The Night That Finds Us All, page 12
We come into the marina under quarantine.
…
The Blackwatch sits at harbor moored to a buoy at the Las Brisas anchorage. There are stacks of boats and barges on the AIS waiting to get through the Canal and ours, as large as it is, is the smallest. After the long journey, there are numerous e-signatures to deal with, and the whole crew sits in the salon bitching and filling out forms on poorly designed webpages on our smartphones: applications for entry into Panama, customs, the whole enchilada, though I don’t think Panama is known for enchiladas. Hank arranges for a state-certified doctor to motor out and test us. There is no bribe. It will take two days to clear COVID quarantine, and it will take another two or three for our canal pilot to clear his queue of boats. Maybe longer until we are able to pass through.
Hank paces the salon, paces the deck, wreaks havoc on his fingernails.
“The Canal has got low water from fucking global warming or some shit! I should’ve got an agent for the Canal,” Hank exclaims, waving his arms about like an ungainly muppet. “It’s a frickin’ labyrinth of paperwork. Water fees. A fucking cash bond that I didn’t fucking know about—no idea if I’ll ever get that money accounted for. Line handlers have a fee! The canal pilot’s fee and the toll, not to mention fuel and reprovisioning. We’re looking at somewhere around thirty grand, just to get through this goddamned place.”
“Bro,” Fama says. Bro-squeeze. “My man, it’s all copacetic. The cost of business, right?” Fama has the stoner voice, mellow and cool and calming. It’s like God gives those voices out when you grow locks. He moves from squeezing Hank’s shoulders to massaging them. “It’s coming out of the buyer’s end, anyway, right? No need to stress.”
Hank seems to relax. Just a skosh. Enough that he stops biting his fingernails and pacing.
Later, we congregate on deck; it is sunny and not too hot and the big container ships are passing. I change Loick’s dressing and it’s healing well enough, but I can tell Loick’s moved into the act-like-he’s-not-injured-because-he’s-tough phase of the injury. Seabees and Threve Two have finished arranging the fenders for when we come to port. At least we’ll have Panama City to explore. I’ve never made this trip and want to put some distance between me and, well, everyone. Especially Seabees. Even Loick’s getting on my nerves with his wincing every time he ties a knot.
“Right. Official watches have ended but I require you all to maintain your duties. I have a roster posted next to the nav station,” Seabees says in a businesslike manner. The kinds of compartments she must have in the chambers of her heart must be ridiculous. It is a little frightening how her demeanor can change from moment to moment. “Fama, Sam, you’ll note that I have you repairing the mizzen shoulder couplings. Complete this before taking any shore leave. The good news is our COVID clearances are in. At least mine is.” She holds up her phone and waves it. “Check your emails. That is all.” She turns and climbs down the companionway to below. Everyone other than Fama follows to begin packing. After a couple hours, we’ve moved the boat into the marina that Hank has booked for us and those crewmembers not tapped for work on the Blackwatch—Hello, Crewmember Vineyard, Seabees had said, in that strange voice—save for the captain have trundled up and out with their backpacks slung over shoulders, ready for a restaurant meal and a chance to satisfy other desires.
“I’m not really a fan of the mastclimber, Fama,” I say. Truth is, I am too small for a good fit in the harness and heights are not my favorite.
Seabees comes back on deck with a snarl of black webbing in her hands. She tosses it to Fama, who snatches it out of the air. “New bosun’s chair, bought courtesy of the owners.”
“Who are the new owners?” I ask. It’s something that’s been niggling at my hindbrain, what with Hank Fucking Huntington’s nerves recently.
“All I know is that they are British,” Seabees says. “Some hedge fund management firm, from what I can tell.”
“Top of the morning to ya,” Fama says in a Dick Van Dyke–level British accent, but he grins, turning over the nylon bosun’s chair in his hands, so I’m the only one who sees Seabees’s face go through a strange set of contortions. Sadness, confusion, fear, anger. The parade of emotions abruptly stops, banished by force of will. “This thing is a mess,” Fama says. He holds it up and gestures for Seabees to come over. “Help me with this?”
