The Ordinary Seaman (51 page)

The Ship Visitor says, “I just wanted to tell you, Esteban, that because of the snow, the Seafarers’ Institute has decided to evacuate all of you from the ship. It’s going to happen sometime tomorrow.” The Seafarers’ Institute’s board had authorized the unprecedented step of taking the crew off the ship, putting them up at the institute for a few days, and flying them home, all at the institute’s expense. “I have a feeling
that you won’t be coming, Esteban,” the Ship Visitor says, with a smile at Joaquina, “though of course you’re welcome to, if you want.” And then he says the U.S. Marshals Service will be posting a lien on the ship and officially seizing her the same day.

“Ajá,” says Esteban. Because the Ship Visitor seems perturbed …

And the Ship Visitor says, “But I wanted to talk to you about something else, Esteban. I know you were the closest to Bernardo.”

Though he hadn’t even remembered Bernardo’s last name, which had made him feel bad …

“Ajá,” says Esteban, noticing how the cold is beginning to make his ears hurt. “We shared a cabin, pues.”

The Ship Visitor, towering over him and Joaquina, looks down at him through the snow with a worried look in his pale eyes, and then he shrugs and lifts his hands away from his sides. “Esteban,” he says. “Bernardo’s last name is Puyano. We finally got it from the U.S. Embassy in Managua, because they issued his visa back in June.” And he said that he and la Reverenda had made a lot of phone calls and everyone was checking and they were going to check again, but so far there was no record of a Bernardo Puyano having left the United States in late October, or having come into Nicaragua. And someone from the embassy had done them the favor of going to Bernardo’s address to see if he was there, and he wasn’t.

“I told them about it, on the ship, before coming here,” says the Ship Visitor. “You can imagine how everybody felt. After everything you’ve all been through, and now this.”

“Sí pues,” says Esteban. He feels Joaquina take his arm in both of her hands and stand closely against him. “I felt bad,” he says flatly, “that I couldn’t even tell you his last name.” Then he begins to understand that this terrible though not unfamiliar sensation swelling inside him is terror. And he feels tears like tiny, hot beads rolling over the cold-numbed rims of his eyes.

Then Joaquina asks if they want to come inside. Gonzalo keeps the heat turned up all the way, she says. Inside, she brews a pot of coffee while Esteban sits in shocked silence next to the Ship Visitor. He hears
a toilet flush in back, and a moment later Gonzalo steps out through the curtain.

Gonzalo says, in English, to the Ship Visitor, “Are you here for your nails or to have your hair cut?”

With her back to them at the coffee stand, Joaquina says in Spanish, “It’s serious, Gonzalo, it’s about the viejito who was on the ship with Esteban. They don’t know what happened to him.”

And the Ship Visitor turns to Esteban and says, “I wish I could even be sure Bernardo was taken to the hospital. None of the Brooklyn hospitals, anyway, has any record of a Bernardo Puyano having been a patient. We’re going to keep looking, of course. There must be an explanation. I don’t know, maybe, somehow, Bernardo is still here in New York.”

Esteban covers his face with his hands and sits back in his chair. And he remembers the day he came back to the ship with his new haircut, soaring on love and carrying the side of beef over his shoulder, and suddenly found himself being hustled into his cabin, which stank of rotting cheese and an old man’s illness. Bernardo was in delirium, eyes blindly rolling, but he’d reached up his arms and in an iron embrace had pulled Esteban’s head towards him and kissed him with dry lips. But he’d been too wrapped up in his love even to realize how alarmed he was until he set on eyes on Mark, when suddenly he’d felt capable of murdering that useless hijueputa unless he took Bernardo to the hospital. And then he’d instantly felt better, no? So happy in love that he hadn’t let himself worry about the viejo. A yanqui hospital, pues. Why should he have suspected anything? Now here he is draining tears of fear and guilt and pity into his hands, for himself as much as for the viejo. Hijo de cien mil putas, he’s hardly given Bernardo another thought ever since he found out he’d been sent home! Though he’s told Joaquina all about the viejo. All about how it was Bernardo who’d practically driven him from the ship so that he could meet her, challenging his pride. That crazy viejo with all his fussy doting and his sad stories and his wrapped snapshots and his pedantic lessons and his sitting cat
and his ridiculous dreams of chicken incubators! This can’t be, no? What did they do with Bernardo? Puta,
why?

