The Weight of Numbers (33 page)

‘Houses,' said the second mate. ‘It's foundations for houses.' He broke into a weird country-and-western drawl: ‘Boom town a'comin'.'

‘Fuck that.'

The proppant was waiting for them in sacks, paletted on the quayside. They had spent a day, about six weeks ago, vacuuming the
material out of the hold, bagging it for later use. Now, coming to collect it, they had the whole job to do again in reverse. They used a mobile crane – the key, as usual, chewing-gummed to the inside of a wheel rim – to lift a smallish hopper, about a ton weight, over the aft silo. Nick guided the hopper into position over the mouth of the silo, thumbed off the karabiners and waved the crane away.

The operator swung the arm back over the quay to the first sack. Men clipped extra chains to the crane arm and hooked it up. The engine laboured, the whole body of the crane shifted, as the operator raised the sack off the quay and began slowly to swing it over to the hopper.

Nick gawped, for all the world as if this operation had nothing to do with him. It was only as the arm came to rest, the sack swinging with dreadful, pregnant force over the mouth of the hopper, that he remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

He reached into his back pocket for his knife.

It wasn't there.

Cursing, he hurried back to his bunk. It was hidden beneath his tiny pillow, nestled in its own, permanent dent in the cheap foam pallet. Not that Nick expected trouble, this trip or any other, but simply because it had become his talisman: slippy cold body, more like stone than steel, wicked lino-cutter blade. He ran his thumb crosswise over the scimitar edge – ah, a tell-tale roughness there. He dug about in his bag of books – Carpentier, Asturias and Marquez, his passion – and fished out his dad's old tin box. From the box he pulled out a stubby screwdriver. Lovingly he loosened the screw in the knife handle. Gingerly he lifted out the blunted blade and reversed it. He did up the screw again and ran his thumb over the unused edge. There was something thrilling about a razor-sharp blade – how it could cut you and you'd not feel a thing, just a wet burn as you first put pressure on the cut, sliding one surface of the slice against the other, revealing damage slowly, by stages: the sick inevitability of it. Like the cartoon coyote, who falls only
after
he finds he's hanging in mid-air.

By the time Nick had recovered enough of himself to pull himself out of this latest excursion through his own head, the first sack of proppant had already stopped swinging, it was in position, suspended over the hopper, ready for emptying.

‘I'm there!' Nick shouted, waving the Stanley knife over his head. ‘I'm there!' – flinging and flapping his way across the deck.

Anxious not to lose the highlight of his day to another, he threw himself on the sack as though it were a lover. The bright sliver of Sheffield steel slipped neatly through the coarse plastic weave. With a smooth downward motion, Nick disembowelled the sack and the proppant spilled through the hopper into the silo. The air filled with a dust that was, in its frenzy and iodine smell, a distillation of thunderstorms. The air crackled in his nostrils and laid a sourness on his tongue. Nick danced about by the side of the silo hatch, impatient, his blood up, while men fastened the second sack to the crane.

He slashed the second sack back-handed and casual, as he saw his heroes slash their way to victory in the movies he preferred. ‘Thank
you
, Mr Jiggins,' the second mate announced, dryly. A few private smiles among the ratings, quickly hidden, as Nick, brandishing his father's doughty Stanley, frowned them away.

So Nick stood, arms folded, Horatio on the bridge, waiting for more sacks. The crane lifted a third sack over the hopper. Nick, catching the second mate's eye, cut the sack carefully, a five-inch gash, letting the proppant out in a steady stream. He stepped away, patient, waiting for the sack to empty. He rubbed his thumb over the blade and felt already, through long practice, a little dullness there.

Black dust lapped the edge of the silo, busy, a midge-cloud, and fell back again. The sack sagged, the flow of proppant eased. Nick stepped forward.

The explosion blew the hopper right off the top of the silo.

The hopper's dented sill missed Nick's nose by inches.

He felt the air on his face.

He watched the hopper rise.

It tumbled through the air.

He felt a chill as its shadow crossed him.

He was aware, for the first time, of the sound of the blast, the great blunt fact of it, ringing in his ears.

The hopper rose and toppled. He watched it curve through the grey china air.

