Sweat makes a Rorschach blot on the back of my uniform. Coast Guard–issued poly-blended cotton never needs ironing but this shit does not breathe in Galveston’s heat. Say the Gulf of Mexico is a stomach—we’re stewing in the hypoxic dead zone. That means low oxygen, brown algae, and the curious side effect that boy fishes drown out the girls. I don’t know why.
I take a bite of pizza, walking down the wharf to my office. I smell the crusty sea. I smell the burn of cargo cranes. Surrounded by giants. I smell gas and oil. The gulf’s got twenty-seven thousand abandoned wells beneath its surface. I smell my dinner, warm comfort of grease. It smells delicious.
Last night I fell asleep at my desk. No tank ships or barges. No SARs to coordinate. I kept the radio up loud enough to wake me in case I needed to tuck in my shirt. Semper paratus. Sure. Sure. No such luck tonight.
The tankers that dock here to load are as big as entire towns, vacant city blocks. And taller still, solid walls of steel. I can make out a few letters on her side: CEAN IANT. She’s empty, plenty of freeboard, taking on a load over at the facilities. I finish my meal, last bite of crust before stepping inside the trailer.
“Evening.”
“Evening.”
“When’d she get in?”
“Hour ago.” Garza’s a newish MIO. Nineteen, twenty. The local lady he’s dating is waiting for him in the parking lot, pumping the AC in her Grand Am.
The wharves are vending machines for the local women. They select the option that suits their needs: a sailor in port for one or two shifts; a merchant marine who comes and goes on three-week rotations; or a coastie stuck in station for four long years. It’s an easy arrangement I myself have enjoyed.
“You’re the duty officer tonight?” he asks.
“No, ma’am.” Sanctioned slang, pulling his chain. “Thought I’d skip down to Marine Safety for the all-night pancake breakfast.” USCG-approved chuckles. “Care to hang around?”
“Hell, no. I’ve been here since oh eight hundred.”
“You check her out yet?”
Garza winks. “I didn’t want you to get bored through the wee hours.”
“Thoughtful son of a gun.”
Garza salutes like some feathered drum majorette and disappears into a night that is dark, and hot, and filled with the chirping of insects.
The trailer quiets. My pizza slice has left a German shepherd–shaped grease stain on its paper plate. There’s no denying that strange things happen in the state of Texas. I tack the dog/pizza plate up on my CO’s corkboard. He’s an animal lover. He also enjoys Italian foods. Always thinking toward promotion, yes I am.
I shove back out into the evening, hopping wharves over to the tanker.
“Permission to board?”
The ocean’s dark as crude. No moon.
The reply sounds like “Permission granted, dork.”
Tankerman’s alone on deck. He’s got a red kerchief tied round his neck and it suits him. A red neck. I’ve never seen this guy before, but it’s simple: we don’t like them; they don’t like us.
I hear the ping and rattle of her hull getting charged. Dockman fills her. Pipes and pumps. She gurgles with gasoline. I try not to think of the girl I can’t stop thinking of.
*
A full inspection takes two hours going by CFR standards. I start with the voids. My back’s to the bulkhead and there’s a planet’s worth of ocean just outside, licking against the tanker, saying, Don’t mind me. Nothing happening here. Nothing except the metric tons of storm and riptide and killer sharks that the ocean runs with. I check the welds for corrosion, fingering their lumpy seams. I don’t like sharks. I check the pumps for leaks. Mostly, I don’t even like the ocean. I check the emergency shutdown systems, listening to the ship, ticking off items on my checklist.
Is it dark inside her?
Check.
Is it scary?
It is.
Do I like it here?
I love it.
I think of the girl.
Check.
Six months ago she pulled a ten-dollar bill from her schoolbag as if she were going to pay me for services rendered. Her underwear rode up to cover her belly button. My boxers were the color of a Band-Aid. She’d stretched the bill between her hands like a proclamation. Sitting back down on my knee, she’d said, “He’s so cute, isn’t he?”
“Hamilton?”
“Uh-huh.” Her eyes glazed, gaga over the bill. “Don’t you just love him?” She rolled her heinie against my thigh.
“Hamilton?” I asked again.
Her answer was slow. “I call him Alexander.”
A real patriot. I snaked my arm into her flabby abundance. “I’m more partial to this.” I nibbled her shoulder. Her skin was soft and thin, like a frog’s or a worm’s, some gentle creature that grows mutated arms from its ears before the rest of us can even point to the source of the poison. A girl.
“Founding Father,” she said, which made me feel creepy. I have a few years on her, four or five, but I don’t want to be her daddy.
And there I was thinking her body and mind were untroubled by the pursuit of popularity, untouched by the concerns prettier girls faced, while the whole time she’s going straight to the top, dreaming on dead patriots.
She turned, eyed my federally issued shorts. “You ready for one more round? Just to make sure it worked?”
She was as fertile and plump as any field I’d ever plowed. She was also the first girl I’d ever met who actually wanted it to work. “No condom,” she had said. “Once more. Just to be certain.”
I liked this girl mostly because I couldn’t understand a thing about her. I lay down, ready to serve my nation.
*
Tankerman and Dockman are still at it when I finish the inspection of the ship. On deck it’s dark. Deck. Dock. Dork. Dark. Like a game of anagrams we played in Cape May. A few lights off the wharf leave the water thick, black, and bottomless. “You got a minute?”
Tankerman bristles and turns. Rough trade.
“I’m going to have to charge you with negligence. You know why?”
He shrugs, grabs his dick.
“You’ve got no flame screens on some of your vents. You’ve got product leaking into the water from the flange on the transfer hose. Can’t you smell it spilling from the outboard flange? I don’t need to tell you the kingdom come if you got flame in that tank.”
The man lifts his eyebrows as a single ridge. That’s all he’s got to say. Like, This job sucks. Like, I hate you coasties, anyway, and I could give a shit about product in the gulf. He’ll take the violation, slap on the wrist.
I pass him the ticket. “You’ll need to appear before the ALJ. This has the date on it. Bring a copy of your COI and your Z-card. Got it?”
Tankerman grunts. Tankerman’s a beast.