Looking for a Ship Read Online Free Page B

the ship. One end was open like the mouth of a sucker. The Cygnus inside resembled a tunnel. Taped to the satellite-navigation receiver on the bridge were recent advisories from the Maritime Administration on the subject of pirates. On the west coast of South America, the S.S. Mallory Lykes had been “boarded by one or more pirates with machetes.” In the Strait of Malacca, the master of a South Korean vessel had been “beaten and forced to open the ship’s safe by pirates who boarded the ship in the vicinity of Batam Island.” Lying near the SatNav was a Maritime Administration brochure called “Piracy Countermeasures.” It said, “Countermeasures should be designed to keep boarders off the ship. Repelling armed pirates already on deck can be dangerous … . Have water hoses under pressure with nozzles ready … . Use rat guards on all mooring lines and illuminate the lines … . Under way, keep good radar and visual lookout.”
    A ship in port can be filthy, hot, and dismal, in contrast
to the same ship at sea. Andy, staring forward from the bridge, seemed to be out there somewhere on the deep ocean, a very great distance from the Wando River. “You develop affection for your ship,” he said quietly. “A rusty grimy disagreeable bucket soon becomes an object of affection.” There on the Cygnus bridge—sweating marrow, reading about rat guards—I found it hard to imagine being affectionate toward the Cygnus, but not entirely impossible.
    As time passed in Charleston, Andy got more night-mating work—Farrell Lines’ American Resolute—but essentially he waited. At some point during the second week, his shipping card became eleven months old. “I’m up in the big leagues now,” he said. “Basically, I think I’m all right, but it’s healthy to be a little nervous.” One day, he felt his health running over when a second mate arrived from New York specifically looking for the Stella Lykes. New York! Oh, Jesus! Andy thought. But he had the older card.
    I was up at five-thirty on the day we expected the ship to be called. I read a long political article that included a catalogue of every national deficiency except the Merchant Marine. Andy slept until nine-thirty but got up nervous about the drawbridge. We left at ten-thirty to make the one-thirty call. Andy said, “This way, if we run out of gas or get a flat tire we can still make it.”
    I said, “We got gas last night.”
    We arrived in Charleston, of course, early enough to ship out on a Yankee clipper. We drove around. We exchanged worries. We killed ten minutes in a Burger King,
and carried the food away, because we felt pressed. When we went into the union hall and sat down to eat and wait, Andy’s hands were shaking. Lettuce fell out of his sandwich. He was unable to line up the straw that was meant to penetrate the lid of his takeout Pepsi. One o’clock. Thirty minutes to go. The door opened. Chester Dauksevich came in, the mate from New York with the inferior card. Beardless, tall, and going bald, with a white mustache, he wore brown leather wing-tip shoes, white-faded jeans, a guayabera. To destroy a few more minutes, I asked him why he had come to Charleston.
    â€œBecause I’m hungry and broke,” he said. “There’s forty guys ahead of me in New York. That’s why I’m here. I might run out of money. It’s costing me too much here.”
    Having been informed long since that this was to be the day of the all-important call, we had not been much concerned about the shipping board. One port-relief-officer job was up there, nothing more. At the job call, there was no mention of the S.S. Stella Lykes. The telephone rang at one-thirty-four. Andy’s wife, MaLinda, standing in rain at a pay phone in Bucksport, Maine, wanted to know if he had a ship. No ship. He would have to wait it out for another twenty-four