Seabees moves to assist Fama while I get the mizzen-gaff halyard ready for hauling, fed through one of the big-ass self-tailing winches. I hop below and get the tools I think we’ll need, a replacement coupling, and a roll of nylon rope for Fama to hoist up said tools as needed. When I return above deck I hear Seabees murmuring and little exclamations from Fama like “Ow, that’s my nuts” and “You don’t have to be so rough” and “It’s like wearing a bondage diaper” and “Stop. Just stop. Let me do it. I know how to strap into a bosun’s chair, would you just—”
It’s a beautiful day, clouds stacked up like container ships waiting to pass. A freshening breeze. Fama, all diapered up in the bosun’s chair says, “Okay, Sam, let her rip.”
I depress the button that activates the winch and up he goes into the vault of sky. Diesel fumes and the cooing of doves. There are no seagulls crying, wheeling in particulate circles. People think of shore as having seagulls, but mostly I associate harbor with doves asking “Who? Who? Who?” as though their little mouths voice the universe’s eternal question.
Fama rises into the sky. Seabees and I crane our necks to look at him, shielding our eyes from the glare.
“This thing is about to go,” he calls down. “We’ll have to remove, get dowels to fill these holes in the wood, and then replace. It’s gonna be a pro—”
Fama gives a little ack! and a wrench and the bundle of nylon falls to the deck and his legs are swinging and the bosun’s chair is up around his torso and his arms flop about, nerveless, above his head like loose sacks of meat. He’s slipped through a hole too small for the width of his shoulders. He’s been almost butterflied, arms dislocated from their sockets, scapula ripped away from ribcage so that his torso distorts, not looking wholly human anymore. After a moment, he is able to scream and he does so, vigorously, and the volume of air exiting his lungs is all the space gravity requires to finish the passage through the loop—he grows in my vision with such swiftness that it takes my brain a nanosecond to realize he is falling and I fall in response, backward, out of the way.
Fama hits the deck with a sickening thud. The screaming has stopped. I push myself up. Seabees already has her phone out and screams into it. The marina. Get an ambulance here. Ambulancia! Ambulancia! Por favor!
A gurgle and then a burp. Fama vomits a wash of blood onto the wood.
And then he dies.
…
Events are a fog; it’s hard to parcel them out. Sirens and ambulancia and policía and questions in Spanish and then English and then more questions. Hank jittering and weeping. He’s shaking like a rung bell. Fama is gone, his bro, his brocephus, his brosephone. The bosun’s chair is examined. A strap has been missed or it failed. It’s hard to tell—nothing has been cut or torn—and the policía aren’t interested in a translated course on sailing gear. It is simply a bad deal—Mouse standing there looking at the deck and saying a bad deal a real bad deal before getting a bucket and filling it with seawater and sluicing the blood away. A crowd gathers to watch the shrouded body be offloaded. It will be examined. It will be evaluated. It will be flown back to the States in due time. We can proceed through the Canal but will need to check in at the ass-end of our passage before hitting the Caribbean headwinds. Seabees calls back the crew—Hank is too shaken—and they return. And that is that.
Loick has a face like a squall passing over the dappled sea, stern and unforgiving. He draws me aside. “What the absolute fuck, Vines?” he says, low and breathy. It’s a pseudo-confidential approach, one he doesn’t really do very well.
“The bosun’s chair…malfunctioned?” My voice is raw. I can play like I’m not affected, I don’t have a proverbial dog in this fight, but I liked Fama. Good man, good sailor. And now he’s gone. “I don’t know, Loick. He fell from the shoulder coupling. It was…rough.”
Loick looks defeated. The absence of his family, the rigors of a sea passage without the release of port, and now this terrible news—it all beats him down. “I spent four months hot bunking with him in the merchant marines,” Loick says, desolate. Hot bunking is when sailors share the same berth but stagger their sleeping during different watches. “I would go off watch and his smell would still be there in the sheets. His warmth on the mattress.” He shakes his head. “Fuuuuuck.”
