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The Unknown Constellations

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

"Rodenko, John."

"Yes."

"Seventeen twenty-four in slops, fifty-dollar draw, leaves you two hundred eighty-nine dollars and sixteen cents. Sign here."

Jack stuffed the money into his pocket and pushed his way out of the saloon, through the line of sweating excited sailors. He picked up his valise in the companionway and stepped out on deck. The first assistant engineer, dressed in his blue uniform, was standing at the head of the gangplank lazily chewing on a match and spitting little pieces of wood onto the pier below.

"Hey, Rodenko," he said, "if you'll wait for me to get paid off I'll walk you into town."

Jack inched his way out onto the gangplank. "I don't think so, First. I'd better shove off right now."

"So you're not going to make another trip with us?"

"No."

"You'll never find a home as good as this ship."

"You may be right." Jack looked somberly at the freshly painted decks, still smelling of fish oil, which had served as his roof for three months. The crew's gear lay scattered about—laboriously addressed cartons, seabags, valises. Presently the sailors would hoist them onto their shoulders and clatter away like children running home from school. "But I'm not going back to sea."

The first engineer raised his eyebrows. "They all say that. What's your story?"

"I'm sick of it."

"What do you figure on doing?"

"Anything. It doesn't make much difference to me. Do you know where I can get a decent room in town?"

"Everything is full up these days. Try a place called the Seven Seas Hotel—I used to stay there. When you hit the street, it's four blocks up and one over."

Jack picked up his bag and extended his hand. "Thanks, First."

"You're a funny fellow, Rodenko. I don't mind telling you that you're the best oiler I ever had on my watch. If you wanted to, you could sit for your license tomorrow. You'd make a first-class engineer, but you don't seem to have any ambition."

Jack smiled. "So long."

"So long. And good luck. I'll see you again."

"Sure."

He eased himself carefully down the steep slippery gangway. At the pier he shifted the bag and turned to observe the ship for the last time. The first assistant, already only a vague little figure from the past, was waving farewell, the back of his hand moving casually back and forth before his face as though he were brushing away flies. Jack waved up at him and at the gray hulk of the ship, suddenly useless and swarming with landsmen; as he lowered his arm his watch strap snagged against his lapel and dislodged his union button. He picked it up and spun it at the ship, but it struck the rat guard on the mooring line with a faint ping and slid off into the greasy water. He took up his bag and walked past the longshoremen who were already unloading coffee on the noisy pier, to the customs office at the outer gate.

He swung the valise onto the customs inspector's desk, snapped it open, and said, "No souvenirs, no nothing."

The inspector pushed back his cap and riffled perfunctorily through Jack's clothes. "How was Brazil?"

"Hot."

"Okay, that's all. Many other men coming off your ship today?"

"I wouldn't know." Jack took the bag and stepped out into the street.

The city was new to him, but the street was not. Wide, cheery, and provincial, with its automobiles parked in neat diagonals and its open-air trolleys clanging leisurely up and down, it might have been a street in any one of a dozen southern cities that he knew.

But the streets were the same in whatever place he stepped ashore. Whether they stank, as they did in Karachi, or shone, as they did in Sydney; whether they were quietly brooding, like the rainy avenues of Cardiff, or infested with humanity, like the alleys of Naples—they all possessed the same fatal loneliness: no one raised his hand in greeting. No one stopped, opened his eyes wide, and said, Well, it's good to see you again!

Perhaps it was worse in the American cities. Here one might imagine that the words homecoming, return to the native shores, would be invested with a significance beyond the coldly satiric. To what home? And to what nativity?

The harbor cities of America lay strung out behind him like the grains of rice dropped by a man afraid of being lost in the woods, and all his meanderings seemed to him as pathetically futile as the screwed-up leaping of a frog on a flat rock. Boston watered his withered spirit no more than New York or Baltimore, and if this city was to sustain him it would be only because he was determined that he would squeeze it with the strength of the dying until its juices ran down his gullet.

When he had paid off in Boston he had clambered down the gangway early in the evening and walked up Atlantic Avenue to South Station, where he had checked his bags, to Tremont Street, across the Common and the Public Gardens, and had sat down on a bench under an old tree on Commonwealth Avenue. The street lamp bathed the tree with its wan light and old Boston rolled past, sedately ignoring him. He had sat until the last of the lights winked out and the noise of the last automobiles faded away toward the Charles River, through the still hours of the night, until the grass whitened with dew and the crying sparrows fluttered through the roric air. Then he had arisen and walked alone to a hotel, where he lay down and dreamed that he was once again at sea.