“What do you think happened?” Esteban asks the Ship Visitor, when he can finally bear to look out from behind his hands, sitting there with Joaquina’s arms tightly wrapped around him.

“I don’t know, Esteban,” the Ship Visitor answers. “I’m just as baffled as you are. What we really need to do is find this Elias and this Mark.”

After the Ship Visitor leaves the salon, Gonzalo announces that he’s closing up early because of the snow. Esteban wakes late in the afternoon in Joaquina’s room, under a blanket on the bed, clutching her body against him. He buries his nose in the soft place between her upper arm and her chest, breathes in deeply… Bernardo
Puyano
. He feels terrible now that he hadn’t been warmer with the viejo. But Bernardo’s effusive and dogged love was so generously and at times so stiflingly given that Esteban always felt blocked from showing him much affection in return. Or maybe love had just stopped flowing inside him, until he met Joaquina … And trying to comprehend or even imagine this mysterious abyss that has somehow swallowed Bernardo, he suddenly realizes that it isn’t something that has been done only to Bernardo. It’s something that’s been done to all of them, and that they never even knew or suspected the truth makes it all the more terrifying. And makes it also too much like what happened to la Marta and to how many compas, everyone he’s lost so far, another thing he’s never understood until right now …

It’s night when he finally feels ready to walk to the ship. There’s plenty of time left. He puts the roll of quarters he’s saved for this occasion into the pocket of his wool jacket, pulls on his stocking cap. From a pay phone on the corner outside he calls in sick at the fábrica for the first time ever, and then he makes all his other phone calls, leafing through the little address book with fingers numbed and aching from
the cold. When he’s finished he stands staring at the receiver for a moment through the clouds of his breathing, wishing there was a way he could track down and phone Milton in Miami, just to talk to him. He listens to the crunching of tires through the packed snow on the avenue, hears shovels scraping pavement everywhere. It’s stopped snowing now. Everywhere, this sparkling white sugar. The avenue has been strung with Christmas lights and tinselly banners.

“IT’S STOPPED SNOWING.” ELIAS TURNS FROM THE WINDOW AND LOOKS AT
Kate, who’s nursing their baby. Hector. Two weeks old. The Law of Similars. Like cures like. Therefore, those nearly ten pounds of pure and innocent flesh cure the father.

Kate’s disappointed in him, of course. Very disappointed. She thinks he’s a total fuck-up. But Mark absconded with all the money, what could he do? Kate has always thought there was something slimy about Mark Baker. She hopes Elias has learned something from all this. These risky ventures have their charm, but really, Elias, it’s time to get serious. He’s explained the “technicalities” to Kate: The crew is still on the boat. Sooner or later federal marshals will seize the ship, there’ll be an auction, the crew will be paid and sent home. Tough break for everybody, all around, but it’s the way things work. In the maritime industry.

Where’d the wanker go? And where’d the old waiter go? Bernardo.

He’s waiting to find out. He’s been waiting for six weeks now, to find out. And feeling sick with
fright.

But they won’t find his name on a single piece of paper. And the Panamanian Registry has no legal culpability, because they were never licensed seamen. He made sure that the “Oath of Officer or Agent of an Incorporated Company” was signed on behalf of Achuar Corp. of Panama City by Mr. Mark Baker. And Mr. Mark Baker has apparently vanished off the face of the earth. And who’s going to force the Panamanian Registry to turn over even that piece of paper?

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.