The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [22]
“Who said they were sexy?” Jun Do asked, though he pictured them that way, too.
“I know this,” the Second Mate said. “A sexy girl thinks she can do anything. Trust me, I deal with it every day.”
“If your wife is so hot,” the Machinist asked, “how come they didn’t sweep her up to be a hostess in Pyongyang?”
“It’s easy,” the Second Mate said. “Her father didn’t want her ending up as a barmaid or a whore in Pyongyang, so he pulled some strings and got her assigned to the fish factory. A beautiful girl like that, and along comes me.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the First Mate said. “There’s a reason she doesn’t come to see you off.”
“Give it time,” the Second Mate said. “She’s still coping. I’ll show her the light.”
“Hokkaido,” the Pilot said. “The ice up there is worse in the summer. The shelves break up, currents chum it. It’s the ice you don’t see, that’s what gets you.”
The Captain spoke. Shirtless, you could see all his Russian tattoos. They looked heavy in the sideways light, as if they were what had pulled his skin loose. “The winters up there,” he said, “everything freezes. The piss in your prick and the fish gore in your beard. You try to set a knife down and you can’t let go of it. Once, we were on the cutting floor when the ship hit a growler. It shook the whole boat, knocked us down into the guts. From the floor, we watched that ice roll down the side of the ship, knuckling big dents in the hull.”
Jun Do looked at the Captain’s chest. The tattoo of his wife was blurred and faded to a watercolor. When the Captain’s ship didn’t return one day, his wife had been given a replacement husband, and now the Captain was alone. Plus, they’d added the years he was in prison to his service debt to the state, so there’d be no retirement now. “The cold can squeeze a ship,” the Captain suddenly said, “contract the whole thing, the metal doorframes, the locks, trapping you down in the waste tanks, and nobody, nobody’s coming with buckets of hot water to get you out.”
The Captain didn’t throw a look or anything, but Jun Do wondered if the prison talk was aimed at him, for bringing his listening equipment on deck, for raising the specter that it could all happen again.
When darkness fell and the others went below, Jun Do offered the Second Mate three packs of cigarettes to climb atop the helm and shinny the pole upon which the loudspeaker was mounted.
“I’ll do it,” the Second Mate said. “But instead of cigarettes, I want to listen to the rowers.”
The boy was always asking Jun Do what cities like Seoul and Tokyo were like, and he wouldn’t believe that Jun Do had never been to Pyongyang. The kid wasn’t a fast climber, but he was curious about how the radios worked, and that was half of it. Jun Do had him practice pulling the cotter pin so that the directional antenna could be lifted and pointed toward the water.
Afterward, they sat on the winch house, which was still warm, and smoked. The wind was loud in their ears. It made their cigarettes flare. There wasn’t another light on the water, and the horizon line separated the absolute black of the water from the milk dark of the star-choked sky. A couple of satellites traversed above, and to the north, tracers of shooting stars.
“Those girls in the boat,” the Second Mate said. “You think they’re married?”
“I don’t know,” Jun Do said. “What’s it matter?”
“What’s it take to row around the world, a couple years? Even if they don’t have husbands, what about everyone else, the people they left behind? Don’t those girls give a shit about anybody?”
Jun Do picked some tobacco off his tongue and looked at the boy, who had his hands behind his head as he squinted at the stars. It was a good question—What about the people left behind?—but an odd one for the Second Mate to ask. “Earlier tonight,” Jun Do said, “you were all for sexy rowers. They do something to piss