Or he had stood on the pier in Brooklyn, newly arrived from Paramaribo, the voyage money in his pocket and the sweat of the engine room still trickling down his back, and stared up the sheer green cliff at the porches of the homes on Columbia Heights. He had crossed the freight tracks and climbed slowly up the old underpass (it was gone now, torn down for an expressway) at the foot of Montague Street. There, at the end of the street on the overhanging rock, were the neat rows of benches on which nursemaids with their carriages and intellectuals with their New Republics sat in the sun; the little rock marking Washington's headquarters during the Battle of Long Island; and the iron fence at the abrupt edge of this toylike square. From the front bench he could look almost straight down at the ship he had lately left, and for a time, in the gathering dusk, he could still discern the white-clad figures of the neat little Japanese sailors from the Something-or-Other Maru berthed next to his own ship as they trudged along the street far below and began the steep climb.

The sun's reflection had burned so brightly in a thousand windows of the skyscrapers across the river that it seared the eyeballs, like Strogoff's sword. In this dusty glow the spider-woven strands of the Brooklyn Bridge leaped tautly over the river, plucking strangely at his heart. As the last color faded from the sky, pinpoints of light popped out of the gloom like fireflies: barges loaded with flatcars, chuffing tugs, and the ferry to Jersey, a floating phosphorescent wedding cake. Behind them and above them tiny yellow squares appeared in the sky, a unique solar system, gradually outlining the towering buildings and so perhaps spectacularly fulfilling their designers' fantastic intentions. After the last of the children and the pensive aesthetes had left, he had sat for some hours listening to the sad honking of the harbor craft and the hoarse cries of the longshoremen below, and finally he had walked the few blocks to the Saint George Hotel, where he had accepted a tired whore in the lobby only because (or so he told himself) it was easier than refusing her.

And only three months before: WELCOME HOME! WELL DONE, WE ARE PROUD OF YOU, the signs on the piers of Baltimore had read when he had arrived from Le Havre with a final shipment of rear-echelon troops, home from the wars. The tremulous soldiers, none of whom had heard a shot fired, did not notice that the signs were already shabby and would be torn down as soon as they had disembarked; they were hooting hysterically, making spyglasses of their cupped hands, and tossing pennies at the stocky girls of the WAC band who stood determinedly on the dock playing the "Beer Barrel Polka"; while Jack, his legs dangling from an empty gun tub high above them, suddenly aware that he was poised over a point of history like the stroke of an exclamation mark, stared at the fading signs that were not intended for his eyes any more than the whitewashed hospitable doorsteps of the city behind them were meant for his feet ...

Now he counted off the blocks of this two-faced city that he was bent on subduing, noting how the broad avenue along which he strode split the Old City from the New, so that they glared at each other like two masks by Böcklin, one smiling fiercely with the false radiance of the new bourgeoisie, the other scowling wearily with the corrupt petulance of the old aristocracy; and as he turned right at the fourth corner he was suddenly plunged into the cobbled and latticed decay of the Old City, an incredible conglomeration of antique stores, nightclubs, sweetshops, and gambling houses.

The Seven Seas Hotel stood grimly at the end of a narrow street in the Old City, its crumbling brick girdled round at the third story with the word Hotel painted in black and white. There was no sign and no marquee; only a plain glass front behind which sat a small group of loafers who might have been window dummies but for their feet cocked on the sill. Jack hesitated in the doorway for a moment, looking down the gloomy little street lined with empty crates and barrels brimming over with oyster shells, then turned and entered the hotel.

He walked past the staring men, slapped a bell on the desk, and said to the clerk, "I want a clean room with a bath."

The clerk was a wizened little old man with deep grooves on either side of his puckered mouth. He said in a surprisingly deep and soft voice, "We haven't got anything like that, but I can let you have a nice room with the toilet right across the hall. Stranger in town, aren't you? Maybe a sailor?"

"Let's see the room."

"It's on the second floor. Take your bag right along with you, you'll like it."

They climbed the uncarpeted stairs. At the landing the old man reached up in the dusk to turn on an old-fashioned lamp that had been converted from gas to electricity; then he shook loose his immense key ring and swung open a creaking door that had a tin 6 tacked to the panel.

"It's getting dark now, but in the daytime it's nice and sunny. There's a pitcher and washbasin, and the bathroom is right across—"

"How much?"

"Two dollars a night, twelve dollars a week."

Jack put down the bag and fished in his pocket. "Here's twelve dollars. Now beat it. I'll be down to sign the register in a little while."

He closed the door behind the old man and turned off the single lamp that stood beside the brass bed. In the gloom the drab square room was more bearable. Bearable? Boxed in by four walls, one should be able to bear anything—a child, an idea, even a dumb loneliness that could only be reinforced in one of the eremitical cells of a hotel for men. No one will bother me here, he thought. He drew the shade on the one window that, bleary as an old man's eye, looked out on the blank wall of a warehouse.

