The Ordinary Seaman Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Guatemaltecos are only born to give their army more people to murder, his nickname onboard would be Caratumba (Tomb Face). The other mechanic, the pretty boy they’d call Pínpoyo, had worked with heavy construction equipment, Caterpillar diesel engines. While everyone in the van chattered on, Esteban saw Bernardo looking worriedly at the back of the cook’s head, as if willing him to turn around and say something about this.
    “It’s having experienced officers onboard, a good chief engineer, that matters,” said Bernardo firmly. “Everyone else just does what they’re told.”
    The van rushed along the elevated expressway, bounced and vibrating. Esteban had only felt this way in helicopters before, not even in IFA trucks, sweating and slightly nauseous and trying to see everything. He saw a cemetery so vast and withered it looked like a whole miniature, firebombed city. How could anyone be happy here, living in an endlessness of factories, refineries, windowless slabs, who knew what it all was? He peered down into side streets as if into the bottoms of suddenly snatched away boxes, dirty brown brick, yellow tienda signs,figures walking along serenely like drunks at dawn through yellow-brown air; he saw people sitting in chairs by sidewalk cooking fires, some in their underwear apparently like at home, but they were so quickly past. Was that corn growing on that rooftop? He would never walk down those streets at night, never. The expressway curved, and skyscrapers filled the van’s window on the other side; he rocked and craned trying to see, glossy gray skyscrapers looking like they’d be blinding in the sun. The van swerved, El Pelos hit his horn, shouted, “Fucking Chinese,” words Esteban understood, though the rest of Pelos’s sullenly muttered invective was lost on him. Bernardo murmured in his ear, “They’re going to have to be good teachers, these officers, chavalo. It’s lucky the Atlantic doesn’t make itself truly dangerous until October, bueno, generally.”
    The Island of Skyscrapers and lights in the sky like fireflies before dusk and the behemoth bridges hanging in a sudden openness of ocean and sky. Tugs, barges, traffic streaming alongside the river. A gleaming white freighter berthed by a neat row of rectangular, blue warehouses down there, but that wasn’t where they were going: the expressway bent downwards and away, soon pulling them through an endless row of iron girders supporting traffic overhead, the van filling with shadows. Industrial buildings, a row of narrow, dilapidated houses, a gasoline station, a pink sign with the black silhouette of a naked woman kneeling like a mermaid, hands clasped behind her head. Morenos in sleeveless T-shirts and hats on a corner, children on bicycles; a long row of dull brown brick buildings, trees growing between them. They turned down a street lined with immense old brick warehouses. They drove along the long brick marine terminal yard wall.
    El Pelos handed an envelope to a uniformed man in a booth, who waved them through, into the stilled complexity of the port. Here and there masts, derricks, and the bristling tops of monumental ships’ superstructures protruded over the roofs of numbered terminal buildings. Motionless cargo cranes against the sky. Parked truck cabs. Sheds and warehouses with aluminum siding. A man driving an empty forklift out from behind a long row of containers. It was Sunday evening;perhaps that was why there didn’t seem to be much going on. But El Pelos kept on driving for a surprisingly long time, deep into what seemed to be a deserted and apparently defunct end of the port, where the buildings were much older, abandoned looking, made of crumbling brick and concrete. Sandy wastes of weeds and built-up earthworks suddenly opening on a patch of beachfront fronting a long, broken pier. A smashed, hollowed-out car chassis in a rubble-filled lot. They passed a small, listing old freighter apparently resting in eternal