Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“Give her whatever she wants,” said Mick. “She works with me, she works her ass off. I owe her.”

“Yes you do,” said Consuelo. Mick could feel heat, perhaps from a recent hot shower, coming off her skin; her face looked scrubbed. Her hair was slicked back, and she’d rolled up her sleeves to reveal, or maybe show off, the tattoos on her sinewy, slender forearms: on one, a small blue Earth with the words EN PELIGRO DE EXTINCIÓN arched over it in Gothic script; on the other, CHINGA TU TIO SAM across a miniature of the old American army-recruitment-poster figure in his top hat; and above it, a simple cartoon Popeye-style ship’s anchor with a tiny, intricate monarch butterfly perched on it, whatever that meant. Beata, Mick’s little sister, had sported similar symbolic protestations. Seeing these tattoos on Consuelo made him miss her.

Consuelo looked past him at the Greeks over in the corner and then flickered to the South Africans. “Trevor, what’s the word?”

“Sad,” said Trevor. “Mick refuses to do a striptease for the talent show.”

“I would pay him not to do one,” she said. She tapped a finger on the bar top while she thought. “Wine, please. Anything red, whatever.” She turned to Mick. “How’d it go upstairs? Did they like the food?”

“I fucked up,” he said. “Chef was pissed.”

She took a gulp of wine like a hungry animal at its trough. “What did you do?”

“Talked too much.”

“Chef is a fucker.” She drank greedily again.

“He’s all right. It was my fault.”

“No,” said Consuelo, “he’s a tyrant.”

“He has to be. It’s part of his job.”

“No, he’s worse than most. Control-freak asshole.”

“Are you drunk already? You can’t say that to me. I’m your boss, technically.”

“Fuck that,” she said. “Outside of the kitchen, no one is my boss. And after this cruise, I have no job.”

She was still sparking with heat, but now it struck him that the source was internal. It was anger. Not at Mick, but at something connected to him, associated with him, his temporary executive power. Flames crackled in her skull and shot their light out through her eyes. And it wasn’t only Consuelo he was feeling it from. Even Trevor’s flirting with him held a flash of insubordinate aggression under the fawning sweetness.

Mick reached along the bar and picked up someone’s abandoned cigarette pack. Trevor raised an eyebrow, but went on washing glasses without a word, so Mick took one of the cigarettes and lit up.

There was a dark thing growing here in the crew lounge, like smoke from a damp, slow-burning dirty fire, expanding into a choking fog. Mick didn’t like it. And he didn’t share it. The Isabella was, so far, a pretty good ship to work on, with an American captain and officers and a small passenger list and good conditions, except for the crew’s quarters, which were damp and moldy, but how much time did anyone actually spend in their tiny dark room except to sleep? So they were being let go, so what? They’d find jobs on other ships. Cabaret wasn’t the only company, not by a long shot. This entire crew could apply to Disney, Royal Caribbean, Holland, Princess, Carnival, Norwegian, any of the other fleets, and they might even find better pay and conditions.

But of course it was tough to have to find a new job. Mick hoped he still had a job with Cabaret after this cruise. His dream life in Amsterdam with Laurens was probably out of the question now. But even if his contract was terminated along with the others’, he would roll with it, start planning for what to do next; he would waste no time being angry, fomenting resentment. He would go out with his head up, professionally. That was how he functioned. As long as he had a job, he did his work as well as he could and banked his paychecks. But of course he was lucky, compared to his coworkers. Many of their countries had been through revolution, coup, oppression, dictatorship, poverty, war, upheaval. Mick had been born during the end of Goulash Communism, Hungary’s mild version of Soviet rule. Budapest had been dubbed “the happiest barrack.” By the time he was old enough to notice his surroundings and form memories, the ravages of the war had largely been repaired, and Hungary had made a calm and seamless transition to democratic voting. As a teenager, Mick had hung out with his friends at the Moscow Square subway station in his Tisza shoes, feeling hip and retro, all of them freely mocking the uncoolness of the Soviet era while fetishizing its remnants and relics as newly chic. School trips took children to Memento Park to see “Stalin’s Boots” while teachers tried to educate them about the former communist regime that had already given way to a free market economy. They’d been lucky. They all knew it. It was good to be Hungarian, to live in their beautiful peaceful city while just to the south, armies fought bitter inter-ethnic wars and everything collapsed and splintered. Now, of course, Hungary’s government was sliding into autocracy, but Mick wasn’t there to experience it. His homeland was a faraway place, existing only in memory.

“So where are you going to go after the cruise ends?” he asked Consuelo. Trevor had gone off to pour vodka for a knot of dour, pale Russians. “What’s your plan? I assume you’ve got a plan.”

“Of course I have a plan.”

“Another cruise line?”

She looked sidelong at him and spoke carefully. “I’m done with cruises.”

“Are you going back to Mexico?”

“I’m going to get famous.”

“Right,” he laughed. “That’s an excellent plan.”

“That’s my plan,” she said, unsmiling, forceful.

“How are you going to get famous?”

“You’ll see me on TV.”

Mick stared at her. Then he grinned, not taking the bait. Right, of course, this was how she joked. He stood up, yawning. “My curfew is now. Good night.”

“Noches,” said Consuelo. “Hasta mañana, boss.”

“Don’t go,” Trevor called along the bar. “I almost had you.”

Down in his quarters, Mick undressed and took a shower, then fell into his lower bunk, naked except for a pair of clean underwear. The room was cramped, like all crew quarters: two bunks, small bathroom, old carpet, sallow fluorescent lighting, no window. His roommate was a chef on the all-night galley crew, room service and breakfast prep. As management, Mick should have had his own, larger room, but no matter; he and his roommate almost never saw each other. There was nowhere to store anything, so they pulled clean clothes out of their duffel bags, which were crammed against the wall, and shoved dirty laundry into the corner. This was how Mick had lived for years. He was used to it. By the time he got into his hard narrow bed, he was tired enough to sleep standing up in a cold rainstorm. This low down in the ship, below the waterline, there was little movement, but the hum and vibrations of the engine were ever-present. For Mick, it was like a white noise machine, a sleep aid that masked late, drunken, loud voices in the hallway, the throb of music from the room next door, every sound but the ones in his own private dreams. Over the years, he had grown to like sleeping underwater, the wild ocean just a hull’s width away, just an inch or two, from his dreaming head.

Late that night, after the captain’s table dinner, Miriam and Sasha stood outside by the railing, feverishly kissing. He was so tall, her neck bent backward. It made her even dizzier. His bristly cheek chafed her smooth one. His teeth knocked against hers. His body felt young and urgent. Her hands went under his shirt, and she pressed her hot palms on his flanks while his hand snaked into her dress to cup her breast. She swooned. They hadn’t had sex yet, but they were like a couple of teenagers all of a sudden. Miriam felt that if she couldn’t lie naked in a bed next to Sasha soon, she might explode. She was fifteen again, a young girl in an old woman’s body.