The Ordinary Seaman Read Online Free Page A

tattoo? Up on my arm, not all over like prisoner tattoos. Elegant, with meaning, asailor’s tattoo. Something that says, I’m leaving the earth to be reborn. A skeleton climbing a ladder up into the stars. Or navigating a ship through the stars. Otilio de la Rosa has a yellow fish outlined in red tattooed on his chest and a hummingbird on his arm and at the beach that chavala said, What are you, a pet store? and just like that he learned what a mistake he’d made.
    On the way to Miami, where they cleared customs and immigration, the plane had stopped in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where among the passengers who boarded and filled the remaining seats were ten more young seamen on their way to New York to meet the
Urus.
But they wouldn’t all come together until Kennedy Airport, gathering around the gargantuan, hairy-shouldered American in basketball shorts who met them in the arrivals area, a cardboard sign that read
“Urus”
in scratchy black marker held from the bottom in two hands against his chest. After that day they’d never see him again, but whenever the crew had cause to recall him, they’d refer to him as El Pelos, The Hairs, or just Pelos. He had black hair cut short like a yanqui soldier, wore work boots with bright orange laces and a sleeveless T-shirt with his shorts, and his muscular arms and broad shoulders were totally matted with bristly black hair. “Hi. How are ya,” he said over and over as they gathered around, scrutinizing them with gray eyes as quiet and watchful as a mistrustful child’s. When he’d finally counted to fifteen he said, “All here? OK, let’s go.”
    He led them outside, this odd and uneasy American, into a late afternoon heat as stupefying as any which mundanely withers Nicaragua’s coastal plains, and left them, faces burning, standing on the sidewalk while he went for the van. A moreno porter wheeling an empty cart back inside shouted at them, “Qué vaina? Son equipo be béisbol, no? Campeones!” and raucously laughed. Is that what they looked like, a baseball team? Sun and clouds had dissolved into a haze the color of boiled, yellowing cauliflower. The airport, a vastness of sooty concrete and glass and traffic, was all by itself the biggest, noisiest, and most unfamiliar city Esteban had ever been in, though it wasn’t as if he’d never seen such places on television or in movies. He stood gaping at the endlessclamor of yellow taxis pulling up in a flurry of shouts, doors and trunks flapping open, slamming shut, roaring off—yet the air, for all the commotion, the constant, ripping thunder of takeoffs and landings overhead, felt utterly still; humid, petrol-fumed air and a faint rankness of old crab shell, the ocean somewhere nearby.
    Behind the open trunk of a radiantly polished red car, a blonde stewardess in a crisp white blouse was tightly entwined in a ravenous kiss with a handsome young man, mouths deeply tunneling. Her honey-hued elbows and arms shifted around his neck; she seemed to be trying to press herself ever more tightly against him, hip to hip, head tilted back, hair falling down like poured, shimmering grain. The man dropped a hand from her waist to her nalgas, her starched skirt denting like soft tin around his big-knuckled fingers, cheeks underneath springing back, wobbling the shimmering fabric around those flagrant indentations. They went on kissing while the crew watched, each in his own way sharing the sweltering heat between the two clamped bodies, running their tongues over their own sweat-salted lips, feeling their own humid shirts clinging to their skin. Then the lovers broke apart as if they’d agreed to do it for exactly so many minutes and seconds; he shut the trunk, they walked to opposite sides of the car, got in, and the car drove off. “Hijo de la gran puta,” one of the crew inevitably growled, others clucked impressed assent, they stood marveling and grinning as if they’d all just had their first providential taste of life at