Snugging his John Deere visor cap down to his eyebrows, Anthony opened the starboard door and strode across the bridge wing. All along Pier 88, stevedores in torn plimsolls and ratty T-shirts scurried about, untying Dacron lines from bollards, setting the tanker free. Sea gulls wheeled across the setting sun, squawking their endless disapproval of the world. A half-dozen tugs converged from all directions, whistles shrieking madly as their crews tossed thick, shaggy ropes to the ABs stationed on the Val’s weather deck.
Anthony inhaled a generous helping of harbor air — his last chance, before shoving off, to savor this unique mix of bunker oil, bilge water, raw sewage, dead fish, and gull guano — and stepped back inside.
“Slow ahead,” said Kolby. “Twenty rpm’s.”
“Slow ahead.” Chief Mate Marbles Rafferty — a mournful black sailor in his early forties, lean and tightly wound, a kind of human sheepshank — eased the dual joysticks forward.
Gently, cautiously, like a team of seeing-eye tuna guiding a blind whale home, the tugs began the simultaneously gross and balletic business of hauling the Valparaíso down the river and pointing her into Upper New York Bay.
“Right ten degrees,” said Kolby.
“Right ten,” echoed the AB at the helm, Karl Jaworski, a paunchy sailor who carried the designation able-bodied seaman into the deepest reaches of euphemism. Eyes locked on the rudder indicator, Jaworski gave the wheel a lethargic twist.
“Half ahead,” said Kolby.
“Half ahead,” said Rafferty, advancing the throttles.
The Valparaíso coasted smoothly over three hundred westbound commuters stuck in the Holland Tunnel’s regular six P.M. traffic jam.
“Is it true Dad and his wife are in Spain?” Anthony asked the pilot.
“Yep,” said Kolby. “Town called Valladolid.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Christopher Columbus died there.”
Anthony suppressed a smirk. But of course. Where else would the old man drag himself at the end of his life but to the site of his idol’s passing?
“Know how I can reach him?”
As the pilot pulled a computerized Sanyo Life Organizer from his vest, Anthony flashed on the previous Thanksgiving: Kolby eating a helping of mashed potatoes saturated with giblet gravy and lighter fluid.
“I got his fax number.”
Anthony grabbed a Chevron ballpoint and an American Practical Navigator from atop the Marisat computer. “Shoot,” he said, opening the book.
Why did his father identify so fiercely with Columbus? Reincarnation? If so, then the spirit that occupied Christopher Van Horne was surely not the visionary, inspired Columbus who’d discovered the New World. It was the demented, arthritic Columbus of the subsequent voyages — the Columbus who’d kept a gibbet permanently installed on the taffrail of his ship so he could hang mutineers, deserters, grumblers, and all those who publicly doubted they’d reached the Indies.
“Dial 011-34-28 …”
Anthony transcribed the number across a diagram of the Little Dipper, filling the bowl with digits.
“Away with the tugs!” bellowed Kolby.
As the World Trade Center loomed up, its promontories rising into the dusk like bollards meant to moor some unimaginably humongous ship, a disquieting thought possessed Anthony. This seventy-year-old Sea Scout, this asshole friend of his icebox father, was within two hundred yards of hanging them up on the shoals.
“Come right ten degrees!” cried Anthony.
“I was about to say that,” Kolby snapped.
“Right ten,” echoed Jaworski.
“Dead slow!” said Anthony.
“And that,” said Kolby.
“Dead slow,” echoed Rafferty.
“Stern tugs gone,” came the bos’n’s report, rasping out of the walkie-talkie.
“You gotta be a little sharper, Frank.” Anthony gave the pilot a condescending wink. “When the Val’s riding this light, she takes her sweet time turning.”
“Forward tugs gone,” said the bos’n.
“Steady,” said Anthony.
“Steady,” said Jaworski.
The tugs spun north, let out a high, raunchy series of farewell toots, and steamed back up the Hudson like an ensemble of seagoing calliopes.
“Wake up the pump room,” said Kolby, plucking the intercom mike from the console and handing it to the chief mate. “Time we took on some ballast.”
“Don’t do it, Marbles,” said Anthony.
“I need ballast to steer,” Kolby protested.
“Look at the fathometer, for Christ’s sake. Our barnacles can stick their peckers in the bottom.”
“This is my harbor, Anthony. I know how deep it is.”
“No ballast, Frank.”
The pilot reddened and fumed. “It appears I’m no longer needed up here, am I?”
“Appears that way.”
“Who’s your tailor, Frank?” asked Rafferty, deadpan. “I’d like to be buried in a suit like that.”
“Fuck you,” said the pilot. “Fuck the lot of you.”
Anthony tore the walkie-talkie from Kolby’s hand. “Lower starboard accommodation ladder,” he instructed the bos’n. “We’re dropping our pilot in ten minutes.”
“Once the Coast Guard hears about this,” said Kolby, quivering with rage as he climbed back into his leggings, “it won’t be a week before you lose your master’s license all over again.”
“Put your complaint in Portuguese,” said the captain. The Statue of Liberty glided past, tirelessly lifting her lamp. “My license comes from Brazil.”
“Brazil?”
“It’s in South America, Frank,” said Anthony, hustling the pilot out of the wheelhouse. “You’ll never get there.”
By 1835 Kolby was in the harbor launch, speeding back toward Pier 88.
At 1845 the Valparaíso began drinking Upper New York Bay, sucking its tides into her ballast tanks.
At 1910 Anthony’s radio officer came onto the bridge: Lianne Bliss — “Sparks,” as per hallowed maritime tradition — the bony little hippie vegetarian Ockham had dug up on Wednesday at the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. “Jay Island’s on the phone.” For someone so petite, Sparks had an astonishingly resonant voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of an empty cargo bay. “They wanna know what we’re up to.”
Anthony ducked into the radio shack, thumbing the transceiver mike to ON. “Calling Jay Island Coast Guard Station…”
“Go ahead. Over.”
“Carpco Valparaíso here, bound in ballast for Lagos, Nigeria, to take on two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil. Over.”
“Roger, Valparaíso. Be advised of Tropical Depression Number Six — Hurricane Beatrice — currently blowing west from Cape Verde.”
“Gotcha, Jay Island. Out.”
At 1934 the Valparaíso slid across the ethereal line separating Lower New York Bay from the North Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later, Second Mate Spicer — Big Joe Spicer, the only sailor on board who seemed scaled to the tanker herself — entered the wheelhouse to relieve Rafferty.
“Lay me a course for Sa г Tomй,” Anthony ordered Spicer. Grabbing the Exxon coffee Thermos and his ceramic Carpco mug, the captain poured himself the first of what he expected would be about five hundred cups of thick black jamoke. “I want us there in two weeks.”
“I overheard the Coast Guard mention a hurricane,” said Rafferty.
“Forget the damn hurricane. This is the Carpco Valparaíso, not some proctologist’s sailboat. If it starts to rain, we’ll turn on the windshield wipers.”
“Can O’Connor give us a steady eighteen knots?” asked Spicer.
“I expect so.”
“Then we’ll be in the Gulf of Guinea by the tenth.” The second mate advanced the joysticks, notch by notch. “All ahead full?”
The captain looked south, scanning the ranks of gray, glassy swells, the eternally shifting terrain of the sea. And so it begins, he thought, the great race, Anthony Van Horne versus brain death, decay, and the Devil’s own sharks.
“All ahead full!”
July 2.
Latitude: 37°7’N. Longitude: 58°10’W. Course: 094. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 810 nautical miles. A gentle breeze, no. 3 on the Beaufort scale, wafts across our weather deck.