He saw the crane operator throw up his hands in front of his face.

The hopper hit the quay a yard or so in front of the crane, bounced, bounded along the quay, checked itself, ran off in a new direction, stopped, turned over, and rang – the sounds running always a fraction of a second behind the visuals, as though his brain were experiencing the world too fast to put everything in its proper order. The channels falling out of whack, the sound un-synching, and a mutter from the cheap seats: ‘Fuck' and ‘Christ'; from the English captain, a ‘Christmas Day'.

In his lungs, the taste of the forge.

Nick knew that taste, was sent back twenty years by it. The rotting cars. The carcases of caravans, their plastic and fibreboard walls leant in upon each other like a ruined house of cards. The rats…

‘The cause of the explosion,' says Nick, to the head bobbing at his lap (things, at his insistence, taking a more orthodox course now: his hand firm on the back of her head, directing the action), ‘was probably a combination of electrostatic charge built up during the loading operation and the volume of phenolic dust free in the silo.'

There is a loud – and in tactile terms, not unpleasant – sputtering, followed by a monosyllable expressive of female incredulity.

‘Phenolic,' he insists, succinctly, and his erection softens like a toffee between her teeth. He frowns.
‘Phenolic
. What? I am telling you this.'

She shrugs, climbs back on the bed and falls back, lifting her knees to her shoulders. ‘Whatever,' she says.

He fucks her once, hard, for her insolence. Twice, for the fun of it. A third time, intensely and with feeling, for romance. A fourth time, all
wet eyes and slithering tongue and ‘I never knew my mammy' –

– and drifts pathetically to sleep.

He dreams:

The hopper, rising.

He sees it rise, he feels the air stroke his face as the lip of the hopper leans over, as though to touch him, as though to kiss him goodbye.

Up it goes, into the silver sky, and its shadow comes over him then, the hopper a gigantic black hexagon in the sky, rising, rising. The bright sky silhouettes it now, backing it like the satin cushion for a piece of jet. The sky is purest white.

Nick Jinks has always wanted to see a rocket launch. This is what he has most wanted to see, ever since he was a child. And today – the very day a man sets foot for the first time on the Moon – at this moment, in this dream, it occurs to him: the accident he witnessed, and maybe even caused,
was a launch
. A detonation. Dead weight, hurled into the air by gigantic unseen forces. (The men on the quay reported a large blue flame shooting out of the silo; Jinks saw nothing like that.)

So, when he wakes, and without quite being able to work out why, Jinks feels an extraordinary sense of fulfilment. Waves of contentment will continue to wash over him at regular intervals, driving him and sustaining him throughout his peril once he discovers, the moment he sits up, shivering in wet sheets, that

(1) he is alone here

and

(2) his satchel is gone.

Apollo Eleven's lunar module lands at 3.17 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, and once it is confirmed that astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin are safely settled on the surface of the Moon, Mo Chavez snaps off his dad's little black-and-white TV.

‘Moisés!'

‘It's time to go, Papa.' Mo opens the curtains to the blinding Miami sun.

‘But men are walking on the Moon, Moisés!'

Mo brushes the cookie crumbs off his father's best shirt and adjusts his tie. The men hardly know each other; there is a nine-year separation dividing them. They connect best in the dumb-show of gesture, the grammer of touch and nudge.

‘Come along, Papa, you want to look your best for the St Patrick crowd,' says Moisés, hustling him out of his rundown Collins Avenue apartment. Mo wanted to do better by his father than to install him in this semi-derelict thirties hotel, but Anastasio is happy here. He can walk down the street and smell the ocean and the garbage and drink rum and eat roast pork sandwiches. He picks up a little pin money writing numbers for
bolito
, and around here no cop would ever dream of pressing charges. This place, in all its growing squalor, is a kind of Havana for the old man, now that the original is lost.

‘St Patrick's?' Old Anastasio is scandalized. ‘
St Patrick's?
'

‘It's the only church on the Beach, papa. We don't want to go far now.'