I give Loick a hug and he resists at first but then eases into it. He feels soft then, all the hard edges of his muscles and physique rasped away.
Hank’s not doing too well, either. He’s got a thousand-yard stare, looking at the marina, looking at the city beyond with all its pomp and blare just a distant hum at the periphery of our senses. The Blackwatch sits heavy and imponderable. I give Hank some of my Klonopin, tell him to take them with whiskey; he disappears to his cabin and when he returns, he’s chilled. Seabees seems shaken and retreats to her berth. The mizzen shoulder coupling still needs to be repaired, but not fucking today. After such a long passage, the crew would usually scatter to the winds, but today we mill about, looking lost. Eventually Mouse wanders off. Then Threve One makes his goodbyes. Hank, still dazed, admonishes all to be back on boat the following night.
On a passing thought, I set up the iPhone to surveil the salon again. Why? The pregnant air. The overwhelming sense of…doom? I pack a bag and disembark to Panama City.
And that is that.
…
Almost.
I’m nearly out of the marina when Loick catches up. He’s putting on a brave face.
“Vines!” He’s got his backpack over his shoulder, venturing out into the wilds of the port town. “You want to get some food?”
I shrug. Right now I feel an overwhelming exhaustion. It’s as though I’ve been holding a tension in my whole body for the duration of my stint on the Blackwatch and with each step between me and its barnacled hull, the tension eases.
“I could eat,” I say.
“Is that a yes?” he asks.
There’s an internet café ahead, so we get coffee and fried…things and eat pretty much in silence.
When he’s finished with his food and drink, he sits back and stares at the slowly revolving ceiling fan and rubs his face and exhales. “Fuuuuuck,” he says, again.
I nod. “Exactly.”
He looks at me and opens his mouth to speak. I hold up my hand.
“I’m not fine, Loick,” I say. “But I’m also not ready for the pastor talk you’ve got all prepared. Not yet.”
“I just want to make sure that—”
“That I don’t upend a handle of dark rum down my gullet,” I say. “I know. There’s not much you can do if I make that choice. But I don’t intend to.” I wave my hand at the open windows of the café. The bustle and commotion of mopeds and small motorcycles buzzing past on the packed-dirt street. Somewhere in the distance a work truck beeps rhythmically as it reverses. A dog barks. A man curses in Spanish. The air smells of exhaust and grilled plantains and tobacco. There are ghosts out there too, painted in bright colors, drenched in sunlight. Fama lying on deck, vomiting gouts of carmine. Horror movie blood from the ’60s, oversaturated and not quite realistic. The rest of the world is no different than the Blackwatch. Around every curve hides something that beggars our understanding of where we fit into the world. How small our understanding of it is. Fuuuck is right. “What I need now is some distance from the Blackwatch. From you. From Hank and the Threves and Mouse. Just for twenty-four hours. Can you get that?”
He pats my hand. His version of a hug, repayment for the one I’d given him earlier. “Sure, V. I get that.”
It’s nice there for the moment with his big warm hand covering mine. But I draw it away. It’s not the warmth that bothers me, it’s that it swallows my hand up.
“Be back tomorrow, ready for duty,” I say and salute.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says. “The whole sarcasm thing.”
“That was hardly sarcasm,” I say.
“You know what I mean. It’s your way of not dealing,” he says.
“I’m dealing, Loick,” I say.
“Really?” he asks, and I can see on his face he regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth. “Okay. That’s fine. But listen. You can sarcast all you want, but just remember to keep a little space inside yourself where you always say the truth. To yourself, at least.”
It’s my turn to pat his hand. I stand up, pick up my backpack, and toss down a ten.
“ ‘Sarcast’ isn’t a word,” I say. And wink, moving toward the street.
“It isn’t?” Loick asks, more to himself than me.
…
I splurge on a hotel room with an air conditioner for a hundred bucks. I want to pretend like there’s no Blackwatch for a while, there’s no old boat full of ghosts and the ghost of me and death and loss. And Seabees. All of them forgotten. Pretend I’ve arrived on the Victress, refitted and sailing tight as hell, at a mooring out there in the Pacific. I’m just here for a little R&R. A stretch of the legs, a sleep, and some food.
