Smoke and Salt

The call came down at eleven at night, and it was not even my problem. I had finished my rounds an hour before and had my boots off and a paperback going when Morgan's voice crackled through the speaker. Christine, get down to the engine room. A pipe let go on the lower level and we are standing in it.

I handled that with grace. I did not. I swore at my boots for a full minute getting them back on.

Here is the thing about being the housekeeper on the MV Gavia. I am thirty-four, I have done this job three years, and somewhere along the way the crew decided that any mess without an owner belongs to me. Flopped bunk, mine. Grease trail through the galley, mine. Now a burst pipe dumping seawater into an engine room, apparently mine. I grabbed two flashlights and the rubber gloves from my locker and went below, grumbling the whole way down the ladder.

The lower level was a shallow lake. Maybe an inch and a half of water sitting on the grating, catching the yellow glow of the emergency lights so the whole floor looked like a dirty mirror. My boots went slosh with every step and I hated it immediately.

There was already a man down there, which I had not expected. Tall, dark hair, maybe thirty-six, kneeling beside a pump with grease under his nails and along one forearm like he had been born with it. He looked up when my light hit him.

"You're late," he said. "I've been hauling water for twenty minutes."

I did not care for that. "I wasn't scheduled to be anywhere," I told him. "Morgan paged me two minutes ago. You must have the fastest walk in Valparaíso."

He grinned. Actually grinned, like this was fun. "Fair enough. I'm Andres. I'm the temporary mechanic, borrowed from shore while your real one is in the hospital with his appendix. Your chief engineer called the agency and the agency called me."

"Christine. Housekeeper." I said it flat, daring him to make the obvious joke about how far out of my lane this was.

He did not take the dare. He just pointed at the pump. "The intake is clear. We bail what the pump can't reach and figure out where the water's going after that."

So that was the work. The pump chewed down the deep end near the bilge, and the shallow spread along the walkway had to go by hand, bucket by bucket, up the ladder to the drain on the deck above. I took one end of the walkway and he took the other. The buckets were the cheap plastic kind and my shoulders remembered about them fast.

Somewhere around bucket twenty I stopped hating my life quite so much. Andres worked steady, no rushing, no showing off, and he talked the way a man talks when his hands are busy. Little stuff. How the ship rocked different than he expected. How the agency paid by the hour and did not ask questions.

Then I remembered the tin in my jacket pocket. My mother sends me smoked fish from home every couple months, and this one had come aboard at the last port, and I had been carrying it around like a fool because I kept forgetting to leave it in my cabin.

"Here," I said, holding it out. "Smoked fish. My mother sent it. I'm not going to eat all of it myself."

He took the tin and looked at it like I had handed him something better than fish. "Smoked? Properly smoked?"

"Properly smoked. She does it herself."

"Then you have just made my night." He opened it right there with wet hands and ate a piece standing in a flooded engine room, and I had to laugh, which surprised me. I had come down those ladders ready to fight somebody about the water in my boots.

"You're taking this well," I said.

"I took a night job on a ship to pay off a bowling alley's winter bills, so my standards are flexible." He worked at a bowling alley onshore, he told me. Pin machines, mostly. They ate a lot of his week and paid like a joke, so when the agency offered a few nights of hazard-rate flood work, he said yes before the man finished the sentence.

"And you'd rather be doing that than this?"

"I'd rather be doing this than unjamming a pinsetter at two in the afternoon," he said. "This at least has an ending."

I told him I had been at sea six years, by choice, and that people always heard that and waited for the sad part. There was no sad part. I liked the work, I liked the smallness of the ship, I liked knowing every bolt of my own territory. He nodded at that like it made sense to him, and he did not ask me why I had no husband, which put him ahead of most people.

Morgan came down around midnight. She was forty-two and never once in three years had she made me feel like the hired help that got in the way, which I appreciated even when I did not say it. She stood on the dry part of the grating with her hands in her pockets and looked over the whole mess.

"Where's it coming from?"

"Cooling line, aft corner," Andres said. "I've got it isolated. The rest is just getting it off the floor before it works into the wiring."

"Can you have it dry by morning?"

"If we keep hauling, yes!"

"Good." Morgan looked at me. "Christine, you don't have to stay. This is his job and mine."

I stayed. I did not examine why. "I'm already wet," I said, and Morgan took that as the answer and went back up the ladder, and then it was just the two of us and the pump and the water.

That was when he did the thing with the valve. He wanted to show me the isolation point, and instead of pointing from across the room he came around behind my shoulder and touched the back of my hand, just lightly, to walk my hand toward the valve wheel. Greasy thumb, warm hand, steady. I did not pull away. I could have. I had pulled away from men before without even thinking about it, quick as a reflex. This time I let my hand sit there under his and looked at the wheel he was showing me, and pretended the reason I was not listening was the noise of the pump.

"That's the one," he said. "If it ever weeps again, that stops it."

"Got it," I said, and my voice came out about normal, which I counted as a win.

We kept bailing. The lake shrank back toward the bilge where the pump owned everything, and by two in the morning the grating was down to wet streaks and the smell of salt in the metal. My arms were shot and my boots had that heavy soaked feeling, and I realized I had not thought about my paperback or my bunk once in two hours.

He caught me looking at him once. I did not turn away fast enough to pretend otherwise, and he did not make a thing of it either. He just handed me the fish tin.

"Last piece," he said. "We split it. Your mother's work, not mine."

The ladder, the deck above, the drain we had been pouring buckets into for three hours, all of it was still there in my head when I took the tin. I had the strange feeling of a night going somewhere I had not planned, and for once I was not in a hurry to fight it.

We took a break on the ladder steps, the dry ones up near the top where the salt spray had not reached. Andres sat two steps below me with his forearms on his knees, and I put the crackers I had stashed in my jacket pocket on the step