Sail Away
Steve Carr
He had a name, the name he had been born with, but he never used it, and often forgot what it was. Aboard the cargo ship Samir, like most ships he had worked on in the past thirty years, he was known as Pink, a nickname given to him because of the pink iris in his left eye. He took having one pink eye in stride as he did the teasing that came with it. Like his name, he often forgot he had an eye the color of a pink dolphin or a pink starfish. Working in cargo holds required the use of his prodigious strength, and far less use of his eyes, so black or pink, his eye color didn’t matter most of the time, the same as it was with most everyone else.
He was twenty-two when he became a merchant seaman, taking a job aboard a ship that was hauling crates of apples from Seattle to several ports in Alaska. He stood on the deck and watched the point of the Space Needle fade in the distance as the ship churned its way to sea, leaving a quickly vanishing path of white-capped currents in its wake. He had hired on to work in the engine rooms, but having no training in it, and no aptitude with numbers required to monitor the gauges and dials, or mechanics needed when repairs were needed, he was quickly transferred to work in the holds, which suited him fine. He loved the smell of the apples and spent his time traveling parallel to the Canadian and Alaskan coastlines eating apples. From there he worked on a fishing trawler for a short time, and then transferred to a cargo ship that took him to Japan. In the years since then he had been to so many ports he lost count. He grew to six foot four and his weight ballooned to two hundred and eighty pounds, all muscle. He had lost two fingers from two separate accidents, had a scar across his upper right shoulder caused by a loose hook hanging from a chain during a storm, and had a tattoo on his chest of a galleon with bright white sails being rocked on turbulent waves.
In all that time he spent little of the money he earned. He didn’t like the taste of alcohol so he never drank, he never took up smoking because cigarettes gave him headaches, and his sexual appetite was so lackluster, that despite his good looks, and the fascination women had with his pink eye, he rarely spent money on women. Other than his clothes, all of which fit in one duffel bag, and a frayed hardbound copy of Moby Dick filled with torn and dogeared pages, his only real possession was a framed picture of his daughter taken of her a few days after her birth. A few days after the picture was taken he left Seattle bound for Alaska.
***
Sitting on a bench on the dock in Seattle, Pink listened to the ocean waves crashing against the piles underneath the piers. He watched the ship he had just taken a speedboat from as it slowly disappeared in a fog bank. He played with the lock on his duffel bag that sat on the ground between his legs. Screeching seagulls circled above him. Of all the creatures associated with the sea that he had encountered in his travels, he hated seagulls the most, even more than sharks. He glanced at his watch several times and tapped on the crystal, uncertain if he wanted time to go backward or forward. He was waiting for his daughter’s best friend, Tammy, to pick him up. The steady breeze that blew in from the water did little to evaporate the nervous sweat that ran in rivulets from under his arms. Just as he stood to stretch, a car pulled up behind his bench. He turned and watched an attractive young woman who was sitting behind the steering wheel, open the door and get out.
“I’m Tammy. Are you Paul?” she asked as she came around to the front of her car.
He had to think for a moment. Was he Paul? He recalled that was who he once was, it was the name given to him at his birth. He unconsciously put his hand to his left eye. “Yes, I’m Paul but they call me Pink,” he said.
She gave an uncertain smile, one that quivered, as if hearing a riddle she had no answer for. “It’s nice to meet you, Paul. Tammy is so excited to see you.”
“Is she?” Pink said. He tried to imagine his baby daughter being excited, and then shook his head, erasing the image of an infant from his brain. “I was on a ship docked in Honolulu when I got your telegram. You were lucky to reach me.”
Tammy pushed back a strand of hair that fell across her face. “Melissa knew where to find you.”
“How is she doing?”
“Not well,” Tammy said. She went to the trunk of her car and opened it. “We can put your things in here.”
He lifted the duffle bag onto his shoulder, carried it to the car, and put it in the trunk.
Tammy stared at the bag and then at the bench. “Is that it?” she asked.
“It’s about all I’ve carried around since I first stepped foot on a ship,” he said.
Tammy closed the trunk. She stared at his face, his pink eye. “You’re going to be amazed when you see your grandson,” she said. “We better hurry before visiting hours are over.”
Tammy got into her car and waited, a bit perplexed, as Pink walked to the edge of the dock and spat into the water. He sauntered back to the car, and certain he wouldn’t fit into the front passenger seat because of his size, he climbed in the back seat and closed the door.
***
An invisible wall of scents of chlorinated cleaning fluid and rubbing alcohol greeted Pink as he walked through the glass revolving doors of the hospital. It made him nauseous, the same feeling he got when there was spoiled meat or rotten fruit in the hold of a ship. He stood in the lobby for a moment, feeling trapped in a way that he never felt in a ship’s hold or in a ship’s narrow passageway.
“Look at the giant, Mommy,” a little girl said as she walked by, being pulled along by the hand by a woman who gazed at Pink with a mixture of awe and alarm.
Tammy entered the elevator, held the door open, and waited for Pink to catch up. He stepped into the elevator, looked around at the shiny metal walls, and then bolted out. Too many containers that he had seen in the holds looked just like the insides of the elevator. “What floor is she on?” he asked. “I’ll take the stairs.”
“The eighth floor, room 814,” Tammy said. She let the doors close.
He walked up the stairs slowly, unconsciously counting each step. His footsteps echoed in the stairwell giving him the uncomfortable feeling that he was being followed by someone the same weight as he was. He stood at the eighth floor door for several moments, steadying his breathing, before he opened the door. He walked down the hallway and past the nursing station.
