The Western Limit of the World (Electronic book text)

THE BOATSWAIN OF TARSHISH Harold Snow figured he'd seen more dead people than anyone alive, something like 102,000 by his best estimate. Lately his eyeballs played old film, like movie screens showing heinous scenes, the dead queued up before him to shake his shoulders and yell, "Wake up " But Snow couldn't wake up. The night the new ordinary came aboard, he lay in his bunk being chased by bombs. He was running down the side deck of a fleet oiler in 1942. Then he was in a medical ward at Pearl where a nurse was giving him a sponge bath and a hard-on at the same time. When he finally did awaken it was thirty-eight years later and a voice in his blacked-out room was telling him the ship had been denied entry into San Francisco. Snow rolled toward the sound wishing he could pretend this was impossible. He wished he could kill the messenger. People underestimated the power of that kind of thing; it was ritualized denial, though in this case he didn't even know who the messenger was. A dream voice, that nurse, flicking his erection as if removing an insect then telling him the Coast Guard was turning the tanker around. Time was muddled. He was ship's boatswain. He hauled himself out of his bunk and across the room wearing boxer shorts, his gray hair sticking straight up off his head. His body was tanned, muscles tightening as he walked, belly round and hard, but his joints clicked. In his private head, he washed his face and combed his hair with Vitalis. By the time he stepped down the passageway from his cabin on the ship's O-2 deck, he wore simple leather work boots, jeans cuffed at the ankles, suspenders, a pinstriped work shirt--blue--and a mackinaw jacket. He descendedthe internal stair tower and out the companionway to the afterdeck, to a clear winter dusk. His ship was called Tarshish, and she lay at anchor eight miles outside the Golden Gate, just north of the sea buoy and just west of the pilot boat San Francisco, its mast lights pitching on a rising southwesterly swell. Beyond, Snow could see the dim hump of the Marin headlands, with the blinking swing of Point Bonita Light defining its seaward side. To the east-southeast, the Golden Gate formed two perfect waves of lighted orange. Lights began their glimmers along the waterfront, Coit Tower like a glowing fire nozzle, the narrow girded pyramid of the Trans-America building rising before the downtown. The sight of it all, and the prospect that they had just lost five million dollars in cargoes, made a desperate ball form in his chest. Snow turned up the portside weather deck to find Bracelin, the ship's chief mate, talking with a Coast Guard ensign, leaning toward the man with insistence. "This is cheap screw," he said. Two crewmen listened from above, stretched out over the poop deck railing making motions as if to spit on the coastie's head. Ostensibly joking, their faces had a grim set, and they looked to be having little fun with it. The coastie was holding his own, all spit-polish with a voice that lectured. "Some people might be okay with bulk chemicals washing up on Fisherman's Wharf. Me, I have a problem with it. If this were a U.S.-flagged ship, she'd be impounded and towed to dry dock. As is, consider yourselves fortunate." He sounded like a northeastern boy. One of