He took a suit and a pair of pants from the valise and hung them in the musty closet, dropped a pack of cigarettes in his jacket, and kicked the bag under the bed. He flipped his wallet in his hand, wondering whether to leave it in the room, but slipped it into his hip pocket after swinging the door, which was flimsy to the touch and rotted at the hinges from countless damp southern winters. He slammed it behind him and went on down the stairs.

The old clerk was not the only one waiting at the register. A grinning towheaded man in a leather jacket watched unabashedly as he wrote "John Rodenko," and, after a second's hesitation, "Chicago, Ill." in the warped ledger book.

"Chicago, eh?" the man said gaily. "That's a fine town, Mr. Rodenko. I was up there, time of the World's Fair. My name is Randy Jackson."

"I don't come from Chicago. Good night."

"Oh, that don't make any difference to me. Now you just come on over here and meet some of the other fellows."

Jack permitted himself to be led over to the little area behind the window that was squared off with two tattered potted palms and a sagging mohair couch. A neatly dressed old man was seated in a chair cater-cornered between the wall and the window. His hands were folded in his lap and a dead cigar butt was clenched between his teeth.

"George, I'd like for you to meet Mr. Rodenko. He's a new guest here."

The old man nodded gravely without moving, then took the cigar from his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and said slowly, "My name is George Stine, S-T-I-N-E."

"How do you do."

"And this gent here is Mr. Walker, one of the best-educated men for quite a distance around."

He indicated a large, stocky man who was rising from an adjoining chair and extending his hand. Walker wore a soft broad-brimmed felt hat pulled so far down over his forehead that it cast deep shadows under his eyes and accentuated the cleft in his chin. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. "Pleased to meet you," he said in a quiet well-modulated voice. "Don't mind Randy. If you're here any length of time, you'll get used to him."

Randy chuckled. "Mr. Rodenko—"

"You might as well call me Jack."

"That's what I like to hear. Is that what your loved ones call you?"

"I haven't got any loved ones."

"Ah, there's the rub," Randy sighed. "I live in the wrong hotel. We're all just a poor bunch of broken-down bachelors here, aren't we, Walker? How about it, George, am I right?"

The old man stared back at him expressionlessly; the emptiness of his gaze was at once profound and superficial, as though so many things had happened to him that the mere effort of facial vivacity had become intolerable. In the moment of silence Randy slapped his hands on his corduroy trousers. "Who's going to supper?"

To Jack's relief the old man shook his head, so slightly that the negative motion might almost have been an uncontrollable palsy rather than a statement of his intention to remain alone.

"How about you, Walker?"

"I have to go up to my room and do a few things. I just got in from the plant a little while ago myself. If you're going to Jolly Joe's, maybe I'll see you there later."

"That's where I'm going," Randy shifted his quid, "but I'm damned if I'll eat alone. What do you say, Jack? Come on along."

Jack nodded at the other men and stepped out into the street with Randy, who stopped in front of the hotel, hooked a finger into his mouth, and pulled out a huge chew of tobacco, which he dropped in the gutter.

"Nice bunch of fellows," he said, as he led Jack up the narrow alley. "You take Walker. He works for O'Toole Company, like me. He wouldn't come along because he wants to sneak up to his room and swallow half a bottle of rotgut before dinner. He's kind of high class, and he doesn't want people to see him drink like that out in the open. He'll come along in a little bit."

"How about the old man?"

Randy moved his powerful shoulders up and down. "They say he had a boy that went in the army and never come back, but that might be just talk. He sets in that little ol' lobby from morning till night, but nobody ever comes to see him. Twice a day he goes to the desk and asks Zeb if there's any mail for him. I guess he keeps hoping they'll notify him that the boy turned up. At least that's the story. The only way to find out is to ask him, but I wouldn't do it. There's nobody in the world more sorrowful than a father who doesn't know if his boy is alive or dead."

And how about a boy, Jack thought, who doesn't know if his father is alive or dead?

"Where do you eat?"

"Right here. Jolly Joe makes the best shrimp jambalaya in town."

It was a dingy little dive only half a dozen doors up the alley from the hotel. The name JOLLY JOE'S was crudely painted on the swinging doors, one word on each door; a scuffled blackboard in the entrance bore the single chalked word Shrimp.

"Don't let it fool you," Randy said with an air of great confidence, as he clapped his meaty hand on Jack's shoulder and propelled him through the doors. "This Joe is a great cook. Used to be chef at one of the fanciest restaurants in town, where all the rich tourists go. But he's horse crazy, see?"

"What do you mean?"

"He's all the time betting on horses, so he bought this place. There's a book right in the back here, behind the kitchen, and when the horses are running he spends all his time there, won't even come out to wait on customers."

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Excerpted from The Unknown Constellations by Harvey Swados. Copyright © 1995 Bette Swados. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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