“Excuse me, sir. Where are you going?” a nurse behind the nursing station desk called out to him.
He could hear the words stammer in his brain even before he spoke them. “I’m here to see my daughter, Melissa Knowles.”
The nurse flipped through some papers on a clipboard. “Okay, Mr. Knowles. She’s in room 814.”
He involuntarily gasped. It dawned on him that he was Mr. Knowles. Not just Pink, or even Paul, but a Mr. Knowles. The title mister, something he couldn’t recall ever being called, made him feel like there was a stranger living inside him, a stranger who was a father of girl and a grandfather of a boy. He walked down the hallway looking at the room numbers on the walls beside the doors. Tammy came out of room 814 just as he arrived there.
“She was in intense pain and they just gave her some pain medications so she’s about to drift off,” she said. “Don’t let it bother you if she doesn’t recognize you. It’s because of the medication.”
“She wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
“Sure she would,” Tammy said. She pointed to his pink eye. “She’s heard about that her entire life.”
Pink nodded and entered Melissa’s room. She was sitting propped up with pillows behind her back. An IV pole with a bag of clear fluid was at her bedside. Clear tubing ran from it to her arm. The regular beeping of a cardiac monitor sounded like a rhythmic cuckoo clock. She opened her eyes and looked at him with glassy eyes and smiled weakly.
“Hello, Dad,” she said, almost in a whisper.
He sat in a blue plastic chair next to the bed, took her hand in his and held it to his cheek. “I had to go to sea,” he said, softly, “but I’m here now.”
She squeezed his hand and closed her eyes. “Take care of my baby,” she said.
The cardiac monitor began to screech, like a demented seagull. Hospital staff rushed into the room and swarmed around Melissa’s bed, pushed Pink aside, and tried to bring her back to life.
***
“I’ve held seal pups in the Antarctic the same size as this baby,” Pink said as he gazed down at his grandson cradled in his arms. He didn’t want to mention that Melissa was only slightly smaller when he had last seen her before going to sea. His grandson’s pink left eye winked at him as bubbles dribbled arose from between its lips. It cooed contentedly. “Where is the child’s father?”
Tammy opened the back car door. “I don’t know. Melissa never said who he was. I don’t believe the father, whoever he is, knows he has a son.”
He handed the baby to Tammy, slid into the back seat, and then Tammy gave the infant back to him. She closed the door. Between the hospital and Melissa’s house Pink and Tammy didn’t speak. He gently rocked the baby in his arms and affectionately uttered gibberish to it the entire way. When he got out of the car he stood in front of Melissa’s house, taking in the sight of a ship’s steering wheel, the large bleached skull of a whale, and a sculpture of a mermaid on a rock, that decorated the front lawn.
“What happened to Melissa’s mother?” he asked Tammy.
“She died five years ago,” Tammy answered. “Melissa said she tried to find which ship you were on at the time, but was unable to.”
He thought back, five years. It was the time he was working on ships carrying cargo up and down the Yangtze River. Images of mountainsides with terraced rice paddies flashed through his mind. He inhaled, hoping to catch the scent of the paddies.
“ . . . was never angry that you didn’t answer her letters.”
Startled out of his reverie, Pink realized Tammy was talking to him. He had tossed unopened every letter written to him into whatever body of water he was sailing on, and watched them float away. “I never got the letters,” he said.
Tammy opened the door to the house and stood aside as Pink walked into the living room, carrying the baby. On every wall was framed maps of the seven seas with red lines that crossed from one port to the next, all routes he had taken over the years and ports he had visited. There were framed photographs of some of the ships he had worked on. His mouth agape, he thought, how did they know?Because letters found him he had always known he hadn’t totally detached from his family, or his past, but the sight of the maps on Melissa’s walls caused his heart to stop beating for a moment. He quickly sat down, unable to breath.
Tammy took the baby from his arms. “Are you okay?”
His shoulders shook and then he broke into tormented sobs. “I was never meant to live on land,” he stammered. “When I was six I narrowly escaped the house we lived in as it was washed away in a flood. It was a message.”
Tammy put her hand on his trembling shoulder. “I’m sure Melissa somehow understood.”
Pink looked up at her, at the baby in her arms. “I can’t bear it that she named him Paul.”
***
At Pink’s request, Tammy slept in Melissa’s bedroom that night. He slept for a short time sitting in the chair in Paul’s nursery. When Paul awoke in the middle of the night and began to cry, he got up from the chair, picked up the baby, changed its diapers, and carried it to the kitchen. While holding it, he fixed a bottle of formula. He took sheets of paper and a pen from a drawer, and placed them in front of him on the table when he sat down to feed Paul. On the front side of the paper, he wrote:
Dear Tammy,
Take care of Melissa’s child because I can’t do it. I need to return to the world I know. On the back of this letter are instructions for how to access my money that will be transferred into a special account for you and Paul. If he ever asks about me, tell him I drowned at sea.
Pink
He turned the paper over and wrote down the instructions. He finished feeding Paul, and then returned him to his crib. He got his duffle bag, left the house, and walked down the street, headed toward the sea.
Steve Carr, who lives in Richmond, Virginia, has had over 320 short stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals and anthologies since June, 2016. Four collections of his short stories, Sand, Rain, Heat, and The Tales of Talker Knock, have been published. His plays have been produced in several states in the U.S. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. His Twitter is @carrsteven960. His website is https://www.stevecarr960.com/ He is on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steven.carr.35977