I eat my weight in arroz con pollo and plantain chips and tea. I think about drinking until I can’t think straight but I already can’t think straight so I get in bed, crank up the rattling air conditioner until the windows bead with condensation, and sleep for eight hours.
In the morning, I find a café and order more plantains and coffee and sit down and attempt to read Ellroy’s Perfidia but his machine-gun prose does nothing for my scattered brain and frazzled nerves.
A shadow falls over my table and I look up. A small woman, dressed all in black, even in the heat. She’s got an amazing head of white, leonine hair, wicked glasses, and a patch over one eye.
“May I sit?” she asks in a heavily accented voice.
I don’t normally welcome strangers to join me, but she is so striking that I gesture to the seat. It’s just me and her and another couple in the café in this part of Panama City, at this time of day. I can hear the sounds of a cook in the café’s kitchen clattering about, children calling to each other on the sun-packed street, the rhythmic percussion of a ball on dirt as they run to a nearby lot to enjoy fútbol dreams.
She takes a seat and hitches up her trousers at the knees then at the crotch like a man might do, and crosses her legs in an indolent manner, as though she has all the time in the world. She orders coffee and pisco and withdraws an evil-looking black cigarette and lights it with a match. Her fine, articulate hands look remarkably strong. No asking permission or forgiveness. Here is a woman I would not mind becoming, if I’m lucky enough to get to my mid-sixties. Early seventies?
“I’ve come to find you,” she says, drawing smoke deep into her lungs and exhaling. “I have come quite a long way, actually.”
“How do you know who—uh—” I stammer. “Who are you?”
“I have been called many things. You can imagine what my students call me,” she says, and brings a fingertip to her eye patch and taps it.
“Patches?”
Her visible eye looks confused. “No. El Ojo. The Eye.”
“You shouldn’t have tapped the patch, then,” I say. “You should touch your eye because…otherwise you’re a pirate.”
Her laughter is genuine and delightful and it fades all too fast. She sips her coffee and pounds her pisco, like a sailor taking shots, and then calls for another in Spanish. The waiter questions her and she snips back at him. She smokes, obviously relishing the sensation. For an instant, I wonder how she might be in bed.
“When I gave up my eye,” she says, tapping her cigarette on the ashtray, “I received some things in return.”
“You gave up your eye?” I say.
“It is a very long story. It had seen too much. So I had to pluck it out.” She gives a wistful smile. “That’s not right, actually. It had not seen too much. It needed to be able to comprehend more.”
“So you ‘plucked’ it out?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”
She picks up her coffee spoon and mimes popping out her eyeball with it.
“Jesus,” I say. “Wait. Hold up. Who are you? What do you want?”
She sighs. “My name is Isabel Certa. Doctor Certa, if you prefer,” she says.
“You’re a doctor? Of what?”
“The most important study of woman or man,” she says. “Literature.”
I laugh but she does not. She just studies me.
“Mmm, okay,” I say. Perfidia is visible on the table. I could be insecure about it, sitting in front of a doctor of literature, but I choose not to be. “What do you want with me, Professor Certa?” I ask. “I don’t recall enrolling in your class.”
“Ah. Sam Vines. Nice to meet you,” she says, her one eye widening. “Good, good. You have a lively sense of humor. This will make your future, our future—” She considers her next words. “Bearable. It is a commendable trait, humor. A cushion on a nice sofa. A soft blanket to soothe you. A nice woolen sock, warm from drying by the fire. One must find comforts in the days to come.”
“The days to come?” I ask. “How about today?”
“I am here, am I not?” She gives me a smile that is quite disarming. She puts a little teeth into it, which I like.
“You said you gained something from losing your eye.”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I did. Memory and vison.”
I suddenly feel like I did the first week I stopped drinking. My thoughts are sluggish and slow. I find myself becoming irritated, that lovely precursor to true anger. Normally I can keep up with repartee or know when to keep my mouth shut. Trauma has unsocialized me. “How can—I don’t see how—”
