The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman

with their lights on seem to run on in serene, shadowy repetition forever. They’d only been “delayed in port for repairs” a little more than a week the night they’d decided to disregard el Capitán’s warnings. They wanted to see Brooklyn, they wanted to go for a walk, post some letters, buy some beers. José Mateo, the cook, had been in Brooklyn, years ago, must have been somewhere around here, he remembered a bar whose Puerto Rican owner would drive him and his crewmates back to their ship after the bar closed so they wouldn’t have to walk back; it was dangerous back then too. But who was going to attack fifteen marineros? They were more worried about running into Immigration Police, ending up in one of those underground cells el Capitán had told them about, put to work cracking walnuts open with their teeth.
    It was another humid, moon-smothering night. They stood around the spigot at the foot of the pier and a rusted barrel filled with water scummed by soap, grime, insects, their decrepit oasis, stripped down to wash, though Esteban felt that all soap did was grease the layers of stickiness all over himself enough to swirl them around a little. They jogged naked back up the ladder, clothing bundled in their hands. In their cabins, many dressed in their best. Pínpoyo’s cologne was called Siete Machos, and he splashed some into Esteban’s hands, stinging his blisters. Pínpoyo is handsome like a puppy-eyed pop star, like Chayanne, looks much younger than his nineteen years, carries himself like a baby-faced galán, that’s why the crew calls him Pínpoyo. The pressed white trousers and the shirt that looked like fireworks against black sky were still in dry-cleaning plastic when he unfolded them from his suitcase. His immaculate white leather cowboy boots had been kissed by lipstick-smeared lips over both narrowing tips. The woman and Pínpoyo had been in bed, both naked except for him in his boots, when she reapplied her lipstick and kissed his boots right there with her juicy chunche right in his face like this, that’s what he told Esteban in his cabin, smiling, hands out by both sides of his face grasping invisible nalgas, eyes bright with the memory and now the telling. Esteban stared at the kisses on the boots and exclaimed, “No jodas!” Pínpoyo said he’d only worn the boots that once; his idea was to have them completely covered with kisses by the time their tour was up, collected one woman at a time, port by port, wouldn’t that be putamadre? “No jodas!”—he’d heard and seen a lot of crazy things in his life! But for some reason this reminded Esteban of Rigoberto Mazariego, who brought his novia’s childhood doll to war with him, a naked plastic doll with blue glass eyes and a wild tangle of reddish hair, took it everywhere, on patrol, into combat, charging up jungly slopes cradling the doll against his ribs with one hand and his AK out in his other, flopping down under fire, charging back up, calmly setting the doll down beside him when he needed both hands to aim and fire, he and the doll did great, neither ever wounded, not even during the ambush on the Zompopera Road, slept with it, ate with it, bathed it. But was Pínpoyo’s thing with his boots like that? Or was itmore like Otílio de la Rosa’s fish and hummingbird tattoo, which was now an embarrassment to him?
    Too bad for Canario; he picked the double-six domino, he couldn’t go into Brooklyn, someone had to stay behind and stand watch …
    They decided to cut across los proyectos rather than risk dark, empty streets with faraway figures waiting on unlit corners to drag foreign seafarers down alleyways at the point of an Uzi, verdad? Looking back on it, the lack of people outside in los proyectos on such a hot night should have seemed ominous. A whole noisy barrio happening indoors: the night air like a sizzling frying pan full of all kinds of music mixed together, merengue, salsa, rap, reggae; voices pouring from windows,