The Nautical Chart Read Online Free PDF Page B

it.
    "That's a good story," she said after a while.
    "It isn't mine. Domino Vitale tells that story to James Bond in Thunderball. I sailed on a tanker that had all of Ian Fleming's novels."
    He also remembered that the ship, the Palestine, had spent a month and a half blockaded in Ras Tanura, in the midst of an international crisis, with the planks of the deck burning beneath a vicious sun and the crew flat in their bunks, suffocated by heat and boredom. The Palestine was a bad luck ship, one of those where the men turn hostile and hate each other and lines get tangled. The chief engineer grumbled deliriously in a corner—they'd hidden the key to the bar but on the sly he was drinking methyl alcohol from the infirmary mixed with orange soda—and the first officer wouldn't speak to the captain, not even if the ship was about to run aground. Coy had had more than enough time to read those novels, and many more, on his floating prison during those interminable days when the scorching air that filtered in through the portholes made him gasp like a fish out of water, and every time he got out of his bunk he left the sweat-imprinted silhouette of his naked body on the dirty, wrinkled sheet. A Greek tanker three miles away had been hit by a bomb from an airplane, and for two days he could see the column of black smoke rising straight to the sky, and the glow that stained the horizon red and outlined the dark, vulnerable silhouettes of the anchored ships at night. During that time, he often woke up terrified, dreaming he was swimming in a sea of flames.
    "Do you read much?"
    "Some." Coy touched his nose. "I read some. But always about the sea."
    "There are other interesting books."
    "Could be. But those are the only ones that interest me."
    The woman stared at him, and he shrugged his shoulders and rocked back and forth on his feet. They hadn't said a word about the guy with the gray ponytail, he realized, or about what she was doing there. He didn't even know her name.

    THREEdays later, Coy was lying in bed in his rented room in La Maritima, staring at a mildew stain on the ceiling while he listened to "Kind of Blue" on his Walkman. After "So What," in which the bass had been sliding sweetly, the trumpet of Miles Davis came in with his historic two-note solo—the second an octave lower than the first—and Coy, suspended in that empty space, was waiting for the liberating release, the unique percussion beat, the reverberation of the cymbal and the drumrolls smoothing the slow, inevitable, amazing path for the trumpet.
    He thought of himself as nearly illiterate in music, but he loved jazz, its insolence and ingenuity. He had fallen in love with it during long watches on the bridge, when he was sailing as third officer aboard the Fedallah, a fruit carrier of the Zoe line whose first officer, a Galician they called Gallego Neira, had the five tapes of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. They included musicians from Scott Joplin and Bix Beiderbecke to Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, passing through Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and others. Hours and hours of jazz with a cup of coffee in his hands, nights beneath the stars huddled on the flying bridge, staring at the sea. The chief engineer, Gorostiola, who came from Bilbao and was better known as the Tucuman Torpedoman, was another passionate fan of that music, and the three of them—later they went on together to the Tashtego, a sister ship in the Zoe line—had shared jazz and friendship for six years, following the quadrangular route the Fedallah. cut as she carried cargoes of fruit and grain between Spain, the Caribbean, northern Europe, and the southern United States. That was a happy time in Coy's life.
    From the floor below came the sound of the radio belonging to the landlady's daughter, who usually stayed up late studying. She was a sullen, graceless girl at whom he smiled courteously without ever receiving a greeting or a