The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman Page B

badly once. And never lost my knife. He sat there looking around, his lips andnose looking like one big, bloody hole in his face, wanting to tell everybody that they had to get up and go, that the blood was nothing, especially when it was your own, that it was wonderful to be able to taste it, feel it filling your own mouth, you fat black pato hijueputa with your earrings and flabby tits …
    They retraced their steps back to the ship, Cebo and El Barbie, the two strongest, making a seat for Bernardo with clasped arms and his arms around their shoulders. They cut across the withered futbol field and small park kitty-corner from a corner of los proyectos; and then down a short, brick warehouse-lined street blocked at the end by a chicken-wire fence with an open gate, which led past brick walls and a canal lined with liquid storage tanks and desiccated trees on the opposite bank until the road curved away, running directly behind their cove and the lot: it was the same road they’d taken that first night with El Pelos in the van, but from the opposite direction.
    They washed around the spigot and barrel on the pier. The others silently waited their turns while Bernardo lay propped back on his elbows with his head directly under the splashing water, looking like some ancient polychrome saint who’d climbed off his church pedestal and flung off his robes to wash two-millennium-old martyr’s wounds, blood-dyed water running in a sheet over his face and thin, bony chest, dividing around his small, cannonball belly and bladed hips, pooling under driftwood thighs and wrinkled old man’s testicles sagging onto the pier. Canario came running down the ladder and onto the pier, twittering “Qué pasó? Qué pasó?” but knew as soon as he saw. Some went to bed that night holding the blood-soaked rags that had been their best shore leave clothes to cuts on their heads, grateful, for the first and last time, for the torrid shelter of iron bulkhead walls. Bernardo had a muddy bump on his head for the rest of the summer, and the cook limped for weeks from a blow to his knee. El Faro had lost his eyeglasses, and Tomaso Tostado two bottom teeth, but not the gold one on top.
    The next day unfathomable sadness and listlessness and shame disabled the crew even more completely than the stomach ailments fromdrinking rat water not even a week before. They put down their tools and went and sat stuporously in the shade under the deckhouse.
    Capitán Elias and el primero Mark saw their bruised and cut faces and figured out what had happened right away, of course. So impatient he was jittery, talking at them in a fast, terse tone of righteous concern, Capitán Elias demanded that they tell him exactly how it had happened. But the crew had already agreed not to tell him a thing. No sé. Nada. No pasó nada. They stared down at the deck.
    “You see? Didn’t I tell you?” He laughed with exasperation and looked from one crewman to another with rapidly blinking eyes, his nose probing the air like an offended ostrich’s beak. “Are you muchachos expecting to get paid for today? How many days have we spent just lying around now?”
    But the rat in the drinking water was
his
fault, and el Capitán
knew
it. What had he and el Primero done, filled it without looking inside first, was it a Japanese rat? They’d gulped down water constantly and heedlessly those first sun-susurrated days, and when they’d taken it down to refill it for the first time, there it was, an eyeless and earless rat evaporated to its skeleton, teeth, and claws, scraps of wet fur clinging to bone like the last shreds of a disintegrated shroud.
    “Take it easy today, OK?” said el Capitán. “No work, we’ll start again tomorrow. Vaya, muchachos, now you know where you are. Stay in Panama from now on, it’s safer, despite what you read in the newspapers.”
    Qué
qué?
What newspapers? Moments later capitán, primero, and Miracle drove off the pier in the Mazda.
    And