Read Online The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman - Free Book Online Page B

deliriously roasting meat—it made their taste glands tighten, faintly drifting up through harbor rot mixed with burning tobacco leaf, radio music and deejay crowing, laughter and shouted speeches. City life and sexiness happening just under their noses, down there on the pier! The crew tried to avoid any mention of the one night they’d left the ship and cut through los proyectos on their way into Brooklyn and Capitán Elias’s warning had come true; it was too depressing to talk about, the humiliation and their own cowering terror still popping away like camera flashes inside them whenever they thought about it or even imagined the possibility of lowering the ladder and trying to join the parties on the pier. Sometimes los blacks smoked something else in little stems they held like toy whistles to their lips, though the odor didn’t seem to reach them. Capitán Elias said it was “crack,” and in the mornings he’d often pause to idly kick the little glass vials this drug came in off the pier.
    When los blacks left the pier at night, walking off with music boxes carried on their shoulders like high-caliber machine guns, they liked tostop and hurl their empty beer bottles against the hull. Whether they were still out on the darkened deck or already in bed, the crew heard the soft smashes far below as if from a mountaintop; the sounds recalled them to the immense emptiness of iron their deck rested on. And the silence after somehow left them feeling even more left alone.
    The afternoon’s blazing sun and heat languished in the mess and cabins at night like an invisible fever patient, so they ate dinner outside, sitting along the four raised coamings of the cargo hatch closest to the deckhouse, backs to the open hold, most of them shirtless and barefoot, oblivious of mosquitoes. But they rarely took off their heavy, paint-sweat-grease-and-grime-saturated pants: they looked down a little on men who wore shorts—though Mark and even el Capitán sometimes wore shorts—never mind those who went around in rotting underwear, and anyway, most had stopped wearing underwear. They still had razor blades to share then but used and reused them sparingly, shaving with cold water and soap down on the pier—only twice since has Capitán Elias remembered to bring them a bag of plastic, disposable razors. Blood dribbled constantly from chins cut by worn blades. They washed every day, but it was as if their skins were becoming unwashably filmed over. By late summer they were no longer taken by surprise by the sight of one another: increasingly sad eyed, shaggy, and dirty as young corpses risen from graves.
    They’d worked until well after dark one night, and by the time dinner was ready, los blacks were already out on the pier. Bernardo carried the metal plates out from the mess two at a time, finally bringing out his own and the cook’s. Rice and canned peas fried in cooking oil, sardines mashed in, that was what they were eating, plates on their laps, the night the first bottle smashed into the deck near where they were sitting. They stared at the spray of barely glimmering shards. Some stood up with plates in their hands, cursing softly. Seconds later another bottle shattered like a handful of hard-flung coins against a wheelhouse window.
    So now, along with the usual bombardments of gull shit, this new problem of bottles falling out of the sky. And now they had to keep theirshoes and boots on at night too, their burning, suffocated toes and feet infuriated.
    Then los blacks began holding contests, trying to hit different parts of the ship with bottles, aiming for the bridge or the masts. They heaved bottles as high into the air as they could, arcing them over the hull and onto the deck, shouting and disputing amongst themselves over how close they’d come to hitting their targets. It was strange to sit there, laconically staring off or talking quietly as usual, a few huddled around Pínpoyo’s dominoes, while others passed