles as if about to charge again, one pausing to lift a leg to urinate against a lamp pole before stepping forward to let out a few last desultory barks. Unlike any other domesticated animal or even wild one, not
even enraged monkeys—bueno, poisonous snakes in another way—only dogs seem to hate the way some humans do: eyes flashing, sneering, screaming, cowardly, stupidly boasting, threatening and sometimes even deadly, like Ana. Dogs and men. Cobardes, hijos de puta. The way Ana ran down that wounded contra and tore out his throat, led a platoon right into an ambush. That bald Capitán Elias with his sad-eyed face of a mangy bitch, and Mark and Miracle, the bitch’s two sons. So if monkeys are the most like humans, how come you never see a monkey pissing against the trunk of a tree?

He turns down an alley leading through buildings with smashed-windowed fronts to another long ago collapsed pier, no need to fence this off. And steps down onto the rubbled shore and begins making his way back along the edge of swift, choppy water towards that illuminated loading dock. Scaling a geometric tumble of smashed concrete slabs and gigantic pier splinters, the harbor night opening out to his right like a windy, sparkling void he might fall away into. Lifts himself up onto a concrete ledge over the seawall at the back of a warehouse and walks a short distance along it before he reaches a high, new-looking wire fence blocking his path, the fence extended well out over the water, the waves slapping heavily at the concrete seawall beneath—put there to prevent just this kind of prowling. But he easily makes his way around it, groping along the wire with soon-aching fingers and the pressure of boot tips, out along one side, over the foaming water, around and back along the other side; farther down, he makes his way around the barrier’s twin. Then onto a narrow, weedy path behind the rear of the next building. Finally he slips under pliant, rusted chicken wire and crouches behind the corner of the warehouse in the dark at the back of the truck drive, looking into the light and the cardboard cartons piled onto the loading dock twenty or so yards ahead, two men wheeling hand trucks stacked with cartons out of the warehouse, into the trailer, in and out. No dogs, so far. The viejo likes to say that it isn’t only when you gamble that you lose—but, viejo, when you gamble? Timing the workers’ movements as they go in and out of the light and slowly edging forward tight against the wall. He just has to reach up, grab one carton,
uff,
fade backwards
into the night, ni verga, and head up the shore the other way to avoid the chochada of those fences…

El Tinieblas, Canario, Caratumba, Tomaso Tostado, and even El Barbie have waited up for him anyway. As if too excited to sleep over the possibility of his bringing something back, something good to eat. They see Esteban coming around the grain elevator in the dark, his frame slanted under the weight of a large cardboard box on his shoulder. And they clamber out onto the ladder all together, clattering down it like bucking cattle spilling down a chute as they sink it towards him—Esteban on the pier, stabbing the box open with a knife.

Esteban remembers this when he sees what’s inside: a time of hunger, no food, but Tío Beny had gone fishing, rowing far out to sea in his wooden launch because it was impossible even to get petrol for the little motor. The morning after his second night at sea he was spotted on the horizon, rowing through the blanching sun, stopping to bail; finally they were able to make out the shape of what had to be a shark roped to the side of the tilting launch. It seemed to take forever for Tío Beny to reach the beach, haul the shark onto the hot, black sand, a sawbill shark that would provide enough meat and bone for caldo to feed hundreds. His hands were swollen and blistered from rowing, his nose so sun-charred it looked like a moldy beet. Everyone crowded around. Tío Beny called out for a knife. Someone handed him a knife, and he stuck it in under the fin, pulled it out, and sniffed at the blood-browned blade. “Podrido,” said Tío Beny, and he dropped the knife in the sand, turned, and trudged off the beach with just that one word, rotted, leaving the inedible shark just lying there.

The case is packed with long, rectangular boxes, almost weightless, wrapped in cellophane, covered with a colorful design, the most prominent word printed on them
PARCHEESI
. He shakes one of the boxes in both hands, nearly hollow, a few loose pieces sliding around. Not even edible. Some kind of toy. He drops the box onto the pier and starts up the ladder while the others delve in.

Midway up the ladder Esteban pauses, shouts “Oye,” and they look up at him from around the carton on the pier, all of them holding
Parcheesi boxes in their hands. He pulls the cigarettes from his back pocket—he’s used up his four matches anyway—and flings it down to them; then instantly regrets it, should’ve at least given them to Bernardo. He shouts, “Share them with everybody else. And don’t let anyone wake me tomorrow.” Then he turns and walks up onto the deck.

Esteban doesn’t make the same mistake the next night: he sees clouds of white vapor billowing through the light of a loading dock, and thinks, It’s something frozen. White vapor pouring from the rear of the truck parked against the dock and out of the warehouse, and the workers are as bundled up as Russian seal hunters. In fact, they may be Russian. The snatches of conversation he overhears as he creeps towards them aren’t in English, sound like Russian. One worker looks just like the Pope, much younger though, wearing a fur hat, clear blue eyes like a young girl’s …

He walks back to the ship with the case of frozen shrimp burning his arms. On the lid, the words “Producto de Honduras.” The first light of dawn is seeping into the dark, slowly dissolving it. Long rows of rooftop water tanks stand out against the paling sky like bleak guard towers. He finds the ship’s ladder down and climbs it, steps onto the deck and sees that no one has waited up for him. He carries the case of shrimp into his cabin and lays it down at the foot of Bernardo’s mattress without disturbing his blankly staring sleep, then gets into his own bed and lies there rubbing numbed, cold, soaked arms with his hands, an itchy horniness warming his groin and exhaustion warming everything else. He falls asleep thinking of putas in flimsy, satiny dresses carrying their high heels in their hands, walking home barefoot through warm mud at dawn, hips swaying, heads down, they sleep through the day too, hide themselves from the day, replenishing and storing up the bitter honey they sell all night long to men fleeing the day.

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.