It was his father's idea that Man's first steps on the Moon – an event that commands a TV audience of one-fifth of the world's population – might be conveniently combined with an exposition of the Holy
Eucharist. Anastasio's regretting his decision now, of course, in thrall to the mission and its enormity, but he can't be seen to ignore the call of the Holy Hour, not in front of his tearaway American son. He spent nine years battling the revolutionary authorities over his freedom to worship. So, muttering, he follows Mo into the unreliable old Deco lift. ‘How long have I waited to receive benediction among my countrymen, and now my son takes me to an
Irish
…'

Mo glances at his father, amused, as they cross the dusty lobby. Heaven only knows where this objection has sprung from. Another piece of Yankee folklore his father has somehow misconstrued. Anastasio only got out of Cuba eight months ago, and his desire to acquire the local US colouring has something desperate about it. A strong man growing old, Anastasio expresses his vigour in anxious, opinionated outbursts. He hasn't the patience to soak up America, no, he must forage for it, he must stitch it out of scraps like a naked Adam covering himself with leaves.

What he ends up with – a motley of overheard conversation, misdirected sentiment and poorly comprehended talk-radio – says less about the old man's American present than about his Cuban past: the way Castro's UMAP labour camps stripped his ordinary human dignity away. When people look at Mo's father, they see what Mo sees: a powerful old man, bullish, a survivor. The camps taught Anastasio to see past all that – past his personality, history and character – to some bare, grub-like, essential man. They taught him to be ashamed of himself, so now he is free, he is trying to be someone different. He is trying to be an American.

‘Welcome to Florida, Father,' says Mo, baiting the old man a little. ‘The melting pot.' This front of easy sarcasm is Mo's antidote to the pity and anger which would otherwise overwhelm him, thinking of his father, for years shackled to the worst dregs of Havana's lowlife, the winos and the queers. For nine years, in prison and out of it, since the day in 1960 he put his fourteen-year-old son on the boat to freedom,
Anastasio has paid the price for his treason. Mo can never let him know how seriously he honours this debt.

Father and son leave the shadow of the dilapidated Greystone Hotel. Mo's automobile is at the kerb, a Thunderbird with brilliant ice-cream bodywork that contrasts obscenely with its cherry-red leather interior. God forbid his father ever catches wind of its nickname among the blades of the
corporaçion
.

The old man makes a big production of how difficult it is to climb into a car so sporty, so low-slung,
tan desrazonable
, and he is messing with the radio before Mo can get to the ignition. Valuable minutes are wasted while Mo hunts for the station, and they are past Lummus Park and its ocean views before the familiar voice of NASA's public affairs officer returns to the air.

‘You see?' says Mo. ‘Everything'll be fine.'

The two astronauts are still sat in their Eagle, doing whatever it is spacemen do once they have landed on a new world. All month the TV and the radio have been talking about how much rehearsal has gone into this. There have been talk shows, cinema newsreels, pull-out souvenirs in the magazines. But there must be some element of chance, there has to be, a part of the mission the astronauts make up as they go along. Or why would they bother to volunteer?

Mo and his father are headed for Garden Avenue, a stone's throw from the 195 causeway anchoring Miami Beach to the mainland metropolis. The traffic, normally so heavy, has vanished. Mo takes advantage, and the Thunderbird trembles, roars and (eventually) accelerates.

Anastasio glances at his watch. Exasperated: ‘Moisés, we are early. We are much too early. Why didn't we wait? Moisés—'

But Neil Armstrong has come on air:

‘It's pretty much without colour,'
he says.
‘It's grey and it's a very white chalk-grey as you look into the zero phase line, and it's considerably darker grey, more like ashen grey as you look up ninety degrees to the sun.'

It is the Moon, seen from the surface of the Moon, and it is grey.

‘Moisés, we are missing it!'

‘Papa, it's fine, it's under control, enjoy the radio, there won't be any TV pictures until they leave the rocket.'

St Patrick's occupies the whole block between West 39th and West 40th Street. There is a church, a rectory, a convent, a school, such an excess of space and ambition that, when Anastasio climbs (grumbling) from the car and sees it all, an actual
mall
of Catholicism, he struggles, unsure what attitude to strike. ‘Well, it doesn't
look
Irish,' he allows, as they climb the broad white steps to the door. Mo, in a brief, dissociated moment, wonders just what idea of Irishness a Cuban dissident entertains.